Baseball posts

The 2023 Minnesota Twins are done, losing their ALDS to the Houston Astros three games to one before a hometown crowd. Not welcome but not exactly unexpected.

The 100+ win Orioles are also done (three and out against Texas), as are the 100+ win Dodgers (three and out against Arizona), and the 100+ win Braves are on the brink, down two games to one to Philadelphia. These things were unexpected. Kinda.

Last year, MLB restructured its playoff system to allow for two more teams, bringing the total up to 12; and to quiet concerns that this was making the long, 162-game season kind of irrelevant, they said the really good teams would get a bye in the first round so they wouldn't have to fight for their life in a best-of-three series. They could wait on the sidelines and watch. It's a reward!

But is it? Here's Joey Poz yesterday:

Sure, you get a first-round bye and the chance to line up your rotation... but you also have to sit around and get rusty for five days, which probably dulls the advantage (or perhaps, depending on who you're listening to, even puts you as a DISadvantage).

As of this moment, the five teams that won 92 or more games are 1-10 in the postseason, the one win being the Braves' miraculous comeback against the Phillies in NLDS Game 2.

And while he suggests that it may be a one-year blip, he adds, via asterisk, that in the NL last year, “the four teams that won 92-plus games went 3-10 in the playoffs, none of them winning a series.”

Wouldn't that be amazing? If, in restructuring the playoff systsem to give greater advantage to the better teams, MLB, in its continued quest for more postseason revenue, actually did the opposite? 

This should be the No. 1 topic for baseball fans everywhere.

Some deaths make me wonder where the hell I’ve been. Jim Caple was a fun, breezy sportswriter that I read often, and when he went away, or I went elsewhere, I didn’t notice. He was there, and then wasn’t, and how come I didn’t realize it? How could I not hold onto that? One of my faults is wanting to hold onto too much, so why couldn’t I hold onto that?

(Another fault is the exact opposite: just leaving; just dropping it all and holding onto nothing. I’m not saying it makes sense.)

Caple didn’t just write like a person, he wrote like a person you wanted to be friends with. Our paths kept criss-crossing: He grew up in the Pacific Northwest, then moved to Minnesota and covered the Twins; I grew up in Minnesota, then moved to the Pac Northwest and cheered on the Mariners. He was already a big-name sportswriter, a founder of ESPN’s Page 2 humor pages, and its Off Base columnist, when I was writing for an alternative Mariners mag, The Grand Salami; but he, now living back here, still agreed to do a regular column for then-publisher Jon Wells. “You got Caple?” I said, impressed. “How did that happen?” I got a compliment back from him, too. Once, after news broke in 2004 that “Laverne & Shirley” alum David L. Lander was scouting for the M’s, I wrote a column parodying the dumb moves of GM Billy Bavasi as if it were an old episode of “L&S,” with Billy in the Lenny role. I remember hearing from Jon how impressed Caple was with the column. Or maybe he was just impressed that I was able to reach back in the memory banks and somehow find Laverne’s catchphrase for dishy guys: Vodeo-doh-doh. Maybe it was just that. But that was enough.

Caple died Sunday night, age 61, from ALS and dementia. His nephew has a nice tribute here. His colleague at The Athletic has a nice tribute here.

Here’s Caple’s column on 50 years of baseball memories. Here he is on first gloves and Jack Morris. When Mariners broadcaster Dave Niehaus died in 2012, Caple quoted his nephew: “I didn't know him, but it feels like I did.” Same with Caple.

Ask a Red Sox fan about Tim Wakefield's postseasons in 2003 and '04, and he might go “sucked” and “rocked,” respectively. In the 2003 ALCS, Game 7, he gave up Aaron Boone's walkoff homerun in the bottom of the 11th to end the season for the Sox and send the hated Yankees, yet again, to the World Series. And in the 2004 ALCS, Game 5, with the season on the line, he kept the Yankees scoreless for three tense innings, allowing the Sox to come back in the bottom of the 14th to win the game and send it back to New York. It was a crucial link in the chain, one of many, in their unprecedented comeback from a three-game deficit to take the best-of-seven series and end the so-called “Curse of the Bambino.” So: 2003 negative, 2004 positive.

Overall, though, Wakefield pitched much better in 2003. He started ALCS Game 1, went 6 innings, gave up 2 runs, got the win. Started Game 4, went 7, gave up 1, another W. Then in Game 7 they brought him in to face the Yanks in the bottom of the 10th: Matusi, Posada, Giambi. Ground out, fly out, fly out. But the BoSox could do nothing with Mariano, and in the bottom of the 11th Wakefield faced Boone, who pinch-ran for Rueben Sierra in the 8th, then stayed in the game. And we know what happened.

2004, meanwhile, began bumpy. Game 1, Sox down 6-0, he pitched an inning and gave up two. Game 3, he came on in the 4th, down 9-6, and allowed 5 runs in 3 1/3 in a 19-8 Yankee blowout. Yet in the crucial Game 5, he held the line. And that's what we remember. 

According to Joe Posnanski, Wakefield learned the knuckleball from his father. Or his father used the knuckleball to end games of catch he thought were going on too long. He figured making Tim chase after balls he couldn't catch was the way to do it. Instead Tim became intrigued with how to throw it, and mastered it, but never thought of it as anything more than a parlor trick. He was a first baseman at Florida Tech, drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates, but couldn't hit A ball pitching and his career seemed done. And then? Then he was goofing around with his parlor trick and an old hand noticed.

Woody Huyke, who managed and coached in the Pirates organization for more than 30 years, happened to see it. Huyke had seen hundreds of players goofing off and throwing knuckleballs for fun, but Wakefield's knuckleball was something different, something explosive.

“I didn't say anything,” Huyke told the New Yorker's Ben McGrath. “I just played dumb. And then two days later we had an organizational meeting, because, you know, he was on the bubble as an infielder. I said, 'Before you let him go, I'd like to see him on the mound, 'cause he's got a good knuckleball.”

We could all use a Woody Huyke in life. Wakefield pitched for 19 years in the Majors, mostly for Boston, went 200-180 with a 4.41 ERA, and consternated batters and catchers alike with that explosive knuckleball. “And, as the famous line goes,” Posnanski writes, “Wake was a better person than pitcher. He won the Roberto Clemente Award for his work off the field. Cliches are cliches, but sometimes they are just true: To know Tim Wakefield was to love the guy.”

He died Oct. 1, age 57, brain cancer. The New York Times headline is like my Boston fan: “Pitcher Who Helped Boston Break the Curse...”

Athletes get better with time. Training gets better, equipment gets better, diet gets better. Today, these guys are doing it 24/7 rather than in their spare time. At the turn of the 20th century, half of Major League Baseball seemed to be hinterland kids avoiding the coal mines who worked at grocery stores in the off-season. Back then, you needed spring training to actually get in shape. Now guys show up in better shape than the rest of the world. That's why amazing plays from the past don't seem so amazing today. 

An exception is Brooks Robinson.

Most of his plays in the 1970 World Series are still amazing—particularly the Lee May play. And that play mattered. That often gets lost in the discussion. It was Game 1, Oct. 10, 1970, and while the 108-win Orioles were favorites over the 102-win Cincinnati Reds, the Orioles had been prohibitive favorites the year before against the New York Mets and still lost in five. And they were losing this one, 3-0. Lee May was 2-2, a single and a 2-run homerun—he was making an early argument for MVP—and with the game now tied 3-3 in the sixth (on homeruns by Boog Powell and Elrod Hendricks), he furthered that argument with a lead-off double down the left field line.

Except, oh wait, not a double. The Orioles third baseman, Brooks Robinson, ranged to his right, stabbed the ball, and, from deep in foul territory, heaved a throw over to first base that nabbed May by half a step. (Video here.)

Even today you're like: Holy crap.

Here's how important that play was: The next two guys got on (walk, single) but didn't score. May certainly would've scored ahead of them, and maybe one or both would've scored since there would've been one fewer out against the Reds. But they didn't. And the next inning, the Orioles went ahead on a solo homerun ... by Brooks Robinson. That made it 4-3, Orioles, and that's how the first game ended. The O's wound up winning the Series in five, Brooks Robinson batted .429 with a 1.238 OPS, and made so many great plays at third, robbing the Reds again and again, that afterwards Pete Rose famously said: “Brooks Robinson belongs in a higher league.” He, not Lee May, was named MVP.

And here's the crucial inning on Baseball Reference's play-by-play chart:

Announcer Jim McIntyre: “Great day in the morning, what a play!” The history books: “Groundout: 3B-1B.”

You know who didn't get Pete Rose's memo about Brooksie? Topps. I guess they didn't have much competition back then, and didn't pay much for photographers, so this was Brooks' card the following season, my first real year of collecting cards, along with his World Series card:

In one he's (I guess?) striking out, in the other ... just what is that? A catcher looking for a contact lens? Someone imitating a turtle? It's like a grainy Bigfoot photo. “We think it's a baseball player but we're not sure.” And it's mostly infield dirt! No one had a zoom back then?

Brooks was my first Brooks—for a time, I actually thought his name was “Brook”—and one of two great Robinsons on the great 1966-71 Orioles team. As a Twins fan, that seemed totally unfair. We'll give you one Hall of Fame Robinson, but two? The other, Frank, won the 1966 World Series MVP, won the 1966 Triple Crown, and hit 586 career homers. It was a time of civil rights, when race was on everybody's mind, and they were asked about it a lot. Hey, two ballplayers, black and white, with the same last name? Surely, you two can solve the implacable American problem. Brooks' go-to was a joke: They were the same height, same weight, but you could tell them apart: “We wear different numbers,” he said. They joked about it in a Miller Lite commercial as well.

Brooks died last week of cardiovascular disease at the age of 86. He was, by all accounts, a beautiful man, open, friendly, classy. I've got a half-dozen quotes about him from Joe Posnanski's obit alone but I'll stick with the best of them. Brooks retired at the end of the 1977 season and they honored him at a banquet. This was shortly after Reggie Jackson hit three homeruns in the final game of the 1977 World Series, and there was a lot of buzz about that. Jackson had said that if he played in New York they'd name a candy bar after him, and now they were going to. And at the banquet, sportswriter Gordon Beard teed that up. He said: “Brooks never asked anyone to name a candy bar after him. In Baltimore, people name their children after him.”

From Joe Posnanski's end-of-regular-season column, going over the events of the last day—beginning with ...

Astros win again (because of course they do)

I had this feeling a couple of days ago when Aroldis Chapman had his ninth-inning meltdown, that it would end up costing the Texas Rangers the division title. I didn’t know HOW it would happen — I actually thought the most likely scenario was that the Mariners would sweep the Rangers — but something about that loss and, specifically, the role of Aroldis Chapman in it suggested some bad juju and a crushing finish to what has been a glorious season for the Rangers.

Well, the Mariners did not sweep — the Mariners have their own bad juju to deal with. But they did take three out of four, including Sunday’s gut-punch 1-0 victory, and the Astros woke up just in time to sweep the Diamondbacks (allowing just two runs in the three games) and now the Rangers are stuck trying to win a best-of-three series in Tampa Bay while the Astros get to sip martinis and wait for whoever wins that Twins-Blue Jays series.

Those two are NOT the same thing.

One: It's very cute that Joe thought the Mariners would sweep. He just doesn't know what it's like to be us. 

Two: Well, I guess he knows it a little: “the Mariners have their own bad juju to deal with.”

Three: I wrote about all this on Tim's and my Section 327 Substack. Basically: Yay, we kept the Rangers from winning the title! Crap, we let the Astros win the title again! There's no winning, even when we win.

Four: It is astonishing how much those two are not the same thing.

The ESPN.com headline:

Braves' Acuña 5th player ever with 40-40 season

I went through the list in my mind: Canseco, Bonds, A-Rod and ... who was the other? Right. Alfonso Soriano in 2006. Or did I even know that? 

Then it hit me: Will Acuna also be the first since the first to win the MVP? Here's how they fared:

• Canseco, 1988, 42 HRs and 40 SBs (16 CS), first in AL MVP in a landslide, with 28 (of 28) first-place votes
• Bonds, 1996, 42 HRs and 40 SBs (7 CS), fifth in NL MVP voting, despite the league's highest bWAR (which obviously didn't exist yet)
• A-Rod, 1998, 42 HRs and 46 SBs (13 CS), ninth in AL MVP voting, despite the league's highest b WAR
• Soriano, 2006, 46 HRs and 41 SBs (17 CS), sixth in NL MVP voting

Interesting that with the exception of Bonds their SB% weren't great. Interesting, too, that with the exception of A-Rod everyone had more homers than SBs.

And now Acuna (thus far):

• Acuna, 2023, 40 HRs and 68 SBs (13 CS)

He's also leading the league in half of all offensive categories but apparently his defense is a little suspect? His bWar is currently 8.0, so he won't approach Bonds' 9.7 bWAR but he has a good shot at A-Rod's 8.5. He's already passed Soriano (6.1) and Canseco (7.3). 

Over on the Substack Section 327 that I do with friend and worldwide webslinger Tim H., I wondered about the MLB teams that have never gone through a name change—either by moving to a different city/state, changing the name of their city/state, or changing their nickname. Like neither Flordia team counts since both made tweaks: Florida Marlins became Miami Marlins (alliterative!) while the Tampa Devil Rays simply became the Rays (meh). I narrowed it down to 11 teams who, soup to nuts, have just been one thing:

• Chicago White Sox
• Detroit Tigers
• Philadelphia Phillies
• Pittsburgh Pirates
• New York Mets
• Kansas City Royals
• San Diego Padres
• Seattle Mariners
• Toronto Blue Jays
• Arizona Diamondbacks
• Colorado Rockies

Tim wondered about some of those original 16 teams, though. Like I discounted the Red Sox because, per Baseball Reference, they'd once been called the Americans: “As I understand it,” Tim wrote, “there's some question whether the Red Sox were ever really the Boston Americans or if they were simply referred to in the papers as such as a shorthand for 'the Boston team of the American League'...” 

Thankfully I have that superhandy newspapers.com account which gives you a bit of a glimpse into our past. And I was able to determine that from 1901 to 1906 there were zero references to “Boston Red Sox” (quotes included) in American newspapers, but there were thousands of references to “Boston Americans.”

All that began to change at the tail end of 1907:

Undoubtedly. 

The best part was a few grafs down:

“Pres Taylor has suggested red stockings to be a part of the uniforms and thought the Boston 'Red Sox' might sound better to the baseball enthusiasts than the names now used by many, such as 'The Pilgrims,' 'The Yankees,' etc.”

The Boston Yankees???? Wow. It's tough to make two cities simultaneously nauseous but I think that sentence would do it. 

I'm with Joe on this. Mr. Posnanski was at the the Royals-Astros game Saturday and fans were still booing José Altuve, and he was kind of scratching his head:

I mean, on one level, sure, I get it: Many people think Altuve was wearing some sort of sign-stealing buzzer when he hit the pennant-winning home run off an Aroldis Chapman breaking ball in 2019.

What I don't fully get is why people in KANSAS CITY are holding on to that all these years later. ... Whatever he may or may not have done, the Royals are not really involved.

It struck me as odd because everything else about Jose Altuve is so utterly likable. He's tiny — the shortest player in baseball since Kansas City's beloved Freddie Patek — and he plays such a wonderfully joyous game. I mean, he's a lifetime .307 hitter. He already has more than 2,000 hits. He's 5-foot-6, 166 pounds, and he has 209 regular-season home runs and 23 more in the playoffs — that's absurd. Only Joe Morgan, among players around Altuve's size, hit 200 big-league home runs. This guy's a little miracle. ... I just find it kind of weird that Royals fans are still mad at Altuve over a home run that beat the Yankees four years ago.

Amen amen amen. I was shaking my head last July when Seattle fans were booing Astros players during the All-Star game, but added: “I know, the booing won't stop. Mob rule. Once booing becomes a thing, you can't put it back in the bottle.” Even so, I'm with Joe on this, and particularly when it comes to Altuve, whom I, as a charter member of the Short Man's Room, totally cheer for.

Not so fast, Yankees Baseball Network

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the pine-tar incident, when KC Royals third baseman George Brett hit a two-out, two-run homerun off closer Goose Gossage at Yankee Stadium to give the Royals a one-run lead—until, that is, Yankees manager Billy Martin accused him of using a bat with excessive pine tar up the handle and asked the umpires to disqualify him and call him out. Which they did. Which led to Brett storming out of the dugout in insane, eyeball-popping fashion. Which has made for a fun video clip ever since. 

Asked by ESPN's William Weinbaum what it's like to be known as the pine-tar guy, Brett responds that everyone's known for something and before that he was known as the hemorrhoids guy (cf., 1980 World Series), so pine tar isn't so bad. Me, I'm like, “Isn't Brett just known as one of the best hitters in baseball history? And one of the last guys to challenge .400? And a great Yankee-killer in the postseason? Plus a handsome SOB?” Let's get our priorities straight, people.

There are two stand-out quotes in their interview for me. The first is Brett describing July 24, 1983:

We were playing the team that I despise the most, the New York Yankees, and they despise me.

Gotta love him for that. The other is when Weinbaum asks him whether he watches the clip much. He says he doesn't seek it out but he doesn't turn away, either. Then this:

Showed it to my kids a whole bunch of times when they were young. I wanted to see the look on their faces when I got mad. I told them, “You better never make me this mad.” And they never did.

Is Brett the greatest Yankee killer of all time? He's in the running—even if his exploits didn't always lead to the Yankees being killed. Royals won the AL West in 1976, '77, '78 and '80, and faced the Yankees in the ALCS each time, and they didn't finally get to the World Series until 1980. But at least that was a sweep. 

These are Brett's numbers during those Yankees series:

Not sure what number I like best: that 1.056 slugging percentage (slugging percentage!) during the '78 ALCS; or the fact that over these 17 games he struck out exactly twice.

For those who don't know: the AL president wound up overruling the umps on the pine-tar call, for not being in the spirit of the rule (pine tar doesn't help you hit homers); the rest of the game was played several weeks later from after the homer, with Brett tossed for rushing the field like a madman, and the Royals won, 5-4. Brett watched the end from an Italian restaurant in New Jersey—another detail from the interview I liked.

Final thought? Billy would've killed for a player like Brett. He was exactly the kind of guy he wanted on his team.

The view from 300 during BP.

The team with the uglier uniforms won. So it goes.

Yesterday I attended my second in-person All-Star Game, at what is now called T-Mobile Park and used to be called Safeco Field, south of downtown Seattle, about 1.5 miles from where I live in the First Hill neighborhood. The last (the only other) ASG I attended was at Safeco, and as I was walking to the game, I ran through all the All-Star Games that played in Minneapolis (where I grew up) and Seattle during my lifetime, and why I hadn't been to more of them.

MINNEAPOLIS

• 1965: Metropolitan Stadium
• 1985: The Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome
• 2014: Target Field

SEATTLE

• 1979: The Kingdome
• 2001: Safeco Field
• 2023: T-Mobile Park

I missed the first one in Minnesota because I was 2 years old, missed the second because I was in college, studying, and had lost track of baseball for a time. I remember feeling sad that I'd lost track of baseball. Like: What had I become? But look at that list again, there's some interesting history there. Our stadiums once had generic names (“Metropolitan”); then in the 1960s and '70s multi-use stadiums were built and named for famous, powerful people (Humphrey, King, RFK, Shea); but then in the 1990s it was decided, no, retro ballparks subsidized by local governments, with high-priced seating and suites so rich people wouldn't have to intermingle with the rabble, that was the way to go, and while we're at it let's make even more money by selling naming rights to the highest-bidding corporation. And that's where we are. The world keeps turning, and turning bad.

But what sticks out for me is that each of the above ASGs was in a different stadium—except for the two I attended, at Safeco/T-Mobile. How often does an All-Star Game show up at the same stadium within a 25-year span? And that led me to this Wikipedia page on all the MLB All-Star venues, which led me to the realization that I have no idea how they choose the ASG venue. I'd always assumed they just took turns. And if a new stadium was built, well, you go to the head of the line. That first part isn't really true, though. The Tampa Bay Rays, for example, have been around since 1998 and have never hosted—I assume because they have a shitty ballpark. It's MLB going to Tampa, “No, you haven't tried hard enough. You're not helping the brand.”

But if a county builds a new stadium? Damn right we're going to showcase you. The first retro ballpark, Camden Yards in Baltimore, opened in 1992 and hosted the All-Star Game in 1993, and since then, with a few detours to stadiums that were established (Veterans, 1996) or iconic (Fenway, 1999) or iconic and soon-to-be-shuttered (Yankee, 2008), it's been all the retro ballparks, year after year. And then I guess they just ran out. In 2019, the ASG returned to Cleveland and Jacobs/Progressive. In 2021, Coors got a second go-round. In '22 it was iconic Dodger Stadium and now it was Seattle's turn to re-host. Re-hosting at the same stadium with a new corporate name is the new thing. It's what's happening. And I was there for the happening.

Seattle lucked out in showcasing our city, since yesterday was about as perfect a day as you could ask for: mid-70s, blue skies, and the mountains were out. My Philly cousin in LA sent me this email during the game: “Seattle sure looks good on TV. In fact the beauty shots are way more interesting than the game.” I have to admit, there were times, sitting in the 300 level behind homeplate, when a plane went overhead and I'd get lost just looking at its slow trajectory against that vast blueness.

On the ground, not everything was so peachy. Walking there, via the International District and Seahawks parking lot, I ran into crowds on Occidental, as well as one of those miked-up doomsaying preachers. I thought: “Well, at least they pushed him way back here instead of in front of the stadium where he usually is.” Except, nope. He was one of four such preachers I ran into on Occidental. Is there a permit involved when using a microphone for soap-box sermonizing in a public space? I'm curious how it works. I'd be way more interested in these guys if they'd lose the mic. (OK, not too interested.)

And the hawking that I wanted to hear but didn't? Scorecard guys. “Programs, get yer programs!” That was about as staple as baseball use to be, and I would've bought one. But apparently they don't sell them that way anymore. Now it's via the souvenir shops and stands, which may be why the lines there were superlong before the game, and not long at all for the foodstuffs. Me, I bought a brat from my usual guys, ate it in my seat while watching BP, then returned to the 100-level and walked around the park a bit. My favorite thing was checking out all the jerseys everyone was wearing. It wasn't just M's and whatever team we were playing. Everyone was represented, all 30 MLB teams, and then some. My seatmate Andy W. saw an Expos jersey; both of us saw a good 1969 Seattle Pilots number. Hell, Rays fans even showed up, poor bastards. (“Poor” in that they have a smart, winning organization with a shitty ballpark and fanbase.) I saw a Bench 5, and a De La Cruz 44, and a Mets de Grom, and a Jeter 2—along with the usual Griffey 24s, Martinez 11s and Rodriguez 44s. Oh right, I even saw a Yankees 13 for the other Rodriguez, A-Rod. That was intriguing. The most obscure jersey? A Kenji Johjima number. Been a while. If ever. 

Two chants got going during the game: “Come-to-Seattle! [clap clap clapclapclap]” whenever Shohei Ohtani batted; and “Sell the team!” whenever the Oakland A's lone rep did anything. That message was for the A's current owner, who is in the midst of shipping the team to Las Vegas, a horrible idea, so I was behind both chants. What I wasn't behind? The continued booing of Astros ballplayers because of the 2017 garbage-can scandal. One, most of the current Astros weren't on that team, so you're booing innocent bystanders. Two, the Mariners weren't going anywhere that year, so it's not like Houston robbed us of anything. And three, who knows, but the cheating might've prevented the New York Yankees from winning the pennant in 2017, which was their best shot at a pennant in the 2010s, so instead they suffered their first pennant-less decade since Babe Ruth was purchased for $100k back in the winter of 1919. C'mon. Anything that prevents the Yankees winning more is a positive. “By any means necessary,” as a great man once said. So stop with the booing already. 

(I know, the booing won't stop. Mob rule. Once booing becomes a thing, you can't put it back in the bottle. See: A-Rod.) 

We had three Mariners reps this go-round and were lucky to get those. The first one chosen, Luis Castillo, didn't play, but George Kirby pitched an inning (and gave up a run), and Julio Rodriguez, whose jersey I was wearing, played the second half in center field and struck out in the 7th. In the 9th, with the AL down by one, he was the fourth man due up, and the first two guys made outs. The third guy, Kyle Tucker, is an Astro who wasn't around in 2017 but was lustily booed nevertheless. He worked a walk to let us see Julio bat again. (See? Astros can do good things.) Last year, it seemed Julio kept making the magical happen, but this season not so much. He flails too much after the outside sliders and then takes the fastballs in the zone. But here he worked a walk, to get us to Cleveland third baseman Jose Ramirez, who struck out to send us home, a little disappointed but not much.

I was excited to see the youth on the field, all these up-and-comers, so it was interesting that the big blow for the NL was struck by Colorado catcher Elias Diaz, age 32+, a career .249/.302/.391 hitter, playing in his first All-Star Game. Good for him! The scoring began with a Diaz homerun (Yandy, AL, 2nd inning) and ended with a Diaz homerun (Elias, NL, 8th inning), which is a nice bookend. We try to stay neat in Seattle. But I would've preferred it ending with a Rodriguez homerun.

Is that my last All-Star Game in my home park? Probably, unless I move. The year 2001 doesn't seem so long ago in some contexts, but I was 38 then and I'm 60 now. And 60+22 isn't my favorite math.

After the game, fans file past an image of a Diaz who was neither of the Diazes that went yard during the game. (I wish I'd taken more photos of all the jerseys. I like the brave Bonds fan. And the Kyle Lewis wearer has nothing on Kenji.)

Charlie Finley was an all-world huckster who had some fun ideas about shaking up the staid old game: those garish, glorious, green-and-gold A's unis; paying his players to grow long hair and facial hair during the hippy-ish early 1970s; manufacturing Old Timey nicknames. All of that was fun. He had shitty ideas, too: orange baseballs, the DH, but I think the worst of them relates to that third fun idea. He'd done well enough with Jim “Catfish” Hunter and John “Blue Moon” Odom, both great, both pure grift, but then he tried to impose the nickname “True” on one of his other young pitchers, and that pitcher balked at the idea. As he should have. Because he already had one of the most perfect names in baseball history. To be honest, I worry a little about Charlie Finley—that when presented with this almost perfect baseball name, nearly a double unique, he didn't see it. He wanted to fuck it up with a false, punny “True.” He didn't see the perfection that was already there in Vida Blue.

For the first half of 1971, when he was just 21 years old, Vida Blue was nearly perfection. He may have been the first superstar to emerge once I became a fan. Everyone else was already there when I showed up: Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Frank and Brooks Robinson, Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, even the fairly youthful Johnny Bench. But Vida Blue was not there and then, in the spring and summer of 1971, he was everywhere. He was an event. He was such an event they held a Vida Blue Day for him ... in Minnesota. Twins owner Calvin Griffith was a sad, slow huckster compared to Charlie Finley, but he knew what people wanted, and he knew in the summer of 1971 they wanted Vida Blue. And so for a twi-night doubleheader, the Twins honored the opposing pitcher. In my memory, if you wore a piece of blue clothing you got in for half price, but that doesn't make much sense. Calvin wouldn't take money from Calvin's coffers. No, what you got, if you wore anything blue—and the Twins' promo ad mentioned any apparel, including “suits, dresses, hot pants...” which gives you a sense of the divide in America at the time, when men still wore suits to ballgames while women wore hot pants—what you got, from Calvin on Vida Blue Day at Met Stadium, was a commemorative button, “an attractive blue button,” the ad said, with the following verse:

Rose are red
My clothes were blue
When I was there
To see Vida Blue

Even at age 8, I was like “That's not a rhyme. Blue and blue? That's just the same word.” But we went, wore blue (without trying), got one of those buttons, and saw the Twins win both games against the eventual division winners. Actually, no, we didn't see the victories. I don't know why I still remember this but I do. We arrived late to the first game, missing out on Harmon Killebrew's pinch-hit grand slam in the Twins 9-4 victory, then we left before the end of the second game (“We gotta beat the traffic!” --Frank Costanza and my father), so missed out on George Mitterwald's walk-off homerun against Vida Blue with two outs in the bottom of the 9th as the Twins won 2-1. Two amazing games and we missed out on both big blows. This is why, for the longest time after I became an adult, I never left a game early.

In that second game, Twins pitcher Hal Haydel got the W for his 9th-inning relief work (one of six Ws in his career), while Vida got the L for the game and went a mere 23-7 on the season. He would wind up 24-8 with a 1.82 ERA, 301 strikeouts to 88 walks in 312 innings pitched, and he would win the Cy Young and the MVP as a 21/22 year old. But the real story was his first half when he went 17-3 with a 1.42 ERA, 17 complete games and six shutouts. Again, that's the first half of the season. He seemed on pace to win 30. He seemed perfection. I'm looking at his game logs for the season and he actually started out poorly, on April 5, giving up 4 runs, 1 earned, in 1 2/3 innings against the lowly Washington Senators. Then he pitched a six-inning rain-shortened shutout against the Royals, striking out 13(!); pitched a complete game shutout of the Brewers; pitched a complete game victory against the ChiSox, and kept going. By the end of May he'd won 10 games (10!), and was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. By the end of August, he was on the cover of Time magazine under the heading “New Zip in the Old Game.”

In the second half, sure, not quite perfection. His ERA rose by a run, to 2.40, and he went 7-5, but there were games that should've been wins. On July 9 against the Angels, he pitched 11 shutout innings, struck out 17 and walked nobody but got the ND. (The A's won it 1-0 in the bottom of the 20th.) Two weeks later, he again went 11, striking out 11 and walking zilch as the A's won it in the bottom of the 12th. But yes, he must've been tiring. His last shutout was August 7 against the ChiSox, his 20th win. In the second half, he was very, very good, but not the Vida Blue of the first half. He was not a comet. But he was beautiful to watch.

Same for the rest of his career. After a season for the ages, he wanted a raise, Finley was penurious, Vida held out. A deal was finally struck ($14.7k —> $63k), but late, so Vida didn't make his first start until the end of May, and though he had a not-bad 2.80 ERA he went 6-10. The next year he won 20, then 17, then 22, as the A's became the only non-Yankees team to win three World Series in a row. In '76 Vida had an ERA of 2.35 and finished sixth in the Cy Young balloting, and was traded midseason to the New York Yankees. Except, whoops, no, another white man, Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, in perpetual battle with Finley, nullified the deal “in the best interests of baseball.” Back you go. He finally got away from Finley in '78, across the Bay to San Francisco, and became the first pitcher to start for both leagues in the All-Star Game. He lasted until the mid-1980s. Along the way there were drug problems. His career numbers are similar to Catfish Hunter's, but Catfish's rep was different, and Catfish came on the Hall of Fame ballot at the right time, so he got in. Blue, not. His rep was of not quite living up to the promise of that first half of 1971. But how could he? Comets streak across the sky, then disappear from view.

How much does Vida Blue mean to me? A kid who grew up rooting for another team in another state? One evening last November, after I'd returned home from New York City sick with COVID, I was involved in the usual late-night web searching, checking out this and that, and I wound up buying a comfort item for myself, something that just made me feel good. It was that August 1971 Time magazine with Vida Blue on the cover. It's been on my bookshelf ever since. It never doesn't make me smile.

I think I came across this particular IMDb absurdity when I was doing research for my review of the Willie Mays doc a few months back. Mays was one of several baseball stars—usually Dodgers or Giants—who made appearances on family-friendly sitcoms in the 1950s and 1960s, and, on IMDb, I was checking exactly who was on what.

I was first struck by this bio:

So IMDb thinks Duke Snider was an actor? Known for that one episode of “The Rifleman”?

But of course not. IMDb doesn't think. The above is just a template IMDb/Amazon uses for lesser bios since apparently it's too cheap to hire anyone to write or police any of this. The template goes:

• [Name] was born on [date] in [place].
• He [is/was] an actor, known for [top 3 known fors].
• He is/was married to [wife/former wife].
• If applicable: He died [date] in [place].

That's how IMDb does the bios for Don Drysdale and Willie Mays, too. It's not how they do the bios for other sports stars like Joe Namath (“The son of a steel worker from...”) or Jim Brown (“Often mentioned as the greatest player in NFL history...”), but then both men actually starred in movies. They didn't just make a guest appearance on “The Donna Reed Show.”

Wait, I just checked a couple more. It's also not how they do the bios for Reggie Jackson (“Reggie Jackson is a baseball Hall of Famer nicknamed 'Mr. October'...”) or Ken Griffey Jr.  (“Ken Griffey Jr. is considered by many experts to be the best player in baseball...”). And why is Junior's in the present tense, as if he were still playing? As if it were written in 1998 and no one's bothered to update it in IMDb's Amazon era? 

Sigh.

Anyway, that's not the part I wanted to bitch about. This is. It's in Duke Snider's trivia section:

Besides being an actor, Duke Snider somehow played baseball, too? Wow. And apparently at a pretty high level!

Seriously, no one's minding the store. 

As soon as I heard about the concept of a “pitch clock” I was against it. Baseball doesn't do clocks. Baseball doesn't do time. Didn't Roger Angell say that? But better?

He did:

“Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.”

He also said this:

“Baseball's clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher's windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch. Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own.”

That's beautiful. And now the current lords of Baseball are messing with that beauty. They want to make sure batters step into the box within a certain number of seconds (or get an automatic strike) and pitchers pitch within a certain number of seconds (or get an automatic ball). They tried it out in the minors and this year they're trying it out in the Majors. They're ruining the game!

That's what I thought.

And then I read Joe Posnanski's piece, “Baseball and Time,” in which he was very much in favor of the pitch-clock change. And he won me over. I'm looking forward to the change now.

No. 1, it's increasingly kinda necessary. In my lifetime, games have gotten longer and longer, and players aren't going to police themselves—they'll take what they can get—and so they have to be policed. Apparently spring training games are a half-hour quicker this season: 2.5 hours vs. 3 hours. That's about what it was when I was a kid.

As for Roger Angell's great quote about baseball and time? Poz says it still applies:

But there's a bigger reason I believe both in a pitch clock in baseball and no clock in baseball — it's because I think we're talking about two entirely different things. I don't think the concepts clash at all.

See, by “no clock in baseball,” what I'm really thinking about is not time between pitches. It's all about how outs, not minutes, are the currency of time in the game. That's the magic. ...

If anyone tried to mess with that part of baseball, sure, I'd roar angrily. Three outs in an inning ... nine innings in a game ... this is the most elegant way ever created to time a sport in my view. There is no clock limiting your possibilities. You could be down six runs with two outs in the ninth inning and nobody on base, the way Pittsburgh was against Houston in 2001. If this were an NFL game or NBA game or NHL game or soccer game, there would have been no hope.

But baseball has no clock. And there was hope. And the Pirates came back and won. I'll have more on that game as we get closer to a certain book I've written.

Point is, there's still no clock in baseball. There's now a timer to make sure that guys don't just stand around and halt the forward momentum of the game. But you're still alive until the last out is recorded.

I like that distinction. Here's that Pirates game, btw, when they defeated time and remained forever young. 

You know the fun thing about that game? Besides the obvious? After Pat Meares' HR makes it 8-4, the color announcer—is it Bob Walk?—says, “A lot of hoopin' and hollerin', but the horse is already out of the barn.” I probably would've thought the same. No chance for a comeback. But when they do come back, when Brian Giles goes deep to win it, the same color announcer offers a really nice, really smooth mea culpa. “Seven runs in the bottom of the 9th inning, he hits a grand slam homerun off possibly the best closer in baseball ... That is just phenomenal. Well, they went out and found that horse, put a rope around his neck, and let him back in the barn.”

Opening Day is March 30.

A few weeks ago, in his Pitchers and Catchers report, Joe Posnanski lamented the dearth of 140-RBI seasons by counting out their number per decade since the 1920s, and ending with this:

2011-present: ZERO.

Yeah, that's right: zero. The most RBIs in a season was Miguel Cabrera's 139 in 2012, followed by Chris Davis' 138 in 2013. I love that Chris Davis and Khris Davis have two of the top RBI seasons of the last decade. But the point is that the big RBI seasons have mostly gone away. This is surely because fewer and fewer hitters are getting on base, batting averages have gone way down, Mike Trout and some of the other great hitters in the game can't stay healthy for a full season. But it's a little bit sad. I'm not a fan of using RBIs to judge a player's production, but I admit to getting a little thrill when I see a player with a BIG RBI total.

As with me and hitting .350. So I thought I'd do the same. To be honest, I thought I'd already done it, in the post “It's 2018: Do You Know Where Your .350 Hitters Are?” but I'd just counted up dearths, not decades. So here they are by decades:

• 1900-09: 25, led by Nap Lajoie's .426 in 1901
• 1910-19: 30, led by Ty Cobb's .420 in 1911
• 1920-29: 95!!!!!, led by Rogers Hornsby's .423 in 1924
• 1930-39: 50, led by Bill Terry's .401 in 1930
• 1940-49: 16, led by Ted Williams' .406 in 1941
• 1950-59: 8, led by Ted Williams' .388 in 1957
• 1960-69: 3, led by Norm Cash's .361 in 1961
• 1970-79: 8, led by Rod Carew's .388 in 1977
• 1980-89: 13, led by George Brett's .390 in 1980
• 1990-99: 18, led by Tony Gwynn's .394 in 1994
• 2000-09: 17, led by three players with .372
• 2010-19: 1, Josh Hamilton, .359 in 2010
• 2020-22: 2*, led by D.J. LeMahieu's .364 in 2020

First, how cool is it that Ted Williams had the highest batting average of the 1940s and 1950s? And it wasn't like it was 1949 an 1951. It was 1941 and 1957—a 16-year gap!

Second is that asterisked “2” for the 2020-22 years. Both occurred during the pandemic-shortened year when MLB teams played, at most, 61 games rather than 162. So do we count those? Not really. If you go by a full season, which is kinda what I do, no one's done it since Josh Hamilton in 2010.

But I'm thinking the new rules—particularly the banning of the shift—could swing the pendulum back again. Fingers crossed.