Author: Graham Womack

Rugger Ardizoia didn’t know he was the oldest living New York Yankee until a few days ago. It’s probably fitting.

Though the 93-year-old San Francisco resident still keeps his team identification card in his wallet, he comes across soft-spoken and reserved, not one to boast about his past or demand attention for it. It’s probably appropriate he not brag too much of his time with the Yankees. Rugger pitched all of two innings in the majors, his sole appearance coming April 30, 1947 when he scattered four hits and two runs. But sit and talk a little while with Rugger– who became the oldest Yankee following the death of Virgil Trucks in March– and the surreal stories I love as a baseball historian start coming out.

They’re stories of making road trips with Joe DiMaggio; of playing for Casey Stengel in the Pacific Coast League; of being on a USO team during World War II with DiMaggio, Red Ruffing and a slew of other major leaguers. I’ve interviewed Rugger four or five times in the past decade, and I imagine there are still a wealth of good stories I haven’t heard. It’s one thing that keeps me coming back– that, and he’s a kind, charming man. The widower told the crowd at the 19th annual Pacific Coast League reunion that he still considers himself married to a wife of 71 years.

As a historian and a journalist, part of my calling is to capture stories. I enjoy preserving and sharing them, and I feel both a sense of duty and urgency. With players like Rugger and nine other former players who attended the reunion, held Saturday near Oakland, California, time is running out to record the stories. Most veterans of the old PCL, who played in it before the Giants and Dodgers came west in 1958, are in their mid-70s or older. The ever-present possibility lurks of great stories dying with these men. Maybe it’s not more than a collection of untold quirky anecdotes, but I like to think the world’s a little better with them accessible.

I didn’t get a ton of stories Saturday, but here are a few anecdotes from Rugger:

• Stengel, who managed Rugger on the Oakland Oaks in 1946, would buy two cases of beer for the clubhouse after every win. (As noted in Jane Leavy’s biography on Mickey Mantle, Stengel’s the same manager whose advice on temperance for players was to not drink in the hotel bar “because that’s where I do my drinking.”)
• Rugger noted he had 117 complete games in professional baseball and wondered how many pitches he threw. He said Stengel was never one to pull pitchers.
• Rugger spoke of going to an event with DiMaggio’s first wife, Dorothy Arnold and seeing her bedecked in jewelry. Upon closer inspection, he learned it was all fake costume jewelry. Arnold explained that as the wife of DiMaggio, she had a certain appearance to keep up.

It remains to be seen how many more reunions can be held. A fellow member in my chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research estimated that 100-110 men who played in the PCL prior to 1958 are still living. I’m reminded of the final reunion of Pearl Harbor veterans, held just a few years ago.

What he did: There’s a Mickey Mantle stat I’m drawn to, and it’s not something that jumps out like the 536 lifetime home runs or 565-foot bomb he hit at Griffith Stadium in 1953. Early in his Hall of Fame career, Mantle was known for his speed, with him being one of the fastest players in his time, perhaps in baseball history. A blown knee in the 1951 World Series and a host of other physical problems that followed eventually made this a distant memory, though certain numbers from his first few seasons hint at what might have been. For me, one Mantle number that sticks out is his .366 lifetime batting average at Sportsman Park in St. Louis.

Mantle only got 119 plate appearances at the ballpark over his first three years in the majors before the Browns moved to Baltimore and became the Orioles, though it’s no surprise to me that Mantle made the most of these PAs. With a famously hard playing surface, Sportsman Park ranks as one of the better hitters’ parks in baseball history, not as notorious as the Baker Bowl in Philadelphia or Coors Field in Denver but similarly able to distort numbers. And it was perfect for a young player with blazing speed. It makes me wonder what Mantle might have done with more time in St. Louis.

Era he might have thrived in: To be clear, I believe Mickey Mantle is one of a select number of players in baseball history who would’ve thrived in any time. It’s a hunch, but I assume all-time greats like Mantle or Willie Mays or Babe Ruth could transcend whatever circumstances they were placed in and dazzle. For Mantle, transcendence was playing home games in a pitcher’s park, in a pitcher’s era and still managing feats of legend with his bat. This being said, Mantle may have put up some obscene numbers playing for the St. Louis Cardinals or even the Browns in the 1930s.

Why: Where to begin? I’ll start with strikeouts, which Mantle was famous for. In later life, the Commerce Comet liked to joke that between striking out and walking roughly 1,700 times apiece, he went seven full seasons without touching the ball. Some of this was the result, though, of his era.

Mantle struck out 17.3 percent of his plate appearances while the American League had a 13.4 percent strikeout rate overall during his career. Looked at another way, Mantle struck out about  30 percent more than league average. I generally believe players could maintain their relative superiority or inferiority to other players in different eras, with some exceptions (Gavvy Cravath wouldn’t out-homer entire teams today, nor would Babe Ruth.) This tells me that playing in the 2013 majors, where the strikeout rate has hovered around 20 percent, Mantle might K 200 times. But it also makes me wonder what he’d be capable of in an era where strikeouts were far less common. Enter the 1930s, where the strikeout rate was under 10 percent for much of the decade.

What would Mantle do with more at-bats where he made contact? His career BABIP, short for Batting Average on Balls in Play, gives a hint. Mantle famously batted just below .300 for his career, .298. However, unlike his contemporary Willie Mays, Mantle’s BABIP was a tick higher than his batting line, .318. There’s a misnomer that BABIP is a luck stat for hitters, perhaps because it’s one for pitchers; research in the past decade or so has found that the BABIP a pitcher allows can vary greatly from year-to-year, in that pitchers have limited influence in what they allow beyond strikeouts, walks and home runs. That said, a hitter’s BABIP is more dependent on skill. It’s a reflection of being able to place balls and leg out hits. On the latter count particularly, it’s a great stat for a speedy young Mickey Mantle– or in today’s majors, the closest player to Mantle, Mike Trout who unsurprisingly has a lifetime BABIP of .361.

Left unsaid here thus far– but said in more previous columns on this site than I can count– is what a hitter’s era might enable for someone like Mantle. It’s a toss-up if the 1930s or 1990s rank as the greatest offensive era in baseball history. While I’ll sidestep that question today, the stat converter on Baseball-Reference.com has some ludicrous numbers for Mantle in the era of Lefty Grove, Bob Feller, Carl Hubbell and 200 other pitchers whose names are little remembered by modern fans. On the 1930 Cardinals, Mantle’s 1957 season is good for a slash line of .422/.572/.770 with 43 home runs and 133 RBI. On the 1936 Browns, who shared Sportsman Park with the Cardinals for many years, Mantle’s ’57 season converts to .418/.568/.760.

I’ll admit I like Mantle on the Gashouse Gang Cardinals more than the Brownies. Baseball history’s most famous drinker would’ve fit right in on the first team, just another young, free-spirited country boy. Pepper Martin and Dizzy Dean would’ve been Mantle’s Billy Martin and Whitey Ford. And it goes without saying that the Cardinals president in those years, Branch Rickey, loved Mantle as a player, saying “He’s the best prospect I’ve ever seen,” and, “Fill in any figure you want for that boy. Whatever the figure, it’s a deal.” Rickey’s tendency was to sell players off just as they began to decline, so Mantle’s peak with the Gashouse Gang Cardinals would probably have been brief. But while it lasted, it would’ve been something to behold.

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

Others in this series: Al Kaline, Al Rosen, Al Simmons, Albert Pujols, Artie Wilson, Babe Ruth, Bad News Rockies, Barry Bonds, Billy Beane, Billy Martin, Bob Caruthers, Bob Feller, Bob Watson, Bobby Veach, Carl Mays, Cesar Cedeno, Charles Victory Faust, Chris von der Ahe, Davey Lopes, Denny McLain, Dom DiMaggio, Don Drysdale, Doug Glanville,Ed Walsh, Eddie Lopat, Elmer Flick, Eric Davis, Frank Howard, Fritz Maisel, Gary Carter, Gavvy Cravath, Gene Tenace, George W. Bush (as commissioner), George Case, George Weiss, Harmon Killebrew, Harry Walker, Home Run Baker, Honus Wagner, Hugh Casey, Ichiro Suzuki, Jack Clark, Jack Morris, Jackie Robinson, Jim Abbott, Jimmy Wynn, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Posnanski, Johnny Antonelli, Johnny Frederick, Josh Gibson, Josh Hamilton, Ken Griffey Jr.,Kenny Lofton, Larry Walker, Lefty Grove, Lefty O’Doul, Major League (1989 film),Mark Fidrych, Matt Cain, Matt Nokes, Matty Alou, Michael Jordan, Monte Irvin, Nate Colbert, Nolan Ryan, Ollie Carnegie, Paul Derringer, Pedro Guerrero, Pedro Martinez, Pee Wee Reese, Pete Rose, Prince Fielder, Ralph Kiner, Rick Ankiel, Rickey Henderson, Roberto Clemente, Rogers Hornsby, Sam Crawford, Sam Thompson, Sandy Koufax,  Satchel Paige, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Spud Chandler, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, The Meusel Brothers, Tony Phillips, Ty Cobb, Vada Pinson, Wally Bunker, Wes Ferrell, Will Clark, Willie Mays

 

 

Statistics are used much like a drunk uses a lamppost: For support, not illumination.

-Vin Scully

Three years ago, in the early stages of this blog, I wrote a post suggesting the best eligible player not in the Hall of Fame. It was three years ago, granted, so I knew less about sabermetrics, less about baseball history, and less about eligible players not in Cooperstown. (I still don’t know everything and I never will, which is one thing I like about baseball history. Through more than 150 years of organized play, there are seemingly endless expanses to explore.) Instead, I based my piece on what I knew best at the time, traditional stats. This led me down a rabbit hole which I can laugh about three years on.

I started by visiting the list of highest career batting averages at Baseball-Reference.com. Why batting average? Before I knew of OPS+, wRC+, or wOBA, to name a few sabermetrics that measure a player’s overall offensive contributions, I considered batting average the best measure of a hitter. And without knowing of total value metrics like Wins Above Replacement, JAWS, or Hall Rating, I figured the best candidate not in Cooperstown would be a great hitter. Don’t ask me how my mind works sometimes.

Starting at the top of the batting average list, I scrolled past all-time leader Ty Cobb whose .367 clip helped get him in Cooperstown long ago, past next runner-up Rogers Hornsby, also long since enshrined, and past Shoeless Joe Jackson, who isn’t eligible. For some reason, I either missed or disregarded the fourth man on the list, Lefty O’Doul, though that’s probably for the best. Lefty’s a great hitter, no doubt, and he belongs in Cooperstown, but he hit .349 in a short career, in a Golden Age for hitters. His 143 OPS+ is worse than 15 eligible players not enshrined. His splits are also nuts: .426 in 733 at-bats at the Baker Bowl; .327 in 2,531 AB’s elsewhere.

After Lefty, I scrolled past a number of players already enshrined, as well as three 19th century hitters: Dave Orr, Pete Browning and Jake Stenzel. In discussions of all-time greats, I tend to reflexively disregard anyone who played before the Modern Era. I don’t know if this is wrong. This in turn led me to the owner of the 22nd highest batting average in baseball history, Riggs Stephenson. At the time I clicked on his name, I’d never heard of Stephenson who hit .336 over a career that spanned 1921-1934, though the sponsor’s message on his Baseball-Reference page proclaimed him: “The greatest baseball player who is NOT in the Hall of Fame!” That was good enough for me. If I ever do a post called “Times I was wrong here,” what I cobbled together on Stephenson will rank highly. He’s not the best player not in Cooperstown. Looking at other stats as well Stephenson’s impact on the game and place in baseball history, I doubt he ranks among the top 100 candidates.

I was reminded of all this by Scully’s quote, which someone recently posted to Twitter. I think there’s some truth in what Scully said (which, as Joe Posnanski noted, wasn’t an original quote), though in the grand tradition of quotes, it’s since been misappropriated by people looking to advance a cause. To my understanding, the quote is sometimes trotted out as an argument against sabermetrics. To an extent, I see the skeptics’ point. In four years of blogging about baseball, I’ve seen discussions where people have used an advanced stat to bludgeon home an argument. Heck, I’ve done it. It’s pretty simple to reference a player’s OPS+ and WAR, throw in a few factoids about him from Wikipedia, his SABR biography, or Google, and call it a day on a post. But it’s also easy to engage in this type of debate using traditional stats in place of sabermetrics.

I’ve been the proverbial drunk on the lamp post with both traditional and advanced stats. In both cases, I’ve been wrong. There’s not a stat in baseball, new or old, that’s best used dogmatically and in the absence of other information. By that same token, I think it’s also wrong to disregard stats entirely. They don’t tell the whole story of what goes on in baseball, but they certainly are evidence of whatever’s going on. They provide context as well. And they can serve as a gateway to learning about forgotten players. It’s why I’m grateful for the rise of sites like Baseball-Reference, seemingly designed to introduce me to players like Riggs Stephenson and so many others I may never have heard of were they not a click away. Ideally, checking out their stats can be just the beginning for learning their stories.

April 1987 marked the 40th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier. On April 6 of that year, the ABC program “Nightline” had on baseball author Roger Kahn and the Dodgers executive who signed Robinson, Al Campanis as guests. At first, it went smoothly, with Kahn noting that his late friend Robinson might be dismayed that the majors at that time had no black managers, general managers or owners. Koppel asked Campanis, by now vice president and general manager of the Dodgers, why there was still so much prejudice in the game.

“No, I don’t believe it’s prejudice,” Campanis said, via a video feed from the Astrodome where his Dodgers had just lost. “I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be a– let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager.”

“Do you really believe that?” Koppel said.

“Well, I don’t say all of them, but they certainly are short,” Campanis said. “How many quarterbacks do you have? How many pitchers do you have that are black?”

Kahn wrote years later that Campanis’s voice was thick as he spoke, suggesting he may have been drinking.

“I’ve got to tell you that that sounds like the same kind of garbage we were hearing forty years ago about players, when they were saying, ‘Ah, not really, not really cut out,'” Koppel said.  “Remember the days when you hit a black football player in the knees.  And you know, that really sounds like garbage, if you forgive me saying so.”

Campanis countered that he’d played with blacks in college, saying he didn’t know the difference in their skin color. He added that he hadn’t known many black swimmers, due to what he termed a lack of “buoyancy.” Koppel gave Campanis “another chance to dig yourself out, because I think you need it.”

“I have never said that blacks are not intelligent,” Campanis said. “I think that many of them are highly intelligent.  But they may not have the desire to be in the front office.  I know that they have wanted to manage, and many of them have managed.  But they’re outstanding athletes, very God-gifted, and they’re wonderful people, and that’s all that I can tell you about them.

The fallout for Campanis, the Dodgers and baseball was immediate and severe, with Campanis being forced to resign within 24 hours of the appearance, his career effectively over. Commissioner Peter Ueberroth hired Dr. Harry Edwards, a sociologist and founder of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, as his assistant for minority affairs; in time, it helped spur an increase in minority hiring for front office and managerial positions. Campanis, who publicly apologized after the incident, calling it “the lowest day of my career,” reached out to Edwards early in his tenure, asking if there was anything he could do to help.

“We’re going to have to deal with the Campanises in baseball,” Edwards said, “And it’s good that I have a person in-house who knows how they think.”

*            *             *

I was reminded of all this after an appearance Thursday by former player and current Chicago White Sox broadcaster Ken “Hawk” Harrelson on MLB Network. To the uninitiated, Harrelson is known on-air for unabashed support of the White Sox and the occasional display of emotional pyrotechnics when a call goes against Chicago. He has little use for sabermetrics. A few weeks ago during a game, he called sabermetrics the most overrated addition to baseball in the past 10-15 years. Harrelson’s remarks naturally stirred some response, first an outcry via social media and then an on-air rebuke by MLB Network broadcaster Brian Kenny, a proponent of sabermetrics. This led to Thursday’s segment, hyped as a debate between Harrelson and Kenny. (Anyone who’d like to watch the full 10-minute clip can find it here.)

To call the segment a debate is admittedly a stretch. It mostly consisted of Harrelson rattling off talking points with a flustered Kenny attempting to reason with him to no avail. I feel for Kenny. One of my biggest frustrations in debate is dealing with someone who cannot or will not listen to me and won’t acknowledge any validity in my points. It’s disrespectful, counterproductive and, of course, all too common. Hawk Harrelson talks baseball the way some of my older family members talk politics. There’s little hope in changing their views, but I’ve learned I can be respectful, listen and voice my beliefs. Occasionally, I even hear a thing or two that causes me to question my views. I think that’s healthy.

Throughout the debate, Harrelson demonstrated only a passing acquaintance with sabermetrics. He slammed the film “Moneyball” before conceding, upon prodding from Kenny, that he hadn’t read the book. He trotted out stats like ‘OBPS’ (a misspeak of OPS, I think) and VORP, which hasn’t been in regular use in baseball analysis in several years. Harrelson reaffirmed his claim about sabermetrics being overrated, saying that numbers had a place in the game but were 50-60 years from being ready, an interesting statement given that sabermetrics has been in baseball going as far back at least as the 1950s. Then Harrelson introduced a stat he called tWtW– The Will To Win– saying that when it could be incorporated into other advanced metrics “then you might have something.” When I first heard reference on Twitter to tWtW, I assumed Harrelson spoke tongue-in-cheek. He offered it without flinching.

Much of Harrelson’s screed came off half-cocked and self-righteously ignorant, though he said a few things I agreed with. At one point, he referred to Kenny’s broadcast partner, former Seattle Mariners second baseman Harold Reynolds who, in sabermetric terms, had -1.8 Wins Above Average in his 12-season career.

Harrelson told Reynolds and Kenny:

People 40 or 50 years from now look at Harold Reynolds’ numbers and say, ‘Okay, he was a pretty good player.’  Well, Harold was not a pretty good player. He was an outstanding player. Because he did things that you can’t put numbers on. Harold was the kind of the guy he would turn a double play when he knew he was gonna take a hit from guys like myself or Kirk Gibson, whoever, gonna knock him into left field. He’d get it over, turn it over and then take the hit. He’d also steal a base in the late innings of a ball game when everyone in the park knew he was gonna steal. He’d also make that diving stop of a ground ball going to his left to keep a man going from first to third.

I agree with Harrelson: Numbers don’t tell the whole story of what goes on in baseball. For me, the best use of sabermetrics is not as some omnipotent tool. It’s to confirm what’s seemingly apparent through visual observation or traditional statistics and to show where more cursory analysis might deceive. For me, sabermetrics is vital to my understanding of baseball, though I’d never use it solely in the absence of other tools.

 *            *             *

In sabermetric circles on the Internet, Harrelson has been largely and predictably panned since his appearance. Colin Wyers wrote for Baseball Prospectus:

Hawk is at least two kinds of extra special wrong. One is what Isaac Asimov described as “wronger than wrong,” where you’re clinging to outmoded beliefs and defending yourself by claiming that better ideas than yours are also incorrect and refusing to address your own deficiencies. Sabermetrics’ failure to be perfect is not a blanket justification to ignore all of it.

The other kind of extra special wrong Hawk stumbles into… is what Wolfgang Pauli called “not even wrong.” It’s when you make claims that can’t be refuted, and in doing so make claims that aren’t worth refuting. Hawk talks about “the will to win” (and believe me, he keeps repeating this) being the most important thing in baseball, and apparently it’s judged by how many wins you have. If you’ve won a lot, you had the will; if you didn’t, well, you didn’t.

People like Hawk will always roll out this line of thinking because it can’t be disproven, so they never reach a moment where they’re refuted and forced to actually quit. So what they never notice is that it’s also totally meaningless; you can only ever figure out who had the will to win after the fact, at which point it’s too late to do anything about it.

I get where the criticism of Harrelson comes from. He’s generally an easy target, given his on-air demeanor. For the most part in his MLB Network appearance, Harrelson was clearly and loudly wrong. But he’s also a sympathetic figure, given his age, status as an ex-player and the fact that, at least to me, there generally doesn’t seem to be malice behind his words, misguided as they sometimes are. Harrelson just comes across as someone who loves baseball and the White Sox and, flowery though this may sound, has his own way of expressing it. I worry that verbally eviscerating Harrelson is the wrong approach, over the top. I think it makes the sabermetric community look worse for wear, about as intolerant as Harrelson came off with Brian Kenny on Thursday. We can do better.

To me, the most telling moment of the MLB Network segment came when Harrelson remarked to Kenny that his main gripe with sabermetrics was that it had gotten people fired. He spoke of a scout he knew– “God rest his soul”– remarking about managers having to call up to press boxes late in the game to get permission to bunt. Kenny and Reynolds didn’t make much of this before moving onto other topics, understandable to a degree since it was a live television segment. If I had been interviewing Harrelson, though, I’d have zeroed in on this and asked more questions. There’s clearly more there. If I had to guess, I’d say Harrelson’s main gripe with sabermetrics is personal. I’d love the chance to listen to whatever Harrelson had to say and then offering as calmly and persuasively as I could what sabermetrics really is: nothing to be feared; something that already is making baseball better.

This is easier said than done, of course, but I believe it’s important to engage with the Hawk Harrelsons of baseball. Even as baseball has changed rapidly in recent years, as sabermetrics has gained rapid acceptance in front offices, there are still many men like Harrelson in the game. If and when they make poorly-conceived comments, I’d rather do my best to win them over to my side than publicly slam them. And who knows, maybe I’d learn a thing or two from them as well. I look at a man like Harrelson, who’s been in professional baseball in one form or another since 1959 and I marvel at all the stories he must have. While most of those stories have probably been told in-booth (and a few are collected in his SABR bio), the journalist and historian in me likes to think there’s always more, that I’m missing out if I dismiss someone out of hand. I prefer to build bridges, to be inclusive, to forgive.

 *            *             *

Al Campanis never got another job in baseball after his resignation from the Dodgers. He lived 11 more years, occasionally showing up at baseball functions, watching as his grandson Jim attempted, without fruition, to make the majors. Campanis died in 1998 at 81. ”His was a life full of love for the game and his family,” succeeding Dodgers general manager Fred Claire said after Campanis’s death. ”No one loved baseball more than Al loved the game. He was a great student of the game and a great teacher of the game.”

In April 2012, ESPN.com did a 25-year retrospective on Campanis’s remarks, talking to Dr. Harry Edwards among others.

“It wasn’t a simple case of Al being a bigot — to say he was just a bigot is simply wrong — people are more complex than that,” Edwards said. “To a certain extent, it was the culture Al was involved with. To a certain extent, it was a comfort with that culture. And at another level, it was a form of discourse he was embedded in.”

Baseball’s culture continues to change, to evolve for the better. For every Campanis or Harrelson still around, I like to think change is possible as well.

I was literally just asked WHY fans should respect MLB history — including that of each of its franchise’s (past/present). WHAT THE HELL?!

— Melissa Dickson (@WhiteSoxDiaries) April 18, 2013

Thursday afternoon, news broke on Twitter that Derek Jeter would be out injured until at least the All Star Break and the response was fairly predictable. While Yankee fans bemoaned yet another sidelined Bomber, opposing fans took the opportunity to bash Jeter and the organization. In the midst, my friend Melissa tweeted a call for fans to respect Yankee history and resist the urge to pile on. Of course that drew one person who argued with her. Melissa wrote the tweet above in response.

I met Melissa awhile back when I tweeted that I could name more members of the 1919 Black Sox than cast members of “Jersey Shore.” (In the interest of not sounding like an elitist, let me add that I can also name more Black Sox than current U.S. senators, Supreme Court justices or foreign heads of state.) People like Melissa and I are in a minority among baseball fans, particularly younger ones. I know full well how little use most fans have for baseball history. I see the traffic numbers for this website, pedestrian even when we’re posting good content regularly. I see the shrinking membership for the Society for American Baseball Research, even while baseball attendance has increased markedly over the past 20 years. People still love baseball, but its history most can take or leave. That’s unfortunate.

I’m drawn to baseball as a writer, historian and journalist. I love the stories. When people ask me which team I’m a fan of, I sometimes say I’m a fan of baseball history. It’s a little dorky but it’s true. While technically I’ve been a San Francisco Giants fan since grade school, it’s baseball history, all 150-plus years of it that I really love. I’ve been reading about it since I was eight and what I’ve found is that most every team has something cool in its past, something worthy of respect regardless of uniform colors. I think of Ted Williams serving in two wars, first as a flight instructor in World War II then as a combat pilot in Korea. I think of the Dodgers signing Jackie Robinson. As for the Yankees, few moments in baseball history yield the emotional impact of Lou Gehrig’s “Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth” speech. Any opposing fan not moved at least somewhat by the Iron Horse’s words is either unaware of their existence or a cold-hearted cynic.

It’s not just baseball history that I love but history in general. I enjoy accumulating knowledge and anecdotes. I like the better understanding of the world the information gives me. I like to think it makes me a better writer and wiser person. More than that, I just enjoy learning about history. A writer I like, Sarah Vowell is, similar to me, a history nerd. Some years ago in an essay, she expounded on this, writing:

On the first day of school when I was a kid, the guy teaching history– and it was almost always a guy, wearing a lot of brown– would cough up the pompous same old old same old about how if we failed to learn the lessons of history then we would be doomed to repeat them. Which is true if you’re one of the people who grow up to run things, but not as practical if your destiny is a nice small life. For example, thanks to my tenth-grade world history textbook’s chapter on the Napoleonic Wars, I know not to invade Russia in the wintertime. This information would have been good for an I-told-you-so toast at Hitler’s New Year’s party in 1943, but for me, knowing not to trudge my troops through the snow to Moscow is not so handy day-to-day.

The other sort of useful thing the history teacher in the brown jacket never really said, probably because he would have been laughed out of the room, was this: knowing what happened when and where is fun.

Ultimately, that’s what baseball history is for me: fun. Its importance in understanding what goes on in baseball today is debatable, seeing as baseball changes from generation to generation and other tools are more useful for deconstructing the current game. Knowing that Joe Sewell struck out as many times between 1926 and 1932 as the Detroit Tigers and Seattle Mariners did on Wednesday night– 40 times– won’t explain why strikeouts are up so dramatically in the majors these days. It won’t say whether baseball’s gotten better or worse over the years, even if some may attempt to use the stat that way. But it’s a fun, quirky fact that provides some contrast. Baseball history is littered with these. (Another fun Sewell fact while we’re on the subject: He had six seasons with at least 600 plate appearances where he struck out fewer than 10 times. Who does that anymore? Answer: No one.)

In February, I got my eight-year-old nephew Jasper his first book of baseball history. From what I hear, he was excited to receive it. That puts a smile on my face. I hope he gets out of the book what I have (Ken Burns’ Baseball– one of my favorites) and is one day able to return the favor for someone else. To me, baseball history is too enjoyable not to be shared.

Hi all,

A quick note this morning to say that I have a new piece up at the Hardball Times. As some of you may know, Baseball-Reference.com added salary information and an inflation calculator to player pages not long ago. Using this info, I recently ranked every Hall of Fame player for their top salary in 2012 dollars.

Hope you all enjoy. I should have a new update here later this week. I’m itching to write about Dave Kingman, who had an infamous run-in with one of my editors from the 49ers magazine I wrote for this fall.