The Endgame

Newsletter #82 - Kelly, Rance, we hardly knew ye

Toronto, September 29, 2024

Kelly, Rance, we hardly knew ye

There’s the Game, and then there’s the Endgame. What’s left when the glory has gone? What remains when the cheering has stopped and the crowds have disappeared?

My daughter Gabrielle and I got interested in baseball in the late 1980s. We’ve been fans of the Toronto Blue Jays ever since. (It’s not always easy to be a Jays fan: As I write, the team is in last place in the American League East). The first Jays home game we went to was in Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium in 1989. We’ve been to away games together in New York, Boston, and Cleveland. Gabrielle once went to the Jays spring training camp in Dunedin, Florida.

Early on, in the halcyon days (the Jays won the World Series back-to-back in 1992 and 1993), Gabrielle and I had our favourite players. Hers was Kelly Gruber, the handsome Texan with flowing locks and lots of pizzaz who played third base and was voted Toronto’s most eligible bachelor when he lived in the city. Gruber played for the Jays from 1984 to 1992. He retired from baseball in 1993.

Kelly Gruber and Gabrielle

I preferred Rance Mulliniks, a left-handed utility infielder from Porterville, California. Rance, easy to overlook, was different from Kelly. He wasn’t much of a crowd pleaser. Rance played for the Jays for a decade, from 1982 to 1992, overlapping with Kelly. He was a member of the 1992 World Series team along with Gruber, although because of injuries he did not play in the series and retired at the end of the year.

It was hard for someone like me to identify with Kelly Gruber, but I found it easy to feel an affinity for Rance Mulliniks. A website devoted to the Jays describes him this way: “He wasn’t big or fast... A left-handed hitter, geeky looking, wore glasses... You didn’t think ‘professional athlete’ when you looked at him... [H]e looked like an accountant... But he became a good baseball player because he worked hard and was smart.”  Rance’s statistics over fifteen years in Major League Baseball were very respectable; batting average .272, 73 home runs, 435 runs batted in. As the website says, he worked hard and was smart.

I asked Perplexity, my favourite chatbot, to compare Gruber and Mulliniks. It told me: “Both players are remembered fondly by Blue Jays fans, but for different reasons. Gruber is often seen as the more talented player with a higher peak, while Mulliniks is remembered for his consistency and adaptability... [W]hile Kelly Gruber had the higher peak and more accolades, Rance Mulliniks provided consistent value over a longer period.” In one view it was better to be Rance than Kelly.

It has been more than thirty years since Kelly and Rance left the game and largely dropped from view. What has happened to them? It’s hard to find out much about their post-Major League history. Maybe some Endgame readers know something and will pass it on. An Internet search tells us a little, not much, about what Kelly and Rance have done—some colour commentary here and there, a bit of teaching, speaking engagements, some coaching, an embarrassing incident involving Kelly...

As for Rance, he’s selling real estate in California. The other day, out of the blue, for old times’ sake I guess, Gabrielle sent me his web page. There’s a picture of Rance. He looks much the same as he did in the glory days, when the crowd was cheering, just a bit older. It looks like he’s ditched the glasses.

The poet wrote:

“It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

                      Turn wheresoe'er I may,

                          By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

(from William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)

The field of dreams

*****

Some reader comments on Newsletter #81 (“A cab at the door”)

One reader responded enthusiastically to the V.S. Pritchett reference: “A Cab at the Door” was Pritchett’s detailed account of his semi-impoverished, bounced-about Edwardian childhood, and the means for survival he devised while he was in the toils of a dramatizing, self-destructive floorwalker-and-salesman father, whose repeated scruffy business failures and the family’s furtive decampings explain the book’s title. ‘I remember Pritchett, at dinner one night, telling us that no one had been invited to a meal at his house when he was a boy; and that if someone rang the doorbell unexpectedly at mealtime his mother would keep the visitor waiting outside until every crumb and vestige of the meal had been hurriedly swept off the table. There was something shameful or sexual about being caught eating,’ he said. ‘I never understood it.’ -Roger Angell.”

From David Wolinsky: “It would appear that my affection for America has a basis in reality. I’ve moved twelve times during my lifetime, the American norm, as opposed to the Canadian norm of seven. Fortunately for our grandchildren, thanks to Uber and Lyft, they will never have to worry about ‘a cab at the door’ although this concern will be replaced by a worry about the rating they’re given by the person who moves them to their next locale. Rather than worrying, I’ve always preferred John Madden’s philosophy, ‘Don’t worry about whether the horse is blind. Just load the wagon.’”

From an old friend: “Just thought I’d let you know I’ve been living in the same house for 51 years!  Stability. Familiarity. Comfort!” 

A reader drew my attention to a story about a woman who lived in the same house in London, Ontario for 95 years.

We keep coming back to George Orwell. A reader writes: “When I was a student, 50+ years ago... I picked up a copy of Homage to Catalonia in a Paris bookstore (not Shakespeare & Co) just because of the author (having read the big two earlier). I loved it and went on to read everything I could of his. And this year, I found a Spanish version of Animal Farm in a B&B (Rebelion en la granja) and brought it home. It's my bedside reading, very enjoyable, though the effort to read it puts me to sleep quite promptly.”