Archive for Old News

If you’re like me, you’ve read more about Jeff Bagwell over the past two weeks than you have in your life. Naturally, this is another Bagwell piece. I may or may not have dreamt about Bagwell last night. (I did.)

It’s that time of year: The Hall of Fame Debates. And much like holidays spent with the family, it isn’t a lot of fun anymore, and alcohol helps. Alcohol always helps.

Jeff Bagwell. “BagPipes.” Worthy of Cooperstown? We’re about to find out. As his résumé was thoroughly debated over the past fortnight, I thought it would be useful to take a trip down memory lane. To July 19, 1999, the summer of one of Bagwell’s finest seasons, when Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci, admittedly one of my favourite writers, wrote about the One Of A Kind slugger. To the SIVault …

Read the rest of this entry »

Below these words — and craftily procured from an unnamed library database — is the announcement of the first Hall of Fame ballot, courtesy of the December 24, 1935 edition of the New York Times.

As the reader can see, this was a bit of an exciting notion at the time — and free of the armchair philologizing that comes with many contemporary discussions of the Hall and candidacy for same (i.e. “It’s the hall of fame, therefore it makes sense to pick the most famous players”).

Below are the five players ultimately selected. One weird thing is how much talk there is of an “immortal ten” when, in fact, only five players were selected.

Name		Votes	% of Ballots
Ty Cobb		222	98.2
Babe Ruth	215	95.1
Honus Wagner	215	95.1
Chri. Mathewson	205	90.7
Walter Johnson	189	87.6

Now here’s the article:

If I’d been around these parts two years ago when Dock Ellis passed, then I would’ve posted this back then. Since I wasn’t, I’m posting it now. And what follows, friends, is baseball greatness captured by cinematic greatness …

Most resonant line: “What happened to yesterday?”

Damn, Dock, what did happen to yesterday? Actually, guys and things like Dock Ellis happened to yesterday, which is partly why everyone loves and is haunted by the yesterday of his or her choosing.

Oh, and the hair-curlers thing you no doubt observed and momentarily cherished is not some sort of directorial flourish …

Bowie Kuhn, who didn’t seem to like anything, predictably didn’t like Ellis’s curlers look, which, it would seem, was just a rolling pin, bathrobe and terry-cloth slippers away from something greater … Anyhow, Kuhn decreed from on well-groomed high that Ellis cut it out and affect a more baseball-y appearance. And then Dock: “They didn’t put out any orders about Joe Pepitone when he wore a hairpiece down to his shoulders.”

Because you, reader, are the attentive sort of person this country needs more of, you’ll undoubtedly recall how, two days ago in these electronic pages, I, Carson Cistulli, invoked the name of Chicago White Stocking Ross Barnes — i.e. progenitor of the home run in organized baseball.

Because you, reader, are also the curious sort of person this country needs more of, you probably thought to yourself something like, “I wonder what it might’ve been like to actually have witnessed that historic event.”

Luckily, this is an area in which I’m able to offer some assistance. For, after a combination of database-searching and barely ept cut-and-pasting, I’ve managed to include in this post some excerpts from the Chicago Tribune’s report of the historic game (from the May 3, 1876 edition of that paper).

The image that introduces this post is the headline for the Tribune’s sporting coverage for that day.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Bespectacled Readership,

Your host, Carson Cistulli (i.e. me), has just — literally, within the last half-hour — completed the drive from Madison, Wisconsin, to an undisclosed location in Michigan.

Though I’m not at liberty to discuss the exact reasons for my visit to America’s second-most peninsula-y state, I can assure you that all but one or two of them (i.e. the reasons) are legal.

In any case, I have two announcements for you, the first of which will make you L — if not OL, then at least STY* — and the second of which will make your quality of life better.

*That’s “silently to yourself.”

The first is this: “… and, boy, are my arms tired!”

Ba-da-bing, amirite?

The second is this: thirty or so minutes of the trip were rendered entirely bearable by listening to an April 2008 interview with Bill James on PRI’s The Sounds of Young America (TSOYA).

Read the rest of this entry »

We all knew that Wade Boggs ate chicken before each game and that he was a superstitious character, but thanks to Dan Lewis’ aptly-named e-newsletter, Now I Know, now we know a little more about that colorful dude:

For night games, Boggs stepped into the batting cage at 5:17 and ran wind sprints at 7:17. (Trying to hex him, a scoreboard operator in Toronto once flipped the stadium clock directly from 7:16 to 7:18.) Before each at-bat Boggs would draw the Hebrew word “Chai” in the batter’s box, and his route to and from the playing field was so precise that by late summer his footprints were often clearly visible in the grass in front of his home dugouts. — Wade Boggs’ entry in the Baseball Library.

If such a thing were possible, I would order more of it. Could even the commissioner himself somehow decree that the players show more of their personality? Perhaps the website or the media could achieve the same by celebrating some of the crazier members of the baseball community. Here are some possible moves baseball could pull to put some of the zany back in the game.

1) Turk Wendell Day At the Park
The team – perhaps the Cubs – could hand out free licorice strings and a toothbrush to remind us all of the wonders of the Turk. Players could take flying leaps over the foul line (or draw crosses in the mound dirt) to add a little exuberance to the game, if they like.

2) Recommend Moises Alou as a Hitting Instructor
332 home runs and a career 133 wRC+ later, he could help some young men figure it out. But a whole team full of batters that eschew the batting glove and urinate on their hands would definitely add something.

3) Recommend Kevin “Touch Me, Touch Me” Rhomberg as a First Base Coach
Rhomberg played left field for the Indians once, but was better known for his superstitions. The two main superstitions that apply here were his need to touch anyone that touched him, and his inability to turn right (he’d keep turning left until he was headed right). Imagine a team full of Rhombergs. Just imagine.

4) Mark “The Bird” Fydrich Talking Ball Giveaway
Technology has come a long way. I’m sure a ball that could say a few key phrases could be made cheap enough to give away at a game. Then, at least, the ball would talk back.

5) Nomar Garciaparra Batting Gloves Giveaway
This might fly in the face of the new effort to speed games up, but a Nomar batting gloves giveaway, replete with a “Nomar at the Plate” video montage might just spawn a whole generation of crazy pre-at-bat rituals.

Hat Tip: Dan Lewis

Perhaps you’re the sort of person who knew this, but I, Carson Cistulli, am not.

In any case, some Paul DePodesta-related googling has verified it: apparently, back in April of 2005, Steven Levitt — progenitor of the Freakonomics brand — wrote a series of three posts for his blog in which he questioned the underlying causes of the A’s success under Billy Beane.

From one such post:

I am not necessarily implying that Billy Beane isn’t a good general manager who can stretch a small budget into a respectable record through good use of data, clever trades, etc. My only point is that there are a lot of people who are above average at their jobs, but they don’t become the subject of best-selling books. He had a book written about him because against all odds his team has been winning almost 100 games a year. And in the book, Michael Lewis sure makes it seem like the main reason is the clever stuff the A’s have done with analyzing hitting. And I am simply saying that is not the reason the A’s win.

In the spirit of data, the skeptics amongst you should tell me how many games the A’s need to win this year or over the next five years so that they would feel that Moneyball is validated. My own view is that if the A’s win 81 games a year for the next five years, it is more likely that Beane was lucky than good. If they win 97 a year, I’ll happily concede that Beane is the best. Even an average of 90 games
a year and I will acknowledge he is brilliant.

The A’s averaged just above 90 wins for the two seasons after Levitt’s statement, but then only 75 per year for the three seasons after that (i.e. through 2009). Here are the win totals, precisely: 88, 93, 76, 75, 75. Is that conclusive in either direction? I don’t know.

In a fourth post, from October of the same year, Levitt announced — with thinly veiled glee* — that Paul DePodesta had been fired from the Dodgers — partially confirming, for Levitt, that the Moneyball narrative was suspect.

*The post is called, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, “Unemployment-ball?”

I have only one real comment on Levitt’s claims — namely, I’m glad I wasn’t aware them at the time. Beane and Levitt are like the Santa Claus and Tooth Fairy of the baseballing world. Which, imagine if the Tooth Fairy started publicly questioning Santa’s ability to make lists and check them twice? That’s not fun for anybody.