Turn the Page: Tommy Helms (1941-2025)

When I was 23 years old, I got my first baseball job — I was a beat writer for the Class AA Charlotte Knights. The Knights’ manager was Tommy Helms.

It was an odd time in Tommy’s life. He had spent the previous quarter century in the big leagues as a scrappy player, a loyal coach, and — briefly and oddly — a manager. The managing thing was not fun. In 1989, he was thrust into the Cincinnati Reds’ manager’s spot for 30 days when Pete Rose got himself suspended for bumping umpire Dave Pallone. Rose returned for a little while and then, as you might recall, got himself thrown out of baseball for life. Helms was reinstated as manager for the rest of the season.

Then he got fired and was replaced by Lou Piniella, who promptly led the Reds to the World Series championship.

Tommy came to Charlotte — the city where he grew up — to kind of try and put his baseball life back together. What I remember most about him was that he would do his postgame interviews while shaving … and after losses, he almost always said the same thing: “Turn the page.” That was it. That was his whole take. He’d been around baseball all his life; heck, he was the batboy for his father’s semi-pro team in Leaksville, North Carolina, when he was barely old enough to carry a bat. He’d suffered countless losses. There wasn’t much to do after a loss except look to tomorrow.

“Do you think the pitching will come around?” I’d ask him.

“Turn the page,” he’d say.

“Why are you guys having trouble scoring runs?” I’d ask him.

“Turn the page,” he’d say.

It struck me that this was a man who’d seen everything in baseball. Tommy had won Gold Gloves. He’d played in the World Series. He’d been traded for Joe Morgan. He’d homered off Carlton. He’d hit .357 against Koufax and .351 against Seaver and spanked hits against both Niekro brothers. He’d palled around with Pete Rose, hung out in the dugout with Yaz and Stargell, and was already a member of the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame. I found wisdom in his daily shave sessions. Turn the page.

As it turns out, alas, it wasn’t actually that easy for Tommy Helms to turn the page. As the season went on, and the losses piled up, and the bus rides grew bumpier, his cheery willingness to look to tomorrow began to fray. After one particularly gruesome loss, he eschewed his shaving routine and barked: “That was a total team effort — a team effort of looking like #^@%*!”

I didn’t understand — couldn’t understand — that he felt lost. Re-read that paragraph of accomplishment, all of it: the Gold Gloves, the World Series, the hits off Carlton and Koufax and Seaver and the rest. Now, he was managing a lousy Class AA team in Charlotte.

Turn the page? No. In early August, he walked away from the Knights … and from baseball. The team was in Memphis at the time, and he announced his resignation and took a flight home. “Ever since the Pete incident,” he said, “baseball just seems different to me.” He went to work for a food broker back in Cincinnati.

I never talked with him again after that last sad conversation. “The whole thing was just harder than I thought,” he said. “I don’t know how to put it into words. It became like a job, you know?”

Before he hung up, I told him how much I appreciated spending time with him and how I’d learned a lot about baseball from him. He scoffed. “Nah, I don’t have much to teach,” he said. "Just remember, kid. Turn the page.”

Checking on Checked Swings

I wrote a lengthy bit on the history of checked swings a few months ago, so I apologize for repeating some stuff. But I think it’s about time for MLB to take a good, hard look at the checked swing … it feels more urgent to me now than it did then.

But let’s begin by recalling some of the history.

There is no rule in baseball’s rulebook defining what makes a checked swing and there never has been. As I wrote in the original piece, there are thirteen definitions of what constitutes a balk … but no checked swing definition. The entirety of the rule goes like so:

In other words, checked swings are and have always been the umpire’s judgment — did the batter strike at the ball or not. This explains why the checked swing has changed over the years. There is footage from 50 and 60 years ago showing batters going WAY around but umpires ruling that they had checked their swings. This famous screenshot of Johnny Bench “holding up” tells the tale:

Over time, umpires have started using the baselines as their guides — basically, if the bat goes past the first base line (or the third base line for lefties), the umpire will generally call it a strike.

But that isn’t the rule … again, there is no rule. And because there is no rule, I think there’s an opportunity. MLB is desperately looking for ways to balance the scales of the game. So far this season, Major League hitters are batting .235, slugging .384, and striking out 23 percent of the time. It’s April, so some of that is cold weather, some of that is the pitchers just being ahead of the hitters, all that stuff, but those numbers aren’t much different from all of last year when batters hit .240, slugged .399, and struck out 23 percent of the time. This is just where baseball is now.

Most of the proposed solutions come at it from the pitcher’s standpoint — reduce the number of pitchers on the roster, make the starter pitch six innings, move back the mound, I’ve even seen some serious people in the game suggest that there should be a speed limit put on pitches.

I don’t know that any of these will get the desired result, though. It doesn’t seem to me like you can improve the game by LIMITING players.

And I have started to think more and more that what MLB should be thinking about is ways to give hitters more of a better chance. It doesn’t look like the torpedo bats will actually have much of an impact, but the idea of building better bats that give hitters a better chance of making contact is interesting. There have been experiments with changing the baseball so that they're easier for hitters to pick up.

And then there’s this idea of creating a checked swing rule — MLB now has the technology to put the checked-swing line anywhere they want. And what I think they should do is make the checked swing line a straight line to the pitcher — so a 90-degree angle for the batter.

I couldn’t tell you for sure what this would do … but my gut tells me that this would allow hitters to be a lot more aggressive at the plate. The strongest among them would be able to stop their swing in time once they know they’ve been fooled … and save the strike. It might reduce strikeouts. It might force pitchers to be finer. It might mean that batters see more hitters counts (1-0, 2-0, 3-0 and 3-1 counts), which is when they will always do their most damage.

• 2024 Batters in hitters counts: .341 average, .605 slugging

• 2024 Batters in pitchers counts: .231 average, .374 slugging

This is where I think the baseball gurus should be looking — they should be trying to figure out ways to allow hitters to get into more hitter’s counts. I’ve heard people offer sledgehammer ideas like starting every relief pitcher at-bat with a 1-0 count or something like that but I just think that’s a bridge too far for the game. But creating a checked swing rule that makes sense? I think they could do that. There would be some rebelling, sure, but all in all, I think that could be great for baseball.

The Jackie Robinson Story

From the start of the 20th century through the 1946 baseball season, Major League Baseball was a white-only institution. There was a rule to keep it so. The rule was not written down, but it was followed and even embraced by every owner of every MLB team because America was a white supremacist nation, and people with dark skin were widely viewed as inferior, unworthy, and subordinate. Even those owners who might not have held those views—or at least not held them strongly—refused to sign Black players out of cowardice, a need to be accepted or pure business calculus.

There were many, many great Black baseball players during those years. Some like Oscar Charleston and Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard and Pop Lloyd and Smokey Joe Williams would have dominated the game and won nationwide fame. Others — too many to name — would have competed for starting jobs and utility roles. They were all kept out. Sometimes, baseball people would justify their exclusion by saying that Black players lacked the intelligence, fundamental skills, consistency or self-control to play baseball at the big-league level. Mostly, though, baseball people wouldn’t justify their exclusion at all. They didn’t feel the need to justify. Questions were rarely asked.

During this time, African American players played in their own disparate leagues, the Negro Leagues. There were countless challenges to conquer in the Negro Leagues, countless indignities to endure, countless disappointments to overcome, but they played on … often with intense joy and heart-lifting brilliance and breathtaking skill.

These leagues were almost entirely hidden from the view of white America, but now and again, a generational player like Satchel Paige would prove too good to hide, and at least a few people began asking: “What would it be like if Satchel Paige faced Ted Williams?”

Then came World War II, and African Americans gave their lives for their country, and when the survivors returned to the same white supremacist nation, a larger number of people of all colors couldn’t avoid seeing the injustice and evil of it all.

Jackie Robinson was one of those African Americans who served in the Army. He was a fierce believer in fighting America’s inequality at every turn. In the Army, he refused to go to the back of the bus and was court-martialed. After winning that case and being honorably discharged, he joined the Negro Leagues — and was furiously outspoken about the bigotry that forced the league to exist. When Brooklyn’s Branch Rickey broke away from the other baseball people and signed a Black player, he chose Robinson, not so much for his baseball skill — Robinson was not the greatest player in the Negro Leagues — but because of his indomitable will. Jackie Robinson, he knew, would not fail.

On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first Black player in the modern history of Major League Baseball. It was the seminal moment in baseball history, the moment when baseball finally began trying to live up to its high place as the national pastime.

“There I was,” Robinson wrote in 1972, “the black grandson of a slave, the son of a black sharecropper, part of a historic occasion, a symbolic hero to my people. The air was sparkling. The sunlight was warm. The band struck up the national anthem. The flag billowed in the wind. It should have been a glorious moment for me as the stirring words of the national anthem poured from the stands. Perhaps it was …”

Perhaps it was. It would take more than a decade for every Major League team to sign a Black player. It would take 25 years for the Baseball Hall of Fame to recognize any players from the Negro Leagues. It would take almost 30 years for a Major League team to hire a Black manager.

Here’s how Jackie Robinson ended that essay he wrote shortly before his death:

“As I write this twenty years later, I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know I am a Black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, in 1919, I know that I never had it made.”

On April 15, 2025, every Major League Baseball player wore Jackie Robinson’s No. 42. Six percent of them were African American.

Balatro

I assume I’m not the only person obsessed by this absurd Balatro poker game, and I also assume that you’re not more interested in my Balatro score than you would be by my “bad beat” poker story.

And still, I spent so much time playing this game that I finally posted this score — 7.925e14. I don’t even know what that number is. I think it’s high. I hope it’s high. Actually, let me give you a chart:

OK, this is definitely a problem. I would hope scoring a number that high will break me free from my Balatro addiction. It probably won’t.

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