Category: MLB

Posted on

Different player/Different era: Ken Griffey Jr.

What he did: Griffey retired last week as one of the greatest ballplayers of his generation, so I won’t regurgitate all the statistics and stories of his greatness that have since shot around the Internet besides to say his 630 home runs, astonishing first half of his career and spotless reputation throughout make him a definite Hall of Famer. But that’s not why I’m writing these words.

This post was inspired by a Joe Posnanski article in the June 14 issue of Sports Illustrated that included a quote from baseball legend Buck O’Neil about Griffey, “He could play in any era.” It seemed like an interesting idea worth exploring more and the article subhead teased it. But the piece was mostly about Griffey’s greatness early in his career and how much more he might have achieved in his own era had injuries not taken their toll over the past decade. It’s a story many have written in the past several years. Posnanski told his story gracefully, as he often does, but I think he missed an opportunity.

Perhaps Posnanski was apprehensive about painting a broader picture of how Griffey might have fared in a particular different era, which isn’t always easy to do. I’ve heard a retired baseball scout I know named Ronnie King say more than once that the game should be judged in 10 year intervals since it changes so much. Still, this new Thursday segment is built around the idea that such comparisons can be made. I’m going to delve deeper into what O’Neil said about Griffey.

Era he might have thrived in: For our purposes, let’s forget the color barrier that barred blacks from playing prior to 1947 and look at how ridiculously well a young Griffey might have done in the 1930s.

Why: This was the Golden Age for hitters, and if Griffey played then, he might have hit .400 or won a Triple Crown or both. The 1930 Philadelphia Phillies for instance hit .315 as a team even with a center fielder named Denny Sothern hitting .280. If Griffey replaces Sothern he joins an outfield of Chuck Klein and Lefty O’Doul who hit .386 and .383 that year, respectively. Imagine that 3-4-5 in the batting order.

Griffey also gets to play his home games at the Baker Bowl, one of the few stadiums in baseball history that was more of a hitter’s park than where he spent his best years, the Kingdome. As a left-handed pull hitter, Griffey would destroy the 280.5-foot Baker Bowl right field short porch, even with its 60-foot fence. Either Griffey gets adept at hooking flies over it or he sets the record for doubles. No matter what, the man who hit .327 in 1991 soars to greater heights than ever before.

I invite anyone to take a stab at what Griffey’s numbers might have been in 1930 (I’m guessing 55 home runs, 180 runs batted in and a .395 batting average.) Better, I encourage anyone to offer their perfect era for Griffey.

Different player/Different era is a Thursday feature here that examines how a baseball player might have fared in an era besides his own.

Posted on

Perfectly rare occurrences in baseball

I’m pleased to present another guest post from Joe Guzzardi, a new Wednesday contributor here. Today, he looks at last week’s near-perfect game and other rare feats in baseball history.

_________________

When a bad call denied Detroit Tiger Armando Gallaraga a perfect game, the media made a big deal of how rare a baseball feat it is to face 27 batters and put all 27 down.

Given that there have been 18 perfect games during baseball’s modern era, a perfect game would be better labeled infrequent rather than rare.

Many other baseball oddities– too numerous to mention in this short space– are less common. For pitchers, among them are walks to the first four batters (only five times); six home runs surrendered by a starting pitcher (six times) and perfect games lost on the twenty-seventh batter (ten times).

It’s rarer then to have a perfect game spoiled by the twenty-seventh batter than it is for the pitcher to complete his flawless game!

Gallaraga’s isn’t even the most interesting of the (nearly) perfect games.

That award would go to Babe Ruth, then a pitcher with the Boston Red Sox. On June 23, 1917, Ruth walked the Washington Senators’ first batter, Ray Morgan, on four straight pitches. Ruth, who had already been jawing with umpire Brick Owens about his first three “Ball” calls became enraged and was promptly ejected.

When Ruth charged Owens and swung at him, police led him off the field. Ernie Shore relieved Ruth.

On Shore’s first pitch, Sox catcher Pinch Thomas threw out Morgan trying to steal. Morgan retired the next twenty-six batters. Since all twenty-seven outs were recorded while Shore was on the mound, the game was considered perfect for decades until the Rules Committee changed its classification to combined no-hitter.

After analyzing all the data, I’ve concluded that baseball’s most interesting rare feat involves runs scored in a single game.

On only three occasions in modern baseball has a National League team scored in every one of its half innings during a nine-inning game. No American League team has ever done it. And no two teams in either an American or National League game have both scored in each of their nine half innings.

Think of it. Hundreds of thousands of baseball games have been played since 1900. Yet, in what seems virtually impossible, in only three of them has a team scored in each of their nine at bats.

In baseball’s highest scoring single game, August 25, 1922 when the Chicago Cubs beat the Philadelphia Phillies 26-23, the Cubs scored in four innings and the Cubs in six. How did the Cubs get to 26 runs by scoring in only four frames? In the second, they scored 10 and in the fourth, fourteen.

On August 12, 2008, when the Red Sox bested the Rangers 19-17 to set the American League record for most runs in a single game each team tallied in only five innings.

In a Texas-Baltimore double header on August 22, 2008 the Rangers won both games by scores of 30-3 and 9-7. In a total of thirty-six innings played, twenty-one of them were scoreless.

Earlier this season, when the Milwaukee Brewers thumped the Pirates 20-0 in the worst loss in Pittsburgh franchise history, the Brewers were held scoreless in three innings.

Not scoring runs isn’t as headline-grabbing as perfect games. Statistically however it’s far more difficult to put up at least one run in each half inning than it is to be perfect.

_________________

Joe Guzzardi is a fellow member of the Society for American Baseball Research and the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America. He has agreed to contribute guest posts here every Wednesday through the baseball season.

Posted on

A great pitcher you’ve never heard of

Photobucket

He died in poverty in Chicago 40 years ago and lay in an unmarked grave before money was raised for a headstone.

His lead researcher credits 363 wins to him through 32 years of Negro League and semi-pro ball– and those are just the wins he’s certain of.

The researcher calls the pitcher he’s spent a decade studying “Satchel Paige 20 years before he was Satchel Paige.”

Meet John Donaldson, one of the greatest baseball players history forgot.

Donaldson pitched on one level or another from 1908 to 1940, crossing paths with Negro League immortals like Paige, Ray Dandridge and Buck O’Neil while also facing white players around the Midwest in semi-pro competition. But by the time his lead researcher Peter Gorton heard of him ten years ago, his story had been relegated to obscurity.

Gorton was approached by his former high school history teacher who was writing a history of black baseball in Minnesota and wanted him to pen a chapter that would include Donaldson, who once pitched in a small town near where Gorton is from. A research group calling itself the Donaldson Network has since developed, documenting the story.

“It’s been buried for almost a hundred years, and there’s a reason for that, and that is, it’s not something that’s sitting right on the top,” said Gorton, an IT worker by day who lives in Minneapolis with a wife and two small children. “You have to dig around in it and try and figure it out, which we’re trying to do.”

The history of Major League Baseball is well-documented, and sites like Baseball-Reference make information on any ex-big league player instantly accessible. It’s harder to find much on the minor leagues and Negro Leagues.

Gorton estimates his group has accounted for 60 percent of Donaldson’s career, thus far. The network only counts verified statistics and, for instance, doesn’t include 100 games where it is uncertain of his strikeout totals. “The Donaldson Network is not in the business of speculating what might have happened,” Gorton said.

Donaldson’s wife died a couple years after him, and no descendants or family histories are known of. Gorton said old newspaper accounts provide the primary source of information. Routinely, visitors to his Web site send him photocopies of articles in the mail. Gorton also said he sometimes calls strangers in towns Donaldson’s teams visited and has them look up newspaper accounts of games.

Donaldson was a marquee name, able to help teams erase debts with late-season appearances that drew thousands. “In John Donaldson’s case, in the Midwest everybody knew who he was,” Gorton said.

Film footage exists of Donaldson, included here with Gorton’s permission. A scout named John Klima who saw the film told me in an email interview that Donaldson would have been a staff ace in the majors. He called Donaldson, “A rubber arm, durable workhorse who should have been a front-end major league starter for many years.”

In later years, Donaldson worked for the Chicago White Sox, scouting a young Willie Mays in the Negro Leagues.

So why isn’t Donaldson remembered? There are a few possibilities. Some may say his statistics aren’t noteworthy since they came against a mix of competition, some of it inferior to pro ball. Gorton also said Donaldson may have had a rift with O’Neil who enchantingly recounted memories of Paige and others in the Ken Burns Baseball mini-series that aired on PBS in 1994. Assuming the rift existed, perhaps it’s one reason there’s no mention of Donaldson in the series or accompanying book (coincidentally, Donaldson and O’Neil were among 39 Negro League finalists for the Hall of Fame in 2006, though neither was inducted.)

There may be a deeper reason for the lack of recognition for Donaldson. One of Gorton’s acquaintances through his research is John Thorn, a veteran baseball author who served as senior creative consultant on the Baseball series and, like Gorton, is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. Thorn told me in a telephone interview that baseball feels no responsibility to honor latter day players, white or black.

“Major League Baseball has made the judgment that 1/10th of 1 percent of all baseball fans cares about anything that happened prior to World War II, and they’re not going to devote very much of their resources to pleasing that 1/10th of 1 percent,” Thorn said. “You can’t argue with it as a business decision. You can argue with it as a philosophical or historical question because if baseball is an important institution, then it ought to be important to learn where it came from and how it grew.”

I’ll close with the footage of Donaldson, hand-cranked at Fergus Falls, Minnesota on August 16, 1925. Donaldson faced off that day against Joe Jaeger who made two relief appearances for the Chicago Cubs in 1920, and advertisements for the game called Donaldson “the colored wonder pitcher.”

If anyone has an opinion on Donaldson’s technique, Gorton would love to hear it.

(Postscript: More quotes from John Thorn)

Posted on

The Kid leaves the picture

All the talk yesterday regarding a blown call costing a pitcher a perfect game may have taken some attention away from what would have otherwise been the story of the day: the retirement of Ken Griffey Jr.

Granted, it wasn’t as surprising a story, since the once seemingly-eternally young Griffey looked more fit for a senior softball league by the end, hitting below .200 for the Mariners and purportedly falling asleep in the clubhouse, missing pinch hitting duties. It wasn’t fun to see Griffey at the end, a beloved player for his youthful energy, supreme talent in the first half of his career and his (we all hope it’s true) steadfast refusal to use performance enhancing drugs. And he was a tragic figure for having more injury-marred seasons than healthy ones in the last decade.

Griffey played in his final game on May 31, one day after the 75-year anniversary of the last time Babe Ruth shuffled out in a Boston Braves uniform that never looked right. Both Griffey and Ruth left the game at 40, shells of the immortals they once were, and, as I wrote in November, their ends bring to mind other greats like Rickey Henderson and Willie Mays who looked like old men by the end of their careers.

Really, short of Ted Williams, who hit .316 his final year and homered in his last at-bat, star players rarely seem to bow out near the top of their games. They generally stay until teams will no longer play them, or — in recent years — if they have some kind of steroid-related disgrace, as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Rafael Palmeiro, and Jose Canseco could attest.

I think I understand why players don’t want to leave. I know I do what I love in life because something feels missing from it when I don’t. In my case, I’m lucky because one of the things I love most, writing, can be a lifelong pursuit. Baseball players get a limited number of years to pursue their passions, and while the sport offers more years of competition than many others, it probably still feels all too short. So I’m sure there must be a temptation for a player to squeeze every last bit of enjoyment out of baseball while there’s still time, to milk every last cheer, to earn every last contract dollar.

Griffey at least had the good sense to make his retirement effective immediately, instead of opting for a tear-filled farewell tour. It seems he’d make a great hitting coach somewhere should a team give him a shot. If Mark McGwire can get this opportunity, as I wrote about in October, it seems only fair to consider Griffey as well.

With everything being said, Griffey finished with 630 home runs, likely rates among the finest ballplayers of his generation and should be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. I have family in Seattle and am happy to say that childhood trips there included a few visits to the Kingdome where I saw Griffey in his prime, when he had one of the most graceful swings I’ve seen. That’s the image I’ll keep of him.

Posted on

The perfect storm

I was nearing the end of my work day yesterday evening when my Twitter feed began to light up with “Oh my God, what the hell just happened?” type comments. I checked ESPN and found the story many sports fans have probably heard in the last eighteen hours: With two outs, in the bottom of the ninth, an umpire named Jim Joyce blew a call at first base and cost a pitcher from the Detroit Tigers named Armando Galarraga a perfect game.

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.

Posted on

Different player/Different era: The Meusel Brothers

Today marks the first appearance of a new Thursday feature here, Different player/Different era. Each week, I will examine a player who might have thrived in another era. My debut piece looks at two players, Irish and Bob Meusel.
Photobucket
What they did: They’re essentially a poor man’s version of the Waner brothers, Paul and Lloyd, who are both in the Hall of Fame and have the all-time record for hits for brothers with 5,611. Neither of the Meusel brothers lasted anywhere near as long in the majors as the Waners did or came close to Cooperstown, but in their primes, they swung similarly sweet.

Irish Meusel hit .310 lifetime with 1521 hits and was a standout for the New York Giants in the 1920s. He had perhaps his finest season in 1921 when he hit .343 with 14 home runs and 87 RBI and helped the Giants prevail over the Yankees in the World Series by hitting .345 in eight games. His younger brother Bob Meusel managed a .309 clip with 1693 hits and was part of the Murderers Row Yankees. In 1925, when teammate Babe Ruth played just 98 games, Bob Meusel led the American League with 33 home runs and 138 RBI.

Era they might have thrived in: Current

Why: There are a couple of big reasons.

First, each Meusel brother was done in the majors by 34, in an era when the vast majority of players didn’t last much beyond 35. Modern medicine might help each Meusel brother play longer. In the current game, they also might make tremendous designated hitters. Paul Molitor, one of the first regular DHs to be enshrined in Cooperstown, only had a few hundred more hits than either Meusel brother around the age each bowed out. Molitor’s .306 lifetime average is also below their career clips.

The second reason I could see the Meusel brothers thriving in the current game is a little more subtle, but was also common in their day when Major League Baseball did not exist west of St. Louis. The brothers were both born in the San Francisco Bay Area and each played for a California team in the Pacific Coast League after their time in the majors ended. A lot of ballplayers left the show for more money and warmer weather in the PCL, and many were Golden State natives, men like Tony Freitas and Joe Marty.

If the Meusels played in the majors today, I could easily see them spending their latter seasons DHing for the Angels or A’s and building up sufficient Cooperstown credentials.

Posted on

Roberto Clemente: Could he have been bigger than a Yankee Clipper?

Today, I’m pleased to present a first-ever guest post for Baseball: Past and Present. A writer and fellow Society for American Baseball Research member, Joe Guzzardi recently mentioned my site in a column he wrote. He subsequently emailed me and volunteered to write for this site. His name and work will appear weekly, at least for the remainder of the baseball season.

______________________

In a post by Graham Womack about the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Willie Stargell, a reader commented that Willie Mays once said that if Roberto Clemente had played in New York, he would have been more popular than Joe DiMaggio.

Although I can’t find the quote anywhere, Mays probably said it. Not only did Mays admire Clemente’s skills from the opposing Giant dugout but they were teammates on the 1954 Santurce Cangrejeros Caribbean League and played together on more than a dozen National League All-Star games including the 1961 contest. In that 5-4 NL victory, Clemente drove in two runners, one of them Mays.

To answer the question about whether a New York-based Clemente would have been more popular than DiMaggio, you first have to consider the magnitude of surpassing the level of admiration showered on the Yankee Clipper.

Such was DiMaggio’s popularity that during World War II, he was not sent into combat. The fear was that if DiMaggio were mortally wounded, the nation would be so psychologically scarred it would not recover. For three years, DiMaggio was stationed in Hawaii to coach baseball.

For the sake of today’s debate, let’s put Clemente in Yankee Stadium’s right field in his rookie year, 1955, through his final year, 1972. Since Giants and the Dodgers had one foot out of town by 1955, it makes more sense to speculate about Clemente as a Bronx Bomber.

As a Yankee, Clemente would have played in seven World Series, more than the two he participated in with the Pirates but fewer than DiMaggio’s ten.

What would have given Clemente’s popularity a big boost is the supportive press coverage he would have received in Manhattan during those seven championship seasons.

For most of his career, Clemente and the Pittsburgh print media had a contentious relationship. The press considered Clemente a constant complainer and malcontent. For his part, Clemente regarded the writers as racists who did not appreciate his many baseball skills and never missed a chance to belittle his accented English. Clemente said his image suffered in mostly white Pittsburgh because he was, in his words, a double minority: black and Latino.

Pittsburgh’s slanted media treatment of Clemente hurt him with the national press, too. Most Valuable Player voting reflects the writers’ indifference to Clemente, no matter what he accomplished on the field.

During his four National League batting championship seasons (1961, 1964, 1965 and 1967), Clemente won the MVP only once. In the others three years, he finished fourth, eighth and ninth.

His 1960 MVP slight particularly galled Clemente. During Pittsburgh’s World Series championship year, Clemente finished eighth on the MVP ballot behind Pirate captain Dick Groat despite having better statistics in almost every offensive category.

Consider, on the other hand, how a player of Clemente’s caliber would have been received in New York during the 1950s.

When Clemente broke into baseball, the great wave of Puerto Rican migration was underway. Affordable air travel enabled tens of thousands of islanders to uproot and move to New York.

His status as an All-Star player on the perennial champion Yankees would have made him a hero not only in the Puerto Rican community but among African Americans also. In 1955, Clemente would have joined Elston Howard as one of the Yankees’ two-first black players.

And in the ’50s, New York had six daily newspapers. Their Clemente coverage would have been glowing and his national reputation enhanced accordingly.

Would Clemente have been, as Mays speculated, “more popular” than DiMaggio?

Probably not. Ultimately, DiMaggio’s stats were better: 13 seasons (an All-Star in each of them, an achievement never matched); .325 BA, 325 HRs, 1305 RBIs, 3 MVPs versus Clemente’s 18 seasons, .317BA, 240 HRs, 1537 RBIs, 1 MVP.

During his career, DiMaggio had single seasons with 46 home runs and 167 RBIs (1937) and hit as high as .381 (1939). DiMaggio also holds the record that most analysts agree will never be matched, his 1941 56-game hitting streak.

But, if he had been a Yankee, Clemente would undeniably have been more popular nationally than he was in Pittsburgh, a parochial western Pennsylvania city that never created the media hype that automatically comes with super-stardom in New York.

Joe Guzzardi is a writer and member of the Society for American Baseball Research. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com.

Posted on

Happy Memorial Day

Just a quick post to say Happy Memorial Day and that it’s looking like it will be a good week for Baseball: Past and Present.

Two new regular features will be debuting here, “Does he belong in the Hall of Fame?” which will run Tuesdays and “Different player/Different era” for Thursdays which will look at how certain players would have done in different eras. I wrote the first two pieces this morning, and I’m excited to see how they’re received.

It also looks like this week could mark the appearance of a first-ever guest post here, as I’ve been talking with a fellow who’s eager to write something. This blog has largely been a personal vehicle for me, so far, and while I want to maintain my creative freedom, I’d also like to have the occasional different voice here. In addition, I’m looking to ramp up the amount of content I have, from a few posts a week to one every weekday, and I may need help on this, since my day job sometimes consumes me.

Thus, I would encourage anyone who’s interested in writing a guest post here to shoot me an email. I have high standards as to what goes up here, as should hopefully be apparent, though the former newspaper editor in me is happy to help anyone step up to the challenge.

Posted on

More all-time durable pitchers

After my post yesterday on all-time durable pitchers, I emailed Fredrico Brillhart. Regular readers may remember that after I did a guest post on ballplayers who saw war combat, Brillhart emailed me wanting to know why there weren’t any Negro Leaguers. I figured he might like yesterday’s post, since my top durable pitcher is Satchel Paige, a Negro League immortal, and I was also curious if he knew of other players I had failed to mention.

Fredrico wrote back:

Hello Graham,

Here are some other additions for your list………..

27 year career in the Negro Leagues >Smokey Joe Williams,

John Donaldson [ I will have John’s leading researcher, Peter Gorton contact you ],

Will Jackman [ his leading bio person, Dick Thompson passed on awhile back, but I think you still can get info if you Google him ] Will was a barnstormer that pitched an incredible amount of games & at one time might have been the 2nd highest paid pitcher to Paige. He didn’t pitch as much in the Negro Leagues, since he was making more money by barnstorming.

See my > Waiting For Cooperstown All-Stars & the Analysis of The Pittsburgh Courier Poll pieces I had sent to you for some other insights, as most that I have brought up here have info there.

Charles “Lefty” Williams was a legend around the Pittsburgh semi-pro sandlots, plus he pitched 20 years for the Homestead Grays in the Negro Leagues, where he was not as effective vs League teams. He is credited with 540 total wins in his whole career including those semi-pro outings.

Massaichi ” Golden Arm ” Kaneda is the all-time wins leader in Japan with 400 wins. For 14 of his 20 year career he had over 300+ IP. In 1955 he had 400 IP. He also had 14 > 20+ win seasons there. His 5,526 & 2/3 innings pitched in Japan would be in 4th place in the Majors all-time. Take note, that in Japan the season is shorter so his massive innings pitched are even more impressive.

Ramon Arano pitched 30 years & won 421 games in Mexico, the most all-time there, adding summer & winter leagues.

Juan Pizzaro pitched 18 years in the Majors & 22 years in the Puerto Rican Winter League &  had a combined total of 290 wins + 38 wins in the Mexican League & 66 wins in the Minors for a grand total of 394 wins in his career. What is amazing is that he pitched non stop summer & winters in the majority of his seasons.

Hippo Vaughn had a grand total of 401 wins as a pro combining his ML & Minor League numbers. 5 times in the ML he had 20+ win seasons.

With these additions I still think you are correct in saying that Satchel Paige was the most durable, even with his dead arm period.

Yours, Fredrico

I’ll close by saying that in the last week, I’ve received other great emails like this. In fact, a reader wrote yesterday to tell me he had mentioned my site in a column he wrote. That appears to be for a newspaper, which is a Baseball: Past and Present first.

Posted on

Looks like I was wrong about Roy Halladay

Back in November, when Roy Halladay looked on the outs with the Toronto Blue Jays, I wrote a post here saying teams would be wise to steer clear of him. It appears I was gloriously wrong on this one, worse than the time I predicted the San Francisco 49ers would win the NFC West and they proceeded to go something like 2-14.

Halladay is on pace to win 24 games, finish with an ERA under 2.00 and a WHIP below 1.00, and today, he became the 20th player in Major League Baseball history to throw a perfect game. In fact, Halladay joined Dallas Braden as the second pitcher this month to allow no men to reach base, leading the Philadelphia Phillies to a 1-0 victory over the Florida Marlins.

When I wrote my post in November, I didn’t yet understand WHIP (which measures walks and hits divided by innings pitched) or fully grasp the importance of Halladay going to a National League contender. I simply offered a few reasons for teams to be wary, including that the track record on older pitchers is uneven and that Halladay was going to be expensive, both for contract dollars and the players any prospective team would have to give up to obtain him.

Like I said, I was completely wrong, and if I had a time machine, I’d tell my San Francisco Giants to give up whatever players they needed to bring Halladay aboard (I’d also probably do some other things if I had a time machine, but that’s a post for another time.) As it stands, the Phillies are now in first place, and Halladay looks like the early favorite for the National League Cy Young Award, perhaps even an MVP. Then again, my word on Halladay wasn’t great last time so I’m open to any thoughts that anyone else has.