BASEBALL NEEDS
"MO" DRABOWSKY
It may seem like breathless hyperbole to call a journeyman reliever a true legend of the game, but Moe Drabowsky deserves the accolade.
Drabowsky, who passed away on Saturday, chucked for eight major league teams, and the highlight of his career -- in a strict baseball sense -- was fanning 11 Dodgers in 6 2/3 innings of Game 1 of the 1966 World Series while toiling for the Orioles.
The rest of the time he was cobbling together an 88-105 record, a 3.71 ERA and 55 saves in 17 seasons.
"As a starting pitcher, I had to work more than two hours to discover I was horse manure that day," he told Bruce Shlain, the author of the 1989 book Oddballs. "As a relief pitcher, I only had to work about two minutes to find out I was horse manure."
Drabowsky's greatest accomplishment, by far, was becoming the most notorious and hilarious prankster in the game -- no small feat at a time when the face of baseball was slathered in clown's grease paint and the game reveled in its flakes and comedians: Dizzy Dean , Casey Stengel , Bill Veeck , Jimmy Piersall , Bob Uecker , Joe Garagiola , Jerry Coleman .
The yuks continued into the '70s and the '80s with Bill "Spaceman" Lee , Jay Johnstone , Al "The Mad Hungarian" Hrabosky, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych , Mickey Rivers , Roger McDowell and Turk Wendell . But somewhere along the line the game grew grimly serious. Now Lastings Milledge high-fives a few fans in a moment of youthful exuberance and he suddenly becomes the face of "personality."
You want personality? Even Moe's obituary, with its lineup of his classic gags, makes you laugh. For example, putting snakes in his teammates' lockers and shaving kits (thus his nickname "The Snake Man") and limburger cheese in their cars; planting sneezing powder in the ventilation system of the visiting team's clubhouse and goldfish in their watercooler; tossing smoke bombs into the shower; using the bullpen phone to call a restaurant in Hong Kong and order take-out food. He even dialed up the A's bullpen during a game, convincingly impersonated manager Alvin Dark , and got reliever Lew Krausse up and throwing -- while starter Jim Nash was working on a shutout. Annoyed by the sight, Nash lost his groove, and the game.
"Players seem to be more serious now," Drabowsky told the AP back in '87. "I would tend to believe they don't have as much fun." Ain't that the truth.
Can you imagine anyone giving Bud Selig a hotfoot during the presentation of the World Series championship trophy? Drabowsky did it to Bowie Kuhn -- by sticking a book of matches under the commissioner's shoe and then igniting a trail of lighter fluid to it after the Orioles beat the Reds in 1970. A firebug like that would get some serious ink these days.
Pranks are still a part of clubhouse life -- just check out the annual photos of rookies in pimp suits and skirts parading out of stadiums or through airports -- but they are inside jokes, not proudly trumpeted as they were in Drabowsky's era. He wasn't nearly the overtly public screwball that Piersall, Fidrych, Hrabosky, Lee or McDowell was, but tales of his handiwork were a common staple in the sports pages.
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Image: baseball-almanac.com
Editor's note: First published in 2006
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