Baseball DIY

I don’t like to write about the current season, because I feel that that kind of discourse is rather disposable and riddled with emotion. But, you know, what the heck.

My three favorite teams are still alive and, to varying degrees, well. The Cardinals have the NL Central locked up, the A’s currently lead the AL West and show signs of preparing to drop the hammer on the Angels, and those pesky Nats won’t go away in the NL East or Wild Card races. The dream scenario is Cards-A’s in the World Series. They could totally play up the Mulder-for-Haren/Calero/Barton deal, with extensive profiles on the modus operandi of Walt Jocketty and Billy Beane. The only thing wrong with that is that Tim McCarver would side with Walt Jocketty, and I don’t want him cheering on my general manager. That’s just bad joojoo...And a little fashion note: I really like the A’s green jerseys. I’m usually against road non-grays, but this is an exception.

I saw on Baseball Tonight that Rafael Palmeiro has taken to wearing earplugs during games to block out the boos. Nothing says “I’m sorry” like ignoring the situation. It’s hard for me to believe that he gets more boos than Bonds or Craig Counsell (am I the only one who boos Craig Counsell?), and you don’t see them running the bases hooked in to their iPods. Well, I think Manny does sometimes.

Every year around this time, I get the nauseated feeling that can only mean that the NFL season will arrive soon. It’s not that I don’t like the NFL, it’s just that...well, it’s not baseball. The NFL and MLB co-exist for only a month or so, and then baseball’s gone, so, subconsciously, I blame the NFL for baseball going away. Nonsensical, yes, but it’s true. So in the grand tradition of saying things you don’t actually mean and whining about thing you can’t actually change, let me just say: I hate you, NFL. We were doing just fine without you.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum's Board of Directors approved holding a special election of Negro leagues and pre-Negro leagues candidates to the Hall of Fame in 2006.

You can learn a lot by visiting the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

When I go to the gym, I use locker #5, because that's Albert's number. If that one is unavailable, I settle for #3, for the Babe. If that one is unavailable, I scoop up #7, for Mickey. If that one is unavailable, I take #9, just because I don't want to walk all the way to #99, for So Taguchi.

Last week (or was it the week before; who can tell with the way time flows?), Scott Rolen decided to have season-ending shoulder surgery. The earliest you can look for him back on the field is Spring Training '06.

I'm kind of going through the same thing, but, you know, not really. Today was my last game as a St. Louis Union for the foreseeable future. My work schedule, which has already cost me a few games this month, renders me completely unavailable for the month of September. In other words, I'm done for the year, excepting a possible one-match farewell in late October.

It sounds stupid, but I really feel sad about missing the rest of the season. I feel like I should turn in my uniform or something. This season has seen us play our best ball to date (granted, we're in our second year of playing, but we just went over the .500 mark for the first time ever today), and I've really felt like a solid contributor to the team, on the field and off. Now, I'm on the shelf, and not even from an injury, but due simply to the reality of life-outside-of-baseball. I'll miss the time on the bench, talking with the guys about whatever we happen to discuss. (Today, we debated who the ugliest current MLBer is. Our consensus: Jack Wilson. Sorry, Jack, but it's nothing you don't already know.) I'll miss the butterflies that I get before every game, the satisfaction of not screwing up in the field, and the visceral pleasure of striking the ball well occasionally. There's more to playing baseball than playing baseball, though; the relationships you develop on a team are valuable and worthwhile, or at least they have been for me the past couple of years.

I hope that next year I'll get to play, because this extended offseason will probably drive me nuts. Playing ball is a good way to spend your time and make friends. I kind of forgot that for ten years or so, but I'm glad I remembered.

And, you know, I also want to play again so I can make up for my 1-for-4 day at the plate. That's just paltry.

Reading the recent post on Bo Jackson as "player of the day" reminded me that back around 1990 (yee gads...) I had that famous "Bo Knows Ball" poster on my wall. He was wearing football pads and had a baseball bat behind his neck, across his shoulders. The point was that he could play both and also have rock hard abs...I think you had to be a girl to really appreciate the abs part.

When I was writing about Jackie Robinson yesterday I thought of an interesting similarity between Jackie and Bo - both were more than one sport players. Jackie was an amazing baseball, football and basketball player and baseball was not his best game. He was actually (according to those who saw him play) a far better football player but he couldn't get on with a pro team so he turned to the Negro Leagues instead and started his pro baseball career.

Bo Jackson was also a multi-sport athlete and that was a large part of his fame, that he could do more than one pro sport period, not that he was particularly stellar at it. (The point was, he was able to make the cut.) I think we are so used to seeing one sport athletes, and only one sport athletes, that we forget how many people are really good at more than one. The pro schedule (and who knows what else) makes it impossible for pretty much anyone to play more than one type of game. See what happened to Michael Jordan if you don't believe me.

My Uncle Mike was a multi sport ahtlete - pitcher on the baseball team, center on basketball, quarterback on the football team. You would all know who he is if he had played at a different time instead of the late 1950s. He got a plaque when he graduated, not a scholarship. But my Mom says he was really something to watch, he was beautiful.

Mike Hurley knew ball, he knew them all.......

Jackie Robinson won the first-ever Rookie of the Year Award in 1947. That's probably somewhere near 109th place on the list of important things he did in his lifetime.

Career stats at baseball-reference.com.

Okay, my computer is back and fixed finally....thanks to the folks at HP for getting it all done relatively painlessly! In the meantime I've been reading The Jackie Robinson Reader, edited by Jules Tygiel (who wrote Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy). Anyway, it is a very well done collection of aticles, book excerpts and letters on Robinson. I particularly liked the sections written in Jackie's voice as it was his motivations and thoughts that have always intrigued me the most.

I have been thinking about Jackie Robinson a lot lately because of all the steriod chaos and questions about who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. I was watching the news a week or so ago and there was a one-liner about Rafael Palmeiro that really hit me hard. The commentator was referring to his drug test and said "Palmeiro has Hall of Fame numbers but will the test ruin his chances...." And I thought so that's it. All it takes for the Hall is numbers and the rest is irrelevant. No one cares about contribution to the game, it's legacy. Apparently if you hit a lot of balls then you have contributed in the greatest possible way; there is nothing more you can do then rack up the numbers.

That's all it takes to change the game.

And so I was thinking maybe I was wrong about the Pete Rose deal. Maybe Giamatti was wrong too. If it is all about the numbers and only about the numbers then Rose certainly should be in, hell any player regardless of his dependency on steriods for success or his coke habit or his gambling addiction should be in. Maybe I'm making baseball more than it is by resisting all of this. Palmeiro has the numbers, so by all means, let the man's legacy remain untainted by a silly little drug test.

But then there is this.

Roger Kahn wrote in The Boys of Summer, "In two seasons, 1962 and 1965, Maury Wills stole more bases than Robinson did in all of a ten-year career. Ted Williams' life-time batting average, .344, is two points higher than Robinson's best for any season. Robinson never hit twenty home runs in a year, never batted in 125 runs. Stan Musial consistently scored more often. Having said those things, one has not said much because troops of people who were there believe that in his prime Jackie Robinson was a better ball player than any of the others. 'Ya want a guy that comes to play,' suggests Leo Durocher, whose personal relationship with Robinson was spikey. 'This guy didn't just come to play. He came to beat ya. He came to stuff the goddam bat right up your ass."

Now that's playing!

And Jackie did it with the whole world watching, with death threats and vile name calls. With games cancelled because he wanted to play, with hotels refusing to let him stay there and restaurants refusing to let him eat. He did it with the weight of his race, with the need of his race, resting on his shoulders. He did it all because he knew that he had to in order to change the world; he could not give up because we all needed to be lifted by his achievement.

We all needed Jackie Robinson to play well.

Pete Rose just wanted money and as for all the steroid junkies, well their reasons for injecting poison into their systems are their own, but I'm sure they have more to do with cash and fame then making the world better and certainly nothing to do with making the game better. It makes me a little sick to think that they could be side by side with Jackie Robinson in the Hall of Fame; all of them equal in their accomplishments. It makes me sick and it makes me sad.

I just keep thinking we should be a bit better than simply the numbers, but then again, we should all be better than war and famine and rampant disease as well.

Excuse me while I read some more of Mr. Kahn; I need to remember why all of this matters again.

During a very specific time in my childhood, call it 1989, the two coolest athletes in my world were Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson. Imagine my horror when, flipping through a Bill James book recently, the author described Bo Jackson as "not that great" of a baseball player. I looked up his stats recently; it turns out Bill was right. Put it this way: the three most statistically similar players to Bo are Pat Burrell, Nick Esasky, and Ron Kittle. I know it was cool that Bo played pro baseball and football, but it kind of goes back to my theory about switch-hitters: if you're obviously better on one side of the plate than the other, why not just hit from that side all of the time?

Trivia: Bo Jackson led the American League at least once in which of the following categories:
A) Doubles
B) Stolen bases
C) GIDP
D) Strikeouts

Highlight the line below for the answer.
D. He struck out 172 times in 1989, which also happens to be the year that he set a career mark for home runs in a season (32).

Complete career stats at baseball-reference.com.

...my viewing of Rear Window last night may have influenced my thought process here...

At this moment, the Royals lead the Athletics 2-1 at the end of four innings. If the Royals can hold on (and there's a long way to go), they can begin to put this prolonged losing streak behind them and try to finish the season strong. If they give up the lead (and there's no reason to believe they won't), they can tie the AL record for consecutive losses (21) and maybe decide that, what the hell, the modern major league record of 23 set by the '61 Phillies is so close that only yella-bellies wouldn't go head and break it.

Which would you rather see?

On the one hand, you know that these guys' lives currently revolve around the fact that they haven't one since I was 24 (my birthday was August 3, and they last won on July 27). They have to talk to family, friends, and each other knowing that the baseball world thinks they're the worst team around, and rightly so. For their emotional and psychological well-being, you want them to get it over with already and notch a victory.

On the other hand...wouldn't it be awesome if they lost, like, 25 in a row? It would be unprecedented, and you and I would have lived through it. We could tell our children, "Yep, I remember the '05 Royals and the myriad ways they found to lose during the Month of Morbidity. It was a gruesome thing to watch." I missed the Cleveland Spiders of 1899, but by God, I saw those Royals suck it up something fierce.

So, I guess it won't be all bad either way. It just takes some distance to realize how cool it is that the Royals are so wretched.

This one's for Colleen.

Trivia: Which of the following was never Gil Hodges' manager?
A) Walter Alston
B) Leo Durocher
C) Joe McCarthy
D) Casey Stengel

Highlight the line below for the answer.
C, Joe McCarthy. Gil Hodges played for Alston, Durocher, and Stengel (ranked 7th, 8th, and 10th, respectively, in career wins by a manager).

Complete career stats at baseball-reference.com.

I'm much better looking than Babe Ruth was (and I bet you are, too).

...be a good player (Albert Pujols, for example) on a bad team or a below-average/average player (say, Geoff Blum) on a World Series team?

I'd rather be the below-average/average player on the World Series team. Assuming I'm not so bad that they would send me down to the minors, I would have no problem serving as one of the invisible contributors to a pennant-winning ballclub. The first five seconds after my team got the Series-winning hit/Series-ending out would make the whole experience worthwhile for me, and I could carry that memory with me the rest of my life. Winning a World Series is something that you can share with 30 or so other people. No one can relate to the joy (I'm assuming he felt joy) Barry Bonds felt when he broke Mark McGwire's home run record. That's something that isolates you from the rest of the world.

Of course, there's the potential for feeling like a coattail-rider whose day in the sun is almost directly attributable to the success of someone/everyone else...But I'm ignoring that right now.

Most of the arguments I can think of for wanting to be the good player on a bad team are selfish. You get paid more, you get the attention, you get an undue amount of credit (or blame) for your team's on-field success...Is there any other reason to want to be Ernie Banks, as it were?

That's not a rhetorical question. If I'm missing something, fill me in.

I remember this guy mainly from the 1987 postseason, when his San Francisco Giants fell to my beloved Cardinals in the NLCS. A seven-year-old's memory latches on to anything having to do with sweets.

Trivia: Candy Maldonado never hit more than 20 home runs in a season. True or False.

Highlight the line below to find the answer.

False. He hit 22 home runs in 1990 with the Indians.

Career stats at baseball-reference.com

Jeremy Murrish finds this funny, and so do I.

The baseball world was stunned recently when the CIA disclosed that the St. Louis Cardinals are actually a "robot army," financed by the powerful Busch family and designed by a team of former Soviet cybernetic engineers. Their goal: to win the World Series, then conquer and destroy the universe as we know it.

This week in Major League Baseball proved time and again that professional baseball players are "people just like you and me" after all. That is to say, of course, that they occasionally just blatantly screw up. The Angels' Francisco Rodriguez dropped a return throw from the catcher to allow the winning run to score in Thursday's game against the A's; Arizona's Luis Terrero fell for the hidden-ball trick (as have I) in Wednesday's game against the Marlins; and let's not forget the absolutely, mind-bogglingly horrendous defense played by the Kansas City Royals in their loss to the Indians Tuesday night.

...which leads me to my own screw-up. For the past eight months, I have kept excellent track of my time in the gym using a handy-dandy thing called a "notebook." Every day since December 30, 2004, is logged either with a detailed account of my workout or a simple "off." This morning I arrived at the gym to find my notebook missing from my gymbag. It had not been returned to the lost-and-found as it had been a few times before. This was instructive, though; just like you can't always rely on someone else to catch a pop-up that bounces off your glove, you can't expect someone else to fix your problems for you.

So, in effect, the past eight months' worth of information is lost to me, and I will have to start from scratch. I intend to learn from this mistake and go forward with my mind fully involved in everything that I do.

I'd advise all MLB players to do the same. When I screw up, I blog about it. When they screw up, it's on Sportscenter.

Dan Gutman has a series of middle grade sports books out that have a great twist - time travel! I love a good time travel book and was totally addicted to them when I was a kid. The "Baseball Card Adventures" take the hero, Stosh, back in time to meet various baseball legends: Mickey Mantle, Joe Jackson, Abner Doubleday and next year, Satchel Paige. These are a great way to bring history to baseball fanatics who might not otherwise be big readers. And you have to love the sci fi twist.

Gutman also has a series on bowling of all things. He says he has written the only bowling/horror novel for kids. I'm thinking he's probably right on that one!

And I just got some pictures of my brother and his wife Stephanie in front of the World Series trophy! They were visiting the family in Rhode Island last weekend and the trophy was on display at McCoy Stadium in Pawtucket. So before the PawSox game they stood in line and got to take a half dozen pictures or so. This so rocks and I'm completely jealous! You have to love Pawtucket, for letting the fans reach out and touch a piece of baseball history. Go PawSox!

Maria Testa has a new book out about an eleven year old ballplayer who happens to be a girl. Some Kind of Pride is about Ruth DiMarco and her dream of playing one day in the majors. She thought she had a shot at going all the way until she hears her father say "Real talent. But I can't help thinking what a shame it is that it's all wasted on a girl."

Well.

I don't know how the story turns out but I know what I wish would happen for all those female little leaguers out there. Can someone tell me why exactly baseball has to be a boy's game? Can't girls field and throw and pitch and even hit just as well as most male players? They aren't as strong but they can be just as consistent. I think baseball should be co-ed...there, I said it.

And if you don't believe me then I dare you to go play a fast pitch softball game against your local high school team. I bet those girls kick your ass.

Two words for the Hall of Fame:

GIL HODGES!

GIL HODGES, GIL HODGES, GIL HODGES, GIL HODGES, GIL HODGES....well, you get the idea.

Erik, you are my new hero.

Several baseball titles have caught my eye recently, for very different reasons. Thomas Oliphant has Praying for Gil Hodges, a memoir of the 1955 World Series. This was the year the Brooklyn Dodgers won and Hodges was a King. Oliphant apparently includes not only a breakdown of Game 7 but also looks into the impact of the game on the fans. I'm such a sucker for baseball history that this is pretty much a must-buy for me, but throw in Hodges and it is impossible to resist. Doris Kearns Goodwin calls it a "small masterpiece" in a jacket blurb and she's no slouch herself when it comes to the game. Looks like a surefire winner.

Howard Bryant is a columnist for the Boston Herald and has already written a very well received book on race and the Red Sox. His new book, Juicing the Game asserts that owners knew about the rampant steriod abuse in MLB and turned a blind eye in order to lure fans back after the strike. They wanted McGwire, Canseco and the rest to hit home runs, no matter the cost, because the fans like home runs. This is shaping up to be the biggest book of the season and I hope that it achieves the kind of popularity it deserves. Fans need to reconsider just what the game is supposed to be about: home runs, or actual strategy and sport. This all reminds of hockey and the days when brawls and fights were the lure for a lot of fans as opposed to the Gretsky style of precision skating. The message in both sports was pretty clear: pick your game folks, and remember that you get what you deserve.

Which means of course that Canseco was all our fault. Crap.

Ever notice that, 90% of the time, VH1's programming consists of some variation on the "Top 10/50/100 Whatevers" theme? After a while, you see "Epic" ranked ahead of "Give It Away," Nirvana ranked ahead of Led Zeppelin, or The Soft Bulletin left off of a Best Albums of the Millenium list, and you realize that, hey, this feels pretty arbitrary.

That's kind of how I feel about baseball's Hall of Fame. The recent flap over Rafael Palmeiro's steroid use brings me back to one thought, over and over: even if he is inducted, will I really feel any different about his career? Isn't it really more of an honorific for Ryne Sandberg to be able to sign his name followed by "HoF '05" than a validation of his playing career? In the Hall or not, we'd all know that Babe Ruth (or, if you prefer, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays, etc) is the greatest there ever was or will be. By contrast, Ray Schalk is in the Hall of Fame, and it just makes me think "I wish I could have been the one not to throw the 1919 World Series; then I'd be in the Hall of Fame, without even really being that good of a player." I realize that any best-of list will include some head-scratchers, but sometimes I think it would be best to not try to make such definitive statements. Why not let the current public opinion determine the value of Joe Tinker, rather than try to instruct us (whatever the cost to the institution's credibility) that he's one of the best ever?

Another thing that annoys me (and that's all this is, my way of griping about something that I have no power to change) is the emphasis on statistical cut-offs to determine a player's HoF candidacy. Though the scale keeps sliding, it's generally agreed that 500 home runs and/or 3,000 hits for a batter or 300 wins for a pitcher are automatic tickets in. If a player hangs around long enough, he can achieve those numbers without ever really being the best for any stretch of time (to beat up on Palmeiro some more, he scores an 8 on the Black Ink test, while the average Hall of Famer racks up a 27), but he's still got the numbers. Albert Pujols has been, if not the best, then the second-best player over the last 5 years; if he gets hurt and can't play for the required ten years, his HoF chances are shot, even though his Black Ink score was 15 going into this season. The Hall of Fame seems to think that it's better to fade away than to burn out.

Audible sigh...

I'm just saying that "So-and-So: Hall of Famer or Not?" is a really boring, meaningless discussion in which I hope I never have to participate. If I had my way, and if the interested parties were eager to lose some publicity and revenues, the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum would transmogrify into, simply, the National Baseball Museum.

Let's focus on the game, not the celebrities.

The United States was tossed out of an international cricket tournament after an election dispute left the Americans unable to decide on a team.

The International Cricket Council on Monday replaced the United States with the Cayman Islands in the ICC Intercontinental Cup.

Ouch. The Cayman Islands. That's like being replaced by Kirstie Alley.

Editor's Note: I tried (and failed) to find out how many players are needed to field a cricket team so I could write something along the lines of "Anyone else surprised that there are x Americans who even know how to play cricket?" What I did find was, you guessed it, Fantasy Cricket.

Last night I grabbed a bat (wooden, of course) and a bag of balls. I walked down to the Little League field a few minutes from my house. Playing on Little League fields makes me feel like a Brobdingnagian. For the next half-hour or so, I just tossed and swatted to my heart's content. With no one else watching, I tried hitting with the wrong end of the bat and failed miserably. But it didn't matter. It was just me and the game, and we both already knew that I wasn't Babe Ruth.

That didn't stop me from calling my shot a few times, though.

You know, lots of things were better when I was a kid: cartoons, the environment, my hairline. One back-in-my-day thing I had forgotten floated to the surface of my memory when, last week, I saw a commercial for a TV show hosted by Harold Reynolds that taught baseball fundamentals to kids. The commercial flashed shots of current MLB players running drills with Little League kids on a sun-soaked, chlorophyllicious field. Then the commercial cut to ordering instructions for this home video.

Come on. When I was a kid, there was a show in which contemporary MLB players ran drills with Little League kids on a sun-soaked, chlorophyllicious field, and I watched it and loved it, though I can't remember its name right now ("I think that would be "The Baseball Bunch," says the wicked-smart Jeremy "Grizzly" Murrish). I envied the kid who got to play catch with Ozzie Smith or shag fly balls from Tony Gwynn. Tell me why there can't be a show like this on television (either a big-four network or on cable) now, especially when seemingly everyone agrees that kids need to be brought back to the game. Why does it have to be a home video that kids have to remember to try to convince their parents to buy for them?

If you want to bring kids back, and you think that television is a large reason why kids have little interest in it, why not put one and one together and invade their small screen world? And why price some kids out of a love for the game? Not every family has 20 bucks to drop on a video hosted by Harold Reynolds. ESPN or ESPN2 definitely could use some quality programming like this to fill the time currently reserved for Teammates or Dream Job.