9 Days Until Spring Training: Graig Nettles

Next week will mark the six year anniversary of the trade that sent Alex Rodriguez from the Rangers to the Yankees. Up until the time of the trade, A-Rod had been a shortstop, but with Derek Jeter entrenched in that position in the Bronx, A-Rod shifted over to the hot corner. In the years since, Rodriguez has established himself as the greatest third baseman in Yankee history. But before there was A-Rod, there was Graig Nettles.

Born in San Diego, Nettles attended San Diego State University, starred on its baseball team and spent the summer of 1964 playing in Alaska with future Major Leaguers Tom Seaver and Ricky Monday. He was selected by the Twins in the fourth round of the very first amateur draft in 1965.

Nettles began his pro career the following year in Wisconsin Rapids with the Twins Single-A affiliate. He had cups of coffee in Minnesota in both '67 and '68 but spent most of the '68 season with Twins top farm club in Denver. It was there that Nettles first played for Billy Martin.

The next year, both Nettles and Martin graduated to the Majors. Billy took over as Twins manager and he brought Nettles along with him. Neither would be there when the 1970 season rolled around. Unable to push the great Harmon Killebrew off third base, Nettles played sparingly, and saw most of his action in the outfield. The Twins won their division, but were swept by Baltimore in the very first American League Championship Series. Despite the team's success, Martin was fired for the first of many times as a manager. Nettles, still blocked by Killebrew, was dealt to Cleveland as part of a package that brought back former Yankee Stan Williams and future Yankee Luis Tiant.

The Indians installed Nettles as their everyday third baseman, and he blossomed. He finished 10th in the AL in walks in 1970, then repeated the feat in 1971 while finishing tenth in RBI, seventh in times on base, and fifth in home runs. Nettles also began forging a reputation as one the top defensive third basemen in the game.

Following the '72 season, Nettles was shipped to the Yankees as part of six player deal. He would spend the next eleven seasons as the team's third baseman, a potent bat in the middle of the line up, and a key a contributor on five division winners, four pennant winners, and two World Series champs.

Nettles joined the Yankees just in time for their final season in the pre-renovation Yankee Stadium as well as for the final year of manager Ralph Houk's thirty five years of service to the organization. Nettles tied Bobby Murcer for the team lead in home runs that season, led the team the following season, and then led the American League with 32 in 1976. He came back with 37 more dingers the following year, good for second in the AL and a fifth place MVP finish. With Brooks Robinson finally retired, Nettles also won his first Gold Glove in '77, and repeated the feat in '78 when he finished sixth in the MVP voting.

Perhaps Nettles' most famous defensive work came in Game Three of the 1978 World Series, when he put on a defensive clinic against the Dodgers. Nettles recorded two putouts and five assists over the course of the game, started a double play, and robbed numerous Dodgers of hits with diving, highlight reel stops.

Nettles remained with the Yankees through the 1983 season, staying productive into his late thirties. He was named Yankee Captain in late January of 1982. I always wondered how Nettles felt about that, given that the two previous Yankee Captains - Thurman Munson and Lou Gehrig - both met untimely ends. Thankfully Nettles avoided that fate, but his Yankee career did meet a premature end.

In early 1984, like many of his Bronx Zoo teammates before him, Nettles released his autobiography, the humorously titled Balls. It chronicled the entirety of Nettles' career, with a focus on the 1983 season, which was mired with the same level of dysfunction typical of Yankee teams of that era. Always known for his quick wit, Nettles didn't pull any punches in his criticism of the organization, of Steinbrenner, and of his contentious contract extension negotiations throughout the '83 season and into the off season. As excerpts of the book leaked prior to publishing, it became apparent that Nettles' days with the Yankees were numbered. Just days before the start of the '84 season the Yankees shipped Nettles to his hometown Padres.

There, Nettles rejoined long time teammate Goose Gossage, and the two helped lead San Diego to their first NL Pennant. After All-Star season in 1985 in which the 40 year old Nettles posted a 120 OPS+, he was all but finished. He spent one more year in San Diego, before rounding out his career spending a year each with Atlanta and Montreal as a pinch hitting specialist. He returned to the Yankees as first base coach for the 1991 season and has been a regular at Old Timers Day since his retirement.

Third base is the most under represented position in the Hall of Fame, with just ten men in the Hall being third basemen primarily. I don' think that Nettles is a Hall of Famer, but he is amongst the best fifteen or twenty third basemen of all time. He is tremendously under appreciated, and suffers comparatively by spending his defensive career in the shadow of Brooks Robinson and Mike Schmidt, and his offensive career in the shadow of Schmidt and George Brett. Nettles still holds the AL record for home runs as a third baseman, and trails only Schmidt, Eddie Matthews, Chipper Jones, and Darrell Evans on the all-time third baseman home run list.

Nettles was the final Yankee to wear number nine before it was retired in honor of Roger Maris in 1984. Other prominent Yankees to wear the number include Joe DiMaggio in his rookie season of 1936, Charlie Keller for most of his career, and Hank Bauer for the majority of the Stengel years.

Five Years After The Day That Never Happened

Today is the fifth anniversary of one of the most memorable days of my life. It happened in the middle of the night, in the cold, remote expanses of the North Pacific, over 650 miles from the nearest piece of dry land - and even that was nothing more than a rocky outcropping on the Aleutian Archipelago.

I was a part of the Semester at Sea Spring 2005 voyage. We had departed from Vancouver, bound for Pusan, Korea about a week before and were met by rough seas almost immediately after passing around Vancouver Island and into the Pacific Ocean. Our ship was a converted cruise liner - a 590 footer ranking among the fastest passenger vessels in the world. But you can only go so fast when attempting to navigate 20 foot swells.

Despite the size of the ship, she pitched and rolled enough to make about two-thirds of the 700 passengers on-board sea sick in one capacity or another. I was one of the lucky ones who wasn't really bothered by all the side-to-side motion, but no one was immune to the effects of the ocean entirely. Eating meant having to hold onto your plate and glass almost constantly, lest it slide off the table. Showering necessitated two hands on the wall for the majority of the time. Even walking down the hall was precarious dance, as you were spilled from one side to the other despite your best efforts to lean against the swell.

There were some rough nights. Up in the bow of the ship, in a large room where most of the students congregated for a Global Studies class each morning, there was a grand piano bolted to the floor. One morning we awoke to find that it had smashed under its own weight when the ship met a particularly large wave head-on.

But through it all, the morale on the ship remained high. There were about 600 college students from all over the country (and from various parts of the world) on-board, all with an incredible trip ahead of us. We were scheduled to sail to Japan after Korea and from there to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Vietnam, India, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil and Venezuela before returning back to the U.S. via Fort Lauderdale. Suffices to say that it didn't all go as planned.

Winter in the North Pacific is not a friendly season. Storm systems have the freedom to build and roam without the inconvenience of bumping into a land mass and sacrificing most of their energy. On that fateful night, we were caught between three of these systems in one of the most remote places on the planet.

We had just crossed the International Date Line, placing us roughly equidistantly from Hawaii, Japan and the Aleutian Islands. It would be difficult to find a location among the major shipping lanes of the world that was further from a major landmass.

I woke at about 12:30 AM in whatever time zone we were in when my bed came unhooked from the wall and began sliding back and forth across our cabin. Pretty much everything in our room was in motion, including the heavy, squat nightstand between the two beds. This piece of furniture, designed not to tip over had done just that, smashing alternatively into the door to our room and the wall that contained our porthole. After a week of vicious seas we were conditioned to take this type of inconvenience in stride, but both my roommate Jeff and I knew that this was beyond the pale. We had experienced 25 foot swells in short stints but these had to be at least 30 feet or more and didn't appear to be subsiding.

After an hour or so of sloshing back and forth, we heard the voice of our Captain come over the loud speaker and inform us that the ship was going to be making a turn in order to face the storm system we were encountering head on. What we didn't know at the time was that it didn't much matter which way he turned the ship.

A more couple hours - and countless shifts port and starboard - later there was another, very similar message. We were on the third deck, but every time the ship banked towards our side, our porthole would plunge beneath the waterline, creating an eerie swallowing sound. If anything, conditions were getting worse.

Finally, at about 4 in the morning, we heard the Dean of Students, Kenn Gaither come over the loudspeaker. In what can only be described as a desperately panicked voice, he said "EVERYONE. PLEASE REMAIN. CALM."

"PLEASE PUT ON YOUR LIFE VESTS, PROCEED TO THE HALLWAY AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS."

At this point, it still seemed like a trivial aggravation. What we couldn't have known was that he had been up in the bridge of the ship - where the Captain navigates from - when a rogue wave at least 50 feet high smashed two of the windows, shorting out all of their controls and disabling two of the vessel's three engines.

Blissfully unaware of what was going on and bleary-eyed from a lack of sleep, we piled into the corridors of the ship, orange life vests securely fastened. I hadn't processed the idea that we were in grave danger just yet. I think we all possess a natural human instinct that tells us everything is going to turn out fine when we are thrust into an emergency. But I looked down the hallway and saw girls crying and guys with bleak expressions on their faces.

We stayed in the hallway waiting for the Dean to tell us we could go back into our cabins, restlessly shifting and slipping from wall to wall, listening to the sounds of various items crashing about our berths. Only, that's not what happened next.

Around six in the morning, we were told to proceed to the fifth deck - the one that contained the life boat stations. As Gaither gave the instructions, he assigned separate locations for the males and females. Kind of like they did on the Titanic.

The gravity of the situation didn't really hit me until I reached the fifth deck and saw a Filipino crew member crying hysterically. This guy, even if he hadn't been on this particular ship for long, had experience on the open seas and was surrounded by others who had even more. If he thought this was bad, then apparently, it was.

The entirety of a seven-level ship's passengers aren't meant to fit into one of those levels. As such, we were packed in throughout, all sitting on the floor since anything that could pass for a seat would quickly tip over should you be foolish enough to try to sit on it. I ended up on a swath of tile adjacent to one of the boat's cafeterias. There were probably 50-75 other people in the same general area, all helplessly sliding from one wall to another each time the ship pitched. There was a steel door to a kitchen right behind me and with every roll from side-to-side, what sounded like the majority of the cookware inside came skidding across the tile floor and slammed into that door in a deafening cacophony of crashes and clangs.

What I can't sufficiently convey in this post was the relentless, terrifying and inescapable pitch of the ship. The picture on top of this post was taken on that day and isn't doctored. We all have experienced the G-force sensation of getting pushed to one side far enough where you feel like you are going to fall over, but this happened every 15 or 20 seconds for 10 or 12 hours straight. After a while I lost the nagging fear that this next wave was the one that was going to turn the M.V. Explorer upside down in 45 degree waters well beyond the reach of even the most perfectly executed rescue plan. But I never fully dismissed it as a possibility.

Out there, 12 hours away from the nearest cargo vessel, 10,000 feet from the bottom of the ocean and 650 miles from land, most of the people on that boat found a way to ignore that fact that we were staring down an inevitable demise should we capsize. For whatever reason, I thought that if the worst case scenario of the ship sinking unfolded, I'd survive somehow. I'd just swim out, break a window if I had to, kick to the surface, cling to some debris and wait to be rescued. Of course, there was no way anyone could have made it out of the ship and even if they did, they would have been stranded in frigid water in massive swells hours away from anyone who could have possibly been of assistance.

I know this sounds pretty far-fetched. But it actually happened. Look:

You don't have to watch that whole episode of Storm Stories to know how this tale ends. Instead of one of the most catastrophic losses of life in modern maritime history, we made it out relatively unscathed. An elderly woman broke her hip and a crew member fractured his arm, but no one was seriously hurt. The ship was forced to limp back to Hawaii, but for a while it looked like we might have to stop at Midway Island to refuel first.

It was "the day that never happened" partially because it still seems surreal but mostly due to the fact that we reversed course and again crossed the International Date Line, isolating that chaotic 12 hour stretch into a sort of bubble of time unto its own.

We missed out on visiting Korea and Japan but in exchange, we stayed in Hawaii for 10 days and Semester at Sea arranged for us to fly chartered jets from Honolulu to Shanghai to Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City before rendezvousing with the M.V. Explorer on the Me Kong River and resuming the rest of the trip as planned.

Before they leave this earth, most people will encounter a true life or death situation in which they come to terms with the fact that this might actually be it. But most of those predicaments end as quickly as then begin instead of being protracted out over half of a day. It was as if we were all involved in an extended hostage situation with Poseidon as our captor and no one with a means of advocating for our release.

It wasn't until we were docked in Hawaii (or maybe it was on a subway in Hong Kong) that I allowed myself to process how close we all came to dying that day. Although I understand it now, I still think back to my friend Dave sarcastically reading out of a Tony Robbins book to make people laugh when we were sliding across the floor. I still vividly remember the crew emerging from the kitchen amidst the sliding plates and utensils with metal bins of french toast to feed the passengers when the swells were at their largest (how they prepared a meal under those conditions I will never know). And the fact that we reconvened our shipboard poker game as soon as the worst had passed, but had to keep our chips in paper cups since they wouldn't have stayed on the table.

I don't think about the events of that day nearly as much as I used to, but every time the anniversary rolls around and I talk to other people that were on the ship, the memories are as real and as vivid as anything else I have experienced in my time on Earth. Unfortunately, the most traumatic events of our lives leave the most indelible marks.

Truthfully, it was during those 100 days of Semester at Sea that I realized that I was halfway decent at writing. I sent periodic letters to my close friends and family but soon started getting email replies from people other than the original recipients telling me how much they've been enjoying my dispatches from halfway around the world. I quickly realized that, if the topic was right, I might be able to write something people enjoyed reading.

That one specific harrowing experience and the balance of the 100 days of that trip altered my life in ways that are still taking shape. I know that I've cheated death and enjoy a disbelieving sort of laugh every time I think about it. I feel like I have a deeper understanding of the world than most people who haven't visited 9 countries in 100 days.

Our Global Studies professor, Robert Fessler gave a speech at the end of the trip that won't go down as one of the great ones of all time. However it's one of the best I've ever heard because it struck the perfect notes while explaining why traveling is enriching on a personal level. He talked about how shared experiences bond people and how being removed from your element forces you to think differently. And thinking differently is what makes life interesting. He made the same "fishbowl" analogy that David Foster Wallace did when he made the his only graduation address at Kenyon College later that year.

From a transcript of Fessler's speech:

"Shangai isn't just a word anymore, it's a place. Cape Town. It all comes back. How could you have possibly imagined back in December that you would spend the rest of your life getting chills whenever you thought of the words "put on your life jackets and get into the hall right now!", with the steady haunting moan of a fog horn in the background. Who else will ever understand that? To you, the world is never going to be the same again."