Opening Day Thoughts

25 years ago was the pinnacle of my baseball fandom. Don’t get me wrong. I still really love the game. But I was head over heels about it as a teen. I think it really started in 1984. I still remember Jack Morris’s no-hitter on NBC early that year. I believe that was the first no-hitter that I ever saw. I absorbed that season like a sponge. I watched every minute of the LCSs and World Series. That Tiger team was dominant, yet none of its players made the Hall of Fame yet. Maybe Morris will, although he would be an unfashionable pick in certain circles. Personally, I think Trammell or even Whitaker or Kirk Gibson would be a better choice. I even have a dark horse candidate I’ll get to in a bit.

For a long time, the 1985 World Series was my favorite ever. My brother was friends with a transplant from Overland Park, Kansas. So we were really pulling for the Royals. When they were at death’s door in Game Six and came back, we emptied our lungs with loud screams. By now, I was working and would spend my cash on sports books and magazines. SI, Sport, and Inside Sports were must purchases. I bought Dynasty, Peter Golenbock’s book on the 1949-1964 Yankees. I believe that was the first adult baseball book that I bought. I still own it. Caldor’s actually had a decent collection of sports books. I bought Whitey Herzog’s the White Rat. And, last but not least, I started buying Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts.

My friend Will was also a big baseball nut. He and some other classmates turned me on to the Mets as well. For the first time that I am aware of, their games were regularly shown in Hartford on channel 20. More baseball on TV. Will and I would sometimes sit in the cafeteria and play GM. We’d make trades between teams that we think would help them both. We were probably ahead of our time.

25 years ago on Opening day (it was April 7th that year. Opening Day is a movable feast.), Dwight Evans, normally a model of patience, hit Jack Morris’s first pitch into the stands for a home run. It was the first pitch of the entire major league season. Imagine that! Waiting all winter, coiled, ready to unleash the lumber at that first pitch. There was another Evans in that game, and I think that both Dwight and Darrell Evans would make good Hall of Fame picks. I’m cool with Jim Rice being in, but Evans was more like fine wine. He got better as he aged. Rice and Fred Lynn started their careers like gangbusters, but it took Dewey a while to get going. Under the tutelage of Walt Hriniak, he really blossomed as a hitter. He also had skills that were under the radar. He was a great defensive player and a lot of folks don’t really know what to make of that. How do we credit defensive greatness Vis a Vis hitting? He also walked a ton, which was underappreciated by the masses those days. Dewey also had the misfortune of having one of his best years shortened by a player strike. In 1981, he tied for the AL lead in home runs. He, Bobby Grich, Eddie Murray, and Tony Armas all had 22 talljacks. As for Darrell Evans, he played most of his career in parks that obscured his greatness. And the Braves and Giants weren’t exactly powerhouses when he played for them.

Since ’86 the Red Sox have gone on to other great seasons, but this was the first good Red Sox team during the era I was starting to really understand the game. But let’s focus on the current team, shall we. I’m not new school. I’m not old school. I’m middle school. I went and picked up the Maple Street Press preview for the Sox this year. It is glossy instead of silicone based, but the writers come from a different perspective than the traditional beat guys and columnists. The player pages in the preview synthesize rationalist Jamesian analysis and the empiricism of the old Scouting Report books. Bill James and later sabermetricians or saberists broil raw stats into something more tasty and meaningful. And smart folks have access to more observational data. Greg Rybarczyk, who tracks every home run at his site hittrackeronline, is an engineer. There are also essays. One, by the controversial Dave Cameron, suggests that Carl Crawford is similar to Dwight Evans. He didn’t say this, but I inferred it. While their skills aren’t entirely similar, both have undertheradar skills that make them more valuable than they appear. With Dewey it was the arm and the eye. With Crawford it is the legs.

Crawford could have been a point guard at UCLA or an option quarterback at Nebraska. How many Carl Crawfords are out there? Could Pat White have been a lesser Crawford? Maybe, maybe not. But if these athletes didn’t have the NFL as an option, more might try to stay with baseball. Some might pan out. Look at Willie Mays. If he were growing up today, would he be a baseball player or might he have stuck with football or hoops?

Iverson was supposed to be good at baseball. And while Michael Jordan barely cracked the Mendoza Line in Birmingham (where he was managed by Terry Francona), how well would he have hit if he played baseball regularly throughout his twenties? Baseball would be better off with these guys. Allen Iverson would be a modern day Dick Allen.; at least off the field with his gambling and drinking. The NFL and NBA will eventually resolve their labor problems, but I sometimes daydream about what would happen if they didn’t.

The Red Sox faced str8edgeracer C.J. Wilson on Opening Day. Texas is the reigning champ. This game would provide on opportunity for Saltalamacchia to show his old team something. On the other side is David Murphy. He was with the Red Sox until the infamous Eric Gagne trade. Adrian Beltre is with Texas this year. I don’t believe there is bad blood between him and the Sox front office. His pillow contract last year worked out pretty well for him. He might not have liked the head rubbing he got last year, but 2010 led to big paydays this year and beyond.

Jon Lester was Boston’s Opening Day starter. Last year, I woke up in the middle of the nite as Boston was playing in Seattle. He was perfect through five. I sat up, only to watch things fall apart in the sixth. The aforementioned Will was at Fenway to see his no-no versus Kansas City. I was working Friday, so I caught the first part of the game on the radio. I cheated and listened to New York versus Detroit on Thursday, despite my distaste for the team of John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman. Hey, it was baseball. I think that Michael Kay was able to keep Sterling’s excesses in check, but Waldman brings out the show tunes in Sterling. Most folks expect the Red Sox to win the AL East, but the Yankees will always be a force to reckon with. Predictions, even scientific ones, usually fail to account for in season trades.

It was a good thing that the season opened on the road. Wet snow fell on New England in the morning. Jeff Burroughs threw out the first pitch. He was the first MVP the Rangers ever had and may be the least memorable MVP since Bobby Shantz. The Rangers wore red. I don’t mind when other teams wear alternate unis, but it doesn’t seem right for the Red Sox. The Bushes were there, as was new Texas owner Nolan Ryan. Ryan is this century’s answer to Clark Griffith.

I didn’t get home until the fifth inning. I pulled up to my spot and sat in the car as Lester gave up a three run homer to Mike Napoli. Lester didn’t have it yesterday. He gave up three home runs and hit three Rangers. Francona pulled him after only 88 pitches. Yet, the Sox were only down by a run. Matt Albers got out of a bases drunk jam in the sixth. That’s tension! The run potential is high, yet isn’t realized. Albers came back out to start the seventh and got Elvis Andrus to ground out. The Yahoo play-by-play says that it went to Albers, but Albers really set the ball like in volleyball and Pedroia got it and tossed to Adrian Gonzalez. Dennys Reyes came in to face Hamilton. He looks a little like a mirror image of Rich Garces.

The Rangers have some lefties in their pen, too; old ones. Arthur Rhodes and Darren Oliver both appeared in the game. It was still 5-4 in the 8th. Were the Red Sox to come back, this was their last best chance with the meat of the order up. After Youkilis and Gonzalez went down, David Ortiz went deep to center with a home run. It looks like Ortiz shaved off his beard this year. He looked svelter than normal. My wife thinks that he is Notasbig Papi this year.

The game was tied, but it wouldn’t be for long. It wasn’t Daniel Bard’s day. David Murphy came off the bench to hit for Julio Borbon and he exacted revenge on his old team by slicing a down and away pitch for a barely fair double to left. After two more doubles, it was Tim Wakefield time. The final score was 9-5, but it was a closer game than that until the eighth. No big deal, there are plenty of games left.

Dominican Cricket Part II

When I wrote about cricket in the Dominican Republic last week, I received an interesting reply from a bloke named Steve:

An English perspective here!

An interesting idea, but I’m not yet entirely convinced. While a batsman in cricket needs to protect the wicket from getting hit (or he will be out), beyond that patience is generally key. If a batsman goes for every ball he risks getting out, particularly if multiple fielders are placed behind him, readying themselves for him to ‘edge’ it behind.

A good batsman will defend balls aimed at the wicket, hit bad balls he is confident will get runs, and leave everything else.

Theoretically a batsman can leave every ball, providing it doesn’t hit the wicket, or doesn’t hit his legs if they are in the way of the wicket. So, I would expect a cricketer to generally be more patient playing baseball, than a ball player playing cricket, as there is no concept of ‘striking out’.

However…just to confuse matters further, shorter forms of cricket (such as Twenty20) are becoming more and more popular, and these forms rely on the scoring of runs within a shorter time period. In this case, the batsman does need to try and hit virtually everything bowled at him, as there is a very limited time period for accumulating runs. So, future cricketers brought up in this style might swing more when playing baseball.

Ed Smith’s book Playing Hard Ball is a great introduction to the similarities and differences between the two sports, if you can find it. Smith was an English cricketer, who happened to be a Mets fan, and be describes his experiences playing cricket, and joining in Spring Training with the Mets.

Just my thoughts. Apologies if this comment is stating the obvious, or missing the point, and thank you for an interesting post!

Steve, thanks for the reply. I enjoy hearing back from readers. I have more info on the game in the DR from Eastern Stars. From pp 105-6:

The boys of Santa Fe played a game they called cricket with a sock ball and four players in two-man teams: one to bowl and one to bat. The bowl was underhanded or sidearm, and there was an old license plate on the ground that served as a wicket. If the bowl hit the plate, you were out. There were three outs to a side. If you hit from one side to another, it was a run. They played twelve run games.

Santa Fe was George Bell’s neighborhood. I’m not sure if this type of game encourages aggressiveness or patience.

Emaus Metropoli

Aaron Gleeman:

 

By releasing Luis Castillo last week and optioning Justin Turner to Triple-A this morning the Mets have cleared the way for Rule 5 pick Brad Emaus to be their Opening Day starter at second base.

Luis Hernandez and Daniel Murphy now stand as his only competition, but Hernandez is no one’s idea of an everyday player and Murphy is expected to be used off the bench…

 

 

It would be cool if he were Latin, but he is from Kalamazoo. Eamus, Emaus.

Bruin Station

It is now less than a week until Opening Day.  Some folks think that pitchers and catchers reporting should be a national holiday, but that day pales in comparison to Opening Day.  I’m excited and not just because the Red Sox are stacked.  Although, I’ve been blogging on and off since November of 2009, I haven’t written much about the games in and of themselves.  I thought about taking an approach similar to Free Darko where they comment on the stylishness of players.  I blathered on and on about Rabbit Maranville and his sons last year.  (Just look at the tab Maranvillains for numerous examples.)  But baseball, the most individualistic of team sports, doesn’t need a Mark Fidrych or a great Jim Edmonds catch to be exciting.

 

I came across a book at the Homer Babbidge Library at Uconn this winter.  It was called The Quality of Home Runs.  An anthropologist from an English university who is an ex-pat former college pitcher wrote it.  I skimmed it.  To get a library card from there as a non-student would cost $50.  But I did read a section where he talks about what makes a particular baseball game exciting.  There are three elements: tension, controversy and rivalry.  These, and the potential for them, can make a game exciting.

 

Max Marchi has a series at The Hardball Times about  exciting games.  He calls tension equilibrium.  Controversy could be a close umpires call or a questionable decision.  Usually that would be the manager who opens himself up for second guessing, but it can be a player.  Rivalry is self-explanatory.  It could be the Dodgers versus the Giants or the Red Sox versus the Yankees.  But it could be more subtle than that.  I plan to write more about this as the season goes on.

 

Bruin Station

 

Billy Beane and Ruben Amaro are two general managers who are former players.  Can you name another one?

 

Bill Walton was a sixth man for the Boston Celtics.  He also filled in for the Grateful Dead when they played in Egypt in 1978.   I don’t know the state of basketball in Egypt, but they’re pretty good at field hockey.  Professor Peter Piccione of the College of Charleston says that they also played an ancient precursor to baseball called sekar hemat.  And, of course, the immortal Sammy Khalifa played shortstop for the Pirates back during the 1980’s.

 

Dead bassist Phil Lesh went to El Cerrito High in suburban Oakland at the same time that Cornell Green was there.  Green played hoops at Utah State and was drafted by the Chicago Zephyrs, but he never played in the NBA.  He tried out as a defensive back for the Dallas Cowboys and had a lengthy NFL career.  Dallas had a thing for athletes of all stripes.  Witness the conversion of Bullet Bob Hayes from sprinter to wide receiver.

 

Was Dallas being innovative in their signing of non-football players because expansion and the AFL were draining the talent pool of football players?  Probably not.  There were plenty more college football players than there were pro jobs to go around.

 

Green was an early hoops to pigskin conversion.  He preceded Antonio Gates, Tony Gonzalez, and Marcus Pollard; to name three.  There seems to be a fungibility of skills between tight ends, power forwards, and pitchers.

 

Green had an older brother named Elijah.  He was better known as Pumpsie and was the first black to play on the Red Sox.  Made his debut in 1959; a dozen years after Jackie Robinson was a rookie in Brooklyn.  Green played on some subpar Red Sox teams.  Those were dark days for the team.  Ted Williams would soon retire and 1967 was a ways off.  Gene Conley pitched for the team from 1961 to 1963.  One time, Pumpsie and Gene got drunk in New York and tried to catch a plane to Israel.

 

Conley was also a Boston Celtic as well as a Milwaukee Brave.  He is the only fellow to have a World Series ring and an NBA title to his name.  Red Auerbach was another guy who liked multi-sport athletes.  Bill Sharman was on the Brooklyn Dodgers; although he never played in a regular season game.  Hondo Havilcek tried out for the Cleveland Browns.

 

Another Red Sox pitcher of the era was Don Schwall.  He, too, was a basketball player in college.  But he never went pro.  He went on to pitch for the Atlanta Braves where he played with Rico “Beeg Boy” Carty.  Later in his career, Carty became a peripatetic designated hitter.  One of his stops was Toronto.

 

Danny Ainge was an infielder in Toronto before joining the Celtics and playing with Bird, McHale, Parish, Dennis Johnson, and, yes, Bill Walton.  He’s now the GM of the team.

 

This is awesome. Before he was a Celtic, Walton played for Helix High, UCLA, Portland, and the Clippers.  He won a ring in Portland.  One of his teammates was Herm Gilliam.  Gilliam played for the Cincinnati Royals before that.  Bob Cousy was the player-coach on that team.  Cousy and Conley were Celtics together.

 

What?  You thought that this was going to be about hockey?

 

The Food Network Network

Bobby Flay liked to play the ponies growing up. When he became successful, he bought his own thoroughbreds. One of them won last year’s Breeder’s Cup Juvenile Fillies race. More Than Real won in an upset by two lengths at Churchill Downs. Paid $29. She’s trained by Todd Pletcher. Pletcher apprenticed under D. Wayne Lukas who won a trainer’s Triple Crown in 1995. No horse has won the Triple Crown since the 1970s when Secretariat, Seattle Slew, and Affirmed won.

Skip Bayless is an ESPN personality, but before that he was a sportswriter. Won an Eclipse Award for covering Seattle Slew’s Triple Crown run. His brother is Rick Bayless; a chef. He was a candidate to become White House executive chef under Barack Obama, but Obama had Cristata Comerford stay on. He also competed on Iron Chef America versus Bobby Flay in 2005 and lost a close decision.

Alton Brown hosts Iron Chef America as well as Good Eats. Before becoming a foodie, he went to UGA around the same time as R.E.M. and majored in drama. He was the cinematographer for the video of the song “The One I Love.” Subtract Michael Stipe from R.E.M., add Warren Zevon, and you have The Hindu Love Gods. They did an album of covers about 20 years ago and are mostly known (if known at all) for their version of “Raspberry Beret.” Zevon is more well known for hits like “Werewolves in London”, “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”, and “Excitable Boy.” Also did a song “Bill Lee” about the wacky lefty pitcher.

Lee is lefty in more ways than one. In 1988, he was selected by Canada’s Rhino Party as their first American candidate. Ran for president against Bush the Elder and Michael Dukakis. Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was his running mate. Thompson knew a thing or two about presidential politics. Wrote Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail 1972. This was essentially an anthology of his dispatches to Rolling Stone magazine as he covered the race. He continued to follow politics for Jann Wenner’s mag. In 1974 he wrote an article titled “Jimmy Carter and the Great Leap of Faith.” It was probably the first national exposure that Carter received. The piece also had an awesome digression about breakfast.

Carter went on to beat Gerald Ford in 1976. Once elected, he appointed his crony Bert Lance to head the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB had an analyst responsible for nuclear energy named Ina Garten. These days, she is better known as The Barefoot Contessa on the Food Network.

Warren Zevon also once recorded a song called “Hit Somebody (The Hockey Song.)” It was written by Mitch Albom, of all people. Mitch is in an ad hoc group called the Rock Bottom Remainders along with other writers including Scott Turow, Amy Tan, and Stephen King. King’s short story “Trucks” was adapted into a movie called Maximum Overdrive. Directed by King, it was produced by Dino De Laurentiis. Dino’s granddaughter Giada is a Food Network personality.

As is Sandra Lee. She’s dating New York governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo’s father Mario was governor. Before that he was a minor leaguer in the Pittsburgh Pirate system. One of Cuomo’s teammates on the 1952 Brunswick Pirates was Fred Green. Green made the majors and was on the 1960 Pirates with Dick Schofield. Schofield was on the 1970 Red Sox with Bill Lee; the very pitcher immortalized in song by Zevon. Enjoy every sandwich.

New(ish) Biographies

I’ve mentioned my work with SABR’s BioProject before. Recently two new bios were added. One was on umprire and league president Tom Lynch. The other was on Negro League pitcher Schoolboy Johnny Taylor. These were for a book that was supposed to be on Connecticut baseball personages. The book may come out some day, but in the meantime, SABR decided to release them. I thought that the one on Taylor was especially well done. I’ll probably write at least one more of these for SABR this year. My plan is to tackle Bowie Kuhn.

I was reading some Robert Caro a couple of years back and his subject wasn’t necessarily LBJ or Robert Moses. It was power. How to acquire it. How to use it. How to keep it. I was overly ambitious and thought about writing about Kuhn in the same vein and show how not to acquire, use, or keep power. I took copious notes but haven’t much to show for it. A few people asked “Who would buy such a book?” The queries I sent out weren’t promising. I did dash off a couple of pieces at THT that were fruits of my research. I don’t have enough for a book, but I should have enough for a shorter bio like these..

Anyways, enjoy my pieces Lynch and Taylor.

Pluto Kuiper Belt

Terry Pluto is a sportswriter from northeastern Ohio. He may be best known for Loose Balls and Tall Tales; oral histories off the ABA and NBA respectively. But he is a generalist and has covered all Cleveland sports. He also wrote The Curse of Rocky Colavito about the Indians. When he first started covering sports and I started following them as a second grader, the Indians had a powerless second baseman named Duane Kuiper. If you’ve read much Joe Posnanski, you are probably familiar with Pluto and Kuiper. The Kuiper belt was his lone major leaguer home run in 1977. The game was televised, which wasn’t always the case back then. They show it on Giant broadcasts occasionally, to poke fun at Kuiper who is a San Francisco color guy. He had a sense of humor about his banjo hitting. He posed for his 1983 Fleer bubble-gum card with a broken bat slung upside down on his shoulder.

In 1949, a 43-year old man was stargazing in his backyard in Las Cruces, New Mexico. While looking at the sky, he saw several rectangles of light that looked like yellow-green windows. This wasn’t uncommon in that time or place. The Roswell incident took place the same day as the 1947 All Star Game and the Lubbock Lights would appear a couple of summers later. But this was no ordinary UFO observer. This was Clyde Tombaugh.

Twenty years earlier, Tombaugh was a researcher at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. He discovered Pluto in 1930. Originally considered a planet, it has been downgraded to a dwarf planet and is the largest object in the Kuiper Belt. He was working as a researcher because his dreams of going to college had been dashed when hailstorms ruined his family’s crops at their farm in Burdett, Kansas. He was able to go after school after discovery. The Tombaugh family moved to western Kansas from Streator, Illinois while Clyde was in high school.

Streator is a coaltown about an hour and a half southwest of Chicago. Another native is Clay Zavada; the Arizona reliever with the Rollie Fingerstache. Zavada was drafted by the Diamondbacks, but quit baseball after his father died unexpectedly. He went back to college and got his degree in business. For the hell of it, he decided to give baseball one last try and pitched for the Southern Illinois Miners in the Frontier League. The Diamondbacks picked him up again and he reached the majors in 2009. Zavada underwent Tommy John surgery last year and is suffering from shoulder soreness, He’s one of the few players who didn’t report in “the best shape of his life” this spring.

But Tombaugh may have a more direct connection to the 2011 National League West. In a chat, Dodger opening day starter Clayton Kershaw claimed that the astronomer was his great uncle.

Icarus In Spikes

Mariano Rivera saved Enrique Wilson’s life. He blew Game Seven of the 2001 World Series but made his best save ever. Wilson was scheduled to fly home to the Dominican Republic on American Airlines Flight 587. But Arizona defeated the Yankees, so there was no victory parade. Instead, the utility infielder changed his travel plans and took an earlier flight home. Flight 587 crashed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens on November 12th, 2001. Rivera told Wilson “I am glad we lost the World Series because it means that I still have a friend.”

Chris Dial saved Alex Rodriguez’s life. Dial is a big baseball fan; has been a Mets fan since 1973. He developed a way of converting a fielder’s zone rating, or how often he fields balls in certain areas of the ball field, into runs saved for his team. Dial is also a chemist and inventor. He invented the Soft Ground Arrestor System. This is bubbly concrete placed at the end of a runway to slow down a plane that is going to fast. Think of it as a runaway truck ramp for airplanes. On Friday the 13th, October, 2006, Rodriguez and several others were on a private jet that made a hard landing at Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, California. The arrestor system stopped the plane.

Other sports stars haven’t had this luck with plane crashes; including some in pinstripes, as we shall soon see. Roberto Clemente might be the most famous one; flying a mission of mercy from Puerto Rico that never made it to Managua, Nicaragua. There was also Knute Rockne and Rocky Marciano. Team planes have crashed. There was Manchester United in 1958, the University of Evansville basketball team in 1977. There was a Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes and the survivors ate the dead. The movie Alive was about this incident.

But a more macabre story is that of Len Koenecke. Koenecke was a fairly decent outfielder in the Thirties. He didn’t really get a chance to play regularly until he was 27. He was a big drinker and that may have had something to do with his late start. His drinking problem was so bad that he got kicked off of the Dodgers and sent home. Keep in mind that this was when drinking in baseball was rampant. A few years earlier, Hack Wilson set the record for runs blottoed in while he was half in the bag. Koenecke had a few before his flight home and he stormed the cockpit. The pilot and copilot beat him off, but he kept coming. Finally, one of them grabbed a fire extinguisher and gave Koenecke on fierce blow and killed him.

In 1999, Payne Stewart’s crash was followed in real time. . Peter Finch must have been happy. Stewart was supposed to fly from Florida to Texas, but the plane he was a passenger in lost cabin pressure and it kept flying until it ran out of fuel and crashed into a Dakota field. Alan Kulwicki and Davey Allison survived the 200 MPH ballet of the speedway, but both perished in aviation accidents. Allison was piloting a helicopter. Billy Southworth Jr. may have made the majors if it weren’t for World War II. He was International League player of the year once. Southworth became a bomber pilot and flew the requisite number of missions before rotating stateside. Alas, he crashed taking off on a routine mission from LaGuardia.

Southworth and Allison were second generation sports figures. Allison’s father was a NASCAR legend and Southworth’s dad was a Hall of Fame manager. But there are also plenty of brother combos from Hank and Tommie Aaron to Peyton and Eli Manning. There are even a few twins. Tiki and Ronde Barber were both in the NFL. (And Tiki wants back in.) Bob and Mike Bryan rule doubles tennis. There’s Ozzie and Jose Canseco. The New Britain Rock Cats once had a manager/pitching coach duo of Stan and Stu Cliburn. (This makes sense. They are a Minnesota Twins affiliated farm team.) Jim Thorpe had a twin brother who died young. Ryan Howard has a twin brother Cory. At one point Cory Lidle was his teammate with the Phillies. Lidle had a twin brother named Kevin.

Lidle crashed a plane into a New York City high-rise two days before Alex Rodriguez’s near crash. His brother Kevin was a ballplayer too. He played in the twilight world of indy league ball. One year he was on the Somerset Patriots. A teammate of his was a Florida kid named Jeff Anderson. Anderson’s father Jerry was a pilot himself. Back in 1979, the Anderson family lived in Canton, Ohio and Jerry was a passenger in a Cessna Citation when it crashed and burned while practicing take offs and landings. The pilot was another baseball player. His name was Thurman Munson.

Gashouse Hillbillies

I did a piece on Joe DiMaggio and Stephen Jay Gould for the Hardball Times annual (which should be out soon.) To give their readers a taste of my stuff I also sent them Gashouse Hillbillies for their website. It ran today.

Marketwatch: The hunt for TV’s lost baseball treasures

Never heard a word of this broadcast. From MarquetteWatch:

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) — Even in the earliest days of televised baseball, the late Ernie Harwell understood that less could be more.

On Oct. 3, 1951, Harwell was working Game 3 of the National League pennant playoff between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants for WPIX-TV in New York, a telecast that was seen nationwide on NBC. When Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson hit the “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” to win the NL pennant, Harwell simply said “It’s gone” and sat silent for several moments while Giants fans at the Polo Grounds erupted.
Harwell’s call has largely been lost to history — obscured by Russ Hodges’ familiar radio call (”The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!”) — because no recording of the WPIX-NBC telecast has ever been found.

Sure, there are filmed highlights of that game. But to purists, the loss of the original television broadcasts of such classics — there is no recording of the original telecast of Super Bowl I, to name another — creates an unsettling void in the pantheon of sports memorabilia