Category Archives: All-Encompassing

Random Link/Article-I-Found-Interesting: The Congressional Baseball Game is Serious Business

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Weather permitting, the annual baseball game between the Democrats and Republicans of Congress is going on right now. It’s taken very seriously, to the point where freshman congressmen who would otherwise not be noted in the halls of Washington suddenly become very popular amongst their fellows if they happened to have played college ball. At least, that’s what this article seems to say.

The Curse of Steve McCatty’s Playgirl Shoot (Humor)

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On May 21, our friend Michael Clair over at Old Time Family Baseball wrote an article over at Baseball Prospectus in which he did tongue-in-cheek scouting reports of ballplayers who did Playgirl shoots in the 1980s. While he didn’t provide a scouting report on him, among the players who Clair exposed (pun intended) was Steve McCatty, who is now the pitching coach for the Washington Nationals.

Upon seeing the image, the Nationals did what any team would do when such a photo is brought back to light: use it as a team-wide gag/inspirational t-shirt.

However, since that fateful day, the Nationals fortunes have fallen. They are a mere .500 since Michael Clair’s article went up*, have fallen another game back in the NL East standings, and would have fallen back even more if not for the fact that the Braves were almost as averagely mediocre as the Nationals were.

Oh, and Stephen Strasburg left last night’s game with an injury. And Bryce Harper may be headed to the DL.

So, did the Steve McCatty Playgirl shoot curse the Nationals? I don’t know. But, then again, it’s no less ridiculous than Colonel Sanders cursing a Japanese team…

*Yes, I do know that the Nationals were on a 4-game losing streak before the article went up. Now be quiet and let me tell the story.

The Joys of Strike Zone

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The most under-rated and overlooked piece of baseball television is the MLB Strike Zone channel.

You probably have no idea what I am talking about. That proves the above point about it being the most overlooked piece of baseball television.

Put simply, MLB Strike Zone is a twice-weekly (usually Tuesdays and Fridays, but occasionally Wednesday as well) injection of nonstop baseball. Available on it’s own channel on most cable and satellite systems that have a sports package, Strike Zone is similar to MLB Tonight, only with little-to-none of the talking heads and with zero commercials. It is, in many ways, similar to the NFL RedZone channel: minimal interruption, maximum game action.

Watching yesterday, for example, I was able to see, amongst many other things: the David Phelps‘ meltdown against the Mets, Ryan Zimmerman‘s first and second home runs (I only missed the last one because I did some channel surfing), several good defensive plays, the Orioles’ comeback and the start of the late games. I would have, had I just chosen one or two games and switched between them, missed a lot. But with Strike Zone, I saw more-or-less everything of note that happened in baseball last night, live or with only a short delay.

And yet, nobody seems to talk about Strike Zone all that much. Perhaps because it is relatively new- it just started last year, after all. Or maybe it is because it doesn’t seem to receive much publicity: I’ve only seen maybe one or two commercials for it, and it seems like MLB Network itself is more focused on getting eyes on the games they are showing on the network on the nights that Strike Zone is on.

With luck, more will start paying attention to Strike Zone, and, with luck, it could even be expanded to more days of the week. So if you haven’t already, check it out.

Crazy Question: Should Surgeons be in the Hall of Fame? (AKA: The Importance of Tommy John Surgery)

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A man who had a major impact in baseball passed today, someone who helped teams win championships and aided some of the biggest names in the sport.

That man was Lewis Yocum, and he was a orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports surgeries like Tommy John Surgery, in addition to serving as the team physician for the Angels. His passing has been commented upon by many in the baseball community, with some declaring that they owed him their careers.

Which leads to this: should surgeons and doctors be considered for the Hall of Fame?

Well, the answer is probably no. After all, they aren’t in this for fame, and to try and say what makes a “Hall of Fame Surgeon” is fraught with questions I don’t think can be answered.

But, let’s just consider for a second the impact that some of these surgeons have had on baseball.

Imagine what the world of baseball pitching looked like before Frank Jobe. Who’s Frank Jobe? He’s the guy who first performed ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction surgery, where a UCL is replaced by a tendon from elsewhere. You probably know it as Tommy John Surgery.

Before TJ Surgery, to have a dead arm was a death sentence for a career. Let that sink in and then remember the full implications of that statement:

  • Without TJS, Stephen Strasburg‘s career would be done.
  • Without TJS, Jim Morris would never have been portrayed by Dennis Quaid in a movie.
  • Without TJS, Hyun-Jin Ryu never gets out of high school, much less comes to America and becomes one of the few bright spots of the 2013 Dodgers season.
  • Without TJS, Chris Carpenter‘s career probably would have ended on Opening Day, 2007. Adam Wainwright‘s career would have ended in 2011.
  • Without TJS, Eric Gagne‘s career probably have ended in the minors. Same goes for Kenny Rogers, C.J. Wilson and David Wells.
  • Without TJS, Tim Hudson wouldn’t have won the 55 games he’s won since 2009.
  • Without TJS, Phil Humber never has his perfect game. Francisco Liriano doesn’t have his no-hitter. Neither does Anibal Sanchez.
  • Without TJS, Kerry Wood‘s career would have been an even bigger “what might have been” than it ended up being.
  • Without TJS, John Smoltz‘s career ended in 2000, with 56 wins and 154 saves never happening.
  • Without TJS, we MAYBE might never have even heard of Mariano Rivera. (There is some confusion over whether or not Rivera had a TJS in the minors, or if it was a different type of surgery).

Hmm… maybe surgeons should be in the Hall of Fame. At least Jobe should.

Classic Continuum: Ballplayers who gave everything

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This article was initially published on Memorial Day, 2012.

On this Memorial Day, it is as good a time as any to mention some of the ballplayers who gave their lives serving in America’s armed forces. The DeadBallEra site has a list of those who died while serving America, and there is also a good site entirely about Baseball in Wartime (primarily focused on WWII), but here are some notables (although, in the end, everyone who gives the ultimate sacrifice is notable). Not all of them died in combat, but all of them died while in military service or (in the case of people like Christy Mathewson) as a result of those actions:

  • Eddie Grant was a Harvard-educated infielder who spent time with Cleveland, Philly, Cincinnati and the Giants. On October 15, 1918, he died after being wounded by a artillery shell in the Argonne Forest of France. His unit had been fighting to rescue the “Lost Battalion” that had been pinned down by German forces. He was 35. A memorial to him was placed in the Polo Grounds (it is one of the plaques that can be seen in the expanded version of the Willie Mays catch photo), and a replica of it is now apparently in San Francisco.
  • Larry Chappell was a light-hitting outfielder in the 1910s who was at one point part of a trade for Shoeless Joe Jackson. In 1918, he died while in Army service only a few days before the armistice from the Spanish Flu pandemic that killed tens of millions of people. He was 28.
  • Ralph Sharman was a young outfielder who did well in a September stint with the Phillies in 1917. After the ’17 season, however, he was inducted into the army. He died in May, 1918 when he drowned while in Alabama, where he was undergoing training. He was only 23.
  • Christy Mathewson had retired from pitching by the beginning of America’s involvement in WWI, and was manager of the Cincinnati Reds. He left the club in the middle of the 1918 season, going to France, where he served in the Army’s chemical division. While there, he suffered the effects of poison gas, which left him with various respiratory ailments, including the tuberculosis that took his life in 1925.
  • Elmer Gedeon, who had had a cup of coffee with Washington in 1939, died while piloting a B-26 Marauder over France on April 20, 1944. He was 27.  He was one of only two people with Major League experience who died in WWII. The other being…
  • Harry O’Neill, who was a catcher in one game (with no plate appearances) for the Athletics in 1939. He was killed by a sniper on Iwo Jima on March 6, 1945.
  • Bob Neighbors, who had a cup of coffee with the Browns in 1939. In 1941, his baseball career came to an end when he had a poor season and, perhaps more importantly, lost his wife of only six months in a car accident while he was away on a road trip. He signed up for the United States Army Air Force after Pearl Harbor, and became a career military man from that point on. He went Missing In Action (and presumed dead) in 1952 when his B-26 went down over North Korea. He was both the only MLB-experienced man to die during the Korean War, and the last to have died in active service, period.

Of course, there were plenty of players who never made it to the big leagues who died in the line of duty, some of whom may have one day become Major Leaguers if not for the cruelty of war:

 

To them and all who have given the ultimate sacrifice, and to those who made it home, we salute you.

434.2 milliseconds

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434.2 milliseconds. That’s about how long it takes a 95 MPH fastball to reach home plate.

It’s only about 34 milliseconds more than what it takes some people blink. Only 134 more milliseconds than it takes the slowest of us to act on reflex based on visual stimuli. Only slightly less time than it takes for a satellite communications system to receive and transmit information.

In the time it took you to read this blog post up to this line, about 13 seconds had past if you are an average silent reader. In that time, you could have had 28 fastballs go past you with another one about a third of the way towards you.

That sound you hear is your mind getting blown. Or maybe it’s of a fastball hitting the catcher’s glove.

A Day With Legends: The 2013 Pepsi Max Field of Dreams Game

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You may have heard of the Pepsi Max Field of Dreams game, probably semi-heard during commercial breaks of MLB Network. Well, basically, it’s part old-timers game, and part fantasy camp. Two teams play a 6-inning game… with the catch being that each team is half made up of former MLB stars (almost all of them either Hall of Famers and ones that one day will be) and the other half is made up of ordinary Joes who won a contest. There are also some ringers (mainly guys who either play or coach locally and had professional careers) thrown in to fill spots in later innings. This year, it was was in my home town of Rochester, New York, and myself and 13,715 of my closest friends were there to see it.

(By the way, any picture you see in this was taken by me, and can be enlarged if you click it.)

Go below the jump for more, this is a photo-heavy post.

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The Unwritten Rules of Watching Baseball

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There are unwritten rules of playing baseball, but what are the unwritten rules of watching baseball? Or at least rules of thumbs or something…

Well….

  1. Veeck’s Law: The knowledge of baseball at a major league game is usually inverse the price of tickets.
  2. Don’t mention a no-hitter in progress, unless you do.
  3. Don’t mention a perfect game in progress, unless you do.
  4. If you mention how quickly a game is moving, it will grind to a halt.
  5. The players coming in from the field after a half-inning will throw a ball to either the cutest kid or the sexiest girl.
  6. If you catch a foul ball, and you are near a cute kid, you had better give him or her the ball.
  7. Every stadium should have at least one “regular” who’s voice can carry into the neighboring county.
  8. The official attendance of the game is always higher than the actual attendance.
  9. When a pitcher turns and fakes a pickoff towards second, at least one person will claim it’s a balk. It isn’t.
  10. The scrappier the player, the more liked he will be, no matter what his batting average.
  11. When there is a stadium trivia question and three of the choices are Hall of Famers and the fourth is somebody like Rusty Staub or Mike Timlin, then the answer is probably Rusty Staub or Mike Timlin.
  12. The temperature of the in-stadium thermometer is always at least four degrees higher or lower than it actually is.
  13. Any close call that goes against the home team is to be considered an insult by a blind umpire, even if it was relatively obvious it was the right call.
  14. After a few drinks, the person a few seats away from you will suddenly become an expert in when to send a runner, when not to send the runner, how to cover home plate, when to pull the pitcher and whether to swing, bunt or take a pitch.
  15. The batboy won’t give anyone a ball, but everyone will try and ask him for one anyway.

 

And that’s just the first 15!

The All-Announcer Team

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This certainly has been done before, but I thought I’d do it: What if you had to make a team made up of announcers and color commentators (either as regulars or as common fill-ins) from either TV or Radio, assuming you could have them in their prime? Well, it’d probably look something like this (there is a jump after the pitchers). I note what team or, in cases where they work for a national network, network they are currently commentating for.

Starting Pitching Staff: This is one of the big strengths, with Jim Palmer (Orioles), Bert Blyleven (Twins) and Don Sutton (Braves) already in the Hall of Fame and with Tom Glavine (Braves) and John Smoltz (Braves and TBS) are going to join them one day. How you’d order such a rotation is anyone’s guess.

Relievers: Dennis Eckersley (TBS), of course, is the closer. Jeff Montgomery (Royals), Larry Andersen (Phillies), Al Hrabosky (Cardinals), Dan Plesac (MLB Network), Rob Dibble (the obscure Compass Media Network radio broadcast) and Mitch Williams (MLB Network) form the rest of the bullpen.

(JUMP)

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Famous For Something Else: Rethinking Jim Thorpe’s Baseball Career

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It’s sometimes said that Jim Thorpe, for all his great talent, couldn’t hit a curveball, and that baseball was his worst sport.

Well, maybe, but then you look at his statistics. Take a look:

Year Age Tm Lg G PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS OPS+ Pos
1913 26 NYG NL 19 36 35 6 5 0 0 1 2 2 1 9 .143 .167 .229 .395 12 /O
1914 27 NYG NL 30 31 31 5 6 1 0 0 2 1 0 4 .194 .194 .226 .419 27 /O
1915 28 NYG NL 17 54 52 8 12 3 1 0 1 4 2 16 .231 .259 .327 .586 81 O
1917 30 TOT NL 103 404 308 41 73 5 10 4 40 12 14 45 .237 .275 .357 .632 96 O97/8
1917 30 NYG NL 4 69 2 2 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 .500 .500 .500 1.000 211 9/78
1917 30 CIN NL 77 269 251 29 62 2 8 4 36 11 6 35 .247 .267 .367 .634 97 O97
1917 30 NYG NL 22 66 55 10 10 3 2 0 4 1 8 10 .182 .297 .309 .606 88 O
1918 31 NYG NL 58 119 113 15 28 4 4 1 11 3 4 18 .248 .286 .381 .666 103 O7/98
1919 32 TOT NL 62 172 159 16 52 7 3 1 26 7 6 30 .327 .359 .428 .787 142 O78/93
1919 32 NYG NL 2 4 3 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 .333 .333 .333 .667 101 /O87
1919 32 BSN NL 60 168 156 16 51 7 3 1 25 7 6 30 .327 .360 .429 .789 143 O78/93
6 Yrs 289 816 698 91 176 20 18 7 82 29 27 122 .252 .286 .362 .648 99
162 Game Avg. 162 457 391 51 99 11 10 4 46 16 15 68 .252 .286 .362 .648 99
NYG (6 yrs) 152 379 291 46 63 11 7 2 21 11 15 57 .216 .262 .323 .585 78
BSN (1 yr) 60 168 156 16 51 7 3 1 25 7 6 30 .327 .360 .429 .789 143
CIN (1 yr) 77 269 251 29 62 2 8 4 36 11 6 35 .247 .267 .367 .634 97
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 5/8/2013.

As you can see, early in his career, Thorpe was dreadful in his limited time playing baseball. But as time went on, he got better. By his final season in the big leagues, 1919, he was hitting a good .327/.359/.428 and his OPS was .787, which is above average. Hardly a world-beater, but definitely not the failure many make his baseball career out to be.

But, wait, what did he do in the minor leagues?

Year Age Tm Lg Lev G AB H 2B 3B HR BA SLG TB
1909 22 Rocky Mount ECAR D 44 138 35 4 0 1 .254 .304 42
1910 23 2 Teams 1 Lg D 45 128 31 2 2 0 .242 .289 37
1910 23 Rocky Mount,Fayetteville ECAR D 45 128 31 2 2 0 .242 .289 37
1910 23 Rocky Mount ECAR D 29 76 18 2 1 0 .237 .289 22
1910 23 Fayetteville ECAR D 16 52 13 0 1 0 .250 .288 15
1915 28 2 Teams 1 Lg AA 96 370 112 13 7 2 .303 .392 145
1915 28 Newark/Harrisburg,Jersey City IL AA 96 370 112 13 7 2 .303 .392 145
1915 28 Jersey City IL AA
1915 28 Newark/Harrisburg IL AA
1916 29 Milwaukee AA AA 143 573 157 25 14 10 .274 .419 240
1920 33 Akron IL AA 128 522 188 28 15 16 .360 .563 294
1921 34 Toledo AA AA 133 505 181 36 13 9 .358 .535 270
1922 35 3 Teams 2 Lgs AA-A 131 501 168 26 15 10 .335 .507 254
1922 35 Portland PCL AA 35 120 37 3 2 1 .308 .392 47
1922 35 Hartford EL A
1922 35 Hartford,Fitchburg/Worcester EL A 96 381 131 23 13 9 .344 .543 207
1922 35 Fitchburg/Worcester EL A
7 Seasons 720 2737 872 134 66 48 .319 .468 1282
AA (5 seasons) AA 535 2090 675 105 51 38 .323 .477 996
D (2 seasons) D 89 266 66 6 2 1 .248 .297 79
A (1 season) A 96 381 131 23 13 9 .344 .543 207
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 5/8/2013

These minor league stats, as incomplete as they are, seem to suggest that Thorpe definitely had a talent at baseball- perhaps not against MLB pitching, but certainly good enough to wreck havoc upon lower levels. But, take a look at those years after his 1919 season- the one season where he hit pretty well in MLB. He kept hitting above .300- at times well above it, and in pretty good leagues like the International League and American Association.

So, what happened? Why didn’t he return to the big leagues after 1919? SABR’s BioProject suggests it was because he started to focus more on professional football- he was the first commissioner of what would one day become the NFL, for example. We’ll never know what he might have accomplished in any one sport if he had focused solely on it- but Thorpe was too great an athlete to be held to just one. Or two. Or three…

And that is and was a good thing.