By far the greatest anything that will happen at Minute Maid Park in Houston this season:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7B4gic1-qU&
He got away. He definitely got away.
H/T: FanGraphs’ own Mike Axisa. Don’t you ever change, Mike.
Ahem:
And I believe we have a winner. That is, unless you know of someone else in the world of baseball who boasts a tickler the size of an oak limb.
The website for CSN Chicago features a soundboard of 45 different lyric gems, courtesy of White Sox play-by-play man Hawk Harrelson.
Push play to hear all 45 in glorious, consecutive fashion.
A million space bucks to reader/commenter juan pierre’s mustache.
Vin Scully on the ones and twos in 1964.
As I’ve made clear in these pages — mostly by means of words, but also occasionally by means of a sexy dance — a great concern of mine, so far as the art and science of baseball commentary is concerned, is in developing criteria by which the learned fan might anticipate the watchability of a particular game. Already we can do this with something like precision via the NERD Game Scores available in each morning’s edition of One Night Only at FanGraphs’ main page. A catalogue of all 30 of the league’s center-field camera shots further prepares the enthusiast for his nightly viewing. (Watching Roy Halladay pitch at Turner Field is much more satisfying, for example, than watching Halladay at his home park — or, worst, at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park.)
A stone that’s been left almost entirely unturned in this pursuit of happiness, however, is a discussion of what makes for an excellent baseball broadcast. In what follows, I outline some criteria for doing just that.
First, allow me to reveal my biases, such as they exist.
Above all, my preference is for spirited banter. Brewer radio commentator and ubermensch among just regular menschen Bob Uecker is unparalleled in this regard. Uecker’s commentary regularly ascends from the level of mere “word picture” to something considerably more noble, and one can find him, with startling frequency, composing spontaneous paeans to The Good Life. Should it be revealed that Uecker speaks entirely in a fixed meter of his own invention, this would be the pinnacle of unsurprising.
Of course, there are some caveats to this issue of spirited banter. For one, it is not merely enough for a broadcaster just to talk a lot or guffaw a whole bunch. This is annoying and should be censured early and often. Moreoever, there’s the Case of Vin Scully. To the best of my knowledge, Scully has never once recounted one of his drunken episodes on air, and yet probably comes closest to rivaling Uecker in terms of charm — which, charm is probably the best word to describe this quality we’re discussing. Let’s just use that, how about.
With that, we might consider three major criteria for assessing the quality of a broadcast, as follows.
You’re damned right I’d follow Billy Martin’s mustache, and his spectacles, into the heat of baseball battle.
Adding to Martin’s lore: Whiskey Slick, his nickname, according to Baseball Almanac. And Whiskey Slick loved an old fashioned fracas, or ten, I learned, after going down the rabbit hole that is Billy Martin’s Wikipedia entry.
Witness:
Martin was well known for drinking to excess and for rowdy behavior when drinking. In 1957, a group of Yankees met at the famous Copacabana nightclub to celebrate Martin’s 29th birthday; the party ultimately erupted into a much publicized brawl when Martin, Hank Bauer, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra challenged a few drunks who were hurling racial slurs at performer Sammy Davis, Jr. A month later, general manager George Weiss—believing Martin’s nightlife was a bad influence on teammates Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle—exiled him to Kansas City. Martin felt betrayed by Stengel, with whom he had a strong father-son relationship, for failing to prevent the trade, and the two did not speak for years.
Exile in Kansas City. The more things change …
A few years later:
On August 4, 1960, Martin, then playing for the Reds, charged the mound in the second inning after receiving a brushback pitch from Chicago Cubs pitcher Jim Brewer. Martin threw his bat at Brewer, who picked up the bat and started to hand it to Martin as he approached. Martin punched Brewer in the right eye, breaking his cheekbone. Brewer was hospitalized for two months, and Martin served a five-day suspension. The Cubs sued Martin for $1,000,000 ($7,416,009 as of 2011), for the loss of Brewer’s services. While the Cubs dropped their case, Brewer pursued his, and in 1969, a judge ordered Martin to pay $10,000 ($59,909 as of 2011), in damages. When informed of the judgment by the press, he asked sarcastically, “How do they want it? Cash or check?”
Martin’s fights as a player also included bouts with Jimmy Piersall, Clint Courtney (twice), Matt Batts and Tommy Lasorda.
There’s no way you can convince me that Martin didn’t pay his fine in cash.
There’s more:
In 1969, Martin’s only season as manager of the Twins, he won a division championship. He was fired after the season following an August 1969 fight in Detroit with one of his pitchers, Dave Boswell, in an alley outside the legendary Lindell A.C. bar.
Ten years later, Martin hadn’t mellowed:
After the 1979 season, Martin got into a fight with marshmallow salesman Joseph Cooper at a hotel in Minneapolis.
Marshmallow salesmen are the worst.
Moving on:
On September 22, 1985, while at a hotel bar in Baltimore, Maryland, Martin fought one of his pitchers, Ed Whitson, who broke one of Martin’s arms.
And here I thought the 2006 scuffle between then Toronto Blue Jays manager John Gibbons and Ted Lilly was the stuff of dreams.
Finally:
Martin’s sparring opponents as a manager also included two traveling secretaries (Minnesota’s Howard Fox and Texas’ Burt Hawkins) in a fight outside of Howard Wong’s in Bloomington, Minnesota; Jack Sears, a fan outside Tiger Stadium; a Chicago cab driver who preferred soccer to baseball; sportswriter Ray Hagar, in a Reno indoor arena bar; … two bar patrons, in Anaheim and in Baltimore; and two bouncers in an Arlington topless bar.
I shudder to think what might have become of a marshmallow salesman who moonlighted as a cab driver, and who preferred the beautiful game to baseball, had he crossed Billy Martin’s path.
Interesting cat, Billy Martin, to say the least. And I had no idea.
Image courtesy Baseball Almanac, “Where what happened yesterday is being preserved today.” They ain’t foolin’.
Part the thickening gossamer of times bygone and remember, two days ago, when we asked you to declare, from on high and with a patriot’s starch, your second-favorite team. Lo, the results are in, and the second-favorite team of the NotGraphs collective (and, by extension, the world about us) is …
The Toronto Blue Jays.
Indeed, the Jays fought off stouthearted challenges from the likes of the Dodgers, Mariners, Cardinals, and White Sox, but in the end we had the warmest feelings for Canada’s last squad standing. So exult, Jays fans: The rest of us do not love you, but we do like you.
And here, Jays fans, is your handsome reward …
Please imagine the preceding as a Canadian flag, and then commence rallying ’round it.
We know baseball players have feelings. And we know we have feelings about baseball cards. Maybe it’s not so far-fetched to think that baseball cards themselves have feelings.
We know that baseball players are competitive. And we know that we baseball fans are competitive, even about collecting. So maybe it’s not so far-fetched to believe that if baseball cards have feelings, one of the feelings they have more often than not is one of competitive fire.
All of this necessitates a competition between baseball cards. A seeded tournament.
Astros hurler Brett Myers (Throws: Right; Bats: Right; Breathes: Mouth) has a bobblehead. The discerning observer who discerns will notice that Myers and his totem-self share the innermost wrath that makes the larger, more ambulatory Myers at once an intimidating hurler and smoldering menace. Absorb:
As renderings go, it’s impressive. Also impressive is this sneak preview of the forthcoming Ryan Theriot Bobblehead:
Bobble of head: Alyson Footer
The learned reader will likely be aware that, as part of our ongoing effort to become the new face of masculinity, we at NotGraphs have slowly but surely taken to cataloging the very best both of mustache- and spectacle-wearing from baseball past and present.
Accordingly, it makes sense that we would be interested in those rare cases where mustaches and spectacles — like two hypothetical trains in an elementary logic problem — meet at a single point.
Thanks to the giant knowledge of reader/commenter/shoulder-brusher-offer Yirmyahu (during today’s occasionally meandering, ever insightful NotGraphs Chat) we are now treated to such a meeting in the person of former major-leaguer Lee Tunnell.
A brief tour of Tunnell’s player page reveals that he was just a moderately successful swingman over parts of six seasons in the 1980s. His life achievements very clearly don’t end there, however.
Image courtesy of Topps via The Baseball Cube.