Saved By the Bell may have started in 1989 and run new episodes out through 1993, but its influence--via countless reruns that continue to this day--saturated the 1990s. I, for one, watched episode after episode when I got home from school. The appeal transcended the content itself. I rarely laughed out loud at the jokes, for example, and the stories and characters were all shallow and stilted. It may be that I loved it just because it was there, like Sid Bream.
As an homage to Saved by the Bell during this multi-week celebration of the decade, I decided to cast the show with first basemen of the 1990s, with help from Eric and Ben.
Mark Grace as Zack Morris
Mark Grace plays the Bueller-esque protagonist of the show. Grace has got the looks, the moves, and the mischievous glint in his eye. He’s not the most powerful hitter or the fastest runner, but he's got the smarts and the charm to get the job done in a pinch. It doesn’t seem like a stretch for Mark Grace to press pause in the middle of a baseball game and turn to the camera with some choice quips.
Scene: Zack/Mark Grace is on a pinball losing streak at the Max, and keeps forking over dough to Slater. A double or nothing bet is on the table when a big, snaggle-toothed girld walks up to Zack/Grace and asks where the bathroom is. Zack/Grace presses pause on the world, turns to the camera, says “Slumpbuster!” and winks.
Frank Thomas as Kelly Kapowski
Frank Thomas plays everybody’s favorite cheerleader and volleyball star. Kelly/Frank Thomas is flawless and unflappable, as likable a fellow as he is a great player.
Scene: Zack and Slater are in a fierce rivalry to hit in front of Kelly/Frank Thomas in the lineup. Kelly/Frank Thomas decides to hold a home run hitting contest to determine who gets the privilege. On the day it should’ve taken place, a hailstorm traps the three sluggers in the dugout and they decide to let Wally Joyner hit ahead of Frank Thomas and they group hug.
Mo Vaughn as A.C. Slater
Mo Vaughn, the Hit Dog, plays passionate, gruff but lovable jock A.C. Slater. This old school letterman uses his physicality to intimidate his rivals, and he’s liable to fly off the handle when provoked. But he’s hiding a heart of gold behind all of that brawn.
Scene: Slater/Vaughn spikes his milkshake with Peach Schnapps at the Max, then slaps a waitress in the rear and punches out an extra. He is suspended from the big game and learns a valuable lesson about alcohol abuse.
Wally Joyner as Samuel "Screech" Powers
Wally Joyner is pretty dorky. He went to BYU, so chances are he goes light on the good stuff, and Kevin Towers compared him to the protagonist of Leave it to Beaver. Joyner refused to juice up when had the necessary phone number in hand via Ken Caminiti, so if Screech/Joyner isn’t primed for a talking-to to Zack/Mark Grace about the dangers of partying too hard, I don’t know who is.
Scene: A shady character whose parachute pants are a menacing charcoal shade offers Screech/Joyner a syringe full of the good stuff at a party. The puny weakling is torn about whether or not to accept the offer, and fantasizes about being the big man on campus with bulging biceps. Screech then bursts awake from this strange dream, as he would never actually attend a party. Relieved, he re-ups the dollup of Vicks VapoRub on his chest and falls back asleep to dream about Eric Karros.
Eric Karros as Lisa Turtle
Of all the 1990s first basemen I can think of, Eric Karros seems like the most likely to be into fashion and grooming. Plus, Lisa was always a bit overlooked, too. Action!
Scene: Blah blah blah, I like fashion. Ew, Wally Joyner, blah blah blah.
Mark McGwire as Jesse Spano
Playing the overachiever who just wanted everybody to love him, Mark McGwire is Jesse Spano. McGwire had the tools to be one of the greats. But he wanted it a little too bad, and he took a shortcut.
Scene: “I’m so excited! I’m so excited! I’m so...strong!”
Bud Selig as Mr. Belding
It’s amazing what those crazy kids get away with right under his nose!
Frank Howard as Max
1960s first baseman Frank Howard will play the jovial cafe owner, as they kinda look alike and are equally spastic and Howard was a first base coach in the 1990's so they both provided over-sized yet wise counsel in times of trouble to a younger generation.
Don't ask us where Dylan Little came from. He is, according to himself, a lifeguard at a turtle hospital. You can follow him on Twitter @orangehunchback.
Interviewer's Note: While at a Ponderosa Steakhouse in Cincinnati, Ohio I ran into former Reds legend Hal Morris. He sat in a booth adjacent to the buffet. At first it appeared that he had a stack of pancakes on his plate, but further inspection revealed that the flapjacks were instead three thin steaks covered in beef gravy. Morris had no beverage save a bowl of cherry pie filling. Though I was interrupting his meal, Mr. Morris exhibited the grace you would expect from a man with a career OBP of .361.
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Interviewer: What was it like being a rookie starting at first base for that 1990 Reds team?
Hal Morris: At first it was like Chris Sabo dragging you to the mall so he could shop for a new pair of ball googles, and sometimes it's like your down in Sarasota and Eric Davis keeps crapping in your scooper.
IV: That sounds brutal. Was hazing typical?
HM: I don't know. I guess so. I helped some dudes pour some Skyline Chili in Reggie Sanders' Walkman the next year. But you’re missing the point. That was a World Series Team. World’s Champions. Hell, I would’ve let Mariano drop Duncan donuts on the dash of my Fiero if it meant another ring.
IV: Were you nervous taking over first base duties for Todd Benzinger?
HM: Not really... Piniella thought Toddy Benz was so ugly at first base he practically gave the spot away.
IV: Do you mean that Pineilla didn't think Benzinger was a good fielder?
HM: No, Benzo was a solid ball player. I don’t know what I meant by that. I was just saying, being a one-bagger in the senior circuit is easy. It's basically the DH of the NL. No one expects you to field, just grab a piece of leather the size of the butt of one of Marge Schott's dogs and pretend like you’ve been there before.
John Kruk doesn't like being taunted about having one testicle.
Who knows what he thinks, really. Don't presume a man is going to tell the truth in a Philadelphia magazine interview where one of the previous questions was, "Did she think Mitch brought his homeless buddy along for a meal?"1 But, in that 2007 interview, Kruk said a guy at a high school football game in West Virginia made a testicle joke once.
"He yelled it from far away, I’ll tell you that, because I woulda beat the shit out of him," Kruk told Phillymag. "If people I know joke, like Mitch Williams, it’s a joke. People I don’t know, they deserve their ass beat."
I guess I knew a whole lot of people in 1994 who deserved to have their asses beat. I was an 11-year-old in Northeast Philadelphia, and Kruk was a running gag in the playgrounds and schoolyards across the Far Northeast. A lot of people simply knew Kruk, who had surgery to remove his cancerous right testicle that March, as the baseball player with one ball.
Kruk's lasting career highlight was a comical right-handed at-bat against Randy Johnson in the 1993 All-Star Game, but he was actually a pretty good player over his 10 seasons (.300/.397/.446 slash line; 133 OPS+). He went to three All-Star Games and hit .348 in the '93 World Series.
And, of course, he did it while being fat.
John Kruk the baseball player, as opposed to John Kruk the running gag for 11-year-olds, is the fat guy who played baseball. He wasn't enormous, but he was usually overweight and unkempt looking. He's "the poster boy for critics who deride baseball players as [not] physically fit athletes" (Murray Chass, The New York Times, 1995)2. He "doesn't look good, partly because of a diet that features hot dogs and hamburgers" (Robert Fachet, Washington Post, 1992). He "looked like a classic Chicago softball player." (Mike Royko, Chicago Tribune, 1993). The adoration continues today: "John Kruk was Kenny Powers before Kenny Powers was Kenny Powers." (Drew Magary, NBC Philadelphia, 2011).
The classic Kruk story is his response to a fan who questioned his conditioning: "I ain't an athlete, lady, I'm a baseball player." His autobiography's even called I Ain't an Athlete, Lady. To be fair, the woman's alarm only came after she saw Kruk drinking beer and smoking cigarettes at a restaurant during spring training.
Kruk didn't care about his weight -- "Besides, two years ago, I was skinny and had the worst year of my life," he said -- or indeed what people seemed to think of him at all. Naturally, he didn't always get along with reporters. Kruk's attitude and physique gained him a bit of a following as a baseball everyman, the smartass kid from West Virginia who made it big. He changed his stance all the time. He had a mullet.3 In the Tribune Royko called him his new sports hero and "the best thing to come along since Yogi Berra." The Virginian-Pilot's Larry Maddry became a fan after Kruk came to the plate in the 1993 NLCS with a giant rip in his pants. Philadelphia went crazy for him that year, as the Phillies lost to the Blue Jays in six. There were John Kruk lookalike contests!4
But let's be clear: John Kruk is awesome. He retired in the middle of a game after getting one last hit. He feared for his life after a roommate who robbed banks believed it was Kruk who turned him into the FBI. He zoned out after catching a fly ball in left and allowed Bobby Bonilla to score from second.5 Chris Farley played him on Saturday Night Live.
And he beat cancer. He returned from radiation therapy for the home opener and got three hits. John Kruk was Lance Armstrong before Lance Armstrong was Lance Armstrong.
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1 I have been told this story by several people: When the movie Rookie of the Year came out, John Kruk was asked how he'd feel were a 12-year-old to strike him out. His response: "Get the hell away from me!"
2 The Times also described Kruk as "the Phillies' Huck Finn in residence." Presumably, he tricked Darren Daulton into whitewashing a fence.
3 "On this Twitter thing," Kruk tells the Philadelphia Inquirer's John Gonzalez, "at least five people a day say 'bring back the mullet.'"
4 Steve Odabashian, the lawyer who sometimes dresses up as Andy Reid, is running for City Council. I don't think you need me to tell you that both the Inquirer and the Daily News endorsed him.
5 The batter, R.J. Reynolds, was credited with a sac fly.
Paul Franz is a friend of the blog and regular Pitchers & Poets contributor. Read his thoughts on a variety of subjects at his blog Nicht Diese Tone.
Todd Helton isn't really a First Baseman of the 1990s. His best seasons came in 2000, just after the last decade of the millennium came to a close. His first full season - good though it was - didn't come until 1998, well after the scars of the 90s had been inflicted, the narratives told. Helton was destined to be a first baseman of the 2000s, and yet he feels just as out of place alongside Albert Pujols, Paul Konerko, Lance Berkman, and Ryan Howard as he does beside John Olerud or Mo Vaughn. Maybe that's because Helton has spent so much of the 2000s fighting against the onset of old age, ever trying to reclaim the prowess that marked his youth, the potential that forced no less than Andres Galarraga out of Colorado. Maybe it's just me, a Rockies fan in his twenties, who sometimes wishes time would have stopped in 1999, when a young Todd Helton defined in vivid terms the possibilities for the future. Much as the 90s were a self-contained and self-absorbed decade, they were also a time of expectation, full of technological fantasies and social and political aspirations for the future. At the turn of the decade and millenium, no player, to me, better represented that optimistic gaze into the future than Todd Helton.
Katie Baker (@katiebakes) is a writer for Grantland. She finds it impossible to read any of the below names without hearing Bob Murphy's voice.
There's a story about Rickey Henderson that goes like this: After being released by the Mets in 2000 and picked up by the Seattle Mariners, he approached teammate John Olerud and asked him what was up with the whole batting helmet in the infield thing. Olerud explained that he had always worn it, having undergone a 1988 surgery for a brain stem aneurysm. Rickey nodded.
"Last year when I was with the Mets," he said, "I had a teammate who always wore his helmet too."
"Yeah, Rickey … that was me," Olerud said.
The story isn't true, sadly -- it was a Mets clubhouse joke that was erroneously reported as fact (this even in the days before Twitter!) and gained traction because, as the New York Post reported, "of Henderson's history of saying odd things. For example, last year Henderson couldn't remember GM Steve Phillips' name."
But it's really a John Olerud story at heart. That his role in the tall tale was (and remains) even remotely believable is a sign of how unassuming he was, always half-hidden serenely beneath that doctored batting helmet of his as if it held powers of invisibility. The player whom, as a sophomore in college, had been deemed one of those coveted Faces In The Crowd, at times appeared practically faceless.
Olerud went straight to the majors from college, but his breakout season came several years later in 1993, when he flirted for a little while with .400 and earned an All-Star nod and a 4-games-to-2 World Series victory over the Philadelphia Phillies. Still, a Steve Wulf column comparing Phillies first baseman John Kruk to Olerud merrily painted Olerud as bland: "they're both named John, but one is Cougar Mellancamp and the other is Philip Sousa," Wulf wrote, adding that Kruk was beer and Olerud was … milk.
"He don't talk," said Kruk of Olerud. "Man, that guy is boring. He just gets his three hits a game, that's all. He didn't say a whole lot at first base. He don't like me, I guess. I can't say I blame him."
Olerud, for his part, was later taken aback by the suggestion that he didn't like Kruk. "That's not true," he said. "I don't know him very well, but he seems to be a good guy, and I very much respect him as a hitter."
Heartbreaking! My own real exposure to Olerud came from his all-too-short stint with the Mets during their slow late-90's crawl back toward relevance. He wasn't fast (it's a true wonder that he hit for the cycle twice in his career) but he was efficient and economical in other ways -- his glove Gold, his swing once described as "so sweet you could pour it on pancakes." He set several single season team records, hit .354 in 1998, and helped twice bring the team to within a game of making the postseason.
More importantly, in 1999 he was part of one of the top Ninetiesest Sports Illustrated covers of all time:
(At least Rey wore a shirt.) But alas, such a provocative cover -- look at Olerud giving Robin Ventura that headlock! Whatta jokester, that guy! -- was little more than a farce. His name appears only thrice in the 2000-word article:
1. "With shortstop Rey Ordoñez showing more reliability to complement his gymnastic flair for the spectacular and first baseman John Olerud providing his usual steady play, New York gives away almost no runs."
2. "Alfonzo (four errors), Ordoñez (four), Ventura (seven) and Olerud (eight) had combined for as many errors as Ventura's replacement with the Chicago White Sox, Greg Norton."
3. [Part of a quote from JT Snow]: "Ordonez and Alfonzo stand out up the middle, but Ventura has five Gold Gloves, and Olerud gets the job done."
That, in a piece ostensibly about "THE BEST INFIELD EVER," of which he represented 25%. Poor Olerud. With coverage like this, it's really no wonder that everyone might believe that he'd be forgotten about one day by Rickey Henderson.
Saved By the Bell may have started in 1989 and run new episodes out through 1993, but its influence--via countless reruns that continue to this day--saturated the 1990s. I, for one, watched episode after episode when I got home from school. The appeal transcended the content itself. I rarely laughed out loud at the jokes, for example, and the stories and characters were all shallow and stilted. It may be that I loved it just because it was there, like Sid Bream.
Mark Grace plays the Bueller-esque protagonist of the show. Grace has got the looks, the moves, and the mischievous glint in his eye. He’s not the most powerful hitter or the fastest runner, but he's got the smarts and the charm to get the job done in a pinch. It doesn’t seem like a stretch for Mark Grace to press pause in the middle of a baseball game and turn to the camera with some choice quips.
Frank Thomas plays everybody’s favorite cheerleader and volleyball star. Kelly/Frank Thomas is flawless and unflappable, as likable a fellow as he is a great player.
Mo Vaughn, the Hit Dog, plays passionate, gruff but lovable jock A.C. Slater. This old school letterman uses his physicality to intimidate his rivals, and he’s liable to fly off the handle when provoked. But he’s hiding a heart of gold behind all of that brawn.
Wally Joyner is pretty dorky. He went to BYU, so chances are he goes light on the good stuff, and Kevin Towers compared him to the protagonist of Leave it to Beaver. Joyner refused to juice up when had the necessary phone number in hand via Ken Caminiti, so if Screech/Joyner isn’t primed for a talking-to to Zack/Mark Grace about the dangers of partying too hard, I don’t know who is.
Of all the 1990s first basemen I can think of, Eric Karros seems like the most likely to be into fashion and grooming. Plus, Lisa was always a bit overlooked, too. Action!
Playing the overachiever who just wanted everybody to love him, Mark McGwire is Jesse Spano. McGwire had the tools to be one of the greats. But he wanted it a little too bad, and he took a shortcut.
It’s amazing what those crazy kids get away with right under his nose!
1960s first baseman Frank Howard will play the jovial cafe owner, as they kinda look alike and are equally spastic and Howard was a first base coach in the 1990's so they both provided over-sized yet wise counsel in times of trouble to a younger generation.
Interviewer: What was it like being a rookie starting at first base for that 1990 Reds team?
