Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin, Part XVI
Cookie Edition … how an Oakland A’s ball girl built a cookie empire … various cookie monsters, bracket contests and baseball expressions
"Scribbled notes on a cocktail napkin" is my weekly Sunday feature that's a tribute to the sports columnists I grew up reading who penned Herb Caen-inspired three dot columns. It's an excuse to shamelessly plug my other side projects, post my favorite Immaculate Grid from the week with a story about one of the players, link to stories I found interesting, and string together loose topics on my mind.
Scribbling from Albuquerque
The year was 1971. The renegade owner of the Oakland A’s, Charles Finley, was full of ideas. More night games, including the World Series. Multi-colored uniforms. Nicknames and mustaches. Orange baseballs. A rabbit that would popup from the ground to provide the umpire new baseballs.
And ball girls at the Oakland Coliseum.
The A’s ran an advertisement in The Oakland Tribune seeking candidates. Hundreds applied. Among them was a 15-year-old student named Debbie Sivyer. It helped that her older sister was a secretary at the Coliseum.
Here’s a few excerpts from the May 1, 1971 story in the Oakland Tribune, written by reporter Doris G. Worsham.
What does a teen-age girl do when she’s pretty, outgoing, gregarious and just loves baseball? She becomes a ball girl for the Oakland Athletics baseball team … sometimes.
Anyway, that’s exactly what Debbie Sivyer and Mary Barry, both 14 years old and both students at Bishop O’Dowd School of Oakland did …
Mary and Debbie were selected on the basis of their knowledge of baseball, pleasant personalities and pleasant looks, according to Mike Haggerty, of A’s public relations …
The ball girl idea was the brainchild of Charles Finley, owner of the A’s, and he also suggested the fashions that the girls sport at every game. When there’s warm weather, the girls done the current fashion rage – Hotpants – and during the nippy night games Mary and Debbie wear long pants and a sweatshirt. Both outfits bear the Green and Gold colors of the team.
Debbie took the money she made working for the A’s to buy her first car, and invested in better ingredients for the cookies she enjoyed baking. She brought cookies and milk to the umpires between innings. They were a huge hit.
In 1974, she graduated high school.
In 1976, Debbie married the founder of a financial and economic consulting firm named Randall Fields and took his name. She was proud of her husband, but bored as a housewife. She decided to sell the cookies that were enjoyed by umpires and friends.
And that’s the short version of how Mrs. Field’s cookies got started.
The business began mostly in airports and malls. It grew rapidly. It was franchised in the 1990s, once had over 1,000 stores (it’s now around 300), and has locations in 22 countries.
Debbie divorced her first husband, later sold the company to an investment group in the 1990s, but remains the spokesperson. She’s now 67 years old, a published author, a member of the Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame, and her story was featured by The History Channel in the third season of “The Food That Built America.”
It all started as a ball girl for the Oakland A’s.
Just for fun, here’s a YouTube clip of modern MLB ball girls making sweet catches.
Isotopes Snack Wars
In the Albuquerque Isotopes clubhouse, there is a Bracket of 64 snacks. Each day, players and coaches vote and the winning snack advances to the next round.
On Friday, chocolate chip cookies defeated strawberries and advanced to the Final Four, along with Oreos, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and ice cream.
I’ve mostly agreed with the clubhouse voting so far. My disagreements from earlier rounds:
Give me jelly beans over peanuts (Round of 64). Less mess.
I prefer Original Lays over Skittles (Round of 32). Less floss.
I’ll take oranges over Uncrustables (Round of 16). Uncrustables are gross.
The early voting on Saturday indicates every vote will count in the Final Four.
This week’s not-so random Immaculate Grid story: Cookie Lavagetto
Born as Harry Arthur Lavagetto in Oakland, he attended Oakland Technical, the same high school as Clint Eastwood, Rickey Henderson, Marshawn Lynch … and my paternal grandmother Barbara Suchon.
He was signed by Cookie DeVincenzi, the owner of the Pacific Coast League’s Oakland Oaks. Harry became known as “Cookie’s boy” and, eventually, just plain Cookie. The name stuck for the rest of his life.
Lavagetto played eight years in the majors, reached four straight All Star Games, but lost four years in his prime for military service. He was admittedly “washed up” when he returned for two more seasons in the major leagues with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
His last hit was his most memorable. It was Game Four of the 1947 World Series. Yankees pitcher Bill Bevens, despite 10 walks, was one out away from the first no-hitter in World Series history. (Don Larsen’s perfect game was in 1956.) Lavagetto was called upon as a pinch hitter and laced a two-run double that ended the no-hitter and scored the winning run. It was his last at-bat in the majors.
Lavagetto managed in the major leagues for the Washington Senators and continued when they relocated to become the Minnesota Twins. He was a local celebrity, given a free car, his own radio show before every game, but felt uncomfortable with it all, preferring obscurity.
More comfortable in the background, he coached the New York Mets and returned to his home region with the San Francisco Giants. He died peacefully in his sleep in Orinda in 1990.
That’s a cookie
No sport has a better vocabulary than baseball.
An easy pitch to hit is called a meatball, a gopherball, and yes … a cookie.
But do you know why?
The internet failed me, maybe everything is not part of the Wikipedia-ization of human knowledge. So I asked my friend Jesse Goldberg-Strassler. Jesse literally wrote the book on baseball thesaurus. This was his answer.
This all connects to the metaphor for eating that surrounds the lineup.
The leadoff hitter sets the table, the big hitters are the big eaters (and they represent the meat of the order). Thus an easy pitch for a big eater is a cookie – or a meatball, for that matter.
On Fox’s postgame show during last year’s playoffs, Hall of Famer David Ortiz called Texas Rangers shortstop Corey Seager “the cookie monster” because he kept hitting home runs on pitches right down the middle.
In 2019, The Cookie Monster himself came all the way from Sesame Street to Wrigley Field to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” It’s every bit as glorious as you would expect.
This week’s “Where Ya At?” podcast guest: Darren Wong
I host a podcast for San Diego State’s School of Journalism and Media Studies titled “Where Ya At?” Each week, I interview an alum to learn about their experience at SDSU, transitioning from student to professional, and their current job. You can listen on all podcast platforms.
Darren Wong went straight from SDSU student intern to working media relations for the Aztecs athletic department. Wong kept track of an incredible statistic, where the Aztecs won a mind-boggling 164 consecutive games when leading with five minutes remaining in a game.
Here’s an except where I asked Darren about this streak and how superstitious sports people get about stuff like this.
Wong is now the Director of Athletic Communications at the University of Harvard. His impact at SDSU is reflected as a mentor to dozens and dozens of SDSU student interns who’ve gone onto very successful careers in sports media relations, including previous podcast guests Jill Cacic and Tina Sturdevant.
Listen to the whole podcast here:
Crafting the Call: May 1 through the years
This week’s “Crafting the Call” YouTube series on baseball play-by-play announcing focuses on a bunch of the remarkable events in baseball that have occurred on May 1, including Rickey Henderson becoming the all-time stolen base champion.
Here’s an excerpt:
Snack war update #1
Chocolate chip cookies chewed past Oreos in one semifinal.
Ice cream was too smooth for Reeses to overcome in the other semifinal.
The Finals are set: Chocolate Chip Cookies vs Ice Cream. Who you got?