The last time the Pirates won 81 games…

Posted on September 4, 2013 by danglickman

September 9th, 1992. At the end of the day, after a 13-8 victory over the Cubs, the record of the Pittsburgh Pirates showed that they had 81 wins.

It never happened again. Until yesterday.

How long ago was 9-9-92? Well…

Bryce Harper hadn’t been born yet.
The United States still was doing nuclear bomb testing.
The Colorado Rockies, Florida/Miami Marlins, Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays and Arizona Diamondbacks did not exist.
Two players from the September 9, 1992 game- Joe Girardi and Ryne Sandberg– are now MLB managers (although Sandberg is an interim manager).
Three participants in the game (Sandberg, Andre Dawson, and umpire Doug Harvey) are now in the Hall of Fame. A fourth, Barry Bonds, would be if not for, well… you know.
Speaking of Bonds, at the end of the 1992 season, he had 176 HR and in 1992 he hit a then career-high 34 HR.
The top movie at the box-office the weekend before was Honeymoon in Vegas. The top movie in the weekend after was Sneakers.
Boyz II Men’s “End of the Road” was the Number One single.
George H.W. Bush was president and was facing both Bill Clinton and Ross Perot in the presidential race.
Nickelodeon was only a few weeks old, the Sci-Fi (Syfy) Channel and Cartoon Network were a few weeks away from premiering.
The first Mario Kart game had only been out for about two weeks.
Gerald’s Game by Stephen King was the number one best-selling book at the time.
The Russian Federation had not yet taken part in the Olympic Games- the 1992 Olympics had the “Unified Team” of Russia and former USSR countries because they hadn’t formed Olympic Committees in time.
A Canadian Team had not yet won the World Series.
Only Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, Dodger Stadium, Anaheim (Angel) Stadium, Kauffman Stadium, Skydome/Rogers Centre, New Comiskey Park/US Cellular Field, the Oakland Coliseum and Camden Yards remain in MLB use from that season. Tropicana Field had been built, but had not yet hosted a Major League team.

In other words: It was a long time ago.

Great Stuff from the B-Ref Japanese Data

Posted on September 3, 2013 by danglickman

With Baseball Reference adding Japanese stats, it’s time to look at some of the coolest stuff from it.

First off, of course, there is arguably the greatest Japanese player ever and one of the greatest hitters on any continent: Sadaharu Oh. You probably know about his 868 HRs, but you probably didn’t know about his impressive 2786 hits. Going on a tangent here, I remember reading somewhere that, after statistical conversions between the leagues, it’s thought that Oh would have had a career in MLB similar to Mel Ott.

Much like how Babe Ruth had Lou Gehrig behind him, Oh had Shigeo Nagashima, who formed the N in what was called the Yomiuri Giants’ “O-N Cannon”. Together, they helped the “Yankees of Japan” win nine straight titles.

However, had you looked hard enough, you probably could have found their statistics elsewhere, and the same probably goes for Americans and other westerners who spent time in Japan since the 1970s, like Charlie Manuel and Randy Bass and recent Japanese imports like Yu Darvish. What makes the Baseball Reference data awesome is that it goes beyond that to Japanese baseball’s earliest professional seasons.

For example, I can’t ever remember seeing the stats of Wally Yonamine, the first American to play in Japan post-WWII. Nor do I ever remember seeing statistics for Eiji Sawamura, the ace pitcher (Japan’s Cy Young Award equivalent is named for him) who once struck out Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Jimmie Foxx in succession during one of Ruth’s famous tours of Japan, but whose career ended premature when he died during WWII.

As a third example of a early-years Japanese player who has interesting stats to look at: Victor Starfin (sometimes spelled Starffin). The first pitcher to win 300 games in Japan, Starfin was able to (mostly) avoid WWII’s effects on Japanese baseball. Well, until he was released in 1944 due to “security concerns” and thrown into a detention camp for being a foreign national. That, by the way, is like the fourth most interesting thing in his SABR biography. Seriously, it starts with his family fleeing the Russian Revolution and ends with him tragically dying in a drunk-driving accident in January, 1957- not long after his final season (1955).

Those just scratch the surface of the treasures in Baseball Reference’s new Japanese pages… go check them out.

Link

This is going to be good.

(The above link is to Japanese statistics just added to Baseball Reference.)

(Humor) Things Cubs players would still be able to do

Posted on August 30, 2013 by danglickman

Jeff Passan has an article on how the Union is worried that the contracts being offered by teams like the Cubs could be a slow march to non-guaranteed contracts on par with the NFL. You can read the article for the full details, but in essence, they are worried that the expansion of the “conversion clause” that allows a team to turn it into a non-guaranteed contract if a player does something. It’s a call-back to the eighties, when everybody was worried about all the cocaine going around, but now-a-days the MLBPA is worried about the implications that teams could not only use the clause to extend it to PEDs, but to, well, anything.

Like, take this snippet apparently from a Cubs contract, meant to list out restricted activities that could allow the Cubs to turn the contact into non-guaranteed if there was an injury. Passan notes that due to the way some parts of the contract were originally written, they could have in theory been able to convert the contract for even the most mild of injuries doing these activities:

“(A)uto racing, motorcycling, piloting, co-piloting, learning to operate, or serving as a crew member of, an aircraft, being a passenger in a single engine airplane or private plane, hot air ballooning, parachuting, skydiving, hang gliding, bungee jumping, horseback riding, horse racing, harness racing, fencing, boxing, wrestling, karate, judo, jujitsu, any other form of martial arts activity, use of an All Terrain Vehicle (‘ATV’), skiing (water or snow), snowmobiling, bobsledding, luging, ice hockey, ice boating, field hockey, squash, spelunking, basketball, football, softball, white water canoeing or rafting, kayaking, jai-alai, lacrosse, soccer, tennis, rodeo, bicycle racing, motor boat racing, polo, rugby, rodeo, handball, volleyball, in-line or other roller skating, surfing, hunting, paddleball, racquetball, archery, wood chopping, mountain climbing, boating, any weightlifting not prescribed by or approved in advance by Club (said approval not to be unreasonably withheld), participation in the ‘Superteams’ or ‘Superstars’ activities (or any like activity) or other made-for-television or made-for-motion picture athletic competitions…”

That’s a big list, and the union was- if I’m reading this right- worried that such a big list and the vague writing of the contract could have allowed the Cubs to NFL-ize the contracts of anybody who, say, had a slight sprain during a pick-up basketball game or had a soccer ball hit them in the nuts. Thankfully, that vague language has been changed, so now the they probably have to actually get shot by a bow-and-arrow or falling down a cliff while mountain climbing for their deal to become non-guaranteed.

Still, even if they WERE in danger of seeing their guaranteed contracts going poof if they got hurt doing those above activities, they still have many activities they still could have done:

Golf
Bowling
Bocce
Ballroom dancing
Water Polo (regular polo is prohibited, however)
Paragliding (hang-gliding is prohibited, however)
Badminton
Australian-Rules Football
Sepaw Takraw (AKA Malaysian Foot-Volleyball)
Korfball (AKA Dutch Basketball)
Kickball
Pesapallo (AKA Finnish Baseball)
Snowboarding (Surfing, Skating and Skiing are prohibited, however)
Shuffleboard
Dodgeball
Ultimate Frisbee
Unicycling (bicycling and motorcycling are prohibited)
Tug of War
Trading Card Games
Paintball
Laser Tag
Billiards
Fishing
Playing “Go Fish”
Darts
Gymnastics
Flying a kite
Table Tennis
Most Track and Field events
Hurling (AKA Irish Field Hockey, sort of)
Bandy (Russian Ice Hockey but with a ball instead of a puck)
Hide and Seek
Tag
Team Handball (regular Handball is prohibited)
Chess
Checkers
Battle of the Nations
Connect Four
Quidditch
Thumb-War
Horseshoes
Blernsball
Rollerball
Calvinball
Podracing
Video Games
Jeopardy!
Staring Contests
Scootering
Segway Racing
Uno
Monopoly
Baseball itself!

…Oh, wait, there is this at the very end:

“…or any other sport, activity, or negligent act involving a reasonably foreseeable substantial risk of personal injury or death.”

Well, there goes those. Good thing the Union was able to get a change in the language of the Cubs contracts, otherwise, they could have ended up with people getting their contracts non-guaranteed after paper-cuts while playing Uno.

HUMOR: The Reaction to Matt Harvey’s Injury

Posted on August 26, 2013 by danglickman

Matt Harvey has a UCL injury and will miss the rest of the season and probably longer, since he will likely have to undergo TJ Surgery. Upon seeing some of the online reaction to this, I believe it can be summed up by clicking here. Note that certain parts of that reaction are not-safe-for-work.

As a fan of baseball and great pitching, I agree with the above assessment.

Ichiro’s 4000 professional hits are impressive, regardless of the league some of them came in

Posted on August 22, 2013 by danglickman

Awhile back, Game 7 of the 1960 World Series was on MLB Network, having been found in an old wine cellar that had once belonged to Bing Crosby, who owned the Pirates at the time. And while, of course, it was one of the greatest games of all time in it’s own right, and had perhaps the greatest home run of all time in Bill Mazeroski‘s walk-off blast, what fascinated me was Roberto Clemente. I heard about how great Clemente was, I could see the old footage, but this was the first time I could see Clemente in a taped television broadcast since his death, as far as I knew.

And a weird thing happened: whenever he came up to the plate or a ball came towards him in the outfield, my eyes could not leave the television. Despite the fact the game had happened decades ago, despite the fact he only went one for four in the game… I could not take my eyes off the television. Because, well, I just knew there was a possibility he’d do something amazing (I hadn’t checked the box score before watching the broadcast, so I really only knew the broad strokes of the game).

To me, Ichiro Suzuki, the man who goes by only his first name, is the closest thing we have had in our lifetime to that sort of player. The player who’s talent is so great that you want to watch the TV not just when he’s at the plate, but when he’s about to make a fielding play as well, or on the basepaths. Oh, he’s left-handed (although naturally a righty, he bats lefty as a way of getting that slight head-start of running to first), and he’s Japanese and not Puerto Rican, but in most other ways the comparison fits: Ichiro, like Clemente, isn’t much of a power hitter (Ichiro averages about nine homers every 162 games while Clemente averaged about 16) but can definitely hit one when needed. Ichiro, like Clemente, has a cannon from the outfield that can stun even the fastest of runners. Ichiro, like Clemente, can make excellent catches in the outfield. And, finally, Ichiro, like Clemente, is a large case of “what if?”

For Clemente, it is a a tragic what-if of what may have happened had he not died that Christmas off the coast of Puerto Rico. For Ichiro, it is a bit more benign: what if he had played in Major League Baseball from the start?

As Ichiro got his 4000th combined hit yesterday, and in the run-up to it, some poo-poo’d him, saying that the 1,278 he had in Japan were meaningless, and that if we were to count them in any way we might as well count minor league statistics, or postseason statistics, or spring training statistics. This is ignorant of both the quality of the NPB (which, while not of MLB quality, is still better than even the best of AAA) and how dominant Ichiro was there (Jeff Passan notes that sabermetric wiz Clay Davenport found that Ichiro’s stats in Japan don’t translate downward that much when converted to MLB), as well as just how hard it is to get 4,000 hits in any league or combination of leagues.

In fact, as far as I can find, only seven players with good verifiable statistics have had 4,000 professional hits including every level: Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Hank Aaron, Jigger Statz*, Minnie Minoso, Stan Musial and now Ichiro. Regardless of league, evel of competition or era, the fact that only seven players out of the thousands upon thousands of professional players in North America, Latin America, Asia, Australia and Europe have had 4,000 professional hits is proof of just how hard it is and how impressive it is that Ichiro has done so.

And, even if you want to totally ignore the Japanese hits, your forgetting the fact that with his hit yesterday, he passed Lou Gehrig (another player with a large “what-if”) on the all-time MLB hit list. And that, on it’s own, is impressive.

So, congratulations Ichiro.

*Statz got most of those in the minor leagues, where he was a constant presence for the Los Angeles Angels for years.

When the Orioles were asked what animal they’d want to be, Jason Hammel had the best answer:

Posted on August 21, 2013 by danglickman

Yes, when the Orioles were asked for the most recent issue of Orioles Magazine what animal they would want to be, Jason Hammel said he’d want to be a Ninja Turtle.

And that, needless to say, instantly made him the winner of that Q&A page. Which, considering Matt Wieters said he’d want to be a Liger (a Lion/Tiger hybrid), is quite an achievement.

Cowabunga, Jason Hammel. And remember: Turtle Power!

Is this the end of the “Red Devil”, old Charlie Manuel? Or merely the end of the Phillies?

Posted on August 16, 2013 by danglickman

Charlie Manuel has had an interesting baseball life. After a sub-par career in the big leagues, he headed to Japan, where he was dubbed the “Red Devil” by fans for his tenacious play (at one point returning to play against doctor’s order after having his jaw smashed into six pieces by a beanball) and becoming the first American to win the MVP of Japan’s Pacific League. He also, legend says, once joined forces with fellow American exiles Clyde Wright and Roger Repoz in fighting the East German National Hockey Team in a Tokyo nightclub.

After retiring, Manuel’s second life began, as a scout and then as a manager. And what a career it ended up being: he made the playoffs once with the Indians before being let go after a contract dispute, and then later began the tenure that this post is about: the Phillies job. In this final year, where the Phillies have flailed and flopped and ultimately cost Manuel his job, some may have forgotten just how good the Manuel Phillies have been. Before this year, they had finished at or above .500 every single year. They won five straight NL East titles, and won one World Series and may well have won another if it weren’t for Alex Rodriguez‘s alleged artificial help (yeah, I said it). While, as SBNation’s Steven Goldman said, Manuel was hardly the second coming of John McGraw, the success must have had at least something to do with him. And, while the fall of the Phillies (the Phillies’ Phailure?) also has something to do with him, it’s not his fault. No, the end of the Phillies run can be traced primarily to Ruben Amaro, the General Manager of Philadelphia.

Amaro gave a gargantuan extension to Ryan Howard in 2010, an extension that has come back to bite the Phillies as Howard’s injuries have increased and his power numbers have gone down. Nobody is willing to trade for him, and as a result, Howard and his 125 million dollar salary will be with the Phillies until 2016. The rest of the team, while not suffering the wear-and-tear of age and injury to the extent as Howard has, still isn’t getting any younger. And bad drafts and once-acclaimed trades have left the cupboard bare for the Phillies as far as the minor leagues are concerned. And, what’s more, Amaro has refused to deal some of the best trading chips he had: he could have traded Cliff Lee for several good prospects this summer, for example, but didn’t.

Charlie Manuel may one day find another job… but the Phillies could be in the wilderness for several years in the future. Good luck, Ryne Sandberg.