This past week, the Twins’ Jose Miranda went 12-for-12; hitting safely in a dozen consecutive at-bats. The streak tied three men for the longest streak of its kind, ever.
“It’s great,” Miranda said. “It’s great to be a part of history.”
But what no reporter said in reply for some reason was, “History is not joined. It is shared, from the moment we are born for eternity.” Why a member of the media did not stand up and say these exact words to Miranda we will never know. Wokeness, probably.
As high as Miranda felt right then, with his guaranteed entry on any “Best Minnesota Twins Moments” lists before the internet melts, being a part of history means you’re a part of the same history as everyone else: The champions, the standouts, the anomalies, and the burnouts.
There was also Lou Camilli. He did the same thing Miranda did, just for way longer and in the other direction.
***
A new face walked into the Cleveland clubhouse in 1969.
Larry Brown squeezed the rookie’s hand.
“Welcome,” he said, or something like it. “Good to have you on the team.”
But all the infielders piling up in Cleveland’s locker room always made Larry feel less welcoming and more and more concerned. One of the only sure things in baseball is that one day, somebody is going to take your job. That’s typically true for aging infielders struggling to hit .250.
In the offseason, Cleveland had acquired Zoilo Versalles, and management had already awarded him Larry’s coveted shortstop gig in the papers. One of his own teammates had called Larry “not spectacular.” So he’d gone into spring training with his fists clenched and won the job for which all he’d asked was a fair shake.
They let him play short for a while, but every new infielder through the door meant his time had gotten shorter. One day in July, it was up. Two-time All-American Eddie Leon was Cleveland’s shortstop, and Larry had gone from fighting for his job to fighting for his roster spot.
Brown wasn’t going to lose it without sizing up the competition, however, and decided to assert himself as a team leader around this new kid. A lot of times, these rookies, they get up to the majors and however tough they thought they were… they aren’t so tough anymore. You want to know right away if you’ve got a soft-skulled milksop in your midst who’s going to piss down to their stirrups the first time they see a knuckleball. So it’s on the veterans to, you know, test the integrity of their bones.
That’s why Brown was squeezing Lou Camilli’s hand just then. Not just as a greeting, but as a measurement. Also to maybe intimidate him a little. Whatever. His plans had not been fully formed.[1]
The truth was, it wasn’t hard to outhit Larry Brown in 1969. Larry knew it. Opposing pitchers knew it. Everybody knew it. Lou Camilli probably knew it when Larry was shaking his hand. Camilli had hit .276 with Waterbury in the minors and had at one point been the leading scorer and base stealer in the Basin League. He knew how to hit, or what to do when he got on base, at least. Which can involve hitting.
Days before, Camilli’s Waterbury club had been playing an Eastern League match-up with the Pittsfield Red Sox. Pittsfield had a lanky Virginian lefty on the mound named Jack Gaines who chose that day to fire the most unhittable shit on earth at the Waterbury hitters and wound up with a two-hit shut-out. The only Waterbury player to make solid contact on Gaines’ stuff that day was Lou Camilli, who singled in the first and the fourth as his teammates flailed and flubbed and fell down. Gaines’ best stuff wasn’t good enough to beat him.
Surely, even a below-average swinger could make enough solid contact to knock Brown off the roster. But one of the other only sure things in baseball is that while anybody can take your job, they might lose theirs first.
Camili spent his first big-league start circulating the idea of a base hit and like Goldilocks, went around sampling all the different types of outs he could make. He struck out in his first at-bat, grounded out in his second, popped out in his third, and went back to the groundout—his clear favorite–for his final at-bat in the ninth. It was fine. Nobody was hitting that day. If it hadn’t been for Eddie Leon’s single in the third, the Royals’ 10-0 smashing of Cleveland would have been a no-hitter. Camilli wouldn’t make another start until September.
Through August, Camilli would get tossed into games as a pinch-runner or a defensive replacement. From August 12 to August 30, he appeared in 10 games, never before the seventh inning. Rumor had it that he’d get some playing time at third base during a road trip that month, due to the general sucking of Cleveland’s third base options at the time, but that never really happened.
Cleveland had transitioned their season into a tryout, slotting in young, unproven players just about everywhere to try and see if there was a combination of them that could be a ball team. At 23, Camilli was part of that group. Transfixed on the next four years of his five-year contract, manager Al Dark was happy to bumble through the rest of the schedule just to see who on his roster could do what. With their focus elsewhere, nobody seemed to notice when Lou Camilli went through his first 13 games and 15 plate appearances without knocking his first big-league hit.
On one occasion, Camilli worked a count to 2-0, then watched a flabbergasting slider cross the plate for strike one.
“No pitcher in our league throws a slider when he’s behind,” a shellshocked Camilli told reporters later.
Listen to that. “Our league.” Clearly Camilli was far more comfortable in the majors in his head than he was at the plate. I mean, a slider? With two balls? He looked back out at the sociopath on the mound as his entire understanding of the sport shifted.
Later, Dark said the moment was perfect, because Camilli was able to learn a lesson about major-league pitchers, and it didn’t matter if it cost the team in the long run because they sucked anyway.
“He was amazed to see a slider at that point,” Dark said. “But he won’t be next time. And since we’re going nowhere this season, isn’t it better for him to learn that lesson now?”[2]
It was a rare thing to be almost 30 and of use in the 1969 Cleveland clubhouse, but Larry Brown got four starts in a row that Camilli didn’t get, and he… well, he didn’t get a hit in any of them. In fact, he went 1-for-August in 11 appearances that month, bopping a meaningless single to left on the last day of the month. He did not come in to score.
Still. A wry smile may have crept across his face if he’d read a concerned fan’s missive to the local rag:
“The enthusiasm of our baseball fans has been jeopardized by turning the last half of the season into a training camp,” wrote one fan. “… minor leaguers have been substituted for competitive and tried clutch veterans like Larry Brown.”
“Veterans or rookies, the result is last place,” one writer muttered in response.[3]
Autumn came. The Miracle Mets prayed to the right god and beat the Orioles in the World Series.
The offseason proceeded accordingly. Players and coaches attended brunches with season ticket holders. Fans wrote letters to the stadium, begging for their favorite players not to be traded. For the first time ever, the Browns outdrew the local baseball team in attendance.
Fans started to notice things like how two expansion teams in Kansas City and Seattle had finished the season higher in the standings than Cleveland, that their team was close to the bottom in all of the major offensive categories, and that this Al Dark character who’d come into the organization was bumping anyone in his way out of it.
“If Dark is such a good manager,” fans asked, “why is the team in last place?”
But the most crucial development for Cleveland, at least for our story, is that over the winter of 1969 and into the dawns of the seventies, Lou Camilli did not log a base hit on a big-league field. No one did. But Camilli didn’t, either.
He was still hitless, but no longer a pure rookie, by the time he felt the spring sun on his face in 1970. Someone had discovered the column full of zeros that had dominated his first major-league run and Camilli spent most of the summer in Wichita.
“I know what’s wrong,” somebody in the Cleveland organization declared. “This boy is playing the wrong position!”
So they shuffled him over to shortstop, a way harder and more stressful job, assuming it would calm his nerves. When Camilli booted a double play ball that led to four unearned runs pouring in, negating three solo homers Wichita had piled up early in the game, they blamed him for the loss in the papers. As the errors gleaned off his mitt and slipped from his hands, the fans called him “Iron Glove” and “Butterfingers” from the stands.[4]
But Camilli knew that Cleveland wanted a utility infielder to play a couple of spots, and if that meant embarrassing himself as he climbed over the learning curve, then he was fine doing that, and eventually became a more confident fielder in the minors. So confident, in fact, that he tried to run right through an opposing pitcher, which of course ended in a collision, a knee injury, and an inability to play in the Double-A All-Star Game to which he’d been selected.
“Get that newly minted shortstop with the injured knee up here!” cried the brass.
Camilli was back with the big club for another August. They dropped him into the action starting August 12, and through the regular season’s closure on the first day of October, they dropped Camilli into a game 15 more times. They lost every game he played in.
Except for one.
Tied 3-3 with the Yankees, Cleveland loaded the bases in the bottom of the 11th. After escaping a bases-loaded Yankee threat moments before, this was Cleveland’s best chance all day to sneak a comeback win. The man people wanted to see coming to the plate was Duke Sims, a tall slugger on the verge of his 20th homer of the season, who’d already hit one that afternoon. Instead, they got Lou Camilli, a man who was 0-for-23 in 23 games in the majors.
Camilli gripped his bat and looked out at the pitcher. The baseball he was fingering was just as hittable as any other. It wasn’t going to come out of this Yankee rando’s hand and do anything he hadn’t seen before. Camilli had already experienced a 2-0 slider. How else could the game surprise him?
And yet, Camilli might have caught himself off guard when he swung, and connected, and shot a liner toward right field. The initial dopamine burst probably set off fireworks in his head as he took a step toward first.
But just a single step. That game-winning hit’s lifespan was measured in nanoseconds, as it was now comfortably snared in the first baseman’s glove. Cleveland didn’t have a win. Camilli still didn’t have a hit.
Duke Sims came up the next inning and bashed a walk-off bomb on a pitch he claimed he hadn’t even seen before he swung.
So, great. Great. A solid line drive gets you nothing, but the guy swinging with his eyes closed knocks it out of the park. Okay, sure. Baseball is great. This is great.
Camilli played hitlessly in five more games in 1970. Cleveland lost all of them. His .000/.065/.000 career slash line through 29 games was less of a “line” and more of a “space.” The following winter, he could have chosen to walk out into nature, find a bear-less cave, and sit, staring into the darkness, where perhaps through a vision induced by madness, he could see images of himself in a major-league uniform, stroking extra base knocks into the corner.
Instead, Camilli went to the Dominican Republic, where after enough catchers had been cut down, somebody looked in his direction, saw the guy who had learned to play the second-hardest defensive position after only a few weeks of clanking, and decided it was his turn to strap on the gear.
Another new position in another place that wasn’t Cleveland. They could keep changing what job he had, but Lou Camilli still had to log a hit. Any hit. A squibber in front of the plate just out of reach of the catcher’s fingers. A blooper that bounced off the rolled-up tarp but a terrible ump called fair. The clearest error in league history from which the official scorekeeper was simply getting a “base hit” vibe.
Camilli didn’t have any of those. Not even that liner with the bases loaded counted because it landed in a stupid glove. Now he was wearing catching gear in the D.R., unable to look himself in the mirror, partially because of the mask on his face, and partially because it was the middle of a game.
Camilli was 0-for-34 on April 30, 1971. Two straight seasons with major-league appearances and not a hit to show for them. Dark had chosen to go with only nine pitchers, meaning that Camilli, always on the bubble, got to stick around after spring training that year. He’d go down to Wichita intermittently and hit .306. He knocked in 33 runs! He hit 13 doubles! Lou Camilli could swing and hit a baseball!
Something about that big-league batters box just grabbed him by the ankle and messed with his head. But answers were coming. We just don’t know what they were.
On April 18, Cleveland had a doubleheader with Washington. Lou Camilli started at second in game one. Next to him was Larry Brown at short, less than a week from being sent to Oakland. It was there, at that intersection of fate, that Camilli made eye contact with a dog.
It scrambled onto the field, its white fur and big, dark spot on its back, instantly spotted on the vast green backdrop. It frolicked as dogs do in wide open spaces, wanting desperately to fill it and roll in it and be seen in it during their glimpse of heaven.
The dog bounced across shallow right field and turned its head to face second base. There stood Camilli, stirrups dampening with ankle sweat in the midday sun, hands on his hips as he awaited with everyone else the end of this four-legged delay.
But in that moment, something may have passed between them. Something profound and pure that came from the mind of an animal but clicked in the mind of a man. The fleeting eye contact between ballplayer and beast was so intense that the dog bolted into the outfield and scrambled over the fence, never to be seen again, we can assume.[5]
Camilli had likely had a similar instinct in response to several of his at-bats since 1969. But this was a new year. A new season. A new era, in which he’d briefly held a telekinetic bond with a stray animal. And Lou Camilli woke up on April 30 a different kind of hitter.
The kind that could hit.
Camilli had gone 0-for-5 in spring training, too, so by late April of his third year playing big-league ball, he was desperate for safe passage to first. But Cleveland was scheduled to play the A’s, which meant Vida Blue was on the mound… and Larry Brown was leading off.
The veteran infielder was at shortstop for the A’s that day, his contract purchased by Oakland exactly a week prior. This was the first time Brown would be taking the field in their uniform, and he’d be doing it against the team that had squeezed him out by filling the clubhouse with infielders until he couldn’t open the door, and by noticing that he was hitting .220 and they could use his roster spot more efficiently without him filling it.
But it wasn’t Brown’s face that would be looking back at Camilli when he was at the plate. It was Blue’s, which was the face of a man who was about to get his team back to the postseason for the first time in 40 years; of a man who would pitch 312 innings with a 1.82 ERA; of a man who would win 10 straight contests, nine of which were complete games; of a man who had developed so far beyond how they knew how to describe ballplayer talent that they just kind of shrugged and comped him to Koufax, even though he was better.
Cleveland was down 3-1 when Camilli came up in the ninth for his first and only at-bat of the day. Graig Nettles had struck out looking behind him; Gomer Hodge was waiting to strike out after Camilli was done. Blue’s innards were still devouring themselves after he’d given up an RBI single three innings ago. Brown was just kind of there. And Camilli stepped up to the plate.
Cleveland had only five hits on the day and Blue had scattered them well enough that the hitters probably couldn’t recall what they’d even looked like. Camilli was not the man to remind them. He had come to be known as “0-for-two-decades” since he had the misfortune of not hitting in the sixties and seventies. But he was only 0-for-34 in that time, unless you counted spring training, when he went 0-for-an-additional-5 that year. And that’s where it would end.
The ball went up and then down and landed in center field, where not a single Athletic was close enough to make the catch. Camilli reached first, joy in his heart, relief in his stomach, and a dog’s voice in his brain.
You did it, Lou, the dog said. Now—ask for the ball back, like a good boy.
Lou smiled and nodded and asked for the ball. Vida Blue did not want to give it to him. The umpire eventually talked him down and Camilli was holding in his hands the first baseball to ever touch his bat and then land somewhere in fair territory where there wasn’t a guy.[6]
They put a “1” in the “H” column for Lou Camilli that day. He hit 15 more that year and finished his major-league career with 22. He never hit a homer and he never hit a triple and he barely ever knocked in any runs.
But one time, he hit a single to center field and offered it to the Hall of Fame. It was a part of history, after all.
They did not want it.
[1] “Indians are Victims of One-Hitter,” Dan Coughlin, The Plain Dealer, p. 48, 10 August 1969
[2] “Hal Asks…” Hal Lebovitz, The Plain Dealer, p. 2C, 24 August 1969
[3] “Sound off…” The Plain Dealer, p. 6C, 24 August 1969
[4] “Iron Glove Who? A Hint, It’s Not Camilli Anymore,” Russ Corbitt, The Wichita Beacon, p. 2B, 23 June 1970
[5] “Knows When He’s Not Wanted,” The Gazette, p. 17, 19 April 1979
[6] “Dunning Fans 13 as Indians Click,” Russell Schneider, The Plain Dealer, p. 3C, 2 May 1971
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