Old Man Game

Don't sleep on the guy with gray hair.

If Don Sutton remembered to take his Metamucil before the game, you were in trouble. (Image credit: This Day in Baseball)

I got my first gray hair when I was a sophomore in high school. I treated it as more of an anomaly than anything, something my friends pointed out and gave me a hard time about in class. I knew my mom had been dyeing her hair for years, but I didn’t really think about what that meant for me. I had no idea what I was in for.

By my mid-twenties, my hair was mostly still brown, but there was definitely a salt-and-pepper thing going on. To my surprise, this didn’t really work against me. Girls seemed to dig it, including my first wife. If only I’d paid for a decent haircut, I might have cleaned up.

I like to joke the gray accelerated about the time I had kids, which is technically true, though, all stress jokes aside, I don’t think they were really to blame. Genetics was the culprit, and by the time I hit my mid-thirties, I had a whole lot more salt than pepper. I guess I could have dyed it, but that was never my style. So I grew it out instead.

I should have done that from that start. Not only was it even more of a hit with the ladies, including my second wife, but people compliment me on it all the time. Nearly ten years later, the gray is giving way to straight up white, but that hasn’t made any difference. A lot of people ask me if I dyed it this way, and my first reaction is to wonder why anyone would do that. But considering how many people go out of their way to comment on it, I guess maybe I answered my own question.

At this point, you’re probably saying to yourself, “We get it, dude. You got nice hair. Isn’t this supposed to be about baseball?” Well, first of all, I don’t have a whole lot going for me in the looks department. I ain’t got big muscles or a pretty face, so how about you let me have this one? And second, I’ll get to the baseball connection.

You see, when I was a kid, there were a handful of players who looked like they belonged in the old-timer’s game instead of MLB. The irony was most of them weren’t all that old. Granted, age is relative in sports, where forty is traditionally ancient. We have more players continuing to compete past that age now, but they don’t look like the old guys from when I was a kid. Take Tom Brady, who plays an even more brutal sport, for example. No one was calling him grandpa at the tail end of his career.

Perhaps I’m more sensitive about this now that I’m in my forties myself, but I don’t think I’m off-base. Look at the first guys who come to my mind when I think about his subject, Charlie Hough and Phil Niekro.

You can’t even see Phil Niekro’s walker in this pic. That’s great photography. (Image credit: Battery Power)

Both were outstanding pitchers. Niekro hit the 300-win mark in the first year I started watching baseball, 1985, which probably only reinforced my correct assumption he’d been around forever. Hough pitched through the 1994 season at the age of 46, but he might as well have been 94 to me. I always thought it was amazing he was pitching for the expansion Marlins when he looked like he’d probably once pitched to Babe Ruth. (He didn’t.) Maybe all knuckleballers look like grizzled old vets. Perhaps the pitch takes an unnatural toll on the body, which I could believe, although Tim Wakefield never struck me as particularly old during his playing days.

Maybe there’s just something in the motion of throwing a knuckleball that makes people wonder if you served in the Crimean War. (Image credit: MLB.com)

Then there’s Sparky Anderson. No doubt you’ll point out he was manager, so his age isn’t as relevant. And that’s true, but Sparky looked like Methuselah to young me while managing the Tigers, and I was astounded to learn he was only 61 when he retired in 1995. He looked the exact same when he was managing the Big Red Machine in the ‘70s, years before I was born, and he was only in his forties, the same age I am now! Maybe if he’d had better hair…but I digress.

Sparky Anderson puffing on the pipe given to him by his good friend Ulysses S. Grant on the day they both turned eighteen. Okay, I’m done with the bad jokes now. (Peter Muhly/AFP/Getty Images)

Instead, I’ll get to my best example of an old man player, Don Sutton. Sutton is one of those borderline Hall of Fame inductees. He polarizes people who get too worked up over that sort of thing, but I always considered him a crafty hurler on the mound. Of course, young me saw his curly gray-white hair sticking out the edges of his hat like a bad Jeri curl and figured he dated back to Biblical times, so it only made sense he’d had time to perfect his craft.

In reality, Sutton was only forty when I first saw him pitch in 1985. He was with the Angels that season, and they were challenging the Royals for the AL West title. I rooted against him vehemently when the Angels came to town for a four-game series late that season with the division on the line. Sutton pitched the fourth game of the series, and the Royals tagged him for four runs in a 4-1 victory, and took three out of four in the series, paving their way to the postseason and their first championship.

The following season was better for Sutton. The Angels won the division, and Sutton went 15-11 with a 3.74 ERA in 34 starts. Unfortunately for him, the Angels blew the ALCS against the Red Sox, who went on to their own heartbreak in the World Series.

I only caught the last four years of Sutton’s twenty-three-year career, and honestly, I remember him better as a broadcaster for the Braves on TBS in the ‘90s. By then, he’d cut his hair. He didn’t necessarily look a whole lot younger, but he definitely looked like less of a dork.

His pitching left an impression on me, however, and he finished his Hall-of-Fame career with a 324-256 record, 3.26 ERA, 3,574 strikeouts, 1.142 WHIP, and 66.7 WAR. “Old man game” is a term traditionally reserved for playground basketball, but guys like Sutton are proof a form of it exists in baseball too.

I take some comfort in that. I know it was the end of his career, but the fact that guys like Sutton were still holding their own in the Show in their forties gives hope to all us middle-aged guys that we’re not washed up yet. Maybe our success isn’t coming on the diamond, but it doesn’t mean we can’t accomplish our goals in whatever we decide to do.

That’s why I wrote this article and the seventy that preceded it. Heck, maybe I’ll even finally learn how to throw a knuckleball.

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Thank you for reading and supporting Powder Blue Nostalgia. Why not subscribe, if you haven’t already? I promise I won’t let it go to my head, which is covered in grayish white hair. In the meantime, share your favorite “old man” player in the comments. You can make stupid jokes at their expense or show them the proper respect they deserve. I like to think I accomplished both in my article.