The Duke muffs an easy one

Sporting News, The, July 31, 1995 by Mike Lupica

Duke Snider came back to Brooklyn last week, and somehow it was as if they had to extradite him out of the 1950s. Forty years exactly from 1955, when Snider and the Dodgers finally won the World Series from the Yankees, the wonderful ballplayer who was known as the Duke of Flatbush was listed in criminal information documents filed in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District as "the defendant Edwin D. Snider."

The charge against him was conspiracy to defraud the government. This is about baseball card shows and false income-tax returns, the way it was with Pete Rose and Darryl Strawberry. The government wants us to know it prosecutes memory now in baseball along with everything else.

Snider was in the courtroom of Judge Edward Korman along with Willie McCovey, the former San Francisco Giant who also pleaded guilty to a single count of tax evasion. McCovey is not the Willie of Terry Cashman's lovely song "Willie, Mickey and the Duke," which is about Mays and Mantle and Snider, the great New York center fielders of the `50s. But now this Willie is in trouble with the law, and so is Duke Snider.

And Mickey Mantle almost died before a Ever transplant saved him. In a year when we have spent so much time talking about the troubles of younger New York baseball stars Doc Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, some old stars, some of the biggest there were once, aren't doing much better. It is not just big money that feels as if it ruins everything in sports. It is easy money, too.

So in a courthouse at Cadman Plaza East just over the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan, on the other side of Brooklyn from where Ebbets Field stood and maybe the other side of the world, Duke Snider pleaded guilty to a felony. The criminal information document described him this way: "... a veteran major league baseball player and a member of The National Baseball Hall of Fame."

It was not nearly enough, of course. There was not nearly enough in there about the'50s or the Dodgers or Brooklyn's baseball summers. Those were baseball times for poets, not the prosecutors who write up the documents such as the ones that were in a Brooklyn courtroom with Willie McCovey and the Duke.

Snider is 68 years old. He must have felt every single day of that as he stood in court He never signed a $20-million contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers the way Strawberry once did with the Los Angeles Dodgers. His salary for a season was what some stars make for a game now. So these card shows were a small way to catch up on all the big money he missed. Then Snider cheated the govermnent the same as Rose and Strawberry.

One of the promoters from whom Snider took money was "Pete Rose Hit King Marketing." What goes around in the card-show business keeps coming around. It brought Duke Snider, No. 4 of the Dodgers, back to Brooklyn in a way he was never supposed to come back.

He took $10,000 in cash for three days of appearances six years ago. He did not report about $10,000 a year in money just like it between 1984 and 1993. Rose made millions from baseball, and Strawberry came along later and made more than Rose. Snider goes in with them anyway, for $10,000 a year, which was his salary once, when he was part of one of the great baseball debates, about him and Mays and Mantle, when he was one of the best ballplayers anybody ever saw.

"You'd think that the Duke would at least learn from what happened to those other idiots," a customer named Billy Stout said from Farrell's bar that afternoon. When Ebbets Field was still standing and Snider was still in center, people would stop at Farrell's before a walk across Prospect Park to the ballpark. Gil Hodges lived 2 1/2 blocks away.

In the middle of the afternoon, there was a big, loud crowd of cops and firemen in Farrell's, after a softball game at one of the seven fields in the Prospect Park Diamonds. A lot of the crowd was young. But not all of it. Also at Farrell's was Buck Skelly, a Dodgers fan out of the summer of 1955. "You're telling me they got the Duke the way they got those other guys?" he said. "I have to tell you, that hurts me very much. I just hope he gets over it the way that Strawberry did."

Then Skelly, who is 58 years old, told you something about how people of a certain age look at all this, from 16th Street and Prospect Park West. "At least (Duke Snider) didn't do any of those drugs," Skelly said.

Billy Stout, too young for Snider or the Brooklyn Dodgers or Ebbets Field, said his parents used to take the same walk across Prospect Park that Buck Skelly did.

"All those guys did so much for Brooklyn," Skelly said. "We felt like Duke and the rest of them put us on the map. It's why we looked up to them." There was a pause from Skelly, underneath all the afternoon softball noise from the firemen and cops. "There aren't any role models left, are there?" Skelly said.

Pete Rose went to jail for income-tax evasion. Rose said he failed to report about $350,000 in card-show and memorabilia income over a four-year period. A few months ago, Strawberry pleaded guilty to failing to pay between $75,000 and $120,000 in taxes between 1986 and 1990. Strawberry thought he was going to jail. A judge let him off with a $350,000 fine and six months of home confinement, and now Strawberry is about to resume his baseball career with the Yankees. His salary for this season will be about $750,000.