Author: Graham Womack

As anyone who’s a regular here has surely noticed, posting at this site has been a bit sparse of late. I’ve had a bit going on in my life, including a new job, and the truth is I’ve also been at a bit of an impasse here. I run hot and cold with this website, and for the past couple of months, my creative fires have cooled, at least in regard to BPP. I assume they’ll come back; they always do.

I apologize for anyone who misses my writing here, though with that being said, as the title would suggest, I have some cool news. A few months of hard work (that I’ve neglected to mention here before now) has culminated with my first-ever freelance piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. I wrote about Tony Gomez, a sandlot player from the 1930s who faced an uphill battle getting into professional baseball because of the dark color of his skin.

The story will be in the Tuesday edition of the paper and can be read online here.

I hope everyone enjoys this story, and I’d love some constructive feedback from anyone who can offer it. My hope is that this is the first of many pieces in the Chronicle and that I can build on my work and continue to grow as a writer.

What he did: I kicked off a new project here Monday, having people vote on a 50-player inner circle for the Hall of Fame, and I suppose it’s no surprise Earl Averill is an afterthought in voting. Players like Averill often suffer in these exercises. Averill, who currently has two votes, played just 13 years in the majors, needing until a month before his 27th birthday in 1929 to debut. His lifetime numbers pale compared to legions of greats who’ve appeared more recently. Even his place in Cooperstown wasn’t easily come by. Averill campaigned for a plaque for years after retiring in 1941, Bert Blyleven for an earlier generation, and it took until 1975 for the Veterans Committee to recognize him.

This isn’t to say Averill doesn’t deserve his due. His 238 home runs, .318 batting average, and 133 OPS+ place him among the best hitters of the 1930s. His 45.1 WAR, while distantly down the career leaderboards, isn’t bad for 13 seasons– just 142 players in baseball history have posted a better total in that span. Averill is certainly one of the greatest Cleveland Indians of all-time, arguably worthy of the franchise’s Mount Rushmore. And I wonder what he might have done with a longer career.

Era he might have thrived in: Averill was a product of his environment, beginning with a town club in 1920 in his hometown of Snohomish, Washington and eventually working his way to the Pacific Coast League and, after starring for three years in that circuit, the majors. He debuted in the American League during a golden age for hitters and took advantage of an ideal home field for offense, League Park in Cleveland, hitting .360 there with a .439 on-base percentage and .625 slugging line. It might not be easy to find Averill a superior situation, though I assume it’s possible.

With Averill’s size, 5’9 and 172 pounds, he might not get drafted today. But I’m reminded a little of Mel Ott. A similarly diminutive outfielder and left handed hitter, Ott also took advantage of a ballpark seemingly built for him. Where it was 290 feet to right field in League Park with a 40-foot fence for Averill, Ott faced just a 258-foot right field porch at the Polo Grounds which helped him hit 323 of his 511 career home runs there. Age and raw talent wasn’t a hindrance for Ott, either, as he got a contract at 17 from the Giants who let him sit the bench a couple years before he became a regular player. Without giving too much away, Ott seems like a lock for my project’s inner circle. With similar career circumstances, Averill might have similar odds.

Why: Numbers talk in discussions about all-time greats, and while Averill wasn’t quite the power hitter that Ott was, I suspect that with a full career and a better park for his skill set, he might have come somewhere close to doubling his lifetime home run totals. I looked at the rates that Averill and Ott homered at their primary parks and elsewhere, and I found that Averill didn’t hit balls out at a terribly worse pace at home or on the road than Ott did.

Home run splits for the two players are as follows:

What he did: I’ve been writing this column for two years, and for two years, Matt Cain has been a potential perfect subject. In part, this column has been about taking men whose stats may have suffered due to their career circumstances. I’ve looked at hitters like Jim Wynn and Bob Watson who might have been Hall of Famers had they not played in the Astrodome of the 1960s. Conversely, I’ve looked at Paul Derringer, who went 7-27 in 1933; on the 1968 Dodgers, Derringer’s efforts that season would be good for a 16-13 record with a 2.55 ERA and 1.098 WHIP. I believe so much of baseball success is about being in the right place at the right time, and until last night, Cain was another Wynn, Watson, or Derringer, a man who could’ve used any era and team besides his own.

For anyone who missed it, Cain threw the first perfect game in the Giants’ 130-season history last night, shutting down the Houston Astros 10-0. A legion of baseball writers have already weighed in about Cain’s feat including Grant Brisbee of McCovey Chronicles. Grant wrote:

There are two ways to talk about Matt Cain: the macro and micro. Big picture and small picture. The micro is on a game-to-game basis. Boy, oh boy, Matt Cain sure is good. He looked awesome in that game, and the change-up was a-changin’. Breaking down specific at-bats. Reminding ourselves how lucky we are to have him. Noting that he got cained, or marveling that he somehow mooned the baseball gods and eked out a win.

The macro and big picture, though, isn’t something you can do very often without spoiling it. That’s where you note that Cain was the original guy, the transitional figure. It’s easy to get myopic and forget that the Giants weren’t always a pitching-rich team that struggled to hit. For a while they couldn’t do either. And then there was Matt Cain, showing up in the majors when he was 20, and pitching beyond his years.

Brisbee may have best captured the context for a pitcher who only recently crossed .500 for his career winning percentage despite compiling a 126 ERA+ and 28 WAR. For much of his seven-plus years in the majors, Cain’s been a sobering example of the importance of run support, of how a lack of it can impact a hurler’s win-loss record. The Giants have scored more than 700 runs just one season of Cain’s career, and if the splits below show me anything, he’s suffered for it. Might Cain be an annual threat to win 20 games on a team that regularly gave him four or five runs a game? I think so. Just look at his splits:

What he did: I always thought Nolan Ryan got screwed playing nine seasons on the Houston Astros. That’s what I used to think at least, looking at years like 1987 when Ryan led the National League with a 2.76 ERA but finished 8-16. Certainly, those Astros went 76-86 and scored two runs or less in about half of Ryan’s starts with him going 1-13 in those games. But there’s a silver lining from 1987, Ryan’s 2.21 ERA at home. In fact, I doubt he’d have won the ERA title with a different home ballpark. Ryan benefited from good pitchers’ parks much of his career, going 59-44 with a 2.77 ERA in the Astrodome, 85-58 with a 2.36 ERA at Angel Stadium, and 180-190 with a 3.66 ERA elsewhere. And the Astros weren’t that bad while Ryan was in town: They had a record above .500 six of the years he played for them.

The Ryan Express has a reputation as one of the best pitchers in baseball history, though some of his success may have been due to luck — good home ballparks, a .269 opponents’ batting average on balls in play, and the fortune to play in an era that mostly favored pitchers. Take these things away, and Ryan may have faced a longer road to Cooperstown, nothing close to the coronation he received with 98.8 percent of the vote on his first ballot in 1999. Sure, he might still have the 5,000 lifetime strikeouts and seven no-hitters, but I doubt it’d be enough for some Hall voters, at least not his first few times on the ballot. I assume he’d be enshrined at some point, it just might take awhile. Look what happened to Bert Blyleven, who needed 14 ballots for his plaque.

So while Ryan’s combination of legendary power and durability makes him a rare pitcher I have no problem projecting across any number of different eras, finding him a point in baseball history where he could’ve boosted or at least maintained his case for Cooperstown is tricky. Put Ryan in Coors Field in the late 1990s and he’d be the second coming of Mike Hampton, Darryl Kile, or some other hapless free agent ace lured to Colorado. Put Ryan in the Baker Bowl, Fenway Park, or another offensive launching pad in the late 1920s or early ’30s, and I assume his ERA would wind up somewhere near 5.00, win-loss record equally garish. But I can think of at least one place where he might have shined.

Era he might have thrived in: The story of Ryan’s rise to greatness is well-told, detailing how he debuted as a wild young reliever with the New York Mets in 1967 before being traded to the Angels in December 1971 and finding command enough to become an ace (though he led his league in walks eight times.) So there are two options: Find Ryan a similar formative environment; or, place him in a free-swinging era where batters walked far less, where the few Hall of Fame pitchers were either fireballers or on great teams or both. I’m speaking of the 1930s. Playing then, on a ball club like the New York Giants, Ryan may have excelled.

Why: The Giants ballpark, the Polo Grounds was the Astrodome of its era, center field a place where home runs went to die. Pitching there, Ryan could make a more-than competent sidekick to Carl Hubbell, and with the ’30s Giants, he’d have the elite caliber of club he rarely found himself on in 27 seasons, a chance to go the World Series in his prime. And if his power translated to the era, Ryan could bring unprecedented strikeout totals, perhaps breaking the dry spell between 1912 and 1946 where no hurler had 300 K’s. Ryan could be the Bob Feller of the National League.

Could this help Ryan’s legacy? Consider that in 1962, Feller and Jackie Robinson were first-ballot inductees for Cooperstown, the first time any player earned a plaque without multiple tries since 1937. It’s not to say Ryan would’ve automatically been enshrined through acclimation, facing consideration in an era of Hall voting where dozens of future honorees generally got at least one vote. Hubbell needed three tries before he was inducted, Lefty Grove four, Dizzy Dean nine. And Rapid Robert was and maybe still is the greatest teenage player in baseball history and a war hero to boot. I don’t know what kind of comparable PR that Ryan might have generated with voters. Still, I assume he’d have had as good a chance as any to do so.

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

Other ’30s pitchers written of in this series: Bob Feller, Lefty Grove, Paul Derringer, Satchel Paige, Wes Ferrell

Anyone who reads here regularly may have noticed that the posting schedule has slowed a bit lately. My apologies. My laptop is currently in the shop, I’ve been dealing with a little BPP burnout, and I’ve been preoccupied writing for other outlets. I should have my computer back sometime this week, and I intend to get back to business here shortly thereafter. I apologize again for my lapse in output and thank everyone for their patience.

What he did: Every so often, baseball gets a great hitter who debuts late. The 1920s had Lefty O’Doul failing as a pitcher with the Yankees, reinventing himself in the Pacific Coast League as a batter, and hitting .398 with the Phillies in 1929. Josh Hamilton might be O’Doul’s modern equivalent, following his selection as the first pick in 1999 draft with a descent into drug addiction. It took him until 2007 at 26 to reach the majors, and it will be interesting to see if, as it’s been with O’Doul, the lost seasons keep Hamilton from the Hall of Fame. This begs the question: What might Hamilton have done with those seasons?

Era he might have thrived in: A fellow baseball blogger, Bradley Ankrom of Baseball Prospectus tweeted something interesting a few days ago. Using the age 21 to 25 totals for players who had comparable stats to Hamilton between 26 and 30, Bradley (@BradleyAnkrom) came up with projected splits for Hamilton for 2002 to 2006. I took a look and have some stats of my own, which I’ll offer momentarily. While I doubt Hamilton would have been the second coming of Mickey Mantle had he debuted in 2002 with his draft team, Tampa Bay, he might have a better shot at Cooperstown.

Why: I went off Bradley’s idea, albeit with a few of my own wrinkles to adjust for different offensive conditions and ballpark effects that Hamilton’s statistical doppelgangers may have encountered. First, I looked at players who had close to a 135 OPS+ for their age 26 to 30 seasons, as Hamilton did. Then, I looked among this group for players who debuted at 21 and found Jim Rice, Darryl Strawberry, Kent Hrbek, and Scott Rolen. Here’s where this gets fun and, perhaps, a little unorthodox.

With the help of the Baseball-Reference.com stat converter, I ran numbers for Rice, Strawberry, Hrbek, and Rolen playing their age 21 to 25 seasons at Tropicana Field from 2002-2006, and I averaged their totals. I then multiplied the averages by .8974, the number of plate appearances the sometimes-brittle Hamilton had between ages 26 and 30 relative to them. When all was said and done, I got the following totals for Hamilton with Tampa Bay from 2002 to 2006:

	G	P	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG
2002	49	185	164	22	44	8	2	8	29	5	17	41	.268	.341	.488
2003	132	560	495	82	146	26	3	22	92	13	56	106	.295	.368	.493
2004	127	548	478	86	143	30	5	24	89	13	60	97	.299	.378	.533
2005	125	542	473	76	140	26	5	27	90	11	59	104	.296	.376	.543
2006	135	593	521	96	159	28	7	31	104	12	64	97	.305	.383	.564

(For those interested, here are the slash lines Bradley offered for Hamilton: 2002: 284/344/478, 2003: 281/345/483, 2004: 304/374/526, 2005: 294/365/507, 2006: 307/377/536. Bradley looked for players who were similar to Hamilton between ages 26 and 30, batting at least .300, with an OBP of .350, .530 slugging percentage, and 2500 plate appearances in this time. He then averaged those players’ age 21 to 25 seasons.)

Baseball statistical alchemy aside, this exercise requires a few assumptions. It requires belief, first of all, that Hamilton could have found a way to play 2002 to 2006. I don’t know if he was in any condition to compete those years, but if a few things had gone differently for him, he may have been. Isn’t that how life goes so often? For purposes of this scenario, I have Hamilton not getting injured early in his minor league career, not finding himself hanging around tattoo parlors, not dabbling in powder and, eventually, rock cocaine. I figure he might realistically be drinking in this scenario, no great thing for anyone with budding alcoholic tendencies, but a slower means of destruction minus hard drugs. Mantle stayed functional through his twenties in this way, as did many other greats.

Life has a way of working itself out. Hamilton has righted course and, at the moment, is leading the American League in all three Triple Crown categories, even hitting four homers earlier this week. The Tampa organization that had to rid itself of Hamilton after his early disaster has become a contender, while Hamilton’s Texas Rangers have done likewise. Provided he stays sober and healthy over the next eight or ten years, Hamilton may have a chance at the Hall of Fame. Still, who knows what might have been.

Any player/Any era is a Thursday feature (generally) here 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, 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., Larry Walker, Lefty Grove, Lefty O’Doul, Major League (1989 film),Mark Fidrych, Matt Nokes, Matty Alou, Michael Jordan, Monte Irvin, Nate Colbert, 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

The impossible or at least the high baseball unlikely happened on Wednesday evening with 37-year-old vagabond pitcher Jeff Suppan winning his first game since 2010. Someone I follow on Twitter asked who must have felt worse, the Giants losing to Jim Bouton in 1978 or the Brewers falling to Suppan. I say the ’78 Giants. It was no great time to be a Giant then; Bouton was also playing just his second game back from an eight-year layoff after writing Ball Four when he combined with two others to three-hit the Giants on September 14, 1978.

I tweeted as much to my friend (@euqubud), who replied:

Probably. It makes me wonder who are the worst/unlikeliest pitchers to win a game. You’d think Bouton would be on it.

I did a few Play Index searches on Baseball-Reference.com, and for our purposes, Bouton comes nowhere close to infamy. Nor does Suppan, who managed to throw four-hit shutout ball over five innings. No, the men I’ll highlight did far worse.

Since 1918, 17 pitchers have won a game surrendering at least 10 earned runs apiece. Sixteen of these men did it in the days before use of relief pitchers was commonplace or sophisticated, when hurlers were expected to finish the games they started regardless of how they went. Then there’s Russ Ortiz, who got one of the ugliest wins ever on May 21, 2000, a landmark offensive season at the height of the Steroid Era.

A list of the 17 pitchers follows in chronological order:

This says nothing, of course, of the myriad of less physically-gifted pitchers who managed to win a game without getting torched. Surely in the distant annals of baseball history, some men who had no business pitching in the majors have won a game or two or more. As modern players continue to become better developed, the majors ever more densely packed with talent, I imagine their lesser pioneers will become ever more of bygone relics.

I’m not going too deep in my analysis here, though if anyone has any thoughts, please feel free to weigh in.

Peter Hartlaub of the San Francisco Chronicle donated $50 to the charity aspect of the BPP All-Time Dream Project. As such, he’s entitled to 1,000 words written by me on a topic of his choice, and I invite anyone who’d like a guaranteed post to donate a similar amount. In this case, Peter asked me to write something on a professor of his at Cal Poly, former newspaperman Herb Kamm. Here goes.

_________________

I never knew Herb Kamm, but if I were to make a list of people I’d liked to have met, Kamm would rank somewhere near the top. I’ve spent a lot of my life wishing I could have known my great-grandfather Elmer Danielson who became a factory owner through fifteen years of night school and who had a sense of humor family members still talk about nearly 40 years after his death. I’d have liked to have met Sacramento native and former big league outfielder Joe Marty who got favorably compared to Joe DiMaggio when they were teammates in the Pacific Coast League and who I started researching a book on two years ago. After them, Kamm might rank third on my personal list.

Outwardly, there would appear to be nothing hugely special or unusual about the circumstances of Kamm’s life, same as Marty or my great-grandfather. I don’t think that’s anything to bemoan. When all is said and done in life, I think most of us are lucky if we’re remembered by anyone beyond the people who love us or the handful of lives we might touch. In Herb Kamm’s case, he probably influenced more people than most, first as a newspaper editor then as a senior citizen professor of journalism in California. By the time our paths could have conceivably crossed, he was teaching a sports journalism class at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo where I attended college. In fact, if I had my act together, I could have taken that class the spring of 2002, the end of my freshman year.

But, as it goes with lots of kids away from home for the first time, my freshman year of college was more about binge drinking, finding new and creative ways to fail at life, and making a rough go of it in my studies. I did very little writing, nearly failed out of school, and if I could, I’d take a mulligan on that whole abysmal year. By the time I had improved academically, Kamm was dead. He died at the beginning of my sophomore year at 85, and I at least made it to his memorial service on campus, getting to hear nice stories about a sweet man. I really missed out on at least one awesome opportunity Kamm could have provided me. One of the sports journalism students told me that on the last day of class the preceding spring, Kamm’s students got to conduct a phone interview with Bob Costas.

I’m lucky that I’ve had a lot of fine mentors in writing and life already. I knew I wanted to write from the time I was eight years old thanks to my dad working diligently with me on it that year after I brought home a D for a report on the sun. In college, I had professors who won Pulitzer Prizes, were working on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and in the case of one professor who had an odd affinity for serial killers, played a few of my peers and I an interview she did with Charles Manson. The day Michael Jackson got arrested, I remember her telling us with a grin, “This is my kind of story.” In recent years, writing this blog has brought me in contact with a lot of cool current and former sports scribes from Joe Posnanski to Josh Wilker to Robert Creamer, among others. I’m lucky to have the life I do and get to interact with a lot of interesting people. But I’d have liked to have known Kamm.

Thanks to the magic of Google, though, there’s more I can say about Kamm here. First off,  there’s a journalism scholarship in his name at Cal Poly today, and rightfully so. Kamm accomplished a lot, providing a blueprint for any aspiring journalist. He got his first reporting job as a 17-year-old in Asbury Park, New Jersey, about the same time that another 17-year-old Frank Sinatra was readying for his first professional singing gig in nearby Hoboken. One forum says Kamm covered both a World Series and the 1945 funeral of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kamm also served as executive editor of the New York World Tribune from 1966 until its folding in 1967, having a front row seat for the demise of a legendary outlet. It’s nothing to celebrate, but I imagine it at least yielded some interesting stories for Kamm. And I’d loved to know what it was like presiding over a staff that featured writers the likes of Tom Wolfe and Red Smith.

Kamm’s death even earned a mention in the New York Times on September 27, 2002. Here’s the full text of Kamm’s obituary:

Herb Kamm, executive editor of The World Journal Tribune in New York in 1966 and 1967, died on Wednesday at home here. He was 85.

He learned he had leukemia eight days ago, his family said.

In 1943, Mr. Kamm joined The New York World-Telegram & The Sun, where he became managing editor in 1963. That paper merged with The New York Herald Tribune and The Journal-American to become The World Journal Tribune. After The World Journal Tribune closed, in 1967, he became an editorial consultant for Scripps Howard Newspapers.

He was at The Cleveland Press from 1969 until it closed in 1982. He later was editorial director at WJKW-TV, a CBS affiliate in Cleveland. He then taught at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo.

Mr. Kamm was born in Long Branch, N.J., and early in his career he worked for The Asbury Park Press in New Jersey and The Associated Press.

He is survived by his wife, Phyllis; their three sons; six grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

Perhaps we touch more lives and have a broader footprint than we sometimes know. At his memorial service, one of Kamm’s sons offered a toast and a proposed headline for his dad’s life, telling those of us in attendance, “With respect to Frank Capra, ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.'” Indeed. Nearly a decade after his death, the legacy of Herb Kamm lives on.