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Another point to consider: Herzog began building what he wanted in St. Louis in 1980. And his real key to that beginning (Ozzie Smith came along in 1982) was dumping Ted Simmons and importing his Kansas City backstop mainstay, Darrell Porter to start the 1981 season. His reason: a) Simmons, for all his virtues, was a horror when it came to keeping baserunners honest; he had one of the weakest throwing arms in the league, especially in the late innings, and the book on the Cardinals to that point was run like hell on Simmons. b) Simmons was asked to consider moving to third base when the White Rat came to town and Simmons refused, no questions asked. And if there was one manager who played it the-team-way-or-the-highway no matter how much a players' manager he actually was, Whitey Herzog was he. But the main reason he wanted Porter was because Porter was a better handler of pitchers and had a better throwing arm. Herzog had always been looking for pitchers who could throw to the infield, as it were, and he needed a catcher who could work that sort of staff and, as a parallel, not throw a ball into the stands when a runner was thinking about taking liberties. But, again, this was of a piece to the kind of baseball that Herzog had advocated and tried to execute for his entire career.

I should say that by no means does it weaken the case for Ozzie Smith going to the Hall of Fame. You could have all the ground ball pitchers on earth and have every one of them plan to throw them to be hit to shortstop, but you still need the right guy covering it - and if he isn't reading the field he's playing on and the spontaneous turns of a batted ball, all the ground ball pitching on earth isn't going to fatten his performance papers.

So Ozzie Smith benefitted from a lot of ground ball pitchers on his club? Well, you work with what you got. (Bill Mazeroski and Brooks Robinson, to name two who got to Cooperstown with the glove work, had pitching staffs who were more evenly divided between fly pitchers and ground ball pitchers, but it didn't exactly kill their reps, either.) Saying Smith got a statistical steroid shot because he just so happened to play with one after another ground ball pitcher is kind of like saying Roger Maris got a power hitting steroid shot by getting a regular chance to have Yankee Stadium's short right field porch reaching out to touch him. Maris's actual secret was that he finally learned how to work the count, and make it work him to a ball he could pull. (An interesting side note: Maris as often as not hit them to pure right center as to dead or inner right field, even in the Big Season. And if he couldn't work out a ball to pull, he was better than credited at going with the pitch; I saw him get a lot of good hits to center or left center, though rarely to pure left or to the left field line.)

Likewise, Smith (who was always trying to find a better way to do it) learned to read his pitching staff better each season he played, and to anticipate the ball's peculiarities - not just on the Busch rug but in all the parks. As much as his pitching staff, Smith learned how to read and work his home field and the fields he visited. That's not an unfair advantage to get more double play balls than you're entitled to - that's work. I can't understand why those few (you have seen them too, I'm sure) who think he should wait his turn, as it were, can't come to full term with a player who was intelligent enough, for all his flash, to learn how to play the entire physical breadth of his position and how it would be worked to. Ozzie Smith's raw talent and acrobatic playmaking was so vivid that it was only too easy to forget that he was playing even more with his eyes and his brains than with his hands and feet.