Baseball Books

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