Baseball: Past and Present

With Steelers mania in my hometown of Pittsburgh at full throttle during this week leading up to the Super Bowl, I decided to add a little balance to my life by finally sitting down to watch the 20-DVD Major League World Series set issued last year by Major League Baseball.

I worked my way up to the 1957 World Series that pitted the New York Yankees against the Milwaukee Braves. Watching the clips from Game 3, I was surprised to see Harry “Suitcase” Simpson at first base for the Yankees.

Even though I’ve never been a Yankee fan, my Bronx-raised father avidly rooted for the Bombers. And in 1957, my family lived in Puerto Rico where the Armed Forces Radio game of the week always featured, or so it seemed, the Yankees. So I was somewhat surprised that I had no clear recollection of Simpson’s brief Yankee days which totaled 99 games in parts of 1957 and 1958.

Still, as I watched Simpson stroke a first inning RBI single, I was happy to be reminded of him. “Suitcase,” I thought, is a great nickname. One of my minor peeves about modern baseball is the virtual disappearance of creative nicknames. “A-Rod,” “K-Rod,” “I-Rod,” and “Gorzo” aren’t nicknames in the true sense of the word.

I grew up with the Pittsburgh Pirates and Bob Prince who had a way with nicknames: Vernon “Deacon” Law, Don “The Tiger” Hoak, Bill “The Quail” Virdon, Gene “The Stick” Michael, and Dave “The Cobra” Parker all have solid baseball rings to them.

Prince and his broadcasting partner Jim Woods also had great monikers. They were, respectively, “The Gunner” and “The Possum”

Going back further in baseball history, nicknames were even more colorful: “Noodles” Hahn, “Hippo” Vaughn, “Piano Legs” Hickman and “Three-Finger” Brown for example.

Digging deeper, the story I found behind Simpson’s nickname floored me. If I asked 100 of my contemporaries to explain how Simpson became known as “Suitcase,” I’m confident that they would all answer that it was a reference to his numerous trades that caused him to constantly be packing his suitcase. After all, Simpson was traded eight times during the four years from 1955 to 1959.

But according to the Cleveland Indians official 1952 sketch book, Simpson got his nickname from sportswriters who likened him to the Toonerville Trolley character named Suitcase Simpson. The date of this revelation, 1952, was years before Simpson’s multiple trades. And the sketch book added the mostly useless information that Simpson’s childhood nickname was “Goody” which came from his willingness to help out his neighbors in his childhood hometown of Dalton, Georgia.

A few other forgotten facts about Simpson surfaced during my research. “Suitcase” was a better than average player during his short eight year career.  For the Kansas City Athletics during his All Star 1956 season, Simpson hit 293 with 21 home runs and 105 RBIs. That year, Simpson led the league in triples with eleven. He won the triples title again in 1957 with 9. In 1955 with the Athletics and the Cleveland Indians, Simpson hit .300

As the old saying goes, you learn something new every day– but rarely about “Suitcase” Simpson.

Everyone around the baseball blogosphere has been writing thank you posts for Rob Neyer, who announced this week he was leaving ESPN.com and joining SB Nation, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t add something as well. But before I thank Neyer, I should thank Joe Posnanski. Or ESPN.com. Or Twitter.

In September, Posnanski granted me an interview that went for one of the greatest hours of my writing life. I’d have been okay if the Sports Illustrated writer, blogger, and busy family man had offered five halfhearted minutes. Posnanski was one of the best subjects I’ve ever encountered. And I say this as someone who’s interviewed Rollie Fingers (who was dull), Jose Canseco (who subtly asked me if I’d read Vindicated— I hadn’t), and Ozzie Smith (who was the commencement speaker at my college my sophomore year and was wonderful.) If I ever make it as a baseball writer, I hope I’m half as humble as Posnanski.

Within hours of me posting the interview, it was up on Baseball Think Factory, and they referred a heavy amount of traffic by their standards (500 unique visitors– I’m happy to get 100-200 from them.) A few days later, a visitor commented that he’d seen my article up on Neyer’s ESPN blog, the Sweet Spot. That was the day my blog got almost 2,000 unique visitors, which was the record here until Neyer linked again in December and gave me so much traffic the server crashed. It remains my high water mark as a blogger, and friends give me high fives when I tell them about the server crash. I hear it’s called being aneyerated.

One other cool thing happened after Neyer linked to me: I got an email saying he was following me on Twitter. I thought it was a joke at first, and then after checking his page, seeing it was a Verified Account and that he had 300 people he was following and more than 15,000 followers, it just seemed surreal. Every other big name sportswriter has ignored me on Twitter. Even Posnanski. I keep worrying that Neyer will get sick of my random Sacramento Kings Tweets (a man has to rep his hometown) and attempts at humor, or that I’ll sneeze and he’ll unfollow me, but it hasn’t happened yet. He’s even linked to me a couple more times because of Twitter.

I wish Neyer well in his new endeavor and applaud him for trying something new. After reading his inaugural SB Nation post today, I Tweeted that Neyer had made the boldest move in sports journalism so far this year. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t hope to eventually write for ESPN or SI or most any other major publication that would have me. But maybe Neyer has the right idea, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes out better for it, with the media landscape continuing to change. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s set a great example for an up-and-comer like me. I just hope he does a link post in his new space.

At the beginning of the 20th century, baseball was practiced in the style favored by New York Giants’ manager John McGraw: Play for the single run with a base hit, followed by the hit and run, a sacrifice or a stolen base.

But by 1921, Babe Ruth was in his second season with the New York Yankees, redefining what one ballplayer could do. His 59 home runs was more than eight entire teams in the majors that year, and not only did the long ball he hit so effectively create more runs, more quickly, it also proved to be a fan favorite.

The stage was set for an epic change in baseball strategy and its ruling elite, and this shift has been recreated in Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg’s book, 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York. I give the book five stars out of five. It’s a well-researched, well-documented account of what may be the single most pivotal season in baseball history.

Spatz and Steinberg provide interesting insights into the minds of the hard-driving McGraw and his Yankee counterpart Miller Huggins. Before the season began, McGraw said of his rivals, “Unless we have bad luck, I do not fear any club in the National League.”

Although the Giants got the best of the Yankees in the 1921 first all-New York World Series, capturing the title by 5 games to 3 in the best of nine set, Huggins nevertheless managed the Bombers to the teams’ first six American League pennants and three World Series championships.

Huggins’ slugging Yankees ended the dead ball era forever and catapulted the team into number one status in the New York baseball world ahead of the Giants. Brooklyn, then known as the Robins, was nowhere as far as fans outside of Flatbush were concerned.

Before Huggins took over the Yankees in 1918, he was the player/manager for the St. Louis Cardinals. And prior to taking the helm for the Cards, the 5’4”, 140 pound  Huggins was one of the most skilled second basemen of his era. At various times during his career with the Cardinals and his native Cincinnati, Huggins handled 15 or more chances or figured in three double plays.

Hall of Fame Yankee pitcher Waite Hoyt remembered his former manager: “Huggins was almost like a school master in the dugout. There was no goofing off. You watched the game and you kept track not only of the score and the number of outs, but of the count on the batter.  At any moment Hug might ask you what the situation was.”

By 1923, when Yankee Stadium opened (see video here), the Bombers started on a seven-decade stretch of mostly dominant baseball. Before 1923, the Yankees and the Giants shared the Polo Grounds.

1921 is full of New York’s rich history as well as the colorful sports journalism of the time from reporters like Damon Runyon and Walter Trumbull. As an example of the descriptive prose found in the sports section in those early days, consider this analysis from Trumbull about Game 5: “The Giants ran bases with all the skill of a fat lady with the asthma racing for a street car.”

The book also has 53 illustrations, many never seen before, that colorfully supplement the author’s text and offer one more reason 1921 is a valuable addition to any baseball library.

The only thing missing from this week’s link out is Mr. T or another reference to Rocky III.

• Bill Miller has posted the third installment of the series we’re doing for his blog on good players on awful teams. This week, Bill writes about Rusty Staub, the best thing going on the expansion Montreal Expos in 1969 (who were really, really terrible, even by Expo standards.) The locals referred to Staub as Le Grand Orange.
• Anyone who enjoys this site or other history-related baseball blogs may like a series about “infamous or controversial historical figures who also had a notable association with baseball.” So far, there have been posts on John Dillinger, Billy Sunday, and a 19th century catcher named Martin Bergen who killed his family and himself. I saw the Bergen story on Baseball Think Factory this week and subsequently read the other two pieces. They’re all outstanding: well-researched, vivid, and well-told.
• The journalism ethics student in me has loved a recent thread in the baseball blogosphere. For some reason, a lot of people hate Sports Illustrated writer Jeff Pearlman. With a passion. I read his book on the ’86 Mets, The Bad Guys Won and don’t know if I see what the hatred is about. Pearlman wrote a recent well-received CNN.com piece about tracking some of his haters down. Apparently, though, there’s more to this story than he told.
• Devon Young, who blogs about the 1982 Topps baseball set, has a fresh batch of articles up including one about a card he refuses to take out of the protective casing it came in off eBay: A 1982 Pascual Perez error card. Kind of sums up Perez’s whole career.
• Kevin Graham has changed the name of his site (though not his URL) from DMB World Series Replay to Baseball Revisited and is asking everyone who has him in their blogroll to note the change. I’ll do that, though a part of me is tempted to write, “The Blogger Formerly Known As…”

What he did: I recently got an email from Brendan Bingham suggesting I write something on Denny McLain. Brendan wrote:

Although Denny McLain’s 31 wins is part of the standard description of what made 1968 the “year of the pitcher,” the accomplishment perhaps had little to do with 1968. McLain had a great year, but it would have been great in any era. I have not put McLain’s 1968 numbers through stat converter, but I strongly suspect that if you transport him to another team that won 103 games and outscored its opponents by 180 runs, and if you allow him to start 40 games and pitch more than 300 innings, there would be a good chance that he would win 30, or close to it.

It’s a bold prediction, and I’m happy to test it out. In search of the right team for McLain, I went back more than 100 years, deep into the Deadball Era.

Era he might have thrived in: We’ll trade McLain’s 103-59 Detroit Tigers for an even stronger club. The 1904 New York Giants went 106-47, scored 270 more runs than their opponents, and boasted not one, but two 30-game winners, Joe McGinnity and Christy Matthewson. The two combined for 90 starts and nearly 800 innings pitched, and if McLain subbed for Matthewson, he’d get his 30 wins.

Why: There hasn’t been a 30-game winner since 1968, partly because the perfect storm of circumstances Brendan outlined hasn’t occurred much since then. Since 1980, just two pitchers have made at least 40 starts, Charlie Hough in 1987 and Jim Clancy in 1982, and both played on losing teams. And no pitcher has broken 300 innings in a season since 1980 when Steve Carlton did it on 38 starts for the 91-71 Phillies.

If McLain pitched today, he’d be lucky to win 25 games. Even on the best current clubs, McLain would receive a maximum of 35 starts a season, pitch maybe six or seven innings per outing, and have at least a few wins ruined by relievers. Like Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak or Barry Bonds’ 73-homer season, 30 wins in one year seems improbable today. It’s worth noting, too, that the live ball era has witnessed just three other 30-game winners: Jim Bagby Sr. in 1920, Lefty Grove in 1931, and Dizzy Dean in 1934. There’s a reason for that.

To win 30 games in another era, McLain would need an ironclad team from baseball’s distant past where he and another pitcher would, for all intents and purposes, be the starting rotation. There may be a few teams like this from the Deadball Era, but I’m partial to the 1904 Giants. The stat converter on Baseball-Reference.com has McLain’s ’68 season translating to 19-14 with a 2.35 ERA for New York, though I think that’s inaccurate. I’m guessing the converter is giving McLain what’s left over after McGinnity and Matthewson, as the numbers roughly parallel New York’s real third starter that year, Dummy Taylor.

Removing McGinnity or Matthewson would be key here, and there’s a temptation to keep Matthewson and make this about him pitching with McLain. But I think this team needs McGinnity, the 33-year-old ace whose 35 wins, 1.61 ERA, and 170 ERA+ were all league bests in 1904. Matthewson went 33-12 with a 2.03 ERA and ERA+ of 133, and McLain posted a better ERA+ in 1968, more shutouts, a better winning percentage, and a comparable number of innings. I wouldn’t sub out Matthewson in 1905 when he went 31-9 with a 1.28 ERA and 230 ERA+ and was the Giants in the World Series, but in 1904, McLain would have been the better young arm.

A legendary manager like John McGraw might have helped McLain, too. Matthewson turned 24 in 1904, the same age as McLain in 1968 and pitched another decade on his way to Cooperstown. McLain had one more good season after 1968 and then began an epic decline in baseball and life. He threw his last pitch at 28 in 1972, had drug problems, and was later imprisoned. There would still be risks for McLain in the Deadball Era. He had ties to gamblers while in the majors and perhaps could have been corrupted in baseball’s early days, when players regularly rigged games. And McGraw couldn’t save everyone, like his pitcher Bugs Raymond who drank himself out of the big leagues at 29 and died the following year.

Whatever the case may be, though, at least in 1904, McLain would surely have been something special.

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

Others in this series: Albert Pujols, Bad News Rockies, Barry Bonds, Bob Caruthers, Bob Feller, Bob Watson, Dom DiMaggio, Frank Howard, Fritz Maisel, George Case, Harmon Killebrew, Harry Walker, Home Run Baker, Ichiro Suzuki, Jack Clark, Jackie Robinson, Jimmy Wynn, Joe DiMaggio, Johnny Frederick, Josh Hamilton, Ken Griffey Jr., Lefty O’Doul, Nate Colbert, Paul Derringer, Pete Rose, Rickey Henderson, Roberto Clemente, Sam Thompson, Sandy Koufax, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Stan Musial, The Meusel Brothers, Ty Cobb, Willie Mays

Although I never lived in Cincinnati, St. Louis, Boston or Milwaukee, one of my early baseball favorites was Big George Crowe, a first baseman for the Reds, Cardinals, and Braves.

My first connection to Crowe, who died on January 18 at 89, came when I was a ten-year-old growing up in Los Angeles avidly collecting baseball cards. Crowe’s 1952 and 1953 Topps cards were the most identifiable and treasured in my collection.

When my family moved to Puerto Rico, I went to dozens of Santurce Cangrejeros winter Caribbean League games. Crowe was a key member of the historic 1954-1955 Crabbers squad that many in baseball claim was the best winter squad ever.

Don Zimmer, a stand out shortstop for the Crabbers, considered Santuce as good as or better than any franchise in the major leagues.

Zimmer attested:

Without a doubt, it was probably the best winter club ever assembled. I mean we had guys like Buzz Clarkson, myself, Ronnie Samford, George Crowe, Valmy Thomas and Harry Chiti catching. We had Mays, Thurman and Clemente in the outfield. I mean you’re talking about a big league ball club. Not only that but Herman Franks was an outstanding manager. We could have beaten National League clubs.

The local media referred to the heart of the line-up, Mays, Clemente, Thurman, Clarkson and Crowe, as “Murders Row,” likening them to the famous 1927 New York Yankees.

In addition to the sluggers, on the mound were Ruben Gomez and Sam Jones. Gomez, incredibly, won 179 games over 29 winter league campaigns, all but one of them hurling for the Crabbers.

During his three seasons in Puerto Rico, Crowe hit .337 with 32 home runs and 179 runs batted in.

The Caribbean League allowed only a limited number of “imports,” the word used to describe non-Caribbean-born Americans. But since the Puerto Rican newspapers prominently featured their “off season” summer successes, I could easily follow Crowe’s career.

In 1957 Crowe, at age 36 with the Cincinnati Reds, had his best season. When an injury to Ted Kluszewski gave Crowe a shot at the full time first baseman’s job, he appeared in 133 games, belted 31 home runs and drove in 92 runs placing him sixth and eighth in the league respectively.

Ironically, Crowe was the only Reds starter not selected that year to the All-Star game during infamous ballot stuffing scandal forced the selections of Roy McMillan, Ed Bailey, Gus Bell, Don Hoak, Johnny Temple, Wally Post, and Frank Robinson. Crowe was beaten out by Stan Musial. Nevertheless, Crowe received a degree of revenge the following season when voters selected him as a reserve to the 1958 All-Star team based on his .300 plus batting average for the first half of the season.

Crowe was an outstanding Negro National League star as well as a professional basketball player for the New York Rens and the Los Angeles Red Devils where he teamed with Jackie Robinson. In 1939, Crowe was Indiana’s first Mr. Basketball.

Crowe lived in the Adirondacks until 2006 when he moved to California to join his family. After suffering a stroke in late 2008, Crowe resided in an assisted living facility near Sacramento until his death.

Other recent baseball passings: Art Mahan, Gil McDougald