Author: Graham Womack

What he did: I’ve written a couple of times recently about Case, an outfielder for the Washington Senators and Cleveland Indians from 1937-1947 who shot 8 mm color footage of his career. I didn’t know of Case before first hearing from his son George Case III, but his stolen bases totals impressed me.

In an era before speedsters like Maury Wills, Lou Brock and Rickey Henderson helped revolutionize base stealing, Case averaged over 40 stolen bases in six seasons of leading the American League. Imagine what Case could have done in an era where stealing was encouraged and coached for.

Era he might have thrived in: The 1980s, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Why: Perhaps no team stole as well as the 1985 Cardinals, who swiped 314 bases and had five men with more than 30 steals. Case stole a career-high 61 bases for the Senators in 1943; the stat converter on Baseball-Reference says Case would have 70 steals on the ’85 Cardinals, second-most on the team behind rookie Vince Coleman who had 110.

Maybe there are certain intangibles a machine can’t compute. I ran track all four years of high school, and I remember that as our team attracted more good runners, I got better. I think a lot of things in life are like that. People thrive on competition. We learn from others who best us, receiving encouragement from their feats that the seemingly impossible can be done.

Case didn’t have many peers to draw from. Wally Moses finished just behind him in 1943 with 56 steals, though no other American League player had 30. In fact, Case fell just shy of stealing at least 10 percent of the bases in his league that year. Looking over Baseball-Reference, I found seven men in the modern era who have done this:

• Luis Aparicio in 1959 and 1964
• Lou Brock in 1966
• Bill Bruton in 1954
• Willie Mays in 1956
• Jackie Robinson in 1949
• Snuffy Stirnweiss in 1944
• Maury Wills in 1962 and 1965

For reference, Ty Cobb didn’t steal 10 percent of the bases in his league when he swiped 96 bags in 1915, Brock fell short of the 10 percent mark when he had 118 in 1974, and Henderson’s record-setting 130 steals in 1982 accounted for 9.33% of the 1,394 stolen bases in the American League that year.

With the glut of expansion and nearly twice as many teams now playing in each league than they did in Case’s era, stealing 10 percent of the bases in one’s circuit has become almost impossible. Consider that Jose Reyes’ 78 steals in 2007 were less than 5 percent of the 1,564 steals in the National League that year. Still, I think Case’s totals for his era are impressive.

Curious, I emailed Case III. He wrote back, “My father often said, that if he had played in another era, he probably could have stolen at least 100 bases in a season.  My dad never ran when the team was behind by more than three runs and never tried to steal third with two outs – it just wasn’t done when my dad played.”

There’s one more thing worth mentioning. Case died in 1989 at 73 from emphysema. When I interviewed Case III by phone two weeks ago, I asked if his dad had smoked during his career. Case III told me his dad started smoking when he was 10. If he’d come of age in an era where this was frowned upon, who knows what his stolen base totals could have been.

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

What he did: Rose has the career record for hits with 4,256, as well as most games played, plate appearances, at-bats, outs and, I’m guessing, money bet on baseball. The latter feat helped get him barred for life from the game in 1989. I consider Pete Rose the greatest baseball player not in the Hall of Fame, I align myself with those who say his ban is cruel and unusual punishment, and I believe baseball should grant an amnesty to Rose and another banished great, Joe Jackson. I say enough is enough, but it’s not my decision.

Era he might have thrived in: The Deadball Era

Why: Rose’s problem is not that he got caught up in illicit activity. It’s that he played 60 years too late.

As the Ken Burns Baseball book recounts, baseball suppressed a betting scandal in 1926 involving future Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis permitted both players to quietly retire (and later let them play again) while American League President Ban Johnson paid $25,000 to have information destroyed that Cobb and Speaker bet on a game of the 1919 World Series they knew to be fixed. Rose is not known to have done anything approaching this yet he’s long gone from baseball.

Gambling was endemic in baseball from 1900-1920, the height of the Deadball Era, with many players being barred for fixing games or betting on them including Heinie Zimmerman, Hal Chase and the eight Chicago White Sox players, including Jackson, who threw the 1919 World Series. But there hasn’t been anything substantiated that Rose ever threw a game. Rose finally admitted to betting on games where he was a manager, after years of lying about it, but he maintains that he always played to win. Assuming that’s true, it’s far different than conspiring with underworld figures to rig a game.

Evidence shows that Rose was a compulsive gambler, and addictive behavior can rear its head in any generation or environment. Rose may have gambled on baseball no matter the era. But in the early days, long before free agency or seven-figure contracts, Rose would have had a fraction of the money to gamble with. He also would have had baseball’s brass on his side — rather than being directly responsible for his exile — had his transgressions become public.

There are other reasons Rose would have thrived in an earlier era. His style of play always suggested he was plucked from another generation, a scrappy throwback who gave his all, earning the nickname Charlie Hustle. Rose’s gregarious, roughhouse character also would have been perfect in an era where players scarcely ranked above street criminals in the social hierarchy.

Needless to say, had Rose played in the Deadball Era, I think he’d be in the Hall of Fame.

Any player/Any era is a Thursday feature here that looks at how a ballplayer might have done in a different era than his own. The feature debuted June 3, 2010 under the name “Different player/Different era.” I’m changing the name, effective this week, because the first one is confusing.

A week and a half ago, my boss said he would have to cut my hours for June. I was bummed but also grateful to still have a job, and I figured things would be alright.

I’ve worked 16 hours since, and it turns out my new free time has been largely consumed by this site. I’ve written thousands of words, done several interviews and even covered a baseball-themed art show. To any fellow bloggers looking to improve traffic, I found that by doing extra footwork recently, I got immediate results. In the past five days, I’ve had more visitors than I used to get in entire months.

(By the way, before I go any further, I should say I’ve tried to steer this site away from personal posts of this nature. This post is mostly for friends, regular readers and fellow bloggers. To others: Monday will be business as usual here with a review of a book about a Deadball Era pitcher.)

More and more, I’m believing that Search Engine Optimization, at least for blogging, isn’t about fancy coding or high tech maneuvering. I think it’s about putting in long hours, doing work others in the blogosphere can’t or won’t do, making an original contribution.

Monday epitomized this. Here’s what transpired:

12:00 AM: The beginning of Monday morning finds me still awake, not having to work until Tuesday, finalizing my post on forgotten Negro League/semi-pro great John Donaldson. Having done three interviews the Thursday before, including an hour-and-twenty-minute session with Donaldson’s lead researcher Peter Gorton, I know I’ve been given a good story.

2:00 AM: I post my story, email David Pinto of Baseball Musings in hopes of getting a link and go to bed.

7:00 AM: I awaken as my roommate gets ready for work, check online, and see that Pinto has linked to me. Excited, I submit the story to another big site, Baseball Think Factory and email Gorton and my two other interview sources for the story.

7:44 AM: Since Donaldson played in Minnesota, I message a blogger there, Sooze of Babes Loves Baseball.

7:52 AM: Gorton emails positive feedback and suggests I submit the story for SABRgraphs, the Society for American Baseball Research’s weekly email of the best baseball writing from around the Internet.

8:05 AM: I email the person in charge of submissions for SABRgraphs, thinking her name is Robin.

8:11 AM: Actually, her name is Rebecca. But she says she will include my story. I cannot lose this morning.

8:23 AM: I email Gorton that the story is also up on Baseball Think Factory, telling him June 7 is officially Blogger Christmas for me (Baseball Prospectus will pick up the story, too, after SABRgraphs goes out on Thursday, and I’ll work out to contribute to a major baseball site, Seamheads.com.)

9:00 AM: Heading to a 9:30 personal appointment, I stop at the post office for a DVD from George Case III, whose dad, George Case, played in the majors from 1937-1947 and shot color footage there.

10:30 AM: I take my car to the shop for a tire rotation and oil change, since the place does a two-for-one deal and is walking distance from my apartment.

11:00 AM: I watch Case’s documentary. As I will write later for Friday, I think it’s good.

3:15 PM: The shop manager calls to say one of my tires needs to be repaired. I decide to take the car to Costco, since I have a warranty there and don’t want to spend more money. The only catch: It’s a long trek, by foot and BART, back to my apartment, and I have a 5:30 interview with Case III. Also, though I don’t realize it at the time, my only cell phone charger is in my car, since my cat chewed through my wall one, and my battery’s low.

5:31 PM: I return to my apartment just in time and call Case III. We have a good long talk until–

6:02 PM: My battery dies.

6:06 PM: I email Case III to arrange a follow-up for Tuesday. I also see a message from Sooze that she will link to the Donaldson story in a blog she does for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Somewhere in all this, I also finalized my post about if Don Mattingly belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Needless to say, I don’t have days like this very often, but I’d welcome another.