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The Pittsburgh Pirates have baseball’s worst record. As of August 20^th,the Pirates with a 40-81 record are three games behind the resurgent Baltimore Orioles and, in the National League, trail the Arizona Diamondbacks by seven.

Accordingly, we Pirate fans revert to our default position. We either look hopefully ahead or comfort ourselves by looking wistfully back.

Earlier this week, the Pirates signed two high school pitching phenoms, Jameson Tallion and Stetson Allie. But since teenage pitching prospects flame out more often than pan out, today we’ll take solace in the Pirate past, specifically the 1960 World Series champs whose 50th anniversary Pittsburgh is celebrating.

My weekly Saturday column is devoted to historic doubleheaders. Today, however, I’ll tell you about three September 1960 double dip sweeps within five days that virtually sewed the pennant up for our intrepid 1960 Corsairs.

On September 18, the Pirates took both ends at Cincinnati against the Reds, 5-3 and 1-0; September 20 in Philadelphia against the Phillies, 7-1 and 3-2 and September 22 at Forbes Field against the Chicago Cubs, 3-2 (11 innings) and 6-1.

By the time the second Cub game ended, the Pirates had eliminated the Milwaukee Braves and reduced to two games their magic number to finish off the St. Louis Cardinals.

Wilmer “Vinegar Bend” Mizell, a late May acquisition from the Cardinals in exchange for promising but expendable second baseman Julian Javier (the Pirates had Bill Mazeroski), pitched brilliantly and won two of the six games.

Mizell’s September 18 first game line: IP 9; H 3; ER 0; BB 2; K 7

September 22 second game versus the Cubs: IP 9; H 6; ER 1; BB 0; K 2

While Vernon Law won the Cy Young and Dick Groat the Most Valuable Player Award, many point to adding Mizell to the starting rotation that also included work horse Bob Friend and Harvey Haddix as the Pirates’ turning point in the  championship season.

When General Manager Joe Brown traded for Mizell, the lefty had struggled in his nine games with the Cardinals posting a 1-3 record and 4.55 ERA.

But Brown was confident that Mizell only needed a change of scenery since over his previous six seasons he had notched a 68-67 record and 3.68 ERA.

Brown, always a shrewd judge of talent, was correct about Mizell. Pitching for the Pirates for only four months, Mizell finished 13-5 with three shutouts and a 3.12 ERA.

Curiously, when the regular season ended, Mizell’s magic vanished forever.

When he started the third World Series game, Mizell was bombed. Lasting only one-third of an inning, Mizell gave up three hits, a walk and four earned runs on the way to a Yankee 10-0 rout.

By pitching two innings of scoreless mop up in the sixth game Yankee humiliation (12-0), Mizell managed to lower his series ERA from108.00 to 15.43.

In 1961, Mizell couldn’t get it back together. He went 7-10 (5.40 ERA). When 1962 started no better, in May the Pirates traded Mizell to the Mets.

Mizell failed to win a game with what would become the worst team in baseball history. When the Mets released him in August, Mizell retired.

Why Mizell had so little success after 1960 remains a mystery. Former Pirate teammate George Witt said Mizell never suffered an arm injury but that “he just seemed to lose his good hard fastball.” Mizell summed when he said: “I can’t attribute it to any one thing—just wear and tear.”

But with Mizell’s retirement came a new career. Mizell entered politics and served three terms as a North Carolina Congressman (1968-1974). Had the Watergate scandal not swept Republicans out of office during the 1974 midterm elections, Mizell might have realized his dream of becoming a United States Senator.

After Congress, Mizell served in various capacities under Presidents Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Mizell, who finished his baseball career with a 90-88 record, died in 1999.

Here’s a funny footnote to Mizell’s horrible World Series outing. Played on October 8, the game date was also Pirate manager Danny Murtaugh’s 43rd birthday.

During the pre-game pleasantries, Casey Stengel said to Murtaugh: “I knew you were comin’ but I didn’t bake a cake. I hope you have a good day except between the hours of 2 to 5.” (Author’s note: the game was played from 1:05 to 4:14.)

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Joe Guzzardi belongs to the Society for American Baseball Research, as well as the Internet Baseball Writers Association. Email him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Miguel Cabrera, Josh Hamilton, and Joey Votto are each among the top six in their leagues for batting average, home runs and runs batted in, the three statistical categories that constitute the Triple Crown.

Here’s how the race looks currently:

Of the three, Votto is statistically closest and might have the best shot. Hamilton appears too injury-prone to rack up sufficient home run and RBI totals, talented though he may be, and a reader pointed out that Jose Bautista has a fairly insurmountable home run lead, with 32 currently. The reader also said more American League hitters should emerge as batting crown contenders, such as Robinson Cano who does his best work in the second half.

Regardless, it interests me that this Triple Crown push is occurring in an oft-proclaimed year for pitchers. I wonder if there’s a correlation, or if it’s a fluke and if in any season, a few top players will be within range of the Triple Crown.

It doesn’t seem so outrageous that solid league-wide pitching could lower the offensive bar enough to make it easier for one or two outlying players to lead all three categories. This kind of thing has happened before. The last time baseball had a Triple Crown winner, when Carl Yastrzemski did it in 1967, the American League had a 3.23 earned run average and a .236 batting average. The year before that, Frank Robinson won his Triple Crown in an American League that boasted a 3.44 ERA and .240 batting average.

Those seasons are nothing compared to 1968, when pitchers were so clearly favored that the height of the mound was subsequently lowered. In what may have been the greatest year for pitchers beyond the Deadball Era, the National League had a cumulative 2.99 ERA, a league-wide WHIP of 1.12 and almost another Triple Crown winner, with Willie McCovey nabbing the home run and RBI crowns but finishing a distant eighth in the batting race.

In fact, 2010 might not be enough of a pitcher’s year to favor a Triple Crown winner. Sure, a lot of pitchers were on pace to win 20 games as of the All Star break, and the NL batting average is a relatively puny .257, with the AL not faring much better at .263. But for some odd reason, the NL ERA is 4.38, while the AL ERA is 4.21. Of the 14 Triple Crown seasons in baseball history, just five came in years where the league ERA was above 4.00. Those seasons are:

• Rogers Hornsby 1922 and 1925
• Jimmie Foxx 1933
• Lou Gehrig 1934
• Mickey Mantle 1956

Granted, Triple Crowns have been won in years favoring hitters. Both seasons that Hornsby triumphed, the National League batted .292 overall. Also, it bears mention that the sample size of Triple Crown winners is so small, with 12 players in baseball history having accomplished the feat that it’s difficult to make determinations one way or another. (Side note: Wikipedia lists Hugh Duffy as having won the Triple Crown in 1894, while Baseball-Reference.com says he finished second in RBI that year. I’m deferring to the latter site. Someone should update Wikipedia, unless I’m missing something here.)

I don’t know if there’s any rhyme or reason regarding the Triple Crown. Still, I would love to see Cabrera, Hamilton or Votto prevail.

It would have been the third perfect game this season — in fact, the third in the last month — and there’s talk of Major League Baseball reviewing the call, which video showed was clearly off. A mountain of words has already been written and Tweeted about this story, including a column by Joe Posnanski that’s better than anything I could come up with here. I won’t say much, though some comment seems obligatory. I’ll offer the following.

While I hope the call gets reversed and Galarraga is credited with the 21st perfect game in big league history, I feel for Joyce. Short of returning punts or being a practice team tackling dummy in football, I think officiating might be the most thankless work in sports. Umpires are subjected to job performance demands I doubt most people ever encounter. Nothing short of perfection is demanded from a ref, and one blown call can permanently detract from decades of otherwise fine work. It’s a worse job than telemarketing.

I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would have been if Joyce had blown a call in Galarraga’s favor to give him the perfect game. From my time as a sports writer covering high school and college games, it got to the point that I would rarely write if fans were griping about officiating. It’s a common complaint on losing ends. Fans are generally quieter when a muffed call helps their team win, even if over time, I would venture that, for most clubs, blown calls help them as often as they hurt them. While the complaint is certainly legitimate this time around, it’s part of a much greater, tiresome debate.

Of course, had there been an opportunity for Joyce to blow a call in Galarraga’s favor and he’d gotten his tainted perfect game on that, some baseball purists might cry foul. Still, I doubt the storm would be anything like this.

Postscript: Less than 20 minutes after I posted this, ESPN reported that Bud Selig will not reverse Joyce’s call.

I miss the Sundays and the breathless SportsCenter reports when Deion Sanders would play in an Atlanta Falcons game, get on a plane and make it to Pittsburgh in time for a Braves playoff game that evening. I still wonder how he did it. I miss Bo Jackson and the “Bo Knows” Nike commercials about how the Kansas City Royals and Los Angeles Raiders star could seemingly do everything. I even miss the images of Michael Jordan struggling at Double-A baseball, and with all this in mind, I have to ask:

Whatever happened to the two-sport athlete?

Fifteen or twenty years ago, this kind of thing seemed fairly common, particularly in baseball, but somewhere in the interim, the idea of playing more than one sport at a time professionally has all but vanished. While we occasionally hear stories of star athletes excelling at different sports as amateurs, whether it’s LeBron James tearing it up in high school football or Kobe Bryant playing soccer in Italy as a boy or Donovan McNabb coming off the bench for Syracuse in the 1996 Final Four, multimillionaire dual threats like Deion and Bo seem to be a thing of the past. And that’s unfortunate.

I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if other athletes got scared watching Bo break his hip in a 1991 Raiders playoff game, which ended his football career and crippled his baseball abilities. Less than a year after Bo’s injury, Sanders’ backfield mate with the Falcons, Brian Jordan, walked away from football promise to focus on baseball. “I think about football,” Jordan told Ebony magazine in 1999, in the midst of what became a 15-year baseball career, “And then I think about the pain you feel on Mondays and thoughts about [playing] football quickly go away.”

I wonder if there was something written discretely into one of the recent Collective Bargaining Agreements that I missed, or some tacit understanding in the sports world that went unpublicized. Or maybe athletes started thinking differently after watching Michael Jordan leave basketball at the top of his game, hit .202 in place of a deserving prospect in Double-A baseball, and inspire a Sports Illustrated cover, “Bag it Michael.” Nobody wants to be that guy, even if Michael got the last laugh by returning to basketball, winning a few more championships and refusing to talk to SI for years thereafter

Whatever the case, there don’t seem to be many success stories about two-sport athletes anymore, just cautionary tales, such as Drew Henson: excellent as a quarterback at Michigan, not so good playing third base for the Yankees thereafter and then, surprisingly, no longer good at football either.

I just read a story on ESPN where Bobby Valentine denied being offered a job as manager of the Florida Marlins this past fall.  The story said Marlins president David Samson refused to endorse manager Fredi Gonzalez after he guided the Marlins to 87 wins, third-best in club history, but missed the playoffs.  This got me thinking that as bad as my own employment situation was these past few months, I’m glad I didn’t have Gonzalez’s job.  It seems like the worst one in baseball at the moment.

Essentially, anyone who goes to manage in Florida is expected to produce with a skeleton payroll, Triple-A level talent at some positions and little fan support, while working for a nightmare owner in Jeffrey Loria.  Modest results aren’t tolerated like they are in other small market outposts like Kansas City or San Diego.  Joe Girardi was run out of town a few years ago after winning Manager of the Year; he subsequently won a World Series in New York.  On the chance Florida teams do succeed, they are promptly stripped down in fire sales.  I might go insane working for them.

This is to take nothing away from Valentine, of course.  He’s one of the best managers of this past generation and seems like one of the few managers who could thrive with any type of team, be it an established veteran club or a young team like the Marlins.  It’s regrettable Valentine’s name has been dragged into all this, because what’s happened to Gonzalez in recent months would have stained the names of anyone attached to it.  And it makes me think of some of the other shit jobs in baseball history.

Certainly, this isn’t the worst baseball job ever.  Not sure what takes the cake.  I wouldn’t have wanted to work for late Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott who, as Sports Illustrated once reported, didn’t pay her front office much, liked to turn off her employees’ computers when they weren’t looking in hopes of saving money, and made them walk her dogs and report back if they pissed or shit.  I also read that Ty Cobb used to force the mascot for his Detroit Tigers to sleep under his bed because he was black.  And I wouldn’t have wanted to be the guy whose job depended on ensuring Mickey Mantle made bed check.

All the same, Gonzalez isn’t in a much better boat.

Any of the positions described above belong in some kind of Hall of Fame for worst baseball jobs.  Creating that Hall of Fame may be a project for another time.  If anyone wants to have at it in the meanwhile, feel free.

(Editor’s note: I originally published this post on March 6, but it got automatically deleted due to technical difficulties.  Thus, I am re-posting.)

Two camps of writers exist in the sports arena: 1) Number-crunchers who produce stories of this sort; 2) The vast majority of us who rely on gut feeling.  All through last season, I figured the Mariners improved because they added Ken Griffey Jr. and lightened the clubhouse.  Barring that, I figured they had a good pitching rotation, which made me happy since a guy I covered in college, Garrett Olson, is sometimes apart of it.  I was unfamiliar with center fielder Franklin Gutierrez, who the story compared, in terms of defensive prowess, to Willie Mays.  In fact, I derided a $20.3 million contract extension Gutierrez received in January.  After all, Gutierrez hit .283 with 18 home runs last year.

The research-driven writing style seems difficult and time consuming.  Quantitative analysis generally isn’t simple, and a lot of us got into sports writing precisely to avoid math.  We also enjoy interviewing celebrities and eating free food at the ballpark.  I know I did when I covered the Oakland Athletics’ Triple-A team, the Sacramento River Cats in 2004 and 2005.  That being said, I also remember being impressed talking to Michael Lewis.  I saw Lewis in the press box a couple of times in 2004 when he was doing research for a follow-up to Moneyball, his bestseller on how the A’s survived as a small-market club.  Lewis came from a background in financial reporting, covering Wall Street, and he told me he never wrote about sports prior to Moneyball.  To call him a sportswriter would almost seem derogatory.

Day to day, sports writing can be lowbrow, filler for the masses.  With so much content needed, there’s often little time to produce stories, one possible reason for the gut opinion style of writing.  It doesn’t take much to cobble together some nice sound bites and observations on which way the wind is blowing, but that also makes traditional sports writing easy to mock sometimes.  Shortly before the sports journalism critique site Fire Joe Morgan went dormant in 2008, one of its posts ripped apart a point-counterpoint on ESPN.com about who would win the World Series.  ESPN.com writer Jayson Stark opined about the Phillies:

They’re here because they’re the toughest team in the National League.

FJM writer “Ken Tremendous” responded:

Fuck all that statistical noise. It’s about toughness. The Phillies are tough. The Phillies are like a hockey team. The Phillies work in an Alaskan cannery 19 hours a day. The Phillies could knock out Kimbo Slice in thirteen seconds.

The Phillies won the World Series that year, but not for toughness.  The Phillies won because, as Mr. Tremendous noted, they had the most home runs and scored the second-most runs in baseball that year, among other things.  They also had Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins and Cole Hamels on the same roster, a Yankee-caliber lineup in terms of star power without the offensively high payroll.

All this being said, I didn’t agree when the recent Sports Illustrated story noted, “The Mariners are baseball’s preseason darlings, favored by many to end the reign of the Angels atop the American League West.”  It doesn’t take a degree in statistics to know Sports Illustrated jinxes things, and the Angels still look pretty good, even if they lost some players this winter.  Still, I am intrigued at the possibilities of having Cliff Lee and Felix Hernandez anchoring a Mariner rotation and I should probably pay more attention to Gutierrez, ridiculous as his contract extension seems.

(Postscript: After reading this entry, my good friend Chris sent me a link to this Popular Science article.  It looks like there are new high-tech methods for tracking defensive ability.)

• When I first contacted David McCarthy, the executive director of the Ted Williams Museum in Florida, we discussed the possibility of having a conversation at some point since McCarthy had known Williams for nearly 20 years.  I emailed McCarthy yesterday about having the conversation this week and think it would make a dynamite post for this site.
• A friend of a friend is playing independent league ball in the Midwest.  He’s 26 and had been an outfielder in the A’s organization up to last year.  I’m interested in writing about how we know in life if and when it’s time to move on from something we love and what keeps us from leaving.
• At some point, three new book reviews should be forthcoming.  I have been reading Chief Bender’s Burden, which is good but taking longer than expected to finish.  After that, I have two other books from its publisher to read: Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball and 1921: The Yankees, the Giants and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York. As I’ve mentioned before, I will review any baseball book that’s sent to me, though if it winds up sucking, I will likely make note of that here, too.

Also, there’s one other thing I can mention now.  A month or so ago, one of the administrators of this site approached me about being part of a group blog on the San Francisco Giants.  I subsequently recruited three friends to be part of the effort, and on Monday evening, I got an email from another of the administrators saying the new site had launched.  I am going to hold off on posting the URL here until we get some content live, but that will hopefully be within a week.  Stay tuned.

I plan to contribute one post a week to the new blog, give or take.  For me, it will be a side project to this site.  To fellow twenty-somethings who like alternative rock, I would say that metaphorically the site you’re on now is like Death Cab for Cutie while the new one will be my Postal Service.  To the older set: If this site is like The Beatles for me, perhaps the new one could be my own personal Wings.  Maybe I’m amazed at the chance to have two baseball blogs instead of one.

“He’s close to where he wants to be,” his agent told The Associated Press on Monday. “We’re confident once Noah throws for teams questions will be answered. Noah’s missed a lot of time and understands the importance of this audition. If he’s at 90 percent now, we’re going to allow him the time to get to 100 percent because we know clubs have questions based on the time he’s missed.”

The skeptic in me thinks: Bullshit.  I’m guessing Lowry is worried his time away from the game has hurt his velocity and is desperate to postpone the inevitable.  It seems akin to asking for more time on a big assignment in college.  Granted, baseball seems like an easier sport to resume playing after a long delay than football, which requires meticulous precision and conditioning that can erode with even a short absence.  Just look what’s happened to Mike Williams or Michael Vick.  Still, it seems like it would be tougher to return to baseball as a pitcher than in another position.

Looking over the annals of baseball history, there aren’t too many pitchers who come to mind who’ve had successful comebacks.  Here are the results of a few:

Jim Palmer: Colossal fail.  Palmer aborted his attempt to return in 1991, after giving up five hits and two runs in two innings of a spring training game.  According to his Wikipedia page, his trainer remarked, “You’ll never get into the Hall of Fame with those mechanics,” to which Palmer replied, “I’m already in the Hall of Fame.”

David Cone: He fared slightly better than Palmer, making it to the regular season after sitting out a year, but quit again with a 1-3 record and 6.50 ERA.

Jim Bouton: He first retired midway through the 1970 season, following the publication of his bestseller Ball Four, but returned to the majors eight years later at the age of 39.  Bouton went 1-3 in five starts with the Atlanta Braves, later saying his motivation was to do something that had never been done before.

Roger Clemens: This return started nicely with Cy Young-caliber pitching, but ended horrifically with Clemens implicating his wife in front of Congress for using Human Growth Hormone.  Short of Barry Bonds, Pete Rose or the Black Sox, Clemens has perhaps the most inglorious exit in baseball history, as well as the all-time greatest excuse for not using performance enhancing drugs: I didn’t, my wife did.

Dazzy Vance: This might not technically be termed a comeback since Vance bounced in and out of the minor leagues after briefly making his major league debut in 1915.  Still, he had to persevere before settling into a Hall of Fame career.

Bob Feller: Another comeback that might not be termed as such, as Feller successfully resumed his Hall of Fame career after seeing combat in the Pacific theater in World War II.  There are a number of other pitchers like him from this era, along with guys like Warren Spahn who got a late start due to military service.

Lowry might be better served to come back as an outfielder.  Lots of former pitchers have transitioned to that successfully, from Smoky Joe Wood to Lefty O’Doul to Rick Ankiel.

Walk-up music is the song that’s played during the six or eight seconds a player is striding to the plate, stepping in, and taking a few practice hacks.  I’ll listen to a song and find myself wondering if it would make good walk-up music.  The trick is to find something that starts right away, no “Funeral for a Friend” by Elton John, with its meandering, three-and-a-half-minute intro (though one of the stations around here likes to play that song in all its 11-minute glory.)

It’s good to find something intense, something incendiary, something that could play during that scene in Braveheart where Mel Gibson rides up in blue face paint and rallies the Scottish to kick the shit out of the British.  The song is all about helping a player get pumped up.  If it sounds like something that could be played in a biker bar or during an arm wrestling competition, or both, it’s probably good.

Some players find something funny, like former Giants catcher Steve Decker who I once heard use the “Winkie Chant” from The Wizard of Oz at a Sacramento River Cats game (that’s the one that sounds like “Oh e oh, e oh oh.”)  There’s also the unintentionally funny, like former major league outfielder Tony Tarasco who once had an explicit song by Jay-Z played.

Closers probably have it best.  Their songs get played while they walk in from the bullpen and warm up.  All the best closers have songs that define them: “Hell’s Bells” by AC/DC for Eric Gagne, when he was in his prime with the Dodgers; “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” by the Dropkick Murphys for Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon; “Wild Thing” by The Troggs for Mitch Williams (though that sadly became all too true when his lack of control derailed his big league career.)

I can picture “Dissident” booming over some stadium’s loudspeakers while I warm up.  “Womack’s really bringing it tonight,” the coaches would tell each other while my fast balls sizzled in, smoke rising from the catcher’s glove, Eddie Vedder’s crooning and the pounding bass notes in the background (it goes without saying, I quit Little League when I was 11 and my fastball topped out at 40 miles per hour.)

What’s your walk-up song?

Three other posts worth reading:

10 baseball players who didn’t do steroids

Got $1000? Jose Canseco will spend a day with you

A former baseball owner dies at 100 and leaves a warehouse of old memorabilia

Helen is a 92-year-old woman who used to live next door to Chris’s family when he was in elementary school.  I never knew her as more than the nice lady who always gave back our balls whenever we hit them over the fence into her yard, but Chris’s mom Carinne kept in contact with Helen after they moved.  I first saw Helen again a few years ago when Chris’s family had her over for dinner.  Carinne mentioned ahead of time that Helen had played baseball as a young woman, so we talked about the game at dinner. Everyone at the table was amazed when I knew who’d played in the 1962 World Series, which Helen attended.  I read a 500-page book of baseball trivia when I was eight, and I still know most World Series winners.  And any Giants fan should know of 1962, the year that Bobby Richardson snared Willie McCovey’s line drive and stole a championship for the Yankees.

We went this afternoon to the assisted living facility in downtown Sacramento that Helen lives in now and spent an hour talking with her.  I hope I am as active at 92 as she remains.  The wall of her apartment is plastered with cut-outs from the sports section of the Sacramento Bee, pictures of men like Randy Johnson and Cliff Lee, as well as many of the Sacramento Kings.  We talked baseball, of course.  She knew of the death of Art Savage, the owner of the Sacramento River Cats.  And though Helen was sick over the holidays she also knew of Mark DeRosa’s recent signing with the Giants.  I said I didn’t know if I liked the move but that I thought DeRosa might be good off the bench and that he had a good bat.  She noted he could play several infield positions (a good point, admittedly.  DeRosa is definitely an upgrade over Rich Aurilia.)

For some reason, the 1969 World Series also came up, and Helen wanted to know the name of the player who was at bat when a wild pitch went in the New York Mets dugout, where manager Gil Hodges ordered black shoe polish to be smudged on it to look like the player got hit.  The umpires bought it, the player got on base and the next batter made a critical hit that helped secure the championship for the Mets.  The name of the batter escaped me at first.  I said Donn Clendenon and that didn’t seem right, nor did Tommie Agee. Then I remembered Cleon Jones.  I mentioned this to Helen and also said I had seen a broadcast from that series on YouTube.

I find baseball one of those topics in life that helps allow a connection for people who might not otherwise have much to talk about.  It’s easy, regardless, to take a little time out and visit someone like Helen, and I feel good after doing it.  It’s a nice thing to do, and my mom instilled a respect for seniors in me at a young age.  All the same, I’m glad Helen and I share a love of baseball.  We should watch a game on television at some point.