Eddie Grant was probably the best MLB player to ever come from Harvard, and was even called “Harvard Eddie” during his career. Sadly, both his life and his career were cut short when he died during World War I.
(Picture from the Library of Congress Flickr Feed)
Kurt Russell is an actor who has starred in films like Miracle, Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China, but in his youth, he played minor league baseball:
| Year | Age | Tm | Lg | Lev | Aff | G | PA | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | SB | CS | BB | SO | TB | GDP | HBP | SH | SF | IBB | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1971 | 20 | Bend | NORW | A- | CAL | 51 | 212 | 179 | 30 | 51 | 11 | 0 | 1 | 14 | 2 | 3 | 29 | 33 | .285 | .385 | .363 | .748 | 65 | 0 | 4 | 0 | ||
| 1972 | 21 | Walla Walla | NORW | A- | 29 | 91 | 77 | 12 | 25 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 14 | 1 | 1 | 8 | 7 | .325 | .389 | .377 | .766 | 29 | 2 | 1 | 3 | |||
| 1973 | 22 | 2 Teams | 2 Lgs | A–AA | CAL | 29 | 99 | 4 | 28 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | .283 | .364 | 36 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |||||
| 1973 | 22 | Portland | NORW | A- | 23 | 83 | 19 | 0 | 1 | 0 | .229 | .253 | 21 | |||||||||||||||
| 1973 | 22 | El Paso | TL | AA | CAL | 6 | 17 | 16 | 4 | 9 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | .563 | .588 | .938 | 1.526 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||
| 1977 | 26 | Portland | NORW | A- | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | .000 | .000 | .000 | .000 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | |||
| 4 Seasons | 110 | 404 | 356 | 46 | 104 | 18 | 1 | 2 | 32 | 4 | 6 | 38 | 41 | .292 | .361 | .365 | .726 | 130 | 2 | 5 | 3 | |||||||
| A- (4 seasons) | A- | 104 | 387 | 340 | 42 | 95 | 15 | 1 | 1 | 28 | 3 | 4 | 37 | 40 | .279 | .351 | .338 | .689 | 115 | 2 | 5 | 3 | ||||||
| AA (1 season) | AA | 6 | 17 | 16 | 4 | 9 | 3 | 0 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | .563 | .588 | .938 | 1.526 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||||||
What’s interesting about Russell’s baseball career is that it happened DURING his acting career. He had been on TV, and had starred in Disney movies like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, which came out in 1969. As you can see, he actually did pretty well, but a rotator cuff injury derailed him.
But that isn’t all. His father, actor Bing Russell, owned a minor league baseball team, and his nephew, Matt Franco, played in the big leagues for the Cubs, Mets and Braves.
Unlike some other failed two-sport athletes, John Elway’s stats in the minors were actually pretty good. That said, I’d say he probably made a good decision focusing on the NFL.
The true meaning of Jackie Robinson (who would turn 94 today) is often forgotten.
I, like many others, have grown up in a sports world where it has not mattered what the color of a player’s skin was, only his talent. It matters not whether the player is Caucasian, African-American, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, Polynesian, or a mix of the above. All that matter is simply whether they can play. This is not just true in baseball, but in other sports as well. It is a meritocracy: If you are good, you are good, and if you stink, then you stink.
While there are, of course, still some cowards out there who continue to throw out racial epithets from the safety of anonymous accounts on the internet, they are just that- cowards. They know that what they are trying to peddle no longer is welcome in the American fan-scape.
And, although it is something of an exaggeration to say this, Jackie Robinson can be thanked for this. As not only did he show that talent knew no race, but he also showed dignity and courage doing it. He defeated those who hated and heckled him by simply ignoring them, not by giving in and returning their hatred.
A good example for any and all who have faced bullies. And something that has led to a better country, both on the field and off.
Happy Birthday, Jackie Robinson.
Today’s picture is of Babe Ruth after a collision with a concrete wall. Ouch!
This picture from 1924 can be found on the Library of Congress Flickr stream, and has no known copyright restrictions.
The baseball card. Is there anything so low-tech and yet interesting as it? And remember how, when you were young, you’d look over those statistics, look at the cool photos, and maybe see a line or two about the player off the field? You know, stuff like:
“Player X enjoys hunting and fishing during the off-season.”
Or…
“Player Y lettered in baseball, football and track in high school.”
Well, the Living Baseball Card project is sort of like that, only with a documentary instead of a line at the end. While it has the picture of the player and lines of stats, what sets the Living Baseball Card (which is larger than the average baseball card) apart is that it comes with a DVD that holds a documentary on the card’s player (the one I watched was about 23 minutes), in which the player talks about his childhood, upbringing, time in the minors, and MLB career.
Take the documentary I watched (I received two cards, but I’m holding one of them back as a possible giveaway in the future), which was on Royals outfielder Willie Wilson. The only person who speaks in the video is Wilson himself, as he discusses his childhood, his baseball days, as well as other topics related to his life. Having known very little about Wilson, it was interesting and seemed a good primer on him: about how he got into baseball, his experiences in the minors, etc. They ranged from the funny- he once left before the second game of a doubleheader in the minors, only to come back and have to grab his uniform out of the wash so that he could pinch-hit late in the game- to the sad- he stopped doing autographs for a time because a man had knocked down Wilson’s wife and young child trying to get it. A well-made and good paced DVD.
It will be interesting to see how the Living Baseball Card moves forward- I can definitely see it as being a possible giveaway at ballparks, for example, as the format could easily be changed around to showcase a current player, or an all-time legend that is getting his number retired.
Time will tell, but it definitely has potential.
You know the story of who inspired this holiday: His birth was an unusual one, but he grew up to perform amazing feats, and spoke in words that have been repeated again and again throughout history. Later in life, he became known for his ability to resurrect himself.
I speak, of course, of Rickey Henderson, born Dec. 25, 1958 in the back of an 1957 Oldsmobile.
I am not going to do the extremely easy joke that goes with that factoid of information.
Although he had hoped to play football growing up, his concerned mother and a school counselor got him onto baseball, mainly because they were worried he’d get hurt. During his Hall of Fame induction speech, in fact, he mentioned that his counselor gave him a quarter every time he did something well on the baseball field.
This is always ironic, because perhaps nobody was pulled from their baseball career kicking and screaming as Rickey Henderson had to be. After he washed up after 2002, he went to play in Newark to start 2003, for the indy-league Bears. He did well enough that he was signed by the Dodgers, which were the final team he’d play for in his big-league career.
But Rickey refused to go, and in the final years of his playing career, he was something of a joke, again returning to the Indy leagues, first for the Newark Bears again, and then the San Diego Surf Dawgs. Only then did he hang it up.
And when he hung it up, he left with one of the most distinguished careers in history. The Man of Steal was voted to 10 All-Star Games, three Silver Sluggers, a Gold Glove, the 1990 AL MVP, and won a World Series in 1993 during his brief stint with the Blue Jays. His 1406 stolen bases are well-known, but often forgotten is that Rickey also holds the record for runs-scored (2295), and is second only to the often-intentionally-walked Barry Bonds for BBs (2190). In fact, I read once that even if Rickey Henderson had never stolen a single base, he would likely have made it to the Hall of Fame, simply due to his good hitting and excellent eye.
But, of course, no discussion of Rickey Henderson is complete without some of his… unique words. Nobody knows for sure which of them are true, which of them are false, and which of them have been lost somewhere in between. Tom Verducci once noted this, writing that it made Rickey something like Johnny Appleseed or Davy Crockett, a character that could not be merely defined as fiction or nonfiction. Some of my favorite stories and quotes often attributed to Rickey:
How many of those are true? Does it really matter?
Happy Rickeymas!
Marvin Miller, the man behind the Major League Baseball Players Association’s rise from an ineffective organization to the most powerful labor organization in the history of the country, has passed away at the age of 95. There are many people who have written big in-depth looks at Miller’s impact, and you should check those out. Here, however, I’ll just let the numbers speak for themselves:
$6,000: The minimum salary of a MLB player when Marvin Miller took over the union in 1966.
$19,000: The average salary of a MLB player when Marvin Miller took over the union in 1966.
$241,000: The average salary of a MLB player when Marvin Miller retired in the early 1980s.
$480,000: The minimum salary of an MLB player in 2012.
$3.4 million: The average salary of an MLB player at the beginning of the 2012 season.
Whatever your opinion of Miller, the union or money in baseball, you cannot deny that he, and the union he built, has left a permanent mark upon the way the business of baseball is operated.
Major League Baseball’s history is long and often full of twists and turns. And in the earliest days of professional baseball, it wasn’t organized very well. As a result, some cities, so small that they make the current small markets look like Metropolises, had teams.
The first Major League, according to some, was not the National League (formed in 1876) but rather the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (notice how it says “players” and not teams or leagues- this was before owners had lots of leverage). It was a haphazard enterprise formed in 1871. Teams could buy their way in, schedules weren’t set in stone, gambling was rampant, and the level of play fluctuated greatly. For that reason, some organizations such as the Hall of Fame and MLB’s official record books don’t consider it a major league. Others, such as SABR and Baseball-Reference, do. As a result, there are some very small cities that show up on baseball-reference.com. And I don’t mean “small” as in “Hartford, Connecticut”… I mean “small” as in “they were smaller than the capacity of modern-day ballparks”.
Take a look (after the jump):
On September 11, 1985, Pete Rose got his 4,192nd base hit, passing the immortal Ty Cobb for most hits in MLB history.
Except… he probably had already passed him a few days earlier, on September 8, 1985 at Wrigley Field. You see, earlier in the decade, somebody had found that, at one point, a game Ty Cobb had played in 1910 had been counted twice. However, the marketing machine and narrative about Rose was heating up, and the number of 4191 had such a nice ring to it and had been the established number for decades, so commissioner Bowie Kuhn declared that 4191 would remain the MLB record for hits (until Rose broke it, of course).
However, Baseball Reference says differently, as do most other non-MLB sources. Therefore, I am declaring Ty Cobb’s “4191” hit total one of baseball’s great lies.
The Baseball Continuum 