Debut no picnic for Wakamatsu

Don Wakamatsu throws batting practice for Toronto. He now scouts for the New York Yankees.

Former Blue Jays coach Don Wakamatsu made his major-league debut as the catcher for Charlie Hough and his unpredictable knuckleball. Wakamatsu was called up from the Vancouver Canadians in 1991.

By Tom Hawthorn, The Province, May 24, 1991

Don Wakamatsu's dream job proved to be every catcher's worst nightmare.

The 28-year-old backstop ended a six-year apprenticeship Wednesday by playing his first major league baseball game. His unenviable assignment was to track a knuckleballer's unguided missiles.

"It's a nightmare to get called up and have to catch Charlie Hough," Wakamatsu said yesterday, the day after his debut. "It's nerve-racking."

Wakamatsu was plucked from baseball anonymity earlier this week, as the Chicago White Sox bought his contract from the Vancouver Canadians.

It was just another among dozens of midseason roster moves, a bit of baseball paperwork noted only by Rotisserie devotees and a patient catcher's delighted family.

For Wakamatsu, who was toting a humbling .127 batting average here, the unlikely promotion has temporarily put aside thoughts of retirement.

"You play in the minor leagues for so long, you wonder if you're ever going to move up," Wakamatsu said before last night's game in Oakland.

"Everything I touched this year went bad. You can't ever give up. Statistic-wise, when I'm playing my worst, I get called up. It's a strange game."

Wakamatsu was promoted by the parent club after backup catcher Ron Karkovice tore a ligament in his left thumb.

On his arrival, manager Jeff Torborg, a former catcher, tossed the rookie a glove as big as a ham hock with the warning he was to handle the notorious knuckleballer.

Early in his debut, two elusive pitches corkscrewed away from him, one costing a run.

Wakamatsu lined a single to right field in four at-bats in a White Sox victory over the California Angels at Anaheim. The ball was waiting in his locker after the game.

Meanwhile, Wakamatsu hopes to learn more about his trade from first-string catcher Carlton Fisk, a future Hall-of-Famer.

"He's been in the game forever, longer than any other catcher," Wakamatsu says. "He's got an aura around him. I try to pick his brain whenever I can."

After a minor-league whistle-stop tour that included stops in Iowa, Florida, Montana, Alabama and Tennessee,Wakamatsu is enjoying the fruits of the major league minimum salary of $100,000 US.

As well, Wakamatsu has finally read his name in a big league boxscore, even if it was shrunk to "Wkmts".

His temporary job has won him a permanent citation in the venerable Baseball Encyclopedia.

"Now, I can be remembered," he said with a laugh. "They say there's only one place to play, and it's the bigs, that's for sure."

Didn't you used to be … Doug Ault?

Doug Ault's Opening Day home runs led the Blue Jays to victory in the franchise's first game in 1977.

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
April 1, 1988

It was a chilly April afternoon 11 years ago when a tall, blond Texan became the toast of Toronto.

Snow was falling, and a wicked wind was blowing in from Lake Ontario. Baseball , the summer game, was making its major-league debut in Toronto.

The hometown Blue Jays were an expansion team staffed by rejects and retreads scavenged from the other ball clubs. Among the cast of castoffs was an unheralded first baseman.

Doug Ault had all of nine games' experience when he walloped two home runs to lead Toronto to a 9-5 victory over Chicago on the club's first opening day.

"It was like winning the World Series," Mr. Ault said recently. "I tell you, if it had been snowing all year, I might have hit 50 home runs."

He hit only nine more homers that season, and was destined to return shortly to the shadows of obscurity.

He was demoted to the minors, retired as a player to become a manager, and last fall was demoted to an even lower level of the minors.

When the Jays leave spring training in Florida to play this season's opening game on Monday in Kansas City, Mr. Ault will stay behind to manage the club's Class A farm team in Dunedin.

"It's a lot more challenging down here," he said. "Down here in A ball, you have to stress the basics. You repeat yourself a lot. But it's more rewarding, too, when you see a teen-ager you managed making the big leagues in two or three years."

Mr. Ault made the major leagues as a 27-year-old rookie after years of travelling the minor-league circuit. He might have been condemned to a life in the minors had the Jays not taken him as their sixteenth of 30 picks.

(Catcher Ernie Whitt, who will likely be behind the plate for Toronto on Monday, was taken next. Pitcher Jim Clancy, the team's third pick, is the only other original Jay still with the team.)

The Blue Jays were hatched on April 7, 1977, on an Exhibition Stadium field carpeted with snow. Before the game started, Chicago infielder Jack Brohamer used a pair of catcher's shin guards as skis and two bats as poles, and glided in the snow from first base to second.

The Jays sold 44,649 tickets to the game, but that many people were never in the stands at the same time. A monumental traffic jam caused many to miss the first pitch (a called strike thrown by Toronto's Bill Singer), while frostbitten thousands fled early.

Anne Murray sang the national anthem, fans baptized the stadium by sipping from mickeys, and Mr. Ault jumped on an inside slider in the bottom of the first inning. The ball finally came to a stop in a $2 seat in the sixth row of the left-field bleachers.

Mr. Ault so liked the pitches thrown by Chicago's Ken Brett that he swung at an outside fastball in the third inning, this time sending it over the right-field fence.

"I remember the fans were waiting on something to happen," Mr. Ault said. "I hit that first one and it just kind of got them going. All of a sudden it was like it wasn't cold at all, like we were in Florida and it was 80 degrees out and we were going to win our first baseball game."

Mr. Ault was not the only hero in the messy barn-burner of a game. Right-handed pitcher Jerry Johnson was credited with the win in relief of Mr. Singer, who when he left the field was cheered despite surrendering a generous supply of hits (11) and runs (4) to the visitors.

Fortunately for the home side, Chicago was just as solicitous. They stranded 19 of their own baserunners and allowed the Jays 16 hits, including two singles by Vancouver-born third baseman Dave McKay and a pinch-hit homer by Al Woods in his first major league at bat.

When the snow had cleared, Toronto was victorious. The fans who had opened the game chanting "We want beer!" ended it with the cry, "We're No. 1!" For one day, they were. But the Jays lost 107 games that season to go with only 54 wins.

"The other 161 games were anti-climactic," former team president Peter Bavasi (now president of a sports-news information service in New York) says today. "The first one was definitely something special."

Making the big leagues is never easy, and Mr. Ault's journey was more arduous than most.

Despite hitting a spectacular .473 to lead all college players in 1972, he was ignored by scouts. He was a contact-hitter satisfied with singles playing a position where scouts expected homers. He hit right-handed and threw left-handed, another oddity.

"I was a weirdo, no doubt about it," he says. "Certainly didn't make things easier for myself."

He ended up playing for the Glacier Pilots of Anchorage, Alaska (where he once saw the sun set and rise during a lengthy double-header), and later took the field for teams in Gastonia, N.C.; Pittsfield, Mass.; Spokane, Wash.; and Mexico City. In the off-season he worked as an itinerant roughneck on oil wells in the North Sea and in Louisiana.

Eleven years after his heroics, Mr. Ault is still asked by fans about what he acknowledges was the greatest day of his career. Of course it was not such a great day for the pitcher he made a patsy of, Ken Brett.

"I don't think he was too happy with me," Mr. Ault said. "I remember playing first base that day, and I could hear him yelling at me from the bench: 'You got lucky!' It was opening day and I guess he wanted to win. But he gave me his best stuff and I hit it."

Years later, the hapless hurler was still bothered by the homers.

"I made a hero out of him," Mr. Brett once said. "For one day at least, I made him the toast of Toronto."

Doug Ault died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Dec. 22, 2004.

Secluded troubadour scouts for new talent in rustic beer parlors

Stompin’ Tom Connors (1936-2013)

By Tom Hawthorn
Special to The Globe and Mail
November 26, 1988


Somewhere in Ontario, Stompin' Tom Connors is nursing a grudge.

It has been 10 years since the minstrel from the Maritimes put away his guitar, returned his many music awards and announced he would stomp for us no more.

The down-to-earth troubadour from Prince Edward Island, who only a few years earlier had won a national audience with such folksy tunes as Bud the Spud and Sudbury Saturday Night, retired in protest against a music industry he believed was ignoring Canadian talent.

He has been on a one-man crusade against the business ever since.

The latest salvo in his quixotic quest is Stompin' Tom Fiddle and Song, the 51-year-old singer's first album in 12 years. He released the record this month to raise money for his latest brainstorm, an album featuring unknown Canadian country artists.

Mr. Connors, who won his reputation travelling the hoser highway from hamlet to village to town, is once again haunting the beer parlors of forgotten hotels.

This time, he is searching for undiscovered performers on whom he is willing to stake his modest fortune.

But, despite frequent pleas for his return to the stage from such fans as actor Dan Aykroyd, singer K.D. Lang, and broadcaster Peter Gzowski, he insists on remaining in seclusion.

"He really hasn't changed his stand on entertaining as yet," says Cliff Evans, a Mississauga, Ont., fire fighter who is his business partner.

Mr. Connors has rarely been heard from since he angrily denounced the recording industry at a press conference in April, 1978.

He pledged at the time not to perform for a year, but his only public performance since then was last year at a protest rally calling for the continuation of Canadian content regulations for radio stations. He sang one of his own songs, We Have No Canadian Dream.

The long absence has given rise to many rumors.

"I've heard all kinds," Mr. Evans said. "People have wondered about sickness, and, obviously, being an entertainer, the first thing most people think about is a drinking problem. I could go on and on and on, but none of these are true. Tom retired because he's fed up with the Canadian music industry.

"Surprisingly, I've even had lots of comments in the few years that I've been around Tom that people have thought he had separated from Lena."

Mr. Connors and his wife met 18 years ago when she was working as a go- go dancer in a bar. Three years later, they were married in a ceremony seen coast to coast on Elwood Glover's noon-hour television broadcast from a Toronto hotel. New Brunswick premier Richard Hatfield and Toronto mayor David Crombie were among the guests.

Far from having separated, Mr. Connors has coaxed his wife into singing a duet with him in French on the new album.

"She doesn't claim to be an Anne Murray or anything like that," Mr. Evans said. "It shows the family side of Tom."

The importance of family is a frequent theme in Mr. Connors' music. He was born to an unwed teen-ager, and his earliest memories are of hitchhiking with his mother across Nova Scotia. Later, he was seized from her by the Children's Aid Society and placed in an orphanage, where he was adopted by foster parents from the hamlet of Skinner's Pond, PEI.

He ran away at age 13, took a job on the docks in Saint John and later worked on coal boats. He bought his first guitar for $19 while thumbing from town to town. He sometimes spent a night in jail as a vagrant; other times he would work in construction, pick tobacco or dig graves.

When he found himself a nickel short of the price of a glass of beer at the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins, Ont., Mr. Connors took to the stage to make up the price.

He wrote songs about everyday life, using crude rhymes and knee- slapping imagery to tell the tale of characters such as the potato- hauling, truckdriving friend, Bud Roberts, whom he immortalized as Bud the Spud.

He soon learned that he could pack any hall if he sang about the town in which he was performing. Thus was born Sudbury Saturday Night, about a night's carousing, and Tillsonburg, about the misery of migrant workers in the tobacco fields.

The nationalist sentiment in his lyrics and his heartfelt appreciation of the rigors of the working man's life won him acclaim.

Mr. Connors and his stomping board - a piece of plywood on which he kept time with his foot after a hotel owner complained about the wear on his carpet - eventually found their way to Toronto. He signed a contract, recorded several albums and later starred in his own television variety show, Stompin' Tom's Canada.

But he always harbored the suspicion that the city sophisticates looked at him as a hillbilly, a rube in a black hat with simple songs. He resented promoters' signing of big-name U.S. acts to star at places such as the Canadian National Exhibition.

He made his break with the industry in grand fashion, returning his Juno awards to the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences because it was honoring too many "border jumpers" who left Canada to find fame south of the border.

He is less harsh in his judgment these days. He is so enamored of country crooner K.D. Lang, who has enjoyed great success in Nashville, that he has penned a tribute to her in his new album. The song, Lady K.D. Lang, includes such lyrics as, "Her main claim to fame was how she sang with a twang" and jumped around like a 'rang-ee-tang."

Today, Mr. Connors lives as a virtual recluse with his wife and 12- year-old son, Tommy, near a village in Southwestern Ontario. Mr. Evans says his partner often plays the guitar for friends.

The townspeople are protective of his privacy.

"They come here looking for him all the time," says the woman who runs the general store. "Fans or reporters, I don't know who they are. The man wants his privacy and I respect that, so I shoo them away. This is a neighborly town, and Tom is just a neighbor."

On weekends, Mr. Connors and Mr. Evans travel the highways of Southwestern Ontario looking for beer parlors featuring country music.

Their record company A.C.T. - Assist Canadian Talent - released an album two years ago that featured four Stompin' Tom tunes and two songs each from unknown singers such as Kent Brockwell, a blind singer from Peterborough, Ont., and Bruce Caves, a firefighter from Norval, Ont.

The record sold poorly, in part because Mr. Connors refused to grant interviews about his project.

Meanwhile, his fans remain hopeful that he will change his mind about remaining a hermit.

"You can't get his songs out of your head," says Mr. Gzowski, who has made several appeals on CBC Radio's Morningside for Mr. Connors to appear on the show. "He's definitely an original, and he's ours."

A modest election proposal

By Tom Hawthorn

Boulevard Magazine
November, 2012

A cocky America invaded Canada 200 years ago. Conquering our land would be “a mere matter of marching,” insisted Thomas Jefferson in one of his less Jeffersonian moments.

American troops occupied Laura Secord’s house, ordering her to serve them food and drink. She plied them with booze, overheard their battle plans, then rushed to warn the local British commander. The red coats and Iroquois allies repulsed the invaders. A chain of chocolate emporiums was then named in the heroine’s honour by a grateful nation. (I may have fudged some of the details here.) Unfortunately, it has proved difficult to build a national mythology around the Battle of Beaver Dams, which sounds like an episode of Hinterland Who’s Who. Only about 30 combatants died, which is what police in Detroit now consider a slow night.

The war continued. They burned down Muddy York. We burned down the White House for the win.

What did the United States get out of the War of 1812? Two songs — Francis Scott Key’s Star-Bangled Banner and Johnny Horton’s Battle of New Orleans. Only one of those became a Billboard No. 1 hit and it is the one not sung before baseball games.

Two centuries later, our noisy neighbours in the basement claim to be the greatest democracy on the planet. Heck, I’m not convinced our American cousins have the greatest democracy on the continent. As those jokesters from the Canada Party argue, our frozen wasteland is “America, but Better.” They have suggested Canada take over the downstairs neighbour. “Not an invasion,” they insist, “an intervention.”

Invasion or intervention, you can expect push back from a nation with a constitutional right to the “pursuit of happiness,” which means they don’t much cotton to being told what to do by no well-meaning, socialist-medicine-taking northern varmints.

We Canadians should continue our policy of stealth infiltration. In the 1950s, Americans were convinced Communists were everywhere — acting in the movies, teaching in their schools, putting fluoride in their water, even hiding under their beds. While distracted by Red witch-hunts, those patriots entirely missed the maple invasion as Canadians slowly poured across the border before quietly insinuating into all facets of American life. Why, you’d hardly know we were there. Play spot the Canuck.

Kiddie crooner Justin Bieber? Canadian.

Michael Bublé? Canadian.

The Band? Neil Young? David Letterman’s musical sidekick? Canadian.

Celine, Avril, Joni, Alanis, Shania? Canadian.

Big-eared electronic dance deejay deadmau5? Canadian.

Titanic director James Cameron? Canadian.

Cutie patootie actor Michael Cera? Canadian.

Cutie patootie actress Ellen Page? Canadian.

Ironsides, from the old television show? Canadian.

Let’s Make a Deal host Monty Hall? Jeopardy! quizmaster Alex Trebek? Capt. Kirk and Scotty from Star Trek? Canadian.

John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Jim Carrey, Dave Foley, Mike Myers, Leslie Nielsen, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short? Canadian.

Curly-haired silent-film ingenue Mary Pickford, known as “America’s Sweetheart”? As Canadian as a maple donut at Tim Hortons inside a hockey rink.

Jennifer Granholm, the firebrand former Democratic governor of Michigan who made a keynote address at the Democratic convention? Canadian.

Conservative political pundits David Brooks (born in Toronto) and Charles Krauthammer (raised in Montreal) and David Frum (son of Barbara) all have a Canuck connection.

With so many of us having successfully infiltrated, we have lulled our southern allies into thinking we’re pretty much similar. With Americans going to the polls this month, we should quickly launch the final volley in our two-century-old plan — to finally end the War of 1812 by allowing ourselves to be absorbed into the United States.

Canada agrees to become the 51st state in exchange for adding a maple leaf to the 50 stars on the flag. Our population is about the same as California’s, so we’d get about 55 votes in the Electoral College. Barack Obama outpolls Mitt Romney by 68-10 in Canada (and by 50-19 even in Alberta, aka Texas North). A close contest becomes a landslide. Americans get health care and, overnight, become a world curling power. Meanwhile, we Canadians get our hands on the mightiest military machine history has ever seen. Today, America. Tomorrow, the world. 

Talking "Deadlines" with Aaron McArthur of Noon News Hour on Global

Baseball Necrology, 2011

By Tom Hawthorn
The Emerald Guide to Baseball, 2012
Society for American Baseball Research

Reno Bertoia
Pierino (Reno) Bertoia [1953-1963] died on April 15 at Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He was 76. He was born in San Vito al Tagliamento, Italy, on Jan. 8, 1935, sharing a birthdate with Elvis Presley. He moved to Canada with his family as an infant. At age 18, he signed an $11,000 bonus, joining the Detroit Tigers without playing a single game in the minors. A smooth infielder, he hit .244 over 10 major-league seasons with the Tigers, Washington Senators, Minnesota Twins, and Kansas City Athletics. While with the Tigers, he began studies at Assumption College in his Windsor hometown. After baseball practice in Detroit, he would walk across the Ambassador Bridge to attend classes. He became a teacher after leaving baseball. Bertoia was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988.

Wes Covington
John Wesley (Wes) Covington [1952-1966] died of cancer on July 4 at Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He was 79. A football prospect in high school in his native North Carolina, a knee injury led him instead to sign a minor-league contract with the Boston Braves. The 20-year-old prospect was assigned to a farm team at Eau Claire, Wis., where he was joined by a teenaged shortstop from Alabama. Hank Aaron, the future home-run king, hit nine homers for the Class-C team in 1952; Covington swatted 24. After two years of army service, the outfielder led the South Atlantic League with a .326 average in 1955. He joined the parent club, which had since moved to Milwaukee, the following season. The knock on Covington was that he was all bat, no glove, but spectacular catches in Games 2 and 5 of the 1957 World Series helped the Braves prevail against the New York Yankees. The lefty batter stayed with the Braves until 1961, when he was selected off waivers by the Chicago White Sox. He also played for the Kansas City Athletics, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the Philadelphia Phillies, including during their infamous slump to close out the 1964 season.

Billy Harris
William Thomas (Billy) Harris [1951-1965] died on May 28 at Kennewick, Washington. He was 79. Born in the hamlet of Duguayville, New Brunswick, Canada, the right-handed Harris caught the attention of scouts by pitching his junior and senior teams to consecutive Canadian Maritime championship. At age 20, he went 25-6 with the Class-B Miami Sun Sox, recording a sterling ERA of 0.83 in 294 innings pitched. He’d appear in just two major-league games, losing his 1957 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, giving up three runs in seven innings. He pitched in relief for the Los Angeles Dodgers in one game in 1959. Over 15 seasons in the minors, including several fine campaigns with the Montreal Royals, Harris went 174-134. In retirement, he operated Billy’s Bullpen Tavern in Kennewick. He was named to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 2008.

Ron Piché
Ronald Jacques (Ron) Piché [1955-2004] died on Feb. 3 at Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He was 75. Piché (pronounced pee-SHAY) made his major-league debut with the Milwaukee Braves in 1960. The right-hander started only 11 of the 134 major-league games in which he appeared. He compiled a 10-16 record with a 4.19 earned-run average over six seasons with the Braves, California Angels and St. Louis Cardinals. (He had a lone single in 42 at-bats in the majors, but did manage two runs batted-in.) The reliever spent 16 seasons in the minors including stints in four Canadian cities (Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, Quebec) though not in his hometown of Montreal. He retired as a player in 1972. Piché served as director of Canadian scouting for the Montreal Expos from 1977-1985. He later did promotional work as a roving ambassador for the club, earning the nickname Monsieur Baseball (Mr. Baseball) in his native Quebec. Piché was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1988.

Dick Williams
Richard Hirschfeld (Dick) Williams [1947-2002] died of a ruptured aortic aneurism on July 7 at Las Vegas, Nevada. He was 82. Williams was one of the most dynamic managers of his era. A hard-nosed stickler for fundamentals, he was an abrasive and volatile firebrand who battled with players, general managers and owners. The pitcher Vida Blue once said Williams made “drill sergeants look like Boy Scouts.” His autobiography was titled, No More Mr. Nice Guy, a witticism not lost on the baseball world. Williams had a knack for squeezing victories from teams that seemed to have little business as contenders. A utility journeyman as a player, he spent enough time on the bench to absorb the nuances of the game. He kicked around the majors for 13 seasons on five teams for a .260 average, playing all three outfield positions as well as every base. After guiding the Toronto Maple Leafs to consecutive International League championships in 1965 and 1966, he was promoted to handle the Boston Red Sox, a moribund team that had finished ninth in both those seasons. The turnaround was dramatic, the club winning 20 more games than the previous season. The Red Sox claimed the American League pennant by winning the 162nd game in a campaign forever to be remembered as the Impossible Dream. Williams did well to push his squad to a seventh game in the World Series before losing, for a third time, to Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals. Williams lasted two more seasons in New England before being fired. In 1971, he was hired by the mercurial Charlie O. Finley, a tyrant whose own disdain for society’s niceties matched those of his new manager. Under Williams, the Oakland A’s won three consecutive American League West division titles, as well as World Series championships in 1972 and ’73. Tired of the owner’s meddling, Williams quit. He handled the California Angels for three seasons before building the Montreal Expos into a contender, though he was fired late in the 1981 season, the only campaign in which the franchise qualified for the playoffs. Williams moved on to the San Diego Padres, another franchise enduring a decade of mediocrity. After two .500 seasons, Williams guided the Padres to the National League pennant in 1984, though they lost the World Series to the Detroit Tigers in five games. Williams ended his managerial career after three seasons in Seattle. He had been only the second manager, along with Bill McKechnie, to lead three different clubs to the World Series. Williams was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 2008.

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