Baseball Books

Another one I ran across that looked pretty cool was something called 9 Innings by Daniel Okrent. Basically, its a pitch-by-pitch, inning-by-inning account of a 1982 regular season game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltimore Orioles, with lots of back story woven in about the players, managers, and owners (including one Bud Selig). I read till about two outs in the top of the first and witnessed a Lenn Sekata leadoff homer off of Bob McClure. It reads somewhat like it's aimed at the baseball novice, but it's not too dumbed down to be enjoyable.

The Neyer Lineups book is well worth getting too, years of bathroom enjoyment to be had.

Seriously Morbs. Years? There aren't that many photos in the book.

Neyer & James on ESPN chat yesterday:

http://proxy.espn.go.com/chat/chatESPN?event_id=5430

One of the Ed Linn books James recommends, the co-authored autobio "Veeck as in Wreck," I recall from my dad's bookshelf; probably the first baseball book I read most of, succeeded by Roger Kahn's profanely nostalgic "The Boys of Summer" on the '50s Dodgers (and Kahn's '30s/40s boyhood).

Oh, I hear ya. The men in my family call it the "Oldbury Curse".

Maybe this was TMI.

I am getting started on "The Boys Of Summer" (morbius' recommendation). it's a little bit more sepia toned but i like it so far.

as for flip open and read baseball books, every fan should own a copy of james' NHBA. am i the only person here who has a copy? i hawk it at every opportunity everywhere because i'm sure it would appeal to anyone with an interest in the game.

so "profanely nostalgic" is a compliment?? i guess i read that differently.

I saw a new book at Barnes & Noble following a season in the Cape Cod League, but I'll wait to take a chance on it in paperback.

the cape cod league has always fascinated me, the "summer in maine" aspect of it as much as anything else.

'49 is U&K if you're a Yankees fan. He paints a really nice portrait of Joe D., which may or may be complete BS, but I prefer to believe it's true.

I'll big up Ball Four and the Halberstam books, and add Tom Adelman's The Long Ball, which is about the '75 season (ostensibly it's about the Series, but it really rambles through the season like one of those four-page SI pre-playoffs recaps, except book-length). I've also got this big monstrosity called The Baseball Chronicle -- I can't see from here who the publisher is -- that sold cheap at the discount tables at Barnes & Noble and covers highlights year by year up to ... 2001, I think, maybe 2002.

I have The Physics of Baseball sitting on my desk waiting to be read, but it's still waiting.

Ken Burns' book doesn't seem like it's actually meant to be read, so I suppose it's a good baseball coffeetable book.

Spaceman's Little Red Sox Book is fun -- I keep meaning to buy it, but just ... well, read a chapter or two at a time in the bookstore, to be honest. It's pretty slim.

And I've only read excerpts of and articles by Roger Angell, but he seems worth picking up.

You said in the other thread someone gave you "Win Shares." Man, that's one James book I knew was NOT for me -- too much pure theory. And he said in the ESPN chat this week "I made four significant mistakes in the design of Win Shares; four that I know of. I am making notes about a next-generation of Win Shares..." So why lay out $20 for a work in progress?

Like I was telling h at the park last night, a friend reports "The Bad Guys Won" is worth it just for dumb ballplayer anecdotes, and the excerpt I read involving the Animal House destruction of the post-pennant-winning charter flight out of Houston (complete with puking wives) was good Flushing Confidential stuff. Nothing about Keith Hernandez's rumored liaison with the San Diego Chicken, alas.

I kind of figured Halberstam's books leaned toward the fiction end when it comes to actual facts, but it doesn't bother me that much.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312322224/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_1/002-5408102-5480027

Filled with stuff I didn't know, from the 1860s through 2004 (did you know this was the first year Topps hadOPS on the back of cards?), from Henry Chadwick (father of the boxscore as we know it) to VOROS McCRACKEN and beyond! Many of you will beshocked at how OLD many sabermetric concepts are... It's also quite hilarious how, in the Stone Age of computers, so many stat mavens worked for the military and used the mainframes to run their baseball numbers at night. Stuff on Strat-o-Matic andother games, the Elias Bureau vs Bill James war, STATS Inc, and how Oakland became the first on-base-centric franchise TWENTY YEARS before Billy Beane (via Sandy Alderson and Steve Boros).

(particularly recommended to Alex in SF)

Has anyone seen the new Bill James handbook? Coliseum Books on 42nd usually has it by now...

also, tips of books for someone who knows pretty much nothing about baseball, except for what i managed to glean from watching a few games on tv, would be appreciated.

Yes, it's good.

friend of a friend is putting out a graphic novel about satchel paige and jim crow...

http://www.cartoonstudies.org/books/paige/sample.html

the new Connie Mack bio by Norman Macht is sposed to be definitive.

I am enjoying that Neyer/James Book of Pitchers.

Got randyrolled yesterday.

Instead of the copy of Christy Mathewson's Pitching in a Pinch that I ordered, I got this.

http://www.amazon.com/You-Gotta-Have-Robert-Whiting/dp/067972947X

Oh! I just read about that book and "wa" in the Cubs spring program.

It said that cultural differences between Japan and America were responsible for the Giants' inability to retain Manasori Murikami after 1965. Apparently the MLB negotiators were more strict in their reading of the reserve clause, whereas the Japanese expected the "spririt" of the deal to prevail. The article was pretty brief but I gather that the "spirit" referred to was that NPB used to send "non-prospects" to the U.S. for seasoning, and when Murikami turned into an actual MLB prspect, they felt that he should go back to Japan, despite the literal meaning of the contract language. It sounds like Murikami (semi-) voluntarily returned to NLP, even though he technically could have stayed in the U.S. under his contract.

I guess it was only because Nomo found some sort of legal loophole in the standard NLP contract that allowed him to sign with the Dodgers in the 1980s. Perhaps that represented some historical cultural shift in Japan's attitude to contract. More recently they seem to have stood on the letter of contract (much to their profit).

It didn't explain the "posting" process that well. Apparently Fukudome didn't have to be posted like other recent Japanese players.

"Wa" (group harmony) is neat. Let us bury our tomahawks and have wa on ILBB.

Just read Summer of '49 -- was kinda hoping for a 50/50 split regarding Sox / Yankees nostalgia-tinted schmooze, & not back-in-the-day when-men-were-men Yankeeography action clumsily intercut w/ "these are fans!" anecdotes. (Unrelated: every time DH leaned on Triple Crown stats or W-L records, I rolled my eyes.) Some cool stories & quotes & stuff, but doesn't really seem to congeal as a book so much, and "the great DiMaggio" can go fart in a hat.

Also read excerpts of that O'Nan / King 2004 Red Sox diary thing a while back. Whatever interest I had in pro-RSN propoganda was totally squelched by that piece of shit.

NB: I hate everything. :p

the o'nan/king book was interesting early because that team did take a dip that looked like it would be their annual august swoon and o'nan totally starts ripping the team. but when they hold on and the playoffs it was too much even for me.

http://images.barnesandnoble.com/images/14260000/14268611.JPG

I read "Summer of '49" when I was fifteen or so. I found it a bit long-winded and boring. No need to revisit it, I guess? :)

apparently it's full of errors.

We're pleased to make two major announcements to the SABR membership and the baseball community at large:

1) SABR is now the publisher of The Emerald Guide to Baseball, and
2) SABR is making the PDF version of The Emerald Guide to Baseball 2009 available as a FREE download from the members-only section of the website (and be sure to direct friends and family to sabr.org so they can get a copy too).

Edited by acclaimed baseball historians (and SABR members) Gary Gillette and Pete Palmer, The Emerald Guide distills the 2008 season down to 586 fact-filled pages that contain the pitching, fielding, and hitting statistics for every player active in the major and minor leagues in 2008. The Emerald Guide fills the hole in the baseball record left by the 2006 demise of the Sporting News Baseball Guide and contains all of the same features and then some, such as team-by-team daily results, a directory of important contacts, and a synopsis of the just-completed season. A bound version of The Emerald Guide is available via print on demand at Lulu.com for $23.94.

Making the PDF of The Emerald Guide available fre to anyone with accesss to a computer is a direct way for SABR to fulfill its mission of disseminating the history and record of baseball. And you, our members, help the organization fulfill this mission each and every day. One of our objectives is for sabr.org to be bookmarked by everyone with a serious interest in baseball. The Emerald Guide offers a step in that direction.

SABR plans to publish The Emerald Guide annually. Gillette and Palmer also authored 2007 and 2008 editions of The Emerald Guide (co-published with Sports-Reference). Free PDF versions of these editions are also available from the SABR website.

Thank you for your commitment to SABR and its mission. We hope you enjoy The Emerald Guide to Baseball 2009.

Sincerely,

John Zajc, Executive Director

http://sabr.org/sabr.cfm?a=cms,c,2766,36,0

fwiw, i third (?) bellisarius and felicity's recommendation of you gotta have wa. it provides a lot of interesting history of japanese baseball even if it's bit dated at this point. it would be interesting to see a new edition taking into account ichiro, matsui et al on one hand and bobby valentine on the other.

anybody have an opinion on that somewhat recent dimaggio bio? i think the author was richard cramer?

huh. how about that...

http://www.amazon.com/Samurai-Way-Baseball-Impact-Ichiro/dp/0446694037/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1236859004&sr=1-4

has anone bought the Fielding Bible II? Froma BP interview with author John Dewan:

The one thing I'd bring up that was kind of fun, was the analysis of Nate McLouth and Carlos Gomez; McLouth won a Gold Glove, and Gomez didn't. Carlos Gomez had the most defensive misplays in center field, which is a characteristic of young players that we've found; other young players up there are Delmon Young, B.J. Upton, and his brother, Justin Upton. All of these players have more defensive misplays. But Carlos Gomez covers so much more ground, that it just shows through on the number of runs saved. The difference that we found between Nate McLouth and Carlos Gomez was amazingly straightforward. Simply, Gomez is covering ground in deep center field, where fielding a ball is much more valuable, than Nate McLouth, who covers more ground in shallow center field, where making a catch means that you're saving a single. Gomez, meanwhile, is saving doubles and triples. It looks to be that the biggest problem for Nate McLouth is that he should play deeper. He has good skills and a lot of good fielding plays in our system, but when we break it down between shallow, medium, and deep, which is something we did in the book this year, he's plus on shallow balls, and minus on medium and deep.

also measures Varitek as worst recent Boston catcher, lol

Yeah that was weird though cuz it sort of seemed like the return of CERA which seems very suspect.

The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 SABR-Sporting News Awards: Ron Selter for Ballparks of the Deadball Era; Andy Strasberg, Bob Thompson and Tim Wiles for Baseball's Greatest Hit; and Jim Walker and Rob Bellamy for Center Field Shot: A History of Baseball on Television. The winners will receive their awards on Saturday, August 1, 2009, in Washington, DC, at the JW Marriott, Pennsylvania Avenue during SABR's annual convention.

The Sporting News-SABR Baseball Research Award recognizes outstanding baseball research published in the previous calendar year in areas other than history and biography. The Award is designed to honor projects that do not fit the criteria for The Seymour Medal or the McFarland-SABR Baseball Research Award. The Sporting News sponsors the $200 cash awards that accompany the honor.

Ballparks of the Deadball Era is Ronald Selter's comprehensive study of Deadball Era-ballparks and park effects, in which he shows the extent to which ballparks determined the style of play. Organized by major league city, this fact-filled, data-heavy commentary includes all 34 ballparks used by the American and National Leagues from 1901 through 1919.

In Baseball's Greatest Hit, Strasberg, Thompson, and Wiles present the complete story of the third-most frequently sung song in America: “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” The book features countless photos and illustrations, providing a pictorial history of the song’s influence on the game and American culture. A bonus CD is also included, which features many rare and classic recordings of the song from artists such as Dr. John, the Ray Brown Trio, Carly Simon, and George Winston.

In Center Field Shot, Walker and Bellamy trace the sometimes contentious but mutually beneficial relationship between baseball and television, from the first televised game in 1939 to the contemporary era of Internet broadcasts, satellite radio, and high-definition TV. Ultimately, the association of baseball with television emerges as a reflection American culture at large.

Baseball America's top ten of '09:

http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/majors/book-guide/2009/269330.html

http://www.amazon.com/Big-Hair-Plastic-Grass-Baseball/dp/0312607547/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266884385&sr=8-1

Thanks, Matos WK.

dude's got a blog too!

http://www.bighairplasticgrass.com/

http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/01/baseball-historians-get-their-own-hall/

Anyone read this?

http://www.amazon.com/Empire-Strikes-Out-Baseball-Promoted/dp/1595581952/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269999008&sr=8-3

Started Fifty-Nine in '84 last night. It's pretty decent so far. A little too fond of sounding like a 19th c. newsman at times.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ebooks/free_ebook.html

Anyone have this coffee table book?

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/0711/neil.leifer.baseball.book/content.1.html

Fifty-nine in '84 was weirdly obsessed with the existence of hookers and the possibility that Hoss Radbourn's true love had been one

The Bullpen Gospels is basically a feel-good Ball Four. You get mentions of baseball groupies and drinking, but none of the gory details. Damn, I need to read Ball Four again.

Haven't read it but I'm guessing it's solid.

Beyond Batting Average
Over the past few decades, a multitude of advanced hitting, pitching, fielding and base running measures have been introduced to the baseball world. This comprehensive sabermetrics primer will introduce you to these new statistics with easy to understand explanations and examples. It will illustrate the evolution of statistics from simple traditional measures to the more complex metrics of today. You will learn how all the statistics are connected to winning and losing games, how to interpret them, and how to apply them to performance on the field. By the end of this book, you will be able to evaluate players and teams through statistics more thoroughly and accurately than you could before.

http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fStoreID=873874

RFI: a basic baseball book for my GF. I feel like I need to introduce slash stats before I can get all wonky. Also, she watched a little of SNBB w/ me last night and, say what you will abt J morgan, having super slo-mo shots of swings is v v educational.

basic as far as analysis or history goes?

Allen Barra, a Birmingham native, has a history of Rickwood Field out:

http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/majors/book-guide/2010/2610530.html

just finished The Bullpen Gospels last week. not a bad read. i preferred the lighthearted stuff over the more serious bits.

http://www.insidesocal.com/tomhoffarth/archives/2010/09/ball-four-more.html

Haven't read the piece yet, but thanks for the link. Along with James's and Kael's books, and (its influence long since dissapated) The Catcher in the Rye, no book ever influenced me more. Read it at just the perfect time, when I was the 12th guy on my high-school basketball team, cracking wise about the despotic coach and some of the lunks ahead of me. I was booted off the team within a year or two of reading Ball Four; not sure if that would have happened without a nudge from Bouton.

has anyone read "'78" by bill reynolds?

no.

John Thorn has an early-days history coming in March:

https://baseballeden.com/Home.html

im reading '78 right now. BF got me eight men out for xmas, that's next.

David Ulin of the LA Times picks his all-time favorites:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-et-0331-baseball-books-20110331,0,7729658.story

"The Long Season" by Jim Brosnan (1960). Ten years before "Ball Four," Brosnan published the first (and still best) baseball diary

I've never heard of this book!

Was there nothing good written after 1983?

I liked the Bronsan book when I read it years ago, but I find it surprising that anyone would list it rather than--or at least alongside--Ball Four, unless you object to Bouton's book for the same reasons Bowie Kuhn and Mickey Mantle did.

This is perfect -- I was just hunting for a good baseball book list (and couldn't really find one anywhere).

Ball Four is a tough read - the narrator is so, I don't know, unlikeable (and not a good writer, though why should he be). Have read about a third and have put it into the "not right now" pile.

I didn't read B4 til a couple years ago and found it immensely readable.

I've only read two of the books on that list in their entirety.

ie, Malamud and Angell.

tho I miiiight have read the Breslin book on the Mets a very long time ago.

the coover book is great but not really about baseball

Ball Four is a tough read - the narrator is so, I don't know, unlikeable (and not a good writer, though why should he be).

Majorly, majorly disagree. Unlikeable, maybe--I find Bouton very likeable, more in love with the quirks and absurdities of baseball than an underpaid, aging reliever barely hanging on with a doomed franchise ought to be, but I can see where someone might find him to be a self-obsessed wiseass. But as to the other point, I think he's a better writer than most writers. (How much credit belongs with Leonard Shecter, his editor, I don't know.)

Clemenza and I totally agree! Bouton is immensely likeable and a great writer. A lousy actor though. Laughable in the Long Goodbye.

No Eight Men Out? That's a very good book imo.

I couldn't make the adjustment to us agreeing, Alex...I think Bouton's fine in The Long Goodbye. Not an actor, agreed, but the guy he's playing is a superficial operator whose slickness is supposed to contrast with Gould's dogged, somewhat clumsy virtuousness, and by that yardstick I think he does okay. When he tells Marlowe at the end that that's the way it is, guys like him are chumps who are there to be taken advantage of, I find Bouton credibly slimy.

I can't stand the movie so I don't really like anything about it.

Surprising...Just the movie itself, or '70s Altman in general? Mark Rydell delivers a line that's on my short-list of funniest ever.

The movie. Although there are other 70s Altman flicks I can't stand there is plenty I love.

1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, written by SABR members Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg, is the winner of the 2011 Seymour Medal, which honors the best book of baseball history or biography published during the preceding calendar year.

http://sabr.org/latest/spatz-and-steinbergs-1921-awarded-2011-seymour-medal

Wow, impressed with the consensus on Ball Four. I should pick it back up then, huh!

I'd also recommend the follow-up, I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, which covers Bouton's half-season with the Astros in '70, his release, and the fallout from Ball Four (some priceless stuff on Bowie Kuhn). Not as good, but good nonetheless. He also wrote a book on managers that I read years ago and liked. There were chapters on Harry Walker, Joe Schultz (shitfuck, a must), Houk, etc. Pretty sure it was called I Managed Good, but Boy Did They Play Bad.

Bouton has a website where you can arrange to get books autographed: http://www.jimbouton.com/. I continue to think about doing this...it's a little pricey, but I think the money goes to charity.

for Ball Four fans:

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/ball-four-tracers/

So thank you all for getting me to stick with Ball Four. It's an awesome piece of work, insightful and fascinating, and Bouton comes across clever, compassionate and decades ahead of his time. His team-mates, for the most part, not so much! I definitely want to pick up the sequel now.

Shawn Green has a Zen-inflected memoir out:

http://mlb.sbnation.com/2011/8/2/2306220/shawn-green-interview

An interesting postscript to The Echoing Green -- Ralph Branca just found out, through Joshua Prager, that his mother was Jewish and that several of his relatives died at Auschwitz:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/sports/baseball/for-branca-an-asterisk-of-a-different-kind.html?pagewanted=all

Stumbled over this searching for a Merritt Ranew quote:

http://www.funtrivia.com/playquiz/quiz1704811385e00.html

20/25.

I'm reading "Ball Four" again and was looking up some of the players on B-R. Cheers on sponsoring the Joe Schultz page, clemenza!

(although there are MUCH better Joe Schultz quotes, IMO) :)

Thanks. There are so many to choose from. Knowing I couldn't get "shitfuck" or "fuckshit" in there, that eliminated about half off the top. There's just something about the absurdity of the roast beef quote I love. (I used to sponsor Fred Talbot's page, too, until a relative of his contacted me about giving it up.)

When you finish, NoTime, try the quiz I linked to in the post previous to yours--it's still up.

I got 21/25. I probably should have done better considering I just read the book.

Schultz never managed again, with the exception of a cup of coffee with the Tigers a few years later. I guess his year with the Pilots gave him a reputation as a loser that he couldn't shake?

http://img.getglue.com/books/big_hair_plastic_grass_funky_ride_through_baseball_america_in_swinging_70s/dan_epstein/normal.jpg

I must have been asleep when this came out--it even gets mentioned upthread. Bought a copy today, looking forward to it so much. (I loved Phil Pepe's oral history of '70s baseball a few years ago.)

Learned about this thanks to the above book. I have no recollection of it whatsoever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s4T_gypZDY

Two-thirds of the way through this--love it. Reminding me of so many things I'd forgotten: e.g., the '76 NL batting race, where Griffey to sat to protect his lead and had Madlock go 4-4 to pass him. And so much else that I wasn't aware of. Three examples: 1) That if you write Dock Ellis's name like it would be formally alphabetized, you get Ellis, D.; 2) Danny Ozark, as the '76 Phillies started to squander a huge lead to the Pirates: "Every Napoleon had his Watergate"; 3) Game 5 of the '74 Series, with Charlie Finley sharing the owner's box with Rock Hudson and Anita Bryant.

Yeah, this book sounds awesome.

I was looking up a Yogi Berra quote online today, and found the Napoleon/Watergate quote attributed to him. My guess: Ozark actually said it, but eventually every great malapropism gets credited to Berra.

http://hardballtalk.nbcsports.com/2012/09/17/tony-la-russa-holds-a-grudge-against-keith-law/

Enjoying most of this:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51364op%2BHbL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

The chapter on the draft and risk/reward is great; it loses me when they get into PITCHf/x, though, where it's like reading a dry textbook.

Good stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_fXNLNzNuk

on Jim Brosnan and The Long Season:

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/10/25/quit-thinking-you%E2%80%99re-hurting-the-club/

Neyer read the Piazza book so you don't have to

http://mlb.sbnation.com/2013/2/15/3991264/mike-piazzas-new-book-has-something-for-everyone

Found some good ones at a thrift-store sale today, all brand new:

MVP -- Robert W. Cohen (evaluates all the awards--looks to have a sabermetric bent)
Ty and the Babe -- Tom Stanton
High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for Fastest Pitcher of All Time -- Tim Wendel
The Stark Truth: The Most Overrated & Underrated Players in Baseball History -- Jayson Stark (going to start on this right away)
2012 Prospect Handbook -- Baseball America (I used to buy every Baseball America/Sporting News/Elias/STATS/etc. annual on the market when they were everywhere as remainders...the glut slowed down a few years ago)

I've never read Jayson Stark, but my impression was that he was someone worth reading. 40 pages into The Stark Truth, I don't think I've recoiled from a book this much since a Cintra Wilson collection I read a few years ago. I mean just him as a writer, never mind some of his over/underrated valuations. His jokes are so clunky and obvious, and he never lets up--he's got three terrible eating jokes in his Babe Ruth entry. And from what I've read and skimming ahead, he's got Kevin Brown, Tommy John, David Wells, Graig Nettles, Andruw Jones, and Bobby Abreu as overrated, and Roger Bresnahan, Todd Helton, Derek Jeter, and Pete Rose as underrated; putting my own feelings aside, wouldn't the general perception of those players be reversed? Lots of strawmen, too. Ron Blomberg is his #1 most overrated DH of all time...I remember Ron Blomberg--has anybody under 35 even heard of him?

Stuart Tanner on his new labor-centered book The Baseball Trust:

http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.com/Legal/News/2013/04_-_April/Q_A__Stuart_Banner_on_baseball_s_antitrust_carve-out/

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm101710363/pure-baseball-keith-hernandez-paperback-cover-art.jpg

This is terrific and can be had on the cheap. Watch two ball games with Keith. Great riff on the hit-and-run and inside pitching strategy.

Mathewson back on the shelves

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/christy-mathewson-and-the-thinking-mans-game.html

Re-reading Ball Four. Not for the first time, but the first in at least 20 years. Just got sent back to Vancouver--great as ever.

The one thing you can do now is check out some of Bouton's stories. There's one about both Tommy Davis (in the majors) and Phil Linz (in the minors) getting co-operation from the opposing catcher so they could preserve .300 averages for the season--in both instances, they get a hit.

I'll give Bouton a passing grade on that one, but just barely. He identifies the Davis season as when he was with the Mets, and sure enough, Davis did hit .302 that year, and went 1-3 for the final game. But it didn't come down to the last AB; he doubled in his second AB, then grounded out in the 4th, then got pulled. Technically, he could have gone 0-3 and still would have rounded to .300. More important: the story is told as Davis's old friend John Roseboro doing him a favor, but Jeff Torborg caught that game--Roseboro only pinch-hit after Davis was gone. As far as Linz goes, the only minor-league season he had that was close to .300 was .298 in 1959. I can see where minor-league stats might have been very unreliable then, and something got revised later on. Otherwise, the story is based on something that never happened.

print the legend

I was at the documentary festival this afternoon, waiting for a film to start, when the guy beside me noticed my copy of Ball Four. "Good book"--said he'd read it long ago.

Earlier, as I stood in line outside, I started giggling out loud at this part:

The kids beat the fathers 40-0, and Sibby Sisti said, "Forty runs, for crissakes, and nobody gets knocked down." And McNertney said he was standing next to Sal Maglie during the game and swore he heard Sal saying, "He's a first-ball hitter"--"a high-ball hitter"--"a fastball hitter"--and none of the kids was over four feet tall.

If you post on ILB and have never read it, order a copy tonight from AbeBooks or somewhere.

I can't believe you hadn't read it in over 20 years. I think I last read it about 3-4 years ago, but it's the kind of book I feel like I should be reading every year when spring training starts.

I saw Sibby Sisti at a SABR convention (before he died, as Yogi wd say)

That's great. Bouton goes fairly easy on Sisti, who's just there to qualify for a pension.

One thing I'm really noticing this time is how the book is like a blueprint for sabermetrics to a degree. First of all in a general sense--questioning conventional wisdom at every turn (I think Ball Four helped me get ready for the Abstracts--but also in some specifics. Bouton talks about how wedded writers are to a pitcher's W-L record, and how it doesn't matter how you're actually pitching--pitch well for a month and win nothing, then win a game giving up six runs, and the writers will be there to ask when you started to turn things around. Also, at one point, he talks about the mindset of a professional player, and how in a key situation he'll say, "I've been here before; I've succeeded and I've failed, and none of that has any bearing on this particular at-bat." You could easily translate that as skepticism about the idea of clutch hitters.

He ridicules a lot of dumb sports cliches but I wouldn't go that far. There are many 2 IP, 2 H, 2BB, 0 ER appearances that he calls "good" or "excellent". He pitches into trouble, escapes without giving up a run, and sees it as a job well done, which isn't really true, especially for relievers.

I was curious about that, so I added up the most basic totals for his excellent and good outings. (If you haven't read the book, Bouton has a detailed personal game log at the back, with a rating for each appearance as excellent/good/fair/poor.) The numbers are microscopic in my old paperback, so hopefully this is accurate.

In the aggregate, at least, his designation of excellents is spot-on, I think:

IP - 72.1
H - 33
BB - 19
K - 59
ER - 4
ERA - 0.50
H/9 - 4.11
KK/BB - 3.11

He's looser with his definition of good, agreed, but I don't think it's that unreasonable a description:

IP - 24.2
H - 22
BB - 8
K - 19
ER - 7
ERA - 2.55
H/9 - 8.03
K/BB - 2.38

Also, when Bouton talks about giving up hits throughout the book, he's often very specific about which ones were cheap hits and which ones were clean. Is that partly where all the work being done on defense right now resides? (An actual question--I don't know.)

Anyway, I think it depends on what sabermetrics means to you. If it means WAR and BABIP and UZR, then no, Bouton has nothing to do with sabermetrics. How could he? A player, much less a player in 1969, doesn't think that way.

But to me there's a direct line from Bouton to James in the more general sense I described above: "Everyone says this is true--it is actually true?" That's everywhere in Ball Four, just like in the Abstracts.

"is it" in the last line...if I manage to get through a post without a typo, other gremlins take over.

Holy crap, nice work. I checked my copy of the book, and you're right, there are some questionable decisions over whether to call an appearance "excellent" or "good" or whatever, but in the aggregate, his designations are justified.

I didn't mean that Bouton anticipated the use of complicated statistics but it's true that he tended to analyze his performances on a batter by batter basis, rather than just looking at the linescore for the day. An outing where you retire five straight batters but make a mistake to the sixth and he hits it out could still qualify as a very good outing, even though 1 ER in 2 IP might not look impressive. He certainly knows it's different than 4 H, 1 ER, 2 IP and getting out of a jam when the defense turns a double play. He also tracks inherited runners scored (and understands why it's important for relievers), which was likely somewhat revolutionary for the time.

I should have tracked inherited runners, too--that would have figured into his rating for each outing. The other big factor is the knuckleball. He tends not to penalize himself too much for walks, as one of the ongoing stories in the book is how he's trying to discipline himself not to give in and throw a fastball (which he doesn't have anymore) when he's behind in the count, unless it's a Dal Maxvill or a pitcher at the plate. He almost considers it a moral victory when he walks a good hitter on a 3-1 knuckleball.

Just loved the book this time around. Beyond the baseball, it's such a document of the culture. On the war and on race, Bouton's great. I'd give him a pass on the book's treatment of women--there's the crude sex stuff (usually really funny), yes, and I could see where that would bother people, but in the way he talks about his own wife and daughter, very thoughtful. The one area where it's typical of it's day is in its treatment of homosexuality. Not hateful or anything, just a very dated kind of humour. That only comes up two or three times.

jason grilli 'wrote' a book

guess i won't be too sad when his regression to suckitude soon gets him dfa'd

http://www.bucsdugout.com/2014/5/12/5706120/book-review-jason-grillis-hilariously-narcissistic-just-my-game

http://www.timwendel.com/images/SummerCover-210.jpg

Excellent. Wendel spends more than a third of the book on the world out there--I wouldn't want a baseball book on 1968 to do anything but. But he makes the connections back to baseball well. Example: I never knew that RFK's assassination was so divisive within MLB as to how it should be handled. Some players sat out the next day, most played; of those who sat out, sometimes management looked the other way, sometimes not. Milt Pappas was very militant, and after an on-field confrontation with his GM, he stepped down as player rep. A week or two later he was traded. No connection, promised the GM. Another: the Astros in to play the Cubs in August during the Democratic convention, Larry Dierker watching the chaos below from his hotel window.

Everyone knows Drysdale's scoreless streak in '68, but both Gibson and Tiant made at run at the record themselves. Gibson got to 47 innings, Tiant (whose streak preceded Drysdale's) to 41. A couple of big fights are documented, including one involving Tommy John and Dick McAuliffe: "...order was soon restored. That's when everybody noticed John holding his left arm. Afterward, it would be determined that he had suffered torn ligaments in his pitching shoulder." Good writer that he is, Wendel leaves it at that.

Great World Series at the end, and a couple of famous plays: Brock getting thrown out at home in Game 5 (Cardinals were 3-1 at that point), and Jim Northrup's triple in Game 7 to put the Tigers ahead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DU6jXgINHZA

Flood said he misplayed the ball and should have had it, Gibson and all the other players (both sides) stuck up for him. I don't know...I'd have to say I agree with Flood.

Okay, back to the present.

i read 'the art of fielding' chad harbach book, it is v good; is more a novel w/ baseball in it than a 'baseball novel' or w/e but its well done, maybe justifying its bidding war

Just joined a Facebook group devoted to Ball Four. For acolytes only, it would seem--as I scrolled through, spotted a post on the death of Greg Goosen's brother.

I've been reading a collection of Ring Lardner's baseball-themed short stories and they are really delightful. The You Know Me Al series and all the others.

Rob Neyer has something up on Ball Four:

http://www.foxsports.com/mlb/just-a-bit-outside/story/ball-four-jim-bouton-45th-anniversary-062215

i was just thinking about Steve Hovley the other day, baseball player who seemed to have figured out how to live:

Steve Hovley was dancing to a tune on the radio and somebody yelled, "Hove, dancing is just not your thing."
"Do you mind if I decide what my thing is?" Hovley said.
So I asked him what his thing was. "I like sensual things," he said. "Eating, sleeping. I like showers and I like flowers and I like riding my bike."
"You have a bike with you?"
"Certainly. I rent one. And I ride past a field of sheep on the way to the park every day and a field of alfalfa, and sometimes I get off my bike and lie down in it. A field of alfalfa is a great place to lie down and look up at the sky."
I sure wish Hovley would make the team.

One of my favourite guys in the book. Still alive--70. You've inspired me to sponsor his B-Ref page, with a quote from your excerpt. (Will probably take a day or two to get processed.)

Has anybody here read Jim Brosnan’s "The Long Season" or Jerry Kramer’s "Instant Replay", the two books mentioned by Neyer that predate Bouton's?

I read The Long Season a few years after I first read Ball Four. I vaguely remember that I understood why it was considered a precursor to Bouton, but that it wasn't nearly as funny--didn't try to be--and that as a critique of the game's inanities, it was fairly mild. Long time ago--maybe I'd like it better today.

I'm about halfway through Steven Travers' Tom Seaver book, The Last Icon. It's pretty good. I read John Devaney's Seaver book as a kid, so I'm familiar with the basic outline of his story, like the game in 1970 where he crossed up Grote, blew a lead in the 9th, and went into a tailspin.

Bizarre hype from Travers in describing that game:

"It was a terrible double whammy of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory; a sure 18-6 record on the road to 30 wins instead of now a 17-7 mark..." Earlier on the same page, he says that Seaver "stood an excellent chance of winning those additional 13 games." (All of this is predicated on Seaver's announced intention, before the season, to try to win 30.)

The game in question was the Mets' 118th that year. Hodges had switched back to a four-man rotation, meaning that Seaver would get 11 more starts the rest of the way. Now, if he doesn't lose that game, and then goes 11-0 to finish up--which of course is really easy to do--he ends up with 29 wins. So all he had to do was win 12 of his remaining 11 starts.

"Excellent chance," yes.

This Seaver book (almost finished) is something else. I've never read a baseball biography where the writer whines so much about how mistreated his subject was (particularly in regards to awards). Conceding that Seaver was one of those players (like Mays, Bonds, Pujols) who was shortchanged because of the shiny-object aspect of awards voting, this guy's positively vindictive at times, as in the ridicule he heaps on Randy Jones over the '76 Cy: "A soft-tossing southpaw from Brea, California, named Randy Jones of the San Diego Padres, a figure barely recalled by history who could also not carry Seaver's dirty jockstrap...Seaver was the best pitcher in the game before Jones arrived and was still the best pitcher in baseball five years later when Jones was 1-8, on his last legs."

Is this really necessary over an almost 40-year-old vote? Jones was 22-14, with a 2.74 ERA, and pitched 315 innings for a 73-win team that year. Seaver was the better pitcher that year, but I wouldn't call it lopsided or anything (5.5 - 4.8 for Seaver in WAR). He doesn't mention Jones in connection with the '75 vote, which Seaver won; Jones was 20-12, 2.24, for a a 71-win team. Randy Jones was damn good for those two years. With regards to '81, he actually says Fernando won a "politically correct vote, as much affirmative action for his role as a Mexican as it was for great pitching." (Surprised the publisher allowed "affirmative action" to stand.) That's another close call that could have defensibly gone either way. And for what it's worth, WAR gives it to Fernando 4.8 - 4.0.

Had the idea that I might write this guy (Steven Travers) via Facebook taking issue with his dismissals of Jones and Valenzuela. Probably not worth the effort: his wall is filled with hard-right links to Dinesh D'Souza, Trump, and lots of fringe hysteria. (The Fernando comment aside, I really didn't expect that.) Partly that makes me want to write even more, but I'll likely pass.

Found a 1993 Barnes & Noble reissue of Ball Four today for $10. Hardcover, perfect shape, with the plastic slipcase still on. When I opened it up, jackpot!

http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/cover_zpswmw9uhvv.jpg
http://i1059.photobucket.com/albums/t427/sayhey1/signature_zpsmb3qbjpt.jpg

Halfway in, I'm really enjoying Hustle: The Myth, Life, and Lies of Pete Rose by Michael Sokolove. Fascinating character, from this 80s baby's perspective.

http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/03/28/book-excerpt-the-arm-jeff-passan-tommy-john-surgery

Youth travel baseball has become at least a nine-figure industry, preying on parents’ insatiable desire to secure college scholarships and high-paying major league futures for their children. In 2015, Perfect Game held more than a dozen events for nine-and-under teams. The same year the U.S. Specialty Sports Association, a governing body for slo-pitch softball that worked its way into amateur baseball, ranked 30 four-and-under teams -- as in, preschoolers.

http://665880566.r.lightningbase-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/00000000-david-Duchovny-bucky-dent.jpg

At last received my preordered copy of Lindbergh and Miller's book about saber-running the Sonoma Stompers last year. I've only read the prologue, which is good.

http://theonlyruleisithastowork.com/

I'm thinking about buying this. Would love to hear more thoughts if you'd care to post any

it's fun; got halfway in about an afternoon of straight reading but I put it down bc work n such. very brisk read and am more interested in the expanded website offerings tbh

http://www.amazon.com/Class-Baseball-Everywhere-Lucas-Mann/dp/0307949753

this one is a good read^

i'm about 130 pp in The Only Rule, wd recommend.

I have learned

-players smoke weed and distrust tobacco smokers
-scouts refer to a prominent, sculpted behind as "baseball butt"

Feh is a hilarious character.

It's making the NYT bestseller list. Had a brief chat w/ Ben L last night, gave him a little grief for letting Sean Conroy throw 140 pitches.

RIP WP Kinsella

Kinsella's Iowa Baseball Confederacy is terrible, too...

― miloauckerman (miloauckerman), Thursday, June 17, 2004

can anyone confirm?

I saw Jim Bouton and his wife speak at the SABR convention today on a panel dedicated to him. He acquitted himself well and wittily, given the post-stroke hardships detailed here:

Bouton’s body was largely unaffected by the stroke. But his mind, the one whose pointed and poignant observations produced the classic memoir “Ball Four” in 1970, will never be the same. This weekend in New York, at the convention for the Society of American Baseball Research, Bouton went public about his brain disease: cerebral amyloid angiopathy, which is linked to dementia.

Bouton had a smaller stroke before his 2012 episode, which was treated immediately with blood thinner. That was “catastrophic,” said Dr. Alec Kloman, a neurologist at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Mass., and led to a hemorrhage in the frontal lobe. The hemorrhage dissipated, but in the aftermath, Bouton’s language skills were essentially wiped out. He had to relearn how to read, write, speak and understand.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/01/sports/baseball/jim-bouton-brain-disease.html

Nice to hear that. Re: Iowa Baseball Confederacy, I read it long ago, I wouldn't say it's terrible, but it is completely fucking nuts.

Just started Posnanski's book on the '75 Reds. Great intro, where he goes through the everyday lineup player by player--even now, not sure if there's been a deeper starting eight since (starting with Morgan and Bench, where you almost certainly have the best post-war players at their positions). Eye-opening: Tony Perez's signing bonus in 1960 as an eighteen-year-old out of Cuba, $2.50. I know about inflation, but...

Gleaned from the above:

1) Before the '75 season, the Royals almost traded George Brett to the Reds straight up for Tony Perez. Brett was 21, a second-round pick, and had just finished third in ROY voting; Perez was 32 and coming off a mediocre season. According to Joe, the Royals backed out of the trade. Maybe even more than a lot of infamous trades that were made, this tells you a lot about the thinking then about established stars (put aside that Perez was somewhat overrated) vs. young players.

2) The night before the 1970 All-Star Game, Pete Rose had Ray Fosse over for dinner. Never knew that.

The Jays are nowhere, my favourite players are hurt or hurting, the past beckons.

Something about 1975 I have no recollection of: the attempt to make a big deal out of who would score baseball's one millionth run. Communications being what they were then, there ended up being some uncertainty, when it finally happened, about whether it was scored by Bob Watson or Dave Concepcion (early May). They credited it to Watson (years later, they retroactively switched to someone else entirely).

Tootsie Rolls had a big contest around the run, with money and prizes to both the player and fans who guessed correctly. Posnanski digs up a quote from the Tootsie Rolls VP:

"I was glad to hear (Watson)'s a clean-living athlete. We have to keep the image--good for kids, good for Tootsie Rolls. I know he's not blond and blue-eyed, but he's my kind of an All-American."

I'm sure Watson was thrilled with such a testimonial...Odd to see the Reds presented as the personification of All-Americanism in the book (no long hair, no mustaches) next to the Dodgers (scruffy third baseman, iconoclastic closer). Not that the Reds weren't, but by the '77 and '78 World Series, the Dodgers inherited that role when contrasted with the Martin-Jackson-Munson Yankees.

Well worth reading. The afterword, which is partly Joe explaining why he thinks the '75/76 Reds were the best team ever, but which is mostly him explaining why he wrote the book, is especially beautiful. It sums up why Posnanski and James and Rob Neyer and a few others are my favourite baseball writers: they can hold two thoughts in their mind at once, and since one of them they assume you already know, they're okay with still writing about the other one as fans.

Good backdrop for the Dodgers' season. The Reds were 18-19 when they bottomed out mid-May; they went 90-35 the rest of the way, .720 baseball. Looks like the Dodgers will blow past them: 11-12 late April, 68-20 since, .773. Man for man, I don't know--depends too on whether you'd only compare them 1975 vs. 2017, or whether you'd pull back a little bit.

About halfway through the Jaffe HOF book. Another improbable feud, one I didn't know about, joining Abbott and Costello, the Everly Brothers, Sam and Dave, and Joey and Johnny: Tinker and Evers argued over a cab in 1905 and didn't exchange another civil word for 30 years. And this from the pre-launch-angle universe:

"(Grich) experimented with his swing during the spring, emulating new teammate Rod Carew's wrist action so as to produce more topspin, and raising his hands. Via Sports Illustrated's Joe Jares, 'He stands deep in the batter's box and holds his hands near his right ear, which he feels has eliminated his old uppercut swing that produced far too many strikeouts and fly balls.'"

new: Visualizing Baseball

https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/a-new-classic-in-sabermetric-literature/

has anyone read this?

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/18/robert-coovers-dark-fantasy-baseball-novel/

yes. it is very good. but it gets so dark it becomes basically.. what's the word ABJECT, and was difficult for me to finish because of that.

I read it a million years ago but I remember liking it a lot.

I held off on this because it was a little bit pricey, but I bought it today with a gift certificate (stupid thing was, I was looking at the American price on the back instead of the Canadian, so I ended up ridiculously overpaying anyway.):

http://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51vMbuQ-0SL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Rooted against them in '72 and '73, for them in '74. In '71, Vida Blue was probably the second player to ever really capture my imagination, after Bench. Vaguely recall my dad and his friend driving down to old Tiger Stadium to see him that summer. Checking his game logs, could have been his July start there. His line for three starts against the
(90-win) Tigers in '71: 24 IP, 6 H, 10 BB, 26 K, no earned runs.

Try again.

http://target.scene7.com/is/image/Target/52029217?wid=520&hei=520&fmt=pjpeg

i haven't read ned colletti's new book, but i've seen (surprisingly?) good things about it

I have only the dimmest memory of this, but the A's book has a fascinating chapter on Vida Blue's holdout in '72 (concurrent with the first-ever league-wide player's strike--cost them eight games). Finley was prepared to pay Blue $50,000, he and his quasi-agent (really an advertising man) wanted close to $100,000. Blue threatened to quit altogether, and took a ceremonial post with the Dura Steel Products Company rather than give in. It wasn't resolved until May 2, when Blue accepted the $50,000 with some extra money kicked in (some of it already owed to him) that Finley wouldn't admit to publicly. Most unlikely Blue defender: Nixon called him "the most underpaid player in baseball."

Hilarious how ill-equipped Finley was for the first set of arbitration hearings in 1974. Across the rest of the league, the owners won 25 or 33 cases--a combination, I'm guessing, of institutional bias and poor representation. Finley, though, lost five out of eight. The players would come armed with mountains of statistics (a few them were represented by Jerry Kapstein, the Scott Boras of his day; Reggie even had Marvin Miller arguing his case), Finley would pace the room and say things like "Mr. Reggie Jackson is a superstar...Gentleman, I ask you: what is a superstar?" When he was pitted against Ken Holtzman, he'd tell the arbitrator that Holtzman would be lost without Rollie Fingers; an hour later, arguing against Fingers in front of the same arbitrator, he'd say that Fingers only piled up saves because of Oakland's great starting pitchers. The suggestion is that Finley never recovered from the reality of arbitration, and just became (even) more and more erratic and resentful for the rest of the decade.

Do they have anything in there about Bowie Kuhn nullifying the trade of Vida Blue to the Reds?

Don't remember that...I'm up to the '74 Series; if it happened after that, it'll be in the book. (I remember the aborted trades to the Yankees and Red Sox in '75, but not the Reds.)

Disconnect. When Hunter left before the '76 season, the A's tried to replace him with a 20-year-old Mike Norris. After two brilliant April starts--a complete-game three-hitter against the White Sox, followed by one hit over seven innings against KC--he came up lame in his third start and was shut down for surgery.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/gl.fcgi?id=norrimi01&t=p&year=1975

I completely associate Norris with the Henderson-Martin A's of the early '80s. Had no idea he was around so early.

In that '74 Series (five games), the A's used five pitchers in total. The Dodgers used six. This year, the two teams combined to use 24 pitchers. (Obviously, two extreme cases of a general trend.)

http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/1974_WS.shtml

(That should say that Hunter left before the '75 season, not '76.)

70s baseball is the shiznit. I've thought about what some 70s version 'extended' modern playoffs where 4 teams from each league met in those seasons instead of just the 2 division leaders for each league would have been like.

Crazy thing about Mike Norris: wrapped up in 1983, then made a brief comeback in 1990(!!!)

His 1980 season was terrific but those 24 complete games probably destroyed his career.

Billy Martin completely f'ed those guys arms on that A's team in 80/81. They had the makings for a great rotation for long term and he just ran in them all into the ground.

it's crazy to think how much pitching has evolved since then. look at rick langford. his K/9 in 1980 was 3.17!! but back then he managed to go 19-12 and pitch 290 innings. wtf

in 1981, the strike-shortened season, Langford made only 24 starts but had 18(!) complete games!

I don't know if evolved as just as much as changed. I figure some guys have the durability to throw that crazy amount of innings and some do not. Even then, the whole complete game thing with that A's team was considered a bit unique. There was a Sports Illustrated cover and lead about that rotation.

earlnash otm, it's like someone paid Martin to destroy those guys.

One thing I noticed reading the book that hasn't changed--at least in terms of those '70s A's--was the quick hook during the post-season. If Holtzman or Blue or Odom (a little less so with Hunter) got into any kind of trouble early in the game--say a couple of runs and a couple of baserunners--there was no hesitation to send Knowles or Lindblad or someone else out there in the third inning. Holtzman had a running feud with Alvin Dark over this.

Sad in a "Campaigner," even-Richard-Nixon-has-got-soul way: when Finley died in 1996, only two ex-A's--Reggie and Hunter, the two guys he screwed over the worst (with the possible exception of Mike Andrews)--showed up at the funeral.

Earl: Blue's overruled sale to the Reds turns up in passing (happened during the '77 meltdown).

I'd have to conclude after finishing the book that Finley was an even more volatile and erratic bully than Steinbrenner (but who did help bring a handful of innovations to the game, and also was the only owner who really understood what free agency was going to mean for the owners; his suggestion that every player be declared a free agent at the end of the season would have indeed kept power with the owners).

Kids in my neighborhood back in the early 80s were huge baseball geeks. We all had copies of "Who's Who in Baseball" or "Street and Smith" and during those early 80s years we played homerun derby or tennis ball (in the neighborhood) along with watching Cubs and Braves games all the time, since they were always on TV.

My neighbor Tobey his dad was a huge A's fan and had one of those huge early 80s satellite dishes (RIP Bo Diaz) and had it to specifically watch west coast baseball like the A's or sometimes Dodger or Giant feeds. His dad got hooked on them when younger with the 70s teams, so trading baseball cards and the like, Tobey was the A's guy and we knew everything about them in that era.

We eventually invented our own game we called 'dice baseball' that we played all the time keeping stats and what not. Later on we got into the Sports Illustrated Baseball Stat game (never Stratomat), but I remember during a blizzard in probably '84 playing out lots of games with Tobey and my buddy Barry. Two would play the game and the third not playing would be kinda like the play by play guy.

Don't know what it was about those games, but there would always be some oddball player that would hit like Babe Ruth out of nowhere. I know Bob Brenly was one when we played those games that hit way, way better than he ever did on the field.

earlnash! have you heard of deadball?? i have played a little with my kids and a slightly embarrassing amount with er, myself:

http://wmakers.net/deadball/

Bought Keith Law's book on Boxing Day, also The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent '60s and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Law's book is good, although I did spend the first few chapters (on the old stats) thinking "Tell me something I don't know." And there's this condescension that runs through it, starting with the cover hype: "The story behind the old stats that are ruining the game..." Really? I'd agree that the save stat has had a negative impact, insofar as it negatively altered the way games are managed, but some player getting undue credit for his RBI count actually "ruins" the game? Or this sentence towards the end: "The battle is over, whether the losers realize it or not." There's a lot of that. Enough that you realize by "losers," he doesn't just mean the side that lost "the battle." He means losers. I guess I was really tuned out on the Jays for a few years--no recollection of his time with the team.

Jerald Podair's City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles is a superb historical monograph based on extensive, original research and brilliantly written. Podair delineates clearly the connection between the decision to build Dodger Stadium and the intricate machinations and alliances of urban politics. This decision ultimately determined that Los Angeles would henceforth develop economically and culturally from a centralized downtown core radiating outward rather than a decentralized conglomeration of independent neighborhoods. The result was the creation of modern Los Angeles.

https://sabr.org/latest/jerald-podairs-city-dreams-wins-2018-sabr-seymour-medal

Almost finished The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent '60s and the Los Angeles Dodgers that I mentioned above. Very good account of the Roseboro/Marichal incident from '65. The conventional wisdom is that outside events--the Watts riots, political chaos in Marichal's Dominican Republic--were very much weighing on everyone, but the author says it was much more the simple fact of how much the Dodgers and Giants hated each other. Sad: the event dogged Roseboro (the hero) and Marichal (the villain) for the rest of their careers and beyond. But the players eventually made their peace--everyone said Marichal's actions were completely at odds with the kind of person he was--and Marichal ended up as an honorary pallbearer at Roseboro's funeral.

http://s.abcnews.com/images/Sports/espnapi_dm_150820_MLB_Dodgers_Giants_baseball_brawl_wmain.jpg

As good as the book is on capturing the team and the decade, it's kind of awkwardly old-fashioned on player evaluation. Example: the author, without explicitly saying so, seems to think Maury Wills should be in the HOF--which, unless you give him a thousand bonus points as an innovator, is a stretch, to say the least. Noticed something interesting when I looked up how Wills did in balloting, though. In 1978, both he and Mazeroski came onto the ballot; Wills drew around 30% support, Mazeroski 6%. Sure was some drastic re-evaluation around the corner.

a glance down the mvp list suggests that wills' mvp was one of two to go to a hitter with an OPS+ under 100 -- the other being marty marion during the war

(tbf, fangraphs gives wills a 103 wRC+ for 1962)

Trying to project yourself into the moment, I can sort of see why writers voted for Wills: he broke a record, he was the acknowledged team leader, he scored 130 runs, MVP voters loved middle infielders back then. Obviously he wasn't the MVP--Mays, Robinson, and Aaron all had epic years. About the best you can say looking at it today is that he may have been the best pick out of the second-tier candidates.

Wes Parker's story is fascinating--as is, as the book points out, his inclusion on this, the one name out of nine guaranteed to elicit puzzlement.

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/legendary/All_Time_Gold_Glove_Team.shtml

On to this now:

http://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348440741l/6211199.jpg

http://www.bhcpress.com/publishImages/Books_Morgenstein_A_Mound_Over_Hell~~element149.jpg

It’s 2098 and the last season of baseball -- forever. After the ravages of WWIII, the once all-American sport is now synonymous with terrorism and treason. Holograms run the bases for out-of-shape players and attendance averages fifteen spectators per game. The only ballpark left is Amazon, once known as Yankee Stadium.

America, nearly wiped out by radical Islam, has established a society based on love. Religion, social media, and the entertainment industry have been outlawed. All acts of patriotism are illegal, and the country is led by Grandma. Heading up the Family in her home base in the Bronx, she works tirelessly to build a lasting legacy for the future.

As baseball historian Puppy Nedick prepares for opening day, a chance encounter lands him face-to-face with former baseball greats. Determined not to go down without a fight, the players band together to revitalize the game for one last hurrah.

But not everyone wants peace. Will baseball become the catalyst for WWIV, or will it save America?

out on march 29!

prod. steve bannon

America, nearly wiped out by radical Islam, has established a society based on love.

I feel like if I repeated this sentence out loud 1000 times I would achieve some kind of enlightenment

but I can't because every time I even think of it I start giggling

Um you guys you can read the text of this in Google Books and it's everything you dreamed of and more

When baseball writers wander astray (Bill Reynolds, Red Sox book above, writing about Bill Lee):

"The article caught the outrageousness of Lee, everything from his fascination with the British rocker Warren Zevon..."

http://watchtowergeeks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/jem-1.png

Great story from the Red Sox book (Bill Lee, who else?). In '75, in the midst of all the furor over busing--the book's almost as much about that as about baseball--Lee, a vocal supporter, got some death threats, and also a visit from the Winter Hill Gang, local mobsters who showed up at his house and threatened to kill him.

"We eventually ended up going out for pizza and getting drunk together, but it was scary there for a while."

Congratulations to Jim Leeke, Steve Steinberg, and Bill Young, who were selected as the winners of the 2018 SABR Baseball Research Awards, which honor outstanding research projects completed during the preceding calendar year that have significantly expanded our knowledge or understanding of baseball.

Leeke was honored for "From the Dugouts to the Trenches: Baseball During The Great War," published by University of Nebraska Press.

Steinberg was honored for "Urban Shocker: Silent Hero of Baseball's Golden Age," also by Nebraska.

Young was honored for "J.L. Wilkinson and the Kansas City Monarchs: Trailblazers in Black Baseball," published by McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

https://sabr.org/latest/leeke-steinberg-young-win-2018-sabr-baseball-research-awards

Roger Angell is 98 (!) today. This is my favorite passage of his: pic.twitter.com/jRvjIcI3Tx

— Emma Baccellieri (@emmabaccellieri) September 19, 2018

podcast

https://baseballbythebook.libsyn.com/

Saw two today I really want to read:

http://dellioandwoods.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/split.jpg?w=450
http://dellioandwoods.files.wordpress.com/2018/09/1976.jpg?w=450

I don't remember the '76 season being as memorable as '75 or '77, but Epstein's '70s book was really good, so I'm sure he'll turn up lots I've forgotten or never knew. Stuff I do remember: Fidrych, the AL batting race, Sparky Anderson's condescension towards Munson after the World Series.

i feel like being a fan in the '70s would have made for some good times. i'm too young to remember anything from the '70s (43 yrs old here) beyond a faint awareness of peak '70s baseball guys Dave Kingman and Bill Buckner (i grew up near Chicago), I just remember that I started watching the Cubs in 1982 -- rookie year Sandberg, Leon Durham hitting what seemed like a million home runs (uh, 22), and as a kid my favorite player was Bump Wills because...his name was Bump. Also I very faintly remember people talking up a young OFer named Mel Hall...oops.

Hundred pages into Stars and Strikes, really enjoying it. The '70s are still (and I guess always will be) my favourite decade for baseball. Obviously, nostalgia is a big part of that, but I'd also agree with something James once wrote, that the decade was a perfect mix of a whole bunch of different approaches to the game. Lots of 40+ HR guys, topped by Foster's 52 in '77; Carew threatened .400 more than once, and there was an endless assortment of other speedy, high-average players like Garr and Templeton and Rivers (many of whom don't fare well using modern metrics, but they were fun and exciting at the time); historically flashy seasons by starters (Carlton, Blue, Guidry), and the beginnings of the modern closer (bad for the game from this vantage point, but Marshall and McGraw and Hrabosky and Gossage and Fingers were all memorable). That was the biggest thing--so many characters. Don't have the book beside me, but there's this little detour about John Montefusco ("The Count," 1975's ROY) getting a big raise the next year and hosting a party at the San Francisco Playboy Club that kind of sums up the decade for me. Again, not cool by today's standards. I know.

Wasn't aware of (or, more like, had forgotten) some of the backstage drama over Toronto getting a franchise. The two leagues were fighting over the city at one point; the AL had given them the team after the whole Giants thing fell through, at which point the NL decided they wanted both Toronto and Washington, so they tried to block it. Meanwhile, the Seitz-Messersmith-McNally case was working its way through the courts, and Marvin Miller complained that the owners were so fixated on the Toronto issue, it was hard to get them to the table for negotiations.

One other thing that made it a great decade: a bunch of memorable WS.

1970 - only 5 games, but legendary defense from Brooks Robinson
1971 - 7 games, Pirates come back from 3-1 deficit, Clemente
1972 - 7 games, first A's title
1973 - 7 games, wild A's win over the barely .500 Mets
1974 - 5 games; one of two lousy Series
1975 - 7 games, on the short list of greatest-ever
1976 - 4 games, the other lousy Series
1977 - 6 games, Bronx Zoo, Reggie's 3 in a row
1978 - 6 games, more of the same, Welch strikes out Reggie
1979 - 7 games, Pirates come back from 3-1 (again), We Are Family

Seven great ones for sure, maybe eight, depending upon how you rate the Brooks Robinson Show. Sad and embarrassed to say I didn't watch the '79 Series--pretentious first-year university student who had put baseball behind him.

I read "Big Hair ..." a few months ago and I'll probably buy this one as well. A lot of the stories in that book left me wanting a more detailed treatment.

So I'm heading to Houston in May and figure to include a baseball game or two, are there any must reads on Houston or Texas baseball?

Jim Bouton's I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, which covers his '70 season with the Astros. (He's in Houston for part of Ball Four, too.) "It Makes a Fellow Proud to Be an Astro" is a basic text.

Now, the Astros are a team that likes to go out on the town,
We like to drink and fight and fuck till curfew comes around
Then it's time to make the trek,
We better be back to buddy's check,
It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

Now, Edwards is our catcher and he's really No. 1,
Dave Bristol said he drinks too much and calls some long home runs,
But we think John will be all right,
If we keep him in his room at night,
It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

Now, our pitching staff's composed of guys who think they're pretty cool,
With a case of Scotch, a greenie and an old beat-up whirlpool,
We'll make the other hitters laugh,
Then calmly break their bats in half,
It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

Now, Harry Walker is the one that manages this crew,
He doesn't like it when we drink and fight and smoke and screw,
But when we win our game each day,
Then what the fuck can Harry say?
It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

(Not a lot to do with George Springer, though, if that's more what you're looking for.)

Sounds ideal thanks! will let you know how I get on with it

Didn't know a thing about this till just now. Rob Neyer's a great writer.

http://i.harperapps.com/covers/9780062853615/x400.jpg

(It uses an Astros-A's playoff game from last year as a snapshot of "the myriad ways in which Major League Baseball has changed over the last few decades.")

that's one crazy guitar chord

that's one crazy guitar chord

you can say that again!

From the Dan Epstein 1976 book: when the Angels brought Tommy Davis out of retirement in June, he was working as a promo guy for Casablanca Records (just taking off with Destroyer and "Love to Love You Baby"). Dick Williams would catch him shaving and making phone calls between innings. (For some truly inscrutable MVP support, look at Davis's 10th place finish in '73. He was a DH who slugged under .400.)

Neyer is the guest on the latest EW podcast (2nd half)

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/effectively-wild-episode-1291-power-ball-to-the-people/

A couple more from Epstein (there's no end to them).

Long relief: Dick Tidrow relieves Ed Figueroa in the 7th inning of a 4-4 game vs. the Twins. He pitches 10.2 innings, gives up four hits and no runs.

Most highbrow promotion ever: Bill Veeck's "Ragtime Night," where they give away 10,000 copies of E.L. Doctorow's novel.

Two things I took away from the Epstein book:

1) How contentious player-manager relationships could be through the '70s. It was such a regular thing for players to badmouth their managers publically. Most of the managers were still old-school autocrats, and they'd often try to enforce dress codes and haircuts and whatever they felt like; on top of that, big money was starting to creep in, baseball was catching up to the contentiousness of the '60s, and managers fought (and resented) that. You hardly ever hear about player-manager friction anymore. (I don't think, anyway--am I wrong on that?) Managers had to adapt. I don't know who the last old-school-type manager was...Pinella?

2) That, in his own bumbling way--and based on personal vendetta--Kuhn might have accidentally made the right call on Charlie Finley's rebuked fire sale. (That's my opinion, not Epstein's.) Legally, Kuhn had no standing whatsoever--as Finley pointed out (to no avail), owners had been selling off players forever. But this was just as free agency was about to kick in. I wonder if it would have been too much shock to the system all at once. I can see where all the other owners, panicked over the loss of the reserve clause, might have followed Finley's lead and automatically tried to sell anybody and everybody playing out his contract (partly as a punitive measure). I don't know--but I can see where player movement for those first couple of years might have been so drastic that teams would have been unrecognizable from year to year. Everything would have sorted itself out soon enough, I suppose, but, to use that deathless phrase, I'm not sure if selling off Blue, Fingers, and Rudi would have been in the best interests of the game, at least in the short term.

Let's go with revoked fire sale instead.

Selig cancelled that loan from FOX to Frank McCourt that more or less forced his hand in selling the Dodgers (for $2B -- even when the bad guys lose, sometimes they still win). Legally it was questionable but the commissioner does have the power to do things in "the best interest of baseball". Finley didn't really need the money, but he liked treating his players as cattle, even more so than regular owners. Kuhn's decision can't be viewed in a vacuum, it was the culmination of more than a decade of the league having the deal with Finley's BS, despite the fact that the team was very successful on the field (the Dodgers made the playoffs a bunch of times under McCourt's ownership too). But I really don't think Kuhn cared about avoiding a "shock to the system", he just wanted to hurt Finley. Kuhn was way behind the times on every labour issue of his tenure, I can't credit him with the foresight of "easing" MLB into the free agency era.

Don't disagree at all about Kuhn's motives (I said as much in my first sentence)--he wanted to fuck over Finley, pure and simple. If it had been O'Malley or Yawkey or one of the old-guard owners making the sale, Kuhn wouldn't have intervened. I just think he did the right thing--or at least, at that moment in time, the best thing--for the wrong reasons. If that sale had gone through, I think it would have been a couple of years of bedlam.

Right, although I'm saying that even if the sales had been "bad for baseball" and led to a couple of years of bedlam (which I don't agree with), Kuhn would have made his move anyway because he never grasped what was good or bad for baseball in any context.

Started Jeff Katz's Split Season: 1981, the book I mentioned above. One of the big appeals of such books for me is taking note of major changes in the game. (Major changes from what seems like recent history--obviously such changes would be obvious if you read a book about Ted Williams or Cy Young.) Three for the few pages Katz spends on Len Barker's perfect game:

-- Barker was considered a hard thrower, sometimes erratically so; his fastball was clocked at 91 m.p.h.

-- Cleveland's PR guy had to get special permission from management to allow the Toronto Star's Alison Gordon into the clubhouse after the game.

-- The same PR guy arranged for the Today Show's Bryant Gumbel to speak to Barker the next morning (this had been the first perfect game since Catfish Hunter in 1968--it was national news). Barker cancelled because he wanted to sleep in. I'm trying to imagine a player today turning down a similar chance to (as I heard some YouTube analyst creepily say the other day) "leverage his brand."

A couple of show-biz anecdotes from the split-season book:

1) John Gavin, Janet Leigh's boyfriend in Psycho, was Reagan's Ambassador to Mexico (he accompanies Valenzuela when the latter gets invited to the White House).

2) Doug DeCinces was a cousin of Lisa Loring, who played Wednesday on The Addams Family. (I had no idea DeCinces was convicted of insider trading a few months ago...is he is prison right now?)

Neyer's Power Ball won the Casey Award for best baseball book of 2018. Has anyone else read it? I'd be interested in hearing what you thought. Honestly, I didn't like it that much--and I used to like Neyer's blog a lot. The baseball was fine, although it felt like a broad overview of very familiar terrain. The bigger problem I had was with the tone. Specifically all the exclamation marks. It was like the Seinfeld Jake Jarmel epsisode.

slightly OT, Neyer has started a podcast on the SABR site, it seems.

The premise didn't interest me very much, even though I've loved reading Neyer's stuff for most of his career. Maybe I'll pick up this book after all.

I finished reading Jon Pessah's "The Game", everything up until the fallout from the '94 strike is excellent, with a lot of cool insider looks into what all sides were trying to accomplish. Once he reached the so-called Steroid Era I felt as though I wasn't learning much that I didn't already know, but then again I was following much more closely during that time.

His fawning over the Yankees and especially Steinbrenner gets to be a bit too much. Somehow big Stein avoids catching much flak and is presented as this visionary figure who sees the big picture in ways that the other owners and even (especially?) the commissioner can't see.

Didn't know this was out there.

http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/books/el9lsa/picture27314104/alternates/FREE_1140/Pine%20Tar%20book%20cover

I guess you could get a book out of it if you pull the camera back far enough. Intrigued.

Found a first-edition Boys of Summer today, very good shape, for next to nothing. It will take the place of the stolen library copy Brian Masini passed on to me 40 years ago (I've been waiting for the Georgetown Library's version of Mr. Bookman to track me down ever since). I've never read it.

i tried to read it as a 9-year-old (or so, can't remember exactly which year) and was disappointed that it wasn't more explicitly about playing baseball. i expect that i'd like it a lot more these days

as is true with a lot of things, like say, brusselsprouts

Yeah, I think I tried at the time (probably 14 or 15) and didn't get very far. I take it it's not a book that someone that age is going to appreciate.

Same here. Should probably read it again after some thirty years.

just picked up that book via someone giving it away on a local "free shit" FB group, got it along with Eight Men Out and W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe.

I read Boys of Summer when I was 10 or 11 and loved it. So dirty.

https://sabr.org/latest/bjarkman-nowlin-grow-flagel-win-2019-sabr-baseball-research-awards

out today, from Lindbergh and Sawchik

https://tht.fangraphs.com/the-mvp-machine-review/

About a third of the way into The MVP Machine, really didn't know the extent to which these independent coaches/entrepreneurs were changing player development among big leaguers (I knew about Trevor Bauer a little, not so much about Justin Turner -- or that Marlon Byrd had jumpstarted JT's renaissance). Anyway, a must read. (You'll be surprised to read about the relevance of the hippocampus size of London taxi drivers.)

Bud Selig has a book out, and Ben Lindbergh did this interview with him where Bud made many of his classic dubious claims. Then Ben ended the show with Superchunk's "I Guess I Remembered It Wrong."

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/effectively-wild-episode-1400-bud-selig-speaks/

Great retirement gift from a collector friend: Joshua Prager's The Echoing Green, signed by Bobby Thomson. (My friend says he has a bunch of things from Ralph Branca's estate.)

Just finished Alan Schwarz's The Numbers Game. I didn't realize it's been around a while (published 2004) until I was close to the end--thought it was a newer book. Pretty eye-opening to find out how far back certain arguments and methodologies go back. Writers were complaining about fielding average (how it didn't measure a player's range) and RBI (opportunities not being equal) over a hundred years ago. F.C. Lane was working with linear weights in 1906. George Lindsey and Earnshaw Cook independently arrived at formulas based on situational matrices (outs/runners-on) almost 60 years ago. (I'd come across Cook's name before via Bill James.) My favourite stat in the book, though, was something someone came up with in 1910 to rank pitchers: winning percentage, batting average, and fielding average were added together, and Otis Crandall was determined to be the league's best pitcher with a 2.136 mark.

Books I'd love to have (checking around, they're either long-gone or unreasonably expensive online):

Ted Oliver: Kings of the Mound (1944)
Earnshaw Cook: Percentage Baseball (1964)
Harlan and Eldon Mills: Player Win Averages (1970)
Eric Walker: The Sinister First Baseman (1982)

I did find a PDF of Player Win Averages.

RIP Jim Bouton

https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/ball-four

https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/ny-jim-bouton-obit-20190710-lhcv7pgzwjdajlsdxprzzjszpm-story.html

sing:

Now, the Astros are a team that likes to go out on the town,
We like to drink and fight and fuck till curfew comes around
Then it’s time to make the trek,
We better be back to buddy’s check,
It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

Now, Edwards is our catcher and he’s really No. 1,
Dave Bristol said he drinks too much and calls some long home runs,
But we think John will be all right,
If we keep him in his room at night,
It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

Now, our pitching staff’s composed of guys who think they’re ‘pretty cool,’
With a case of Scotch, a greenie and an old beat-up whirlpool,
We’ll make the other hitters laugh,
Then calmly break their bats in half,
It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

Now, Harry Walker is the one that manages this crew,
He doesn’t like it when we drink and fight and smoke and screw,
But when we win our game each day,
Then what the fuck can Harry say?
It makes a fellow proud to be an Astro.

They should do a Bouton bobblehead where his cap has come off.

I found out about this NY Bouton event one day late:

http://www.fieldofschemes.com/2019/07/22/15085/listen-to-an-evening-of-jim-bouton-readings-by-five-writers-in-his-debt-including-me/

Found a used copy of this the other day:

http://prodimage.images-bn.com/pimages/9781600788215_p0_v1_s550x406.jpg

Didn't know it was out there. Often my favourite kind of baseball book: start with something narrow (a game, a season), and then, if it's good, widen out from there.

Saw this home movie footage of Marichal the other day:

On the hill with the Dominican Dandy (Part 1 of 2) pic.twitter.com/BTWaPYvdOf

— Flagstaff Films (@Flagstafffilms) August 1, 2019

That motion is incredible. I kind of missed Marichal--he was still pitching when I became a fan, but at the very end of his career--but I'm grateful I got to see Tiant, Seaver, and Palmer's deliveries.

because i like to dig, i found the game. i'm sure someone noted all this on twitter. this was the top of the 4th inning.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SFN/SFN196908100.shtml

There's footage of Gibson from that day too on that same Twitter page.

“I rooted against the team because my ego was in full control and if we lost then I could get out of there." Wow.https://t.co/JI6vr2FCBR

— Greg Rajan (@GregRajan) September 16, 2019

Covered Barry Zito on his first day in the big leagues, and good for him. What’s the point of writing a book that omits the truth? As Dusty once told me, “I’ll never write a book because I’m not gonna lie, and there are too many truths I don’t want to be public.”

— Full Dissident (@hbryant42) September 16, 2019

aw

Visited a friend today who, back in the mid-'80s, started a baseball monthly I contributed to, Innings. He had decent distribution, but it only lasted about a year.

Anyway, he gave me some old print matter (he's in his 70s), including some Registers and Dope Books (pre-PED) and Sporting News from the '60s, including a '63 issue with a screaming headline about the Giants' payroll about to exceed $500,000.

The most amazing thing he showed me was a copy of a Branch Rickey biography--forget the author--with an signature and a personal note from Rickey to whoever once owned the book (Martin bought it at a university book sale years ago).

Thought this was excellent:

http://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407428024l/586605.jpg

The basic premise is Dom DiMaggio and Johnny Pesky going to visit Williams in Florida just before he dies--but it covers their friendship since breaking in, along with Bobby Doerr, who couldn't make the trip. Someone on the Irishman thread said it was the rare American film that paid attention to getting old. True, but I didn't think it was all that insightful on the subject; this book is.

The back inside photo is of Williams standing in left field, with the scoreboard behind him; the board shows the Red Sox with 29 runs against the St. Louis Browns. Looked it up, and they actually had back-to-back games against the Browns in 1950 where they scored 20 and then 29. Never knew that.

Resumed The Echoing Green, the Bobby Thompson/sign-stealing book. Ralph Branca was his mom's 15th child!

Today’s job: Full transcription of 84 minutes of Rickey Henderson. It is hilarious, and when you know you’re fully engaged on the next project, Book no. 10...Man of Steal: Rickey Henderson and the Legend of Oakland. pic.twitter.com/z0fcRBlu49

— Full Dissident (@hbryant42) December 12, 2019

Where did the patented Rickey snap-catch come from? “Trying to be like Willie Mays. Started in Oakland. We had a pitcher who threw a no-hitter. First time was last out. I snatched it outta the air, gave everybody a heart attack.”
True: 1983, Mike Warren. https://t.co/LfSwV8ZPC6

— Full Dissident (@hbryant42) December 14, 2019

Reading Wayne Coffey's book on the '69 Mets. Seems out of whack: in 1965, 21-year-old starter Tug McGraw pitched 7.2 innings and beat Sandy Koufax.

When Mets owner Joan Whitney Payson attended the opening NLCS game in Atlanta, it was the first time she'd been there since 1939, when she attended the opening of Gone with the Wind--she was an investor in the film.

angell at 99: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/baseball-fiction-and-life-roger-angells-era-spanning-career-at-the-new-yorker

The baseball book of the decade, and probably more besides, is @CharlesLeerhsen's biography of Cobb. It is not a rehabilitation but a resurrection. It proves conclusively Cobb's first biographer told lied about him for money after Cobb's death.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) March 26, 2020

Will get this as soon as the price comes down a bit.

http://www.amazon.ca/Bouton-Baseball-Original-Mitchell-Nathanson/dp/1496217705/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=jim+bouton&qid=1588982354&sr=8-2

anybody read The Unforgettable Season?

1908 NL? Haven't.

i just got “The Glory Of Their Times” by Lawrence Ritter

"The Unforgettable Season" is great. Haven't read it in years and years, but its reputation is deserved (same with "The Glory of Their Times").

"The Glory Of Their Times" is sensational. I didn't realise it's an oral history. All these terrific stories of jumping trains and settling contracts at the soda fountain and outsized revenge plots and big, big outfields. I don't think I ever realised how big the outfields really were. I always thought the low home run totals for those days was all on account of the dead ball. But they were MASSIVE. Most home runs were inside the park. Look at the Huntington Avenue grounds!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/WorldSeries1903-640.jpg

They also really make you understand how low-class ballplayers were considered. I haven't come across anything about race, yet, but it's interesting that even in such a milieu, where white players were shunned from the nice hotels, even though they had money, mixing was strictly not allowed. I guess everybody's always got to stay divided.

1900-1910 was peak dirty baseball though. McGraw's Giants, spiking opposing fielders, a lot more on-field contact compared to today's game. Players had bad reputations on and off the field. At the time there were a lot of players were born to Irish immigrants, and those stereotypes didn't help either.

Tracer, there is or was a Glory edition that included the interviews' audio.

becomes a centenarian next month

So far as I know he is listening to baseball. But his eyes trouble him. https://t.co/Wn9IOwFy70

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) August 9, 2020

morbs, what's..... glory? a podcast?

Tracer, see above... Ritter's The Glory of Their Times

Happy 100th (tomorrow) Mr Angell

from 1962:

“This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.”

Wow...The Summer Game was one the first, I don't know, dozen baseball books I read. And even though I was 13 or 14 and too young to appreciate it, I actually did.

He is among the most readable of great writers.

What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look – I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring – caring deeply and passionately, really caring – which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete – the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the hap hazardous flight of a distant ball – seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

- "Agincourt and After," 1975

wow, that's great, and makes me want to read more from him. always interesting to hear someone try to explain why they care about sports, despite the all the obvious negatives (other people, mostly)

https://blogs.fangraphs.com/effectively-wild-episode-1592-the-roger-angell-centennial-celebration/

One thing I still remember is this bit from Earl Weaver, after the '69 Series (still have my copy...and turns out I quoted this in the Earl Weaver thread upon his death, so I can just cut-and-paste):

Later, in his quiet office, Earl Weaver was asked by a reporter if he hadn't thought that the Orioles would hold on to their late lead in the last game and thus bring the Series back to Baltimore and maybe win it there. Weaver took a sip of beer and smiled and said, "No, that's what you can never do in baseball. You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all."

Also fantastic is his long recollection, in the Ken Burns film, of Jackie Robinson getting inside some pitcher's head as he walked, stole second, and then rattled the guy so much he walked the next two batters and forced in a run.

(Next three batters, that should be.)

from Angell's Bob Gibson profile (1980):

“Well, I never really liked being on the All-Star team,” he said. “I liked the honor of it, being voted one of the best, but I couldn’t get used to the idea of playing with people from other teams in the league—guys who I’d have to go out and try to beat just a couple of days later. I didn’t even like having Joe catch me—he was with the Braves then—because I figured he’d learn how to hit me. In that same game, he came out and told me not to throw the high fastball to Harmon Killebrew, because the word was that he ate up that pitch.” Gibson’s voice was almost incredulous as he said this. “Well, hell. I struck him out with three high fastballs. But in any of the All-Star games where I got to pitch early”—Gibson was voted onto the National League All-Star squad eight times—“I’d always dress right away and get out of there in a hurry, before the other players got done and came into the clubhouse. I didn’t want to hang around and make friends. I don’t think there’s any place in the game for a pitcher smiling and joking with the hitters. I was all business on the mound—it is a business, isn’t it?—and I think some of the writers used to call me cold or arrogant because of that. I didn’t want to be friends with anybody on the other side, except perhaps with Willie Stargell—how could you not talk to that guy? None of this was meant to scare guys, or anything. It was just the way I felt. When Orlando Cepeda was with us, I used to watch him and Marichal laughing and fooling around before a game. They’d been on the Giants together, you know. But then Cepeda would go out and *kill* Marichal at the plate—one of the best pitchers I ever saw—and when it was over they’d go to dinner together and laugh some more. It just made me shake my head. I didn’t understand it.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1980/09/22/distance

(You get a few free articles; this should be one.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/04/mets-are-losers/618470/

Excerpt from “So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin’ True Story of the New York Mets—The Best Worst Team in Sports”.

no real excuse for why it's taken me this long but i finally read 'ball four' this weekend

and basically, christ what an asshole

bouton is smart and funny but nowhere near as smart and funny as he thinks he is, which is why he couldn't get more than two votes for player representative. he drips condescension for everyone except Marshall and Hovley, whom he's more or less scared of.

a number of times he's not wrong -- Maglie should've let him work, and someone should've caught him -- but he's such a prick that it's no wonder no one bothered

also his quote about his ex-wife's book was fucked up, like it was her responsibility to solve his 'grass' problem while also raising their three children.

yeah he was anti-war and anti-racist and he deserves kudos for stepping up at that time . . . but he didn't step very far

anyway it's no surprise that even the guys he thought he'd portrayed lovingly -- like manager joe schultz -- hated him for it

The other players know he's writing a book and don't trust him because of it, that's clear from the few times that he breaks the fourth wall. Obviously he didn't care about being seen as a loner who would sit in a corner by himself writing rather than socializing with the other players, that didn't endear him to anyone either. The players respect him and his accomplishments -- with reason, for as a star player on a WS winning team, he'd accomplished more than any of those Pilots misfits ever had and ever did -- but they don't particularly like him as a person at all.

So yeah, Bouton was a dick but OTOH he understood that in an era when players didn't earn multimillion dollar salaries and were trapped by the reserve clause, he had to look out for himself and build a career outside of baseball before it was too late. Can't fault him for that.

I dunno mookie I think he’s pretty smart and pretty funny. the opening few grafs are a masterpiece of self deprecation and a window into the baseline psyche of what motivates (a lot of) professional athletes

he drips condescension for everyone

Could not disagree more--it's a book by someone who loves every last stupid thing about the game.

I’m maybe 2/3 of the way through and I don’t get a “dripping with condensation” vibe.
He acknowledges his views are out of step with most of his teammates - which makes him a “commie” outsider to some of them. And I don’t think he’s all that condescending to them despite that. He only seems to really come down on coaches and managers, and he’s not wrong about the points he makes. He explains his thoughts on that well enough.
I’m finding his views (some, not all) surprisingly progressive for the time/profession.

The only thing that jumps out at me is him talking about players being unfaithful and the looking up girls skirts in the stands. Obviously players arent going to like having that stuff shared, he should have known using real names for stuff like that was going to have a lot of blow back.

Could not disagree more--it's a book by someone who loves every last stupid thing about the game.

About the game, yes. About the people who play it, not as much.

Like Thermo said, he was sharing details of players private lives (active players, even) and had to expect some blow back. I don't think he cared whether he made enemies, everyone was equal cannon fodder for his book. That does make him an asshole, even if he was kind of a visionary at the same time.

Sorry to be stubborn, but still disagree: for Bouton, the game is the people who play it. When he writes of Gene Brabender--a guy he has basically zero in common with (except the game they play)-- that he could crush your spleen, it's said with humour and affection. You can make an argument that he betrayed confidences, but that pretty much holds for anyone who writes a book or makes a film where certain characters are recognizable as real people. Bouton used real names; to do otherwise would have been silly. He either writes the book honestly, or he doesn't write it--or, more probably, he just writes another pointless sports book. I don't think he cared whether he made enemies, everyone was equal cannon fodder for his book. Right--and I'm sure he knew the cost.

(But, as he also notes, at a certain point many of the players were very aware of what he was doing--some would come up and say "Here's a story for your book." His pen would fall out on the mound. So I doubt, when the book appeared, it was a total shock to many, maybe most of them.)

Dirk Hayhurst didn’t use names for a lot of the players he was writing about.
But his books were a little different I suppose.

i didn't say it was a bad book! but yeah i'd have absolutely felt betrayed if i'd been his teammate (apart from marshall/hovley/bell, and even then i'd have not appreciated the attention).

he draws the line at specifically naming the married guys who fucked around on the road -- which i can absolutely understand and appreciate, but i don't think he ever understood where the line was (not least when he goes into all the 'beaver shooting')

he has a certain self-awareness that's good but doesn't go terribly far. i mean it's nice that he came to appreciate don mincher despite his alabaman origins, but somehow it never occurred to him to avoid pranking people when he was among the team's least-liked players

anyway yes the book is totally intriguing and important! but it also doesn't make me think a great deal of him

certainly the stuff about contracts/labor/marvin miller is crucial

Still waiting to buy the biography that came out last year; 10 years ago, you could wait a couple of months and used copies would start to turn up at half the price, but not anymore.

There are more good books written about baseball than any other American team sport. Here are our 100 indispensable picks that no baseball fan should be without. https://t.co/9Mt8S2vmqC via @alexbelth

— Esquire (@esquire) November 30, 2021

I count 21 that I've read, but that could be off in either direction--I have so many of them, sometimes I wasn't sure. Two of my three favourite are there, Ball Four and the first Historical Abstract; Robert Creamer's Casey Stengel biography missing. Going to look for a Boxing Day deal on the Posnanski book.

Kill The Àmpaya!

https://i.imgur.com/jEI67fX.png

This has been posted in the general obituary thread; should be noted here too.

https://www.mlb.com/news/roger-angell-dies-at-101
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/sports/roger-angell-dead.html
https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/remembering-roger-angell-hall-of-famer

Halfway through Keith Law's The Inside Game. Pretty good, but I just finished the chapter where he writes about the status-quo trap, the tendency to think doing nothing is safer than change, which he illustrates with Grady Little leaving Pedro in too long in 2003, and with the Giants keeping three prospects who never panned out rather than trading for Roy Halladay (coming off a mediocre season, headed for a string of great ones) around the same time. Fine--except earlier in the book, he writes about availability bias, where a team might mistakenly jump at a known quantity primarily because he's known, and you could just as easily make the argument that the Giants avoided that. It's sometimes a here's-the-answer, what's-the-question kind of book.

The book sounds interesting, but when did Law become an armchair psychologist? I get that he wants to take a break from analytics and write about the human element of the game, but has he actually researched that? Or is he just trying to pad his memoirs by giving it a more "academic" spin?

When the Halladay trade happened, it was widely thought that many teams were overvaluing their prospects and were reluctant to make trades for established stars. I don't think it had much to do with availability bias, but perhaps my timeline is a bit off? He was working for the Jays at the time, right? He'd be the right guy to comment on what front offices were generally thinking.

The book's in the car right now, too lazy to walk out and get it, but I think he says he had a background in all this stuff at university.

The availability bias (and it might have a different name...many biases covered in this book) would have been in play in the negative: San Francisco didn't, in that particular instance, fall prey to it. My basic point is that there are all sorts of biases--the very biases he writes about--that come into play simultaneously, and when you chastise one team for falling prey to one of them, the opposite may be true for the other team; they may have wisely avoided it. In the Halladay non-trade, there was the Giants avoiding the availability bias, falling prey to the status quo bias, and--true of the Jays also--being led astray by recency bias, not making the trade because Halladay was coming off a poor season. The Jays, who made Halladay available, got away with it: the Giants passed, and the Jays got four or five more great seasons out of Halladay.

All these biases are at cross-purposes, and I think Law sometimes cherry-picks them to suit his purposes. Which is one of the biases he writes about.

So that Halladay non-trade was in 2004, not around the time he was actually traded years later.

Cherry picking biases sounds about right based on your description. That would annoy me as a reader but I should read the book before assuming too much.

also keith law is a prick

(xpost) I should have made that clear, 2004. I'm on the chapter about good decisions right now, and that deals with Halladay in 2009.

One instance where Law looks like a genius is an early chapter where he writes about vaccine hysteria (connecting it to one of his biases), and chastises people who won't get a measles vaccine, and how misinformation is feeding them, and what would happen if there were a serious epidemic, etc...and he's writing in the middle of 2019.

Reading Kevin Cook's Ten Innings at Wrigley: The Wildest Baseball Game Ever, With Baseball on the Brink. Before starting, I thought it'd be Ryne Sandberg's famous game against the Cardinals (must have been a Saturday--I was watching) -

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN198406230.shtml

or Mike Schmidt's four-HR game -

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN197604170.shtml

but it's neither; it's this one:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/CHN/CHN197905170.shtml

I think I will be receiving the Howard Bryant Rickey book for Xmas.

the only player I ever had a poster of.

Love the kind of useless trivia you pick up from a book like Ten Innings at Wrigley.

1) Bob Boone and Randy Lerch of the Phillies remain the only pitcher-catcher combination to both homer in a game before taking the field.

2) I guess I should have known this--I didn't--but the Dodgers, in their "legendary draft of 1968," landed Garvey, Cey, Lopes, and Buckner. That's incredible...that's 8,800 hits in the same draft, many of them (probably most) for the Dodgers.

3) There was an umpire's strike in '79 (the first?). It had just been resolved before the 23-22 game in question, but the replacement umpires were still working games before they returned. The home plate umpire that day was nursing a hangover.

It's still the '70s, far and away baseball's greatest decade for me.

Don't remember Danny Ozark all that well (Phillies manager in '79), but evidently he was a Yogi Berra in training. When the Phillies were mathematically eliminated in '75, he was quoted as saying "We're not out of it yet." On team morale: "Morality isn't a factor." When he was kidding around one time, he said "I'm being fascist."

Nice image after Schmidt wins the game in the 10th with a HR: two of the old-school reporters start writing their game reports on typewriters, while one of the younger reporters starts writing his on a Teleram P-1800 computer, and another writes his on a Radio Shack TRS-80.

Finished the Kevin Cook book. (Not a cookbook.) I just grabbed it off the shelf looking for something quick to read over Christmas, but it was excellent. You start with this one game that then branches off in so many different directions (beginning with histories of the Cub and Phillie franchises, all their woes and mismanagement). The cast of characters in the 23-22 game takes in HOF'ers (Schmidt and Sutter), weirdos like Tug McGraw and Dave Kingman, all those relievers I mentioned, Rose and Buckner, pure '70s guys like Bake McBride and Rawley Eastwick and Garry Maddox, Bob Boone and Tim McCarver, etc. The story of Donnie Moore is central; as I remembered, there was a whole confluence of factors that led to his suicide (which was actually a suicide/attempted murder of his wife).

Then and now. In '79, Kingman was a veritable freak, a guy who hit home runs or struck out. He led the NL that year with 131 strikeouts--which would have have placed him 56th on the MLB list in 2017. (Gorman Thomas did strike out 175 times in the AL that year.)

I am reading Ball Four and I love it, and though I’m only 30% in, I can otm this:

and basically, christ what an asshole

I’m 80% of the way through this, and into the Ball Five (post playing career?) bit so I feel qualified to comment now.

Firstly, Bouton tells the story really well. The book is full of both the broad sweep - the grinding slog of a season, from the minors to the majors and traded onwards - and the tiny details - the stuff they talk about in the bullpen, like the All-Uglies Team and the punctuation of family visits and pranks. So there’s a very frank portrayal of the professional player’s life back then, which has probably changed quite significantly since then, though the long hours of travel and boredom no doubt stay the same.

There’s some real laughs in it, he has very dry humour. But all the same, it’s clear as day that this guy is not liked, and it’s not because of his politics*, it’s because of his personality! Seriously. Steve Hovley managed to stay in the team, as did the guy who forever had a sore arm and went from starting to relief without Bouton thinking about this much besides “whyyyyyy can’t I start?”

Seriously. I won’t say that this works against the book, that it is a worse book for it, but Bouton is a prick. I got the strong sense that this would be the case even if he’d never published this. He’s always making digs and jokes at people despite clearly being disliked at best, and he absolutely loves to trot out the true catchphrase of the prick, “I couldn’t resist!” It’s a sad day when you’re sympathising with some dead-eyed big boi Bouton is dunking on just because Bouton has no clue how to read a room. If this guy was a football manager, we’d say he lost the dressing room, and in his case it would be almost as soon as he walked into it.

*Re his politics - yeah great you’re anti war, but the book is still filled with mentions of “beaver shooting”, some of which is basically upskirting aiui. That’s a criminal offence today, I found that far worse than any of the stuff about greenies or cheating on the wives or whatever.

Anyway I am finishing the last part of this but not looking forward to it. The atmosphere in the clubhouse and the tales of how the games went and how he felt pitching his knuckleball and all that - wonderful, I would read 20,000 pages of this. Him in television? I really don’t care, you know?

Classic read basically.

I don't think I'd change anything I wrote above--and I doubt either one of us would move the other an inch as to what we think of Bouton or the book--but I'm glad you mostly liked it. Haven't read the follow-up, Glad You Didn't Take It Personally, in ages (and only once)--I should read that again. It's about his '70 season with the Astros, and also about the fall-out from Ball Four.

i haven't read dirk hayhurst's book(s) so maybe he talks about this? (although tbf he was always marginal)

players in the minor leagues are trying desperately to *not* be in the minor leagues. they're in direct competition with their own teammates in a zero-sum game. but at the same time they're expected to publicly support each other in search of a Texas League title lol

there's a book to be written about that (even apart from the at-large racism of organized baseball)

(also 'sugar' was a good movie)

By the way, I should mention that the impetus for me to read this book was seeing this comic about it.

Finished Ball Four properly - all the post-career updates.

I went from finding Bouton irritating to more sympathetic. He wrote about his daughter Laurie‘s death with such tenderness and in such pain, and how it affected him. As he aged, he gained more perspective on his life. I loved his later life meeting with Steve Hovley, and that conversation he had with Gary Bell where they talk about modern players and all the money they make. He even has perspective on how pitchers are better cared for now - this is even truer now than it was in the later texts.

But yeah, as above: the perspective shift only reminds me of the original things I didn’t like much about his narration. An absolutely essential book.

One of the most moving things--not sure if it's in there--is when, after decades of Mantle not talking to him, Bouton took the initiative and contacted him when Mantle's son died of cancer: (Wikipedia) "Bouton tried several times to make peace with Mantle, but not until Bouton sent a condolence note after Mantle's son Billy died of cancer in 1994 did Mantle contact Bouton. The two former teammates reconciled not long before Mantle's death in 1995."

Yeah it is in there. It was very touching.

By the way, even though Baseball Reference discontinued their page sponsorships, they grandfathered a few around that, and I'm proud to say I'm still the sponsor of Joe Schultz's page:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/schuljo05.shtml

His player page--I tried to get his manager page first but I think someone else had it, or maybe it cost a lot more--but it's still Joe.

Got a few at the town sale yesterday, including the International League yearbook for the 1987 season. I got excited thinking it would be filled with future HOF'ers, but no: scanning league leaders for both hitters and pitchers, the only one I can spot is Glavine, 18th in ERA. I do see the names of numerous future Jays: Mike Sharperson, Rob Ducey, Manny Lee, Lou Thorton, Sil Campusano, David ("Dave") Wells, Duane Ward, etc. The Jays had a strong farm system then. Two other names: John Gibbons, Bill Beane.

Going to start on Pat Jordan's The Suitors of Spring. Jordan was one of SI's key baseball writers in the '70s; I remember an excerpt in the magazine from A False Spring, his memoir of his own minor-league pitching career. Never read the book, but the piece ended memorably, with him completing something like a two-hit shutout and thinking he'd finally arrived. The Suitors of Spring, from '74, has essays on eight pitchers, including Seaver, McDowell, Johnny Sain, and Steve Dalkowski (9 minor league seasons, 956 IP, 1324 K, 1236 BB).

I’m reading Jason Turbow’s The Baseball Codes, which is about the unwritten rules of the game. Ty to Mookieproof for this! So far my favourite chapter is about retaliation:

That the Royals were willing to wait a full season for revenge hardly set precedent. Take the time in 1973 when A’s outfielder Billy North let go of his bat as he swung at an offering from Kansas City rookie Doug Bird, sending it sailing toward shortstop Freddie Patek. North jogged out to retrieve his lumber, but stopped at the mound on the way to ask the startled pitcher, “Do you remember me?” Bird replied that he did not. “I remember you,” said North. “From Quincy.” Then, to the surprise of everybody, he started swinging. “We were all stunned,” said A’s second baseman Phil Garner, watching from the dugout. “Everybody was stunned.” “We were on the bench saying, ‘What the hell’s going on?’” said A’s catcher Ray Fosse. “They started fighting, so we as teammates ran out, and so did the Royals. When it was all over, we all asked, ‘What the hell just happened?’”

What the hell happened was that in 1970, when North was a twenty-two-year-old playing for Quincy, Illinois, of the Single-A Midwest League, he had the misfortune of coming to the plate against Bird, then twenty years old and playing for Waterloo. The two batters ahead of North had connected for home runs, and Bird responded by brushing North back. After the hitter had words with Waterloo’s catcher, Bird’s next pitch drilled him in the helmet. North missed three days. That was the last time the two shared a baseball diamond as minor-leaguers. North got called up to Oakland the following season, and two years later, when he saw the transaction wire indicating that Bird had joined the Royals, he began counting down the days until Kansas City came to town.

About halfway through the Pat Jordan book I mentioned above, The Suitors of Spring. There's a long chapter, "The Old Hand with a Prospect," about Woody Huyke--career minor-league catcher, "organization man" who obligingly goes wherever he's sent, hoping to maybe get a coaching job in the majors one day--and his relationship with Bruce Kison, 20 at the time and a year away from his famous middle-relief game in the '71 Series. It reminded me so much of Bull Durham, which I know is based on Ron Shelton's own minor-league experiences, but I bet he'd at least read Jordan's book when he sat down to write it.

Huyke never got his major-league coaching job, but:

He managed in the Pirates' organization from 1974 through 1989, and 1990 through 2004. He voluntarily stepped down as manager after the 2004 season, remaining with the Gulf Coast League Pirates as a coach. One of Woody's early successes, in 1989, was identifying Tim Wakefield's potential as a knuckleball pitcher (at the time, Wakefield was a light-hitting first baseman) and convincing the Pittsburgh Pirates organization not to release him.

Still alive; Kison died five years ago.

Anybody read Evan Drellich's Winning Changes Everything? A friend writes that it's

a look at the Luhnow-era Astros that offers: a) a case-study reckoning with two decades of league-wide Moneyball cloning; and b) a sobering portrait of Alex Cora in his Houston days (a drunkard and a lout, according to Drellich).

The Sam McDowell chapter in the Pat Jordan book is a time-capsule snapshot of the baseball mindset just a few years before James published his first Abstract. Jordan dwells on how immensely talented McDowell is, and how that doesn't translate into gaudy W-L records. He never outright says it, but the unspoken message of the chapter is that McDowell just doesn't know how to win. He's too preoccupied with his hobbies (he paints, he's a gunsmith), he's got "too much stuff" (and therefore never had to learn how to pitch), etc., etc. Mostly, it's an obscure character flaw that holds him back: "He seems to be afraid that if he let his talent grow to its fulfillment he might cease to possess it, and it, in turn, would possess him. So he treats his talent like some unruly growth he must periodically prune before it becomes unmanageable." Huh?

What isn't mentioned: his alcoholism (understandable--probably not public knowledge when Jordan profiled him) or (barely; there's one brief acknowledgement) the mediocre teams he played for. Cleveland wasn't as bad as I thought--they had 86- and 87-win seasons during McDowell's tenure there--but they were usually under .500, and bottomed out at 60 and 62 wins.

From everything I've ever read about McDowell, it does sound like he was his own worst enemy, so I'm not saying Jordan doesn't get at something. But psychoanalyzing his W-L record is such a time capsule.

(Personal corroboration: on that 1972 trip to spring training my family took--I've posted photos here--I have a distinct memory of my dad talking to one of the players, maybe even Harry Walker, about the recent McDowell/Gaylord Perry trade. Whoever it was said that Cleveland got the better of the deal because Perry was a "winner" and McDowell wasn't. Subsequent events proved him right, but I don't think for the reason he thought.)

I don't think a team-wide cheating scandal is going to hurt Altuve one bit. It'll be ancient history. If he makes it to 3000 hits, most people aren't going to be talking about 2017, they're gonna be talking about his 3000 hits. They'll talk about his Astros winning 4 pennants in 6 years (or whatever it ends up being). And they'll talk about how short he is and how unlikely his story was. Jaffe himself says that Altuve will probably go in with 3000 hits.

― ✖, Sunday, June 4, 2023 8:21 PM

Finished Andy Martino's Cheated, which is mostly about the Astros but also covers all the other rumoured and actual sign-stealing going on the past few years (plus a pre-history: Bobby Thomson, etc.). I mostly agree with ✖'s post, but not entirely. The book makes clear that Altuve was much less eager to take part than other Astros, and, numerically, received the assistance of far fewer garbage-can signals than others. But a) he did receive some--maybe 20 to their 200, although that may have been more, because sometimes the signal was no-bang, and b) his series-winning HR off Chapman in the 2019 ALCS is very murky: Altuve clearly signals as he approaches home plate that no one is to remove his jersey in all the celebrations, possibly because he was hiding some kind of signal-giving apparatus, or maybe for a more benign reason. Martino presents a couple of other possible explanations, but he doesn't commit one way or the other. History tends to simplify, so Altuve's role is ambiguous enough, I think, that all that will be remembered is that he was on that team and part of all that.

Two things I didn't know: 1) Verlander and Cole may have benefitted from doctored baseballs. I always assumed that Astros pitchers were exempt outside of additional run support, and that since no one cares about pitcher wins anymore anyway, that wouldn't matter to something like HOF viability. It seems obvious Verlander won't be affected, but it does look like he's not blameless. 2) The worst offender in terms of numerically documented trash-can signals was Springer. Which would explain the non-stop booing he got in L.A. a few days ago.

Beltran, hard to say. He was heavily involved, but at the same time, he did seem to be scapegoated--only player specifically named in the report--possibly because of earlier issues he'd won when he'd taken on MLB.

By the doctored baseballs do you mean the spider tack stuff? Cos that was known regarding those two, but a lot more guys than them benefited from it. Manoah famously called Cole the biggest cheater in the modern game (!) because of it.

No index, so I can't look it up specifically...It had to do with clubhouse people rubbing up the baseballs pre-game; the Astros pitchers would use the ones that had more or less of whatever they used. Maybe that's the same thing you're talking about. I knew Cole had issues, but I thought that had to do with stuff he was allegedly doing during the game.

I do recommend the book. Like a lot of people, I was half-paying attention when the story broke wide open in 2020, but then COVID happened and my attention turned elsewhere.

Oh that’s interesting, no it’s not the same thing, will check it out for sure 👍🏻

Here's Altuve's HR:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC34yua88z0

At 6:25, Ken Rosenthal actually asks him why he was signaling not to tear his shirt.

Gausman had some choice words about it, don’t know if you ever saw it. Kind of shocking they never punished any players.

This Astros thing is bad!!! Guys lost jobs, got sent down, missed service time bc of how they were hit in HOU. Does anyone really think they only did this in 17? #getreal

— Kevin Gausman (@KevinGausman) November 14, 2019

That's stressed in the book; nine pitchers lost their jobs right after a loss to the Astros in 2017 (one of them sued). Honestly, I think the timing of COVID and the lost season had a lot to do with it--within weeks of blowing up, the story was dwarfed by events. Also, to get people to talk, MLB had to (or at least decided they had to) offer players immunity

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F6UuxPabMAAT-wA?format=jpg&name=large

Thought it made sense to move this here. Relevant lead-in, the first six posts here:

2023 NLDS: Atlanta Braves vs. Philadelphia Phillies

I think there's legitimate room for disagreement here. As I've said many times, I'm always amused when the defender of a controversial book or movie or whatever--in this case, me and Ball Four--is surprised or annoyed that not everyone agrees with him. Ball Four divides people, even today--I get that, and if we disagree, we disagree.

With that in mind--and I've probably posted some variation on most of these thoughts already in this thread--if you're going to write Ball Four, I believe you need to write Ball Four. If you want to move the sports book forward, you can't walk up to a line of privacy, back off, and end up writing the same old sports book. If Bouton hadn't done it, someone else would have. And if no one ended up ever crossing that line, maybe we'd still think of Mickey Mantle as this 100% heroic figure who used to hang around the park for hours after the game signing autographs for kids.

It's like a friend of mine who once told me he loves the first Schoolly-D album, he just wishes it weren't so profane and so out of step with acceptable discourse today. Okay...but without that, it's not the first Schoolly-D album it's something else. If you were to take Taxi Driver and make Jodie Foster 19 instead of 12, make Travis a flawed but well-meaning vigilante instead of a racist psychopath, that might make it more acceptable to some people, but it wouldn't be Taxi Driver anymore. If you want to write Ball Four, you have to write Ball Four.

And, again, I don't think there's an ounce of malice in anything Bouton wrote, or any attempt to shame anyone. All the stupid stuff he writes about--behaviours both silly and much, much worse--he knows it's all part of the game he loves. People he has zero in common with--Gene Brabender, Fred Norman--he enjoys their company. Sibby Sisti, who's nothing but a full-time annoyance hanging around for a pension, Bouton gives him what I count as the funniest line in the book. I think even Sal Maglie, the one guy he clearly doesn't like, makes him laugh once or twice. And he of course adores Joe Schultz, and that comes through.

(I also believe Bouton when he says that, at a certain point in the season, everyone knew he was writing something. Players would come up to him and say "Here's a good story for your book." He'd drop his pen on the mound and some coach would casually pick it up without saying anything, clearly knowing something was up.)

As far as the ethics of journalism, I don't know the geography of a clubhouse, but is it taken for granted that anything overheard is printable? I'm used to the classic Hollywood treatment--All the President's Men, etc.--where the question of "Is this on the record?" was a given. Maybe that's a quaint notion that no longer applies. I will say, if the Braves know who leaked the Arcia comment, that reporter may have won the battle and lost the war. Good luck getting anybody to open up to you in the future.

I think Arcia has a legitimate complaint.

I will say, if the Braves know who leaked the Arcia comment, that reporter may have won the battle and lost the war. Good luck getting anybody to open up to you in the future.

That sounds like an important distinction I didn't acknowledge.

Alex Cora was asked about this

Alex Cora was on Baseball Tonight with @Buster_ESPN and while he didn’t touch on too much with the Red Sox, he did talk about giving teams bulletin board material.

He alluded to the whole Eduardo Rodriguez situation in 2021, but the best part was his story from 2007.

After Ryan… pic.twitter.com/GVskWI32nq

— Tyler Milliken ⚾️ (@tylermilliken_) October 12, 2023

This continues to roll on. The reporter was named as Cespedes BBQ’s Jake Mintz. First this happened:

"And then some jackoff comes in at the end of the season that gets a credential, God only knows why. And the clubhouse is a sacred space." Alanna Rizzo went off on Jake Mintz's clubhouse reporting on MLBN's "High Heat" Thursday. pic.twitter.com/6dooqeLPnh

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) October 12, 2023

1) He yelled the phrase when cameras and recorders were rolling. I have audio. Had he done it at a slightly different moment, a camera sending an interview live to the truck might have caught it. Would you be eviscerating that network? Or would you say,

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) October 12, 2023

Shouldn’t say that with cameras around?

2) Suggesting you shouldn’t report something said in the presence of MORE THAN A DOZEN reporters because it “wasn’t meant to get out?” is suggesting reporters should be protecting players from themselves. That’s not our job. It’s theirs.

— Chelsea Janes (@chelsea_janes) October 12, 2023

Statement from the BBWAA pic.twitter.com/X6ThJPk6CK

— BBWAA (@officialBBWAA) October 13, 2023

In that post above, I still never really explain why I give a pass to Bouton but not to the reporter. I realize that it comes down to personal bias, that--fairly or unfairly--I value what Bouton does (writing a book) more than what the reporter does (writing an article, game report, whatever). Ball Four changed sports books, and I think it was extremely important in the evolution of how we view athletes; quoting Arcia in the clubhouse led to a memorable postseason moment (not the HR itself but the staredown) but has no intrinsic value otherwise. So it's basically a biased value judgement in the end.

I was also thinking that Ball Four is so great, it divides people in unexpected ways. In one respect, Bouton and Bill James were trying to do exactly the same thing: demystify a lot of silly things people believed about baseball and baseball players. Yet the most memorable comment I've ever encountered from James on Ball Four is "Jim Bouton is a loudmouth." I'm surprised he either can't see or won't acknowledge his affinities with Bouton.

I've never seen the TV series, but I'm guessing that it's something close to what the book would have been if Bouton had held back and not crossed that line of privacy: Wacky Expansion Team. Still entertaining, but changing nothing. Similar to how I avoided The Bad News Bears for 20 years because I assumed it would amount to Wacky Little League Team and little more. Instead, it's a surprisingly harrowing argument that adults should never be allowed to coach kids baseball.

Posnanski is 1000% on the reporter's side.

https://open.substack.com/pub/joeposnanski/p/friday-rewind-the-hunger-games?r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Spent the morning in the library basement helping move boxes for the upcoming town book sale. The guy who organizes the moving always lets me take a few baseball books. Found a hardcover of Bouton's I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally--library stamp but in excellent shape, what I assume is a first edition. Also Harold Rosenthal's The 10 Best Years of Baseball: An Informal History of the Fifties. He's got the wrong decade, but looks interesting.

Unlikely I'll ever read it, but found a copy of this at the town book sale (hard to find a good image online):

https://i.postimg.cc/VkxpDQVN/leflore.jpg

Published in '78, right after his .325/212-hit season with the Tigers. He followed that with two more good ones, then stole 97 bases for the Expos in 1980--three more and he would have been only the third guy to steal 100 after 1900. (Henderson stole 100 the same year, Vince Coleman a few years later.) LeFlore was out of the game after the '82 season; his Wikipedia entry says it was soon revealed that he was five years older than he claimed. Received MVP votes in four of his nine seasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_LeFlore

I would love to read a book about the most successful ex-con in baseball history! I didn't know that they made a movie based on his life too.

He's still alive. Not being too far from Detroit, I thought to check today to see if it was autographed. No luck. (He and Fidrych both played in the '76 All-Star Game.)

Read Bouton's I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally for the first time in years. Very worthy follow-up. Still a few things that are dated, of course--two songs they sing on the bus, in particular--but a great chronicle of all the fallout from Ball Four and the end of Bouton's career (and beginning of his TV career). One chapter is letters received about Ball Four, including one from Ruth Ryan: "...both Nolan and I enjoyed it very much." Another chapter, "Sanctity of the Clubhouse," addresses issue raised above. There's a part involving Doug Radar that I want to quote but can't find at the moment.

Bouton's working for ABC at this point:

I had a great time with the Astros. They made me feel most welcome, and there was a marvelously nutty interview with Doug Rader, the third baseman, who suggested Little Leaguers should actually live one a diet of bases, pitchers mounds and bubble-gm cards.

Bubble-gum cards?

"Oh, yes. They have lots of information on them about hitting and pitching."

Anybody read Evan Drellich's Winning Changes Everything? A friend writes that it's

_a look at the Luhnow-era Astros that offers: a) a case-study reckoning with two decades of league-wide Moneyball cloning; and b) a sobering portrait of Alex Cora in his Houston days (a drunkard and a lout, according to Drellich)._

Pitcher usage was a common fight between them in 2012, Luhnow’s first season of play with the team. Late in games, managers have to deploy their relievers in a way that positions the team to win while also protecting those pitchers’ health. Sometimes relievers throw on multiple days in a row, increasing fatigue and the chance of injury. Even if a reliever does not enter a game, just warming up in the bullpen can be taxing. Luhnow wanted Mills to use his better relievers more frequently.

“What if his arm isn’t feeling well?” Mills said. “We can’t do that, because we’re going to kill this guy.” “What do you mean we’re going to kill this guy?” Luhnow said. “He can’t throw four or five days in a row,” Mills said. “Well, he can, if he only throws an inning here, two-thirds of an inning here, or whatever,” Luhnow said. “No, he can’t. Because he has to warm up,” Mills shot back. “We just can’t walk up there and get this guy to come in the game. He has to warm up; his arm has to get hot.”

never heard of this!

The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg

I have two copies of Thomas Klise’s wild and wildly out-of-print 1974 novel, The Last Western, and my friend Maria gave me both of them. It’s a strange, shaggy, ambitious book—one of those classic Catholic Social Apocalypse/Baseball novels, whose protagonist both pitches in the Major Leagues and becomes the pope, among other things; we talked about it at The Awl back in 2012. As it is not the social baseball novel that I’m writing about here, I will move on from it beyond encouraging you to seek it out. The reason I bring it up has more to do with Maria’s practice of buying a copy of the book whenever and wherever she finds it, and then giving that to someone she thinks would get something out of it. This seemed strange to me at the time, and I told her as much, but it makes more sense to me now. If you are going to love a book that’s hard to find, and want other people to love it, too, that is what you will have to do. And so, at least until Defector Classic Editions comes into existence and publishes a deluxe new edition of the book, I am committing to doing it when and wherever I find a copy of Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s 1983 novel The Celebrant, the book I most enjoyed in 2023.

The Celebrant is easier to find than The Last Western, if nothing else; first editions are expensive and seem decently rare, but you can get copies of the most-recent printing, from 1993, from the University of Nebraska press and on Amazon. And I imagine it would still work if you got it that way, but there was something about how I found it that felt auspicious. Some friends had recommended it years earlier, and critics had praised the book widely when it came out decades before that, but the fact that it had fallen so far out of the conversation—it’s the only book that Greenberg ever published; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page—made it seem all the more significant when it finally turned up on a shelf at The Strand. If you can get a Lost Classic on Amazon, it feels less lost, somehow, and maybe even like less of a classic for being on there alongside all the self-published anti-vaccine claptrap and knockoff HDMI cables. The thrill of discovering it, right in its place and where it had never been in any of my previous visits, felt more like what I’d imagined.

However lost it was, The Celebrant is indeed a damn classic. The Last Western concerns the end of everything—a whole world collapsing under the weight of human cynicism, malaise, jealousy, greed, unbelief, and all the other 1970s American Classics. The Celebrant, which is set around the turn of the 20th century and tells the story of a Jewish immigrant family and their complicated personal and professional relationships with baseball in general, the New York Giants more specifically, and the iconic Giants ace Christy Mathewson in particular, is more a novel of beginnings than endings. It is a story about how baseball has made people into Americans, which it always has, and how fraught and complicated and implicating a thing that is. There is a lot of baseball in it, and Greenberg writes it elegantly and expertly; the turn-of-the-century details are carefully wrought; there’s nothing showy about the language, but the steakhouses and train carriages and ballparks are described in evocative and graceful ways. It feels real enough—crowded and smoky and half-drunk, or starched and fancified and lonely—that Greenberg’s detours into more debauched and dreamlike corners are made all the more disorienting.

It is a commanding performance, all told, and Greenberg’s stuff is all the more effective for how well he controls it, and how meticulous he is about setting up what needs to be set up, and how comfortably he changes speeds. As good as the baseball writing is, and as colorful as the color is, what has stayed with me about The Celebrant is how deftly Greenberg navigates the concentric and contradictory layers of reverence and awe and unreality and devotion that make fandom so simultaneously deranging and enriching a lived experience. The Kapinski family comes closer to these icons—to Mathewson, especially, and to the Giants’ irascible manager John McGraw—than they are strictly comfortable with, and ultimately perhaps closer than they can strictly handle. You’re not supposed to do business with your gods.

If what follows is tragic, it is mostly so in the same accumulative way that stories told over sufficiently long periods of time tend to be. Everyone is pushed and pulled by the forces that always push and pull people, and also by the abiding and All-American subsuming of the small by the large, and the past by the future. It’s a smaller book than The Last Western in a bunch of ways, if just as worthy of rediscovery. Both have to do with belief, but if The Last Western is about the crisis of a world without it, The Celebrant is about the strange and shifting shapes that belief can take, and the lonesome places our devotions can take us. - David Roth

Posnanski's Why We Love Baseball has won the 2023 Casey Award for best baseball book of the year. It's his third Casey. How do I know all this? Joe, the world's greatest self-promoter--i.e., the world's most exhausting self-promoter--has a column about it today.

Winners and nominees (launched in 1983):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casey_Award

Bought this at a flea market--$10, still shrink-wrapped; a bit too much in that setting--only because I didn't know it existed until today:

https://i.postimg.cc/fR9xWtBY/kirk.jpg

Came out in '97, two years after Gibson retired and nine years after his famous HR. Oversized hardcover, almost a coffee-table book--surprised he got someone to publish it (he pretty clearly wasn't headed for the HOF). Also surprised the cover photo is him as a Tiger, and not what you'd assume would be on the cover.

Fine player, though--one of three or four Tigers who probably would have been a better pick for MVP than Willie Hernandez.

What's he got to say about his famous homer?

Big-deal acquisition today: Martin Levin, who used to edit Innings, a short-lived Toronto monthly I wrote for, gave me his copy of the 1977 Baseball Abstract, the first one.

https://sabrweb.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/1977-Bill-James-Abstract.jpg

I don't know how many copies James self-published--my guess is 100. (The '78 edition, also self-published, sold 250 according to Wikipedia.) I've been trying for 20 years to get a copy, and I've never so much as seen one for sale online, whether eBay or Abe or anywhere. So I don't know what it's worth, but I'm guessing quite a bit.

(Martin also told me that he's donated some stuff to Cooperstown, including the half-dozen or so issues of Innings. Somewhere in the deepest catacombs of the library there, yes--I'm in the HOF!)

wau

I feel it's like owning a copy of the Magna Carta. I'm somewhat biased.

Damn that's incredible clemenza.

I missed a line in that Wikipedia entry: the first edition sold 75 copies (one of whom was presumably Martin)...I posted about this in Facebook. Half of me was thinking "You shouldn't be attracting attention with something this rare." The other half was laughing at that half: "Haven't you learned yet--no one cares about this stuff. Criminals are busy stealing cars--they're not combing Facebook looking for Baseball Abstracts."

So cool!

Amazing clem, congratulations on your acquisition (and your unofficial HOF induction)!

On the induction, thanks. On the other...Jesus, this is embarrassing...it's a reprint. When Martin gave me the book, I took a quick look and put it right in a bag. Looked exactly like the '78/'79/'80 editions I already have: card-stock cover, a little faded, hand-stapled. I was posting yesterday from a coffee shop on my way home; found the image above online.

So how did I figure out that it's a reprint when I got home? It required a lot of detective work:

https://i.postimg.cc/jSN0FyPy/reprint.jpg

(Thought about posting this in the absent-minded thread--yes, I actually managed not to notice that. If I had bought it online, I'd be looking at the expensive-stupidity thread, created by me for me.)

I don't even have the heart to revisit the Facebook post, where I tagged Martin. Still excited to have it, but obviously not quite where I was yesterday.

Let me now tell you all about the Picasso I bought on eBay last month.

Sorry to go on about this...As I suspected, the reprints are pretty rare in and of themselves:

https://picclick.com/Vintage-Bill-James-Baseball-Abstract-Set-1977-1978-262998858206.html

If that's accurate, this person sold the first five for $2,500, with the '77 and '78 editions reprints; I've got the '77 reprint and originals for '78-'81 (which Mike Saunders--Creem, Angry Samoans--gave to me years ago), so presumably the value would be comparable.

The story of the '77 reprint is pretty interesting according to that link: "reprints are just as rare as they were only produced (allegedly by Bill James' wife) upon written request." I don't know if that's how Martin got his or if he bought it second-hand.

Ordered a copy of this today:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/andy-mccullough/the-last-of-his-kind/9780306832598/?lens=hachette-books

Honestly, it was mostly to support the one book store in town--I try to order something every month or two. I don't think it's something I would have bought otherwise, although at least it's a biography rather than an autobiography.