Month: September 2010

Here’s the latest guest post from Joe Guzzardi, a regular Wednesday and Saturday contributor here.

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In 1952, when Philadelphia A’s pitcher Bobby Shantz won the American League Most Valuable Player award, I was a nine-year-old kid growing up in Dodgerless Los Angeles and rooting for the Hollywood Stars.

I remember wondering how it was possible that Shantz, not much bigger than me at 5’6” and 135 pounds, could be mowing down Ted Williams and Yogi Berra in the big leagues when I was still throwing pop flies to myself in my backyard.

No one could deny that in 1952 Shantz hit his peak. Posting a 24-7 win-loss record for a fifth-place team, Shantz garnered the MVP award in a landslide by easily outdistancing New York Yankee stars Allie Reynolds, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra.

Shantz led the American League in wins, winning percentage (.774), fewest walks per game (2.03), finished second with 27 complete games, third with a 2.48 ERA and 152 strikeouts, tied for third with five shutouts, fourth with 255 innings pitched and fifth in fewest hits per game (7.39).

In his first major league appearance on May 1, 1949, Shantz pitched two-thirds of an inning of scoreless relief against the Washington Senators.

As inconspicuous as his debut was, Shantz showed what he was all about five days later. On May 6 Shantz notched his first big league win when at Briggs Stadium, Detroit, he entered the game in the fourth inning in relief of Carl Scheib. For the next ten innings, Shantz held the Tigers to two hits and one earned run while striking out seven.

A’s manager Connie Mack, a former catcher, kept Shantz from using his most effective pitch (the knucleball) and was predisposed to more physically intimidating hurlers like Joe Coleman, Lou Brissie and Dick Fowler. But when Mack retired after the 1950 season, new pilot Jimmy Dykes gave Shantz more rest and let him use off speed pitches. The result: in 1951, an 18-10 record for a 70-84 Athletics team.

In 1957 the Athletics, now located in Kansas City, traded Shantz along with Art Ditmar, Jack McMahan, Wayne Belardi and two players to be named later to the Yankees in exchange for Irv Noren, Milt Graff, Mickey McDermott, Tom Morgan, Rip Coleman, Billy Hunter and a player to be named later.

Used mostly as a spot starter with Whitey Ford, Don Larsen, Tom Sturdivant and Bob Turley, Shantz went 11-5 and led the major leagues in ERA with a 2.45 mark.

Lost in the annals of time is Shantz’s disappointing role for the Yankees in the famous 1960 World Series against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Shantz pitched two-thirds of an inning (scoreless) in both the second and fourth games. In the second, he earned a save for Turley.

In the seventh game, the wheels came off. Shantz entered the game in the third inning and held the Pirates scoreless for four innings. But in the bottom of the eighth, Shantz gave up singles to Gino Cimoli, Bill Virdon and Dick Groat before coming out in favor of Jim Coates.

All three eventually scored and the earned runs were charged to Shantz. The Pirates tallied twice more before eventually winning the game, 10-9, and the series, 4-3.

Manager Casey Stengel decision to leave Shantz in may have cost him his job. During the regular season, Shantz never pitched more than four innings. Why Stengel left Shantz in for the fifth is a baseball mystery.

The following year Shantz landed with the Pirates and subsequently pitched for the Houston Colt .45s, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies.

Over his career Shantz, a three time All Star, sparkled in the 1952 contest when in the fifth inning he struck out Whitey Lockman, Jackie Robinson and Stan Musial. Had the game not been called because of rain, Shantz might have broken Carl Hubbell’s record of five in a row.

He also won eight Gold Gloves including the first four years (1957-1960) it was awarded.

In a baseball oddity, Shantz and his brother catcher Billy were teammates on the Philadelphia A’s (1954), Kansas City (1955) and the Yankees (1960).  However, they were only battery mates in Kansas City.

In 2010, the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame elected Shantz. The Pottstown native now lives in Ambler, PA.

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

Here’s the latest from Joe Guzzardi, who writes “Double the fun,” looking at one famous doubleheader every Saturday.

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On Memorial Day, 1962 the transplanted Dodgers playing in Los Angeles returned to New York for the first time since the team left Brooklyn in 1957 to play a three game series against the woebegone New York Mets.

In an effort to fill up the disintegrating Polo Grounds with new fans, the Mets had loaded the roster with ex-Brooklyn heroes including Don Zimmer, Clem Labine, Charlie Neal, Joe Pignatano and Gil Hodges.

The effort to lure fans succeeded. The Mets drew nearly one million rabid rooters, many of whom soon crowed about the new franchise: “I’ve been a Mets fan all my life.”

For the May 30 double dip 55,704 Metropolitans’ rooters jammed the Polo Grounds to watch their beloved team take on their cross country rivals.

On paper, it didn’t figure to be much of a contest. The Mets, eventual losers of 120 games, are considered by most to be the worst team in modern baseball history. The Dodgers won 101 games and finished one game behind the National League pennant winning San Francisco Giants.

The match up pitted Sandy Koufax (14-7) and Johnny Podres (15-13) for the Dodgers, against Jay Hook (8-19) and Bob L. Miller (1-12).

Unsurprisingly, since we are talking about the Mets, there’s a story behind the two New York starting pitchers. The Mets were the only team in baseball to ever have two players with identical names, Bob Miller. Naturally that led to considerable confusion.

To complicate matters even further, the Millers roomed together. Their teammates decided simply to call them “Lefty” Bob Miller and “Righty” Bob Miller. Manager Casey Stengel, for reasons known only to him, called “Righty” Bob Miller “Nelson”

In any event, “Righty” Bob, who faced the Dodgers that afternoon, lost his first 12 starts until on the next to the last day of the season, he notched a win against the Chicago Cubs.

As for Hook, since he earned a mechanical engineering degree from Northwestern University but notched only had a 12-34 record during his three Mets’ seasons, Stengel joked: “Hook can explain a curve ball but he can’t throw one.”

In the first game, Koufax was fortunate that the Dodgers spotted him a 10-0 lead through the top of the fourth. The 1962 Koufax hadn’t yet hit his Hall of Fame stride. Although Koufax struck out 10, the Mets battered him for 13 hits and six earned runs before succumbing 13-6.

To the immense delight of the crowd, one of the runs came off the bat of Brooklyn favorite Hodges when he homered in the fourth.

The nightcap was closer. The Mets shelled Podres, knocking him out in the seventh inning after he gave up five earned runs. The Mets outhit the Dodgers 9-5 including two more home runs by Hodges. Nevertheless, the Mets lost, 6-5.

For the season, the Mets went 2-16 against the Dodgers and fared only slightly better against the San Francisco Giants, 4-14. The Mets did however manage to break even against the Chicago Cubs, 9-9. The Cubs lost 103 games to finish in ninth place, ahead of only the Mets.

Although other professional sports teams have had more barren seasons, the Mets remain the benchmark for failure.

In 1976, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers went 0-14; the Detroit Lions posted a 2008 0-16 mark.

Yet the Mets remain synonymous with futility probably because they had players like Miller, Hook and of course Marvelous Marv Throneberry who, by the way, tapped a weak grounder to shortstop in his pinch hit and lone plate appearance that afternoon.

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

What he did: Here’s another interesting player I doubt many modern baseball fans have heard of. Maisel played in the big leagues from 1913 through 1918 and retired with largely unremarkable stats: a .242 lifetime batting average, 510 hits, and a career slugging percentage of .299. Supposedly, the New York Yankees turned down a chance to trade Maisel straight up for Joe Jackson. That had to sting.

Perhaps the one thing Maisel did remarkably well was steal bases, which may have helped earn him the nickname Flash. Maisel stole 194 bases in his career, averaged over 30 steals per season, and led the majors with 74 swiped bags in 1914. He was only caught stealing 17 times, which the blog Cybermetrics recently noted was far better than the league average that year. Maisel’s big season came one year before Ty Cobb stole 96 bases and set a big league record that stood for 47 years.

Thing is, in a different era, Maisel might have topped this.

Era he might have thrived in: With the Murderers Row Yankees of the late 1920s and early ’30s

Why: I’ve written before about players who excelled at stealing bases during times it wasn’t trendy to do so. In June, I devoted one of these columns to Washington Senators outfielder George Case, who liked to say he could have stolen 100 bases in a different era. In my research on Case, I noted that Ben Chapman stole 61 bases for the 1931 Yankees. I decided to see how Maisel would have fared on those clubs.

The stat converter on Baseball-Reference has Maisel stealing 97 bases on the 1930 Yankees, a team that hit .309, scored 1,062 runs and had Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig turning in career-defining seasons. It’s a little astonishing that New York finished a distant third in the American League that year. Maisel’s presence wouldn’t have made the difference in the standings, though it could have helped his legacy.

If Maisel had played for those Yankees, he may have set a record to last until Maury Wills stole 104 bases in 1962. The record would have almost outlived Maisel, who followed his playing career with work as a minor league manager and fire chief and died in 1967 at 77. Like Maisel, Wills was an infielder mostly known for stealing bases and playing generally good defense. Considering Wills received as much as 40 percent of the Hall of Fame vote, went the full 15 years on the writers ballot, and may still have a shot with the Veterans Committee, I suspect Maisel’s achievement would have gotten him at least some consideration, too.

Granted, many players probably could have compiled gaudy stolen base totals on the 1930 Yankees, if the stat converter is to be believed. Wills’ 1962 season converts to 126 stolen bases, Cobb would have 115 steals for his converted 1915 effort, and Rickey Henderson circa 1982 would have stolen 167 bases for the 1930 Yankees. Heck, I might have even set the stolen base record that year.

Any player/Any era is a Thursday feature that looks at how a player might have done in an era besides his own.

Here is the latest from Wednesday and Saturday contributor Joe Guzzardi.

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You may not believe it (I know I didn’t) but on April 22, 1959, the Chicago White Sox on its way to a 20-6 triumph scored 11 runs on one hit against the Kansas City Athletics at the old Municipal Stadium.  A sparse crowd of 7,446 witnessed history.

During its American League pennant year, the Go Go Sox needed all the offensive help it could get.

But the gift from the Athletics was more than manager Al Lopez could have hoped for in his wildest dreams.

For the season, the White Sox had a .250 over all team average, scored only 669 runs, had 620 RBIs and 1,325 base hits. Those totals ranked Chicago sixth in offensive output in an eight team league. The total base count of 1,928 was seventh; home runs, dead last with 97. The White Sox were the only team in the major leagues to hit fewer than 100 homers.

To make up for its weak hitting, the Go Go Sox counted on speed and plate discipline as it led the league in stolen bases with 113 (56 for leader Luis Aparicio), triples with 46, batters hit by a pitch, 49 and tied with Detroit for most times reaching base via a walk, 580. The White Sox were tough to strike out, too, whiffing a league low of 634 times.

The Sox, however, relied on the proverbial strength up the middle.

Anchored by the double play combination of the incomparable Nellie Fox, the American League’s Most Valuable Player and Aparicio, the Sox were also solid in center field where Jim Landis’ clutch hitting, glove and throwing arm contributed to many key wins.

Behind the plate, Sherm Lollar equaled his more famous New York Yankee rival and former teammate, Yogi Berra. Lollar appeared in seven All Star Games and won three Gold Glove Awards.

Solid pitching rounded out the White Sox. Starters Early Wynn (22-10), the 1959 Cy Young Award winner, Bob Shaw (18-6) and relief specialists Turk Lown and Gerry Staley were solid all year.

The White Sox were unlikely pennant winners.

From 1955 to 1958, the Yankees won 4 straight American League crowns and 9 of the last ten years including 7 World Series titles.

Prognosticators liked the Cleveland Indians chances in 1959 too. Like the White Sox, the Indians had speed, good pitching but also had power, namely Rocky Colavito.

But the Yankees’ pitching faltered. Whitey Ford had an off year (for him), Bob Turley, the 1958 Cy Young Award winner, went 8-11 and Mickey Mantle, although he hit 31 home runs, drove in a mere 75. The Yankees finished in third place, 15 games behind the White Sox.

The Indians challenged but, losers of 15 of 22 head-to-head games against the Sox, came up in second place, five games shy.

When the White Sox sewed up its first pennant in forty years, fire Commissioner Robert J. Quinn ordered a celebratory five-minute sounding of the city’s air-raid sirens that set many Chicago residents rushing out into the streets to look for a possible Soviet Union bomb attack. But Quinn’s alarm was just one delirious fan’s way to celebrate. Unfortunately for Quinn and other White Sox devotees, the magic wore off in the World Series when the South Siders lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4-2.

Now let’s go back to that incredible seventh inning when the White Sox tallied 11 times on only a single by Johnny Callison. Three Kansas City pitchers (Tom Gorman, Mark Freeman and George Brunet) issued ten walks, Brunet hit Callison, while Athletics’ defenders Joe DeMaestri, Hal Smith and Roger Maris committed three errors.

Over the course of 9 innings, the Go Go Sox amassed 16 hits including six for extra bases.  Fox had three singles, a double, two walks and drove in five.

Unfortunately, White Sox starter Wynn could not stick around to enjoy the Athletics’ largess. In Wynn’s worst outing of the year, Kansas City knocked him out in the second after he gave up 6 earned runs. The victory went to Shaw who pitched 7.1 innings of scoreless relief. Bud Daley, ironically not part of the catastrophic seventh, absorbed Athletics’ loss.

Hank Bauer, who managed the Athletics from 1961-1962 and the Oakland A’s (1969), said that of the tens of thousands of baseball games he watched, no two were ever alike.

No game proves Bauer’s point more than the April White Sox-Kansas City game.

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