Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ralph Kiner: A Great Player For Some Horrible Teams

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Ralph Kiner, who passed away today, was a great player who played for some really bad teams. In his ten seasons, only twice was his team above .500. He never played in the postseason, and only once did he come close- when the 1955 Indians finished three games back of the Yankees in what was Kiner’s final year. He didn’t make the Hall of Fame until his final year of eligibility, and during his time with the Pirates, Branch Rickey held a grudge against him, scapegoating him for the team’s failures in an effort to make it possible to trade him for prospects*.

For those reasons, perhaps it isn’t surprising that when his death was announced, his obituary in the New York Times spent just as much time on his stint as the voice of the Mets as it did on his playing days, which were, admittedly, short.

And this is a shame, as in his ten seasons, nobody else hit more HRs than Kiner, and, what’s more, no World Series-era player with no postseason experience, not even Ernie Banks, had a better OPS for their career than Kiner.

So as you hear people on TV, in print and online talk about his radio days, just remember that he was truly one of the great players of his time.

*Interestingly, when he was finally traded, the Pirates didn’t get any good players back.

Some interesting articles you should look at…

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As I work along on the next Bizarre Baseball Culture, I’ve been distracted by some great baseball articles along the way. Check them out:

Over at Slate: William Edward White was the son of a slave, but he was of mixed race and lived his life as a white man… so does his one appearance in 1879 “count” for being the first African-American major leaguer?

Michael Clair looked at the time Michael Bolton made a softball video. It may well be even weirder than Sammy Sosa Softball Slam.

And, finally, Jonah Keri tries to figure out what is going on with the Orioles.

Famous For Something Else: Russell Wilson

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As amazing as it seems, I have never had Russell Wilson of the Seahawks as a “Famous For Something Else” entry. Oh, I had a post in which I put up his minor league numbers, but it wasn’t a “Famous for Something Else”. So, without further ado, Russell Wilson’s minor league statistics:

Year Age Tm Lg Lev Aff G PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS TB GDP HBP SH SF IBB
2010 21 Tri-City NORW A- COL 32 143 122 18 28 4 4 2 11 4 6 16 36 .230 .336 .377 .713 46 4 4 0 1 0
2011 22 Asheville SALL A COL 61 236 193 40 44 5 4 3 15 15 2 35 82 .228 .366 .342 .708 66 2 7 1 0 0
2 Seasons 93 379 315 58 72 9 8 5 26 19 8 51 118 .229 .354 .356 .710 112 6 11 1 1 0
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 1/13/2013.

It should be noted that Wilson has not officially retired from baseball. Oh, sure, he probably won’t ever play again (although he has said he might be interested in hanging out with the Rangers next Spring Training to take BP, after they had picked him up in the Rule 5 draft as a publicity stunt), but he still appears on a Major League organization’s depth chart, if only as a “just-in-case” possibility.

Of course, even if he did want to be a two-sport athlete, it’s highly unlikely that he’d be able to pull it off, and not just because of his career .229 BA. The fact is, it’s more-or-less impossible to imagine an NFL quarterback also playing another sport, given both his importance to his team and how involved the QB is to football’s strategies and tactics. Bo Jackson was a running back- important, but not the type of person who needs to know every play in the book. Same goes for Deion Sanders (who, admittedly, always had the NFL as his higher priority except for when his MLB team was in the playoffs), who while an important part of every defense he was in, was hardly as indispensable as a quarterback is to a NFL team.

The only way I could maybe see it happen would be if the QB was a starting pitcher who only worked early in the week. But even that is a bit of a stretch.

Quick Aside

Aside

In the next few days, there will be some football stuff leading up to the Super Bowl… but also a Bizarre Baseball Culture!

Book Review: “The 34-Ton Bat” by Steve Rushin

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The 34-Ton Bat: The Story of Baseball as Told Through Bobbleheads, Cracker Jacks, Jockstraps, Eye Black, and 375 Other Strange and Unforgettable Objects isn’t the first book of it’s kind. By which I mean, it is not the first book to look at baseball based on how things related to it- helmets, hot dogs, and the like. For example, there were two books called Game of Inches that not only looked at off-the-field innovations, but on-the-field ones as well.

However, 34-Ton Bat is one of the best written- in this case, by journalist Steve Rushin. While Game of Inches covered more, Rushin ties together the many pieces of baseball miscellanea into something of a story, connecting both personal experiences- such as working at Metropolitan Stadium as a kid- and old stories- such as the long-forgotten shooting death of a man in the Polo Grounds seats- to objects connected to them, and the history of those objects.

The death at the Polo Grounds, for example, leads to a discussion about the seats themselves and also some more tangential developments. For example, as time has gone on and Americans’ weight has increased, seats have become wider. In addition, the NYPD were the ones who investigated the fan’s death, and starting in 1877 that same police department had been handing out medals for valor that included a charm in which the letters N and Y were interlocked- providing the likely inspiration for the Yankees’ logo.

The book is filled with such wonderful connections, and for the most part they flow and fit perfectly. You would think it strange to somehow connect urinals, radio broadcasts, beer, naming rights, and the national anthem, but in one chapter Rushin does just that, not making it seem forced at all. In fact, he makes such leaps seem logical in nearly every chapter of the book.

This isn’t to say the book is perfect. At times, it will feel like Rushin is spending too much or too little time on some subjects. In other cases, it feels like some interesting things that could have been covered weren’t (for example, I don’t recall seeing much on catching masks and how they have slowly evolved into the goalie-like masks of today). Still, those are just small nitpicks. If you like baseball, and especially are interested in the history of some of the objects and traditions connected to it, you should give 34-Ton Bat a read.

The reviewer received his copy of the book as a holiday gift from family.

The USA returns to first in late January Continuum Rankings Update

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It’s the Continuum Baseball Rankings! Thanks to good performances in basically every tournament that wasn’t the WBC, the United States went to number one in the IBAF’s world rankings, and that helped them also move to the top in the Continuum Rankings. Japan and Cuba also benefited from international play results that the IBAF rankings follow (but I don’t always follow), and Japan further benefited from a 3-game sweep over Taipei in November. This caused the Dominican to fall to fourth, mainly because they didn’t play much after the WBC and weren’t in the best of positions in the IBAF ratings.

Similar things happened to other Latin American teams, and that leads to another issue I’ll have to figure out: due to those country’s baseball systems, which often have financial problems outside of the WBC as far as going overseas. I’m going to try and figure out a way to try and counter this without bringing back in the number of MLB players and MLB Win Shares.

Anyway, these ratings include the 2013 end-of-year IBAF World Rankings, the three games “Samurai Japan” and the Chinese Taipei national team played, games between “professional or equivalent” teams in the East Asian Games and the entirety (since all teams in it were “professional or equivalent”… which is to say, they were all each country’s best players, in this case amateurs) of the West Asian Baseball Cup.

The next update will be after the Caribbean World Series in February.

Go below the jump to see it:

Continue reading →

Tanaka signing sets up what could be an Apocalyptic year for the Yankees

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The word “apocalypse” does not, technically, mean the end of the world. It instead means “uncovering” or the revelation of something. In that truest sense, the New York Yankees have set themselves up for an apocalyptic year in 2014. Because with the signing of Masahiro Tanaka, they have turned their back on any semblance of the financial restraint they showed last year in a quest to possibly get under the luxury tax and are going with the good old fashion weapon of the Yankees of old: money. Lots and lots of money.

Problem is, with the team that that money has bought, it has yet to be uncovered whether that’s going to do it anymore… at least the way the Yankees did it this offseason.

What do I mean by the way the “Yankees did it” this offseason? Well, what I mean is that the Yankees have, for a lack of a better word, assembled a team that recalls the “Jurassic Park at Camden Yards” Orioles of 1998. Having fallen in the ALCS the past two years, Orioles ownership threw a bunch of money at the problem, signing past All-Stars and award-winners… leading to a team that actually had a higher total salary figure than the Yankees. Problem was, these are the past All-Stars and award-winners who they got (not counting re-signings of players like Harold Baines and Brady Anderson):

The 1998 Orioles average age was 33.3 years old, their most common batting orders had no players that were younger than 30 at the end of the season, and of the eight pitchers that would start 10 or more games that year, only two of them were under 30. The “Jurassic Park at Camden Yards” Orioles underachieved greatly, finishing 79-83, 4th in the AL East, and beginning the long string of under-.500 years that would last until 2012. Carter, Charlton and Guillen were all gone from the team by the end of the year (although Guillen, admittedly, had mainly been gotten as a backup infielder), while Drabek retired at year’s end.

Now, look at what the Yankees did this off-season:

  • Signed Brian McCann, who will be 30 in 2014
  • Signed Jacoby Ellsbury, who will be 30 in 2014 and has a history of injuries
  • Signed Carlos Beltran, who will be 37 in 2014
  • Signed Matt Thornton, who will be 37 in 2014
  • Signed Brian Roberts, who will be 36 in 2014 and has a history of injuries
  • Signed Masahiro Tanaka, who will be 25 in the 2014 season.

Other than Tanaka, the list looks shockingly like what the Orioles did- getting old all-stars. And, like the Orioles of 1998, the Yankees will likely have their line-up made up entirely of players older than 30-years old. Although, to be fair, the Yankees rotation is younger and I’d definitely take a 30-year-old McCann over a 33-year-old Lenny Webster or Chris Hoiles and a 30-year-old Ellsbury over a 34-year-old Brady Anderson. But still, you can’t help get this sinking feeling that maybe, just maybe, the Yankees money-hammer isn’t going to work this time, that the players they have acquired are too old and too injury prone to bring them to the promised land.

Still, It’s not hard to see why the Yankees are doing this. After all, they missed the playoffs last year and were lucky to end up tied for third with the Orioles in the AL East. And, as that happened, their ratings and attendance plummeted, and probably would have been even lower if not for the attention the grand Mariano Rivera farewell tour got. So, what were they going to do? Just spend money on some younger and cheaper players? Let Tanaka go to the Cubs or Dodgers? Pfft. They wouldn’t let that happen, they are the Yankees. And, hey, the money approach has worked before, and it may well work again. And they better hope it does, because if it doesn’t, it could turn into a baseball apocalypse in the Bronx of a somewhat more dire kind.

A Change in The Continuum Baseball Rankings method

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As I mentioned yesterday, the latest installment of the Continuum Baseball Rankings is coming up.

However, there will be one major difference: I will not be taking into account the number of MLB players and Win Shares for each country, instead using only the input of the IBAF World Rankings and results from international tournaments in which a country’s “professional or equivalent” team took part.

There are a few reasons for this.

For one, using MLB players and MLB win shares in it heavily skews it towards the USA, Dominican Republic, etc.

For another, it skews away from countries that have their own leagues, such as Japan and Korea, as well as an isolated nation like Cuba.

Finally, they are at times incomplete, as the site I use to find the numbers for it goes by place of birth, not necessarily nationality, leading to, for example, Donald Lutz being listed as an American and not a German.

So, when the next Rankings update comes up, it’ll have used a different method for things that happened after July of this past year.

Alex Rodriguez is not a popular guy

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So, we all know Alex Rodriguez isn’t very popular in the MLB office, but how unpopular he was amongst his fellow players hasn’t been very clear until now. Oh, there had been “sources” about how disgusted they were, and some players have outright talked about their feelings on A-Rod. But now, Jeff Passan and Tim Brown have written an article over at YAHOO! in which they reveal that other players are so sick of Rodriguez that they would have him kicked out of the union completely.

This is unprecedented. While he can’t be kicked out of the union due to legal matters, this is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time something like this has actually been bandied about at all. Even the replacement players like Kevin Millar, Shane Spencer and Brendan Donnelly were merely cut out from the MLBPA’s marketing deals (making them, for example, not available in video games), not kicked out of the union.

Of course, this won’t end with Rodriguez getting kicked out of the union, and he’s not being cut from any marketing deals either, but it does show something: while the union itself may have said it wasn’t happy with suspension of Rodriguez, the union members seem to wish the union could just leave him out to dry.

What’s Coming Up This Week on the Continuum…

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Okay, so, this coming week:

  • There will finally be a book review of Steve Rushin’s The 34-Ton Bat. I’ve been saying it was coming for awhile now, but now I will make sure it finally happens!
  • An article on the joys of AAA baseball, written in the cold, cold winter
  • An update of the Continuum Baseball Rankings to reflect international play, MLB players and so-on from the later half of 2013
  • An update to the Glossary.
  • And more!

So, see you later!