His relationship with Gossage dates to 1988, when Gossage, then with the Chicago Cubs, gave Girardi, then a Class A catcher, a ride home after a spring-training workout.
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Goose Gossage still really, really, really doesn't like Bryce Harper and thinks he's a "punk" ... but good news, Bryce ... Gossage doesn't hate you as much as he did back in March!
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Girardi said his discussion with Gossage had not been uncomfortable.
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Gossage does not blame the Yankees for casting him out.
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Among the topics were bat flips, Goose Gossage, and Bryce Harper.
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"If those guys didn't like you, it was honesty," Gossage said.
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Levy checked with Gossage, who told the Yankees he was in.
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Then, several days into spring training, Gossage, in an interview with NJ.com, decried being compared to Rivera and the current Yankees closer Aroldis Chapman, who, unlike Gossage, were rarely asked to get more than three outs.
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Lucy Gossage of Great Britain cruised to victory in the women's race.
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" NJAM: So when people say Mo is the great reliever .... Gossage. "(Bleep).
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Gossage said that while he appreciated the conversation, he had no regrets.
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Fishman shrugged it off, even if Gossage could have been talking about him.
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He is good friends with Gossage, and will say nothing negative about him.
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It means a lot for (TMS president) Eddie (Gossage) to have me back here.
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The top three finishers that year were Bruce Sutter, Jim Rice and Goose Gossage.
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"You have no idea what that meant to me," Gossage said, wiping his eyes.
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Gossage had visited Kison in Florida after learning that he was dying of cancer.
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Gossage told NJ.com it was "an insult" to compare Rivera and Chapman to him.
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So it was that Gossage broke down when he described how Steinbrenner consoled him in private after Gossage gave up a three-run homer to George Brett that sealed Kansas City's sweep of the Yankees in the 1980 American League Championship Series.
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"There's no other printer in the world that could make this book," Gossage told me.
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Gossage was a reliever in his day, so he's certainly sensitive to home run pimping.
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When was the last time Goose Gossage was in the dugout during an actual game?
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"The last year before an election, you don't leave your boss behind," Mr. Gossage said.
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Beverly Gossage is a Senior Fellow for Independent Women's Voice and President of HSA Benefits Consulting.
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" Asked if he was saddened that Gossage could not restrain himself, Dent said, "That's just Goose.
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For Gossage, conversations with reporters seemed to be an opportunity to get something off his chest.
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Gossage had 42 career victories with the Yankees, 151 saves, a 2.14 ERA and one title.
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He joined fellow bullpen standouts Goose Gossage, Hoyt Wilhelm, Rollie Fingers, Bruce Sutter and Dennis Eckersley.
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It took weeks for Giambi to summon the courage to talk to Gossage, the salty veteran reliever, but soon they bonded over baseball history: 13 years earlier, when he was 10, Giambi had seen Gossage pitch for the Yankees in the World Series at Dodger Stadium.
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We're not saying Gossage is right and we're not saying he's wrong — we're just saying he's awesome.
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Gossage, next on the call list, agreed that the concept of two high-profile closers was crazy.
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One evening, I joined Steidl and Gossage as they made the final decisions about the book's packaging.
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The Hall of Fame pitcher Goose Gossage, a former Yankee, in an expletive-peppered interview with ESPN.
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"The game is becoming a freaking joke because of the nerds who are running it," Gossage said.
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Also deserving some credit is Bautista himself, who refused to engage Gossage when alerted to his comments.
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"To go through the absolute lowest, to experience everything in one year, was completely overwhelming," Gossage said.
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Gossage said he did not watch much baseball these days, maybe an inning here, an inning there.
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Girardi, then a Class A catcher, got a ride home from a spring training workout with Gossage.
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It's spring training and Goose Gossage is back to warm your frozen butts with some more fiery takes.
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Gossage held them up to the window, to see them in daylight, and then let out a laugh.
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Goose Gossage entered two World Series games in the seventh inning or earlier; Rollie Fingers did so six times.
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Gossage bought one cabin in this enclave in 22017, just as his Hall of Fame pitching career took root.
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"I was put on earth to be a baseball player and to throw a baseball; I'm convinced," Gossage said.
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It was the only time Gossage won a title, and he treasures the season because of how it unfolded.
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Cashman asked Gossage to be more considerate, in part because the Yankees have one of baseball's largest analytics staffs.
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Peppering his words with expletives, Gossage described having the urge last year to stuff Cashman into a trash can.
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"Monster Energy is the perfect series sponsor for NASCAR at the perfect time," said Texas Motor Speedway President Eddie Gossage.
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Mr. Gossage said the loss of Mr. Butts's guidance is a significant blow for Mr. Trudeau and the Liberal Party.
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The Hall of Famer Goose Gossage may not like him — the opinionated Gossage, who was not invited to be a guest instructor this spring, belittled Cashman in a series of interviews this week — but Cashman has adapted to the modern game, turning a roster once larded with dead money into something much more nimble.
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One Monday morning in October, Steidl was at work in his long, narrow press room with the American photographer John Gossage.
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"If problems exist, you run to the problem," Cashman said when asked why he thought it necessary to meet with Gossage.
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Few sports franchises embrace their history as firmly as the Yankees, and few former ballplayers relish reliving it more than Gossage.
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Gossage semi-unloads on Harper, calling him a "punk" ... but has to admit, the kid's got skills on the baseball diamond.
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He signed a premier closer, Rich Gossage, known as Goose, and sent Lyle onto the winter banquet circuit in a foul mood.
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Goose Gossage is so fucking mad about nerds that he is cursing like the saltiest sailor that ever sailed the open seas.
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Gossage can still reach back for that intimidating glare, the one that radiates an uncomfortable intensity — particularly when the subject is Cashman.
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"He would've been gone 10 years ago if George was still around," Gossage told The Daily News in an expletive-filled rant.
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Reggie Jackson, Ron Guidry, Willie Randolph, Stump Merrill, Lee Mazzilli, Andy Pettitte and Gossage have been among the regulars in recent years.
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In 1978, even with Gossage as the closer-in-chief, Lyle saved nine games, won nine more, and received another World Series ring.
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Gossage missed two months with a thumb injury in 1979 after he brawled in the showers with the burly designated hitter Cliff Johnson.
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And unlike most current players, Gossage always had an opinion on whatever topic was put before him — whether it was impolitic or not.
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It hurt when Steinbrenner signed the free agent Goose Gossage soon after the 1977 season, relegating Lyle to the role of setup man.
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As Gossage wiped away tears, he moved on to another story: how Catfish Hunter extended a hand and then a dinner invitation with several teammates after Gossage had collapsed amid a pile of clothes in his locker after throwing away two bunts in the bottom of the ninth inning in Toronto shortly after he came to the Yankees in 1978.
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Gossage had a lengthy relationship with the former Manager Joe Girardi, dating back to 1988, when they were both in the Chicago Cubs organization.
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Gossage, a Hall of Fame closer, said in February that there was nothing particularly impressive about holding a three-run lead for an inning.
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"It opens up another front," said Patrick Gossage, who was press secretary to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the former prime minister and Justin Trudeau's father.
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"At the finish line it felt like I was on top of the world, it was amazing," Gossage said as she celebrated with her family.
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Today, March 24, 2016, Phillies legend Mike Schmidt picked up where Goose Gossage left off, in an extremely grumpy essay published by the Associated Press.
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The question can be applied to Disney princesses (Ariel, Jasmine, Cinderella, Mulan) and Major League Baseball mustaches (Don Mattingly, Goose Gossage, Dennis Eckersley, Rollie Fingers).
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In recent years, Gossage had become a headache to the Yankees, railing about what was wrong with today's game to any reporter who would ask.
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Cashman, who like Gossage did not return phone messages seeking a comment, may have had enough of Gossage's outbursts in recent years during spring training.
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Even the majors' career hits leader, Pete Rose, struck out in his final at-bat, at age 45, against San Diego's Goose Gossage in 1986.
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But Gossage, a Hall of Fame member, was given a special day after playing seven years with the Yankees and posting numbers similar to Lyle's.
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Any reliever who "can't save a three-run lead for one inning, they shouldn't even be in the big leagues," Gossage told N.J. Advance Media.
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There was no such drama in the women's race as Gossage powered home almost 30 minutes ahead of fellow Brit Flora Colledge, who came in second.
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Gossage immediately vaulted himself to legendary curmudgeon status by dropping F-bombs, S-bombs and lashing out left and right in a short interview with ESPN.
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Few seem to relish it more than Gossage, who despite his age carried himself with the swagger of the late 70s do-anything, say-anything Yankees.
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Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage, Bruce Sutter, Lee Smith and Dan Quisenberry brought notice to the statistic in the 20143 and '22014s, often recording multi-inning saves.
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There is no reason to overthink this: if Gossage is going to pose as a big ol' asshole, we might as well take him at his word.
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He lavishes as much attention on Lagerfeld's photographs of models as he does on the photographs of artists like Gossage, whose book took four days to print.
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Before the 2017 season, Cashman called Gossage's agent, Andrew Levy, extending an offer to return for spring training, but only if Gossage promised not to be disruptive.
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Gossage, who played for eight teams in a 22-year career, said there was only one person who could have filled the imperialist owner's boots: Donald Trump.
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Donato plays on the top line with Kerfoot and the sophomore Lewis Zerter-Gossage, and was one of four Crimson players with 40 or more points this year.
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Surprisingly, Manfred is on the right side of history here, aligning himself with both Bautista and Harper, and telling Gossage and his lot to go kick rocks (sort of).
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If Gossage hit a straight flush on the river at the World Series of Poker with David Price money on the table, he might just do the hokey pokey.
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Betances, a three-time All-Star and the only Yankees reliever besides Goose Gossage to have compiled three 100-strikeout seasons, lost the case and was awarded $3 million.
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Gossage is a real caricature of baseball's old guard—the crusty old dudes who walked backwards and barefoot to spring training through hailstorms, they who say modern pitchers are babied.
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Gossage presented Earnhardt with the top of the electronic scoring pylon from his Cup victory, with the No. 1 spot lit up with number 8, his car number at the time.
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Yankees Hall of Famer Goose Gossage gave an absolutely scorching interview to ESPN's Andrew Marchand on the state of baseball today; pardon my spoiler, but Goose isn't that pleased with it.
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In the spring of 2008, John Gossage took a road trip in coastal England and Wales, visiting a number of out-of-the-way places, including Caerau, a Welsh mining town.
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In the end, Gossage, who wavered on going, thought the time he spent talking fishing and baseball with the former soldiers was as good for him as it was for them.
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The Yankees have long been a more staid and stable operation under Steinbrenner's son Hal, and there is less tolerance for drama and eccentricities — or, apparently, continued cranky rants from Gossage.
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The honor of closing out the championship would normally go to a team's All-Star closer, especially one with more career saves than the Hall of Famers Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter.
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Gossage instead wants to insist that there's always more happening in a photograph than its putative subject, that a photograph is always in the first place a record of an optical experience.
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There was no Core Four, but four cornerstones of the 1970s — Willie Randolph, Goose Gossage, Ron Guidry and Reggie Jackson — showed up, along with more recent stars like Orlando Hernandez and Hideki Matsui.
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By the time he retired at the age of 42, in 1994, Gossage was the oldest player on a sub-mediocre Seattle Mariners team whose youngest player was an 18-year-old Alex Rodriguez.
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With Earnhardt back in Texas for his last Cup race before he retires from full-time racing, track President Eddie Gossage rode a horse into the media center to recognize NASCAR&aposs most popular driver.
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As he was watching pitcher's fielding practice one day last year, Gossage observed that it was not just Yankees players who had become more circumspect in their public comments, watching what they had to say.
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Chapman, the Yankees' new closer, threw 26 pitches to catcher Brian McCann, drawing a large crowd of team officials, including General Manager Brian Cashman and Goose Gossage, a guest instructor and a Hall of Fame reliever.
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The number took decades to catch on, and for most of the 1970s and 1980s, teams wisely deployed "fireman" relievers like Goose Gossage, Rollie Fingers and Bruce Sutter whenever an opposing lineup presented the greatest threat.
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Similarly, using closer Kenley Jansen in the seventh inning instead of the ninth was an insightful reversion to the old Goose Gossage fireman way of using closers, going not for the save, but for the win.
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The White Sox, the first of nine teams for whom he would play, had the foresight to stick Gossage — with his tempestuous demeanor and blazing fastball — in the bullpen, where he could let his adrenaline ride.
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For decades, the Yankees have relished having alumni return as guest instructors; among those who have been in camp this year are Ron Guidry, Lee Mazzilli, Rich Gossage, Stump Merrill and the recently retired Nick Swisher.
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What makes it work for me is that Goose Gossage knows for a fact that the first thing some nameless pitcher, and perhaps all pitchers, would ask upon leaving the mound is how many pitches he has.
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The heartache did not keep Gossage from fulfilling a pledge that afternoon to meet with a group of disabled veterans who had spent the day fishing at the Mount Massive Trout Club, where he is a member.
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But on Friday, one day after an expletive-peppered screed about everything Gossage thought was wrong with baseball, he was called into the principal's office — getting a talking-to from General Manager Brian Cashman and Manager Joe Girardi.
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"I think they were out of the same book, of stirring it up and keeping people on their toes, and that's the way it was around here," Gossage said, peppering his language, as he often does, with expletives.
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She received over 23 responses over the course of a few years — including a postcard from a New Jersey steakhouse, signed by John Gossage with the message "I eat out" — but abandoned the project when graduate school called.
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Whereas last year he reserved his ire for Jose Bautista–"a fucking disgrace"—and the nerds running the game—"a bunch of fucking nerds running the game"—Gossage took aim at someone a little closer to home: Mariano Rivera.
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He showed Gossage a copy of the 1952 edition—which he had bought secondhand a few years ago—as well as his reproduction, running his fingers over the surface of the page like a skater doing turns on ice.
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But, starting in the nineteen-seventies, a mystique grew up around the closer, partly because pitchers like Sparky Lyle, Goose Gossage, and Al (the Mad Hungarian) Hrabosky—and, later on, Jonathan Papelbon and Brian Wilson—developed outsized mound personalities.
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Even now, nearly 20173 years later and with a left ankle that had to be fused after decades of landing on it, Gossage ambles in his familiar slump-shouldered, pigeon-toed gait, his long arms dangling at his side.
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The players enforcing those rules today learned from the recently departed veterans, who were in turn hazed by good ol' boys like Gossage, who themselves learned how to Play The Game The Right Way from guys who started their careers during Jim Crow.
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Buried among those buried, worth no more and no less, are a bunch of cards for Rich "Goose" Gossage, who was then riding out the shoulder of a long and brilliant career that would eventually get him elected to the Hall of Fame.
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It is in conversation not only with the work of such notable contemporaries as Luigi Ghirri, Stephen Shore and John Gossage, but also with the great mathematically minded innovators of early Italian Renaissance painting: Fra Angelico, Paolo Ucello and Piero della Francesca.
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But that was not enough to prevent the Yankees from banishing Gossage from two of his most cherished rituals: working as a spring training instructor and participating in Old-Timers' Day, which is Sunday, when the Yankees play the Tampa Bay Rays.
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"George was a disciplinarian, and there is a lot of discipline that goes into playing this game," said Rich Gossage, the former Yankees reliever, who is baffled about why he was allowed to keep the bushy Fu Manchu mustache he grew in 1981.
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One hopes Major League teams now keep combination scouts/ninja assassins to take care of high school coaches who do this sort of thing to their draftees, but this was two decades ago, and contemporary best practices were...well, you heard what Goose Gossage said.
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But it's probably sufficient to say that time and attrition and a bunch of other non-negotiable things had finally conspired to make Gossage exactly as common as his baseball card—one glowering grouch among many, standing maybe a bit closer to the exit than the rest.
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While the process took place, in the course of the next three days, Gossage moved between the library and the press, spending abbreviated intervals in his bed at the Halftone Hotel—the kind of half-active, half-inactive twilight familiar to the parents of a newborn.
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Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker The book, to be called "Looking Up Ben James," was a record of a trip through Britain that Gossage had made with Martin Parr, the English photographer, who is best known for somewhat grotesque representations of working-class communities in Britain.
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Gossage, who turns 20163 next month, first came to the edge of this former mining town one summer in the late 22016s, singing, "America the Beautiful," while riding in the back of his uncle Bert's Jeep on what was then a day trip from his home in Colorado Springs.
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Earlier this week, as a spring training guest of the New York Yankees, Gossage loosed a densely fragrant mudslide of superheated bitchery into the nearest open microphone—about young players, Latin players, kids today, managers today, geeks, dweebs, weirdos, and how They Make The Orange Juice Too Strong These Days.
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The Yankees have a rich tradition of closers, from Sparky Lyle and Goose Gossage to Mariano Rivera and, since Rivera's retirement, David Robertson and Andrew Miller, who was the American League reliever of the year last season but was moved out of the closer's role to make way for Chapman.
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That point was underscored Monday, on the eve of pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training, when Gossage, 66, told various news media outlets that he had not been invited by the Yankees for his usual role as camp instructor, then launched into a broadside against General Manager Brian Cashman.
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There still is a season of racing for Earnhardt to finish, one in which he expects he will receive well-wishes from his fans as well as retirement gifts, although he said he hoped for nothing like the miniature ponies Gordon received from Eddie Gossage, the Texas Motor Speedway president.
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In the same way, we can assume that Goose Gossage—who was teammates with Rickey Henderson and Dennis Eckersley and Reggie Jackson—is less concerned with showboating and youthful narcissism and deviations from baseball's grim and coppish norms than he is with the horror of realizing that those celebrations are no longer his.
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But at spring training in 1984, seeing a brighter future for him as a reliever — and lacking a relief ace with the departure of Goose Gossage to the San Diego Padres as a free agent — Ellis, the coach Jeff Torborg and Yankees Manager Yogi Berra asked Righetti to switch to the bullpen.
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While Dent is remembered as the unlikely hero that day for his three-run homer over the Green Monster, Gossage helped the Yankees hang on for a 5-4 victory, stranding the tying run at third base when he retired an old nemesis, Carl Yastrzemski, on a pop-up for the final out.
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Gossage had one of the great right arms of his generation, but his mind is right there in the seething middle, and what he is saying—that the young people act too young, and that he would like to punch them into acting more the way he'd like them to act—is more than familiar.
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The tirade was notable, if it was notable, because of how fuck-heavy and comprehensive it was, and because of when it arrived—at a time when there wasn't much else in baseball to talk about, and after all the changes in the game that Gossage groans and grouses had already become something like settled law.
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None of it will seem terribly new to anyone who has had the experience of hearing some sozzled ex-ballplayer spend a half-inning coming really close to using ethnic slurs during a guest slot on some mid-summer broadcast; it is also very much in character for Gossage, a self-styled Old-School Guy who has looked like the disagreeable 51-year-old owner of a bar called Sticky's since he was 25 years old.
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