Toggle navigation Subscribe. By Rhiannon Walker Oct 29, Cito Gaston spent an entire week in his basement by himself in the fall of In a change from the previous 16 seasons, Major League Baseball expanded the best-of-five format to a best-of-seven; Toronto collapsed and blew its lead over the Royals.
The Blue Jays became the fifth team to surrender such a lead in a playoff series, and it devastated Gaston. And we hate to lose, absolutely hate to lose. Already a subscriber? Log In. Subscribe now to get full access to the new sports page.
Must read content, player grades, stuff you can't get anywhere else. View Plans Already a subscriber? They were the first team that drew 4 million fans in a season. They also had the highest payroll source: Baseball Cube. Something peculiar to Toronto is that billionaires do not directly own sports teams.
They sit on the board and hold a major stake in megacorporations that own the teams. For a Southern Ontario baseball fan, the vertical integration can cut both ways. The positives are that every two decades or so, the chance to have the strong brand association that comes with having a popular winning team will supersede the boundless appetite for profits and dividends.
That happened around It also became the M. That was a Canadian-owned brewer until That seems like a solar system from MLB in These goddamn Canadians were not treating their license to print money solely like a license to print money. Background …the Selig faction, et al.
Were they right, or were they just crying poor? They outscored their foes by Only two other teams, the New York Mets. The Mets Only Cleveland. Flipping to , the Yankees have the best regular-season winning percentage at. The Los Angeles Dodgers. But six teams exceeded. The other end of the spectrum is similar. The worst team from , the Miami Marlins, at. But six of the 30 teams fell below a.
The Mariners were a. Cardona recalled that Sammy moved to Oklahoma. Whichever man it might have been, his experience may have come in a local circuit, the South Texas Negro League.
Cito was raised by a truck driver. Gertrude was a homemaker and at times a waitress. His grandfather was a Baptist minister and the Gastons often attended church twice on Sundays.
Young Clarence had ambitions of being either a truck driver, a singer, or a major-league baseball player. Others remember him as a garbage man, who would trade his work gloves for a baseball.
At some point in his teens, Gaston acquired his nickname from a neighborhood friend in San Antonio. In a May online chat with Toronto fans, he said it came when he was 14, but earlier stories suggest that it was a few years later as he began to play amateur ball.
At any rate, the man responsible was Carlos Thompson, who later became a police detective in San Antonio. He thought Gaston resembled a Mexican wrestler whose stage name was Cito. Gaston grew up in both San Antonio and Corpus Christi. At Solomon-Coles, he was a pitcher. In the young man joined the Cardona Welders baseball team in San Antonio. Local businessman Johnny Cardona Sr. He went up there and hit the ball all the way out there in deep center field. I bought him his first pair of spikes, and the rest is history.
Gaston worked for the San Antonio sanitation department in The Milwaukee Braves signed Gaston as an amateur free agent on March 22, First thing he did was to chase a ball in deep center field, so I knew he could catch. Then he fired a strike so I knew he could throw.
Then he beat out a groundball, so I knew he could run. And then he hit a home run, so I knew he had power. He was still bothered by a cracked shinbone that had gone undiagnosed during the season. On August 28 Gaston smacked a solo homer over the right-field wall to break a tie with Amarillo. That earned him a cup of coffee with the Atlanta Braves in September. In nine games, he went 3 for After that performance Gaston headed south to play with Cardenales de Lara of the Venezuelan Winter League in the season.
Perhaps he had difficulty adjusting to the city of Barquisimeto, or was homesick, or the league was beyond his capabilities. He played in just 31 games, with a modest batting line of. The Cardenales released him. More than six feet tall. In the pound range. Athletic builds. And right away, two cops pulled guns on us. We were just two friends, two ball players, out for a drive.
How dangerous that could have been. Cito Gaston is almost a human history book of American civil rights. He was born in He had parents who stressed to him that blacks and whites were not equal in America. His dad was in the army but never knew if he was fighting for America or if America was fighting against him. They said stay away from walking through parks at night, putting yourself in a position that could be dangerous.
Gaston has lived something of a charmed life in baseball. His first big-league roommate was Hank Aaron. In the Atlanta organization, he played on a Texas League championship team that included Bobby Cox, who hired him for his first big-league coaching job.
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