Bradley is good write, good glove, good Tar Heel

By Scott Benjamin

After reviewing the analytics and checking each metric, is Jeff Bradley Good Bat?

Of course he is. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

If you want to impress someone with your resume, forget about Michael, James, McAdoo or the Kangaroo Kid.

If you graduate from the journalism school then you don’t need to add bold type or an exclamation point.

For years sports fans might have argued over beer and pretzels about whether Fordham or Syracuse has produced better sportscasters. Or who is more talented: Vin Scully (Fordham) or Bob Costas (Syracuse).

But when it comes to sports print journalism, consider the Tar Heels’ roster.

CUE THE TRUMPETS:

· Peter Gammons, who not only would shag fly balls and pitch batting practice many moons ago at some of the Red Sox road games, but in 1972 invented the baseball notes column while at The Boston Globe. He got inducted into the writers’ section of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2004. Not only does he play the guitar, he’s spent more than 30 years combined at ESPN, NESN and the MLB Network.

· Curry Kirkpatrick, who fellow Sports Illustrated senior writer Frank Deford once called “The Sultan of Satire.” In 1991 he played sports for a weekend in Kennebunkport with President H.W. Bush and wrote about it. Perhaps more notably, after Sports Illustrated put golfer John Daly on the cover that next week, Kirkpatrick refrained from opening hand grenades in the Time/Life building. The former Westport resident was a charter member of the United States Basketball Writers Association’s Hall of Fame.

· S.L. (Scott) Price, who in 1980 frequented Bobby Valentine’s Sports Gallery Café in Stamford when it had just opened, the Connecticut drinking age was 18, and so was he. He has been with Sports Illustrated since 1994 and has written four books. The New York Times has stated that Price “is a master of the new journalism developed by Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese and Price’s personal paragon, Pete Hammill. Whenever he writes about sports – or about the craft of writing – he hits one over the fence.”

· Tim Crothers, who had a long stint at Sports Illustrated where he wrote the first national story on Tigers Wood, and who now teaches journalism at UNC. He has not only written a book on Tar Heels basketball coach Roy Williams but the most successful coach at the school – women’s soccer mentor Anson Dorrance, who has guided the program to 23 national titles.

When asked recently during a recent phone interview about what he acquired from the famed program, the first thing that Bradley said was, “I learned how to type fast.”

Well, it was more than that: Over nearly three decades he wrote for The New York Daily News, ESPN The Magazine, Sports Illustrated and The Newark Star-Ledger. He is now the communications director for Toronto FC.

Remarked Bradley, “The school had excellent professors, who taught you how to gather information on and off the record, conduct an interview and develop questions.”

Jeff Pearlman, who has written best-selling books on subjects ranging from Walter Payton to the Showtime Lakers, stated in 2018 that during his tenure as a baseball writer for Sports Illustrated in the late-1990s and early-2000s, Bradley “was one of the five or six must-read scribes on the job. He had a detailed understanding of the game, he explained intricacies with a surgeon’s precession, he was quick with a sharp phrase, on point with his calls.”

It Figures.

The Bradley family is the hottest thing in the Garden State this side of Bruce Springsteen.

Jeff’s older brother Scott played in the majors from 1984 to 1992, starting with the Yankees of Yogi Berra, and is now the coach at Princeton. Older brother Bob is the soccer coach at Los Angeles FC.

However, is Bradley also Good Glove?

Of course he is.

He sold 7,000 high-quality youth gloves last year, a 150 percent increase over 2018.

Bradley Baseball Gloves (www.bradleybaseballgloves.com) – operates out of the basement of the Manasquan, N.J. home he shares with his wife, an elementary school teacher. It was partly inspired by “Shoe Dog” (Scribner, 401 Pages) - Phil Knight’s best-selling book on the evolution of Nike.

Bradley, who lost his job at ESPN The Magazine and then later was part of the cost-cutting in 2013 at the Newark Star-Ledger in New Jersey, said he was reading the book and decided to take the plunge since he had experienced difficulty years earlier in finding baseball gloves for their two sons – Tyler and Beau.

Bradley said many of the Little League players he coached had ill-fitting gloves.

“Most youth gloves are not up to par,” he declared. “It’s sort of like, whatever functions.”

“The focus of Rawlings and Wilson has always been on the professional players,” said Bradley.

“There doesn’t seem to be the attention given to gloves that is usually given to bats,” he continued. “Parents will go in and spend $300 for a bat but just invest $29.99 to buy a glove off the shelf.”

“What I have that Nike didn’t have in the 1970s is the Internet,” Bradley said, making a comparison of the start-up operations.

He said his biggest market is Texas, where there have been “some
nice things” posted about the company on Facebook.

Regarding the current state of the game, five years into his tenure, Commissioner Rob Manfred has discussed or proposed options to make baseball more enjoyable in a digital society.

Bradley said one of the best ways would be “to open the strike zone.”

“You would have more balls in play,” he explained. “When you have teams that will have their batters take a lot of pitches, you end up with a lot of walks, strike outs and home runs. That’s not necessarily the most exciting baseball.”

“Stepping in and out of the box I don’t think is a big issue,” Bradley said.

“What is causing the longer games are commercial breaks that take three minutes when you could be starting the next inning in 30 seconds,” he said.

He said maybe some of the advertising could be placed at the bottom of the screen while the games are in action, but overall he fears that not much can be done about the longer intervals between innings.

Regarding the firing of three managers – A.J. Hinch of the Astros, Alex Cora of the Red Sox and Carlos Beltran of the Mets – following the commissioner’s report on the Astros’ sign-stealing, Bradley said, “I think a lot of teams have been doing something. It’s probably pretty widespread with all that’s out there in camera angles and high definition.”

“The Astros had a more elaborate plan and they got caught,” he remarked.

Bradley noted that The Wall Street Journal reported in 2001 that the New York Giants stole signs in the famed 1951 National League playoff series by using telescopes.

“As a result of the investigation and the penalties, I think you’re going to see teams be less brazen and they will also change their signs more frequently,” he said.

On another topic, Bradley said that since he is “a purist” he would rather keep the current playoff format instead of expanding it to seven teams per league as has been proposed.

“I remember growing up and having just the best three-out-of-five game league champion series and you could watch every inning of every game,” he said.

“Now some of the playoff games are on at crazy hours,” Bradley said of the format where five teams per league qualify.

Also, for years baseball economics have prohibited regularly scheduled conventional double-headers where the fan gets to see two games for the price of one.

WFAN radio personality Richard Neer suggested in 2018 that the teams hold conventional double-headers so that there would be more days off and to entice fans to come and also boost revenues, offer the double-headers at 70 percent of the cost of two games.

“I would love to see something like that,” Bradley said. “I used to get my Mets schedule as I was growing up and circle the dates with the doubleheader games.”

He said teams also could be required to play a small number of day-night double headers with separate admissions to address the need for more off days and the possibility of starting the season after April Fool’s Day.

Is Manfred trying to be a visionary, by playing games in London, seeking to speed up play and expand the playoffs?

“He works for the owners and it is not so much being a judge and jury person,” Bradley regarding the commissioner’s powers.

Bradley said he supports the move to a 26-man roster from the current 25 active players per team.

Advocates have said that the additional player is needed in an era of strict pitch counts and match-up relievers.

In 2000 MLB sportscaster Costas wrote the book, “Fair Ball” (Broadway, 197 Pages), which bemoaned that “two-thirds of the team in major league baseball have no chance of contending for the World Series” because of the current economic structure.

Costas recommended a superstar salary cap and not only a ceiling on team expenditures, but a floor, which would ensure that the small market and low budget teams would at least make some attempt toward being respectable.

Said Bradley “That theory hasn’t held up well,” noting that some low-budget teams have excelled.

Kansas City won a World Series in 2015 and Cleveland almost took the Commissioner’s Trophy in 2016. Tampa Bay has been to the playoffs five times since 2008 and Oakland has qualified five times since 2012.

“With good management, you can be competitive in four- and five-year windows,” he said of the lower-payroll franchises.

However, he said many teams appear to be more cautious about making long-term commitments to high-priced free agent superstars, as was seen in 2019 when San Diego didn’t sign Manny Machado until February 19 and Philadelphia didn’t agree to terms with Bryce Harper until March 3.

Then, this year the Red Sox decided to lower their expenses by trading pending free agent Mookie Betts to the Dodgers shortly before spring training.

“Every team has serious decisions to make about the future and how they’re going to manage their money,” said Bradley. “There is more emphasis on the three-year plan and the five-year plan. You usually have someone in the organization who has responsibility for managing the long-term budget.”

He added, “The Yankees made changes starting in 2016 to lock up some young players for a while at a lower expense, which gave them the flexibility to splurge for $324 million to get Gerrit Cole,” the Bronx Bombers new ace pitcher.

Are the front offices trying to turn baseball into too much of a Science?

“Everyone has to have an analytics department,” Bradley said. “Some organizations take it further. Some just run numbers. Some teams have depleted their scouting departments. There are scouts that have lost their jobs,”

On a separate subject, he said former Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, who will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in July, “was always accessible” to reporters, but also “was very guarded and would never say anything to bad mouth a teammate. He didn’t talk much about himself, he mostly would praise his teammates. He knew his job as captain and as the voice of the team.”

Additionally, “He would never discuss his own injuries,” Bradley recalled. “Either he was playing or he was injured. It was never, ‘I’m playing hurt.’ It was a smart way to do things.”

He said that Jeter conducted himself with class, noting that even though he dated some high-profile women, “He stayed out of the tabloids,” a different narrative than New York Jets Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Namath had experienced a generation earlier in the City of Heroes.

Bradley said Internet has drastically altered sports-writing by putting “news all over the place.”

“There are people writing stories who don’t have a formal education for it, and are amateurs,” he said. “In some cases they don’t even go to the games and some of what they write is bombastic.”

“When I was with The [New York] Daily News [in the 1990s] there were 20 copies of The Daily News in the clubhouse, and you would, if needed, step aside with a player if there was some disagreement over a story,” Bradley declared. “Now the players are on their IPhones and they may be reading something on SB Nation that was written by someone who has never been in Yankee Stadium.”

Now his link to baseball is a youth glove company that is an alternative to the brand names.

Consider the possibilities.

Knight started selling his athletic shoes with the swoosh logo out of his Plymouth Valiant. Now he’s worth a reported $22 billion, which puts him in Mike Bloomberg’s tax bracket.

Netflix even has a movie option on “Shoe Dog.”

So consider where Bradley Baseball Gloves might be headed.

If Tom Cruise portrayed Jerry Maguire, a sports agent who was fired and then started his own agency, why couldn’t he play a former sportswriter?

Bernie Sanders once wrote a letter to Barack Obama imploring him not to visit Nike because it offshores to low-wage countries. So if he gets to the Oval Office, will he propose legislation prohibiting Bradley Baseball Gloves from expanding its operations to China?