In which I write Haiku-style poetry about a potpourri of baseball cards I found in a value pack. Because, well, it’s my blog.
1991 Bowman Danny Darwin
Kneeling on one leg
Danny Darwin has a ‘stache
What’s with the background?
Spring Training games started today as the Red Sox defeated Northeastern University today, 3-0 in a abbreviated game. Jarrod Saltalamacchia had a double, Pedro Ciriaco had an RBI, and Daniel Bard gave up a hit and struck out three in his one inning of work.
You may now continue on your day.
In my rundown of The Palace Hotel Putsch, I noted that there was one possible outcome that we wouldn’t see coming. Actually, it was a category of possible outcomes: the Black Swan. Here’s what I wrote:
A black swan is an event that very few, if any, people see coming, but ultimately changes lots of things. The idea’s names comes from the fact that everybody thought that a swan couldn’t be black, until they found a species of swan that was black. The creation and wide-scale adoption of the internet, for example, was a black swan event. While it’s unlikely that there will be some earthshaking revelation or breakout player that will change the situation in the Boston clubhouse, it also is key that the possibility is not completely abandoned. In other words: expect the unexpected.
The Black Swan came into being with the trade that shook the world: Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Nick Punto (who I can only presume was thrown in to make it a nice even number) for James Loney, prospects, and money. And all of this happened after the trade deadline.
While many have focused on the Red Sox, and deservedly so, what’s being lost in this is how this is another step in the rebirth of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Just think, last year at this time, they were one of the saddest stories in baseball, having been ravaged from their old glories by the decadence and divorce drama of the McCourt family. Now, they are ascendant, on the heels of the Giants in the NL West race and close to a Wild Card spot. They have good baseball men running things behind the scenes, the smile of Magic Johnson (which, if it could be harnessed as energy, would be able to light all of Southern California) as the public face, Vin Scully still on the call and Don Mattingly managing in his forever-hunt for a World Series ring (he is, by my calculation, the only person to ever play for the Yankees who remains in the hunt for a World Series ring. Okay, him and Mike Mussina.)
And it is only beginning for the Dodger Blues. This coming winter, the Dodgers will be selling the local TV rights to various interested buyers. Those rights, it should be noted, will be big. Very, very big. We’re talking billions of dollars,or a similarly high amount that is in Scrooge McDuck territory. Why, they could start making so much money, the Yankees will call for more revenue sharing…
…Okay, that last one is an exaggeration. The fact remains, though: the Dodgers are moving on up, and the big trades they have pulled this year could just be the beginning of a new era of Dodger Green. While there are some pitfalls that could strike this rise down- trading prospects, for example, could very easily come back to bite the Dodgers- it is clear that this new era might last awhile.
Baseball is full of stories of teams that turned on their managers. In the early 1950s, for example, the St. Louis Browns were so happy that Rogers Hornsby had been fired that they gave Bill Veeck a trophy in appreciation (whether they actually did or if it was another Veeckian publicity stunt is up for debate). But rarely have there been revolts quite as slow-motion and public as the one unfolding in Boston, which is worthy of a comedy movie, a sort of reverse-Major League in which a team of All-Stars and colorful characters goes below even lowered expectations. Oh, and instead of Lou Brown, this team is managed by Bobby Valentine.
Although this clubhouse drama has been going on all year, it has once again been burst into the forefront thanks to a report by Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports that revealed that several major Red Sox players blasted Valentine during a meeting with club officials on July 26 at New York’s Palace Hotel (or maybe it was just some meetings about the overall poor performance of the club, but it seems like the accounts of it being a player revolt outnumber those accounts). This post has been created to summarize the details and provide levity to such a spectacle. Much of the information in this posting can be found in Passan’s tour de force.
(jump)
Quick: What’s wrong with the picture below?
Okay, how about this?
The answer is: Neither of them are correct. In fact, they both have anachronisms in them: the Ruth jersey, for example, has the famous “NY” logo on the jersey itself, something that they didn’t do until 1936, by which point Ruth was retired.
But the biggest lie on these replica jerseys: they have names on the back. To the casual fan, perhaps, this is not anything out of the ordinary. After all, teams have been having the names of the players on the back of their uniforms forever, right?
They’d be wrong. In fact, the first time any MLB team had names on the back of the uniform was in 1960, when the White Sox started doing it.
So, in other words, Babe Ruth never wore a Yankees’ jersey with his name on the back (no Yankees, not even those of the present day, have their names on the back, with the exception of some recent batting practice uniforms). Ted Williams never had his name on the back. And, quite frankly, if you don’t know immediately that a “3” on the back of a Yankees uniform means Ruth and/or a “9” on a Red Sox uniform means Ted Williams, perhaps you should be paying more attention the history.
So, for giving people a false image of baseball history and insulting the intelligence of devoted baseball fans, I hereby declare that having names on the back of retro uniforms is one of the Great Baseball Lies.
A lot of people read my take on Friday night’s yelling match between the Rays and Red Sox coaching staffs, and how I (along with ESPN’s Buster Olney and Mike Greenberg) thought it wasn’t over. It still might not be. But thankfully, last night was not one for fighting, but rather a fine pitching duel between David Price and Josh Beckett, that ended with a unexpected walk-off home run by Jarrod Saltalamacchia that sent the Red Sox from being a 2-under-.500 afterthought in the AL East to another one of the AL East’s five (out of five) teams at or above the .500 mark. Will it change the Red Sox season and send them barreling into the mad fracas that is the main hunt of the AL East? I don’t know. One game usually doesn’t make that much a difference, but it felt like the Red Sox got off the mat last night.
Watching the game on FOX’s “Baseball Night in America” (one of the few weeks of the year where FOX’s Saturday game is in primetime), it felt like it was the Rays’ game. The Red Sox kept messing up: missing cut-off throws, leaving runners in scoring position and making it seem like the Rays were winning by several more runs than they actually were. Which may explain why Dick Stockton took a second to actually say the words that the Red Sox had just won the game after the homer, like he couldn’t believe it himself until he had a few seconds to let it sink in.
They will be playing again today, as Jeremy Hellickson meets up with Clay Buchholz. It will be interesting to see what kind of game will be if. It’s close, it will be more like the Saturday game, unlikely to be too heated in any way but the play on the field. But if one team gets a big lead, I worry that it will end up more like Friday, and we could see some ugliness rear it’s head.
Huzzah, internet! Google used to scan a bunch of old newspapers, and although they stopped doing it, the ones they did before they ceased the scanning are still there. Thus allowing us to see such headlines as this beauty from the Boston Evening Transcript July 10, 1914:
Kind of different from the reaction of Bryce Harper coming up to the bigs, huh?
The Baseball Continuum 
