Cecil Celester Cooper, nicknamed “Coop”, was born December 20, 1949 in Brenham, Texas.
The smooth-fielding first baseman was one of the most consistent hitters of the late 1970s and early 1980s, always among the top batting and fielding leaders. But because he played at the same time as Rod Carew and George Brett, he never won a batting title.
Welcome to the Baseball History Podcast: Featuring This Week in Baseball History, baseball dictionary and a tour of baseball cities. I’m your game announcer Bob Wright.
This is game 50 of the 2009 baseball season
In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 1 week of December.
December 6
1976 The Brewers trade first baseman George Scott and outfielder Bernie Carbo to the Red Sox for Cecil Cooper. Cooper will become a dominant player during the early eighties appearing in five All-Star games batting over .300 in the first seven of his eleven years with Milwaukee.
Cecil Celester Cooper, nicknamed “Coop”, was born December 20, 1949 in Brenham, Texas.
The smooth-fielding first baseman was one of the most consistent hitters of the late 1970s and early 1980s, always among the top batting and fielding leaders. But because he played at the same time as Rod Carew and George Brett, he never won a batting title.
Once described by Baseball Digest as the “Rodney Dangerfield of baseball”, Cooper was a great player who didn’t get the respect he deserved. An introverted Texan, Cooper remained in the shadows for much of his 17-year playing career, despite having a lifetime .298 batting average, two Gold Glove awards, and a five-time All-Star selection.
Intending to go to college after his high school graduation, Cecil was spotted by a Boston Red Sox scout and was drafted in the sixth round of the 1968 by the Red Sox. He was taken in the Rule 5 draft by the St. Louis Cardinals in November 1970, but the Cardinals returned Cooper to the Red Sox in April of 1971.
Playing in the shadow of Carl Yastrzemski, Cooper finally made the team as the opening day first baseman in 1974. Cooper ended up playing 74 games at first and 41 more at designated hitter, getting most of the starts when facing right handed pitchers.
Cooper didn’t have a good defensive reputation early in his career, which is why he spent a lot of time as a designated hitter. In 1975 he ended up hitting .311 with 14 home runs in 305 at-bats.
One of the team’s hottest hitters in August and September, Cecil had a scary moment on September 7. The Red Sox were playing the second game of a doubleheader against the Milwaukee Brewers, when he was hit in the face by future teammate Bill Travers. Cecil had to be carried off on a stretcher and was bleeding from his nose and mouth. The incident hampered his performance the rest of the season. He was 4-for-11 in the playoffs but just 1-for-19 in the World Series.
Appearing in 123 games the following season, again splitting time between first base and designated hitter, Cooper hit a solid .282 with 15 homers and 78 Runs Batted In. After the 1976 season, manager Don Zimmer told Cooper told that he would become Boston’s regular starting first baseman. This was not to be the case, as on December 6, 1976, Cooper was sent to the Milwaukee Brewers.
The trade was not particularly popular in Milwaukee. However, Cecil Cooper went on to become somewhat of a legend in Milwaukee.
Cooper was a clutch contact hitter who could hit for both average and power. He kept putting up such solidly consistent numbers year after year that it was easy to overlook his achievements. In his first year in Milwaukee he hit .300, in his second year he hit .312, and in 1979 Cooper hit .308.
Playing for a smaller market team allowed Cooper to thrive, and in 1980 he did just that. He hit better than .300 in every month of the season finishing with a remarkable .352 average, 25 home runs, 219 hits, and an American League-leading 122 Runs Batted In. His season was largely overlooked because Royals third baseman by George Brett flirted with a .400 batting average, setting for.390. The unassuming Cooper said, “With Brett hitting close to .400 all year, I didn’t expect to get much publicity, and I didn’t have any trouble living with that.”
Coop was also part of a record game in 1980. On April 12, in an 18-1 Brewer rout of the Red Sox, he and infielder Don Money connected for two grand slams in the same inning. This marked only the fourth time in major league history this feat had ever been accomplished. Since then, there have been two others, most recently in 1999, when Fernando Tatis of the St. Cardinals hit two grand slams himself in one inning.
In a strike-shortened split season in 1981, the New York Yankees won the first half in the AL East while the Milwaukee Brewers finished first in the second half. This set the stage for a best-of-five game divisional playoff between the two clubs. Although the Yankees won the series in five games, it was the following year that the Brewers had the best season in franchise history. Cooper hit .320 with 12 home runs in the abbreviated campaign.
In 1982 Cooper hit .313, with 32 home runs and 121 runs batted in. On October 3 of that season in a game deciding the American League East championship, the Milwaukee Brewers defeated the Baltimore Orioles 10-2, closing out the season with a mark of 95-67. Their opponent in the American League Championship Series was the California Angels.
The Brewers reached their first World Series as they eliminated the Angels in five games, becoming the first team in major league history to come back from a two-games-to-none deficit and win a best-of-five postseason series.
In the decisive Game Five, Jim Gantner and Charlie Moore scored on Cooper’s seventh-inning bases-loaded single. In a gesture reminiscent of former teammate Carlton Fisk, who waved his arms to keep the ball fair in Game Six of the ’75 Series, Cooper was motioning for the ball to get down. He later said, “I remember thinking, ‘get down ball, get down.’ The crowd was so loud I couldn’t really hear myself saying anything, but I just wanted to keep waving so that ball would fall in there.”
In the World Series that year against the St. Louis Cardinals Cecil homered in a losing effort in Game three; his 8-for-28 record was not enough, as his team lost a seven-game series.
In 1983 Cooper hit .307 with 30 home runs and a league-leading and career-high 126 Runs Batted In. He became an excellent defensive first baseman winning the Gold Glove Award twice in his career. He also won the Silver Slugger Award in three straight years.
Following the conclusion of his playing career, he worked in several capacities in the Brewers organization. He returned to the major league coaching ranks in 2005 as a bench coach for the Houston Astros.
On August 27, 2007, he was named the interim manager of the Astros making him the first African American field manager in Astros’ history. On September 28, 2007, Cooper’s interim tag was dropped and he became the Astros’ 16th manager. However, Cooper was released as Astros manager on September 21, 2009.
In 1983 Cecil Cooper was honored with the Roberto Clemente Award, and in 2002 he was inducted into the Brewers Walk of Fame.
A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Eric Aron. It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org
In this inning we’ll open up the Baseball Dictionary
Under the letter: J
Journeyman
A veteran ballplayer who is reliable but not a star; esp. one who has played for several teams.
And now for the ninth inning…
Continuing our trip around baseball cities…
This tour started with the following email:
Hi there!
I’d like to start by thanking you for providing the invaluable resource that is the Baseball History Podcast. I was raised by an adamantly non-athletic family, and since being properly introduced to baseball in 2004 I’ve been intrigued by the historical and statistical aspects of the game. Listening to your podcast has introduced me to players and concepts that I likely would not have encountered on my own; in particular, I find myself fascinated by Christy Mathewson, as his mechanics were ideally suited for the era in which he pitched, and with the thought-experiment of placing him in different eras. It’s also fun to think about him pitching just down the road from where I grew up, in Norfolk, Virginia.
I’ve wanted to contribute to the tour section of your podcast since the very beginning, but have been nervous about doing so; the only professional parks I’ve been to are Harbor Park, home of the Norfolk Tides, and Camden Yards in Baltimore, both of which have been featured previously. Eventually I decided that the best thing to do would be to write about a team I knew nothing about, and to learn more about them in the process. Here’s the result, and I hope you like it!
So…
This segment comes to you compliments of listener Jamie Haven.
Hanshin – Han(like “ham”)-sheen
Yomiuri – Yo-mee-ooh-ree
shi no rodo – shee-no-row-dough
Seibu – Say-boo
Fukuoka Daiei – Foo-koo-oh-ka Dye-yay
Hanshin Tigers
Founded on December 10 1935, the Hanshin Tigers are the second oldest professional baseball club in Japan, younger only than their long-time rival the Yomiuri Giants. The Tigers’ home stadium is the world-famous Koushien Park, Japan’s oldest ballpark, built in 1924. Koushien is one of only three parks in Japan with natural turf and is the only field that boasts a real dirt infield.
The Tigers are arguably the most popular team in Japan, achieving attendance of over 3 million in 2005-07. They were the only Japanese team to do so. Since the Tigers’ home stadium is Koushien, which hosts the famous high school baseball tournament of the same name, the team takes to the road for two weeks in August, referring to the time as the “shi no rodo”, or “road of death”.
Though the Hanshin Tigers share a name with the Detroit Tigers, they are more often compared to the Boston Red Sox; both teams play in historic ballparks and enjoy large, dedicated fanbases, despite years of admittedly disappointing performance. Prior to the Red Sox resurgence of recent years, the teams were also comparable for their powerhouse performance during their early years, followed by decades of relative obscurity. The Tigers were the winners of the first-ever Japanese pennant game in 1936 and won four of the next twelve championships before entering a slow decline in 1947.
The Hanshin Tigers have a bitter divisional rivalry with the Yomiuri Giants which strongly resembles that of the Red Sox and the Yankees. The rivalry has existed since the mid 1930s, when the Giants became essentially the only foil to the Tigers’ dominance of the Japanese Professional League. Overall, the Tigers have faced the Giants 13 times in the Central League Championship and have lost all 13 times, including 6 times in the 1950s alone.
As of 1950, the Tigers had an impressive win-loss record of 730-472. In that year, the Professional League was split into the Central and Pacific Leagues. Though the Tigers have won the Central Pennant five times since the split, only once have they won the Japan Series, in 1985. Some say that this is due to a curse, again somewhat analogous to the Red Sox; however, in the Tigers’ case, the curse is thought to be due to Colonel Sanders!
Yes, that’s Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken. When the Tigers defeated the Seibu Lions in 1985, elated fans gathered near a river in Osaka. One by one, they called out the names of the Hanshin players; as each name was called, a fan who resembled the player jumped into the polluted river. The celebration was momentarily halted when the fans reached Randy Bass, as none of the fans present resembled the bearded American, but not for long; in lieu of an actual person, the fans removed a statue of Colonel Sanders from a nearby KFC and hoisted it into the river!
Since then, the Tigers have won the Central pennant only once, in 2003. As time went by, several attempts were made to remove the Colonel from his watery resting place, a task made difficult by the depth and murkiness of the water in which he lay. These efforts were particularly dedicated in 1992 and 1999, when the Tigers’ performance seemed likely to earn them a pennant, but to no avail, and the Tigers continued their losing streak. In 2003, when the Tigers finally achieved a Central pennant after eighteen years, many KFC restaurants in the area moved their statues inside, and the replacement of the original statue was bolted to the ground to protect it from enthusiastic fans. However, the Tigers were defeated in the Japan Series by the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks, and the curse continued.
Finally, on March 10, 2009, a large portion of the Colonel’s torso was raised, as were the hopes of dedicated Hanshin Tigers fans everywhere. Though the Tigers finished out 2009 with a disappointing 67-73 record, it should be noted that the Colonel’s glasses and left hand have not yet been recovered. Fans are optimistic that the remaining portions will be found during the construction currently taking place on the river, and that the Tigers will thereby regain their position as the dominant Japanese baseball team.
Notable past and present Hanshin Tigers include Kei Igawa, now of the New York Yankees; three time All-Star Cecil Fielder; Kevin Mench, who holds the right-handed record for consecutive games with a home run at seven; and Randy Bass, recipient of two consecutive Japanese batting crowns in 1985-86. In 1964, Tigers pitcher Gene Bacque received the Sawamura Award, the Japanese equivalent of the Cy Young. He remains the only non-Japanese pitcher ever to receive the award.
Thank you Jamie, and as promised “You get the credit.”
[ References ]
http://www2.gol.com/users/michaelo/Tigers.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanshin_Tigers
http://baseballguru.com/jalbright/stats.html
http://www.baseball-reference.com (several subpages)
For those of you that want to stick around, here’s an
Extra Inning
This email arrived from Rich
Hi Bob,
I just wanted to thank you for all of your enjoyable podcasts. I especially like to listen to them while I cook my little city-apartment kitchen. I’ve heard all of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Cleveland Indians ones so far, and a handful of others. I would appreciate a chance to let listeners know about my own baseball history project here in Brooklyn, New York. Almost a year ago a friend and I began a walking tour company called Gotham SideWalks. It has been a lot of work, but we love it and we continue to add tours and build a following. Since we both love baseball history, we have been working very hard on designing a tour called “Bike Brooklyn Baseball.” It covers about 100 years of baseball history throughout Brooklyn. Since the route is about 10 miles, we have made it our first ever bike tour. It will debut on Sunday, November 8th in Park Slope, and winds through many other different and interesting Brooklyn neighborhoods. The route takes about 3 hours, but has many rest stops. At these stops, we cover baseball history chronologically from the 1850s to the 1950s. We’ll be using stories and old photographs and, of course, our natural surroundings to help us tell this infamous history of baseball in Brooklyn.
Most baseball fans know about the great Brooklyn Dodger teams of the 1940′s and 50′s–stories like Jackie Robinson’s signing, the magic of Ebbets Field, or the meteoric rise of Brooklyn’s own Sandy Koufax. But many don’t know beyond this. Tidbits like the fact that baseball’s first superstar, Jim Crieghton, was a Brooklynite? And that he was in a gentleman’s club called the Jolly Bachelors, whose clubhouse still stands today. Or that the “Trolley Dodgers” began playing in Park Slope before they moved across Prospect Park into a neighborhood called Pigtown to play at the new Ebbets Field? The tour takes you from the roots of Civil War era baseball to the exodus of the Dodgers in 1957… all while rolling along one of the finest circuits of urban bike paths in the country. I’ll list the details below if anyone is interested, but all the best and most accurate details are on our website: http://www.GothamSideWalks.com.
We meet in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in front of Brooklyn Bicycles bike shop at the corner of 9th Street and 6th Ave. You can take the subways trains F or G to 7th Avenue, or the R or M to 4th Avenue. You should come with your own bike, or take you chances to see if they have any more rental bikes in stock. It would be only $25 for the day, including helmet. The tour itself leaves at 11:00 sharp, and costs $15 cash if you pay at the tour.
Thanks so much Bob, and keep up the great work.
Sincerely, Rich Garr
If you would like to a part of Baseball History Podcast, submit your written contribution for the tour segment. I will only be doing the tour when one is sent in by a listener. You can do the segment on any stadium or team; past or present; Minor League, Major League, Negro League or any league outside of the US. Write about 1 page in a conversational tone, send it to me, I will record it, and you will get the credit.
You can email me at baseballhistory@gmail.com.
You can follow me on Twitter; I’m BaseballHistory.
Look for the new BHP web site at Baseball History Podcast at baseballhistorypodcast.com.
Well, that’s it for today’s game of Baseball History Podcast. I’ll see you later at the ballpark.
