Never Too Much Baseball

A Four-Course Feast of Baseball Ignorance

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sun, 13 May 2012 20:19:00 +0000

The past couple of weeks have brought an even greater parade of baseball ignorance than usual from the professionals who play and report on the game. I started to write about one of them, but before I could fully digest that affront to my baseball taste, another one jumped out at me, followed by two more. My plate is full to overflowing now, and I'd better share it with you while I still have an appetite for it. I am happy to share with you the four-course meal of ignorance that I've been stewing over for too long. Two you're already familiar with, as they have gotten considerable national coverage, so I'll say less about those. Another is an old favorite of mine. The fourth is a more local specialty, and we'll begin with that one.

The appetizer course is a tepid bowl of albondigas, a thick Mexican soup, which is a fair description of the state of Keith Hernandez's brain during a recent Mets telecast. With a runner on first, the batter tried to sacrifice but popped the ball up in front of the plate. The Mets catcher ran out but instead of catching the pop, let the ball drop, hoping for some kind of funky double play, which can happen if the batter neglects to run (get the force at second and double him at first) or if the fielders outsmart the runner.

In this case, the batter ran and the runner headed back to first base, but that wasn't what prevented the Mets from turning a double play. Ignorance was the culprit. When the first baseman caught the throw from the catcher, he was a step away from first base, where the runner stood watching like Ernie Harwell's house by the side of the road. Quick--what should the first baseman do? Tag the runner? Touch the base? Throw to second? Don't feel too bad if the answer didn't jump right into your head. Keith Hernandez, a borderline Hall of Fame first baseman who played ball for more than two decades, didn't get it right on the Mets telecast. In fact, he and lead announcer Gary Cohen were totally stumped when Ike Davis touched the base before tagging the runner, recording one out.

"Could that have been a double play?" they wondered, and spent the next inning and a half detailing their complete befuddlement about what the first baseman might have done differently to turn two. Hernandez was frank about it, saying, "I played ball for more than twenty years, and I admit I have no idea." That blew me away, because I knew how to make that play even before Hernandez reached the major leagues in 1974. It's simple! Technically it's a ground ball, so the runner is forced at second. All you do is tag the runner first and then touch the base. Voila! Double play. Touching the base first removes the force, and with the runner standing on the bag, he's safe.

It blew me away that both Cohen and Hernandez acted as if they had never seen the play before. Once or twice a season per team, a fielder will let a catchable bunt drop, and once in awhile it results in a double play. It is inconceivable that Hernandez has never seen this play before and inexcusable that he had no idea how the play should be made. In fact, a rule change covering this very play occurred during the course of his career. The fielder used to be able to glove the ball first to fake the runner back toward first, then drop it intentionally before throwing to first. The rule change dictated that the ball had to touch the ground first. What was he doing out there for 2,012 games as a major league first baseman if not thinking about what to do if he found himself standing there with a baseball in his glove and a runner standing in front of him? Sorry, Keith: you just lost my support as a Hall of Fame candidate. What a meatball!

For the main course we have some overcooked rump roast, representing the total ass Cole Hamels made of himself by declaring that he hit Bryce Harper on purpose with a pitch because he is "old-school" and honoring a tradition of introducing a precocious rookie to the man's world of major league baseball. Hamels has been roundly ripped for this stupidity, though the five-game suspension was meaningless as it didn't even cost him a start. Perhaps he was thinking about Bob Gibson beaning Jim Ray Hart during spring training of Hart's rookie season, a peculiar form of hazing that only showed what an asshole Gibson was on the mound. I met Gibson a few years ago at the Hall of Fame, and he was soft-spoken and gracious. He was also 70 years old and several decades removed from the days when he refused to speak to teammates at All-Star games because if they were friendly it might make him think twice about knocking them down a week later.

If Hamels' intention was to intimidate a rookie, he used an ignorant, self-defeating approach. As Pedro Martinez could have told him when they were teammates three years ago, you don't need to hit a batter to intimidate him. You knock him down, you brush him back, you move him off the plate, whichever cliche has meaning to you--but hitting him puts a runner on base, and that's just stupid. Ask Sal "The Barber" Maglie, a renowned "head-hunter" of the 1950s, who stated those principles in a magazine article that is the manifesto of malicious pitching. The idea is to throw the ball as close as you can to the batter without hitting him. Maglie declared that he threw at Roy Campanella almost every at-bat, because Campy was skilled at ducking out of the way. He still threw at him, because his goal was to get Campy to lean back just enough on the following pitch to be more vulnerable to the low-outside breaking ball. But he wouldn't throw at Don Zimmer because Zimmer wasn't good at ducking. That's why Zimmer has had a metal plate in his skull for half a century. Maglie was being partly a humanitarian--he didn't want to injure Zimmer--but mainly a pragmatist. He didn't want to put a runner on base.

That kind of sophisticated thinking is lost on Hamels, who compounded his stupidity by bragging about it after the game. I have just one word of advice for Hamels when he returns to action against Washington and steps into the batter's box: DUCK! If you're lucky, you'll get plunked in the rump and not the noggin.

After the rump roast comes the cheese course, and for that I present a stinky hunk of camembert in honor of Jamie Moyer's cheesy confrontation with Chipper Jones. Moyer got into a snit because he felt that Jones, a runner at second base, was watching the catcher signal pitches and relaying information to the batter. Moyer considered that a form of stealing, i.e. cheating, and made a big stink about it. I'll try to be brief about this one (you're welcome). When team management stations someone in the center field bleachers or clubhouse with a pair binoculars to tell the batter what pitch is coming, that is cheating. It has been done for more than a century, most notably on the 1951 New York Giants at the Polo Grounds, but it has always been cheating and always will be.

However, unless a runner at second base is more interested in checking out the blonde in the sixth row than in earning his salary, he has nowhere else to look except in front of him, where the action is. If he sees the catcher's signals--which are right there in front of him--and is savvy enough to understand them, that is deciphering, not stealing. It isn't that easy to do, and the defense has ways of changing signals for every game, every inning, every batter, or even every pitch. Any time a runner gets to second, the pitcher and catcher huddle to decide which variation of signal to use. They also have the option of letting the runner see the signal for a curve but knocking the batter down with a fastball instead. There are innumerable ways of countering the relative ease with which a runner can decipher signals. But in no way is it a transgression of baseball etiquette or rules for the runner to let the batter know what he thinks the next pitch will be. It is no different from someone in the dugout deciphering all those dorky gyrations of the third-base coach giving signals. Like a hunk of camembert left out in the sun too long, Jamie Moyer has ruined my appetite for geriatric hurlers.

Finally, there is dessert, so here's a stale piece of three-layer cake decorated with announcers who should know better than to prolong the myth that there is such a thing as a "broadcasters wing" at the Hall of Fame. I've written about this before so I'm not going to go into the whole history. Suffice it to say that THERE IS NO WRITERS OR BROADCASTERS WING! There is a display in the museum showing the winners of the Spink Award for writing and the Frick Award for broadcasting. That's it. Yet announcers in particular perpetuate the self-serving penchant for congratulating Frick Award winners for being "inducted" into the Hall of Fame.

It's my own fault for violating my policy of watching baseball on Fox with the sound turned off. But I was channel-hopping and lingered on the Fox telecast two Saturdays ago, just long enough to hear Buck congratulate his booth partner, McCarver, on his upcoming induction into the Hall of Fame. McCarver thanked him and elevated the misconception to new heights by chirping about how honored he was at his upcoming "induction into the Ford Frick broadcasters wing of the Hall of Fame." Congratulations, Tim: you have achieved the ignorance trifecta! You're not being inducted, there's no such wing, and even if that display is a wing, it isn't named after Frick. Wake up, Tim, and look over here in reality, where you are going to receive an award at a ceremony that is separate from the Hall of Fame induction. That's all.

Warning: those of you who do not learn from this repast are condemned to repeat it.

Get Used To It, Mr. Strasburg

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 18:50:00 +0000

On the same afternoon when I watched Mike Pelfrey pitch eight innings of one-run ball only to see the bullpen (aided by a muffed fly ball) blow a 4-1 lead and cost him the victory, I saw that the same thing happened to Stephen Strasburg. That is, he left the game as the potential winning pitcher, only to be deprived of that notch in the win column by shoddy bullpen work.

In Strasburg's case, he pitched six shutout innings against the Marlins, throwing a modest but possibly sweat-inducing 94 pitches, and getting the rest of the day off as Nationals manager Davey Johnson put the 1-0 lead in the hands of the bullpen. By the ninth inning, the lead was 2-0, but that didn't matter when Brad Lidge staged his own throwback night by walking a batter and coughing up a game-tying home run to Logan Morrison. The Nationals won the game in the tenth inning, but of course some reliever scavenged the win.

I have a message for Mr. Strasburg: get used to it. Pitch your ass off, young man, and hope for the best, but don't expect to win as many games as you deserve to. Understand that in an age where managers expect less and less from their starting pitchers, you are the poster child for a huge talent who might have to wait years to be challenged enough to reach your full potential. Nobody will have more no-decisions snatched from the jaws of victory than you will, but the good news is that if you can put together a very long career, you might set the all-time record. More about that later.

In a season in which Strasburg will turn 24 years old, and having already undergone the kind of serious arm surgery which many long-lasting pitchers got out of the way early in their careers, his manager has already put an innings limit on him for the season. It's a rather modest limit, too, in the neighborhood of 175 innings. If he skips a start here and there and takes the mound 30 times, the average start will not last six innings. Something will have to give on that front, probably depending on whether the Nationals remain in the pennant race late in the season. Can you see Johnson shutting Strasburg down midway through September if they're within a couple of games of making the post-season? No way.

As of today, Strasburg has made 21 starts in the majors and recorded eight wins. That doesn't sound too horrible until you realize that in 13 of those starts, he has held the opposition to no more than one run. It's fair to say that any time you give up one run or no runs, you're entitled to win. So he should be about 12-4 instead of the 8-4 he is in reality.

Two of those non-wins were leads blown by the bullpen, yest and an important game last September. It was Strasburg's first start after missing just over one year following Tommy John surgery, and he held the Dodgers to a pair of hits in five innings, walking nobody and striking out four. He left with a 3-0 lead, but the bullpen promptly blew that one in the sixth inning, and the Dodgers went on to win.

So that's two starts out of 21 in which the bullpen has cost Strasburg a win. I have studied the 20 winningest pitchers in the last 50 years (all with 240+ wins), tracking leads blown by the bullpen as well as games in which the pitchers left as the potential losing pitcher but were bailed out by their offenses. The two leading victims are Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux, with 67 and 61 respectively. If either man had won two-thirds of those games they left with the lead, they would have challenged the 400-victory mark reached only by Cy Young and Walter Johnson, who did not hand any ball over to any damn bullpen bush-leaguer in the seventh or eighth inning. Similarly, if Bert Blyleven's various bullpens had saved even one-third of the leads Blyleven handed to them, he would have vaulted over the 300-win mark and earned election to the Hall of Fame much sooner.

Clemens and Maddux are also the unfortunate leaders in differential between vanished wins and rescued losses. Clemens was bailed out by his teammates only 37 times and Maddux 35, compared to 58 for the all-time leader in being rescued, with Jim Kaat.having the worst differential at 41-58. Here are the pitchers I studied, each listed with career win-loss record followed by additional wins and losses if relievers had never affected their decisions. They are listed according to career wins:

MADDUX 355-227   61-35
CLEMENS 354-184   67-37
CARLTON 329-244   35-49
SUTTON   324-256   48-54
RYAN   324-292    45-48
NIEKRO   318-274    47-43
PERRY   314-265    37-47
SEAVER   311-205    35-41
GLAVINE 305-203    53-49
R. JOHNSON   303-166    49-32
JOHN   288-231    52-56
BLYLEVEN   287-250    47-29
JENKINS   284-226    26-27
KAAT    283-237    41-58
MUSSINA   270-153    40-19
PALMER    268-152   22-29
MOYER    267-204    51-54 (through 2011)
MORRIS    254-186    30-26
D. MARTINEZ   245-193    46-47
TANANA   240-236    49-41

One thing is clear from the chart: the more recently you pitched, the more likely you are to have a lot of wins sacrificed on the altar of the 12-man bullpen. Stephen Strasburg sit on the tip of a large iceberg yesterday and saw career victory #9 melt away in the ninth inning. Get used to it!

The Day of the (Starting) Pitcher

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:37:00 +0000

So we're one day into the new baseball season, and most of what we've seen is great starting pitching. Even though the Mets moved in the outfield fences at Citi Field, the Mets and Braves managed to scratch out one puny run between them. Kyle Lohse didn't allow a hit to the Marlins until the seventh inning on Wednesday, the Reds shut out the Marlins yesterday, and the Phillies also scored a 1-0 victory. But before we declare this "The Year of the Pitcher" just because Day One reminded those of us who were watching baseball in 1968 of that offense-deprived season, let's take a closer look at what some other pitchers did yesterday.

Last night, someone posted a message on Facebook to the effect that "I enjoy watching closers mess up because it brings us closer to managers stopping the insane way they use relievers." It made me realize that I've felt the same way for a number of years, since I started doing studies of the relationship between starters and relievers. I hadn't seen anyone else say it as blatantly as that, but without a doubt, yesterday was a great day for people who think managers deserve to get burned for micromanaging their bullpens in the late innings.

Thanks to Retrosheet.org, I launched a massive study seven years ago that has seen me examine--so far--more than 100,000 box scores from the last 60 years. I'll summarize the study briefly here. I looked at the key situation which has changed for managers in the past few decades: your starting pitcher has gone seven innings and now has a lead of three runs or less. As the manager, do you leave him in there or take him out? Do you give the starter a little rope and let him get in trouble before you replace him? Or do you have a blanket strategy for who pitches which inning no matter what has led up to that situation?

In the 1950s and 1960s, the question was a no-brainer. Your starter stayed in and pitched the whole game. Only if he had a major collapse in the final two innings would he be replaced. More than 90% of the time, the starter went longer than seven innings. In fact, this tendency continued all the way into the 1980s. Even in the mid-1980s, if your starter gave you seven innings and had the lead, he would start the eighth inning more than 80% of the time. (Similarly, a reliever who held the lead through the eighth inning started the ninth inning more than 90% of the time.) The trends didn't shift markedly until the late 1980s, when managers (can you say "La-Rus-sa?") started along the path that has led to today's prevailing strategy of managing from the end of the game forward--that is, going to the ballpark with the hope that your closer will pitch the ninth inning, your main set-up guy will take care of the eighth inning, one or two guys will be the seventh-inning specialists, and whatever you get out of the starter past the fifth inning is almost a bonus.

Here's the bottom line of my study. Decades ago, the starter always went more than seven innings with a small lead. Over the past two decades, a starter with a lead through seven innings gets to start the eighth inning less and less often, with the recent figure only about 20% of the time. Even if he makes it through the eighth unscathed, it's still hugely likely that he won't pitch the whole ninth inning. Even a reigning Cy Young Award winner isn't immune to this overriding strategy. If you're a major league manager today and don't want to field a lot of questions after the game, you put your closer in to pitch the ninth inning no matter what.

But the truth I've uncovered through those 100,000-plus box scores is consistent and inescapable: it doesn't matter! It doesn't matter how far you go with your starters or how compartmentalized you are with your bullpen deployment. Back when Robin Roberts and Warren Spahn were completing most of their starts, if your starter kept pitching after the seventh inning with a small lead, the team won approximately 85% of the time. In the past decade, with several relievers being used to protect leads and the starter hitting the pines after seven innings, the team has won approximately 85% of the time. Actually the team success has been lower in the past decade, but the variation has been only a few percentage points.

The point is clear: using four pitchers to hold a 3-1 lead is NOT a more successful strategy than letting your starter carry the responsibility for holding the lead. You don't need a 12-man pitching staff to win more games; you need a better ten-man staff, and jettisoning your bottom two pitchers in favor of an extra pinch-hitter or defensive replacement could only help your team's chances of winning.

After each season, I return to Retrosheet.org, go through the season's box scores, and update my spreadsheet with the result of every game in which a starting pitcher has a "save situation" lead (three runs or less) after seven innings of work. There are hundreds of such games every season, though fewer than there used to be because managers increasingly tend to excuse the starting pitcher after a mere five or six innings of work. Yes, if it's Johan Santana coming off a missed season due to arm surgery, I'd take him out after five innings, as Terry Collins did yesterday. So that game won't be part of my study because the starter didn't go seven innings.

As I scan the box scores, I look for those seven-inning outings by starters. Only they will be in the study. (That excludes Kyle Lohse's six innings of no-hit ball on Wednesday because by the time his manager had to send him out there for the eighth inning, he led 4-0--the so-called "non-save situation" which is seemingly akin to asking the landlord to take out your garbage. But I also find myself more and more eager to open up that next box score and find the next blown saves. Each one validates my core belief that relievers are responsible for blowing a lot of leads that the starter would have held.

I didn't have to look very hard to find them yesterday. Several games will be part of my study. Let's start with Ryan Dempster of the Cubs, who gave up a leadoff single to Ian Desmond and then didn't give up another hit until the eighth inning, when Desmond singled with one out. Dempster struck out the next batter, and then his manager, Dale Sveum, took him out of the game. He led, 1-0, and had struck out ten batters, including both outs in the eighth. But he had thrown 108 pitches, and out he came, replaced by Kerry Wood. Desmond promptly stole second, and Wood walked the batter. Both runners moved up on a wild pitch. Another batter walked to load the bases. Already it was clear that a hot pitcher, Dempster, had been replaced by a reliever who couldn't find the plate. But that's the guy Sveum chose to leave in the game--even though the team's closer (and, presumably, their best reliever), Carlos Marmol, was more than available. To no one's surprise, Wood walked one more batter to force in the tying run. The Cubs went on to lose when Marmol allowed a run in the ninth inning. Have a nice season, Cubs fans!

Next up is Justin Masterson of the Indians, an underrated pitcher who completely stymied the Blue Jays yesterday. In eight innings, he allowed just two hits, one of them a Jose Bautista home run. He struck out ten Blue Jays and walked only one. He did all of this while throwing a mere 99 pitches. He had a 4-1 lead after the seventh inning, and his manager, Manny Acta, let him pitch the eighth. Incredibly, he retired four batters that inning! One reached base after striking out on a wild pitch, but it was no problem for Masterson, who retired the side easily. So why did he need to be replaced for the ninth inning? He hadn't allowed a hit since the fourth inning. But out he came, replaced by closer Chris Perez. How did that go? It went single, single, sacrifice fly, walk, two-run double, and a tie ballgame. This game wound up going 16 innings, an opening-day record, before the Indians lost. I can't help thinking that if were managing in Cleveland, I would have liked Masterson's chances of holding a three-run lead in the ninth inning.

Still, Masterson isn't a star and perhaps hasn't earned Manny Acta's unflagging faith in him. That should not have been the case with Justin Verlander, the defending AL MVP and Cy Young Award winner. He faced the Red Sox yesterday in a great duel with Jon Lester. Neither team scored in the first six innings, and Verlander allowed just two hits (yes, it's a recurring theme, a starter getting replaced and burned despite allowing only two hits). The Tigers gave him a 1-0 lead in the seventh inning, and he responded by retiring the Red Sox in order in the eighth. In the home half, the Tigers got another run to give him a 2-0 lead.

What a dream situation for Tigers manager Jim Leyland! He had the best starter in baseball, who was clearly on his game, and he also had the best reliever in baseball, Jose Valverde, if that can be judged by his streak of 51 consecutive saves, including 49 for 49 last season. How do you want that steak, Mr. Leyland? You want potatoes with that? Fine. How about some broccoli? No? It's the best broccoli in the world. It has delighted 51 consecutive customers. Yeah, steak and potatoes is pretty traditional, but how about that broccoli! Look at all that cheese!

Leyland went for the broccoli, and it took Valverde exactly five batters to blow the 2-0 lead. So much for Verlander's quest to top his 24-win total from last season. Valverde, after blowing his first save since 2010, scavenged the win when the Tigers got a run to win, 3-2. The run was charged to Boston's new #2 reliever, Mark Melancon, on a hit off the new #1 man, Alfredo Aceves, who will carry the load to replace Andrew Bailey, who was brought in to replace Jonathan Papelbon, who blew New England for Philadelphia, allowing the Phillies to jettison Ryan Madsen, who blew his elbow out during spring training with the Reds and whose absence means that Aroldis Chapman will continue to blow away hitters out of the bullpen awhile longer before we get to find out if he'll be the next Randy Johnson.

That's how baseball goes these days. Closers, like bullpens in general, are merry-go-rounds full of guys coming out of nowhere, showing their potential, blowing out their arms, replacing each other, coming back, and piling up numbers. Almost anyone with one superior pitch can be a closer in the short run. As ephemeral as they are, every team wants one. If it's the ninth inning, you'd better get that closer in there no matter how great the current guy on the mound looks. To be sure, other opening-day pitchers got through seven innings with a small lead and were rewarded with a "Win" on their records. Johnny Cueto led, 2-0, after seven innings, and two relievers (including Chapman, who blew away three hitters) polished off a 4-0 victory. Roy Halladay also got through eight innings with the traditional two hits allowed and a 1-0 lead, only to get the hook in favor of Papelbon. The new guy got the job done to preserve Halladay's first win of the season.

So the tally so far this season is two wins and three no-decisions for an aggregate of five starting pitchers (each one talented enough to be the opening-day starter) who totaled 38 2/3 innings of work and allowed all of two runs (one scored after the bullpen took over) and 11 hits. For me, that's a dramatic way to start the season. Usually there are five or six successful outcomes for every lead that is blown. Maybe the next 20 starters to hold a seven-inning lead will get the win. That happens. But after one day (albeit with only half the teams playing) of seeing aces ruined by their bullpens, I can't help hoping that this is the season where it all blows up on the over-specialization of relief pitching, the season where the success rate drops from the 82-86% range down to an indisputable 64%, and managers finally see the light.

The Greatest Baseball Fan I Know

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:56:00 +0000

I met John Russell during the summer of 2003, my first as a researcher at the Baseball Hall of Fame library. I was stationed at the downstairs desk, the library's public area where scholars and fans alike congregate to explore and share baseball history. Some visitors make appointments; some make annual pilgrimages (like another great fan, Toronto's Rudy Gafur, who didn't miss an Induction Weekend for a couple of decades); some drift in without seeming to know where they are or what they'll miss if they don't take the trouble to ask someone what they shouldn't miss; and some purposely arrive unannounced.

John Russell is the king of the last category. He entered the library one afternoon, walked purposely to the Reference desk, and waited patiently until I finished assisting another visitor. As I recall, he said something along the lines of, "Well, I've made it. I didn't want to come to Cooperstown until I felt entitled to the privilege." There might have been something about completing a quest, but one thing was clear: this was one of the proudest moments of his life. That alone caught my interest, and before he left the library that day I had learned quite a bit about him. I have learned much more during the steady correspondence we have maintained ever since as well as time spent together on his second Cooperstown trip several years later.

World War II was a grim time for England, and one of the few sources of hope was the presence of American soldiers at bases all over the country which might be saved only by them. For relaxation, the Americans, naturally, played baseball. So it was that a young English lad named John Russell saw the game being played on his native soil. The game intrigued and attracted him during his limited exposure to it. When the war ended, the exit of American soldiers left young John without anyplace to watch baseball being played.

In fact, he went nearly half a century without seeing a ballgame. During that time, he grew up, turned his active fandom toward football, and enjoyed a successful career as a taxation consultant. He also maintained his interest in baseball, listening to it on Armed Forces Radio whenever he could. For many years that consisted solely of the World Series. That became tougher after Bowie Kuhn sold out to television and began the transformation of the World Series into prime-time fodder in the early 1970s. In 1971, as a student in London, I listened to the World Series on Armed Forces Radio--with thenight games starting around 2 AM. You have to be dedicated to stick so closely to a game you only glimpsed as a child.

When John retired in the early 1990s, he determined to put his savings to good use. He hatched a plan to see every major league team's ballpark. This alone would be a more ambitious plan than most rabid American fans would care to undertake. I've been to about 25 parks in my lifetime and know some people who have seen 40 or 50 over a period of decades. The flip side is a handful of published accounts of more recent whirlwind tours, such as the couple who saw all 180 or so major and minor league parks in one season.

John had a different plan. He decided he would take an annual trip to The States, each time seeing a few parks, until he had covered all 30 teams. Scheduling and travel logistics were in his blood and his resume, and he relished the chance to map out and execute this series of pilgrimages. He did, and he did. It took him ten trips to see 30 parks, and when he had fulfilled that mission, he headed for Cooperstown, his reward for perseverance. Being acknowledged by someone at the Hall of Fame was like the conferring of an honorary degree, and I was delighted to be the one to award him a Doctor of Fandom degree.

The past decade has seen an explosion of new ballparks, and John has dutifully returned year after year, attending games in each new one in its inaugural season--sometimes even in its inaugural game. That was the case in 2009, when the two New York ballparks opened. He had been a Mets fan since the inception of the franchise (because listening to "The Giants win the pennant!" had made him an early New York Giants fan who abandoned that team when it fled to California, and the Mets were playing in the Polo Grounds, where Bobby Thomson's home run had galvanized his youthful enthusiasm for baseball) and wanted to see the first game at Citi Field. In order to be guaranteed a seat for Opening Day, he purchased a season ticket. He went to nine games there and gave most of the other tickets away, but the money didn't matter (he paid $300 for a $30 to the opener at Yankee Stadium). In the space of 33 hours, he saw four games--two each at Citi Field and Yankee Stadium.

That brings up one of the three amazing things about John Russell's approach to ballpark pilgrimages. He has attended a complete three-game series at every park--and the ballpark will be up 41 as soon as he sees his first game in the new Miami venue. Often he'll spend a whole week in a city, using the ballpark magnet as an excuse to explore everything else the city has to offer. He provided me with a complete log of every trip, ballgame, and final score which I put in the "Fans" file at the Hall of Fame library. It's a remarkable document. (It is also not the only John Russell artifact at the Hall of Fame. When the new park opened in Washington, he also bought a season ticket, which brought with it an invitation to the inaugural luncheon ceremony, a recording of which he proudly donated.) He's a museum hound, an opera buff, a train aficionado, an amateur photographer, a de facto restaurant critic, and a tireless walker.

That brings up the second--and to me the most--amazing thing about John's travels. He does not drive. He uses only public transport and his feet to get around. Trains are his preferred mode of travel, but he'll make use of planes, buses, trolleys, and taxis when needed. He doesn't need them for any place within a walkable distance, and this retired gentleman reminds me of what I did when I was 28 years old. I spent nearly four months crisscrossing Europe on a Eurailpass; at a price of $400 for three months, I could ride first-class on virtually any train in Europe, and I slept more than 40 nights on trains. At one point I was in a different country six days in a row. I would arrive in a city around 8am, spend the entire day walking, exploring, touring museums, cathedrals, castles and the like, sample the local cuisine, observe the natives, and mosey on back to the train station to catch a train around 9-10 PM to another city.

I think it's the best way to travel, and so does he. You don't miss much that way, and other people do all the work. Which brings me to the third thing that amazes me about John's travels. He has written about them, detailed accounts that are not only day-by-day but also logistic-by-logistic--and he does it all from memory! He'll get home from a two-week tour of several parks and summon up the details of every encounter, travail, detour, triumph, and treat. I am one of a limited number of people privileged enough to read these accounts, titled Best Available because that is his standard request when buying game tickets. Last year was the 18th edition of this annual account. I have urged John to try to publish (last year McFarland published some other Englishman's ballpark travelogue), but he seems determined not to.

I enjoy Best Available very much. He is as meticulous in his narrative as he is in his logistics, and pointed in his opinions, whether they concern seat location, food, fans, schedules, and games. His game descriptions have become more sophisticated over the years, as he has learned more about the game's rhythms, skills, and atmosphere. That is, he came to baseball without preconceptions and is therefore more open to its aesthetic character. For instance, the thing that impresses him most is how little time it takes outfielders to track down extra-base hits and get the ball back to the infield. It amazes him when a right fielder can chase a slicing line drive into the corner and somehow prevent the baserunner--hundreds of feet away--from advancing past second base. Americans would simply say, "nice play," but John's untrained eye sees the speed and symmetry in this athletic effort.

Good for him. He loves baseball and ballparks. He fills in off-days and other gaps in his schedule by going to minor league games. Of the six times he has seen two games in one day, three have involved minor league games: he saw the Mets and the Long Island Ducks in one day; the Phillies and the Camden Riversharks; and the Orioles and the Wilmington Blue Rocks. "All by public transport," as he reminded me in a recent e-mail.

"Will it be the last?" he asked in the announcement of his itinerary for Trip #19. There is a new ballpark this year in Miami around which the trip is built, but there are no new openings on the baseball horizon unless the Oakland A's drift 50 miles southward to San Jose. Will he find an excuse to return after seeing park #41 this spring? Will he keep coming back anyway even without an excuse, perhaps to explore the classic minor league parks or return to favored major league cities?

Who knows? But keep an eye out for a proper-looking, affable Englishman who knows much more about baseball than his accent would lead you to suspect. He plans to attend four games in Miami, two in Baltimore, four in Washington, and three (with the Mets visiting) in Philadelphia. He is contemplating a return to New York later on ("for The Met as well as the Mets") and Cooperstown as well, now that he has earned his graduate degree. I hope to see him then, but in the meantime, if you're lucky enough to sit next to him at a ballpark, give him my best. He deserves it, as the greatest fan I know.

A Pilgrimage To the Past

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 14:29:00 +0000

Baseball is all about connections. Players make connections with teammates that extend beyond the playing field and beyond their careers. Management links combinations of people whose connections strengthen the collective effort. As fans, we connect with teams, players, and events, and each of us accumulates a rich fabric of memories, favorites, and unfulfilled wishes. Every baseball experience enriches that sense of connection not only with our own past but also with the history of the game we love.

The forging of baseball connections is at the heart of Deadball: A Metaphysical Baseball Novel by David B. Stinson, a self-described "recovering lawyer" (published by Huntington Park Publications, at $15). Its central character, Byron Bennett, is a former minor league third baseman currently stuck in a low-profile minor league job but mainly obsessed with the game's past. As such, he is a baseball Everyman, part insider and part fan. As Stinson writes, "It doesn't matter where the game of baseball is played, nostalgia is an essential component--a place where the past and the present exist side by side, commingled amongst the fans with the memories of their youth and the athletes playing in the shadow of those came before them."

Bennett takes this "nostalgia" to extremes--in the view of his friends and ex-wife. When his boss cautions him to "stop obsessing about the past," he protests, "I'm not obsessing about the past. I'm a historian! That's what we do. If you loved baseball like I do, I'm sure you'd feel the same way." How many of us have said that to our friends and family! But we can't help it. We can't watch a game without noticing that the pitcher doesn't have command of his curve the way we've seen before, or that the batter's stance reminds us of someone else's, or that the trajectory of that home run is the highest ever. These observations and echoes seep into our consciousness and enrich our enjoyment of the game. It's only a short step to pursuing these connections actively rather than waiting for them to come to us while we watch a game.

Bennett, a lifelong Orioles fan who played and now (in 1999) works in their farm system, is intrigued by Union Park, the home field of the glorified Orioles of the 1890s. Visiting Baltimore, he wanders the neighborhood of the long-vanished park and catches glimpses of the past. He also meets Murph and Mac, enigmatic, ghostly figures who feed his curiosity about the old parks. He feels compelled to visit Tiger Stadium for the first time before it is torn down at the end of the season. En route, he checks out the former site of Forbes Field, where he meets a man who identifies himself as George Grantham, a long-dead infielder for the Pirates in the 1920s. That disconcerts him but also spurs him forward. He senses some connection between Grantham and the Murph/Mac duo from Pittsburgh, but can't pin down anything tangible. He can't even find Murph and Mac agan back in Baltimore. Returning to the eating place where he met Mac, he finds that it has been boarded up for years.

So goes Bennett's pilgrimage into the past. The bulk of the novel concerns his several trips to cities that housed the old parks--New York, Boston, Cleveland--with side-stops along the way. Most of what he finds is inconclusive; he can get close enough to the past for brief glimpses, but they don't add up. Passing through Ohio, he finds himself not far from the birthplace of Cy Young and detours to check that out. The result is enigmatic; he sees an apparition of Young sitting on the front porch of his old home and goes up to talk to him, but is deflated when the baseball immortal utters only the un-immortal words, "Son, your headlights are on," before disappearing inside the house that soon also disappears.

This odyssey is frustrating for Bennett, and by extension for the reader. We want him to find something definite, but it eludes him. He is being tested, it turns out, and only his steadfastness in the face of such prevailing uncertainty makes him worthy of the final discovery that concludes the novel. The reader is tested, too, by what reads at times like a travelogue, complete with the names of every street traversed by Bennett. Stinson's style is straightforward and casual, as if he's just along for the ride, too, not even in control of what happens next. Midway through I found myself thinking, "The payoff had better be worth it," and following Bennett as he scours the baseball landscape for clues.

Is the payoff worth it? Yes. Absolutely. Read it and discover the connections for yourself.

Pick a Year--Any Year

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 02:08:00 +0000

[Spoiler alert: you won't hear about baseball until a little paragraph near the end.]

This started as a passing discussion during the monthly card game last week. Ron posed the question: in what year were the largest number of influential history figures alive? The terms were defined loosely, i.e. the person didn't have to be at the peak of importance or even doing anything at all; he or she could be a baby or on his/her deathbed, as long as they were alive in that year. "Influential" was a catch-all word for any person who figured out something important, or the most famous, or big names in their specific fields, or anyone who presence on the list would instantly improve it.

Ron had a year in mind, and Mark and I jumped at the question. Mark thought it would have to be in the 1940s, and my quick response was 1869. That was the year War and Peace was published, so I could build my roster around Tolstoy if nobody else. We discussed it a little bit and said we'd investigate, come up with a definite year, and see whose list was better.

I found a couple of good sources: a wonderful book by Bernard Grun titled The Timetables of History, and an online listing of who was born and died in each year. I got about 150 names from the former, and 100 or so from the latter, and am presently armed with a list of 264 people who were alive in the year I chose. I didn't include many world leaders--no Popes, no royalty except Queen Victoria, and no presidents except those who were important in other areas, like Teddy Roosevelt and Ulysses Grant. Suffice it to say that everyone who was president from Andrew Johnson through Hoover was alive in my year.

I was hoping to have Abraham Lincoln on my list, but couldn't quite manage it. To roll back my year to 1865 would eliminate too many important people born between then and 1869, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Marie Curie, Mohandas Gandhi, and Henri Matisse. So I turned Lincoln loose and even a couple of other important people to settle on 1869. That was before I got online and found out how many really big names arrived on the scene in the early 1870s. Once I looked into that, 1869 was gone, and the only question was where I would draw the line. That turned out to be 1874, a year in which an extraordinary number of enduring figures were born: Churchill, Frost, Maugham, Marconi, Houdini, and Honus Wagner are only six of the 15 I found. There were some people I regretted losing along the way, including Dickens (died in 1870), John Stuart Mill (1873), Samuel Morse (1872), Robert E. Lee (1870), and Dr. Livingstone (1873), but for sheer volume I had to stake my claim with 1874.

Let's start with my Very Big 25, a difficult task of narrowing down greater possibilities. If I wanted to choose an important business tycoon who helped the U.S. expand and connect, should I go with Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, or J. P. Morgan? After much power-drilling and explosives work (a la Gutzon Borglum, who was alive that year), here is a 25-figure Mount Rushmore from 1874:

CHARLES DARWIN
SIGMUND FREUD
KARL MARX
LEO TOLSTOY
LOUIS PASTEUR
WINSTON CHURCHILL
VLADIMIR LENIN
MOHANDAS GANDHI
THOMAS EDISON
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
MARIE CURIE
MARK TWAIN
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
VINCENT VAN GOGH
PETER TCHAIKOVSKY
WALT WHITMAN
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER SR
PIERRE RENOIR
RICHARD WAGNER
ORVILLE & WILBUR WRIGHT (counts as one)
HENRI MATISSE
ERNEST RUTHERFORD
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
ROBERT FROST

As I throw more names at you, you'll see how tough it was to pick a featured 25. The other years in consideration also have formidable Top 25 contenders. Mark has worked his way backward from the 1940s and is leaning toward the early 1930s instead, giving up Elvis to add Edison and Curie. His big stars include Einstein, Freud, Jung, Heisenberg, Tesla, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Gandhi, Picasso, Dali, Edmund Hillary, Martin Luther King, all the movie pioneers, and legendary athletes like Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones, and Joe Louis.

Ron went in the other direction, first naming 1777 as his year. He conceded that it was weak in some areas and might lack depth, but he liked his starting lineup: Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other founding fathers, Napoleon, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, Jenner, Austen, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Voltaire, Rousseau, Lavoisier, Watt, Kant, Gauss, and so on.

Those are worthy all-stars, but it's time to trot out the whole 1874 roster, like a college football squad at a big home game, with all the freshmen and red-shirts in uniform, even the youngest recruits. How can you possibly beat all of them?

Let's start with writers--with American novelists: in addition to Twain, we have (most of the following lists will be in alphabetical order) Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Willa Cather, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Herman Melville, Gertrude Stein, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. How about some American poets? There are Whitman and Frost, along with William Cullen Bryant, Emily Dickinson, Emma Lazarus, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Oh yeah--don't leave out O'Henry and Ambrose Bierce.

I've only mentioned Maugham in passing, but there's an impressive portrait gallery of fiction writers from the United Kingdom: Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard, Kipling, Robert Louis Stephenson, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells. Other British literary figures alive in 1874 included Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Carlyle, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Beatrix Potter, William Butler Yeats, and Robert Browning.

With Yeats, we move over to Ireland, which contributes an impressive quartet to the squad: George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, J. M. Synge, and Charles Stewart Parnell. Now we have playwrights involved, which adds Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov, the landmark theater figures in their respective countries. Other theater biggies include Sarah Bernhardt, Luigi Pirandello, and Konstantin Stanislavsky, the man who wrote the book on acting.

We're not even done with literature yet. We can't omit the other European literary giants from 1874, especially the French sextet: Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, George Sand, Jules Verne, and Emil Zola. For Russians besides Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov, we have Ivan Turgenev and Maxim Gorky. To finish off literature, we turn to Hans Christian Andersen.

Next up: art. The Impressionist movement was just starting in 1874, so we have a pantheon of big names there: Van Gogh, Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Paul Gaughin, Georges Seurat, Auguste Rodin, and Paul Cezanne. For Americans, try Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, James Whistler, Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, and Grandma Moses. Other notable artists alive in 1874 were Piet Mondrian, Gustave Courbet, Edvard Munch, Vassili Kandinsky, and Antoni Gaudi, the weird genius of Barcelona.

If music be the food of love, list on. Or at least start with Franz Liszt. In addition to Tchaikovsky and Wagner, this rich ensemble includes Johann Strauss, Johannes Brahms, Anton Dvorak, Edvard Grieg, Harold Schonberg, Gustave Mahler, Ignace Paderewski, Claude Debussy, Arturo Toscanini, Jean Sibelius, Giuseppi Verdi, Giacomo Puccini, Alexander Scriabin, Modest Mussorgsky, and last but certainly not least, Sergei Rachmaninoff. Care for more popular, less classical music? Okay, you can listen to Enrico Caruso or Jenny Lind, go to a show by Gilbert and Sullivan, march to a John Philip Sousa tune, or sample the innovative styles of Scott Joplin and W. C. Handy.

Science is a huge category. Any year from the first half of the 20th century will be loaded with scientists, but for my money most of them built on the discoveries made by the people on my 1874 list. These were the guys who have units of scientific measure named after them, like Lord Kelvin, James Joule, Anders Angstrom, and Heinrich Hertz. Robert Bunsen and Alfred Nobel were still around, and literally dozens of people were alive who would later win a Nobel Prize for scientific work. We'll skip that whole list (along with Pulitzer Prize winners, noting merely that Pulitzer was alive), and stick to the most important scientists who were alive in 1874: besides Darwin, Freud, Pasteur, and Rutherford, I give you Max Planck, Nicola Tesla, Robert Millikan, Joseph Lister, Robert Maxwell, Gregor Mendel, Dmitri Mendeleyev, Henri Poincare, Pierre Curie, Alfred Adler, Luther Burbank, George Washington Carver, Paul Ehrlich, Robert Koch, George Cantor, John Venn (Venn diagrams!), William James, and, finally, lest you find your appetite waning, Ivan Pavlov.

I'm partial to explorers, and there are several kinds represented here. First are the archeologists, with two huge names alive in 1874: Howard Carter, who found King Tut, and Heinrich Schliemann, who may have found Troy. Though Africa explorer Dr. Livingstone died in 1873, his follower, Henry Stanley, was still alive. So were all the big polar explorers: Robert Peary, Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Matthew Henson. Throw in John Wesley Powell, the great explorer of the Colorado River, John C. Fremont, who did the same for California, and John Muir, the champion of the national park system, and you have the greatest group of explorers since the 1700s. Ferdinand de Lesseps made it easier for them by designing the building the Suez Canal, and Thomas Cook came along to offer the package deals that created the tourism industry.

That brings up a world of its own that was in its heyday in 1874: the Wild West. I have 18 legendary names under that heading, grouped as outlaws, lawmen, and Indian chiefs. Can any group of chiefs top this quintet: Geronimo, Cochise, Chief Joseph, Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse? It's a wonder that George Custer lasted until 1876! Lawmen include Wyatt and Virgil Earp, Doc Holliday, and Bat Masterson (who later wound up as a boxing writer in New York). They chased after the likes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok, and Billy the Kid. Also adding flavor to those parts in those times were Lillian Russell, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Annie Oakley.

Of course, 1874 was a time when the United States was growing exponentially in all directions. Most of all, as the nation recovered from the Civil War, railroads were the first step in stretching the limits of American adventure and enterprise. Business and industry boomed over the next several decades, and many of the people who pioneered and fostered areas of growth were alive in that year. I've already mentioned some of the big money people--Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt--but left out Rockefeller Jr., William Randolph Hearst, and Andrew Mellon, among others.

Next up are the men who created companies which are still around and which define their products, including Levi Strauss, F. W. Woolworth, Oscar Meyer, Louis Vuitton, Louis Tiffany, Domenico Ghirardelli, John Cadbury, George Pullman, Karl Faberge, Isaac Singer, John Deere, Milton Bradley, George Westinghouse, Karl Benz, and F.A.O. Schwartz. The inventors belong in here, too, like Henry Bessemer, George Eastman, Guglielmo Marconi, Louis Lumiere, and Cyrus McCormick. Where would we be without them?

True to form, I have avoided politics and world events, but now it's time to acknowledge the other significant historical figures besides Gandhi, Lenin, and Churchill who were alive in 1874: Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, Otto von Bismarck, Sun Yat-Sen, Cecil Rhodes, Jefferson Davis, Cordell Hull, Elihu Root, Lloyd George, Mikael Bakunin, Giuseppe Garibaldi, William Jennings Bryan, Rasputin, Chaim Weizmann, and William Howard Taft. Two other Supreme Court justices of note were Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis. Facing them would be the ubiquitous Clarence Darrow.

We need to have a worthy list of the famous women who were alive in 1874, and there is no difficulty in assembling such a list. In addition to Marie Curie,writers, and other women already named, it includes Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, Harriet Tubman, Julia Ward Howe, Jane Addams, Mother Jones, Lucretia Mott, Carrie Nation, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Clara Barton, and Sojourner Truth. Note the common theme: people who dedicated themselves to improving the lives of others.

Time out on the field to fill out a roster of baseball pioneers and early great players who were alive in 1874. Buck Ewing can catch, with Cap Anson at first base, Nap Lajoie at second, George Wright at shortstop, and John McGraw at third. Honus Wagner can cover half the outfield, with King Kelly and Harry Wright covering the other half. Albert Spalding and Cy Young would head the pitching staff, the impressive squad would be managed by Connie Mack, and we'd have daily reports and analysis in the newspaper by Henry Chadwick.

If you think I've been piling it on, complain to the football guys: Pop Warner and Amos Alonzo Stagg. As for laying it on a bit thick, I've been saving Phineas Taylor Barnum for you, the man who can keep you interested in the sideshow of remaining 1874 figures. Over in the corner, where they won't bother anybody, are a few philosophers: Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Bertrand Russell. Nearby are abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Seeing how things work are Henry Ford and Thomas Watson (IBM founder). The trio with the baffled expressions are French: Frederic Bartholdi, who gave us the Statue of Liberty; Gustave Eiffel, who gave us the idea for the erector set; and Georges Escoffier, who gave us modern French cooking. Wandering the Pacific Ocean are Father Damien and Admiral Dewey, on quite different missions. Lurking somewhere is Brigham Young.

I think that's all of them. As I noted at the outset, the majority of these people were not in their "prime" in 1874. What were the most important things that actually happened that year? There was the first exhibit of Impressionist paintings; Disraeli became Prime Minister; the Paris Opera house was completed; Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd was published; streptococci and staphylococci were discovered; and that's about it. The year itself was fairly uneventful, but it marked the crossroads of an extraordinarily diverse deluge of people who influenced not only their own time but also our enduring understanding of the world around us.

Maybe there's another year out there that is more prolific. I'm curious about the early 1820s, before Beethoven and the Romantic poets exited the scene. It would stand to reason that a more current year might be a candidate, since there are so many more people, innovations appear almost continuously, and the whole world knows what is going on. Perhaps the all-time year is 2012 but we won't live long enough to appreciate it. (I'm betting the "don't" on that proposition.) Try to beat 1874 if you can. Even if you can't, it will be fun to see which people were alive at the same time. Woody Allen built a charming film on that premise in "Midnight in Paris," and we can learn from the lesson that every time has its own appealing array of famous figures.

The Winter of My Discontent

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 14:48:00 +0000

It has been more than a month since I felt like writing anything about baseball. The musings, daydreams, and historical diversions that usually fill the off-season void have not been sufficient to overcome the ravages of reality enough for me to celebrate anything with words. Oh, I'm having a fine winter on a personal level. I'm not complaining. It's just that a sense of dread has replaced anticipation of things to come in the sport I love.

If I'm lucky, it will turn out that only the real world is going to hell and not baseball as well. Maybe it's the sense of economic chaos in the air, the emergence of class warfare. Maybe it's that American politics has turned into a spectacle rivaling professional wrestling in its emphasis on theatrical bluster and chest-thumping. The "good guys" seem weak and at times traitorous, and the "bad guys" have become more brazenly despicable. A decade ago we witnessed the all-time "foreign object" tossed into the fray: "weapons of mass destruction." Once that fraud was uncovered, however, our individual and collective self-interest trumped wisdom, and now the clowns in the ring have stopped even pretending that they care about the rest of us. They only care about outbragging, outfinancing, and outslandering each other, forcing all of us not-so-innocent bystanders to accept that the whole show is rigged. The good guys and the bad guys are all working for the same company; this is what we get for letting the CEO of Halliburton run the country for eight years.

The previous paragraph was not entirely a non sequitur. What looms on the baseball horizon is the result of letting an owner run the game for the last 20 years. Lest we forget, Allan Selig was an owner for nearly a quarter-century before usurping the role of commissioner, and even then it took him awhile to sever his ownership ties with the Milwaukee Brewers. Naturally the owners are so happy with the way he has run things that they're about to let him keep the job at least until he passes his 80th birthday. As one wag noted recently, he seems intent on staying "until Meryl Streep plays him in the movies."

One of the first things Selig did once he assumed power was to make ownership's most serious attempt to bust the union of players, choosing to cancel the last two months of the 1994 season rather than strike a reasonable deal. As a result, baseball fans had no major league games to enjoy from mid-August 1994, to late April 1995, and we had no playoffs or World Series in 1994. We had nothing to look forward to, and many fans deserted Major League Baseball. I could understand why, though I remained steadfast because of my lifelong addiction to watching games in person, on television, or in my mind's eye as I listened on radio.

How did Selig address the problem of getting fans to put their asses back in the seats of major league ballparks? He surreptitiously facilitated the staging of a home-run chase in 1998 which did bring a lot of fans back into the fold. Although the smoking gun may never be produced, it is naive to think that Selig and the other people running baseball in the 1990s had no clue that players beefed up on steroids in order to hit more home runs. Mark McGwire's bloated biceps were the closest thing this country has seen to "weapons of mass destruction" in the last 15 years. Like the used car salesman he used to be, Selig put a shiny coat of paint on his prized lemon, made a quick sale, and hoped that when the engine dropped onto the highway someday, he wouldn't get sued.

When the engine finally clunked onto the pavement--when the rampant use of steroids was exposed--Selig stuck his head firmly in the sand and said, "Really? I had no idea." Rather than do something about it, he stonewalled the public, and it took a congressional investigation and the Mitchell report to force Selig and the Players' Association to institute sanctions against steroid use. The union had gone to bed with Bud once MLB's financial pie got so big that there was more than enough for everybody; that is, after decades of regarding players and owners as "good guys" and "bad guys," of being able to take sides, both parties--like politicians--are clearly partners in the same conglomerate, engaged jointly in fleecing the public. Stan Musial was the property of the St. Louis Cardinals, a well-paid indentured servant, but Albert Pujols is his own subsidiary.

Almost as soon as Selig and the union introduced procedures guaranteeing that the manufacturers of performance-enhancing substances would be able to stay a step or two ahead of enforcement, he declared that the problem had been solved. Of course it hasn't been solved. Ask Manny Ramirez if it has been solved. Ask Ryan Braun of Selig's beloved Brewers. Ask the minor leaguers who are still getting caught using prohibited substances because they can't imagine any other way to reach the majors. Ask all the players up and down baseball's evolutionary scale who are investigating the potency and undetectability of the latest designer drugs. Selig's public assurances that the steroid mess has been cleaned up rings as hollow as politicans pretending to enact meaningful campaign financing reform. If there is one lesson we're learning this winter, it is that the people who have the most money and power are primarily concerned with doing whatever it takes to keep that money and power.

Do you think commissioner Selig's priority the last two decades has been anything other than putting money in the pockets of the cronies who pay him millions of dollars a year to look after their interests? Why do you think he has pushed so hard for an extra playoff team (possibly this year), leading to an extra playoff tier, leading to more revenue for the television networks that make the big profits and salaries possible? No wonder he wants the steroid mess to go away, and stalls as long as he can before doing as little as possible to fend off the posse of truth.

I believe (though it might be wishful thinking) that Selig's legacy will be the black eye of the steroid-bloated faces of a generation of tainted stars and derailed prospects. My wife just asked me what was the "last straw" that made me start writing about the discontent that has been festering in my baseball soul this winter, and I told her it was that in the wake of Barry Larkin getting elected to the Hall of Fame, all that people seem to want to talk about is the impending nightmare of the big-name steroid users appearing on upcoming Hall of Fame ballots. Nobody seems to care about Larkin, a terrific all-around shortstop who won an MVP Award and would have won more than his three Gold Glove Awards if the voters hadn't insisted on voting for Ozzie Smith in perpetuity.

You don't need me to rehash every other baseball writer's anguish over the impossible task of separating the users from the non-users. The voters have made a clear statement by giving scant support to McGwire, lukewarm support to Rafael Palmeiro and his 3,020 hits, and not even enough support to two-time MVP Juan Gonzalez to keep him and his 1,404 hits on the ballot. Next year, with Bondsclemenssosa added to the ballot at once, it will be that much easier for voters to make their point more emphatically by rejecting all of them. Of course, some writers will vote for them, as some have voted for McGwire and Palmeiro. The result might well be that nobody gets elected. If Bondsclemenssosa siphon off 30-40 percent of the vote, and if returning candidates get their fair share (but not enough for Jack Morris or Jeff Bagwell to get over the 75 percent hump), will there be enough votes left for guys like Craig Biggio and Mike Piazza to get elected?

I don't know. Nobody knows, and that's the point. For the first time in Hall of Fame history, voters will not simply be evaluating the numbers. It won't be "how many" of this or that stat, but "how much" those stats owe to drug-enhanced capabilities. It is likely that we will never know who did what, when they did it, or even (specifically) how their numbers were affected. We had steroid-bulked pitchers throwing faster pitches to bloated batters who hit baseballs further partly because their increased velocity on the way in caused a greater force at impact leading to greater distances on the way out. Where was the advantage? The answer to that question is the factor that George Mitchell emphasized in his report but that Selig and his co-conspirators (starting with former union head Donald Fehr) managed to sweep under the carpet: the advantage was gained by all users when facing opponents who refrained from using.

Selig's tacit approval of PEDs (first because there was no "rule" against them, later because catching some people allowed him to pretend that future players would be deterred from using them) has tainted the game so substantially that it may take decades to sort it out and overcome it. Like the most corrupt politicians who pass legislature to benefit their friends, he has enhanced the financial position of MLB so that even its humblest entrepreneurs--useless middle relievers--are millionaires. Good for them. They have achieved the American dream. But they have done so by ruining the illusion for the rest of us. Even if we fans boycott the ballparks, as many did in the mid-90s, even if we resist the temptation to load up on the jersey, caps, and other ephemera produced by teams who change their logos or colors every few years to create a fresh market, we are still corrupted by watching the game televised by networks to whom baseball moguls sold out long ago. Bowie Kuhn, another stooge-turned-commissioner, started the ball rolling on that travesty when he eliminated day games from post-season baseball. Forty years later, we still hear the annual hue-and-cry about night games starting later and ending so late that young fans can no longer grow up with the thrill of championship pursuits. Nobody in charge will be reversing that trend soon, or even making the fan-friendly gesture of moving back the starting time just for World Series games to a more reasonable 6:30 or 7:00 PM. Why not? Because their bosses at the Fox Network believe that there is no time other than prime time. It's almost enough to make one yearn for the days of Kenesaw M. Landis, baseball's hanging judge.

How do I really feel about it? You get the idea. This winter, the commissioner who brought us divisional play and the wild card unveiled his latest brainstorm--a concept previously used only in rec-league slow-pitch softball: the 15-team league. Using economic coercion, he forced the new owner of the Houston Astros to accept a move to the American League; no move, no purchase. If he was so intent on moving a team, why didn't he do the logical thing, which would have been to take the Milwaukee Brewers, who switched from the American to the National League back in 1998 in order to avoid two 15-team leagues, and put them back where they originated? The answer to that one is easy: because Bud Selig wanted a National League team in Milwaukee ever since 1966, when the Milwaukee Braves moved to Atlanta. Selig was the leader of a corps of Milwaukee businessmen who launched a legal and economic campaign to restore National League baseball to his hometown. They shanghaied the Seattle Pilots in 1970 to create the Brewers, and it took another 28 years to maneuver them over the Senior Circuit, but he did it, by golly. There's no going back on that one. So here you go, Houston, but don't forget to find a designated hitter.

The main effect of two 15-team leagues is that interleague play will be continuous, since you can't have a team from each league sitting out the weekend. I'll admit that on this issue I'll keep an open mind on this one. I loathe the idea of interleague baseball, but the games themselves, taken one at a time, are not necessarily a bad thing. Some of the most exciting games I've ever been to at Fenway Park were Mets games; I just watched one on "Mets Classics," the so-called "Omir-acle" home run game. Games are games, and in the middle of May it doesn't matter what uniforms they're wearing. Just give me a good ballgame to enjoy.

But the idea of a pennant race coming down to a final-weekend series between teams from opposite leagues stinks. It's an invitation to scandal. A lot of people were up in arms because the Yankees didn't go all-out in the last game of the season, trotting out eleven pitchers until they lost to Tampa Bay, conveniently keeping the rival Red Sox out of the playoffs. What do you think will happen when the Yankees get to play some National League team the last day of the season that has a chance to keep the Mets out of the playoffs? Or vice versa? Or the Cubs have a chance to screw the White Sox out of the post-season? Or vice versa? Pick your team's rival and give them the direct means to cost you the chance to make your kids or grandkids go to bed during the fourth inning of that key World Series showdown. All together now: invitation to scandal.

So those are some of the churnings that are drowning out the usual winter daydreams of what wonders lie ahead in the next major league season. Adding to the discontent is the probability that it will not be made glorious summer by the sons of (New) York who run the Mets. They have abdicated, abandoning the team's fans by letting the most exciting player in franchise history walk away without a fight. This is the second-most despicable exit in Mets history, topped only by M. Donald Grant letting Dick Young persuade him to jettison "The Franchise," Tom Seaver, in 1977, not quite halfway through his Hall of Fame career. On that occasion I had some solace because Seaver was traded to my favorite team, the Reds. I had no qualms about turning my back on the Mets for seven years, and it was made easier because for most of that self-imposed exile I lived nowhere near New York. But after spending the past decade watching most of the team's games on television--including 1,000 or so performances by Jose Reyes--I'm having a hard time telling myself, "Oh boy, I can't wait to watch and see if the Mets' medical staff trashed Ike Davis' foot so badly that it falls off during his home run trot!"

Go Reds! (I guess.)

Celebrating Mets History Anyway

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:54:00 +0000

This is a tough week for Mets fans as Jose Reyes has done what most New Yorkers can't manage until they're twice his age--he took the money and fled to Florida. The team might be in for the Second Dark Ages the next few years, reminiscent of the forgettable seasons between the departure of Tom Seaver and the arrival of Dwight Gooden. On the other hand, they might ride a talented young pitching staff and a patchy lineup to some sort of miracle. They've done that before, too.

This is a good time to look back at Mets history and put things in perspective, a task made more feasible and enjoyable by the publication of The Mets: A 50th Anniversary Celebration (compiled by the New York Daily News, published by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, and reasonably priced at $40), a volume which should be on the coffee table of any Mets fan by Christmas afternoon. With more than 300 pages packed with images and memories, it features text by Daily News staffers Andy Martino and Anthony McCarron, and a Foreword by Ron Darling.

The images are the best thing about the book; if you never looked at the text, you'd still get your money's worth from the images, starting and ending with reproductions of 20 Daily News front/back pages with the most significant headlines in team history--inside the front and back covers. Nearly every page of this franchise history--grouped by decades and including all the key games and players--includes a photograph taken from the pages of the Daily News. These photos cover everything you'd want to be reminded of, and some things you'd rather forget, if you're a lifelong Mets fan.

I enjoyed every photo in the book, but a couple of them stand out for me. One is a ground-level shot of Endy Chavez making "the catch" in 2006, his body stretching so he can his elbow above the fence to make the catch, the ball snowconed in the webbing of a glove that's a couple of feet above the wall, where huge block letter proclaim THE STRENGTH TO BE THERE. Even better than that is the photo of the all-time franchise miracle catch: Ron Swoboda in Game 4 of the 1969 World Series. I watched it happen live, and I've seen the footage of the catch hundreds of times, yet I'm still astonished not only that Swoboda caught the ball but also that he got to that spot so quickly. He had to be prescient to get that great a jump, and has suggested as much himself. I've seen a photo of the ball finding his glove just an inch or so above the ground, but for me that image is topped by the one on Page 71 of this new book. It shows Swoboda landing on the turf with his twisted glove a few inches above the ground. His left knee and right forearm have hit the ground, and he is fully outstretched. The amazing part is that the ball is not visible. We can see a couple of feet in front of Swoboda's glove, the webbing of which is no more than three inches clear of the planet. There is no baseball. Knowing that in the split-second it would take for the glove to be flat on the ground, the ball would somehow sail into it, boggles the mind.

I have been a Mets fan since the first day of the franchise, and still remember being bribed by my parents to sit for a portrait when I was eleven years old with the assurance that I'd be able to listen to the first exhibition games of the inaugural 1962 misfits while sitting. I went to a couple of dozen games at the Polo Grounds, and countless more after they moved to Shea Stadium. I've been there through all of it, and I believe this book would have been better served by writers who were more personally involved in the team's history. Gary Cohen would have been a terrific choice, but the Daily News did this project in-house.

McCarron says he's been watching the team since he was a kid in the 1970s, but Martino has only covered the team since 2008. The authors did their homework, plenty of it, and they cover most aspects of the team's history clearly, thoroughly, and rationally. It's a smooth read and every Mets fan can learn a lot; I found their detailed account of the franchise's origins quite illuminating. You'll enjoy reading the text, especially the blow-by-blow descriptions of key innings in important games. You will relish many reminders of the past glory, and you can also wallow in the traumatic times as well. The authors certainly relished digging through the team's dirt, and seldom passed up a good opportunity to rip them.

Having said all that, I have to point out three major problems I have with the text. The first two are related in that they are symptoms of the main problem I have stated--that the authors got too much of their Mets history second-hand. That increased the chance that they might miss some things in their research, might make simple factual errors, and might interpret partial data in a way that skewers the truth they are seeking to describe. Unfortunately, Martino and McCarron are guilty of all three of these things. Let's start with the factual errors. There aren't too many of them (and an acceptable number of typos), but nearly all of them occur in their coverage of the early years of the franchise, and they're all pretty embarrassing. Would someone who has observed the team's history directly make the mistake of identifying Tug McGraw and Jerry Koosman as right-handed pitchers? I doubt it, but these authors did just that. In fact, twice they said Koosman was a righty (once on the same page as a photo of his pitching motion) and from Minnesota (he's a Wisconsin native). They even misspelled Casey Stengel's name twice, and wrote about someone named Edgardo Alfronzo. The most annoying mistakes involved the 1969 champions; this book tells you that Pete Reichert [sic] bounced the ball off J. C. Martin's shoulder in Game 4 of the World Series; that Koosman's record that season was 17-6 (it was 17-9); and most regrettably, that the last out of the Series was a fly ball to center field. Yikes! Red Foley would never have let that happen.

The bigger problem--the error of omission compared to the errors of commission listed above--is that the authors apparently have little idea of how popular the Mets were during the 1960s. "How long did it take for the lovable losers to become mere losers?" they ask on Page 33, talking about the 1962 team. Apparently their answer is "right away," which simply is not the truth. They adopted the view of New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte, whom they interviewed. (All newspaper quotes in the book are from the Daily News, but the authors did interview several Times writers even though they weren't allowed to print their work.) Here is their account on Page 38: "Robert Lipsyte recalls 1964 as the definitive end of the endearing Marvelous Marv, cute loser Mets. After two years of bad baseball, the act simply ceased to charm most people. 'By the time they were at Shea Stadium, that was totally over,' Lipsyte said."

Judging from that summary dismissal, you would get the idea that life at Shea Stadium was dismal, lifeless and barren until the Miracle Mets of 1969. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the authors didn't know enough to research the numbers, or they ignored what they found. Here are the facts: in 1964, the Mets drew 1.7 million fans to Shea, second in the National League, while the Yankees--the pennant-winning Yankees who also led their league in attendance--drew 1.3 million to Yankee Stadium. What? The team that won 53 games drew over 30 percent more fans than the team which won 99 games and its fifth straight pennant? Of course the novelty of the new stadium was part of the appeal, but clearly the "lovable loser" factor was still present. People kept choosing to go to Flushing rather than the Bronx, and it had to be for some other reason than the expectation of a home-team victory.

That season ushered in a stretch of twelve straight seasons in which the Mets outdrew the Yankees, a streak not broken until the Yankees moved into the renovated Yankee Stadium in 1976. In 1969 the Mets became the first New York team since the 1950 Yankees to draw over 2 million fans, but let's look at the period from 1965-1968. Lipsyte says things were dead for the Mets and their fans during that period, and I have to wonder whether the authors were compelled to ignore the Mets' popularity rather than dwell on the worst decade in the history of the Daily News' primary readership's favorite franchise. The fact is that the Mets kicked the Yankees' ass during the 1960s, and Martino and McCarron are remiss in not mentioning a word about it. It was fun at Shea in those years. It was like going to a circus where it was likely that an acrobat would fall.

Quickly, the attendance figures by which the Mets trumped the Yankees in those year: in 1965, 1.77 million to 1.21; in 1966, 1.93 million to 1.12; in 1967, 1.56 million to 1.26; and in 1968, 1.78 million to 1.18. Add it up, and it's an average of 1.76 million to 1.19, or about 48 percent more fans for the Mets. Recall that during these four seasons, the Mets averaged 62.5 wins a season, and by the end had still never finished higher than ninth; the Yankees averaged 75.5 wins despite finishing last in 1966. Clearly there was plenty of losing going on at Shea, so why were the fans going there in droves (they were second or third in league attendance during those years)? Much like the fans at Wrigley Field in recent years, they went to Shea for the giddy, almost party-like atmosphere, the sense of being in a park on a beautiful day or evening, surrounded by people who just want to be there to watch the passing parade, even if it did include a few fielding and baserunning gaffes. Compared with staid Yankee Stadium, Shea was festive, symbolized by the franchise embracing the notion of banners in the stands. That practice was forbidden in the Bronx, but Mets fans quickly found that they could express with wit and images both the joy and anguish of rooting for the Mets.

In 1963, Mets management decide to promote banners by staging the first "Banner Day," during which fans paraded around the field with banners between games of a doubleheader. Pretty soon it became a contest, and I'm pretty sure the first winning banner fittingly declared, "To err is human, to forgive is a Mets fan." By the time the team started to play decent ball in 1968, banners were a fixture, as were the witty perspectives provided by the "sign man" behind the third-base dugout. "Banner Day" was an annual event until the early 1990s, and it is significant that the Mets just announced that "Banner Day" will return in 2012. The fans need some way to express themselves again, though I don't think you'll see any banners at Citi Field promising that Mets fans will forgive as easily as we used to.

This is a vital omission from the Daily News version of Mets history, because that first generation of fans established the foundation for the franchise's enduring popularity. Their children took to the team anew in the 1980s and have pretty much stuck by the team ever since. But to trumpet the Mets' success at the box office in the 1960s would have meant reminding readers that the other huge factor was that the Yankees stank. The authors weren't up to that, but I didn't find any such gaps in their account of more recent team history.

My third beef is stylistic and a pet peeve of mine. The authors use "Met" as the adjectival form of "Mets," referring to things like "the first Met run". Let me make this clear. The franchise is called the Mets. Anything that refers to the franchise has to say "Mets". The only time "Met" is correct is when it refers to an individual player, as in "Richie Ashburn was the first Met to score a run." Otherwise it has to be Mets. This is especially true in New York, where "Met" actually refers to two non-sports entities: the Metropolitan Opera and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a matter of fact, the "first Met run" was Gounod's Faust, performed at the Metropolitan Opera House (known as "The Met") in 1883.

In this book, "Mets" and "Met" are often used in the same sentence, depending on the part of speech. That looks bad, sounds bad, and is bad. What does it mean to refer to "Met management"? If the authors are referring to the ball club and not the art museum, they are talking about the people who run the franchise called the Mets. Therefore they are "Mets management" and nothing else. And so on, and so on. It bothered me every time I saw it, and there is more useless interchanging of team-related terms here than I've ever seen in a book.

Despite these reservations, I'll repeat that this is a great book, and you can't go wrong giving it to your favorite Mets fan for Christmas. Or at least by Opening Day 2012, when we'll need a more urgent reminder that in a 30-team enterprise the odds are that you'll win a championship every 30 years, so a team with two titles in 50 years is still far enough ahead of the curve for its history to be celebrated.

A Lesson In Shoddy Journalism

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 01:44:00 +0000

Last week I attended a card/memorabilia show in Johnstown, NY, at which I was approached by a man named Doug Gladstone. He introduced himself to me, passed along a greeting from a mutual friend, and said, "You got hosed by the Hall of Fame." Since I agreed with him, I looked forward to talking with him. It turned out that although he wanted to write about me, he didn't have time to talk more than a minute, but during that minute he mentioned that he wasn't aware that I had a blog. That surprised me a bit--after all, the blog is what got me fired. Evidently Mr. Gladstone was going by some hearsay (perhaps from the mutual friend), so I gave him my card with my phone number and suggested that before he interviewed me, he should check out my blog as research.

The next thing I heard from him was an e-mail with a link to his own website, at which he had posted the following:

"One of the people who I was most privileged to meet this past Wednesday evening, at the 21st Annual Sports Memorabilia and Card Show in Johnstown, New York, was sports historian and blogger Gabriel Schechter. The author of such books as Victory Faust; The Rube Who Saved McGraw's Giants and Unhittable; Baseball's Greatest Pitching Seasons, as well as Guts and Glory; The Golden Age of American Football, Schechter's most recent book came out in 2009 and was called This Bad Day in Yankees History, which was sort of a page-a-day calendar highlighting the missteps of baseball's most famous franchise.

"I've long heard that Schechter was a smart guy -- he won $19,600 in 2008 when he appeared on the quiz show Jeopardy -- but I didn't know how truly principled he was. This is readily apparent if you read his insightful blog, "Never Too Much Baseball", at http://www.charlesapril.com/. For instance, this little snippet comes from his posting of August 18, 2011:"

"Well, truth is truth, and that matters to me and to others who have steadfastly corrected misstatements. People will believe all kinds of things. They used to believe the Earth was flat and that cancer was always fatal, and there are still those who insist that the Holocaust never happened or that men never actually walked on the moon. Some people won't believe in global warming until they start choking in the streets..... But when you do know the truth, your head is less clouded by confusion and you have more immunity from the annoying effects of untruth."

"Many people know that I wrote A Bitter Cup of Coffee because I also wanted the truth out there, namely, that Major League Baseball and the players association have been hosing nearly 900 retired players out of pensions for more than three decades. Furthermore, since the mainstream media have been indifferent, by and large, to the plight of these men, I felt that it was my moral responsibilility to do something to remedy this situation.

"So on some level I feel a kinship to a guy like Schechter, who baseball insiders know was terminated by the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown last year for writing about the hypocritical stances the museum sometimes takes. Using office PCs and software to supposedly run Yahoo fantasy baseball, hockey and football leagues and allegedly running no-limit poker tournaments for HOF Fantasy Camp participants at a time when Pete Rose is on the ineligible list for his betting on baseball games are among the laundry list of head scratchers that Schechter writes about in his great blog."

That's what Gladstone wrote, apart from the quote from my blog. The big problem was his assertion that I got fired for writing about the Hall of Fame's hypocrisy, and the implication--through the list of topics in the following sentence--that those things were examples of the kind of hypocrisy that I wrote about while I was working at the Hall of Fame, resulting in my firing. I don't know how he could have done me a greater disservice than by putting it that way, so I sent him an e-mail which read in part:

"You have made a major misstatement here, and I hope it can be corrected. I was NOT fired by the HOF for making remarks or posting blogs that were critical of the way things are done at the HOF. While working there, I was very careful not to write anything overtly critical of my employer. The list of topics (such as gambling) which you included as examples of the kind of thing I wrote about the HOF were ALL written and posted AFTER I was fired. So it's misleading for you to present it as you have."

In the blog which got me fired ("A Wing and a Player," posted in August 2010), I did write about something hypocritical the Hall of Fame did--back in 1971, when they attempted to create a "separate but equal" wing for Satchel Paige and other Negro Leaguers. But while working at the Hall of Fame, I never blogged anything critical of the people I worked with or for. The gloves came off after I was fired, of course, as I tried to make clear to Gladstone. "A Wing and a Player" was the last of three blogs I wrote that summer about the common misconception that the winners of the Spink and Frick Awards are thereby elected to the Hall of Fame. The thrust of those three blogs was critical of the writers and broadcasters for perpetuating this self-serving myth. I said nothing about the Hall of Fame's role in perpetuating this myth, but the Hall tacitly conceded my point this year by handing out those awards at a separate ceremony, removing the chief cause of the misconception, namely that because the awards were given out at the Induction ceremony, the winners were being inducted.

Here is Gladstone's e-mail response to my complaint that he didn't talk to me before writing about me:

"If I erred, it wasn't intentional. If there's heat to take, let the HOF contact me, assuming they read this at all. And strictly speaking, I never wrote that you were fired for the Fantasy Camp poker games or playing fantasy baseball on hOF computers. Your take on my posting was correct. The writers and broadcasters are not inducted into the Hall of Fame when they win the coveted Spink and Frick Awards; to suggest otherwise is misleading or hypocritical."

Let's take a close look at this. The article he posted about me made not a single mention of the Spink and Frick Awards, so you'd have to do the three-step jump he's done here (plus read my original blog) to make the association that when he wrote about "hypocritical stances" by the Hall of Fame, he was referring to those awards and not to the subjects he raised in the rest of the paragraph. Someone who simply read his blog would have a tough time not thinking that he was making a connection in those two consecutive sentences. Sentence A: I got fired for writing about Hall of Fame hypocrisy. Sentence B: Here are some examples of Hall of Fame hypocrisy. That's a basic element of writing that anyone who takes Freshman Comp knows: the lead sentence of a paragraph gives the theme/subject of the paragraph, and what follows illustrates that theme/subject. You'd have to be psychic to read those two sentences and not conclude that they were related.

Thus his denial rang hollow to me, and I also didn't like his statement that only the Hall of Fame might be upset by what he wrote. The irony was inescapable in my mind: here Gladstone had written this piece about my being a "stand-up guy," but as soon as I stood up to his misstatement, he dismissed his own error as excusable because it wasn't intentional.

That is no way to deal with a stand-up guy. I sent the following e-mail to him:

"No, you didn't write that I was fired for playing fantasy baseball on HOF computers. But you did write that I was fired for writing about it, and that is simply not true. If you're going to extol me as a truth-teller, the least you can do is tell the truth. Don't wait to take heat from the HOF. You're taking heat from me."

This was his response:

"Let's back off, shall we? I don't need the attitude you're exhibiting. I wrote a complimentary posting on someone who had always impressed me because of his record and accomplishments. Just be gracious and say thank you."

Just so you know, I had thanked him the first time I wrote; the e-mail began, "I very much appreciate your writing this," and I thanked him for quoting that particular blog passage. I don't know why he felt I should thank him for blithely dismissing my concerns about the veracity of his blog, but the condescending huffiness of his latest e-mail did nothing to soften my attitude. So I responded:

"Maybe you don't need my attitude, but I certainly didn't need your unprofessional approach to your column, which is the only thing that prompted that attitude. When we met, I agreed to let you talk to me and suggested that you read my blogs as research. You read the blogs, drew conclusions from them (incorrect conclusions), and ran with them without checking with their subject. That is a poor way to go about journalism. As I noted in my previous e-mail, it is especially ironic that you wrote about someone you praised as a truth-teller, then not only didn't tell the truth about him but also acted as if there was nothing wrong with that."

I requested that he correct or remove the post and assured him that if he didn't, I would write a blog to clarify the truth of the matter. This was his response, which he began by quoting the paragraph which bothered me:

"There are two sentences that make up the above graph. .....as I've written, you were terminated for writing about the hypocritical stances the museum sometimes takes. The postings about the broadcasters and writers wings were what I meant. You've also written about the betting that goes on. One has nothing to do with the other.

"As far as my unprofessional approach goes, that's really the pot calling the kettle black. Is it this iconoclastic, shoot from the hip attitude that got you canned? 'Cause knowing a bit about employment law as I do, if I did what you did, namely, writing insubordinate postings about my day employer, I'd be canned too.

"This will be my final thoughts on this matter. Accept 'em or don't, I really don't care. Have a nice life."

All right, let's discuss this. He and I may have known that he was talking about the "wings" when trying explain why I was fired, but there was no way for the reader of his article to know that. I will repeat here that despite his confidence on the subject, he still does not know why I got fired. So his presumptions about employment law are completely out of line. In fact, there was a hearing on my firing, because the Hall of Fame challenged my eligibility for Unemployment benefits. At the hearing, I learned that I wasn't fired so much for writing the blog, but for sending the link to a number of members of the BBWAA, leading to e-mail exchanges with a couple of writers. The Hall of Fame felt that I was out of line for engaging in a personal "dialogue" with writers upon whom it depends for casting ballots in the annual Hall of Fame elections. So, contrary to Gladstone's assumptions, I didn't get fired for exposing hypocrisy at the Hall of Fame. The judge ruled in my favor, writing that contacting the writers may have been "poor judgment," it did not qualify as the "willful misconduct" that would be necessary to disqualify me from receiving benefits.

If Gladstone had taken the trouble to talk to me first before writing his article, he would have learned this. But he didn't, and when I called him on his negligence, he attacked me instead. A friend of mine once said, "Righteous indignation is very satisfying, especially when you're in the wrong." Clearly from his final e-mail, Gladstone is relishing his righteous indignation at my failure to do anything besides thank him profusely and continuously for complimenting my blog. I suspect that Gladstone's intention was to use my story to tweak the people who run the Hall of Fame. Otherwise how do you account for his bland assumption that only the Hall of Fame could possibly object to what he had writtten? He seemed much more concerned about their reaction than mine.

So yes, thank you, I will have a nice life. It was a nice life before my 45-second encounter with Gladstone at the show in Johnstown, and his article won't change that. I know the truth of this dispute, and I still care about the truth enough to share it with my readers. If someone else wants to make his readers read between the lines to figure out what he actually means, rather than forcing his readers into the same flawed assumption he has made, that's his problem. Even by the nebulous standards of the quasi-journalistic world of blogging, it's a shoddy way to do things. It's lazy and negligent, especially considering that his subject had agreed to be interviewed for the article. I even gave him my business card with my phone number so he would have no trouble finding me. That's what makes me think that he had no intention of doing more than using my case as a needle to stick in the voodoo doll he's carrying around with the Hall of Fame's logo on it. Again, that's his business. I have my own voodoo doll and my own reasons for needling the Hall of Fame, but I won't take advantage of anyone else to do it.

"Twilight Zone" At The World Series

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:37:00 +0000

I was going to write about Tony LaRussa's "Twilight Zone" experience in Game 5 ("I keep calling for Motte. Where's Motte? When I tell Derek Lilliquist he's fired, will he think I said 'your fly is open'?") and decided to wait until the World Series ended, but after last night's bizarre Game 6 I'd like to get this on record before we see what the final game throws at us.

As someone with a low opinion of LaRussa, I was delighted on Monday to see the ultimate micro-manager done in by breakdowns in the most basic communication. His embarrassment and the changing stories he and his troops gave about the game's gaffes have been hashed over by others, though I have one question about his strategy that gnaws at me: why was Allen Craig running on those 3-2 pitches to Albert Pujols with nobody out in the ninth inning? The fact that the FOX announcers had no problem with it makes me doubly certain that LaRussa was misguided.

I can't recall the last time I saw a runner on the move in the ninth inning when his team trailed by two runs. The Cards had their three big power hitters lined up (Pujols, Holliday, Berkman), and with a home run needed to tie the game, it was imperative to keep that runner on base. I know the rationale behind running him was that LaRussa wanted to stay out of the double play. But just how likely was a double play in that spot. In 162 innings in the major leagues, Neftali Perez has thrown 11 double-play balls, and has struck out 164 batters. The guy is not Dan Quisenberry, throwing everything at the knees. He's a strikeout pitcher, and it was far, far more likely that he would strike the next batter out than that he would get a double-play ball. Yes, Pujols did lead the league in grounding into double plays this year for the second time. But he still struck out twice as often, and over his career has struck out three times as often as he has hit into a double play.

The proof that he was much more likely to strike out in that spot is that he DID strike out, on a waist-high pitch at least 6-8" outside. Two innings earlier, Craig had already demonstrated his ability to get thrown out by a mile trying to steal, so I thought at the time (when he ran on the first 3-2 pitch, a foul ball) that the risk of losing the baserunner on a K-CS double play was too great. In a one-run game it would be a different story, but with the Cards down two runs, there was no actual benefit from the other possible positive result, a base hit on which he could have advanced an extra base. That didn't matter. What mattered was keeping him on base so that even with two outs, Berkman would have a chance to tie the game. But LaRussa decided that it was vital to avoid an event that has occurred once every 7.3 games (Pujols' rate for grounding into double plays) while leaving himself virtually helpless against an event that has occurred once per inning (Feliz striking out a batter). He paid the price, and I was happy to see it.

Now, about Game 6, which was a "Twilight Zone" experience for me as I watched it. I'm thinking of the episode titled "Stopover in a Quiet Town," in which a couple wanders around a place where nothing is what it seems to be, until they discover they are merely the playthings of an alien child who just wants to mess with them. I think there was some voodoo involved, too, especially on those errors. Can't you see some impish kid watching from above the game--flailing at the Matt Holliday and Rafael Furcal dolls on the missed fly ball, flicking a fingernail at David Freese's doll as he tried to catch a routine popup, and giving Michael Young's doll a vigorous shake every time he tried to handle a ground ball? Things happened, and you couldn't figure out how. The Cards had an inning in which they didn't hit the ball out of infield, yet they not only scored a run, they left the bases loaded and had another runner picked off.

Watching home plate umpire Gary Cederstrom's strike zone move around, I thought I was looking at some kind of fun-house mirror. Great-looking pitches were called balls, and so-so pitches were strikes, creating an unusually large number of funny and dirty looks from players (and some major-league yapping from Pujols when he was called out on strikes in the sixth inning. Even the pitchers were laughing at the Invisible Shrinking Strike Zone.

It was all part of a thrilling game in which 42 players were used (including 15 pitchers) and 44 batters reached base, which featured seven lead changes and five ties, and you could picture Nolan Ryan's cardiologist waiting for the phone to ring every time the Rangers failed to get that coveted final out. We saw a "prevent-doubles" defense prevent a double--by playing the double into a game-tying triple in the bottom of the ninth. We saw American League pitchers fail three times to lay down a bunt good enough to advance a runner--except for the time when the National League pitcher threw the ball into center field (someone check the Fernando Salas voodoo doll for a fresh puncture). We saw one star nearly break an ankle from being so surprised by that wild throw that he forgot how to touch second base, and saw another star leave a World Series game because of a bruised pinkie after he suddenly found someone foot between his hand and the base it was trying to reach.

We saw all that and a lot more--a little bit of everything--and we can only hope to see some semblance of it tonight in the finale of the most surprisingly great Series I've ever seen. I can do without the voodoo and the "Twilight Zone" effects, however, and hope to see something more along the lines of "The Best Games of Our Lives".

Hall of Fame Honors Selig With Locked Door

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 11:24:00 +0000

When the press release was distributed by the Hall of Fame on August 18, it seemed like a cool thing--dedicating a library space to the archives of baseball's nine commissioners. As the release put it, "Cooperstown will also now be forever celebrated as the archival home for the Office of the Commissioner following the Wednesday night unveiling of the Allan H. 'Bud' Selig Center for the Archives of Major League Baseball Commissioners at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, during the Owners' Meetings."

Upon further review, however, it turns out that this unveiling was mostly for show, a symbolic gesture to Herr Commissioner near the conclusion of the Winter Owners' meetings, held in Cooperstown for only the second time, giving each party a chance to suck up to the other. The Hall of Fame, having finally shed the Doubleday Myth, managed to create another one with the dedication of an empty, inaccessible space in honor of Selig.

Here's how Hall of Fame Chairman of the Board of Directors Jane Forbes Clark described the "Center," located off the library atrium in what was formerly offices for the Education Department: "The Selig Center for the Archives of Major League Baseball Commissioners will ensure a permanent home for the documentation and preservation of the Office of the Commissioner's contributions to baseball history. This archive will provide a central location for the study and research of the importance of the Office of the Commissioner, and its role in shaping and advancing the National Pastime for nearly a century."

What did she tell us here? In this place, this "center," we can study and research the preserved documentation of the contributions made by the commissioners. Go in there, American public, make yourself comfortable, and read all about it. Sounds great, and it would be if it were true. But none of it is true. First of all, you can't go in there. I can't go there. Even Hall of Fame staff can't go in there without tracking down one of the handful of people with a key. If you want to trek across the country to do research on that book about one of the commissioners, you won't be allowed in there either. But it doesn't matter, because there won't be anything in there anyway.

The Hall of Fame has a fair quantity of archival material related to baseball's commissioners--more than a dozen, I'm told. The largest collection is the papers of Bowie Kuhn, sent by Kuhn a year or two before he died, when he was afraid that legal problems might result in those papers being seized. But he stipulated that the papers can't be accessed until twenty years after his death. So nobody gets to see those dozens of cartons.

But the other archives won't be in the "Center for the Archives" either. Read that a couple of times to let it sink in. Let's open up a center for the archives, even though we can't put the archives in there. Why not? Because archives need to be preserved in a climate-controlled environment. Every item in the Hall of Fame's collections,apart from the library files containing newspaper clippings, is stored in climate-controlled areas in the museum basement. Temperatures are cooler in those rooms, especially where they keep the photos (at 52 degrees). The Hall of Fame is not about to install climate control in a little office off the atrium so that archives can actually be stored there. Why should they? It isn't as if anyone is going to be allowed in that room!

The procedure for looking at Commissioner-related material remains unchanged from what it has been for many years. You make an appointment to visit the Giamatti Research Center, tell them the archives you'd like to examine, and they bring the material to you in the main research center. The presence of this space--named after an actual commissioner--is irrelevant to library staff and visiting researchers alike. It is a non sequitur, a myth, a fraud.

Yet somehow it is perfectly fitting for this occasion and for this commissioner. The largest of the vacated offices will be available for meetings and conferences--but only involving VIPs. Even though the press released mentions photos (of the nine commissioners) and other items on display, it won't be open to the public, nor will it be part of tours (except for VIPs). There is a skeletal collection of books in the "Center," duplicates of Hall of Famer bios and so on. There's nothing to do in there but sit and thumb through stuff not related to commissioners, which reportedly was exactly how Selig enjoyed himself for awhile after the unveiling. Maybe he was reading the secret documentation that Abner Doubleday really did invent baseball, as Selig still believes was the case. If he believes the Doubleday myth, no wonder he thinks that people will be able to see archives in this archival center.

So even though the place isn't what Jane Clark pretended it was at the unveiling, it is what it is--empty, presumptuous, useless, and inaccessible--and therefore the most fitting tribute to Bud Selig's legacy that I can imagine.

A Book To Be Savored

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 10:49:00 +0000

There seems to be no debate in baseball history circles about the identity of the game's greatest photographer: Charles Conlon. If/when the Hall of Fame stops dithering and institutes an annual award for baseball photography, it will be named after Conlon. With good reason: the New York-based Conlon took thousands of photos from 1905-1942, capturing two generations of players in images regularly published in The Sporting News.

In the early 1990s, the American public became re-acquainted with Conlon in two ways: The Sporting News issued over 1,000 baseball cards in several sets; and in 1993, BASEBALL'S GOLDEN AGE was published by Abrams. It featured over 200 Conlon photos in a large format, with captions by Neil McCabe. The book was terrific, full of Conlon's haunting portraits and images of bygone stars. Conlon photographed 128 (future) Hall of Famers during his career, and 63 were featured in BASEBALL'S GOLDEN AGE.

Now, a mere 18 years later, Abrams has published a second volume of Conlon photos, titled THE BIG SHOW. Again, it has just over 200 photos, with captions by Neil McCabe and a foreword by Roger Kahn. To celebrate the occasion, Abrams (www.abramsbooks.com) has also reissued BASEBALL'S GOLDEN AGE with a new foreword by Roger Angell. If you want to possess a shelf of the best baseball books, these two Conlon collections have to be on it.

McCabe says the new volume is better than the original, and I agree. Even better. For one thing, the selection is more democratic. This time around, only 41 Hall of Famers are included, leaving more room for lesser players and intriguing story-lines. For instance, where the first volume had ten Babe Ruth photos, the new volume has only two, but has a section including a number of men who intersected with important events in Ruth's career--Jack Warhop, who gave up Ruth's first home run; Guy Bush, who gave up his last; Duffy Lewis, who witnessed both; Sammy Byrd, who was nicknamed "Ruth's legs" because he replaced him so often late in games; and Ford Frick, Ruth's ghostwriter who later went out of his way to protect Ruth from the 1961 home run challenge by Roger Maris.

While the first volume had multiple photos of other stars besides Ruth, the new volume has only one player with as many as four, and that's Bob Fothergill, not exactly a household name. Many related players face each other as you turn the page, the neat connections provided by McGabe. There are also numerous paired photos showing a player early and late in his career, perhaps even later as a coach, eager young faces hardened by years of competition at a difficult and dangerous game. McCabe astutely points out many subtleties in the multiple portraits of certain players.

The true joy to be found in exploring this book is the attention it brings to players so obscure that even aficionados of the Deadball Era or the Golden Age haven't heard of them. But they have great names and faces, and great stories. Submitted for your enjoyment are the immortal Gabbo Gabler, Braggo Roth, Pete Sivess, Buddy Gremp, Smead Jolley, Buzz McWeeny, Pid Purdy, and many more. Look at their faces and see how Conlon's lens permeated their characters and souls. There are happy faces like Jim Bottomley, Melo Almada, and Jim Turner, and brooding faces like Urban Shocker and Charley Hollocher, who died young.

McCabe says the new volume is better because he had a better idea of how to go about the captions. Instead of the more statistical and anecdotal captions he provided the first time around, he has made ample use of quotes--contemporary statements about the player in the photo, or quotes from the subject--to tell each player's key story. So we get Stan Coveleski explaining how slippery elm was essential for throwing his spitball; Edd Roush on winning a rare argument with John McGraw; Slim Caldwell on getting struck by lightning on the pitching mound; Nick Altrock on how he wrestled himself into submission; I could go on and on.

I understand better than anyone why McCabe enjoyed this project so much. I had almost the same experience a few years ago, writing the captions for two photo collections by Neil Leifer, who will someday win the Conlon Award. The first, his baseball photos, is a good book, but the second (football photos) is much better. Leifer says his football photos are his best, and certainly football provides more dramatic and dynamic images than baseball. The football-book editor certainly did a better job of choosing a balanced mixture of images. But I think the text is the big difference. For the football book, the publisher, Taschen, got permission to use the football writings of Jim Murray, the best dispenser ever of sports one-liners. So I had the option of using Murray quotes and other quotes that I wasn't given in the baseball book. The result was that, when I had a photo of an offensive tackle with tufts of turf stuck to his face mask, instead of parading facts about the subject all I had to do was supply Murray's superb statement that "To a lineman, the football is just a rumor."

McCabe has made wonderful use of quotes in THE BIG SHOW to shed light on time-worn tales and to introduce readers to long-lost tales. They are the difference in this book. It is more than a collection of dramatic images by baseball's best photographer. It is a treasure trove of captivating stories and expert testimony about nearly 200 players whose lives were etched on their faces for Conlon to reveal. Get this book and savor it for a long, long time.

[NOTE: At the same time that this wonderful book has been published, the Rogers Photo Archive has established a website, www.theconloncollection.com, where high-quality prints of the entire Conlon collection can be purchased.]

PNC=Panoramic Nonpareil Cityscape

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 12:55:00 +0000

After hearing for many years about the splendors of PNC Park in Pittsburgh, I finally got there last weekend. My friend and former Hall of Fame colleague Russell Wolinsky wanted to make the pilgrimage, which was enough to persuade me to join him there on one of the three days I visited the ballpark I'd been told was even more beautiful than whatever they're calling that place in San Francisco these days.

Russell and I managed to buy tickets separately online in the same row for Monday's twi-night doubleheader between the Pirates and the Brewers. As a bonus, I went to the Saturday and Sunday games with my Reds, stayed with a college friend I hadn't seen since last century, and planned an encore visit to the remnants of the left-center field wall from Forbes Field, which ought to have a statue in front of it of Yogi Berra gazing helplessly up at the spot where Bill Mazeroski's Series-ending home run sailed into immortality on October 13, 1960.

Let me cut to the bottom line: if you haven't been to PNC Park, get there! Don't wait for the Pirates to be contenders; though all four games I attended were close and mostly well-played, the ballgame is not the chief attraction. Simply sitting in any seat in the park and taking in the spectacular views beyond the outfield walls is a breathtaking experience you cannot get anywhere else. I lived in the Bay Area when the park first known as Pacific Bell Park opened in 2000. I went to twenty or so games there before moving to Cooperstown in 2002, and it's fantastic. No major league park, including PNC, has a more attractive perimeter. Take the walkway past McCovey Cove to the McCovey statue, stroll along the concourse past right field where you can duck into an enclosure and watch part of the game for free, circle around past the marina and the looming Bay Bridge, and complete the circuit by admiring the statue of Willie Mays in front of the main entrance and the statues of Orlando Cepeda and high-kicking Juan Marichal near the Lefty O'Doul Bridge in the right-field corner.

As terrific as the views were at Pac Bell, I found that the best views from inside the park were in the worst seats for watching the game, out in the upper deck in right field, where you could look down at the fans in boats waiting for a Barry Bonds blast into the cove, and enjoy the best angle on the marina and the bridge. But you didn't have that great a view of the game. That's the best thing about PNC: you can get similar views from out in right field of the bridges on the Allegheny River, but the most spectacular views are from the seats that are also closest to the baseball action. And they're about as cheap as you can find for prime seats these days; Russell and I sat in the grandstand one section over from home plate for $27. For my first game, I splurged on a box seat seven rows up from the first-base dugout. It cost a mere $35; the same seat at Fenway Park would cost $135, and it would be at least twice that sum at Yankee Stadium.

Let's talk about the views at PNC. Better yet, let's look at them. Here are some of the photos I took:

Notice how the colors of the buildings change depending on the amount of sunlight. The top photo was taken at twilight, the middle one on a cloudy early afternoon, and the bottom one around 5 PM. They appear to be right beyond the outfield fences, though the yellow bridge reminds us that the Allegheny River lies in between. That's the Roberto Clemente Bridge, a footbridge leading to a downtown area that has undergone decades of renewal. A century ago this city was dubbed "Smoketown," but that is thankfully just a factoid from the distance past now. Here's a better image of the Clemente Bridge, with The Great One's statue and yours truly:

I saw four close games in three days on this trip, all decided in the late innings, the Pirates splitting two games over the weekend with the Reds, and dividing a pair with the Brewers in a rare twinight doubleheader. One player I particularly wanted to see was the Reds' flamethrowing lefty, Aroldis Chapman. He entered a tie game on Saturday and gave up two runs, taking the loss, but not before I got this striking image of a 98mph pitch that for him is almost a change-up:

I saw a lot of good baseball in Pittsburgh, except for one recurring theme. Since it's one hobby horse I haven't carried on about in my blog before, this is the time. It concerns sacrifice bunts by position players. I thought Bill James proved back in the 1980s that the sacrifice bunt was a self-defeating strategy, and the explanation seems pretty simple. If you have a runner at first base with nobody out, you have a better chance of scoring (and of scoring more runs when you do score) than you do with a runner at second base and one out. The same is true with any combination of runners; if you give up an out, you reduce your odds of scoring, even if you've advanced the runner(s). The obvious conclusion is that you should only ask your weak-hitting pitcher to sacrifice, not your professional hitters.

Apparently Clint Hurdle and Dusty Baker haven't gotten the message, because I watched them demonstrate the futility of asking hitters to bunt. Two instances occurred in the first game I went to, and a third in the doubleheader, which made me think that these managers would have been more comfortable in 1911 than in 2011. In the bottom of the fourth inning, trailing 1-0, the Pirates had runners on first and second with nobody out. Up came Neil Walker, one of the two best hitters in the lineup. He bunted. Let's say the bunt works and moves the runners to second and third. The next hitter was Brandon Wood, hitting about .210, and following him was Ronnie Cedeno, another weak hitter. So the guy who was on pace for 90+ RBI tried to bunt over two runners. Does that make any kind of sense? In the fourth inning of a 1-0 game?

Walker popped up the bunt and the pitcher caught it easily. Wood struck out, but Cedeno singled in one run before the rally fizzled. In the next inning, Walker came up with runners on first and second with one out, and he singled in a run. In fact, the failed sacrifice attempt was the only out he made in the game; he went 3-for-4 with a pair of RBI singles. But Clint Hurdle felt it was more important in the fourth inning of a 1-0 game to take the bat out of Walker's hands. No wonder the Pirates are near the bottom of the barrel in runs scored this season.

What happened in the seventh inning turned my stomach. Trailing 3-2, the Reds started the inning with a single and an RBI double, tying the game. Up came Paul Janish, like Brandon Wood a player for whom the term "professional hitter" might be a stretch, sporting a .220 career average. So I could almost see why Dusty Baker asked him to bunt the first pitch. He bunted foul. On deck was a pinch-hitter for the pitcher, so give Janish a chance to bunt the runner to third. When Baker had him bunt the second pitch, I had to wonder. Janish isn't a pull hitter, and the least he should be able to do is tap a little ground ball to the right side that would move the runner to third. He might even get a base hit.

Two things should be mentioned at this point, two things about baseball in recent years that most observers (especially the ex-players doing commentary) have concluded: bunting "skill" has deteriorated, and pitchers keep getting worse at fielding bunts. So a bunt in fair territory isn't automatically conceding an out. Just as a .200 hitter's little ground ball to the right side might find the hole and become a base hit, so might the bunt halfway to the mound get misplayed into runners on first and third. So I could almost see why Baker asked Janish to bunt twice. Of course, Janish merely proved that he wasn't up to that task.

So what happened on the 0-2 pitch? Janish tried to bunt again! And he popped it up right to the pitcher. I almost chewed up my scorecard when I saw that. Did Baker think Janish was no better than a pitcher with a .115 batting average? Did he have so little faith that Janish could make enough contact by swinging to move the runner over? He had managed a double and a single the night before. Way to stoke his confidence, Dusty! Bunting on an 0-2 pitch with nobody out! Baker got what he deserved. The Reds didn't score that inning, and the Pirates got the winning runs off Chapman in the bottom of the inning when that guy Walker came up with runners on first and second and one out, and singled in the deciding run.

Skip ahead to Monday and the second game of the doubleheader with the Brewers. The Brewers stormed to an 8-1 victory in the opener (it was 2-0 after seven innings), giving them a 9-0 record against the Pirates this season. When Corey Hart opened the nightcap with a home run, I'm sure the hometown fans thought, "here we go again." But the Pirates held tough, and it was a 2-2 game going to the bottom of the seventh inning. The Pirates got the first two men on base, and here came rookie third baseman Josh Harrison, who had tripled and singled in the first game and was hitting about .260. You know Hurdle asked him to bunt the first pitch, and you also know that he fouled it off. The pitcher was Zack Greinke, a tough righty with a wicked curve, so let's give Harrison a chance to sacrifice.

You probably know what happened on the second pitch. Another signal to sacrifice, and another foul ball. At some point, doesn't the manager have to say, "okay, kid, let's see what you can do," and give him a chance to hit? Isn't that what a young team like the Pirates is about--giving young players a chance to do something right? Is playing for one run even the best option for the home team in a tie game in the seventh inning against a high-powered offense? Well, Hurdle, possibly having learned a lesson about the futility of asking a hitter in 2011 to lay down a sacrifice, decided to let Harrison swing away.

Greinke threw a wicked curve that broke low and away out of the strike zone. Harrison chased it with a flailing hack--and sent a dying quail into short left field that went for a double, scoring the go-ahead run. From that point, the Pirates proceeded to put together their biggest rally of the season, a seven-run outburst that allowed them to cruise to the victory. That's all it took. Give a "professional" hitter (no matter how raw or helpless he looks, he's still getting paid $300,000+ to swing the bat in the major leagues) a chance to hit. Something good might happen. Imagine asking your shortstop to bunt an 0-2 pitch with nobody out in the seventh inning of a tie game!

That was the only ugly thing I saw in three days at spectacular PNC Park.

Once More--With Feeling

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 11:05:00 +0000

One year ago today I posted the third part of a series on the myth of the "writers and broadcasters wing" at the Hall of Fame (titled "A Wing and a Player"). The confusion over whether such "wings" exist has existed since the J. G. Taylor Spink Award for baseball writing was created in 1962. That award was handed out at the annual Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which has been the main cause of the misconception that the award's winners had been elected to the Hall of Fame. The misconception was multiplied after the creation of the Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters in 1978. Since then, in addition to writers being able to perpetuate the self-serving myth that their brethren were being elected to the Hall of Fame, broadcasters have congratulated their fellow award-winners on being "elected to the broadcasting wing" of the Hall of Fame.

There is no such "wing". There's an exhibit in what I described as a nook, and the award winners are honored there. The misconception continued unabated at the start of this year's baseball season. On the initial telecast on ESPN, the new crack "Monday Night Baseball" team of Dan Shulman, Orel Hershiser, and Bobby Valentine took all the way until the second inning to note that they were in the presence of "three Hall of Fame broadcasters"--Vin Scully, Jon Miller, and Jaime Jarrin. I cringed when I heard that, knowing people like me who care about accuracy were in for a long season. Midway through the season I got another jolting reminder of how pervasive the myth is. After Reds announcer (and 2000 Frick Award winner) Marty Brennaman accused the St. Louis Cardinals and their fans of being "whiners," he was taken to task as someone "who should know better, as a Hall of Fame announcer," by none other than Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, the smartest man in baseball (as acknowledged by everyone between LaRussa's right ear and left ear).

My trio of blogs a year ago had a couple of consequences. Because I sent a link to about 20 prominent members of the BBWAA, I was fired, a liberation that has led to one of the most enjoyable years of my life. More importantly to the baseball world, the Hall of Fame decided that--after nearly a half-century of handing out the awards at the induction ceremony--they would forthwith give out the Frick and Spink Awards at a separate ceremony the day before the inductions of the actual Hall of Famers.

As a result, there is no longer any illusion that the award winners are being "inducted" into the Hall of Fame. A google search yields no claims since the ceremony that this year's Frick Award winner, Dave Van Horne, or the Spink Award winner, Bill Conlin, were inducted. Conlin's newspaper reported late last year, when the award was announced, that he had been elected, but that premise has been dropped. As for Van Horne, here's the lead of the column written by Brad Wilson of his hometown newspaper, the Lehigh Valley (Pennsylvania) Express-Times:

"The nook where Easton native Dave Van Horne will live forever with baseball's other immortals at the National Baseball Hall of Fame here in Cooperstown, N.Y. takes some dedication to find.

"Tucked above the main gallery whose famous bronze plaques eloquently tell the story of America's national pastime, the display dedicated to the game's storytellers takes a bit of patience and perhaps directions from a staff member to find, but the effort brings rich rewards."

Bravo! I attended the Saturday ceremony at Doubleday Field (the birthplace of baseball's greatest myth, that Abner Doubleday invented the sport) to see if anyone harbored the illusion that the award winners were now Hall of Famers. I asked half a dozen Hall of Fame staff members, "who's being inducted today?" and they all gave the correct answer: nobody. The ceremony itself was terrific, featuring a typically acerbic speech by Conlin (who took several digs at Bud Selig, warming my heart), a heartfelt speech by Van Horne, and a moving speech by baseball executive Roland Hemond, the second winner of the Buck O'Neil Award for lifetime achievement. The best thing about having a separate ceremony was that, for the first time, the award winners were the center of attention. With just a few exceptions (most notably Bob Uecker), they have been largely ignored by the crowds at the induction ceremony all these years; the spectators have come to see their favorite players inducted, and that's all they care about. When weather has looked threatening, Hall of Fame officials would move the award winners from the start of the program to the end, resulting in a large-scale exodus during their presentations. This year, even though only about 2,500 spectators were admitted (free) to Doubleday Field, they all wanted to be there to honor the winners, and they all paid attention to the speeches.

So there might be a happy ending to all of this controversy. Nobody can stop Marty Brennaman from claiming repeatedly that he's a Hall of Famer, and nobody can stop the Tony LaRussas and Dan Shulmans of the world from believing it. But in the coming years, as the tradition of the separate ceremony becomes entrenched, there's a chance that the myth will disappear. People believe what they're used to hearing and seeing over and over again, and after sufficient time passes, the future generations won't even be award that there was ever confusion over who was and wasn't elected to the Hall of Fame.

To illustrate this trick of the mind, I want to go back and take a final, revealing look at how this misconception grew over the past half-century. It didn't appear out of thin air; it occurred because the people who had the loudest voice--the people hosting the induction ceremony and introducing the winners--either ignorantly or intentionally perpetuated the notion that the award winners were being inducted. I have gone through every induction ceremony transcript to see who made these misstatements and when. I found about two dozen--some vague, some egregious--not counting last year's ceremony, which I wrote about in last year's blogs.

Here are those references (I call the file "Frickinspink"). I'll give you the year, the quote, who was being introduced, and who said it. In some cases it was the award winner--and by the way, I found exactly ONE award winner who went to the trouble of reminding the audience that he knew he wasn't being inducted, he was merely winning an award. That was St. Louis writer Bob Broeg, winner of the Spink Award in 1979. Most of the time, the confused person was the MC of the ceremony, the current head of the BBWAA (if I don't identify the speaker, it was the BBWAA representative). After the quotes, I will add comments, especially when the quote falls into a gray area. Here you go:

1967: BOB ADDIE (intro of Grantland Rice): “It’s altogether fitting that he should be in the HOF where he helped put so many of these ballplayers.”

1968: WATSON SPOELSTRA (intro of Damon Runyon): “It’s wonderful to know that writers get into the HOF too for their ability and not their extracurricular affairs.”

1973: FRED LIEB (accepting Spink Award): “I want to give thanks to Ford Frick, who originally suggested this idea of putting some living members into the HOF.” A decade into the Spink Award, it was pretty clear that the writers felt they were being elected. In those early years, the BBWAA went back to honor its earliest heavyweights, as the Hall of Fame itself did in its first decade.

1978: BILL LISTON (intro of Gordon Cobbledick & Edgar Munzel): “. . .The presentations of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for 1977, which in case you don’t realize is the induction of great baseball writers into this great hall.” No mincing words there, as Liston made sure everyone knew what was what--even though he was 100% wrong.

1979: BLAKE CULLEN (PR director for National League, intro of Bob Elson): “What finer reward could baseball give than having a plaque hung here in baseball’s HOF. . .to see Bob join that very special family, the Baseball HOF.” So two years in a row, there was an explicit statement of the untruth. You can see how the snowball was growing.

1988: JIM MURRAY (accepting Spink Award): “Putting me in a HOF, a baseball HOF, is ridiculous.” Technically, you could consider this a way of saying that Murray knew he wasn't being put in the HOF. I'd like to give him credit for knowing better--but I know better.

1991: JOE GARAGIOLA (accepting Frick Award): [To Yogi Berra] “We’re in different buildings, but here in Cooperstown together.” This is where I have to explain another big factor in the confusion. From the opening of the Hall of Fame's library in 1969 until the 1994 renovation, the library and the museum were in separate buildings, and the display of Frick and Spink Award winners was in the lobby of the library. If the library could be thought of as a "wing" of the museum, then the award winners were indeed honored in a separate "wing". That's what Garagiola acknowledged here. He knew he wasn't a Hall of Famer like his pal Yogi. He knew his plaque would be in another building and not in the museum's plaque gallery.

1992: MILO HAMILTON (accepting Frick Award): “I congratulate my fellow inductees today.” Hamilton must not have heard Garagiola's speech. He bought into the delusion with glowing self-satisfaction.

1992: TRACY RINGOLSBY (intro of Ritter Collett): “. . .One of 43 writers to have been inducted.” Here's another case of the BBWAA president making a blatant misstatement, showing that the myth was firmly entrenched and not going anywhere.

1995: BOB WOLFF (accepting Frick Award): “There’s something else that all of my distinguished HOF broadcast colleagues have. . .” Also: “. . .the historic news that I had been selected for the broadcast wing of the HOF.” He also referred to Garagiola, Jack Brickhouse, Chuck Thompson and Lindsey Nelson as “HOFers”. I was surprised that it took until 1995 for someone to use the word "wing" and wonder if it was related to the fact that the display was now in the museum itself. A year ago, I noted the scalding irony that the award was named for Ford Frick, the chairman of the Hall of Fame's Board of Directors in 1971 and the man who adamantly wanted the plaque of Satchel Paige, the first Negro Leaguer elected to the Hall of Fame, hung in a new museum display on the Negro Leagues. That is, Frick wanted a "separate but equal" wing so that nobody would be confused into thinking that Paige was actually a Hall of Famer (when his election was announced, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn made a point of reminding people that Paige was not actually a Hall of Famer). By the 1990s, the truth had gotten so twisted that winners of the Frick Award believed they were Hall of Famers BECAUSE they were displayed in a separate wing.

1996: JEROME HOLTZMAN (MC of ceremony): “It is now my distinct pleasure to introduce the first new HOFer. He is Mr. Joseph Durso.” Holtzman, just three years away from being named MLB's first "official historian," should have known better, but this is a measure of how rampant the myth had become.

1997: HAL McCOY (intro of Charley Feeney): “Let me read what will be on Charlie’s plaque. . .our newest inductee.” McCoy was one of several people to perpetuate the myth who was later the beneficiary of it. In my first blog, I noted that when Lon Simmons won the Frick Award, fellow broadcaster (and Simmons protege) Jon Miller eagerly called him a Hall of Famer, making me realize that many people like Miller willingly spread the untruth in the hope that people would call them Hall of Famers if/when they won the award, which was exactly what happened last year, prompting my blogs (that first one was titled "Unfortunately, I Was Right").

1998: JIM STREET (intro of Sam Lacy): “The plaque that will be placed on the wall of the writers’ wing inside the HOF. . .”

1998: SAM LACY (accepting): “I’m thankful to Larry Whiteside who sponsored my entry into this HOF. I’m thankful to Larry Doby for going in along with me.”

1998: JAIME JARRIN (accepting Frick Award): “. . .the first Latin American announcer that received during his life enshrinement in the Baseball HOF.” From these last three statements in 1998, you see how deluded the winners had become, regarding the "wing" and election as interchangeable.

2000: CHARLIE SCOGGINS (intro of Hal Lebovitz): “This award will hang in the writers’ wing at the HOF.”

2000: HAL LEBOVITZ (accepting Spink Award): “I can’t stop thanking my peers for voting me into the writers’ wing of the Hall. . .If I have a secret to pass on to make the Hall of Fame, it’s just to live long enough.”

2002: HARRY KALAS (accepting Frick Award): “It’s very special to be inducted with. . .Ozzie Smith.” The strange notion of a "separate but equal" Hall of Fame status was unshakeable at this point.

2003: JOHNNY BENCH referred to Harry Caray as “a HOF announcer”.

2003: HAL McCOY (accepting): “. . .Andy Furman, who was calling me a HOFer on the radio years before I ever thought anything like this could possibly happen.” McCoy was reportedly quite upset at the Hall of Fame staff member who broke the news to him that he wasn't actually a Hall of Famer. Another award winner pestered a staff member a year after the award, demanding to know why his plaque wasn't in the gallery yet. This is when the misconception stopped being harmless and became downright sad. In e-mail exchanges I've had with several award winners, the common note they sound is weariness at constantly having to correct people who call them Hall of Famers, a weariness that apparently can only be overcome by letting the misconception stand unchallenged.

2004: LON SIMMONS (accepting): “I do not now consider myself the quality of being a HOF announcer.” Well, I don't either. I consider him definitely the quality of an award winner, however.

2009: BOB DuPUY (MLB’s CEO, and HOF Board of Directors member, intro of Tony Kubek): “This man is now a HOFer.” Honestly, don't you think the situation was completely out of hand when a Board member didn't even know the difference? Joe Morgan, the Vice President of the Hall of Fame and Miller's broadcast partner on ESPN when Miller won the award, made no attempt on the air to correct the statement that Miller had been elected.

I have saved the best for last, though it's out of sequence. Here are the immortal words of Mets announcer Bob Murphy, accepting the Frick Award in 1994:

“My special thanks to the members of the Ford C. Frick committee, the gentlemen who cast the votes. I remember so vividly back in ’78. It was the late Chub Feeney who had the idea of a special wing at the HOF for baseball broadcasters, and I was fortunate to sit on that very first committee and I had the privilege of voting for Mel Allen and Red Barber, and stayed on the committee for a number of years. I remember the late Bart Giamatti said to me, 'Bob, would you enjoy being considered for the HOF?' I said, 'Are you kidding?’ He said, 'Well, you’d have to get off the committee. We don’t elect people that are sitting on the committee.’ I said, 'Consider my resignation.’”

Isn't that a happy ending? It isn't about elections or qualifications or where your name is going to be displayed. It's about being part of the good-ol'-boy network, and who cares what they know? If Bart Giamatti said you could be elected to the Hall of Fame, who wouldn't bail out of the silly committee? He was the chairman of the board, after all. But someone must have had another idea. Between Giamatti's death in 1989 and Murphy's "election" in 1994, four other broadcasters won the Frick Award. At least one of them knew he wasn't a Hall of Famer; at leastone knew that he was.

It just proves that for decades, the people who have been most directly involved in the award and what it means have been careless with their understanding and their words. Bart Giamatti probably did think he was electing Bob Murphy to the Hall of Fame. What does it matter, you ask? Well, truth is truth, and that matters to me and to others who have steadfastly corrected misstatements. People will believe all kinds of things. They used to believe the Earth was flat and that cancer was always fatal, and there are still those who insist that the Holocaust never happened or that men never actually walked on the moon. Some people won't believe in global warming until they start choking in the streets. People will believe what they want to believe, and Marty Brennaman will keep telling everyone that he's a Hall of Famer. You can't stop that. But when you do know the truth, your head is less clouded by confusion and you have more immunity from the annoying effects of untruth. The Hall of Fame finally saw it my way and decided this year and removed the chief circumstance that had forced their award winners to hem and haw when strangers identified them as Hall of Famers. I hope the award winners from now on will be able to sleep better and go out in public more comfortably than their predecessors. I know I will.

Gambling at the Hall of Fame: Part Three

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:28:00 +0000

In the last of this three-part series on gambling at the Hall of Fame (please read the first two parts if you haven't already), it's time to talk about gambling that goes on AT the museum every day of the year. I'm referring to fantasy sports, and if your reflex response is "gee, that's no big deal," I ask you this: if it's so harmless, why did Jeff Idelson, the President of the Hall of Fame, caution Hall of Fame employees not to disclose the fact that he was participating in one of the leagues?

The first baseball season I worked at the Hall of Fame was 2003, and it quickly became clear that many of my colleagues were obsessed with fantasy sports. Nothing since then has changed that first impression. During the season there were daily discussions on how everybody's team was shaping up, trade proposals, and plenty of razzing of anybody whose team was tanking. Naturally, I asked if I could be part of the league in 2004. Erik Strohl, the commissioner of the "big" league that involved about a dozen HOF employees, told me I'd have to wait until someone dropped out, since they didn't plan to expand the league.

In 2006, Strohl decided to expand the league to 16 teams, and I was brought into the brotherhood. The fee was $40. Part of that, I learned, was spent on a memorial for a friend of Strohl's (a non-HOF person and league member who had passed away), and the rest went to prize money. First place was around $200, second place was worth about $125, and the third-place finisher got his $40 back. An additional $40 went to the team that improved the most after the All-Star break (to give managers of second-division teams a reason to stay involved). That prize money has remained the same, as has the allocation for the memorial.

Few events on the HOF's annual calendar are as eagerly anticipated as Draft Day. It occurs on a weekday in mid-March, in the early evening. For various reasons, some of the managers choose to conduct the draft from their offices at the Hall. I did so that first year because I had a very slow dial-up internet service at home, and was afraid that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the rapid-fire draft. There were four of us in the museum after 6pm that evening, and it was fun to make a pick and zip around the other offices to compare notes with and harass the other managers.

I stayed in that league four years, winning it in 2007, for which I got the prize money plus a cute little bobble-head doll from Yahoo, the website on which the league was conducted. Like most of the managers, I spent a fair amount of time at work on league activities. I usually got to my office 10-15 minutes before my official workday began, and I'd check my fantasy teams before doing anything else. I'd monitor standings, see how everyone did the night before, make roster changes, lineup changes, and so on. If this spilled over into the start of my work-day, so be it. During the day, there were all those discussions with other managers, all those trades to consider, occasional visits to Yahoo to make roster changes, and all that razzing. Lots and lots of razzing. It was a blast. The majority of the managers were from the Curatorial and Research departments, but there were managers from the business part of the operation as well. Many of us participated in more than one fantasy baseball league, but the only important concern centered around how you were doing in the "big" league.

That's the league that Jeff Idelson joined in 2009. He said he had never participated in a fantasy league and wanted to find out what it was all about, so he ponied up his $40, drafted a team, and spent the season comfortably in the middle of the pack. But in August 2009, something happened. The HOF was having a problem with bandwidth and decided to do something about it. The employees were kept in the dark about the issues, but of course we heard things, and had to react to a change in policy which restricted internet access on HOF computers. We heard that the problem was too many people listening to game broadcasts; that some Visitor Services people were caught playing video games during work hours; that the HOF was too broke or too cheap to buy the extra bandwidth needed to conduct routine business; and so on.

What they did tell employees was that in order to use the HOF's bandwidth capacity more efficiently, our computer usage would be monitored. The upshot was that, for the first time, the HOF adopted a filtering service that prevented access to certain websites. The Barracuda program that they installed mainly targeted sites designated as involving gambling or pornography. Some of those designations proved absurd, as anyone knows who has dealt with such programs. Remember the words of the U.S. Senator whose committee was investigating pornography: "I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it"? Well, the strangely endowed Barricuda program had a liberal definition of forbidden territory and was capable of barring a website like this one right here simply because the word "pornography" appears on it.

What bothered the HOF fantasy league managers was that Barricuda barred access to the Yahoo fantasy league pages. We could no longer access our league or manage our teams on our work computers, even during non-work hours. Some guys got around the Barricuda censorship by bringing their laptops to work to access forbidden sites. Some of us tried instead to get an exception made to the policy. You could get exceptions made by going to the powers-that-be (chiefly the head of the Information Services department or Senior Vice President Bill Haase), and I succeeded one time with some innocuous site which contained a biography of some long-ago historical figure I needed to read for a fact-checking project. I was allowed access to the site but had to tell them the minute I was done so that Barracuda could flag the next person who tried to access it.

A couple of people made official requests to have access to Yahoo restored, but to no avail. The strange thing was that a half-dozen of us were also in a league on espn.com, and the commissioner of that league successfully made the case that full-time access should be granted--on the same basis which was advanced on behalf of the Yahoo league! The rationale was that these sites have up-t0-the-minute information (biographical and statistical) which is important to people whose job involves daily discussions with the public about who is doing what, and who have to base their writing/research/museum exhibits on thorough and accurate data. For some reason, it was deemed that it was okay to use espn.com, but not yahoo.com. You might think that this argument was nonsense, but the fact is that everything that happens in baseball, everything that other people write and say about the game, past and present, is relevant to the work that goes on in the HOF library. With an estimated 50,000 questions directed to the Research department every year, the people who work there have to know what is being posted and where.

I went to see Jeff Idelson in late August, to discuss the new censorship policy in general and its effect on the "big" league in particular. He listened but said there was nothing he could do to change the policy. He also told me that he was totally screwed in the league because not only couldn't he access Yahoo at work any more, but he couldn't access it at home either. I wanted to ask him how that was possible (had the HOF installed Barricuda on his home computer?), but didn't because I figured the answer would just make me feel sad.

That was that. The rest of the season bore out my worst fears as a manager. I now had to set my lineups at home before going to work, which was certainly possible. But it meant that if one of my starters wound up not starting a day game, I had no chance to adjust my lineup. I counted four times when this cost me strong performances by players I would have substituted, and that was enough to cost me third-place money. So I quit all my fantasy leagues in 2010. I didn't see how it could be worth all that time and effort if Barracuda's bias against one website could flush it all down the toilet. I wasn't the only manager who quit the league over that policy. At least two others did, including Jeff Idelson.

But here's the catch. Baseball isn't the only sport that has captured the fantasy enthusiasts at the HOF. They've had fantasy football and hockey there for as long as I worked there. Every Monday during football season brought a rehashing of Sunday's action, and I lost count of the number of times that Erik Strohl strolled past my desk to discuss hot goaltenders with the person I shared the office with, Bill Francis (otherwise known as "Bartleby the Researcher"). So there is fantasy action every day of the year at the HOF.

This next thing is what truly befuddles me. The hockey and football leagues are also conducted on Yahoo--and HOF employees are allowed access to those leagues on their work computers! But they're still not allowed to access their baseball league at work. Isn't that the screwiest logic? We've got people who are involved in baseball as their work, but let's not give them access to a site with a ton of baseball information. Instead, let's make it easy for them to monitor their football and hockey leagues at work.

When managers were being recruited for a new Yahoo baseball league starting this year, I was one of three HOF people (the other two still work there) who signed up. I did so as a favor to the commissioner, and of course because I now work out of my home and can access Yahoo any time I damn well please. But right after the season started, one of the HOF managers refused to pay his league fee. He hadn't realized it was a Yahoo league, and he explained, "I do all of my fantasy leagues at work." So he hasn't made a single roster change all season--and his team has been in the top three all season. I know. That doesn't say much for the rest of us.

But it does say a lot about the waste of time and resources at the HOF. I know fantasy baseball isn't illegal, but it is gambling (make no mistake--if there were no money at stake, these leagues wouldn't exist), which the HOF should be more sensitive about than other institutions. [Can you say "Pete Rose"?] That is, the HOF is sensitive about gambling when other people are doing it. It must be okay if a member of its Senior Staff, Senior Director of Exhibits and Collections, Erik Strohl, is still the commissioner of the big league. Then again, if it's nothing but harmless fun, why didn't Jeff Idelson want anybody to know that he was part of it?

Gambling at the Hall of Fame: Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 11:45:00 +0000

Are you ready for the bizarre story I promised you last time, about gambling AT the Hall of Fame? If you haven't read "Part One" please do so before reading this one. In it, I told about the Hall of Fame refusing to hire me in the mid-1990s because of my background as a Las Vegas poker dealer, telling me that they were afraid of employing someone with a gambling background at the same time they were being criticized for excluding Pete Rose because of his gambling indiscretions. You have to read that story to appreciate fully the irony of what happened a decade later.

Between the time the Hall of Fame snubbed me and the time they finally hired me in 2002, I left Las Vegas, spent nearly five more years dealing poker in California, and published two books of baseball history (VICTORY FAUST and UNHITTABLE!) which gave me enough credibility as a baseball historian to get hired as a researcher in the library. There I peaceably went about my business and limited my poker involvement to playing in the same once-monthly, 25 cent-limit, friendly game I had enjoyed during my first Cooperstown tenure a decade earlier.

In 2005 the Hall of Fame folks decided to launch a new program: a fantasy camp. Many major league franchises were running these popular camps, and it made sense to stage one at the Hall of Fame. In addition to the baseball fun and publicity, the Hall's aim was to find a bunch of fellows rich enough to spring for the $8,000 price tag, gather them in Cooperstown, and possibly persuade them to become substantial museum donors. Here is the announcement released to potential attendees:

"For an experience that will never be forgotten, lovers of baseball will flock to Cooperstown, NY, to spend five days with some of the greatest names in baseball history.

Baseball’s First Annual Hall of Fame Fantasy Camp

For five glorious days in October, baseball fans from around the country will share the field with some of the greatest sluggers the sport has ever known. From October 5 through October 9, you can play baseball each day on historic Doubleday Field, walking the same ground as the greats of baseball history at the first annual Hall of Fame Fantasy Camp sponsored by the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

The Hall of Fame Fantasy Camp gives baseball enthusiasts a chance to experience the atmosphere of a real major league-style locker room as they practice and play the game using professional bats and equipment provided by the Louisville Slugger company. You can share laughs and stories with some of the greatest players in baseball history, while making friendships with other lovers of the game. The camp managers will be:

* George Brett, three-time batting champion with 3,154 hits, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1999
* Lou Brock, Hall of Famer inducted in 1985 with 938 stolen bases and 3,023 career hits
* Phil Niekro, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1997 with 318 career victories and 3,342 strikeouts
* Duke Snider, Hall of Famer inducted in 1980 with 407 career homers and 11 World Series homeruns

Other Hall of Famers who will be on hand as camp coaches to offer professional tips include Mary [sic] Wills, Joe Niekro, Jamie Quirk, Carl Erskine, Dave Bergman, and Jon Warden. You can watch the season’s playoff games at night with Hall of Famers, get their autographs, and have your picture taken with them, so you can bring your camp experience home with you. Play golf with the Hall of Famers on the lush Leatherstocking Championship Course of the Otesaga Hotel, where you’ll be pampered in luxury for four nights. A private behind-the scenes tour of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum will be conducted exclusively for camp attendees. The camp week will conclude with a private, candlelight dinner in the Hall of Fame Gallery where fantasy camp accomplishments will be recognized and honored.

Only 48 places are available, and the package includes lodging, ground transportation, all meals, and special gifts. The cost is $7,995 for individuals and $7,495 apiece for groups. Cost for Friends of the Hall of Fame Benefactor members is $6,995, and the cost for Friends of the Hall of Fame Benefactor members coming with friends is $6,495. To reserve your spot on the roster, call 1-607-547-0327 or register online. The fantasy camp is open to both males and females, and you can bring along a non-playing guest for a small fee. Come live your baseball dreams, or honor a friend or loved one by giving them this once-in-a-lifetime experience. All you need is a love of the game."

It sounds great, and it was great for those who didn't flinch at the cost. Illness prevented Duke Snider from making it, and Robin Roberts took his place. Nearly all the available places were sold, and the other spots on the four rosters were filled by Hall of Fame staffers, including President Dale Petroskey. Everyone had a great time, and only one thing went wrong: it rained. The rain began Friday morning and continued through the weekend, preventing them from finishing the two-games-a-day schedule. For some reason, however, the people running the fantasy camp hadn't considered the possibility that it would rain, and when it became apparent late Friday morning that they suddenly had the whole afternoon to fill and nothing besides ballgames scheduled, a Plan B was necessary.

What do you think they did? Pause a moment to think about what you would have done in their place, with more than 40 men sitting around the five-star Otesaga Hotel, having ponied up $7,000+ to play ball with Hall of Famers at Doubleday Field, and suddenly with no ballgames on the dark gray horizon.

Shortly after noon my office phone rang. It was Greg Harris, the Hall's Vice President of Development. "Hey Gabe," he chirped. "Our fantasy campers have been rained out and we need to come up with something for them to do. How would you like to deal a poker tournament this afternoon?"

A chill ran up and down my spine when I heard this. I couldn't believe that the Hall of Fame, which had once considered my poker background poisonous, was actually asking me to contribute that expertise to an officially sanctioned Hall of Fame event. Greg knew I could run a tournament because earlier that year, I had been asked to run a couple of little tournaments at Cooperstown's exclusive men's organization, the Mohican Club. Those had gone smoothly, and he wanted me to do the same thing for the fantasy campers.

"I don't know," I told Greg. "In light of the Hall of Fame refusing to hire me in the 90s because I was a poker dealer, I would feel extremely awkward dealing poker FOR the Hall of Fame. Are you sure that you want to sanction gambling here?"

He thought for a moment and replied, "Well, suppose the money all goes to charity and not into somebody's pocket. Would that be okay with you?"

It was my turn to think for a moment. There was no escaping the absurd hypocrisy of the basic request, but making it a charitable enterprise would remove it from the realm of gambling. I found three other reasons to go for it: it would be an entertaining change of pace from sitting at my desk; I would be coming through for the big boys when they needed me, which might be rewarded down the road; and, like the campers, I would get to hang out with some Hall of Famers. So I said yes.

Twenty minutes later I was at the Otesaga, where a terrific locker room had been set up in a basement conference room. The campers had everything a quasi-ballplayer could ask for: lockers, couches, a big-screen television, boxes of cigars, two barrels of beer, and a handy poker table. It was a great place to hang out during a rain delay, and most of the participants drifted through during the afternoon. About a third of them participated in the poker action; the rest used the free time to explore the museum or the memorabilia stores lining Main Street.

I set up one-table, Texas hold'em freezeouts that would take about an hour apiece. Nine or ten guys would buy in for $20 apiece to play no-limit poker, getting eliminated as they ran out of chips, and continuing until one player had all the chips. I had run similar tournaments at the Sam's Town poker room in Las Vegas, and it's a foolproof format. The campers loved it, because at worst they would be eliminated early, grab a beer, hit the couch, and watch ESPN.

And the winner. . .well, the winner kept the cash. I can't say that I was surprised when the first winner, one of the campers, stuffed $180 into his pocket and wandered off to see which souvenir store would get his windfall. I wondered if Greg had even run the notion of donating the buy-ins to charity by the campers before getting them to sit down at the table. You don't get to be a vice president of anything without knowing how to pull legs. But it was too late for me to do anything about it. I had already participated in gambling AT the Hall of Fame, and I wasn't going to cause a scene and storm off, refusing to entertain them further. So I kept dealing.

I ran four or five freezeouts that afternoon, and everybody had a lot of fun. The majority of the players were campers, but some of the ex-major leaguers played. The life of the party was Jon Warden, who looks and sounds like John Goodman. His performance at that initial fantasy camp has made him a staple at all such Hall of Fame events since then, including the present "Hall of Fame Classic" exhibition games, a nice gig for a guy whose major league career consisted of 28 games with the 1968 Tigers. He could make a living as a full-time baseball clown, and he was a hoot at the poker table.

Joe Niekro, Dave Bergman, and Jamie Quirk all played at different times, but the other celebrity star of the afternoon was George Brett. I've seen him at other Hall of Fame events, and his ebullience is always a crowd-pleaser; he was the liveliest player of the afternoon. When I've told this tale to people, I've emphasized my belief that the guys who played in those poker freezeouts got the most genuine major-league experience of all: "they drank beer in the locker room," I explain, "smoked cigars, played poker, and got to have George Brett call them 'fucking dickheads' when they beat him out of a pot!" How can you beat that?

My afternoon ended at 5pm, when my workday ended. I went home and told my wife-to-be Linda all about it, and we shared our amazement at the Hall of Fame's willingness to break the law when it suited its short-term purposes. Late the next morning, we were about to have lunch when the phone rang. It was Greg Harris. It was still raining. It was still impossible to play ball at Doubleday Field. And they still hadn't come up with an alternative activity. He added that after I had left at 5pm, the campers had run another freezeout without me, and it was a fiasco. "How would you like to deal some more freezeouts this afternoon?" he asked. "You'll get paid for working, and we'll throw in a free buffet at the Otesaga."

All I could do was laugh. The only reason they'd be willing to count this as work time was that the Hall of Fame wouldn't let me work more than 35 hours a week to begin with. That was my limit for the last seven years I worked there. I was like a researcher on the equivalent of a pitch-count, as if that extra five hours a week would cause my brain to deteriorate or blow out my annotator cuff. By paying me for dealing five hours on Saturday, they could get me up to 40 hours without having to pay me overtime. Don't think they didn't take this into consideration! Greg had checked with the Inhumane Resources Department, and I was advised how to make the entry on my time-sheet.

So I spent a second afternoon at the Otesaga. The buffet was plentiful and tasty, the campers treated me like a comrade in arms, the freezeouts went smoothly, and a fine time was had by all. Once again, the winners pocketed all the $20 buy-ins. Shocking! During the year that followed, Greg and I talked about making the freezeouts an official part of the program, to be played during the evenings if it didn't rain. That never happened. I learned later that when the campers saw the poker table, they arranged to play a dealer's choice, high-stakes game instead of piddly $20 freezeouts. That's how it went during the remaining few years of the
Annual Hall of Fame Fantasy Camp, and I was just as glad. It was still illegal, and they didn't con me into participating any more.

It still strikes me as absurd and hypocritical that the Hall of Fame staged a gambling event--but not surprising. It goes hand in hand with Major League Baseball officially banning gambling while accepting revenues from gambling entities. Watch baseball on television and you'll see ads for casinos flashing on the front of the grandstand behind home plate. When I went to a ballgame in Montreal--remember when baseball was played in Montreal?--there was only one billboard on the whole expanse of the outfield wall, and it was for a casino. When the Arizona Diamondbacks played the first home game in franchise history, the largest ad on the center field scoreboard was for a Las Vegas casino. New York Yankees broadcasts are sponsored by one of the New England casinos. The list goes on and on. Apparently it's very BAD for players to gamble, but it's okay to take money from the casinos that fans might frequent. And it was just fine in the eyes of the Hall of Fame to let their fantasy campers--and potential major donors--gamble as much as they wanted to. But after getting conned into it that first year, I was happy that they opted to--in the words of Yogi Berra--include me out.

So that's the story, and it turns out that there will be a Part Three to this series. This one has gone on long enough, but I still have to tell you about the gambling that is still going on AT the Hall of Fame. Stay tuned!

Gambling at the Hall of Fame: Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 11:33:00 +0000

I want to tell you an amazing story about gambling at the Hall of Fame, but to appreciate the irony of the story fully, you need the background to put it in context. For that, I have to take you back twenty years to my first tenure in Cooperstown.

I arrived here in April 1991, intending to spend five or six months doing research at the Hall of Fame library for a novel based on the adventures of Charles "Victory" Faust. I wound up spending exactly one year, setting a record that still stands for the longest continuous research visit, and by the time I was done I had abandoned the novel and embarked on what wound up being a nonfiction book about Faust. I did complete my planned research by the end of September, figuring I'd head back to my home in sunny Las Vegas rather than sticking around for the upstate New York winter. Instead, I was hired to do the research for a very fine book by Richard Scheinin titled "Field of Screams". It was a long, cold winter, but I survived and didn't return to Las Vegas until April 1992.

By then I was firmly established as part of the Hall of Fame library's family, a close-knit group of seven employees. Mostly I hung out with the two full-time researchers, Bill Deane and Gary Van Allen, arriving with them when the doors opened at 9AM and staying until they kicked me out at 5PM. By mid-summer they allowed me to fetch my own files, located in the large room on the second floor where visiting researchers sat across from each other around a large central block of tables. That's where I met Bob Davids, who had founded SABR in that room two decades earlier. That's where I met Danny Peary, who recommended me to Richard Scheinin, and where I met Dan Heaton, who later served as editor of my book on Victory Faust.

Most days I was on my own, eventually going through well over 1,000 clipping files, and some days I was completely on my own. When they had staff meetings, they literally left me alone in the library, suggesting that I answer the phone if it rang and answers inquiries if I could. Looking back, this seems like quite an odd practice, since that was the era when a lot of material was stolen from the library. They apparently had no concept of security and preservation, as they do now. They're still paying the price for those lax practices. But I enjoyed having my run of the place and not having to impose on them to fetch all those files, and I did answer the phone a couple of times.

Eventually I dead-ended on the Faust novel and my money ran out, so it was time to go back to Las Vegas and start dealing poker again, which I had done on and off since 1980. While continuing my Faust research and getting sidetracked writing a screenplay about him (four drafts, two years), I dealt at tournaments from 1992-95, eventually putting in five years as a dealer at the World Series of Poker. Along the way, I realized that researching and writing about baseball history was what I enjoyed most, but that was easier said than done.

Sometime in the year after my exit from Cooperstown, Bill Deane alerted me that the library had gotten the authorization to hire a third full-time researcher. He urged me to apply, and I jumped at it. He wasn't sure how long the hiring process would take, but that didn't matter to me. I felt that researching at the Hall of Fame was my destiny, and I was prepared to wait. Little did I know that the wait would amount to a full decade.

In June 1993, I returned to Cooperstown to deliver a paper (on Faust as an early example of the media creating a celebrity out of thin air) at the third Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. Librarian Tom Heitz suggested that this would be a good time to interview me for the prospective researching job. That interview was conducted over lunch at the Doubleday Cafe, with Bill Deane sitting in. Heitz told me, "We like you and we'd like to have you working at the library. But there's one problem. The people in charge are concerned about your poker background."

For the past year, he explained, the Hall of Fame had been the target of much criticism in the press for the change in policy that prevented Pete Rose from being elected. He would have been eligible for election in 1992, but was barred from inclusion on the BBWAA ballot because he was on MLB's "Ineligible List". Heitz mentioned one Cincinnati writer in particular, Tim Sullivan, who was regularly raking the Hall over the coals for excluding the popular all-time "Hit King". I had attended the 1992 induction ceremony, after which a crowd gathered to chant "Where's Pete? Where's Pete?" at Commissioner Fay Vincent as his car left the site. The whole issue was painful for the Hall of Fame officials to deal with.

Heitz asked for permission to have MLB's Security Chief, Kevin Hallinan, conduct a background check on me as a condition of my application going forward. I said fine and provided a list of two dozen figures in the Las Vegas gaming industry they might interview, including the folks who ran the World Series of Poker. I had nothing to hide.

After lunch, I delivered my paper and then went right back to the Hall of Fame for two more interviews. The first was with the #2 man in the operation, Bill Guilfoile. I had spoken with Guilfoile many times during my one-year visit to his domain, and he had been very friendly to me. I had even interviewed him for an hour or so about his earlier posts as publicity director for the Pirates and Yankees. But on this occasion he was clearly on edge and not in a smiling mood. He was candid about his concerns, telling me about Tim Sullivan and others who had been hypercritical of everything the Hall of Fame did. His chief concern was, as he put it, that these writers "will accuse us of being hypocritical if we hire someone with a background in gambling at the time time that we're barring Pete Rose from election because of his gambling."

I like the response I made, though I can see now why he didn't. "I think it would be a feather in the Hall of Fame's cap," I told him, "to show that you can make the distinction between a self-destructive, low-life law-breaker and someone who has spent over a decade in the industry while maintaining his integrity." That was the end of that subject, though the interview lasted most of an hour.

After Guilfoile was done with me, I moseyed down the hall to be interviewed by Hall of Fame Director Howard Talbot. This was a strange, short conversation, no more than ten or fifteen minutes, in which Talbot asked me no questions about baseball history, research, the library, or anything possibly related to the job for which I had applied. As I departed, he made the only relevant remark made in that office, saying, "maybe you can teach me to play poker." Sure, Howard, any time.

Back in Las Vegas, I resumed work on Faust and awaited my Hall of Fame fate. Bill Deane told me that after the interview, Tom Heitz consulted with him and Gary Van Allen, telling them, "We have six candidates for the job, and these are the top three. Please rank them--and it will help if you don't rank Gabe first." Bill and Gary went off to neutral corners, did their rankings, and both placed me first. I will note here that in retrospect, I would have ranked myself third. The other two top candidates were more qualified. Tom Shieber had already been a high-ranking SABR officer and done significant research, most prominently on baseball photography. Rob Neyer was the protege of Bill James, the sabermetrics guru who had changed the way researchers approach baseball history. The only advantage I had over them was that Bill and Gary knew me personally, liked having me around, and could more easily picture working with me than with a couple of guys they hadn't met.

Heitz saw their preference and said, "Okay, if that's who you want, I'll support you. But it will take time." Two factors might delay the date when a third researcher might be allowed to report for duty. One was that the Hall of Fame was midway through a massive renovation in which the library--a separate building since it opened in the late 1960s--would finally be joined to the museum itself. Since late 1991, the library had been housed in the old movie theater down the block from the museum; in fact, as part of the library family, I had helped them make the move. The new library was slated to open in 1994, and it was possible that the new researcher might not be needed until the larger facility opened. The other factor, I was told, was that both Talbot and Guilfoile were nearing retirement and simply might not want to deal with the repercussions of hiring me. So I was advised to be patient.

Within a few weeks, however, the whole situation changed. I forget the order in which two events combined to make the situation seemingly clearer. One was that Rob Neyer took himself out of the running after accepting a job with ESPN. The second was that Gary Van Allen died suddenly. This was in July 1993, not long after my interviews. Now the arithmetic was easy: there were two research jobs available, and two preferred candidates.

The logical course of action, even from the viewpoint of Talbot and Guilfoile, was simple: hire Tom Shieber to replace Gary Van Allen, and either hire this Schechter guy when the new library opened or at least okay his hiring after they were out of the picture. Did they do any of this? Nope. They didn't hire anybody, not even after Bill Deane left early in 1994, creating a vacuum with no full-time researchers. The powers-that-be were willing to let the library's service deteriorate to a scandalous state--part-time interns answered the phones the rest of that year and let unanswered research inquiries pile up--rather than hire anyone. It wasn't until Tim Wiles arrived in January 1995 to fill the newly created post of Director of Research that a qualified researcher joined the staff.

Meanwhile, Tom Shieber and I were left to twist slowly, slowly in the wind. In 1995, during my next visit to Cooperstown, Tom Heitz showed me a copy of the "background check" compiled by Kevin Hallinan's crack staff. It was a joke. They had not interviewed a single person on the list I had provided. All they did was go to City Hall to check public records, establishing that I didn't have a police record or any blotches on my credit history. That was all. The biggest joke in the report was the notation that I was residing on "an empty lot". That's right. Talk about wishing that I'd vanish into thin air! In reality, I was living in a new condo that had been built in 1991, but the blueprint the "investigators" checked two or three years later identified it as an empty lot, and that was good enough for them. Obviously the whole notion of the background check was a smoke screen, and I realized that they had no intention of hiring me.

I took that personally for a long time, until years later when I met Tom Shieber, who was hired by the Hall of Fame in the late 1990s as a curator. We compared notes and discovered that we had been treated the same, i.e. totally ignored. Nobody representing the Hall had informed either of us that our applications had been rejected, or were dormant, or that the whole hiring process had been put off. The only news I ever got was from Bill Deane, and that had usually amounted to "hang in there, we haven't heard anything yet."

I never heard anything until 2002, when I returned to Cooperstown to do research for what I planned as my third book, and to keep showing up at the library until they hired me. Six months after my arrival, I was hired. Tim Wiles interviewed me, and I don't recall being asked anything about poker, gambling, or the gaming industry, even though it was only two years since I had dealt my last hand of poker. I'm not sure he was even aware at that point of my application for a research job nearly a decade earlier. This interview was job-related, and I got the job.

So it seemed that with the new regime and with the passage of time, nobody cared about my poker past. Howard Talbot and Bill Guilfoile were long since retired, and Talbot's successor, Donald Marr, had given way to Dale Petroskey. It was a new century, a new library, and a new life for me. I wouldn't even have to think about dealing poker again--or so I thought.

[NEXT TIME: Gambling AT the Hall of Fame]

A Somewhat Less Diabolical Hall of Fame Quiz

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 12:04:00 +0000

Last month I posted what I billed as the "most diabolical" Hall of Fame quiz ever. Apparently it lived up to its billing, and I am now convinced that the quiz was not only diabolical--it was impossible to solve. The person I thought most capable of solving it spent several hours on it, came up with only six of the 20 matches, and gave up. That was good enough for me.

Here is a revised version which I believe will give you a fighting chance of coming up with a solution, or at least will be more fun to attempt, especially if your mind was boggled the first time around. I'm still offering the first person who submits a correct solution signed copies of the three books available through this website. I'm also still requesting that you e-mail your solutions to me at gschechter@nycap.rr.com.

Here's how it works. There are two sets of 20 names which you must match together. One set consists of Hall of Famers, and the other of quasi-Hall of Famers. That is, the last names are all names of Hall of Famers, and most of the first names are as well (in fact, two of the 20 are actual Hall of Famers as well). I've combined them into full names (in the previous version, I had separate lists of first and last names, which you apparently had to be psychic to combine successfully). All you have to do is match them up. The connections are still fairly diabolical, many involving character traits of the Hall of Famer and others involving wordplay or the mere sounds of the names. Here are the two lists, in alphabetical order: good luck--and have fun!

HALL OF FAMERS
Grover Cleveland Alexander
Walter Alston
Wade Boggs
Mordecai Brown
Ed Delahanty
Joe DiMaggio
Dennis Eckersley
Charlie Gehringer
Lefty Gomez
Harry Heilmann
Rogers Hornsby
Reggie Jackson
Tony Lazzeri
Rube Marquard
John McGraw
Gaylord Perry
Kirby Puckett
Branch Rickey
Albert Spalding
Don Sutton

QUASI-HALL OF FAMERS
Robin Banks
Raul Bender
Manny Brouthers
Juan Chance
Ban Combs
Burleigh Feller
Hack Fingers
Andy Flick
Catfish Hunter
Dizzy Keeler
Rich Lemon
Ty Mathewson
Bid Nichols
Heinie Palmer
Josh Ruffing
Warren Slaughter
Curt Speaker
Waite Traynor
Luke Wright
Early Wynn

My Proudest Moment at the Hall of Fame

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 10:44:00 +0000

Maybe it's fitting that my proudest moment at the Hall of Fame did not occur at the museum or even in my office in the library, but outdoors at the Clark Sports Center. Though I enjoyed every day I spent at the library (except for the last one), we're coming up on the fifth anniversary of the one moment which, for me, crystallized the Hall of Fame's threefold mission to "preserve history, honor excellence, and connect generations." That all happened on July 30, 2006, at the annual induction ceremony. Also fittingly, this ultimate Cooperstown moment involved someone named Cooper--though not the James Fenimore guy whose statue stands in front of the old library entrance.

It was in 2006 that the Hall of Fame went back in time and inducted 17 significant figures from the old Negro Leagues. There was a lot of controversy not because of the 17 electees but because of one person who was not elected: Buck O'Neil. The hugely popular O'Neil, already in his 90s, was on the committee that voted in 17 of the 39 candidates, but he reportedly fell one or two votes short himself. One rumor that circulated around the Hall was that he urged that he not be elected in lieu of other candidates.

Just as history had given short shrift to so many long-forgotten Negro Leagues standouts, so the 2006 induction ceremony short-changed them. All 17 were inducted in a mere 36 minutes, less time than it took Carlton Fisk to deliver his acceptance speech in 2000. Some of the inductees had relatives present, and they were instructed simply to read the text on the plaques. A few of them sneaked in a few extra comments, including descendants of Effa Manley and Jud Wilson. For the rest, induction consisted of the plaque being read by Bud Selig, along with general remarks by O'Neil and Jackie Robinson's daughter Sharon. The Hall had made a sincere effort to find as many relatives as they could, but with most of the inductees long since deceased, that was a tough task. Still, for the limited number of relatives in attendance, five or ten minutes at the microphone wouldn't have been too much to grant.

Let's talk about the plaques, which are the enduring memorial to those 17 now-immortals. Traditionally, the plaque text has been written by the Hall's head of public relations. For a couple of decades, from the 1970s to the mid-90s, that meant William Guilfoile. Following him, the solemn task was performed by Jeff Idelson. Since Idelson became the Hall's President in 2008, his PR successor, Brad Horn, has written the plaque text.

The exception to this practice was 2006, when Idelson understandably felt that the workload of composing 18 plaques (the 17 Negro Leaguers plus BBWAA electee Bruce Sutter) was too much. Instead, the assignment was delegated to three members of the library's staff: Russell Wolinsky, Bill Francis, and me. We actually held a draft to decide who would write which plaques; two of us did six, and the other did five. I don't remember the order of my first five picks, but they were Sol White, J.L. Wilkinson, Biz Mackey, Cum Posey, and Jud Wilson. My last pick was a guy I knew nothing about, Andy Cooper. Little did I know that just a few months later, his plaque would result in my proudest Hall of Fame moment.

The three of us went off and wrote the first drafts of the plaques. There followed a group meeting with librarian Jim Gates and Jeff Idelson, at which we critiqued the drafts, decided what needed to be omitted and what needed to be emphasized, after which we were sent back to put together final versions which Idelson would tweak into permanent wordings. I think Russell and Bill would agree with me that what you see on those 17 plaques is approximately 75% of what we originally wrote.

We had the library's wealth of research material to draw from, and the executives were the easiest to write. I knew a fair amount about Biz Mackey, and Jud Wilson's accomplishments were easy to track down. But Andy Cooper was fairly elusive. When the Negro Leaguers were elected, the Hall of Fame had issued statistical summaries of their careers, largely compiled by historian Dick Clark, and the numbers were useful though they never tell the whole story. There were a few items in Cooper's clippings file in the library which helped, and I found some tidbits in John Holway's oral histories of Negro Leaguers. Here is what I finally submitted to Jeff Idelson:

TALL PITCHER UTILIZED WIDE ARRAY OF PITCHES, SHARP CONTROL, AND CHANGES OF SPEED TO WIN CONSISTENTLY FOR TWO DECADES. EXCELLED WITH DETROIT STARS FROM 1920-1927, THEN TRADED TO KANSAS CITY MONARCHS FOR FIVE PLAYERS. LED MONARCHS TO NEGRO NATIONAL LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP IN 1929 AND LATER MANAGED THEM TO THREE MORE TITLES. RELIEF ACE BETWEEN STARTING ASSIGNMENTS, REGARDED AS SECOND ONLY TO BILL FOSTER AMONG NEGRO LEAGUES LEFT-HANDERS.

Here is the improved version on Cooper's plaque:

On July 30, my induction ceremony assignment was along the chute through which invited guests entered the field next to the gym where the ceremony has been held since the mid-1990s. Looking from the stage, I was on the left, about even with the front of the stage, so I didn't have a very good view of the people who were up there or the inductees' representatives, but I could hear the plaques being read and the brief remarks. Near my post sat a large group of Jud Wilson's relatives, and I talked to a few of them during the ceremony. They were thrilled to be there, especially when their designated speaker, Sha'Ron Taylor, accepted Wilson's plaque. She cleared up a big mystery in my mind. I had always read that Wilson's nickname, "Boojum," represented the sound his booming line drives made when they bounced off outfield walls. I couldn't make the connection--until Taylor pronounced the word, which she did with gusto two or three times during her brief remarks. The nickname, it turned out, was "buh-ZHOOOM!!" Now I can hear it loud and clear.

But the joy of hearing "buh-ZHOOOM!!" paled next to the spine-tingling moment when Andy Cooper Jr.--one of ten Cooper relatives on hand--read his father's plaque. He was a little boy when his father died of heart disease at the age of 43 in 1941, and didn't remember anything of his father's baseball exploits. What he knew was on that plaque. I think he's a minister; if not, he should've been, because he read the plaque with evangelical zeal. As Detroit Free Press writer John Lowe wrote following the ceremony, "Cooper's son regularly raised his voice when he read his father's plaque. He emphasized the words 'in relief' during this line: 'Often pitched in relief between starting assignments.'"

You bet he raised his voice. For him, the words on that plaque represented a revelation to the world of his father's greatness, and his reading of them a once-in-a-lifetime chance to call out to his father and let him know he will live forever in the plaque gallery at the Hall of Fame. Nobody who spoke that day reveled more than Andy Cooper Jr. in the words engraved on a plaque. And I wrote those words. Standing there and listening to how my words had moved this man so powerfully gave me goosebumps, and I've gotten them again while writing this.

Talk about preserving history, honoring excellence, and connecting generations! I never got to meet Andy Cooper Jr. and might never cross his path again, but we are linked by words I typed dispassionately on a computer and which he so stirringly delivered to the world. His resounding pride made that my proudest moment as a representative of the Hall of Fame.

The Most Diabolical Hall of Fame Quiz Ever

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 12:20:00 +0000

I don't know if "diabolical" is the right word or not for this quiz. I've been working on it for a few weeks, and at different times it has seemed demented, ingenious, absurd, hilarious, or just plain sick. The one person I ran some of it by e-mailed me a few days later to call me a "sneaky son of a bitch" because an answer suddenly jumped into his head as he was driving down the highway. I took that as a compliment.

I'm offering a prize to the first person who comes up with the complete solution to this matching-game puzzle: signed copies of all three books available on this website. So please don't post answers as comments on this site, because you'll be helping other people solve it. Instead, e-mail your solution to me at gschechter@nycap.rr.com. I'll answer all e-mails and let you know how you did, and when the prize is awarded I'll post the solution on this site.

So here you go. There are three columns with 20 names apiece to befuddle you. The first column contains first names, nearly all of them the first name or nickname of a Hall of Famer. The second column contains surnames, and these are all names of Hall of Famers. The first thing you need to do is match these up to create full names. For instance, "Al" and "Kaline" would make a logical combination.

The tricky part is matching up those combined names with the names in the third column, which are all full names of Hall of Famers. The connections are not obvious--certainly not as obvious as the example that "Al Kaline" sounds like the quality of a battery, so if you saw "Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra" in the third column, you'd make the connection with that Hall of Fame battery. For a more typical example, one connection I failed to make was a Hall of Famer to go with "Smoky Ashburn". That sounds like a cigarette or cigar so I wanted to find the name of a brand, but until Jeff Kent is elected to the Hall of Fame I don't think there is one. So "Smoky Ashburn" will have to wait. Likewise, "Happy Day" would have worked if there was a Hall of Famer named Hawkins, since Edwin Hawkins originally recorded the song "Oh Happy Day". But no.

The connections can be made in all kinds of ways. Some refer to character or personality traits of the Hall of Famer in the third column. A lot of them involve wordplay or puns, either the sound of one of those names or the meaning of a word. Some involve a non-baseball association with the name, and others are baseball-related. A few of them might be considered unsavory, and I've been told that a couple of them are politically incorrect (though I resisted the temptation to identify Effa Manley as a "Pie Baker").

Without further ado, here are the names, in alphabetical order. Good luck--and above all have fun with it!

FIRST NAMES: Andy, Ban, Bid, Burleigh, Catfish, Curt, Dizzy, Early, Hack, Heinie, Josh, Juan, Luke, Manny, Raul, Rich, Robin, Ty, Waite, Warren

LAST NAMES: Banks, Bender, Brouthers, Chance, Combs, Feller, Fingers, Flick, Hunter, Keeler, Lemon, Mathewson, Nichols, Palmer, Ruffing, Slaughter, Speaker, Traynor, Wright, Wynn

HALL OF FAMERS
Grover Cleveland Alexander
Walter Alston
Wade Boggs
Mordecai Brown
Ed Delahanty
Joe DiMaggio
Dennis Eckersley
Charlie Gehringer
Lefty Gomez
Harry Heilmann
Rogers Hornsby
Reggie Jackson
Tony Lazzeri
Rube Marquard
John McGraw
Gaylord Perry
Kirby Puckett
Branch Rickey
Albert Spalding
Don Sutton

From Worst To First At The Hall Of Fame

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 22:36:00 +0000

You are looking at a photo of part of the Hall of Fame's newest exhibit, "One For the Books," which covers the records and record-keeping of the game. Those of you who have visited the Hall of Fame might recall the exhibit it replaced, which wasn't called anything--with good reason. The old "records room" was without a doubt the worst exhibit in the museum, but has been replaced by a exhibit which might turn out to be the best. After striking out in this department for many years, the Hall of Fame has hit a home run for which no asterisk will be needed.

To put it bluntly, the old exhibit provided visitors with all the charm of perusing a train schedule. It contained bare listings of the top-ten career and active leaders for about twenty hitting and pitching categories. For some years there was a case with actual Cy Young Award and MVP trophies and the like, but that has been gone for awhile. All that was left was a bunch of boards with some names and numbers, and virtually no explanation of where those numbers came from.

That was the problem: the numbers came from the Elias Sports Bureau, baseball's record-keeping dinosaur, which has a peculiar attitude toward baseball statistics. Elias believes that it owns baseball statistics (which is why they charge good money to part with any numbers, unlike a website like http://www.retrosheet.org/ which shares history for free), yet for anything that occurred before the company began operation in 1918, Elias was and is still content to accept as gospel the statistics printed in annual guides. That decision was made at a time when record-keeping was lax and inconsistencies were rampant, but Elias chose to do its own work only on the games that were played after it went into business. It took until research began for the first comprehensive Macmillan Encyclopedia in the late 1960s that researchers sought to reassemble accurate statistics for games going back to the start of the major leagues in the 1870s.

In addition to the hundreds of discrepancies between the statistics in guides and those compiled by researchers who combed newspapers and other sources to determine what actually happened in those earlier games, there was the problem of "official" stats. Earned run average, which had been tracked by Henry Chadwick and others for decades, did not become an official statistic until 1912 in the National League and 1913 in the American League. For Elias, this meant that whatever happened before those years didn't count. Back in the 1960s, before people bothered to find out what actually happened before 1912, Elias felt it was on solid ground in protecting the sanctity of "official" statistics. By the 1980s, when dedicated researchers had pinned down the actual events, Elias lost some of its footing. In the 21st century, with websites posting extensive statistics and basing new research on analyzing those raw numbers, Elias has become the baseball equivalent of the Flat Earth Society, clinging to a premise that seems more futile all the time.

Why is this important? Why is it relevant to the discussion of this new exhibit? Because for decades, the Hall of Fame has had a deal with Elias to use its statistics and nobody else's. As a result, even as recently as the 2010 Hall of Fame Yearbook, it states that there is NO KNOWN career ERA for the following pitchers: Jack Chesbro, John Clarkson, Pud Galvin, Addie Joss, Tim Keefe, Joe McGinnity, Kid Nichols, Charley Radbourn, Amos Rusie, Rube Waddell, Mickey Welch, Vic Willis, and Cy Young. Yes, Cy Young. In 2010, the Hall of Fame was telling its patrons, "Sorry, but even though we are the greatest baseball facility in the world and are the repository of baseball history, we have no idea how effective Cy Young was. Sure it's all over the internet how many earned runs he allowed in how many innings, but we don't recognize the events that occurred before league officials at the time decided to report those numbers in its annual guides."

Even more strangely, the Hall of Fame decided to provide partial numbers for ERA--that is, they adhered to the Elias policy of pretending that a pitcher whose career straddled the years when ERA become official did have a legitimate ERA based on those post-official seasons. For instance, Christy Mathewson started pitching in 1901, had his most glorious years during that decade, and was in the twilight of his career when ERA became an official stat. Elias computed his ERA from the last five seasons of his career (which constituted 164 of the 636 games he pitched in the major leagues, or about 25%) and came up with 2.62. So that's the number that has appeared in the Hall of Fame yearbook for years, and the reason Mathewson was never listed on the "top ten ERA" board in the old room. His actual ERA, as researchers have known for two or three decades, was 2.13. Instead, the "career" leader in ERA, according to the Hall of Fame, was Eddie Cicotte, whose career began in 1905 but whose post-1913 ERA was the lowest Elias could find. Never mind that his pre-1913 ERAs showed only one season below his listed career total, meaning that, as opposed to Mathewson, his true ERA was higher than what was displayed in the museum. Official was official to Elias and therefore to the Hall of Fame.

An even more ridiculous situation existed with RBI. Believe it or not, the RBI was not an official statistic until 1920. As a result, for many years the Hall of Fame has been telling patrons and visitors that Babe Ruth drove in fewer than 2,000 runs in his career. We're pretty damn sure today that his actual total was 2,213, but it didn't bother the Hall of Fame to shortchange the game's most prolific slugger. Yes, they had an asterisk in the yearbook and a tiny paragraph in the records room which noted that pre-1920 RBI weren't counted, but it was not deemed important enough to supply the actual numbers in any place where people could find them. If you wanted to know how far from reality it was to assert that Ty Cobb drove in only 727 runs despite scoring 2,245, you had to look somewhere else. The Hall of Fame, the repository of all that has happened in baseball history, wasn't going to tell you. Nor was Elias, which has always made the American public feel like the Tin Man trying to confer with the Wizard of Oz. Its sources and methods were shrouded in secrecy; even now at the Hall of Fame, only two or three people are authorized to have direct contact with Elias, which charges fees for any question it deigns to answer. It was like trying to get officials in Florida to part with the actual vote totals in the 2000 election.

I bring all of this up because as part of the new "One For the Books" exhibit, the Hall of Fame has finally shed the Elias albatross and entered the 21st century, where people want to know what really happened back there in history. For the first time in decades, the Hall of Fame yearbook tells us that Christy Mathewson had a 2.13 career ERA, that Babe Ruth drove in 2,213 runs, that Ty Cobb drove in 1,938 runs, and even that Pud Galvin, whose pitching career ended in 1892, recorded a 2.85 ERA. And museum visitors will no longer be marveling at just how tragic it was that one of the infamous 1919 Black Sox--Eddie Cicotte, the all-time leader in ERA, for goodness sakes--didn't get to play out the rest of his career.

The Hall of Fame is now utilizing statistics supplied by http://www.baseball-reference.com/, one of several websites that has been providing actual numbers to the world for years. There might be some discrepancies, and there might be a more accurate number here and there that can found from some other source, but the point is that even though we might figure out someday that Christy Mathewson's career ERA might be 2.14 rather than 2.13, we're light years from the travesty of telling people it was 2.62. More importantly, the new exhibit utilizes not only the raw numbers provided by Sean Forman of bb-ref, it presents them in a unique and exciting way thanks to sophisticated software.

At the right is one of two "towers" where folks like me could spend the whole day learning about what our favorite players did. It displays 35 categories of statistics (rotated automatically until a visitor starts pressing buttons to track specific players or stats); the one in this photo is stolen bases. It provides four top-ten lists: career leader, active leader, one-season record-holder, and active one-season record-holder. Above each list is an image of the revelant leader, in this case Rickey Henderson, Juan Pierre, Hugh Nicol, and Jose Reyes. (Hugh Nicol? Hold that thought.) That's Juan Pierre up at the top, the active leader. The numbers are updated daily, automatically by computer. If you're an Alex Rodriguez fan who checks this display on a daily basis, you can watch him climb up the various career and active lists.

Even better, you can start pressing those buttons. Press the name of any player on any list, and you'll get a display indicating every list where that player can be found. As you see, this includes batting, pitching, fielding and team lists, and you can zip through them at the touch of a finger. The capper is the feature at the bottom. You can access any year in baseball history and see what all those displays would have looked like if you had visited the museum at the end of that year's season. For instance, take Tris Speaker, widely regarded during his career as the second-best major leaguer, behind only Ty Cobb. Yet today Speaker is largely forgotten, regarded by fans as some relic from baseball's Bronze Age who put up a bunch of numbers that have largely been surpassed over the decades and are no longer relevant.

How can we appreciate just how great Tris Speaker was? One way it to press those buttons on the tower. I clicked on 1928, the year he retired, to see exactly where he stood at the time on the various lists of career leaders. Here is Speaker's report card (where he stood all-time the day he hung up his spikes):

Batting average: 6th (.345)
Hits: 2nd (3,514)
Singles: 6th (2,383)
Doubles: 1st (792--this record he still holds)
Triples: 6th (222)
Runs: 3rd (1,882)
RBI: 6th (1,529)
On-base %: 7th (.428)
OPS: 7th (.928)

He also made the top-ten lists for active players in home runs (tied for 8th) and stolen bases (fourth). Throw in the all-time records for outfield assists (449) and double plays by an outfielder (139), and you start to get an idea of just how great Tris Speaker was.

Approximately 1,000 players have led a category at some point, and all but a handful are represented by images in this display--in itself a remarkable achievement by the Hall of Fame's photo department considering that many of them are relatively obscure 19th-century players (when it was easier to break records). Roughly 2,700 players, or more than 15% of all players who have seen action in the major leagues, have been on a top-ten active or career list at some point, and you can find out where and when in this one display. See what I mean about spending all day there?

Of course, this is only part of the new exhibit, which features over 200 artifacts and, for the first time, puts those numbers in context by devoting a separate display to each category. The Hall of Fame has shed its trepidations about displaying numbers that reflect what actually happened on the field, and is now eager to explain why and how those numbers came to be. Amen Hugh Nicol is a good example. An outfielder whose career ran from 1881-1890, Nicol played most of his career in the old American Association, which lasted only a decade and presented a quality of play somewhat inferior to the more established National League. The view of historians over the years has given short enough shrift to the American Association that its most outstanding stars, including Pete Browning and Harry Stovey, have barely gotten a sniff at election to the Hall of Fame. Yet there is Hugh Nicol listed as the one-season stolen base champion with 138 in 1887. In the stolen base display, we find not only a helpful paragraph describing how he did what he did, but also the rulebook from the time, open to the page which showed how stolen bases were to be tabulated--essentially, until the mid-1890s, players were credited with a stolen base for going from first to third on a single, etc. Yes, Nicol didn't do what Rickey Henderson did, but he was the best at doing what he did when the rules rewarded those feats. So he is honored, while the reason for that number is explained. In the same display we find Sophie Kurys, who stole over 200 bases one season in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League--and a fine explanation of why comparing stats from different leagues in different eras is such a fruitless apples-and-oranges exercise. Kurys played on a field with only 72 feet between bases and with a ball about the size of a softball. But nobody else in that league did what she did, and her stolen base total is better than anyone else playing in any professional league, so she is honored in this new records exhibit.

It isn't just the raw numbers of the records that get the attention they deserve in the "One For the Books" exhibit. Senior Curator Tom Shieber and his staff also tell the stories of how records have been kept over the past 150+ years of organized baseball, and show us the evidence. When I worked at the Hall of Fame, I loved giving library tours which included a look at the actual record books (large ledgers) kept in the league offices, which showed what every player and team did from day to day in every measurable statistical category. The new exhibit displays many of these daily sheets--for instance, visitors can see what Joe DiMaggio did during every day of his 56-game hitting streak in 1941. It also includes many scorebooks and scoresheets kept by official scorers and reporters of the game's most significant events, such as the official scorebook from the 33-inning game between Pawtucket and Rochester in 1981, or the official scoresheet signed by Johnny Vander Meer after his second consecutive no-hitter.

Here is my favorite such display:

What is this? At the left is part of the "Honey Boy" Evans Trophy awarded to Ty Cobb for posting the highest batting average in the major leagues in 1910. The only problem is that Cobb didn't actually have the highest batting average that year. Nap Lajoie did. How do we know this? It took until the 1970s for someone to take the time to figure it out, but the evidence is in this display. There are two pages displayed from the official 1910 American League daily records. At the right is the page showing what Cobb did every day in September 1910; at the left is the similar page from his teammate Sam Crawford.

In a nutshell, here's what happened. The poor schmuck charged with keeping these records--like a medieval monk meticulously transcribing one word at a time--made a mistake. Instead of marking the Tigers' stats from the second game of a September 24 doubleheader, he made a notation indicating that they were from one game of a September 25 doubleheader (the Tigers played only one game on the 25th). Meanwhile, on the last day of the season, in a controversial doubleheader involving Lajoie which isn't worth retelling here, Lajoie got enough hits to pass Cobb--though nobody knew it at the time. Why? Because that league scribe had realized that those September 25 stats really belonged on September 24. The trick was that, for some reason, instead of merely leaving the numbers intact and changing the date, he added a line to each Tiger's record indicating the numbers as being from September 24--but neglected to cross out the same data from the September 25 line.

After the season ended and the controversy swirled over how Lajoie was allowed to get seven bunt singles in the final-day doubleheader, league officials (presumably American League President Ban Johnson) discovered the double entry and directed that those extra numbers be deleted from the players' pages. They were, too. The numbers were crossed out--you can see the little red pen-strokes through that line on Crawford's page--for every Tiger except. . .Ty Cobb! That is the discrepancy that was discovered in the late 1970s and first reported in 1981 by The Sporting News. All the records had been corrected except Ty Cobb, who got credit for an extra game in which he went 2-for-3, enough to push his average to .385 (as calculated then, but wouldn't you know it, they got the arithmetic wrong, too!), enough to earn him that "Honey Boy" Evans trophy.

Today Lajoie is recognized as the 1910 batting champion at .384, just ahead of Cobb's .383. But the ramifications are much greater than the 1910 batting race. If you subtract that 2-for-3 game from Cobb's lifetime totals, it turns out that he had 4,189 hits instead of the 4,191 that was accepted for so long (and of course some earlier sources had him at 4,192). Incidentally, according to the 2010 Hall of Fame yearbook, Cobb had--Elias strikes again!--4,191 hits; the 2011 yearbook finally credits him with 4,189.

The 4,191 figure was one of the most glamorous statistics in baseball for decades, a career record that lasted even longer than Babe Ruth's 714 home runs. So it was that as Pete Rose moved inexorably toward setting a new mark, the baseball world and the public geared up to celebrate the new record. It occurred on September 11, 1985, a single off Eric Show of the Padres that we've all viewed on television many times. That was hit #4,192, and that's when the festivities began. That was history. That was it.

Of course, we know now that Rose actually passed Cobb three days earlier, at Wrigley Field. Facing Cubs starter Reggie Patterson (who allowed all of 77 hits in his major league career), Rose singled in the top of the first inning for hit #4,190. In the fifth, he slapped another single off Patterson for #4,191. As the http://www.retrosheet.org/ "play by play" account of the game notes, "ties Cobb's hit record, which was presumed to be 4,191 at this time". In reality, he had tied Cobb's 4,189 two days earlier, on September 6, a game I remember watching intently on television. The actual tying hit was a sixth-inning hit off. . .reliever Reggie Patterson. Earlier in the game, I vividly remember, he had sneaked a home run just over the right field fence at Wrigley off starter Derek Botelho.

Although we can surmise that Rose, as the manager of the Reds, might well have kept himself out of the lineup until the Reds got home following their weekend at Wrigley so that the home fans could witness the record-breaking hit, the fact is that he tied Cobb's record on Friday at Wrigley and broke it there on Sunday. After going hitless in Cincinnati on Monday, he singled and tripled off Show on Tuesday, September 11, and that's when the big party began. Were the Chicago fans gypped out of the privilege of witnessing the unseating of a record that had stood since 1928?

I wonder if footage exists of those games at Wrigley. My guess is that none does, and that it's one of the reasons why the MLB Network and other media outlets still insist on calling September 11 the day the record was broken. Quite simply, the hit off Show is the piece of footage they have, and it's easier to keep rolling that footage rather than do what the Hall of Fame has now done, namely present the facts as they happened. Not only does Cobb go from 4,191 hits to 4,189, his (all-time record) career batting average goes from .367 (the figure I grew up revering) to .366.

This leaves us with just the philosophical question: doesn't the belief of everyone at the time that Rose broke the record in Cincinnati trump our current understanding of what happened when? That may be true in terms of appreciating why the celebration at the time would be more important than holding a retrospective ceremony today in Wrigley Field would be. That isn't going to happen. But it's important that the Hall of Fame has finally seen the light and acknowledges that what actually happened on the fields trumps a bookkeeping error that wasn't caught soon enough to be corrected without unforseen consequences.

That is the legacy which makes the Hall of Fame's new "One For the Books" exhibit so important from the historian's point of view. The exhibit is full of dozens of such contexts, and though few of them are as dramatic as the Cobb fiasco, each has its fascination for us and illuminates some aspect of the game itself, how events have been recorded, and how a closer look at the details bolsters our love of the game and its rich history.

Tom Shieber, who headed this massive undertaking, deserves a ton of credit, as do the many Hall of Fame staff members who assisted him (I was even consulted on a couple of the items while still working there). I also want to single out Dan Wallis, who designed the exhibit in a visually inviting way, not only facilitating the new technology that aids our baseball education but also providing striking non-baseball perspectives. This is an exhibit which both casual and serious fans are going to enjoy for a long time, and it will look different every day thanks to the constant updating of history as it occurs.

Don't Make Me Keep Explaining This

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Tue, 03 May 2011 11:01:00 +0000

In case you haven't noticed, relief pitchers are taking it in the shorts so far this season, and there's no help in sight. Tony LaRussa's Cardinals alone blew a half-dozen leads in the ninth inning in April, and the late-inning meltdowns are becoming a daily staple.

The fact is that more leads are blown in the eighth inning than in any other inning, partly because managers are hoarding their closers--i.e. their best reliever--for ninth-inning duty, leaving inferior pitchers for the earlier innings. A great example of the pitfalls of this approach occurred over the weekend, and I feel compelled to harp on it here. I've written about this phenomenon before (see "My Favorite Box Score of the Month," archived in December 2009), but Marlins manager Edwin Rodriguez didn't get the link I sent him because he fell right into the same trap.

The Marlins played at Cincinnati on Saturday (April 30), with Josh Johnson starting. Johnson has been the best pitcher in the National League so far this season, with a 4-0 record and 1.06 ERA going into the game. It was business as usual for him--seven shutout innings, only five hits allowed as he nursed a 1-0 lead through the whole outing. The Marlins got him two more runs in the top of the eighth, at which point he had a 3-0 lead and an ERA of 0.88 for the season. You had to like his chances, right?

Edwin Rodriguez cared about only one number: Johnson had thrown 117 pitches, so out he came. The decision was an easy one. A pair of left-handed hitters--Jay Bruce and Joey Votto--would start the Reds' half of the eighth, and Rodriguez had just the man for the job. Randy Choate has become one of today's managers' favorite type of specialist, the southpaw who is particularly tough on lefties. In his career, lefties have hit just .217 against him, and only .202 in 2010. Sure enough, Bruce and Votto were no match for him; he struck them both out on an impressive seven pitches.

That brought up Brandon Phillips, and also brought Rodriguez heading from the dugout to the mound. Let's pause for a second. One of the problems with making substitutions is that you don't know how the new player will perform. This uncertainty is especially true for pitchers. An outfielder inserted as a defensive replacement might not have a ball hit to him, but a relief pitcher will be the center of the action from the time he steps on the mound. There is less margin for error. So the manager has to--or should, since apparently not all of them do so--consider the likelihood that the pitcher entering the game will do a better job than the pitcher you have out there right now.

In this case, Rodriguez had some solid information to go on: Choate looked terrific. He was throwing strikes that the batters couldn't hit, including the reigning NL MVP. His effective stuff was a known quantity compared to the uncertain stuff of the pitchers warming up in the bullpen. He faced a .279 career average by right-handed hitters like Phillips, though it was over .400 in 2010 (which means that earlier in his career, when he faced righties and lefties about the same number of times, he was more effective than righties than he has been recently, when his managers have been more reluctant to let him face righties). In other words, in 2010 righties were twice as likely to get a hit off Choate as lefties were--which sounds pretty compelling until you remember that even with that disparity, Choate was still a sizable favorite to get him out. Yet Rodriguez took him out in favor of right-hander Edward Mujica.

Here's my point. Why did Rodriguez feel such an urgent need to remove Choate? He had a three-run lead, two outs, and nobody on base. What was he afraid of? That Phillips was twice as likely to get a single or a double? So what? Even though the Reds had several righties in a row due up, they would all have to get on base in order to present Rodriguez with the crisis he thought he was averting by removing a pitcher who had just struck out two batters on seven pitches. Why not see just how good Choate was today? Why not give him a chance to make an out pitch against Phillips, or even against the hitter after him? Why take out an effective pitcher and bring in a new one who might be throwing like a batting practice pitcher today?

Was there some compelling reason to have Edward Mujica in the game at that point? Let's see--career average by righties against him: .272; by lefties: .274. In 2010, righties actually hit 41 points higher against him than lefties did. So even if you accept a manager's prerogative to make game decisions based strictly on percentages, allowing the conclusion that Choate needed to come out of the game, there was no statistical basis for thinking Mujica would do better. Righties hit him about the same as they hit Choate. Throw in the uncertainty factor--the vague odds that Mujica's stuff be as good as Choate's--and it's hard to see why Rodriguez was in such a hurry to match up Mujica against Phillips.

You know what happened, of course--I wouldn't be blogging about it if Mujica had mowed down the Reds. Phillips doubled, about what Rodriguez feared he might do against Choate, except that now he had a pitcher on the mound who suddenly didn't look anywhere near as good as Choate did for his seven magical pitches. Johnny Gomes singled, scoring Phillips, and went to second on the throw home. Miguel Cairo singled in Gomes, and the score was 3-2.

Pause here a second. First we saw Rodriguez take out a pitcher who had just struck out two straight hitters. Now he has a pitcher on the mound who has given up three hits in a row. And this is the guy Rodriguez chooses to face another hitter! Not the guy with good stuff, but the guy who can't get anybody out. It wasn't until Ramon Hernandez followed with another single that Rodriguez got the message and took out Mujica.

In came Ryan Webb, another denizen of the lower reaches of the Florida bullpen. He promptly surrendered a single to Paul Janish on which Cairo scored the tying run. Even though Mujica was the chief culprit, the "blown save" was charged to Webb. That made three appearances in a row in which he blew a save, the previous two in the seventh inning. Meanwhile, closer Leo Nunez languished in the bullpen, waiting for the Marlins to take a lead so he could mop up another save. It never happened, as the Reds won in the tenth off yet another unproven reliever nobody has heard of yet, Mike Dunn. Rodriguez wound up using four relievers, including he three worst, with the game on the line, and succeeded only in getting his best reliever a day of rest.

As a Reds fan, I loved it. I was following the action on the computer, was delighted to see Choate exit and kept waiting for Mujica to come out. But he didn't until he gave up four straight two-out hits. That's what I hated to see, as a pitching analyst. The Marlins website has a "depth chart" indicating that Mujica is the bottom-ranked reliever, another way of saying that he's the worst pitcher on the staff. That's why so many leads are being blown in the seventh and eighth innings--managers are putting in their worst pitchers in the game first and hoping they'll hold on long enough to allow their best reliever to pitch a carefree ninth inning. More and more often, these managers aren't arriving at the ninth inning with a lead at all.

The hitch for the managers is that they want to avoid being second-guessed. They don't want to face the post-game press conference and have to explain why they went against the percentages and managed by gut feeling. The percentages can be defended, and if events overcame expectations, that's just part of the game and why they play on the field and not on paper. What I want to see is the Edwin Rodriguezes of baseball give themselves more credit. I hope that at some gut level, Rodriguez had an impulse to leave Choate in to face Phillips. I want him to think, "if I have the balls to let Randy get the third out here, I'll look like a freakin' genius!" Instead of being afraid of what some reporter might ask later, managers need to look past the percentages and see the evidence right in front of their eyes. Unless they're playing my Reds, of course. Then they can make as many short-sighted, horrible decisions as they like.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I posted the above two days ago. If I had waited a day, I could've had an even starker example of narrow-minded managing. I'll leave out the names of the relievers, to protect the innocent, but the manager was Brad Mills. His starting pitcher, Aneury Rodriguez, was making his first major league start, which would account for Mills removing him after 83 pitches even though he had allowed only one hit through five innings. No matter. He was done for the day. In came a reliever who retired the side in the sixth with only a walk allowed. He left for a pinch-hitter. In came reliever #2, who retired both hitters he faced, striking out one. But he was a lefty and the next batter was a righty, so out he came. The new guy, reliever #3, retired the righty, and Mills' team took a 2-0 lead to the eighth inning.

Even though Mills had used three relievers who had recorded six outs while giving up nothing more than a lone walk, that wasn't good enough. Without having to, he brought in yet another reliever, replacing the one with the 1.72 ERA. Reliever #4 mowed down the other team in order on ten pitches, including a strikeout. He was the fourth reliever employed by Mills who didn't give up a hit. That wasn't good enough either. Mills had one more trump to play, his closer, Brandon Lyon, who had already blown three saves in the first month of the season and had a 4.77 ERA. His job is to close and by golly he's going to close, figured Mills.

So in came Mills with a 2-0 lead heading to the bottom of the ninth. He promptly walked the first man on four pitches. No problem. Next came a single, and still another single, but that didn't trouble Mills either. So what if his closer had already given up more hits than the other five pitchers yielded in the first eight innings? He was the closer, it was his job, and he stayed out there--long enough to give up a third straight single that tied the game, 2-2--and very quickly after that, a game-winning double.

Let me cut to the chase. This kind of game is why I could never have lasted as a beat reporter. After the game, I would've asked Mills, "What was there about [#4's] performance which persuaded you that he had to be replaced?" If by some chance I got a civil answer to that one, I would've continued with, "What was there about [#3's] performance which you thought #4 could improve on?" and so on up the line. Then I would've tracked down those relievers and asked them, "while you watched Lyon blow the game, were you thinking 'jeez, I could've done better than that if he had left me in?"

The only encouraging thing about this sequence of events is that once again my Reds were the beneficiaries. Held to one hit over eight innings by five pitchers, they finally found a pitcher they could hit--and the opposing manager obliged by deciding that this was the guy he would allow to keep pitching no matter what, until the game was completely lost. That's two reprieves in four days. Maybe if enough National League managers either don't read this blog or don't learn from its lesson, the Reds will get the whole pennant handed to them.

I just know that I'm going to continue my vigil for senseless bullpen breakdowns, especially when the Reds are playing. Will Dusty Baker fall into the same trap? Or has he learned from what he has seen the last few days?

2010 Was Not the "Year of the Pitcher"

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:53:00 +0000

Last summer I posted a blog titled "Not Yet the Year of the Pitcher," in which I reported on being interviewed by a Blomberg News reporter who wanted to know why people were calling 2010 the "Year of the Pitcher". I disagreed, saying that a half-season was not conclusive. The two pitchers he cited as evidence of clear pitching dominance were Stephen Strasburg and Ubaldo Jimenez. Strasburg had made a strong first impression while Jimenez had a 13-1 record at the time. As we know, Strasburg is on the shelf for awhile with elbow surgery, and Jimenez didn't even reach 20 wins for the season, much less the 25 that seemed a shoo-in in June.

In my blog, I listed current young pitchers with tremendous talent and compared them to a similar list from 1968, long acknowledged as the true "Year of the Pitcher." The most I would concede was that 2010 was the "Year of Pitching Potential." Nothing I've seen since then has changed my opinion. Although pitchers overall fared better in 2010 than they had in recent years, by no means did they dominate hitters, and they certainly didn't approach the success that pitchers achieved in 1968. Let's take a closer look at the numbers.

The league ERAs in 2010 were 4.02 in the National League and 4.14 in the American League. These are the lowest figures since 1992, when both leagues had ERAs under 3 and nobody thought it was "year of the pitcher". It was the last year before expansion from 26 to 28 teams, followed by two more teams a few years later, which combined with other factors to bring a boom in offense. How much did expansion affect the numbers? In 1992, the ERA in the NL was 3.50; in 1993, mainly thanks to the 5.41 team ERA posted by the inaugural staff of shellshocked Rockies pitchers, it jumped to 4.04. In the AL, which didn't even expand, merely lost some talent in the expansion draft, the ERA went from 3.94 to 4.32.

It has taken almost 20 years to whittle that expansion effect (and other effects) back down to where offense was at the time. But it's nowhere year what the major leagues experienced in 1968. That year, the NL's league ERA was 2.99, with a 2.98 mark for the American League, the first time since the Deadball Era that both leagues had sub-3 ERAs. Thirteen of the 20 major league teams had an ERA under 3. That's a year of pitchers!

Midway through last season, when the Blomberg reporter interviewed me, there were more than a few pitchers with sub-2 ERAs, several on a pace to win about 25 games, and a group targeting 250 strikeouts. But as I predicted, the long, hot summer took its toll, and as a group last year's starting pitchers fell short of all projected stats. Nobody made a run at 250 strikeouts; four reached 225, but the high total was Jered Weaver's 233. Three of them reached 20 wins (not including Jimenez), but nobody had more than 21. A respectable number--15--finished with ERAs under 3, but nobody stayed under 2. Of those 15 who achieved what today stands as a major achievement, a sub-3 ERA, only eight pitched at least 200 innings. So what we're seeing is not the dominant workhorses of the 1960s, but starting pitchers who are pitching better with limited use. Is it any coincidence that only seven of the 15 won more than 14 games? The starting pitcher used to be sent to the mound to win. Today's starter knows that the game will ultimately be in the hands of the bullpen most of the time, so his mission is to pitch six strong innings and rest up for four or five days.

What we did see more of in 2010 was shutouts, 202 in the NL and 127 in the AL. The AL total has been around that figure for several years, but the NL jumped from 150 and 143 the previous two seasons. On the other hand, complete games went up only from 152 to 165--that's for both leagues put together. In other words, last year's 329 shutouts was twice the number of the complete games, so at least half of all shutouts required buttressing from the bullpen.

In 1968, by comparison, the leagues combined for 339 shutouts. That was 14 or so per franchise, compared to 11 per team in 2010. Moreover, there were 897 complete games in 1968. That's how you measure dominance--a starting pitcher mowing down the opposition on his own, game after game after game. That year, Denny McLain won 30 games by completing 28 of his 41 starts. In 2010, he would've completed about one-fourth of those games, and his win total would've been below 25.

So let's not get carried away and carry around the assumption that 2010 was actually a year when pitching dominated. It wasn't. It was a year when some pitchers did better than most recent pitchers have; a year when teams in one league were shut out more often than they have been recently; a year in which we saw more 1-0 games than we've seen in a long time; a year in which the overall pitching stats weren't as bad as they've been for most of the past 15 years; and a year in which a number of young pitchers showed the potential to grow into Hall of Fame candidates. Overall, pitching was as erratic as usual, with flashes of brilliance but not much sustained dominance.

There are some signs that point toward a pitching-favored cycle on the way. There are other signs that don't, including the continuing deterioration of relief pitching from overuse and misuse. For me, the jury is still out as much as Adam Wainwright is out, a reminder that injuries are the great equalizer in baseball, and pitchers are getting hurt at record rates despite all the coddling. Oh, don't get me started on that one!

The Greatest Pitching Duels of the Century

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 11:56:00 +0000

Sticking to my policy of reviewing only books I can highly recommend, I bring you a gem by Jim Kaplan, long-time "Sports Illustrated" writer and author of a dozen previous baseball books, including a fine biography of Lefty Grove. His new volume, titled The Greatest Game Ever Pitched: Juan Marichal, Warren Spahn, and the Pitching Duel of the Century (published by Triumph Books, http://www.triumphbooks.com/), is a double biography of the two great pitchers whose careers intersected in spectacular fashion on July 2, 1963.

On that night, in a showdown witnessed by a smallish crowd at Candlestick Park, the two future Hall of Famers dueled for 15 scoreless innings before Willie Mays homered in the bottom of the 16th to give the Giants and Marichal a hard-won 1-0 victory. Both pitchers threw over 200 pitches in the game, just one reason why we are unlikely to see this kind of marathon duel repeated in our lifetimes. What made the duel more remarkable was that Spahn was 42 years old when he refused to budge against the 25-year-old Marichal.

What makes Kaplan's book so captivating is not so much the blow-by-blow description of the game itself--interspersed a few innings at a time--as it is his account of how the two pitching masters arrived at that moment in time as equals despite the differences in their ages and the paths they followed to that unforgettable night at Candlestick Park. Kaplan describes in detail how their pitching styles were similar; the righty Marichal and southpaw Spahn were mirror images; both used extremely high leg kicks to gain leverage and take strain off their arms, and both served up a baffling array of pitches at different speeds that wrecked hitters' timing.

More than that, he focuses on their mental approach to the game and to life. Both had nearly died before having their chance at greatness. Spahn was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge, while Marichal miraculously revived from a six-day coma when he was nine years old. Both found joy in playing the game of baseball and dedicated themselves to the hard work necessary to excel at that game. Before and after that night in San Francisco, both exhibited determination, stamina, and a will to win, all of which were manifested brilliantly as they went deeper into the game, refusing to yield to fatigue or to each other. When the night began, Spahn had a record of 11-3, a grizzled veteran on his way to a 23-7 season, his 13th 20-win season; Marichal was 12-3 and headed for a 25-8 record in his third full season in the majors. Spahn had been the outstanding pitcher of the 1950s and Marichal would stake his claim to that title for the 1960s.

As the night wore on, their guile kept them ahead of the hitters, and their wide repertoires allowed them to keep fooling hitters even in their sixth and seventh at-bats. Today's managers are afraid to make their starting pitchers, with their limited arsenal of pitches, face hitters more than three times in a game. That is only one of the differences between today's game and the 1960s that Kaplan ably points out. Here is his nutshell view of the change in players' interaction with fans:

In the 1950s, players were all business on the field but pretty good about handshakes and autographs off
it. Today's athletes genuflect to the three P's: PR, patriotism, and piety. They make a show of throwing
the ball into the stands after the last out of an inning. They stand for "God Bless America," which has
replaced "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at many parks during the seventh-inning stretch. And they're
constantly pointing to the heavens, as if God just hit that 450' dinger. But just try to approach a ballplayer
as he leaves the clubhouse. You are no competition for his cell phone.

We get much more than a great ballgame in this chronicle of two stars converging on history. This is, after all, a double biography, and Kaplan allows to see Spahn as a product of his blue-collar background in Buffalo, and Marichal in the context of the history of his native Dominican Republic. We see them coming and going, and some of the most moving passages cover their post-career lives as both men attempted to pass on their love and knowledge of baseball and cement their legacies. Among other things, Kaplan provides the best account I've read of the unfortunate 1965 bruhaha between Marichal and Dodgers catcher John Roseboro.

Reading this book, what emerges is a vivid double portrait of two great men, different in so many ways but alike in the most important respects, who seemed inevitably poised for this epic showdown. It didn't have to happen--the careers of many great pitchers have dovetailed without a similarly spectacular confrontation. Aging Walter Johnson, for instance, won his two starts against rookie Lefty Grove in 1925, 5-3 and 2-1 without any extra innings; Tom Seaver never faced Roger Clemens during their three years together in the American League. We're lucky to witness such match-ups. Only 15,921 fans paid to see Spahn and Marichal that night, so we're lucky to have Kaplan's first-rate account of it.

Another feature of Kaplan's book is a sidebar in each chapter covering in some detail another epic pitching duel, i.e. his other contenders for the twentieth century's "greatest game ever pitched". Here are his choices: Babe Ruth's 14-inning masterpiece in the 1916 World Series; the double no-hitter by Fred Toney and Hippo Vaughn in 1917; the 33-inning game between Rochester and Pawtucket in 1981; another 1981 dandy featuring Ron Darling of Yale and Frank Viola of St. John's; the 1965 game in which Sandy Koufax and Bob Hendley gave up only one hit between them; Jack Morris' 10-inning shutout to clinch the 1991 World Series; and Harvey Haddix's ruined 12-inning perfect game in 1959. Three other sidebars cover Spahn's early-career Braves cohort, Johnny Sain; the link between Marichal and Roseboro; and a summation of extra-inning performances since the Spahn-Marichal marathon.

Apart from a few factual errors which shouldn't have crept into such a fine book (the one that bothered me most was the statement that Spahn won the first Cy Young Award in 1957, forgetting that Don Newcombe won the inaugural CYA in 1956), the above list is my only quarrel with Kaplan's approach. I don't object to the great duels he detailed, but rather to those he omitted. The book's text covers 200 pages plus the end matter, so there was room to include three other extraordinary pitching duels, two of which would make my top five list of the greatest games ever pitched. The third duel deserved mention mainly because it involved Carl Hubbell, who was at Candlestick for the Spahn-Marichal and declared that Spahn should "will his body to medical science" so it could be determined how a 42-year-old arm could throw so many effective pitches in one night. Exactly 30 years earlier, Hubbell himself staged an equally impressive performance (in his prime, at age 30) against the St. Louis Cardinals at the Polo Grounds. For 16 innings, Hubbell and Tex Carleton threw nothing but goose-eggs. Carleton left for a pinch-hitter while Hubbell kept going until the Giants scored the game's only run for him in the bottom of the 18th inning. Hubbell pitched the equivalent of two complete games, facing 59 hitters (the same number faced by Marichal 30 years later--Spahn faced a mere 56), scattering six hits, striking out a dozen Cardinals, and walking. . .nobody! He must have had an eerie but exhilarating sense of deja vu as he watched Spahn and Marichal at Candlestick.

Baseball's most extreme pitching marathon was the 26-inning duel between Joe Oeschger of Brooklyn and Leon Cadore of the Boston Braves on May 1, 1920, in Boston. Kaplan mentions it in passing in the sidebar about the 33-inning game, but dismisses their achievement with the disclaimer that "the lineups they faced were much weaker" than those faced in the 1963. I have a couple of problems with this dismissal. First, in a book that accentuates both the physical stamina and the competitive toughness that compelled Spahn and Marichal to keep going, it is unfair to ignore how those factors influenced what Oeschger and Cadore did. The score was tied 1-1 after six innings that day in Boston, yet both starting pitchers logged 20 more innings before darkness ended their ordeal. Oeschger faced 90 batters that day and Cadore a whopping 96 (both Spahn and Marichal faced fewer than 60). Spahn and Marichal were stubborn about staying in the game, but think of what must have gone through the combat-weary minds of Oeschger and Cadore as they kept mustering the concentration to get through each inning of that marathon.

I also disagree with Kaplan's contention that the 1920 lineups were much weaker. Yes, Spahn faced a very tough Giants lineup that night; in addition to three Hall of Fame-caliber sluggers (Mays, Willie McCovey, and Orlando Cepeda), he had to contend with Felipe Alou, Harvey Kuenn, and Ed Bailey, all accomplished hitters having solid seasons. Still, those Giants had a team batting average of .258; the 1920 Dodgers had a team average of .277 and the Braves were at .260, so despite their (Deadball Era) lack of home run power, they weren't exactly chopped liver. The pennant-bound Dodgers were third in the league in scoring, and Cadore held them to one run and 15 hits in 26 innings (Oeschger surrendered only nine hits to the Braves).

Moreover, the lineup Marichal faced in 1963 was as weak as the 1920 pair, with the single exception of Hank Aaron. The 1963 Braves had a team batting average of .244, and their lineup on July 2nd wasn't even that good. Their second-best hitter, Eddie Mathews, was injured, struck out twice, and left the game. His replacement, Denis Menke, hit .234 that year. Apart from Aaron, only catcher Del Crandall hit more than 11 home runs in 1963, so the rest of the lineup lacked pop. Here are the 1963 batting averages for the rest of the crew that Marichal mowed down so easily: Frank Bolling .244, Roy McMillan .250, Lee Maye .271, Mack Jones .219, and Norm Larker .177. I'm not trying to take anything away here from what Marichal did; I'm just saying that Kaplan shortchanged Oeschger and Cadore.

My own nomination for the best pitching duel wasn't even mentioned by Kaplan, and I don't know why. For one thing, apart from the two World Series games he covered, it was the only game that mattered in a pennant race, adding an element of urgency that was absent on July 2, 1963. I'm referring to the October 2, 1908 game between the pennant-chasing Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Naps, featuring future Hall of Famers Ed Walsh and Addie Joss. With a week left in the season, the Naps trailed the first-place Detroit Tigers by a half-game, with the White Sox one-and-a-half games out. The pressure was on both pitchers, and they were well-equipped. Joss came in sporting a 23-11 record and a 1.20 ERA. Walsh was even better, with a 39-14 record, including pitching both ends of a doubleheader just three days earlier.

Both pitchers were at the top of their game that day in Cleveland. The Naps scored an ugly run off Walsh in the third inning. Joe Birmingham led off with a single and Walsh picked him off, but Birmingham got in a rundown and the White Sox threw the ball away, allowing Birmingham to race to third base with nobody out. Walsh retired the next two batters with no damage, but an Ossee Schreckengost passed out enabled Birmingham to score. That was the only run Walsh surrendered; in eight magnificant innings, he yielded only four hits and struck out a season-high 15. It wasn't magnificent enough, because Joss pitched a perfect game.

For my money, the pitching was the equal of the Koufax-Hendley game, with the added dimensions that it featured two future Hall of Famers in their best seasons in a game that helped decide the pennant race. I wish Kaplan had written about it. Still, it's just a quibble, just my way of filling in the 2% of the glass that's empty in a book that is 98% full. If you want to read not just about a terrific game but also about what makes great baseball players the performers and men that they are, you can't do better than this elegantly written book by an author who is as seasoned and sure of his craft as Warren Spahn was that night.

The Duke's-Eye View

noreply@blogger.com (Gabriel Schechter) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:35:00 +0000

This has been a tough winter for baseball Hall of Famers. Sparky Anderson died in November, the seemingly indestructible Bob Feller left us in December, and now Duke Snider is gone. I never got to meet Snider, which I'm told was my loss. But he was the protagonist in one of my favorite Hall of Fame stories, and I always think about him when I traverse the walkway that connects the museum with the library atrium.

Until 1994, the museum and library were separate buildings, and many people didn't even know the library was there unless they drifted into Cooper Park and found the library entrance. I didn't know about it when I first visited the Hall of Fame in 1969, and never saw the library until I moved to Cooperstown in 1991 (for one year) to do research at the library. That year, I hardly spent any time in the museum; it seemed like a separate entity.

If the Hall of Fame hadn't needed more space for plaques in the gallery, the buildings might still be separate. As part of the expansion of the plaque gallery, a curving walkway was built containing blown-up images of some of the most famous artifacts in the library (such as FDR's "Green Light Letter" okaying the continuation of major league baseball during World War II, the lyric sheet for "Take Me Out To The Ball Game," a scorecard from Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard Around the World" home run in 1951, etc.). Emerging from the walkway, you find a large glass wall with a lovely view of Cooper Park, with a three-sided courtyard next to the building.

In time, that courtyard has been decorated with benches and several sculptures. Stanley Bleifeld, the sculptor, is a Dodgers fan, and the first piece he donated to the Hall of Fame depicted the stars of the Dodgers' only championship in Brooklyn. The two figures from Game 7 of the 1955 World Series--pitcher Johnny Podres and catcher Roy Campanella--are 60'6" apart. Podres is following through on one of the pitches that stymied the Yankees that day, with the squatting Campanella ready to catch it. During the summer, there is a constant stream of people taking photos around the pair--most often standing in the batter's box in front of Campy. Here is an image of it taken today, following the latest upstate New York snowfall.

Several years ago, Duke Snider was visiting the Hall of Fame, and he and his party were given a tour of the library and the museum. Exiting the library atrium, they were greeted by the statue of Snider's old teammates. The party stopped. The tour guide, a Hall of Fame employee who shall remain anonymous here, said, "What do you think, Duke?"

Here's a closer view of what Snider was looking at:

Snider reportedly took a good look at the scene, tilting his head and reminiscing. Finally he spoke. "Yeah," he said, "that's Podres' ass all right. I looked at that thing for eight years!"

And who could argue with the Duke's-eye view? Was there ever such a perfect question asked of the only person on the planet who could answer it properly? Perhaps the staffer who asked it was expecting some piece of nostalgia about Game 7 of the 1955 World Series, that World Series in general, the feeling the Dodgers had after finally beating the hated Yankees, a story about Podres or Campanella or some catch Duke made to save a game for Podres, or something related to baseball. Nope. Snider looked at the sculpture, realized "well, that's the view they're giving us here," and responded to that.

I wasn't there but I feel like I was, and every time I walk past that spot with a visitor, I make sure to tell the story. It always gets a big laugh. I hope it makes you laugh, too, as we pause to mourn another departed immortal.