Goose Gossage Yells Some More At Clouds

Author by indaburgPosted in Baseball

91sn32qLast week, 64 year old Goose Gossage, in Tampa as a guest instructor with the Yankees, gave us a rant for the ages, blaming baseball’s decline on bat flippin’ number crunching NERDS! They are just ruining the game he knows and loved to play. Well, he wasn’t done, even though he was told by Brian Cashman and Joe Girardi to shut his yap, according to the New York Post.

“Who’s died in the last 100 years because of a bad call? They say, ‘Well, they lost a World Series and the kid lost his perfect game.’ I said, ‘Who died?’ Leave the human element in the game. You cannot take the human element out of baseball because it is the fabric of the game.”

A little bit of my soul dies every time a call is wrong. Does that count? No one is supposed to die in baseball. I hope. We’re playing the game wrong otherwise. That is so besides the point. The point is to get the call correct. The human element is the players on the field, not the umpires. No one is going to the game to the see the umpires… but Gossage thinks they are:

“No manager can run on the field anymore and kick dirt on the umpire. That was exciting. That was part of the game. That woke everybody up and everybody loved it.”

Okay, I’ll give him that. It is entertaining. But you know what? Arguments between managers and umpires still happen. Plenty of managers got their asses ejected last year. (List of ejections last year.) They’re not supposed to argue calls but managers see this as a way to motivate their team so they still do it.

Oh, but we’re still not done. Cam Newton, you are on notice:

“It’s a shame, it breaks my heart to see the direction this game is going. What, do we want a bunch of Cam Newtons running around?”

Yes, I would love to see a bunch of Cam Newtons running around. He’s fun.

Can anyone translate the following? He kind of went off the rails here:

“So, if no one keeps it in check, which there is no one keeping it in check, first of all, no one wants to bite the hand that fed them or the hand that feeds them today. The only liaison we had was Joe Torre. It’s like Washington DC. Everybody starts out with good intentions. You can’t beat them, join ‘em.’’

I guess, yeah! If you can’t beat them, join ’em. Flip those bats, crunch those numbers!

39 thoughts on “Goose Gossage Yells Some More At Clouds”

  1. Wait…what? He wants managers to show passion but god forbid that the actual player does!

    Goose, please, seek help immediately for your whatever this is.

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  2. “Who ever died from being able to run out the clock for the last ten minutes of the game? Get rid of the shot clock, the Four Corners offense is part of the fabric of the game!” – Goose Gossage, 1987

    “Who ever died from only having white players on the field? Segregation is part of the fabric of the game!” – Goose Gossage, 1949

    “Who ever died from stagnant offenses? The neutral-zone trap is part of the fabric of the game!” – Goose Gossage, 2006

    “Who ever died from CTE? Leading with the helmet is part of the fabric of the.. oh, oops.” – Goose Gossage, roughly nowish.

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    2. The first time I saw that four cormers bullshit when I was a kid, I was aghast. And the announcers were kissing Dean Smith’s ass the whole time. I found it completely surreal.

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      1. Funny, that triggered a memory. I have an uncle who is seven foot tall and was (obviously) a basketball player in college. Pure post up man. Many years ago we were talking basketball. I would have guessed a big center would have hated the four corners. He thought it was genius and a great tactic, given the rules of basketball. A big admirer of Dean Smith. In fact, he didn’t particularly favor the shot clock coming in.

        You just never know where people will come down on stuff.

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  3. Poor Goose. He used to be somebody. Now he’s nobody, just like 99.9% of the rest of the population. And he’s getting old. And nothing makes any sense any more; what with all the free love and rap music and cam newtons and democrats and everything.

    It just makes you want to yell at the clouds and vote for Trump.

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        3. I always pray for sex, every night. I want everyone to have lots and lots of good, healthy sex. “In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Sex is natural, sex is good. Not everybody does it, but everybody should. Sex is natural, sex is fun. Amen.”
          Pope Francis is hella cool.

          Liked by 2 people

        1. One of my favorite playlists on Amazon Music is actually “At the Sock Hop”, you might be surprised to know. As much as I love hard rock, rap, and r&b, I love music from the era. The sly dirty lyrics. I remember explaining to my former mother-in-law that Lollypop was not about a lollypop. She blushed so hard. She thought it was about a lollypop. Wake Up Little Susie. Sure, they fell asleep watching a movie past curfew. And the homoerotic Jailhouse Rock. How many coed prisons were there in the 50s?

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  4. You leave Goose alone! He cries himself to sleep just about every night. Part of that is because his grandkids won’t show him how to use his dvr and he swallowed his dog whistle talking about Cam Newton and the bat flippers.

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    1. In fairness, chaco, I started down the “dog whistle” path myself and took it out because I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t know that much about the Goose, so I gave him the benefit on that one. He might have said the same thing about Manziel if Manziel hadn’t self-destructed on his own.

      But you are probably correct.

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      1. I suppose I should say I don’t think Goose is a bile spitting bigot, I think like my comments from the other day, that Goose sees his culture majority dominance ending in part and has been lashing out at the most obvious visual embodiment of those opposing ideas.
        I really wonder what he thought about a contemporary like Reggie Jackson.

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        1. I think it is more of a mortality/relevance phenomenon, which is why so many people who are past their primes rail against kids today…..which has probably been going on since crotchety cave men were complaining about “kids today”, with their fancy fire. I think it is more of an attempt by old people to stay relevant (i.e. I still matter), not wanting to acknowledge that the world is not their anymore and that every day it is less and less theirs and more and more belongs to those that are younger.

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        2. Certainly, the part that troubles me is his specific demonizations. Baseball n-words (ne.., ner, I can’t say it) are easy targets and have been since the inception of advanced analytics. That he mentions bat flippers and Cam Newton is more problematic. The “bat -flip” comment has some more undertones. Like stex, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt but he sure is making that hard.

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        3. Oh, I assume he’s a biggot. Most white people his age have some level of racism because that is how they were raised, and the older they get the harder it is for them to filter it out. People can change….but only so much, and it seems like with advancing age, many gains are lost. Not true for everyone, of course, but certainly true for people that don’t strive to improve as a person to that seek education/knowledge as a normal part of their lives.

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        4. This is the source of my comment about having days of feeling like the Goose, Paper. Growing up in east Texas in the late 1950’s (you saw “The Help”, no doubt. That was spot on my childhood), much of my adult intellectual life has been built around a rejection of values that I had no idea were wrong until I was about 12 years old.

          Your comment is very accurate. You get into your ’60’s, reminiscing and sorting things out, and that stuff comes right back at you. It’s very hard to keep it in the right container.
          Goose is kind of funny because he wants to wrestle his demons in public.

          But I do understand.

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        5. I have actually now seen “The Help”….as some black comedian noted, “Just what we need, another movie in which rich white women discover racism.”

          I agreed and so took a pass on that one.

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        7. I’ll tell you why the movie had some resonance and was worth the effort, Paper. My nephew, who majored in film at a significant university, wrote the movie off for the easy plot, poor characterizations, and the fact that it “just wasn’t realistic; it wasn’t like that.”

          I clarified for him that it was EXACTLY what it was like. Young people reject it today because it is too foreign for (most) sensibilities.

          If you lived in it or around it growing up, that movie was a kick of reality, right in the face. I will grant the weaknesses of the movies in other areas, but the culture was portrayed quite accurately and brutally.

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        8. I clarified for him that it was EXACTLY what it was like. Young people reject it today because it is too foreign for (most) sensibilities.

          Most of us have probably seen 42 (the Jackie Robinson movie). If you remember, the part when he goes into the tunnel to get away from Chapman’s racist tirades never happened in real life. The producers had to put it in the film because during initial screenings people couldn’t believe that Robinson just dealt with the racial taunts without ever responding. They had to “create a scene of him exploding” to make it more believable!

          I believe the latest Jesse Owens movie had a similar situation.

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        2. To be fair here, the benefit of the doubt is that he is just a relatively benign beneficiary of institutional racism as opposed to an active bigot speaking out about his interest in maintaining those institutional racist policies.
          Has he mentioned Bryce by name? If not it can certainly be considered a telling omission.

          Liked by 1 person

        3. Good point. And I wasn’t prepared to give him all that much slack. Paper is probably on the right trail. But I don’t know enough about Gossage to label him one way or the other on the race issue.

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        4. I’m just rambling now but I’ve always been fascinated by the disconnect between those people who don’t consider themselves to be prejudiced against another ethnicity but who clearly are in subtle ways. The Klan members are the shouting racists that acknowledge it, but the more nuanced “I can’t actually bring myself to the idea that I’m a real bigot because I intuitively know that is wrong” mindset. The age cohort breakdown would be very informative.

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        1. It really is an amazing tribute to the perseverance of the human spirit that these white Americans over 60 can go on living every day in a place where the standard of living is so bleak.

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