things I learned about in baseball this week/how i learned to stop worrying and love baseball

So.

This year I did something I didn't expect; I got into baseball.

It started in the summer, suitably. I couldn't sleep. I have several ways to deal with this but I usually start off by reading something boring. I was on Deadspin, they had one of those "how can Shohei Ohtani flourish?!" type articles on it. I read, I stayed awake, I read more. If I'd read about NFL, maybe I'd have fallen asleep, but no.

This went on for a few weeks and it only got worse, not better. I started talking to Pirates fan/general legend mookieproof about this, who started sending me interesting deep cuts. I mentioned it in passing to Red Sox dad Tracer Hand, who responded with enthusiasm and encouragement. I asked lifelong Cubs fan felicity about it, who was amused but who also encouraged this interest & would talk about her beloved Cubs and favourite players over the years. These three are my baseball gurus. I listened, I learned, I looked up their faves, I was and am grateful for their attention and patience with my nonsense.

Now, I didn't exactly know literally nothing. From the Yakuza games, I knew the different pitches, how/why you foul off a pitch, stealing signs (supposedly more serious an offence in Japan!), from general, idk, life? a lot of the terminology, a good chunk of the teams. I also knew that, given the inclinations of my gurus, I wouldn't be supporting the Yankees. (I do not actually have a team and tbh I don't know if I will*?) But basically I was starting out with almost nothing.

And I had a weird disconnect. I knew I liked reading about baseball - something that seems less weird in a game where so many people are into sabermetrics. But I wasn't sure about watching it. For one thhing - the games are long. (I generally watch/follow football/rugby/GAA - you could easily watch 2 or 3 games of any of those in a baseball game.) For another, I live in the UK and the games are late (and, you know, on another continent). And finally, what if I'd spent all this time reading about Sandy Koufax and the Black Sox Scandal and sticky stuff and juiced balls and all that and I didn't actually like it?

But I'd watched plenty of clips on Youtube and so I found myself, much to my husband's disgust, months after this phase started, watching Mariners-Angels. Carlos Santana homered. Ohtani struck out. But you know what? I fucking loved it.

One of my late night readings led me to Andrew Baggarly's book about the 2010 SF Giants WS win and I was captivated by his prose and the romance of the story, so I ordered that. I also have his other book about the Giants which I finished reading & reviewing here: The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

The story of the team took me in and it's stories that kept me awake reading about baseball. That and redasses. I respect that.

I watched what I could of the current season (maybe 10 games?) & then I realised that I wanted to watch the games I was reading about from those Giants teams. So I started watching them on Youtube. This was when I was watching 2012 WS Game 1 (Zito clowning on & eventually scoring off Justin Verlander is hilarious af, sorry.)
https://i.postimg.cc/7Z5Q9VLw/53-BFBC89-9-E37-4955-A010-1-DF3-EB023-DA0.jpg

And so I kept doing it. (FYI I have watched patches of the Giants 2010 & 2012 postseasons and I am excited to eventually get to the Madbum series, though my next one is the ALCS game 3 2003 cos I want to see two legendary pitchers clear the benches - hbp just doesn't provide me all the violence I need in a sport you know.) So if you are still reading this extremely indulgent thread 1) lol wau 2) thanks, though 3) please feel free to recommend you any classic games you think I might like. I will watch any team. I like pitchers and defence as much as dingers - some of my favourite teams in football have been Italian teams strong on defence, so I guess I carry that over from other sports. Hoping to watch as much of current postseason live as I can, but, timezones & also that's over soon.

Anyway, tedious intro over. What did I learn about in baseball this week? (This is so far in the realm of useless but entertaining trivia as I have finished one book & I still have 3 more to read, 2 of which are not about the SF Giants. I feel as though I could read and watch for ten years and still feel like a dilettante but I won't. Also, I have a job and husband and other responsibilities.)

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX4L2LHGs98

2. That poor Bill Buckner features in a surprising number of song lyrics, mainly about going between the legs.

3. That Mark Mulder makes John Rocker seem liberal now. (RIP Big Three).

4. That Jimmy Carter likes the Braves

*I basically need some sort of connection to a team. My football team are the one my family supports; I support GAA & rugby teams from my part of Ireland. So, no team, but that's ok for me.

So glad you started this thread

“Classic games” is an interesting one - so much of it is situational - like within the context of a season or a series. I’d love to know what other people think are classic games worth watching in and of themselves

I'd start with Carlton Fisk and Game 6, '75 Series--pretty sure the whole game's on YouTube. Fisk just scratches the surface of that game. It's also probably the last moment baseball was incontrovertibly "the national pastime." (Game 7 of the '75 Series was watched by 51 million people, second most ever--for some reason, more were watching Game 6 of the '80 Series.)

WS Gm 6, 1986, Mets/Red Sox.

If you are going to watch Gm 3, 2003 ALCS, you are sort of starting in the middle of the story. You might want to set it all up by watching some selected BOS-NYY games from the 2003-2004 regular season (7/01/2004 is a good one), the entire 2003 ALCS, Game 3 and Game 7 are classic moments, then top it all off with the 2004 ALCS. This is pure drama.

That’s a good lineup

The Joba Chamberlin midges game (Gm 2 2007 ALDS) is a tight game with some late laughs.

Might appeal to your sense of humor maybe.

Oh, sorry for so many Yankees recommendations, but the entire 1995 ALDS is amazing from start to finish.

That would be NYY-SEA.

What playoff baseball does better than any other sport is slow motion drama - the gradual tightening of the vice as the bases are loaded in a tight game and the pitcher's natural advantage gives way to pressure. Overtime playoff hockey has drama like no other, but the continuous action of the game and how suddenly it is over, doesn't let you appreciate the build the way baseball does. This is what I love about baseball.

Hey I'll watch any team! I just have the Yanquis permanently crossed out in my heart. Thank you for the recommendations! Fwiw the Game 3 rec was following on from the Phanatic-Dodgers video, in the genre of "fat old men getting mad".But I've been watching the 2010 postseason out of order anyway.

Lol @ old fat men getting mad - you've come to the right sport.

A thing I learned (though not this week) is how fast things can go downhill in this game. Managers are so fast to yank a pitcher off when he fucks up, but it's always unfortunate for the guy who inherits the mess afterwards. Postseason has delivered so much of this. The Mariners-Astros game, we had to stop after 12 innings, but I was so impressed by the way the pitchers held it together under what must have been immense pressure. Stuff like that, stuff like Tim Lincecum having a shaky first inning against the Braves in his first postseason game before going on to strikeout 14 of them. That's all stuff I love.

G7, 2001 WS was incredible, but, as pointed out above, detached from the rest of the series--and detached from the years preceding it, when it seemed like the Yankees owned the WS--it might not seem so incredible.

Probably true, but I don't really have a choice in the matter since I wasn't there. I will be watching these games, just fyi!

The background to 2003/2004 Sox/Yanks in my mind is that it’s the modern Yankees not quite in their full pomp but close to it, a young Jeter, Torre at the helm, just a few years removed from “greatest team ever” status (they got that engraved on their 1998 World Series rings). so-called because they set the MLB record for most wins in a season (though not the most regular-season wins iirc). They’ve still got Mariano (greatest closer ever), Bernie, Posada, Soriano, Pettite, Weaver, David Wells for god’s sake, Clemens, Contreras was great that year, they’d just signed Matsui. They were a great team. A-Rod was still playing short in Arlington, Texas.

Boston largely already had the lineup that would win it all a year later. Crazy to realise that Nomar was still playing for them in 2003! Feels like he doesn’t belong in this era of the team but there he was. It was Big Papi’s first year in Boston. Dustin Pedroia was NOT on this team (?!?) Schilling wasn’t either. The starting pitching was hittable apart from Pedro. And no real certified closer. Foulke was busy locking up the American League lead in saves in Oakland.

For a self-contained game, maybe G6, 2011--the David Freese game. Incredible...I think the Rangers were one strike away from winning the series three times.

Last post for a bit, else I'll never shut up...If you're interested in individuals, not just games, I'd suggest Reggie's 3-HR game in the '77 Series, Brooks Robinson in the '70 Series, and Roberto Clemente in the '71 Series. Not sure which specific games to look for with Robinson and Clemente.

5. Buster Posey grew up playing baseball in a purpose-built batting cage on his parents' 50 acre farm.
6. "Soft hands" - this is such a weird term omg?

Can I just point out, I made this thread as a way of giving some relief to the people I was no doubt boring to death about it, so please don't worry. And yes I am interested in individuals too!

G6, 2011--the David Freese game

Maybe this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ypIakgaR2c

The whole game's on YouTube too--almost four hours.

post season baseball is the absolute best and I'm sad I can't really afford bt sport anymore to record the games and watch them during UK friendly hours. at least I got to see the Atlanta baseball team win the WS for the first time since my beloved maddux/glavine/smoltz era.

You could fall down the rabbit hole for weeks with these recommendations, but if I had to pick one game from the last decade it has to be Game 7 of the 2016 WS, Cleveland vs Chicago Cubs. The history and backstory won't ever be repeated (176 combined years between the two teams since their last championship) and the game has at least five or six "WTF did I just see????" moments.

good one

oscar bravo i guess you might cite the 1991 World Series? it comes up a lot in “the best ever played” conversations. the beginning of the Smoltz/Maddux era in Atlanta.

would recommend game five of the 2015 ALDS between toronto and texas

it was toronto’s first playoff appearance in 22 years. the blue jays lost the first two games at home, then won both games in texas to force a decisive fifth game. the seventh inning alone — top and bottom — is among the craziest single frames in history

would also recommend game one of the 1988 world series between the dodgers and a’s. it has a legendary conclusion and the announcer was vin scully, who was peerless

I remember that 2015 game (how did I not think of that first?)...Another insane one with the Jays: G4, 1993. I don't know that it's famous for any one hit or play, but I think it was the longest Series game ever at the time (4:14), and maybe the highest scoring (15-14). Mitch Williams took the loss, a bit of foreshadowing.

I am excited for you to be in a position to watch an entire season next year! Baseball is best when you can let it ambiently drift by for a summer and take in the rhythms by osmosis (“he’s having a good year…” you’ll nod to yourself when your 2B is slashing 240/300/275. “Whaddabum…” you’ll say about your fringey reliever who’s pitched 50 innings of low-leverage ball to the tune of a 2.00 era)

Off the dome shit:

Kerry Wood’s 20K game

A’s at dodgers WS 88 game 1

Any supercut of Pedro Martinez strikeouts

Any supercut of Bonds’ HR in 2001, to see what peak performance looks like

I have also recommended the book “Class A” by Lucas Mann as a contemporary look at the low minors.

The Rhys Hoskins bat spike this weekend was rad

xp on Kerry Wood & Pedro Martinez but I appreciate specific recommendations, tysm!

Also commit this to memory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn28Dz4RUxc

gyac, I assume you've seen this classic moment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbEHAsZxRYo

Fun fact you might enjoy:

Left-handed relief pitcher Billy Wagner (known for his absurd strikeout rate) is actually a natural right hander but after breaking his right arm twice as a kid he learned to throw with his left arm. And now he’s probably going to wind up in the hall of fame for being such a dominant pitcher.

Game 7 of the 2016 series is also my pick. Classic Cleveland clutch comeback to tie it coupled with a classic Aroldis Chapman meltdown, finished off with a determined Cubs team scraping out two runs (and Cleveland making it tense at the end too.)

Ten cent beer night is an event that encapsulates baseball in Cleveland in the 70's

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daWdOwqQhCs

I will respond to all these posts in time but I’m watching this alds game atm. However I am nearly finished A Band of Misfits, about the 2010 Giants, and I’ve seriously watched this clip about ten times & also Clark’s homer against Nolan Ryan in his first big league at bat (!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUkTfbOEKTs

Lmao both at the guy going “you’re overmodulating” and Clark going “HUH??? NO WAY!” And also the guy stepping in from the side to clearly try to calm him down, and Clark shakes his hand instead.

Supposedly he used The Thrill is Gone as his answering machine message as well. Legendary.

smoothest swing of all time

there's also a whole thread about BASEBALL MOVIES that i haven't really paid attention to

would recommend:

BULL DURHAM - it's long since passed into cliche (and tim robbins very obviously cannot pitch) but it presents the cliches in a nice manner, and also i used to live in durham and know where that house is

SUGAR - pretty honest look at what it's like to be a (dominican/puerto rican/venezuelan) kid left to fend for himself in the minor leagues. needless to say, there are a lot of non-success stories

NO NO: A DOCKUMENTARY - the story of 1970s pitcher dock ellis, who once threw a no-hitter (for the pirates, no less) while tripping on LSD. among other crazy shit like plunking four straight cincinnati reds to start a game. he was a troubled and interesting man

This, along with Aaron's 715th, is my favorite baseball memory ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4nwMDZYXTI

I remember that 2015 game (how did I not think of that first?)

These days Toronto vs Texas G5 is the first thing I think of when it comes to games/moments that I want to rewatch. But I didn't want to be accused of homerism by recommending it first ...

Game 7 of the 2016 series is also my pick. Classic Cleveland clutch comeback to tie it coupled with a classic Aroldis Chapman meltdown, finished off with a determined Cubs team scraping out two runs (and Cleveland making it tense at the end too.)

And that's only the last three innings!

This week has been rough and I’ve barely watched any baseball.

More things I learned specifically about “Surfin” Barry Zito from reading excerpts from
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61frVWPOc1L.jpg

- Barry Zito did meth in his teens
- the first chapter opens with a quote from someone saying “if San Fran wins the World Series, does Barry Zito get a ring?” (Ouch - though I am a fan of brutally honest sports autobios).
- Barry Zito’s grandfather started a newspaper with Mussolini (!)

I need to read this book, there’s nothing more boring than reading stories of endless success from people who go to bed early and never do anything bad.

watch game 5 2012 NLCS giants vs cardinals if you want some more zito lore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8S-PI7HZ8o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Meay49NgGXI
giants down 1-3 in the series and he gets the start despite a very poor showing in the series before. giants win the next three then zito wins game 1 of the world series vs verlander which you mentioned.

I was thinking about which game I would recommend watching and actually realised the games I got the biggest kick out of weren't necessarily epic important ones. Like any Greg Maddux 85 pitch complete game shutout with like 2 strikeouts and upward of a dozen groundouts + handful of weak pop flys is amazing viewing imo. Especially with how different baseball is now.

Or Tom Glavine locating his fast ball consistently just outside the outside edge the strikezone with such monotone regularity that the umpire starts calling it a strike.

(xpost) You've almost perfectly described Maddux's G2 win against the Yankees in the '96 Series:

86 pitches, 6 H, 2 K, 0 BB, 0 runs. He didn't pitch a shutout, though--Bobby Cox brought in Wohlers for the 9th. He didn't let Maddux finish his Maddux.

yeah those 90s braves pitchers were clinical, hated them of course.

For what it's worth, Maddux was more of a strikeout pitcher than he's generally remembered as (with some help from the umps): 6.1/per 9 for his career, 6.9/per 9 during his '92-'98 peak. My favourite pitcher then--travelled to Montreal to see him somewhere in the middle there.

I did get the chance to see Smoltz's 3,000th career strikeout in person, that was epic. Still much love for him in the ATL.

I was thinking about which game I would recommend watching and actually realised the games I got the biggest kick out of weren't necessarily epic important ones. Like any Greg Maddux 85 pitch complete game shutout with like 2 strikeouts and upward of a dozen groundouts + handful of weak pop flys is amazing viewing imo. Especially with how different baseball is now.

ALCS game 3 2003

One that I forgot to recommend, on YouTube in its entirety: Mark Fidrych vs. the Yankees, June 28, 1976, 48,000 people in Yankee Stadium (on a Monday), ABC's Monday Night game, Fidrych 7-1 with a 2.18 ERA going in, the biggest story in baseball.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwGj4VfCreg

For style, Luis Tiant.

https://phildellio.tripod.com/tiant.jpg

Yes! I have been meaning to check out Fidrych as well!

xps
I'm glad!! He was my favourite player back when I first started watching baseball. used to love andruw jones as well. and in the non atlanta baseball players division it was tony gwynn and his incredibly flat no uppercut swing. then later i was all about ichiro.

(xp) I think you'll fall in love. I was so lucky to have watched that game (14 years old). It's just hard to convey today how one baseball player could so thoroughly capture the public's attention and imagination. It happened again a few years later with Fernando, although I don't know that there's one single game of his where it all coalesced so perfectly.

xp Parker looking cool af.

(Oops--the Fidrych game was in Tiger Stadium, which makes the 48,000 people even more remarkable. The mid-'70s Tigers were not good.)

I love they have the commercials too in that broadcast!

I’ll be honest, a thing I found - and find, tbh - really difficult about watching baseball both live and classic is the number of ad breaks! How does that not drive people mad?

“At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.”

— Albert Camus

Fidrych throwing 250 innings and striking out 97(!) that season is always really amazing to me. 9.6 bWAR!

xp lmao

xp baseball as a tv spectator sport simply isn't designed to hold your attention 100% of the time, you gotta pair it with something else that can be done in fits and starts such as browsing the internet or chopping vegetables or playing a turn-based video game

Parachuting in to say that I am a 51-year-old American male human with exactly one sports allegiance. And that allegiance is to the 1982 St. Louis Cardinals. Not the Cardinals in general, not St. Louis teams in general. Pretty much just that one spectacular season.

I was exactly the right age to be excited by a baseball team. Especially, a locally beloved and long-storied team that suddenly caught on fire in a particular way. Was it slugfesty? No it was not. Was it Sabermetric? No it was not. Was it especially steroidal? No it was not. It was a style of play based on baserunning, stealing, speed, fielding, contact. It was called "Whiteyball" after the (in retrospect) rather unfortunately nicknamed manager Whitey Herzog.

Ozzie Smith. Lonnie Smith. Willie McGee. Keith Hernandez. Bruce Sutter. Joaquin Andujar. It's been 40 years and no sporting persons have dislodged those names from my memory. Nor will they.

Since then, I have watched a few other sporting contests, with varying amounts of interest. But none has matched the passionate intensity of being eleven years old in a red hat in terrible seats in that cranky old Busch stadium with a scorecard on my lap and a fire in my heart. Personally I am fine leaving it there: a whole life of fandom in a few humid evenings in 1982, eating ice cream from a novelty batting helmet.

xp baseball as a tv spectator sport simply isn't designed to hold your attention 100% of the time, you gotta pair it with something else that can be done in fits and starts such as browsing the internet or chopping vegetables or playing a turn-based video game

That's beautiful, YMP.

^

eating ice cream from a novelty batting helmet

i have one from every stadium i've been to in the last 8 years (4 total) and my kids love these. they were bath toys until my youngest recently decided to elevate the jays and yankees ones to the "display"shelf in her room that was normally reserved for her fancy in-the-box dolls.

ymp are you . . . me?

that would be a plot twist!

1982 cards ftw of course. the '85 version of the team is fun too. they didn't win the WS but they were even better and even faster and more exciting, a team tailor made to play on artificial turf. willie mcgee having his best season, the wizard ozzie smith doing his usual defensive stuff but also putting together his first above-average offensive season after being seen as a liability earlier in his career, jack clark looking like a bag of big league chew and the only power threat on a speedy team. mcgee stole 56, tommy herr and ozzie both stole 31, andy van slyke had an incredible name and stole 34, and vince coleman stole 110 bases (!) and hit one home run.

this is a fun thread, gyac, thank you for starting it

Very nice, YMP.

Truly amazing: the '82 Series matched up the Cardinals (67 HR, fewest in the majors) against the Brewers (216 HR, most in the majors). Surely that's the only time that ever happened. George Hendricks led the Cardinals with 19 HR, Darrell Porter had 12, and no one else had more than 8.

Oh yeah put these names directly in my veins please: Lou Brock, Gene Tenace, Tommy Herr, Andy Van Slyke, Vince Coleman.

I gave exactly zero fucks about baseball (or any sport) before that. And I pretty much haven't since!

When my St. Louisan nephews cared about the Cardinals, it was the Mark McGwire to Albert Pujols era and I just couldn't get into it. Huge guys hitting long balls is not a Cardinal virtue. Base-stealing and relief pitching are Cardinal virtues. (That is, if you were an eleven-year-old St. Louisan in 1982. Plenty of other ways to be, but I cannot change my nature.)

Here in DC there was a brief flash of potential excitement around the Ryan Zimmerman, Jayson Werth, and Bryce Harper Nationals teams, but that has dissipated and I am back to not giving a shit.

We’re you a fan of the 2015/16 era Royals?

Or the 2022 Guardians?

I have no opinion on those, so I will punt to my apparent doppelganger. Take it away, mookieproof!

i'm in the willie mcgee k-hole again, but this sabr.org profile on him has so many lovable moments: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/willie-mcgee/

Willie loved sports as a child and played baseball, basketball, and football, depending on what was in season. However, it was baseball for which Willie developed a true passion. Around the age of 10, he found out that one could make a living playing baseball, and for a while he slept with his glove and bat while wearing his ball cap and cleats. The most sensitive of the McGee children, he was shy and lacked self-confidence. His little league coach described his posture on the baseball field as that of a child who “spilled the milk.” He attended Henry Ells High School where his reserved nature initially kept him from trying out for the baseball team. He eventually joined the team in the 10th grade at the urging of coach Bill Erkkila. “I was his P.E. teacher when he was a sophomore, and he was tiny, scrawny, and very quiet. His outstanding athletic attribute was speed,” Erkkila later remembered.

The rookie was needled and teased by teammates, including Hendrick. This initially bothered him until he understood they did so because they liked him. Hendrick, along with coach Dave Ricketts and teammates Bruce Sutter, Bob Forsch, and Ozzie Smith, served as mentors. Smith took McGee under his wing more literally, allowing him to live in his home. It was months before the always respectful McGee called Mrs. Smith by her first name.

'85 Cards had five players finish in the top 11 of MVP voting (McGee, Herr, Tudor, Clark, Coleman) with Ozzie Smith down at #18. Andy Van Slyke was good that year too.

I didn't know STL had the revitalizing juice back then, an aging Cesar Cedeno (a mere 34 but he'd been around since 1970) came over during the season and hit .434/.463/.750 w/6 HR, 19 RBI, 5 SB in 28 games.

Andujar won 21 games (didn't have a *great* season but a pretty good one which was enough to get those wins.) Tudor didn't luck into his 21 wins though, i always forget he threw 10(!) shutouts that season.

2003 ALCS game 3 brawl DELIVERS. The commentary on this is killing me.

DON ZIMMER, A 72 YEAR OLD MAN WENT INTO PEDRO MARTINEZ’S FACE AND PEDRO MARTINEZ THREW HIM DOWN

I see Martinez mentions this as his only career regret but I’m sorry, it’s seriously funny. You’re an old guy involved in baseball and you go charging into a brawl, what did you think was going to happen?!

actually both knees have been replaced

Zimmer gets bundled over like a pile of rags

Commentator 1: THAT IS TERRIBLE
Commentator 2: I’d like to see that again
Me: ME TOO

Oh yeah that’s the good stuff…the way he rolls…
https://media.tenor.com/S5izgmPLdcEAAAAd/pedro-martinez-don-zimmer.gif

Postscript to this tragedy: I went out to change 3 litter trays and I was not adequately focused on the job at hand - I ended up splitting a bag of used litter and having to scoop it up because I was still thinking about Zimmer’s roll and the way he went down and so set the bag down on a sharp-edged tile…still worth it…

This year I did something I didn't expect; I got into baseball.

It started in the summer, suitably. I couldn't sleep.

Curiously this happened to my mum a few years ago. Channel 5 (I think) started showing baseball really late at night - actually early morning - and she was going through an insomniac phase and she got hooked on it. This is someone who had never shown the slightest interest in any sport ever - except if there was a chance of Scotland beating England at something.

I reviewed A Band of Misfits and Moneyball here: The (S)word in the Autumn Stone: What Are You Reading, Fall 2022?

Baggarly seems like a cool dude. 3 time Jeopardy champ.

What!

https://www.nbcsports.com/sites/rsnunited/files/styles/article_hero_image/public/archive/assets_article/bayarea/2012/07/25/825877.jpg

Going to IRL BEISBOL with users Sharivari and Tracer Hand in London next year ahhhhhh
https://cdn-vox--cdn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/GBUfL4Ha6DhwK67pmCEhNVBafy8=/1400x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11573119/XdDDeOn.gif

too bad it’s Cubs-Cards but you can’t have everything!Still! BASEBALL IRL!!!!

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8e/Cubs_win_World_Series.gif/640px-Cubs_win_World_Series.gif

Have fun! Maybe you can arrive early and catch a hr during batting practice.

I’m the shortest person of those three so I hope to duck out of the way and let them do the catching tbh

the fences are pretty shallow iirc

Good luck guys l’ll be wearing full tools of ignorance

Enjoying this thread as an ex-Expos fan who recently got back into baseball due to my son, who has been playing baseball for a number of years but has only recently gotten more into watching baseball.

Still feels weird to be a Blue Jays fan, but that's my son's team, so my team also.

Look no offence but did you not cringe at the hype for the Jays closer during that last Mariners game

Btw speaking of Expos I find it incredibly funny that Pedro hits the Phillies batter audibly in the first pitch of this video and the title of the video is about Pedro getting plunked

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDA85mcVSxU

Pedro Martinez is probably my favorite Expo, I still remember listening to his perfect through 9 innings game on the radio while playing videogames (which is a weird thing I regularly did as a teenager).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTNyk1oklQA

Thank you SF Giants youtube account for delivering me this unexpected Matt Cain content, I love him so much

lol straight into gyac's veins!

have you watched the whole thing?

it's strange, but you rarely get to hear baseball players actually talk in detail about the plays in a game. it's great. usually it's just rushed post-game shit about how we played hard and trusted in god

Yes I have! My favourite part of this is Blanco’s 7th inning catch, which he was in a position to get only because he knew Cain tended to throw a certain pitch when he was down in the count and if it got hit it would go in the gap between centre and right field.

absolutely incredible moment. right, all those minute little adjustments. they happen on every pitch but they're not usually appreciated.

i love how happy and lazy Bochy looks in the studio. you earned it buddy.

I love how everyone is so superstitious and afraid of jinxing it, they refuse to describe it. “Matt Cain has not given up a base runner tonight.” Lmao also @ Cain’s “ugh” when he throws a pitch in the dirt in the 8th inning and hits Posey bouncing back up.

xp clearly Peavy and Lincecum got him on the good stuff like Peavy said.

I can’t believe he unretired to coach the fucking Texas Rangers.

it's a great point posey makes that the last pitch of the game, the sharp opposite field grounder off the end of the bat, would have been a double down the line if that game was in 2022. third basemen just don't play left handed hitters over there anymore.

They also don’t mention my favourite non-play moment

Cain was at 103 pitches as he strolled back to the dugout, where baseball's superstitions had long since taken over for his teammates. Well, for most of them.

You don't talk to a pitcher who is working on a no-hitter, and you certainly don't sit close to him in the dugout. But when Cain returned after the stressful seventh, he found Belt, in his second big league season, in his spot. Cain was amused, and a day later Belt admitted that it wasn't his first faux pas in that type of situation. In the minors, he once walked back into the dugout in the middle of a no-hitter and pointed out to teammates that there were a lot of zeros on the scoreboard.

CAIN: "I mean, it's kind of obvious. There's a towel. (Pitching coach Dave Righetti) would always lay out a towel. It was always there ... (Ryan Vogelsong) was like, 'What are you doing!' Belt was just completely oblivious, which now we know Belt and its standard for him. It was awesome."

BELT: "It wasn't funny at the time. I got the death stare from Cain and Vogey, but looking back on it, he might have gotten the perfect game because I sat there. I look at it as I think I'm good luck. But yeah, that was a scary moment for me, for sure. I thought Vogey was going to kill me."

They should have included a trigger warning of Dave Righetti’s no hitter against the Red Sox.

Cain was always so stoic and calm on the mound. I love seeing him so emotional! 🥺🥺🥺

An extremely less magical but oddly memorable game was in 2011 when the Giants were eliminated from the 2011 playoffs by the Diamondbacks. Some weird shit went on in that game. Mike Fontenot got ran over by the 2nd base umpire (this was hilarious). Henry frickin Blanco got a triple.

gyac I am not sure if this was covered already but a friend posted abt it and I immediately thought of this thread:

Dock Ellis attempted to hit every batter in the Cincinnati Reds lineup on May 1, 1974, as he was angry that the Pirates were intimidated by Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and the rest of the Big Red Machine. In the clubhouse before the game Ellis announced, "We gonna get down. We gonna do the do. I'm going to hit these mo**********s." Ellis took the mound and drilled Rose in the ribs. Morgan was next, he was hit in the side. Dan Driessen batted third, attempt to spin out of the way, he got plunked in the back, bases loaded. Cleanup batter Tony Perez had a pitch thrown behind him, another thrown over his head, and somehow avoided two others to draw a walk. Manager Danny Murtaugh pulled Ellis, but not until after Dock sent the next two pitches directly at the head of Johnny Bench.

Was he tripping?

I assume not, I knew the LSD story of course but not that one

Pete Rose richly deserved getting hit. Not sure about the other guys.

He wasn't tripping. It was a vendetta of some sort--there was a detailed account of it in a book I read a few years ago...I think there was a specific reason why Perez was spared, but I've forgotten it.

Actually, I think it was just Ellis getting tired of the Reds beating the Pirates all the time, and their penchant for bravado and arrogance.

I didn't really think he was tripping, it just seems so bizarre (from the perspective of 2022) that it seems to be on par with the LSD story.

I think I maybe know where I read about it--let me check.

very heartwarming thread. i drifted away from watching baseball when i was a teenager and then i had to move home around the start of the 2021 season bc of breakup/job loss/life stuff and the giants miracle season, which i watched with my mom who is a lifelong fan, was the thing that gave structure to my day and kept me from falling into self-loathing + despair. and since then i've watched almost every game.

love watching the highlights from matt cain's perfect game + tim lincecum's two no-hitters. somehow even knowing what's going to happen the close plays have my heart racing.

I think it was Dan Epstein's excellent Big Hair and Plastic Grass where I read it--thought I had it, but maybe I read a library copy. Anyway, here's a pretty detailed account.

https://theathletic.com/1785449/2020/05/01/what-the-f-is-it-with-this-guy-the-day-dock-ellis-threw-at-every-cincinnati-red/

In the spring of 1974, Dock Ellis decided he was sick of the Cincinnati Reds’ shit. The Big Red Machine was ascending. Three years removed from a World Series, the Pirates were on the decline. Ellis couldn’t abide by how his teammates handled the paradigm shift. When he saw the Reds, he vowed to send a message. On the first day of May, he got his chance.

otm

the Dockumentary is absolutely worth watching if you can track it down

This has been bugging me, so I found the Facebook post I put up eight years ago--of all places, it was Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge where I read about it.

Most amazing thing I’ve yet come across in Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: a 1974 game between the Pirates and the Reds where Dock Ellis stated his intention ahead of time to hit everyone who stepped up to bat. Here’s the box score:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/.../PIT/PIT197405010.shtml

In the first inning, Ellis hit Rose, hit Morgan, hit Dan Dreissen, walked Perez (who, according to an account I read, had to dodge every pitch), then got pulled (not ejected), but only after almost hitting Bench with a couple of pitches. Perlstein says it was in retaliation for a racist security guard who harassed Ellis at Riverfront Stadium; the other explanation I’ve come across is that Ellis was tired of the Reds beating up on Pittsburgh, and wanted to send them a message.

I was 12 when this happened, and had been a big fan for two or three years. The Reds were my favourite team. No recollection of this at all.

The link above for the box score is incomplete:

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/PIT/PIT197405010.shtml

Learning about America through baseball:

https://i.postimg.cc/02Kwkjb6/A9-B42-B72-EF71-47-D8-BC64-4-E8-D7194-CD83.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/FHjkS6bN/F9-E63-D39-5-A7-B-4-D30-B66-E-4-D01-EC4-F1-D77.jpg

Georgia - the South
Alabama - the South
North Carolina - maybe????
Tennessee- lmao no
Arizona- what the fuck is Arizona

Btw these articles were from the 2014 regular season, a season where Bumgarner lived in Tim Hudson’s basement

Tennessee is the South. They’re busting Cain’s chops for moving to Arizona

“Every game day there’s grits”

The secret of the Giants’ success revealed!

Tennessee is the South. They’re busting Cain’s chops for moving to Arizona

Bitch don’t tell me the Robinson/Reese story is possibly apocryphal; I want to believe

That story is featured prominently in the Ken Burns documentary, and I think I've read mention of it elsewhere too; have to believe it happened. (Such a great story.)

A busy week with work & personal stuff but again back on my pitchers of the noughties kick. Watched some Roy Halladay videos and read this SI piece about his death, life and some incredibly frank views from his family. Some highlights:

Dodgers righty Brandon McCarthy tweeted, “Roy Halladay was your favorite player’s favorite player.”

He planned to fly himself to the minor league affiliates. (“I don’t know if the Phillies will reimburse you for the fuel,” Miller cautioned. “I don’t care about that!” Halladay said.) He gave journals to anyone who would take them. He discovered there was no audiobook of The Mental ABCs, so he booked studio space and paid someone to read it aloud. He planned to pursue a bachelor’s degree and eventually a master’s.

Outside of Bright House Field, Halladay coached his teenage sons, Braden and Ryan. He echoed his father’s insistence on persistence, but he did not push them quite so hard. Big Roy mentioned that Little Roy had been throwing 90 m.p.h. at 17, but Braden at the same age struggled to hit 80. Little Roy didn’t want to hear it. He was a father, too, and he would teach his boys his way.

The games have a different energy and a charming authenticity here. Fans start their own chants — ¡Le voy al Sarapes mas fuerte! — with no prompting from the scoreboard. Even the youngest fans seem glued to the action. They voice their disapproval with whistles, not boos. When the home pitcher gets two strikes on a batter, the smallest of voices are the first to chirp out what is less a cheer and more an imploring wail:

“¡Pónchalo! ¡Pónchalo!”

“Strike him out!”

There are other differences. A player’s thumping walk-up music fades out when the pitcher comes set, but then it starts up again after the delivery. As a result, every plate appearance seems to have its own soundtrack, which has the odd effect of making each confrontation more compelling.

Sigfredo Sánchez’s cell phone started ringing with all of Puerto Rico on the line.

“Hang up the phone!” Menjivar told him. “Stop talking to people. You’re not allowed to talk about it!”

“Fucking awesome,” Lincecum said to reporters. “If you guys can print it, print it.”

Couldn’t then, Timmy. Can now.

Righetti threw a no-hitter for the New York Yankees on July 4, 1983. Like Sánchez, Righetti’s historic day broke a long franchise drought. His no-hitter was the Yankees’ first since Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. And while Righetti was celebrating his achievement, someone swiped all his stuff from the Yankees dugout.

So amid the delirious joy at AT&T Park, Righetti ordered Giants reliever Merkin Valdéz to collect Sánchez’s cap, glove and jacket.

I can't read any more Roy Halladay articles. Too upsetting.

Bob Gibson, haha fucking hell. Legendary quote about this on his Wikipedia page

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8COgmnqoTc

“Between games, (Willie) Mays came over to me and said, ‘Now, in the second game, you’re going up against Bob Gibson.’ I only half-listened to what he was saying, figuring it didn’t make much difference. So I walked up to the plate the first time and started digging a little hole with my back foot…No sooner did I start digging that hole than I hear Willie screaming from the dugout: ‘Noooooo!’ Well, the first pitch came inside. No harm done, though. So I dug in again. The next thing I knew, there was a loud crack and my left shoulder was broken. I should have listened to Willie.”

damn he went down like he was shot!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNLW6sEBlaQ

I’d read about this before, but I’d never seen the actual grand slam.

The funny thing is, as he peered out to the mound during that fourth-inning at-bat, Clark wasn’t trying to break the code of how Maddux might pitch to him. He just wanted to see if Cubs manager Don Zimmer would signal for left-hander Paul Assenmacher, who was warming up in the bullpen.

“I didn’t know whether he was going to take Maddux out,” Clark said. “So I’m looking right at the conference on the mound to figure out what’s gonna happen.”

“The Thrill” was already 2 for 2 off Maddux in Game 1, having doubled in a run in the first inning and hitting a solo homer in the third.

Then Zimmer strolled out to the mound in the fourth. In terms of strategic mistakes, Zimmer’s biggest one was standing a mere 5-foot-9.

“Maddux is standing on the mound and Zimmer has his back to me,’’ Clark recalled. “And he’s quite a bit shorter than Maddux (who is 6 feet), plus (Zimmer) is on the downslope of the mound. So, I can see Maddux.

“I’m looking right at Maddux — right at him — and he goes, ‘fastball in.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ I looked at Kevin Mitchell and said, ‘Did you see what he just said?’”

As much as I like Fred McGriff, it's hard to make a case for him being HOF-worthy but not Will Clark--more bWAR, higher OPS+, more MVP support, even better post-season numbers, retired at 36 and still a dangerous hitter (just as the PED era hits its stride; looked like he was really going to benefit from inflated offense in the game). I'm sure the VC will induct him within the next decade.

if the VC have their way, anyone who made it past second base will eventually be in the hall. i'm sure they were pretty much like "ooohh lotsa home runs and RBIs. you're in!"

McGriff had one big thing in his favour--well liked by everyone he played for/with/in front of--whereas I vaguely remember some issues between Clark and Bonds. Yet when I google them together, I get Clark saying Bonds was the best player he ever played with or against. So I don't know.

Letting the VC committee almost guide his BBWAA ballo--because what's the point of waiting around for the inevitable?--was the subject of a Posnanski column the other day:

But — and this is what I’ve been thinking about — maybe I’ve been doing it wrong. Take a guy on this year’s ballot: Jimmy Rollins. Rollins is below my imaginary line. He’s not far below, but with 47.6 WAR and 40.1 JAWS and a 95 OPS+, along with various other stats, he’s just not quite there. By my measurements, I have him below numerous infielders who are not in the Hall of Fame, such as Whitaker and Bobby Grich and Graig Nettles and Ken Boyer and even his old teammate Chase Utley.

Is that the right way to look at it? I’m just not sure. Because Jimmy Rollins did everything well, he hit and had some power, he stole bases and he won Gold Gloves. He was an MVP. He was a leader. He has almost 2,500 hits. He was a credit to the game. From the cues the Hall of Fame has given, Jimmy Rollins is EXACTLY the kind of guy they want to be elected.

Knowing that, should I vote yes on him even if he’s below my line?

For what it's worth, I think trying to anticipate the VC committee, while maybe admirable in theory (why not vote someone in now who's going to get in anyway down the road, possibly after he's dead?), would be a bad way to put together a BBWAA ballot.

Isn’t there a thread for this?

But it's a thing I learned about in baseball this week.

Oh I’m sorry, I thought it was a thread by someone new getting into baseball. Monologue away!

Well, that escalated quickly.

Gyac, you posted a Will Clark clip; I posted about Will Clark. Thermo posted something pertaining to what I posted, I responded, etc. I think that's how ILX works. But by all means, outline some guidelines for posting in this thread and I promise I'll comply.

I don’t give a shit about the HoF. I don’t post in that thread for a reason; stats wanking and that kind of shit bores me to death. People who like that aspect of the game, fill your boots. It personally is the worst aspect of the sport for me.

I think It's magical that you've discovered Will Clark--way to go!

(More the kind of thing you're looking for?)

I think it’s ok for me to comment upon the most joyless aspect of the sport in my own thread.

for what it's worth gotta admit I also avoid all the bwar+ etc etc stuff wrt baseball as well and thought today's posts about mcgriff's hof credentials were misplaced in this thread
xp

I only brought up McGriff in connection to Will Clark. I like this thread, and I chipped in early with some classic-game suggestions, but if this is a strict no-stats/no-HOF zone--and you're not supposed to follow posts wherever they lead--sorry, to me that's just a weird version of what baseball is (and a rather personalized version of how ILX works), and I promise I'll keep clear.

That’s more than ok and I’m sorry for being harsh, it is just as I said a really awful part of the game for me and I avoid the related threads for that reason - but I have very much appreciated your enthusiasm and other contributions here even though we do disagree on a ton of things in baseball as you know!

This is one of my earliest baseball memories--the fake "intentional walk" in the 1972 Series. The A's of that era were an immensely entertaining team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR0jGrfQCu4

I know I've told my "I helped Will Clark make a putout" story on ILX before but it's been years, so: I went to Mississippi State when Clark, Rafael Palmeiro, Jeff Brantley and Bobby Thigpen were the big stars on the team. In 1985, I was at a home game sitting in the shallow right bleachers not too far past first base. Opposing hitter drives one to the left-center gap, and for some reason I follow the hitter instead of the ball, where he doesn't even come close to the bag rounding first on the way to the standup double. Play is over and everyone's like "welp" and I can't believe nobody caught what happened. I yell "he missed the bag!!! He didn't touch first!!!" and everyone near me in the bleachers turns to look at me. I yell it again, "He didn't touch the bag!!!" Everyone around me starts yelling it too, "he miss the bag, he missed the bag." Pitcher's got the ball but the next batter isn't quite in the box yet. Clark looks over at Ron Polk, the head coach, and Polk shrugs. 1B umpire is stonefaced. Clark steps over to the base, pitcher does the come-set and throw over and the umpire erupts in a big punchout. Crowd goes wild, Clark gives slight glove-wave to the direction where all the yelling was coming from.

My sense is that he was the John Rocker of his day, but man he could rake.

I love this and I’m so glad you posted this again! Re John Rocker, I think there’s probably a lot of truth to that - WC being a friend of his during the playing days. Now he works for the Giants in some capacity and also does a lot of work for various autism charities (including Autism Speaks, ugh), so possibly he may have become better over the years? But he came across as incredibly cocky and arrogant during the playing years, which I think you’d kind of expect from a guy who could hit like that. Was thinking of the part of Moneyball where they flat out say that a good player is one who doesn’t get in his own head and drag himself down and it helps if he’s pretty stupid too. Clark hasn’t ever come across as stupid but there is definitely a tendency among a lot of players to just keep moving and worry about the rest later, and that seemed to be a big part of his makeup afaict? But I guess if you’re going to homer off Nolan Ryan in your first at bat then you’re probably going to be at least somewhat arrogant.

Actually a quick look through his Twitter account follows- he appears to run his own account going by the amount of replies RTed, it seems a relatively shithead free experience? Mostly players from various sports and the odd weird follow like Kenny G or Spongebob? Compared to, oh, idk, Buster Posey making Ben Shapiro one of his 53 accounts followed!

How did I never hear this story before?!:
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/detroit/news/brady-feigl-dna-test-inside-edition-minor-league-baseball/#app"> https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/detroit/news/brady-feigl-dna-test-inside-edition-minor-league-baseball/#app

God dammit

Haha, that’s amazing.

Since I’ve been appreciating Brandon Belt this week, about this at bat, and pitcher-batter duels in general:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6FTg1XwLfg

When I started watching the postseason a few months back, this was one of my favourite things to watch early on. Trying to get a guy out who’s clinging to the plate like a flea on the underside of a cat. This one is the current record, with 21 pitches, and it’s brutal. You can feel the pitcher’s frustration. He had Belt on two strikes after three pitches. Belt digs his heels in, fouls off pitch after pitch. Hits the full count and it just keeps going. 14 minutes of this, and it ends with an out. A loss? Any time a single at bat drives a pitcher into the stressful inning zone is a win, and the Giants did go on to win that game. And Belt ended up scoring two runs later.

I was actually at that game in Anaheim. It was the top of the first so my friends and I were grabbing a beer. I several times looked out and said to myself, Belt is still up? It's great to hear the audio of that at bat. The Giants were the visitors but the crowd started getting into it as it lasted about 20 minutes if I remember correctly.

I'm going to go back and read this thread as it seems like there are some good nuggets in here.

A friend told me this story last night. It's a classic.

Another McCarthy, Mike, the former head of MSG Network and the new GM of Cubs telecasts, this week met with one of his TV analysts, former Cubs first baseman Mark Grace. Grace told him this story:

Circa 1991, the Cubs were in Cincinnati, Rick Sutcliffe pitching for Chicago. Paul O’Neill, then with the Reds, smashed a long home run. In Cincy, home-team homers were followed by fireworks, thus Boom! Bang! Flash! Boom!

The next batter, Eric Davis, blasted one, too. Boom! Bang! Flash! Boom!

Out of the dugout walked pitching coach Billy Connors. As he neared the mound, Sutcliffe protested, hollering to Connors to turn around. He continued to plead with Connors that he has it under control, not to yank him.

When Connors reached the mound, he soothed Sutcliffe with, “I’m not taking you out, Rick. I just wanna give that fireworks guy a chance to reload.”

https://nypost.com/2020/02/27/rick-sutcliffe-once-pitched-himself-into-fireworks-hilarity/

hahahaha

xp incredible!

gyac I think it’s cool that you got onto the 2010s Giants because they were such a weird frickin outlier (band of misfits indeed) and I get the sense that those teams don’t get the same “respect” as even like the ‘11 cardinals or something. I don’t really care about that respect stuff though, I’m more of a Kruk and Kuip / Jon Miller fan than a Giants fan, anyway.

Don't forget about David Braxton Flemming. Giants fans are spoiled as they are some of the best broadcasters in the business.

They are a weird crew and I do love the broadcasters a lot. “Grab some pine, meat!” lives in my memory probably forever. Jon Miller obvs classic. Colour commentary isn’t really a thing this side of the Atlantic, so I was first surprised and then delighted by it. I was watching an old Dodgers game that had Vin Scully commentating on and he started off the game remarking that it was “Hispanic Heritage Day”. The Dodgers had started with Ricky Nolasco on the mound. The game went badly for him and he coughed up several runs and Don Mattingly came out to take the ball from him. Vin remarked “Don Mattingly has decided, Hispanic Heritage Day or not, it is time to get Ricky Nolasco out of there.”

I’ve never heard anything like the commentary in my life. It’s great.

Jon Miller is phenomenal. So gentle.

yes. he made joe morgan endurable. no mean feat.

https://i.postimg.cc/L6Nbvw8P/759-C83-D6-0-E0-C-49-DB-9861-9-C4-FD167643-D.png

lol

best swing of all time obv

This was quoted in this pretty good oral history.

Sports Illustrated once described Clark’s swing as “the sweetest swing anyone had ever seen, an uppercut with a long, loopy follow-through that made it seem as if was wielding a buggy whip instead of a 32-ounce bat.”

Candy Maldonado, teammate: Yeah, he’s the only man in the world whose answering machine is “The Thrill is gone.” Oh, that hillbilly!

Obsessed with this guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtImIqR5neU

And I really should have included this too, the tongue is just too much

2023 Giants FanFest on February 4 is almost here!

Let’s throw it back to 2019, when we got Buster Posey to give his best Bruce Bochy impression 😂 pic.twitter.com/F1fn2HUn8b

— KNBR (@KNBR) January 26, 2023

I will eventually get back to reading & writing about stuff but atm thread is kind of this stuff

Spahn & Sain & delay for rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cByahfjo6U

this is a classic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ey-rq-9mYm0

I saw that! I think he might have mentioned it in Curveball?! I need to upload this pie chart I saw about why Zito lost games really quick…

https://i.postimg.cc/RhMChV5p/B12-DFF2-A-0-FFE-49-E8-A313-DE5044397-C90.png

Iirc: Huddyed - pitched well but fucked over by the defence
Cained - no explanation needed
Zitoed - the quality of being Barry Zito and being basically a law unto himself

I really like Zito even though I mock him all the time.

Atm watching videos of runners jumping over the catcher to score, of which this is obviously the greatest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3BDn2K6sgo

Watched some more brawls, surely no brawl has a better memorial tshirt than this?
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/bBgAAOSwhgZjP4fn/s-l1600.jpg

Was reading this article about clubhouse cancers and found my way to this Athletic article about Joan Ryan’s 2020 book, Intangibles: Unlocking the Science and Soul of Team Chemistry.

I read and loved Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes about fifteen years ago, long before I started reading her SF Chronicle work about the Giants. So I knew her behind the scenes work was great already.

In this book, which kind of has an eyerolly business book title and sometimes - only sometimes, I stress - vibe, she investigates theories of what makes a successful clubhouse work. What personalities they need, who fulfils those roles, and even drops in some science about it all. I’m only partway through this book but her sources and stories are incredible. She has a whole chapter about Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent.

Anyway I need to actually finish and read this book and I’ll review it in the book thread as before. But if what I’ve described here is at all of interest to you, consider this:

The concept of conventional team chemistry is anathema to Kent’s individualistic orientation to the world. “I’m not a friendly person. I don’t really like people that much. Because I’m self-satisfied. I’m self-motivated. I don’t dance. I wasn’t a part of a fraternity. I don’t cheer when I go to sporting events. I don’t celebrate birthdays and anniversaries even though my wife kills me when I don’t. Friends don’t motivate me. Friends don’t make me better, personally. Doesn’t fuel me.” He conceded that feeling comfortable in a clubhouse and having relationships with teammates probably affect the performance of “people who aren’t self-motivated and (are)a little bit weak.”

“And then there are guys who are bad motivators. They think they’re creating chemistry but really [they’re] making it worse. When they try to challenge you as a person or your work ethic or ‘this is the way the game’s supposed to be played.’ You look at him and think, ‘Who in the hell made you God? You’re not even the number one player on the team.’” I asked if he was referring to Kent. “Jeff Kent wasn’t like that! Jeff Kent was never like that!” he said, his voice rising. “Folks can say whatever the hell they want to say about that guy and me. We were both A-type-personality players. We didn’t hang out. I didn’t care what he was doing. You have players who care what another person’s doing in the locker room. It’s stupid. It’s hard enough to prepare yourself to be good — why do you care what that dude is doing over there? Why do you care Jeff Kent is over there looking at properties for his hunting places? Who gives a crap? “When it came to game time, what name would you want on the back of the uniform of the guy playing second base? I want Jeff Kent. Because he’s a ballplayer. When it comes to guts, someone who goes out there to do his job — they can say whatever they want about Jeff Kent, they can say whatever they want about Barry Bonds — when it came to who they want to play in left field, who they want to play at second base, it would be Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent.”

One day in the clubhouse at the end of August, Burrell found Huff and together they ushered Lincecum into the small office. The superstar pitcher had lost all five of his starts that month. The Giants had slipped six games out of first place. Lincecum didn’t seem to be listening to his coaches or manager Bruce Bochy, and he balked at suggestions that he improve his workout routine. He had been so spectacularly successful his entire life that he seemed paralyzed by failure. “Timmy, man, I know you’re struggling, bro,” Burrell said, leaning forward in his chair, locking eyes with the young pitcher. “I know this is hard for you. But we need you, Bud, we need you.” Huff mostly listened. Burrell was pointed but loving. “Look, Timmy, you’re our rock. If we don’t have you, we’re dead. We’re dead.” “As I’m watching Timmy,” Huff told me later, “his head starts coming up, the chin’s coming up, the chest is coming out a little bit more. You could see in his facial expression, in his eyes, that somebody had belief in him. He’s 0 and 5. He’s getting bad press. Everybody’s on him. And then something was triggered inside of him. You could see it. I’m sitting there in awe watching and listening to this. And no shit, the very next start against Colorado, on September first, he shoved it up Colorado’s ass.”

Over time, he began to feel an ease he hadn’t known since, well, maybe ever. He became more open to the everyday signals of trust and became more trusting, more accepting, and less self-centered in return. His life outside of baseball was a mess — he was still drinking and popping Adderall, and his marriage was still crumbling — but with his teammates he could be the person his teammates seemed to think he was. He began arriving at the park early and leaving late. He rediscovered his power at the plate and led the team in doubles, triples, and home runs. Most surprising, he found teammates gravitating to him for advice or a laugh, as if he were a leader. “They’d ask me about things,” he said, “and that had never happened to me in my life.”

wow thx for that gyac. those excerpts are great!! gotta admit i kinda warm to jeff kent after reading that as my personality skews that way somewhat (minus the athletic talent or irl success).

also your titling of another thread has had depeche mode stuck in my head for a week now. could be worse.

Jeff Kent actually comes off a lot better than that excerpt suggests, I was laughing so much at it when he’s like I DON’T DANCE OR CELEBRATE BIRTHDAYS

This followed right after:

I shared a comment from a player who said teammates lifted his performance in ways he couldn’t do for himself. “Can he quantify it?” Kent asked. “No,” I said. “Does that mean the effect isn’t real?” He said maybe for highly emotional players, it’s real. “And even if it’s real,” he said, “if you can’t quantify it. …” I interrupted. “OK, you say you love your wife. But you can’t measure it, right? So how do you know it’s real?” “Because I’ll take a bullet for her.” “And there’s the baseball equivalent of that, right?” The toothpick bobbed. “Sure. I’d take a bullet for a guy on the mound whether I like him or hate him,” he said. He smiled. “Yeah, I get your point.” If his willingness to take a bullet for his wife means his love is real, then his willingness to do the same for a teammate means that something deep and even profound existed between him and his teammates. Maybe even between him and Bonds. I could almost see the wheels turning in Kent’s head. He was thinking this through.

the show i can remember was back in the day on ch4 or 5 where they used to show a game on weds nights presented by i think tommy boyd? and a canadian called todd macklin. (there must of been a show prior to this i guess because i think my rooting for atlanta predated the show. i was definitely following them for a few post season disappointments, blowing a 2-0 lead to the yankees etc before they finally got the ring by beating cleveland).

tbh not sure i'd call myself a proper fan cos i find regular season games a really hard slog to sit through. but post season baseball incredible, but even then i could only really enjoy games if i recorded them and could skip adverts, pitching changes etc havent been to america for 25 years or so but last time i did i saw a couple of spring season games and a minor league game. they were okay but didn't find the in person experience anywhere near as compelling as the in person experience of watching football which is the only other sport i've seen live regularly. also when on holiday in the US i really enjoyed listening to games on the radio.

my peak fandom years were definitely the maddux/smoltz era. tho i also loved the theo epstein red sox years. my interest tailed off a bit post bonds(loved watching him play) and a bit more post ichiro.

Posting this image here in order to say hi to roxymuzak if she drops in.
Also importantly, what is going on here
https://64.media.tumblr.com/3be844cc831cfbc3fa7dccf736de4ac5/tumblr_n4dd45hsGW1rjr6zho1_500.gif

tbh not sure i'd call myself a proper fan cos i find regular season games a really hard slog to sit through. but post season baseball incredible, but even then i could only really enjoy games if i recorded them and could skip adverts

i think that is just timmy tim’s hot breath lighting up a chilly april afternoon tbf

Why isn’t Buster’s though

Reading about ex-Giant Robby Thompson and his glove, specifically this on his Wikipedia page:

Thompson was known for the well-used baseball glove with which he played for almost his entire career.[36] He was offended when the San Francisco Chronicle printed a story titled, "Thompson's Ugly, Pathetic Glove is a Gem."

In a 1990 Sports Illustrated article on mitts titled (as many in the genre are) "Glove Story," former player and manager Phil Garner went so far as to say, "Players become sexually attached to their glove," an assertion for which we offer no proof, or even comment.

Now, mind you, not all players are so fanatical about their gloves. The old Twins shortstop, Zoilo Versalles, used to throw his away after each error (eventually alienating his glove company so much he had to go to sporting-goods stores to replenish his supply).

Another superb defender, Omar Vizquel, had such uncharacteristic fielding problems early this season that his teammates took it upon themselves to "sacrifice" the offending glove, which Omar had borrowed from teammate Zach Sorensen. In a scene inspired by the movie "Major League," they constructed an altar containing the glove, a bottle of wine, a hanging roast chicken, a Buddha-like figure, 14 candles, incense, two rosaries and a baseball with "the curse is killed" written on it.

In the 19th century, however, the use of a glove was considered the province of weaklings.

"Padding hands like that to prevent injuries or not feel pain was an unmanly act,"

I have spoken with a number of English cricket fans who are still on that gloves-are-unmanly train. Not sure they realise how hard baseballs are thrown in the modern game. It's a trip checking out really old gloves though. A friend of my dad's has one from ca 1945 or so and it really is like an oversized leather glove that you might use for garden chores. No webbing.

The lore about how to break in a glove is extensive.. another rabbit hole for you some time. These days Rawlings et al will "pre break in" the gloves to an extent and there's a whole science/art to it. Check out this guy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i_x0neoseU

My English cricket fan went HUH?????? when I read this out to him, we’re going to need some more info on this pls

On what? I'm telling you, English people I know have scoffed at gloves in baseball, like it's a sissy affectation

Really?! My better half disputes that!

The term dick in the spread

oh no

used to have a real fascination with the incredibly battered and pine tar besmeared batting helmets that some hitters would wear year after year. i seem to recall biggio was one but then again I could be mistaken cos he was just generally raggedy and always put me in mind of pigpen from peanuts.

also was semi obsessed with andy pettite's eyes, or more specifically how they looked when he wore his cap pulled down low and was just about to throw. oh and his killer pick off move.

xp
definitely sure that the difference between how fielders threw the ball in cricket compared with baseball in the 1980s was much starker than what it is now. seems clear that cricket has really taken on board the lessons from baseball in the last 20 years.

I think of John Kruk when I think of filthy batting helmets

PROCTOR IN SHAMBLES, BURNS GLOVE

He said “everything I had” was a part of the bonfire, presumably meaning his glove, cap, spikes and who knows what else. The smell wafted up to the press box, and it reeked as bad as Proctor’s outing.

i looked it up, he pitched the next day, gave up 5 runs, walked three, took the loss.

ah wait hang on, wrong month! he pitched two days later, pitched one inning, struck out two. it worked!

scott proctor wasn't that good, but joe torre absolutely wrecked him -- 83 appearances/102 innings in 2006 + 52 appearances/54 innings in the yankees' first 105 games of 2007 before trading him for . . . wilson betemit!

and he walked his share of guys, so those innings were not low-effort

he pitched a couple more years after that, during which he had a 6.59 era

Besides the big controversial rule changes, the clubs & MLB seem to be producing more content like this now. with bat flipping and celebrating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IG3ATI_g24

Videos like these and the micd up videos are a nice way of showing the players’ personalities and giving them someone to pull for. I mean I know it sounds obvious but this is ironically a great traditional part of the game that’s previously been only spoken about and not shown much as far as I can tell?

https://i.postimg.cc/vZGVfydf/96-A2101-D-5-D94-4-CEB-857-B-CFC146838045.jpg

Obviously I have to tip my cap to the iconic scene from The Franchise ofc:

Amazing clip of Bruce Bochy telling Brandon Belt he made the team in 2012 🥲

"If you need a beer, grab a beer." pic.twitter.com/HuqL4tTlkN

— KNBR (@KNBR) January 11, 2023

Decided to have an AL league team too - the Mariners. I watched them the whole playoffs last year and with Téoscar they’ve got so many players I like now. Obvs would support the failing Giants in a hypothetical Giants-Mariners final, but lol, when is that ever going to happen.

M’s have been my runner up AL team for a long time. There’s never not been someone I really enjoyed watching on that team.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiN9K7lMOd4

The phantom grand slam! I can’t get over the umpiring of this. Fucking spectacular.

dying at the little bitty fake swing after he went back to the box

very odd they made him go back though?? the only rule i'm aware of is that you have to touch the bases in order, that's all

Who knows? It must be a near once in a lifetime occurrence for an umpire. Might as well make it worth it.

Morse also hit that legendary hr to tie the score in 2014 NLCS game 5. It was followed pretty fast by the Ishikawa one, which was legendary too.

Morse had lost his home run swing three months earlier. But Bonds gave him a tip before Game 5, telling him to be sure to get his front foot down. Morse did, and the results were seismic.

This clip honestly lives in my mind rent free.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6bhpUoorms

Bochy getting the reliever tossed out on a technicality in a tight game because Mattingly stepped on the mound a second time - absolutely ruthless.

Giants Manager Bruce Bochy came out to protest to the plate umpire Adrian Johnson that Mattingly’s about-face constituted a second trip to the mound. The umpires huddled and agreed, and Broxton had to leave the game.

“It’s an easy mistake to make,” said Bochy, who snared the Dodgers and Grady Little, manager at the time, in the same trap in 2006 when he managed San Diego.

Amazing. And the Giants end up winning 7-5

Sergio Romo said for every kid who asked for his autograph in spring training, he asked for theirs. The result is this amazing cap full of kids’ autographs. He’s one of a kind. pic.twitter.com/pRXyPoEt8W

— John Shea (@JohnSheaHey) March 28, 2023

That’s what’s up! I love him. I remember reading this from 2011:

Sergio Romo’s locker is in the corner right next to Wilson’s. If you didn’t already love Romo before, you should see the space above his locker (where his name and number are) where he put up several letters from fans (one from a kid that’s written in black and orange marker), along with a black and white poster someone drew of his heavily bearded face. I think it’s a pretty good bet that if you send Romo fan mail, he won’t just read it. He might display it, too.

That fastball down the middle wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment choice. The decision to throw it tracked back to Game 1 of the series. Romo, sitting on the top step of the Giants dugout, caught eyes with Cabrera as he chased a Marco Scutaro foul ball.

“I’m ready for your slider,” Cabrera said after he blew a kiss to Romo and walked away.

Giants reliever George Kontos whipped his head around. “Did he just tell you he’s ready for your slider?” he asked.

Romo couldn’t even process the smack talk.

“Woah, Miguel Cabrera knows who I am,” Romo said to Kontos.

https://i.postimg.cc/k4n6xbmC/42-B7-B55-E-3-AB2-43-A0-A236-7-B6-A70-DCFBA0.jpg

🥹

Jesus Christ

Sergio Romo is the best among us. If you've never read @BrownieAthletic's story on Romo and a girl named Ariel Gariano, take 10 minutes and do it now. You won't regret it.https://t.co/ag3sovw1rv https://t.co/8LoYSaNOwN

— Perryn Keys (@PerrynKeys) March 28, 2023

fucking hell

Mookieproof sent me this article with Wade Boggs, Ted Williams and Don Mattingly all discussing hitting. It was great.

"Have you ever smelled the smoke from the wood of your bat burning?" asked Williams in a voice not unlike that of John Wayne.

"Whaaat?" said Boggs.

"The smell of the smoke from the wood burning?"

"What are you talking about, Ted? I don't understand."

"Five or six times, hitting against a guy with good stuff, I swung hard and—oomph—just fouled it back. Really hit it hard. And I smelled the wood of the bat burning. It must have been that the seams hit the bat just right, and the friction caused it to burn, but it happened five or six times."

WILLIAMS: Have you ever smelled the smoke from the wood burning?

MATTINGLY: I've had it happen. Yeah. Twice, for sure. All of a sudden, I smelled a real big burn, and at the same time I was thinking, "I just missed that one." Two or three times. I've never told that to anyone, because I didn't think anyone would believe me. I think one of the bat burns came off Nunez, too.

BOGGS: That's the damndest thing I've ever heard. I thought I'd heard everything about hitting, but that's unbelievable. Amazing.

WILLIAMS: I think the hardest thrower I ever faced was Virgil Trucks. He threw as hard as Feller. DiMaggio said he was the hardest thrower he ever faced. I hit more home runs off him than any pitcher because he challenged me.

I had never heard any of these stories. Incredible work gyac.

The red seat at Fenway I didn’t know about until reading that article, and then funnily enough it came up in an old tweet of Adam Wainwright’s where he tours stadiums the Cards go to.

The seats are all green in right field except one that is red. This was the famous landing spot of Ted Williams' 502 foot HR in 1946 (longest in Fenway's history). It was so far that Gene Mack, cartoonist for the Boston Daily, wrote it would be talked about for a long time. Yep pic.twitter.com/XgpMJc4vWA

— Adam Wainwright (@UncleCharlie50) June 19, 2022

Jeremy Affeldt on the time Bruce Bochy accidentally roasted Xavier Nady right in front of him 😂 pic.twitter.com/7udroUlGgm

— KNBR (@KNBR) August 16, 2022

The Athletic had a longread this week about this rant, absolutely perfect, no notes, made Kevin Keegan look (even more) amateur.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiVVbYK9HXw

Watching Barves-Mets with my husband who got into baseball a few months after I did. Commentary on Spencer Strider: “blah blah he’s only six feet tall”

Himself: only six feet tall?!
Me, with all the authority of someone who has been into this game getting on for a year now: that is considered “short” for a starting pitcher, it’s not the same as real world height!

I also had this in my Twitter bookmarks, incredible “sorry” from Bochy

― limb tins & cum (gyac), Saturday, April 8, 2023 3:35 AM (three weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is hilarious. i went to high school with X, he was 2 years older. he was on my older brothers little league team, he was like 8 and my bro was 12 and x dominated. he was crazy good at hoops too. i tried to go to every sporting event he was playing in. one high school game he hit for the cycle plus a grand slam, i unfortunately missed that one.

gyac you might appreciate this

🍻 pic.twitter.com/ScHrfXWhvU

— Will Clark (@WillClark22) May 2, 2023

I will watch it tomorrow, however did you know this about Nady

Xavier Nady is the only non-pitcher to go directly to MLB since John Olerud in 1989.

i knew it at the time but didnt know that's held up. However, he didnt end up going straight to the pros, went to Cal and dominated there.

Injuries really derailed his career, sadly.

Yeah it’s a hard grind isn’t it. At least he was on that great World Series team. I love all the SF WS teams but the 2012 postseason was so dramatic and felt like a genuine team effort - in terms of all the individual moments - that they are perhaps the most talented as a cohort? Ofc the 2010 band of misfits will always be my favourites.

I looked up what he’s doing now btw and according to his Instagram, entering golf tournaments with Jacoby Ellsbury ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ at least he’s not hunting I guess

yeah he was a pretty normal bro all things considered.

He played for a shitload of teams.

yeah, was basically like always injured.

during his 75 games with the mets in 2006, xavier nady was such a 'fuckin badass' that some fans posted a song about him on their myspace

the song is no longer online, but here i -- among very few people in the world, presumably -- can offer you, in all its 96kpbs mp3 glory, The Ballad of Xavier Nady by Kuff & the Buttheads. it's pretty awesome; i wonder if he knows about it

(he was v. good with the pirates!)

Omggggggg

lmaaaaaao mookie thats amazing. the internet is a wonderful place.

That song is amazing! I can’t believe you held onto it all these years.

Clearing out some space on my phone and found this, real school disco hours.

https://i.postimg.cc/pV7Gs8zF/45892-A64-1-BCA-464-E-A316-D55-FA7-CC2450.jpg

Wow just saw this thread. Fantastic origin story.

Does gyac know about BZito's musical talent (sic)? His demos were scrubbed mostly from the internet but a couple songs still survived. This is one my wife and I often sing to each other apropos of nothing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUKln0aoB-A

I do but I didn’t know about his demos! Zito is a complete space cadet, I love weird guys like him. Thank you for this!

This is the greatest forgotten Zito recording btw

Didn’t Bochy call him “Planet Zito”?

Saw Prince Fielder’s home run celebration referenced & only just looked it up now, frankly amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVUikaRCJeg

Also anyone who hates home run celebrations should dry up tbh

lol the best. I watched his dad hit a number of towering homers in Knoxville, Tennessee when he was with the Blue Jays' AA team there.

I am obsessed with fielding this month. This catch!

Ji Hwan Bae with the circus catch 🎪

🎥 @Piratespic.twitter.com/7s5KxpAE6J

— The Athletic MLB (@TheAthleticMLB) May 28, 2023

Kutter Crawford. Athlete. 😳 pic.twitter.com/TuUxx3Nnv4

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) May 28, 2023

Casey Schmitt 94.1-mph dart 😲 pic.twitter.com/GNlaOKl4Po

— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) May 17, 2023

can't believe this just happened 😮pic.twitter.com/AEL5fyu0D9

— Codify (@CodifyBaseball) May 28, 2023

;_;

It's Oneil Cruz's first game of the season and he already recorded the hardest throw by an infielder this year at 96.7 MPH 🤯 pic.twitter.com/5XUlqHRjac

— MLB (@MLB) June 21, 2022

He’ll be back, dw king

gyac did you ever see the infamous "ass is in the jackpot" video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn28Dz4RUxc

Some of the most verité/straight out of peak-Cassavetes dialogue ever encountered.

I am late seeing this, but that’s incredible. Really liked seeing Ty Kelly in the corner of the screen as well.
I also laughed at this article exploring the history of the phrase.

I love when Collins starts going nuts and you hear Hallion mutter under his breath to the other umpire "take him, take him", meaning "take Syndegaard while I deal with the real problem."

I can’t remember if it was on this or some other thread I expressed my disappointment on learning that baseball players as a cohort are famously conservative, which is not great as a fan, you know?

Nevertheless, in dishonour of the Clayton Kershaws/Brandon Nimmos/John Rockers/AN Other Red Sox starter/Anthony Basses of the game, here is a non-exhaustive list of players who seem like non-shitheads. I haven’t added Sean Dolittle because no shit. Please add any others you are aware of!

David Ortiz: supports the gays

“I have gay friends and we have great relationships when it comes down to respecting each other,” he said. “It’s not something you choose to be. It’s not like, ‘I want to be a baseball player,’ or, ‘I want to be a basketball player.’ It’s something you’re born with and everybody needs to accept that. Hey, look, the way I see things, I love people the way they are. Especially if you are honest with yourself. You know what I’m saying?

“It’s the (expletive) 21st century man. Get over it.”

Kevin Kiermaier does too.

“It’s one of those things, my parents taught me to love everyone as they are, go live your life, whatever your preferences are, go be you,” Kiermaier said. “I can’t speak for everyone who’s in here, obviously, but this is a family-friendly environment here at a big-league ball field. … We just want everyone to feel welcomed and included and cheer us on. No matter what your views on anything are.”

June ❤️🏳️‍🌈 pic.twitter.com/ShVxVltgv0

— Julio Rodriguez🇩🇴🦁 (@JRODshow44) June 1, 2023

MARK CANHA SAYS HAPPY PRIDE MONTH pic.twitter.com/RMx6j56AHm

— Helen Elizabeth (@hesilf) June 1, 2023

Great to see Mobile native and baseball great @JakePeavy_22, a World Series and Cy Young Award winner, at this morning's parade in Selma. pic.twitter.com/cky351bwnW

— Doug Jones (@DougJones) December 2, 2017

Oh how did I forget future Cy Young Award winner and quadzilla Spencer Strider!

Going by his Twitter activity he:
- hates Elon Musk
- Is pro gun control
- supports women in baseball!

It’s deeply frustrating to see sexist and angry reactions to something that should be universally celebrated and supported. This is a fantastic development for the sport and our country. Rachel should be very proud of her appointment, and WE should be rooting for her success! https://t.co/L7yBicoLsl

— Spencer Strider (@SpencerSTRIDer) January 10, 2022

in preparation for your first baseball game, you may or may not wish to be apprised of 'keeping score'

Do you score the game?
jim caple on the art of scoring
interview with longtime red sox official scorer chaz scroggins
the unofficial scorer

every pro who keeps score now seems to swear by the eephus league halfliner but i have not tried it

in any case, i here offer a page (you will need two of them; one for each team) from the Wilson Sporting Goods Co Official Baseball Score Book No. E5317

hi def here

sample: https://i.imgur.com/k2xik8F.jpg

I want to like dontrelle as color guy but he’s such a dork

Aw i loved the one time I saw him commentate! The Marlins were getting crushed in some other game & he was like “I like to see so and so do well, but not against my fish!”

Also, in honour of it being Tim Lincecum’s birthday this week, from an article in a tab I’ve had open on my phone for at least six months:

Lincecum’s no-hitter - the first in Petco Park’s 10-year history - was popular well beyond the pro-Giants crowd in San Diego.

Lincecum is from Seattle and pitched for the University of Washington. During a pitching change during the Angels-Mariners game at Safeco Field, the ninth inning of the Giants-Padres game was shown on the video board, until there were two strikes on the last batter, Yonder Alonso.

Josh Hamilton then stepped into the batter’s box and the other game was taken off the board, drawing boos from the crowd. Hamilton had a long at-bat and word began trickling through the crowd that Lincecum had finished the no-no.

Before the next batter, the final out of Lincecum’s no-hitter was shown, and the crowd cheered.

Righetti recalled that early in Lincecum’s career, his stuff was so good that it wasn’t uncommon to think, “Uh oh, this is the day.”

“I don’t know that he’d say this publicly, I think he maybe felt his time was past,” Righetti said. “I knew he watched Jonathan get his, and then Cain, and you know he’s thinking about it.

“For him to get it, I had tears in my eyes. I know what he’s been through, back and forth, and being the guy, and people picking him apart. I’m proud of him. I told him that the last game - the way he’s been handling it all, and the way he’s gone through this wave that every guy’s got to go through.”

I will never love a player more than Timmy.

10 years ago today, Tim Lincecum threw 148 pitches en route to his first no-hitter against San Diego 🔥

No one has thrown more than 134 in a game since. pic.twitter.com/djOLuOUkmM

— KNBR (@KNBR) July 13, 2023

148 yeeeeeesh

Gee I wonder why he was never the same after that game...

He was never the same before that game! His worst regular Giants season was 2012!

Pavs wrote this about him on the day:

At the end of the historic night, as Yonder Alonso’s fly ball sailed toward Gregor Blanco’s glove in left field for the final out, Lincecum stood on the mound, pounding his glove with his fist. He was so locked in at the time that he was still thinking about the next set of pitches. Catcher Buster Posey jolted him out that mode, hitting him from behind with a massive bear hug. A huge smile broke out on Lincecum’s face.

“I felt it then,” he said. “I had been running on adrenaline the last couple of innings.”

Those last couple of innings put manager Bruce Bochy in an awkward position as Lincecum’s pitch count hit alarming numbers.

Lincecum had walked a batter in the first inning and hit one in the second while throwing 38 pitches. He settled into a groove, striking out six straight on just 21 pitches, but still was moving forward with a pitch count that looked as though it would force Bochy and pitching coach Dave Righetti to throw in the towel.

Lincecum had other ideas.

“He wouldn’t have talked to me the rest of the year if I took him out,” Bochy said, smiling. “There was no chance.”

Oh and yeah reading about his early Giants years and the amount of time Cain and Lincecum pitched deep into games to hold onto a slender lead - Righetti in the same interview actually highlighted the Giants developing a closer as a huge turning point for them - you can definitely lay some blame on the lack of bats and making the young pitchers more responsible for results than they should have been. Cain was destroyed by injuries later in his career too.

What I remember most at the time about Timmy local scouting reports when he got drafted was that he was an injury risk waiting to happen. He was of below average height and tried to compensate for the lack of arm torque with an absurd stride length. I forget what finally did him in, I'm guessing his hip/back?

Yeah his hip in theory, though Andrew Baggarly thinks his premature decline before this was due to losing flexibility with age and obviously having a delivery extremely dependent on being incredibly athletic. But he also wouldn’t have made it to the big leagues without that delivery. Baggarly wrote this in his magnificent piece about him:

Lincecum didn’t look like what a starting pitcher should look like and he didn’t throw the way a starting pitcher should throw. Scouts knew he didn’t fit the pattern. The Giants knew when they drafted him that his career probably wouldn’t last a decade. But they also knew the peak would be so, so high-impact. You just had to appreciate him while you had him, which is why the Giants didn’t hesitate to bring him to the big leagues when they did in 2007 — even though that decision cost them $10 million in arbitration down the road.

Non-exhaustive list of stadiums I want to visit based on the stadiums themselves:

Fenway
Wrigley
Oracle/whatever it’s called
PNC

Stadiums I would visit based on them being in places I would like to go to:

Yankee Stadium
Citi
T-Mobile/whatever it’s called now

Where my husband wants to visit based on places he wants to go:
-wherever the Marlins play
- Minute Maid
- Chase Field (“it has a pool and they play techno!”)

You can see my difficulty here.

Happy to host y'all in SF, I can usually pull pretty good seats unless the Dodgers are in town.

Fenway is the best. PNC is stunning.

San Diego's stadium I thought I'd hate but is really quite nice.

Wow! That’s so kind but honestly the expense of SF puts me off a bit. If we end up going to any of these places I’ll post about it here.

PNC looks great, heard Pittsburgh is nice to visit too. Really regret not visiting Wrigley last year (a whole three months before I got into baseball).

xp also Tracer Hand can confirm I am very annoying in person

i just went to wrigley for the first time a couple of weeks ago! my third (or fourth if you count "former") mlb park. game was 6:15, we got to our seats at 5:30 to get the pre-game "experience" of watching people roll in etc... and it got rain delayed until 9pm.

vibes were nerdier and more wholesome than expected (the concert the night before was drunk and vaguely aggressive, we were starting to get a weird vibe for the city for a sec! and 6 hours of potential drinking is never good!), wrigley is charmingly janky (i didn't have to sit in my seat, thankfully instead sitting a couple rows behind, because the roof was dumping all the rain water ON MY SEAT), 10/10 for vibes, 5/10 for comfort, 2/10 for ushers asking for our tickets in the 9th inning when we tried to get close to take a picture (we got to the 200s without a ticket anyway), 11/10 for the dj playing country roads at about 7:30 and all of the stadium singing along as we waited for what truly seemed like it was gonna be a rainout

also i was there with two of my fantasy leaguemates and me and one of them brokered a deal where i traded him dansby swanson before the game, felt kinda dirty trading a guy i was about to see play

100% incorrect it was a delight

unless I see someone wearing a Lincecum shirt in public!

xxp I love this, I really liked Chicago, 10/10 city, so would gladly put up with rain and whatever! Also Country Roads being a thing in stadiums fascinated me, Jarred Kelenic started doing it in Seattle as his walk up song to get people to sing along and in a recent game every time he got on base or did something they played it. Think it got played six times one evening.

the Mariners played “Take Me Home, Country Roads” every time Jarred Kelenic was at bat, again when his out at second base got overturned to be safe, and again at the end of the game

the crowd sang along every time lol

last night’s game was so fun https://t.co/tdawxQh2ti pic.twitter.com/ZialQ0frRn

— The Hottest Jerrica You Know 😘 (@JinkiesJerrica) June 28, 2023

Speaking of Wrigley, I did not know until just now that Cubs fans return opponents’ home run balls! Prompted by watching Sox-Cubs highlights and this fan’s amazing expression:

Straight Cas, homie. pic.twitter.com/7nRCNKNrDG

— Red Sox (@RedSox) July 15, 2023

The tradition, like so much else in the Cubs history, apparently traces its roots back to 1969, the year the Cubs collapsed in the last part of the season, blowing a 10-game lead over the Mets.

That season at Wrigley, Hank Aaron hit his 521st career home run, tying him with Ted Williams. The ball was caught by Ron Grousl, a 24-year-old bartender who was a denizen of the left-field bleachers.

Grousl said he offered the ball to Aaron after the game as the slugger was making his way to the Braves’ bus, but Aaron refused, apparently angry that fans in right field had dumped beer on him when he ventured near the wall.

The next season, when Aaron hit a home run at Wrigley Field and Grousl caught it, he said he was still so upset with Aaron’s rejection (and maybe everything else that happened in 1969) that he threw the ball back onto the field.

“I just thought: ‘Get this out of here. I don’t want it,’” Grousl, 70, said in a telephone interview. “I just threw it back.”
Asked if, after all these years, he regretted throwing back a home run hit by one of baseball’s greatest players, Grousl said: “No. I went to every game. I caught a lot of home run balls. You were just mad about the whole thing in ’69.”

SF native so biased but Oracle is an unbelievably beautiful ballpark. T-Mobile is also really fun and has a great atmosphere. Yankee stadium I went to recently and was a little disappointed by, though the subway going by in right field is neat.

NYS blows goats and u shd go to queens and/or coney before u consider going to the bronx

Yeah you are right Jimmy, I kind of wanted to see the short porch but I heard Citi was easier to get to and in an area with more to do?

xp I really want to, the arcade, the right field with the canoes, the iconic (?) Coke bottle, obvs has the bronze plates for Timmy’s no-hitters, but honestly the cost is the only thing tbh

Biased Met's fan here, but Citi is a great stadium with great food, plus Flushing is nearby with amazing Chinese food. It's easy to do both in one day.

Coors Field is a really great place to see a game, especially if you like home runs.

Plus, Denver is the bomb. It's transformed since I lived and worked there in the late 80s/early 90s, thanks in no small part to the ballpark.

xxp for some reason I didn’t realise you were a Mets fan…I’m really sorry

Coors is interesting to me, it’s just that Denver isn’t somewhere I think I would go, so I might never make it there, but yeah I know about the conditions and the Rockies mascot is legit. Then again, maybe I’ll have to see that fucked up airport in person?

Man I bet they were fun to watch during the Arenado/Story/LeMahieu years though.

Without a doubt the funniest profile description going
https://i.postimg.cc/6qjTH41c/IMG-5632.jpg

Why’s he wishing happy Valentine’s to their dog 💀
https://i.postimg.cc/PrJCCKPR/IMG-5633.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/ZKQCp3NK/IMG-5634.jpg

for a second i was like… “two beautiful girls? is he talking about…. her tits?”

Then again, maybe I’ll have to see that fucked up airport in person?

It's not worth the trip by itself, but the entire mythos surrounding the airport and its construction is hilarious. They even play into it; there is currently construction going on, and so there are signs up saying "Pardon the mess, the lizard people keep stealing our tools."

Then again, I just recently spoke to someone who swears she saw a group of handcuffed people being hustled off the plane on the tarmac there and . . . into a tunnel entrance. So who knows.

Fellas I’m sorry but I’m thoroughly into the Red Sox in a really shameful way 😔 I am reading about Ted Williams, I am fully Teddy Ballgame-pilled. DID U KNOW:

- he was half Mexican
- the red seat he hit is a matter of dispute as to whether it happened, supposedly no less a source than David Ortíz tried for it multiple times with an aluminium bat & couldn’t get anywhere close
- supposedly there was also a “wind tunnel” that aided the ball’s carry, if it did happen
- learning that one of the greatest hitters of all time got hated on by the Boston press, what the actual fuck

“Oh, I hated that Boston press,” Williams wrote in his autobiography, “My Turn At Bat.” “I can still remember the things they wrote, and they still make me mad. …

“I didn’t hit in the clutch. I wasn’t a team man. I was `jealous.’ I `alienated’ the players from the press. I didn’t hit to left field. I took so many bases on balls. I did this. I did that. And so on. And so unfair.”

I read "My Turn At Bat" a million times as a kid. It's not so much an autobiography as an extended Twitter rant before there was such a thing. There isn't another baseball book like it as far as I know.

It's true, the press hated his guts for so many years, and it was love/hate with the fans a lot of the time too (possibly spurred on by the treatment he received in the press). This is why his appearance at the 1999 All-Star Game in Boston was such a big deal and a completely unforgettable moment to everyone who saw it, Ted was finally vindicated and got the adulation he deserved.

It was also upsetting in the 90's, as a Ted fan and a Yankee hater, to see DiMaggio (wife beater and general egomaniac) and Mantle (perpetual drunk, adulterer) get treated as living legends while Ted was something of a niche topic for baseball hipsters to talk about. But by the summer of '99, both of them were dead and I think people realized that they should appreciate legends like Ted Williams while he was still around.

IIRC, when DiMaggio made public appearances, he insisted on being announced as the "greatest living ballplayer" because he was just that much of a prick. He would have been announced as such at the '99 ASG but he died earlier that year, so Williams got the spotlight all to himself and was announced as "the greatest hitter who ever lived" without any objections.

It was also upsetting in the 90's, as a Ted fan and a Yankee hater, to see DiMaggio (wife beater and general egomaniac) and Mantle (perpetual drunk, adulterer) get treated as living legends while Ted was something of a niche topic for baseball hipsters to talk about.

Who are the great baseball players who are well-regarded as people? Cal Ripken, Jr., maybe? Jim Palmer? Actually, I'm sure there are a lot, but the assholes seem to get the most attention.

Clemente, famously

Stan Musial, Ernie Banks, and Sandy Koufax, at or near the top of the list.

I was watching the dire Sox-Yankees game & broadcast was talking about Casas’s approach to the plate & hitting. I linked the Fangraphs article about his hitting approach in the Casas thread, but the broadcaster said he was a “new school hitter, believes in hitting on the planes like Ted Williams”.

I’ve never read the Art of Hitting and suspect it would be both too technical and difficult to understand for me (a person with subnormal spatial ability) but I was like, huh, didn’t know that was his approach cos I thought Williams was the standard-setter for modern hitters.

So anyway I googled ‘Ted Williams plane hitting’ and the results were both expected and funny.
https://i.postimg.cc/J47MxgCd/IMG-9340.jpg

Ha.

This piece must have been linked before somewhere but if you haven't read it, it's a doozy - https://www.esquire.com/sports/a5379/biography-ted-williams-0686/

This thread is almost a year old and I felt like writing…something…So why not write it here?

I got into baseball last year via the mediums of both insomnia and Ohtani. I spent most of last year in love with the 2010s Giants and Tim Lincecum remains my favourite, of course.

This year was different: I came into it intending to follow the Mariners and Giants but I watched a whole slew of teams, most notably the Red Sox who I took up watching when they were on one of their good streaks.

As an Irish person, watching loser teams doesn’t really bother me much. It’s what it is, unless you follow rugby or golf. I don’t have any geographical connection to any of the teams I follow.

This year has been tiring because although I’m trying to be a 162 person, I have followed every game. I read the box scores like I used to check in on twitter every morning. I’m excited for the hot stove season. I know not just the rosters but the front offices, the beefs, a lot of the lore. I guess I’m a fan, in the sense of the abbreviated true meaning of that term.

However, I’m not complaining. The past year has been very difficult for me and my family for reasons I can’t post publicly but some of you know. Baseball takes up time and space in my life that I might otherwise spend tied in knots about this. It distracts. It makes me happy, it rarely makes me sad. I love when I watch Brayan Bello’s changeup dip like it’s Timmy’s. I love when I see a reliever come into a jam and get out of it. I love when a batter grinds and grinds at an AB and you see the pitcher visibly frustrated. I especially love how, even if that AB doesn’t pay off for the batter, his teammate is likely going to come in and benefit from it. I loved watching the Red Sox-Astros game where Framber Valdez was dealing, Triston Casas struck out, and he went straight back to the dugout steps and told Justin Turner about something he noticed in the AB - and JT got the first hit of the game in his next time up.

All these things are very small, but the season is so long, and through it you can see players develop, not always for the better. You can see how teams that play each other regularly adapt and respond. You can see the duels between batters and pitchers that know each other well and how tense they can get. I love texting my friends who watch the games when a pitcher gets a great hitter out, or gets out of a bases loaded jam and we always say “That was a big out!” I haven’t followed a team properly in so long, not since my beloved Man Utd extinguished any remaining love I had for them by bringing back Ronaldo and through the Mason Greenwood shitshow. It’s nice to have something to follow along with other people and to be able to talk about it, and for it not to be that deep. It’s just ball.

The philosophy of the game is quite different from other sports I’ve followed. More than anything else, baseball is a grind. I was talking to my parents about this months ago and they were genuinely shocked by how many games are played. You hear players and managers talk about “flushing it”, “that’s 162” and so on - you have to move on. You can’t dwell in this game. And you can’t get in your own head about it or the game will pull you down fast. I found that attitude really helpful in dealing with my own problems this year, and perhaps explains both why I like baseball so much beyond all the stuff that happens in the games.

I made the thread about Triston Casas cos I saw this young player with his painted nails and thought, “wow that is a tough fucking thing to do in a sport like this, fair play to the young fella.” I still think this, and many of the people I admire in life tend to be people who have the courage to be themselves or speak out for what they believe in. Lincecum, Votto, Casas - all occupy a similar space in my mind. And there are more players like this all the time and I think it benefits the game.

To see the parameters of the sport shift according to the young players who are always coming in and changing things has been fascinating to me too. The new rules have encouraged the running game like nothing else. Pitch clock keeps it moving. It’s the philosophy of 162 transplanted to the field of play itself and it’s breathed new enjoyment into this season for me. That’s obviously a big part of why I’ve been able to watch so many games this year - if they are under three hours then it’s no hardship at all.

I wrote all this and I don’t really even know what I said so if you want a tl;dr it’s that baseball has been a huge addition to my life and has got me through some very bad times and for that I’m extremely grateful.

gyac, I (we?) are here for it!

One thing (and perhaps I'm showing my age here) is that I always opt for the audio (radio) feed as it allows you to keep one ear in during the 162 slog yet maintain some semblance of productivity (work, chores, parenting, etc.) that video does not allow. Also attending the games in-person can be a wholly different immersive experience but for me that's just down to a handful of games a year at home and even less when on the road (except in Japan because nothing compares to the NPB game experience).

The Irish-RedSox connection is vast and makes a ton of sense, especially for immigrants (speaking as a great-great-grandchild of one who made it from Ulster to Boston but ended up in Mississippi as that was where he could find work, picking cotton).

I admire your passion and dedication, your energy is a very welcome spirit to this board.

Thank you Steve! I appreciate this sweet post.

So I watch all my games via the MLB app cast to my TV mainly, and when you do that you can’t select the radio feed. Obviously when I watch Giants games I’m hoping for Kruk and Kuip anyway.

So the Red Sox being an east coast team actually means I have been able to watch them more as well. That’s a lot more important to me on a simple practical level than the diaspora connection. There’s plenty of Irish in SF as well!

best wishes gyac. I v much enjoy your baseball posts maybe even more so because I don't watch baseball anymore and have never done twitter so you getting really into it via ilx has allowed me to kinda reconnect with it in a background kinda way.

Thought of another good one for the "great baseball players who are well-regarded as people" question: Willie Stargell. I think he was revered by just about everyone who played with him, and probably by most everyone who played against him. Posnanski has a good column a couple of weeks ago about his idea for the Willie Stargell Award: "So I guess I would want to give the Willie Stargell Award to a player whose 'leadership, presence and ability to rise to the moment are comparable to the qualities exhibited by Willie Stargell in 1979.'" It'd basically be a parallel award to the MVP, but where character and narrative do count for a lot (which they're not necessarily supposed to in the actual MVP voting).

https://open.substack.com/pub/joeposnanski/p/introducing-the-willie-stargell-award?r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

I mean, c'mon.

https://i.postimg.cc/7ZCrr5ST/willie.jpg

otm

<3 Pops

Good post Gyac. Relate to a lot of that as a relatively new (2016) international follower.

I need to radio feed more. It’s my go to if I’m driving while a ballgame is on (as happened today) and it’s just a whole nother way to experience it! I (sadly) don’t get/take too many opportunities to use my visual imagination these days, but those radio calls let me see the runner on the third base with the umpire beside him, the fans in the stand and the dodger stadium center field space with its 76 signs and tarps covering the seats on the inner edges (which I just learnt were put there as when Randy Johnson pitched, his particular arm slot made the ball hard to see with those particular center field seats). In the mariners/dodgers game today, there was an infield hit in extra innings with a runner on third. The runner was caught in a run down, touched the plate but ran outside the base path in the process. The suspense of the radio commentator having to figure out what was going on himself before relaying it made it far more entertaining to listen to than to watch. That extra separation, being told a story, verbally, that is presently happening is a unique joy.

Anyway, baseball is great and makes my life much better and today I learnt about another field that had to change its centre field backdrop to benefit batters vision

best wishes gyac. I v much enjoy your baseball posts maybe even more so because I don't watch baseball anymore and have never done twitter so you getting really into it via ilx has allowed me to kinda reconnect with it in a background kinda way.

Who are the great baseball players who are well-regarded as people? Cal Ripken, Jr., maybe? Jim Palmer? Actually, I'm sure there are a lot, but the assholes seem to get the most attention.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, September 12, 2023 11:34 AM (five days ago)

if anybody has anything bad to say about tony gwynn, i don't wanna hear it!

Wonderful post gyac. Better than 99% of baseball writing I've read anywhere this year. It got me thinking about how a baseball season lets you get to know players on a level that I've not felt with other sports. It's the length of the seasons, sure, the ups and downs, the slumps it seems they'll never get out of, the joyousness of the clutch play, all of which pretty much everybody who plays a good number of games will get to experience in one way or another cause there are just so many goddamn games, so no matter who you follow, teams or players, you'll get taken on this ride with them.

But there's something else too, there's a personal side and a camaraderie that you see in the dugout that I dunno, I just don't really recall seeing Premiere league players hamming it up with each other on the sidelines, or NFL dudes. You get a little of this in the NBA. Maybe it's because there's so much downtime, even for starting players, there's a sense that you're all locked in this dream with each other together and you might as well make the most of it. Endless handshakes and in-jokes and superstitions and shared moments. And I love how you've picked up on all this stuff, and all the kinds of bits of personal background that people like Vin Scully and Joe Castiglione were/are masters of, eg which racist high school did this kid attend, what restaurant are those rookie teammates hanging out at, who moved out of his family home because his parents were such assholes, which team had the best clubhouse chemistry. If you wrote a Pop Bitch for baseball i would sign up for the Patreon.

This post almost brought me to tears! I think I probably am like that overused Moneyball line in being romantic about baseball! Thank you to you for sending me stuff throughout the year and being my Red Sox enabler. Our big boy will rake again!

Grant Brisbee & Andrew Baggarly both wrote different pieces about Lincecum that really got to the heart of how I feel about my favourites doing well & more broadly the joys of sports fandom, I guess.

Brisbee:

If this all seems overwrought, well, yeah. You should either pick one athlete who makes you absolutely lose your mind like the Beatles just landed at JFK, or you should question if sports are really for you. And once you get to that point, a Hall of Fame doesn’t matter. It’s like your favorite movie winning an Oscar. It makes for a neat section on the Wikipedia page, but it doesn’t make you enjoy the movie more.

Here is one final element: my favorite person had to have a good heart. He had to be easy to love. He had to form an endearing and durable connection with fans. He had to be someone people wanted to read about.

In 1994, Buck Showalter, then the manager of the Yankees, complained about the way the Seattle Mariners’ star player, Ken Griffey Jr., wore his hat backward and his “shirttails” untucked. Showalter said it showed a lack of “respect for the game.” For this, he was booed during a road trip to Seattle. Griffey told reporters that Showalter was “jealous because he doesn’t have a 24-year-old who can carry my jock.” Griffey became one of the most marketable stars in the league; two years later, Nike ran an advertising campaign premised on a Griffey run for president that prominently featured his backward hat.

The Griffey showdown was one in a long line of coded racial arguments, minor battles between two types: the “standard” white player and his nonwhite foil. The archetype of the white baseball player has always been a study in negative space. He does not flip his bat after home runs. He does not insult the hard-working fans with talk about politics. He never takes more than one day at a time. As a result, he cannot exist without a foil to embody all those “flashy” or “hot­headed” or “provocative” things he is not. The foils, of course, have generally been black. But as the demographics of the sport have changed, so, too, has this dynamic.

good posts, good thread

Baseball on radio is the best. I remember my grandfather's deep trance as he listened to the Twins on his transistor radio's earbud, lying on the couch with his eyes closed. Was he asleep? Following the game? Dreaming about it? All I could tell was that he had attained a state of contentment too deep to be disturbed by small children playing in the same room.

Born in 1900, Grandpa would probably be a little disoriented if he could be presented with a 2023 Vikings game televised in 4K, but I don't think he'd detect many changes in baseball on the radio. Some things are timeless.

Unordered list of less common baseball terminology that have made the jump into my daily usage. NB some of these might not be baseball exclusive/might be American sports twitter terminology but I learned them through baseball, so.

Lit up (which I pronounce as per the people of my region “li’up”) - everyone knows this one, I don’t need to explain it.

Glazed/to glaze - you see this on the comments of the official mlb Instagram and Twitter all the time. Refers to lavishing positive attention on someone that really doesn’t need it for a minor achievement. Usually used for stuff like MLB posting six times about Shohei in an hour or something.
https://i.postimg.cc/sf5qZyRF/IMG-9832.jpg

Inverted commas (pejorative) - I have no idea of the etymology of this but it’s incredibly rude. Basically used to disrespect a player, eg:

I can’t believe we’re getting no-hit by “Chris Flexen”

Nice piece of hitting, a - broadcasters use this all the time and it’s such a weird little phrase I use this all the time now approvingly. I used it in a voice note to my mother and she was like, “what the fuck are you talking about”.

Man knows ball (pejorative?) - usually in reference to someone who generally does NOT know ball but who has had a rare good take. Kind of like a tip of the cap but less sincere. The most famous example of this is:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1727DVakAIomQg?format=jpg&name=small

Playing backyard ball with my kid, I used the terms "duck snort" and "can of corn" and when I explained I learned them from listening to "hawk" on TV it didn't help his mystification.

YES! Can of corn I hear a lot!

"Bag of balls" has always been one of my favorites, as in, "they traded him for a couple of prospects and a bag of balls."

Those prospects, of course, are inevitably slapdick.

I always loved "worm-burner" for that particular type of grounder

A buddy of mine played golf once with Jim Rice, who explained what a "slump buster" was.

I knew that term already. I did not expect it from the cranky old man who’s on every Red Sox broadcast!

Oh yeah, he was quite effusive about it.

eyewash is a good one

I read the article about that the other day!

maybe not strictly a baseball thing but I associate it with pre 80s baseball: calling cigarettes/cigars “schmegs”, “heaters”, etc

Keith Hernandez used to call sucking down a cig as fast as possible in the dugout tunnel a “heater”.

I think they use “heater” for fastballs.

that too.

I also like “cookie”

Throw him the dark one.

“Spits on it” in reference to a batter taking a ball. “Max muncy spits on that ball”.

Ribeye is a favourite too.

I feel well at home as an Aussie with Baseballs need to shorten absolutely everything.

Replacement level ______ is good for any given schmuck you have been assigned to work with

• (Daniel Stern) "So, do you hate baseball?"
• (Helen Slater) "No, I like baseball. I just never understood how you guys could spend so much time discussing it. I mean, I've been to games, but I don't memorize who played third base for Pittsburgh in 1960."
• (Billy Crystal) "Don Hoak."

me: so what exactly are your dad’s thoughts on Wilyer Abreu?

"looks like the real deal"

yknow dad stuff

Does he mean like as a player or he’s a big thicc boy who can swing it

Please also tell me any players your dad doesn’t like

Side note, have we discussed the way scouting reports talk about players?! I never could have guessed how accurate the old guys were in Moneyball.

TH you should be able to guess who most of these guys are on the current RS roster:

1.

Run: Average speed. Moves very well for a catcher and could steal a handful of bases.

Well-built with a large lower half. Young face, but physically mature for his age. Room to fill out in his upper body. Not a great athlete, although surprisingly athletic for his size. Will need to watch his conditioning as he matures.

Dual United States and Mexican citizen. Drafted in the 26th round in 2014. Spent time in the Mexican League in 2019-2021. Also spent time with the independent Winnipeg Goldeyes of the American Association and Tigres de Aragua of the Venezuelan Winter League. Drove an Uber to make ends meet. Made his MLB debut with Seattle in 2022.

Strong, imposing frame. Thick, fully developed lower half. Will have to work to maintain body and athleticism, but has a strong work ethic and long-term concerns on that issue are minimal. Very long limbs. Has done a good job with conditioning early in his career. Arrived at 2020 Alternate Training Site with a more toned physique.

Small, athletic. Very twitchy. Has grown since he entered the organization, but still is relatively slight of frame. Does not have a frame to add significant weight, but is sneaky strong for his size.

Tall, strong frame. Quick-twitch athlete. Athleticism stands out on the field. Has added significant strength in his upper body since he joined the system, and specifically was noticeably stronger when he reported to the Alternate Training Site in 2020.

And their thick, fully-developed lower halves.

Lolllll, I know, I read that, and I was like…What the actual fuck

I was looking for an old Buster Posey scouting report that criticised the size of his ass but alas can’t find it now

1. Wong
2. Casas
3. Duran
4. Bello
5. Rafaela
6. Duran

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HB1xDGlJ14

I'd say Wong has above average speed tho

How did you guess Duran for two of them 😭 1,5 & 6 are all correct, 2 is Devers and 3 is Bernie

4, ofc, is
https://i.postimg.cc/T2C6nH9R/IMG-7046.jpg

Bello’s scouting report is hilariously wrong for your guess

Physical Description: Lanky right-hander with an athletic frame. Still somewhat on the skinny side, but has added noticeable muscle. Some projection remaining, but will always be on the thin side.

Ah whoops

It's late

Damn that picture should come with matching oven mitts cause Casas is SMOKIN

xpost Bello is decidedly not on the thin side imo. His forearms are bigger than Pedro's ever were. But I'm going to stop there otherwise I'm going to sound like these fuckin horse trader scouts.

https://legacy.baseballprospectus.com/ds/

Bello is pretty lean and muscular, he’s not like Sale but he still looks relatively slim for an SP I guess? He’s bigger than Pedro for sure

Thank you Jimmy!

I like how they backhandedly compliment/insult catchers

Runs well…For a catcher

Moves well…For a catcher

Unique athleticism for a catcher.

99% chance my first MLB park I visit is pnc in April 🤗

^Mookie 2 thred

that is very exciting - are u just in pit or do u have time to do like, cleveland too

I messaged him about it already and will be taking all his recommendations!

Pittsburgh has aiui a lot of museums with dinosaurs which is like top of my list visiting a city so I don’t think Cleveland this time, but if you want to sell me on it I’m all ears.

The Science of Hitting:

There is one very important side effect—a team effect, actually —of an individual exercising this kind of discipline his first time up, and the point seems to be lost on so many people in baseball. If you’ve made that pitcher pitch, if you’ve made him throw four or five or maybe six or seven times, right away, and if the batter behind you does the same thing, and all nine guys in the lineup do it, the pitcher will have pitched the equivalent of half a game in three or four innings. The effect should be telling: He will probably be out of there, worn out, by the sixth or seventh inning.

Compound the situation and say it’s a real hot day, and he’s a little wild and he walks a couple guys. He could be on the ropes even sooner.

But how often do you see it happen? A guy starts off wild, throws a couple in the dirt, then the batter swings at the first strike and pops up. Then the next guy does the same thing: two or three bad pitches, and then a ground-out, then a couple more bad pitches, and the batter swings at the nearest pitch available and fouls out. Instead of wearing him out, you’ve helped him out. A pitcher is lucky to face such dumb hitters. Too many hitters boot the ball in just this manner: They don’t make the pitcher pitch.

I’ve heard batters try to argue the point. They say, “Well, I can’t do that, I can’t be that selective because I miss too many balls.” A perfect example is Frank Howard. Frank says he can’t hit well with two strikes because he misses too many. Well, the ones he is missing are the ones in a tough spot or the ones he has been fooled on and shouldn’t even try to hit before two strikes anyway.

The fact is that when a Howard gets his pitch he does just about as good a job on it as anybody in the American League—when he gets his pitch. He might not be able to handle as big an area as, say, Frank Robinson, but in his area he is as good as anybody. The best hitters can take care of the whole strike zone, but then all have certain spots they hit better in. If you start going out of your area, you’re just helping the pitcher. The very best pitchers would have a hard time throwing the ball consistently in a foot square. That’s about their limit. You make them work, make them throw curves, fast balls, sliders, and they will eventually miss and give you the opening you want.

So: Make the pitcher pitch.

99% chance my first MLB park I visit is pnc in April 🤗

A man so fiercely modest and private that while at the University of Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship, he didn't tell his parents back in Brooklyn that he was also on the baseball team. The man whose mother requested one of the first copies of his 1966 autobiography, Koufax, so she could find out something about her son. ("You never told me anything," she said to him.)

"When Hideo Nomo was getting really, really big, Sandy told me, 'He'd better learn to like room service,'" O'Malley says. "That's how Sandy handled the attention." Koufax almost never left his hotel room in his final two seasons for the Dodgers. It wasn't enough that he move to a creaky, charmingly flawed farmhouse in Maine with a leaky basement, he quickly bought up almost 300 acres adjacent to it.

It was this bad: Koufax couldn't straighten his left arm--it was curved like a parenthesis. He had to have a tailor shorten the left sleeve on all his coats. Use of his left arm was severely limited when he wasn't pitching. On bad days he'd have to bend his neck to get his face closer to his left hand so that he could shave. And on the worst days he had to shave with his right hand. He still held his fork in his left hand, but sometimes he had to bend closer to the plate to get the food into his mouth.

His elbow was shot full of cortisone several times a season. His stomach was always queasy from the cocktail of anti-inflammatories he swallowed before and after games, which he once said made him "half-high on the mound." He soaked his elbow in an ice bath for 30 minutes after each game, his arm encased in an inner tube to protect against frostbite. And even then his arm would swell an inch. He couldn't go on like this, not when his doctors could not rule out the possibility that he was risking permanent damage to his arm.

if you foresee visiting more parks in your future i think ballpark stamping is really fun - https://mlbballparkpassport.com/

$76 + shipping for the passport is kind of steep but they sell a more modest one without bells and whistles for $22. it's a one man passion project so part of the high cost is to cover licensing fees from MLB. also in the grand scheme of how much souvenirs and concessions cost at a park it's not a terrible price... also apparently if you buy one at a stadium teams put their own markup on it, i hear it costs like $100 at fenway.

other souvenirs to get - customer service at parks will give you a 'first game certificate' for free, generally. scorecards. souvenir team baseballs, mini baseball bats, pins. soft serve in a collectible hat. collectible beer cup. unfortunately parks don't really do ticket stubs or programs anymore...

Yeah I don’t know, it might be a bit of an ask with not living in the US. It’s a really nice idea though, if you went to games regularly it would be really worth doing.

Happy you're going to get to a game, gyac!

Finished The Science of Hitting! Ok, it’s not very long but I’m very distracted by Mario Wonder and sleeping.

Things I learned about Ted Williams & his thoughts on hitting:

- good hitters “guess” the pitch coming - based on previous experience. You see this all the time during games now - they’ll say “he was waiting on that fastball” or similar. This was apparently not widely accepted at the time.
- “75% of an outfielders job is to hit.” Is this because Teddy was an ordinary fielder at best?
- DON’T SWING AT THE FIRST PITCH. He says even if you take a strike first time out, you learn by that strike how the pitcher is throwing and how his stuff is looking and can adjust accordingly…If you’re a good hitter, that is.
- a good swing should be from the hips up. I think a lot of guys must do this nowadays going by how big some of their thighs are and how hard they hit the ball, but Teddy knew about torque!
- he could not hit the knuckleball, at all.
- he was like, I respected Ty Cobb but he was a slap hitter and his swing was about half the size of mine
- (related to previous): Ty Cobb was trying to give him advice on how to hit with a shift on, Ted in addition to the above is like staring into the distance and thinking of all the Boston baseball writers who hated on him for not going oppo, and like the meme, Ted is like “none of these people knew I couldn’t hit the opposite way!!!!”
- anyway he did eventually learn to hit oppo
- his most crank opinion is SWITCH HITTING ISN’T REAL, USE YOUR DOMINANT HAND
- to which I reply: watch these swings, frozen head Ted

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRa-ir8mpw8
- make good use of time outs!

But yeah, a good read, I think I mentioned that the impetus for me to look into this book was this very good Fangraphs article with redacted player name. It made me wonder how much of modern hitting is based on his approach.

re t. ballgame’s fielding, i’ve seen him referred to as ‘a statue’ in left

i don’t think he’s wrong though

Yeah you’re obviously not going to give too much of a shit about the glove when he can hit like that

it's amazing how he lost almost five peak-era seasons to military service and never missed a beat upon his return from both wars. i think if anything TW is vastly underrated vs what his accomplishments were. you'd be looking at a player with 700+ HR and 2500+ rbi if he'd never gone to war, which is probably a fairly accurate extrapolation.

Not sure if you saw it, but NTBT had a good post upthread about this!

things I learned about in baseball this week/how i learned to stop worrying and love baseball

I’m watching the 2004 ALCS documentary 4 Days in October and I hadn’t realised that this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQyY-azd2vk

Was from that series.

Whoever cut the explanation “A-Rod says it’s just his running motion!” to the shot of A-Rod doing a stiff-armed running motion to the umpires is a genius. I laughed for a solid thirty seconds.

yes!! that series had everything

Why the fuck did Pedro pitch in game 7

yeah that was weird. i don’t remember the reasoning. boston was up big. who knows. maybe he begged tito.

What I remember about that series was working a job at the time with a Yankees fan during the alcs, which was on the TV in the kitchen every night. And after that 19-8 shellacking he was really feeling his oats, just crowing about the new Yankee dynasty. Little did he know of course that that was basically the last day of the Yankee dynasty. With every Yankees loss, he withdrew a little bit more until that Johnny Damon grand slam and...

https://media.tenor.com/6C-6YhMqTPYAAAAC/the-simpsons-heart-broken.gif

second best moment in baseball history behind Willie Mays making The Catch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsuYIN7y8Ew

That 2003 series ended less satisfyingly than 2004 but it sticks out more in my memory because I'd never seen cops lining up against the walls during the game (near the end of game 7 IIRC) before.

lol. I had no knowledge of the Damon grand slam before watching this series so when he gets thrown out at the plate to start the game, I was like, oh ok cos I already knew the outcome…little did I know.

The Ortíz slash line for that series is filth 😮‍💨

.387/.457/.742, OPS of 1.199

I was on baseball reference looking that up and then I was like, Manny didn’t really seem to do much that series, wonder if he had a better WS?

Looked further up the page and see that he was the WS MVP so I guess it turned out fine

That 2003 series ended less satisfyingly than 2004 but it sticks out more in my memory because I'd never seen cops lining up against the walls during the game (near the end of game 7 IIRC) before.

honestly i remember where i was in 2004, talking to my dad long-distance on the phone, saying to him look, i know it looks bad, we’re down 3-0 in the series, but if we can just win this one then we got pedro, we got schilling, and then it’s game 7 and anything can happen

a lot of people forget the key contributions of curtis “the mechanic” leskanic to win game 4 (in fact his name is missing from the back of my commemorative t-shirt from that year, though everyone else on the postseason roster is there). his 1 2/3 innings of shutout ball in game 4 were the last pitches he’d ever throw in the majors.

something i didn’t know about the mechanic until now

His cousin Katrina Leskanich was the lead singer of Katrina and the Waves, known for their 1985 hit "Walking on Sunshine."[3]

My discovery of old gamedays on mlb.com leads me to once again conclude that the universal DH is a crime

https://i.postimg.cc/KzYs4ZLC/IMG-1404.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/TPfsMjPd/IMG-1405.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/zvbtS0xj/IMG-1407.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/fyGHHmFh/IMG-1408.jpg

Impressed with the Zito single already but hitting young Verlander’s high velo 😮‍💨

you know that felt good

https://i.postimg.cc/KjZ6tRjN/IMG-1417.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjOeJTsKDE8

lol most “excuse me” swing ever

EXCUSE ME FOR RAKING

LOOK AT THAT OPPO POWER

I was going back through this thread looking for classic games to watch so I’m collating the links here for winter

1975 WS game 6 recommended by clemenza - this video has far better quality than some much later games.

1986 WS game 6 - recommended by PBKR

Red Sox-Yankees 1st July 2004 - recommended by PBKR

2003 ALCS - recommended by PBKR

2004 ALCS -recommended by PBKR

ALDS game 2 2007 (CLE-NYY, midges) -recommended by PBKR

1995 ALDS (NYY-SEA) - games 1 2 3 4 5 - recommended by PBKR

2011 WS game 6 - recommended by clemenza

2016 WS game 7 - recommended by NoTimeBeforeTime

2015 ALDS game 5 (Toronto-Texas) - recommended by mookieproof

1988 WS game 1 - recommended by mookieproof

1993 WS game 4 - recommended by clemenza

Kerry Wood 20 strikeout game - recommended by Jimmy the Mod

Let me tell you, when there’s an accidental space between the link and the = in one of those bb links? Not a good time

Have you ever seen footage of Craig Counsell's batting stance when he was a player?

here's a fun one:

Rangers defeat Orioles 30-3

xp I have not…Hunter Pence esque?

I will add your game to my list omar cos I watched game 7 2016 yesterday and I have thoughts about that but I need to finish hoovering my house first

https://www.mlb.com/video/backstory-of-counsell-s-stance-c1869982183

I’m speechless, I couldn’t have predicted that in a million years

2016 World Series, Cubs - Indians, Guardians, ugh, Indians

I read the story of this game 7 in SI a while ago and although that detailed out the key happenings of this in detail, that was a whole 162 games ago for me and I’d forgotten. So I was watching thinking, k this goes to extras but how? Hendricks was cruising, the Cubs were grinding out runs here and there, and then…they take Hendricks out early.

He looked how I felt watching it seven years later: like he wanted to kill someone. Insane if they took him out an inning early and ended up getting walked off.

I’d forgotten how many star names were on the rosters - a very young Lindor! A very young Kyle Schwarber! A baby faced Jose Ramirez! Drone injury clown Trevor Bauer! so I had some nice moments of recognition throughout. Anyway back to the game. I was trying to remember how the lead slipped away and then Jon Lester came in.

Anyway JL is a Sox/Cubs legend and yeah…that wild pitch off David Ross’s head? That felt like something that could only happen to the Cubs, and it did. But after that they pulled the score back to 6-3 and I was like, ok, where is this going?

Aroldis Chapman is coming out of the bullpen?

Yeah. I’m sure his blown saves are like actually less than his converted but at the same time you’re like…how the fuck does this guy have a job? And the Cubs ended up using three catchers in this game. I didn’t even know you could carry three on the roster.

Spent most of the ninth wondering where is this rain delay? And then it happened. Obviously I knew how it turns out but it felt when Cleveland didn’t walk it off in the end of the 9th that they weren’t going to, because that and the rain were a huge break for the Cubs.

What a thrilling double from Zobroist, though. The man went 0-4 and still stepped to the plate in the biggest moment of his life and got it done. NOT TRYING TO DO TOO MUCH. Rizzo freaking out on third as he realised they’ve scored the go ahead run and the inning is still going is one of the most endearing things I’ve ever seen in a game.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE_1ShFSrY0

That’s got to be the biggest Cubs hit of all time, right? None of these guys should ever pay for anything in Chicago again. This also made me realise that Rizzo hasn’t been back to Wrigley since he was traded. I looked up the Yankees schedule for next year and it’s finally happening - in September. I hope he has a healthy year next season, but also, fuck the Yankees for jeopardising his health.

Bryzzo getting the final out was perfect. I only saw 2023 Kris Bryant play and he was incredible. What can you say? But his Cubs years are eternal.

Going to post this before I lose this post (happened once already!) and then paste the notes I took on my phone

Notes:

- Schwarber being ruled safe after bad Kluber fielding - lmao what even was that? Disastrous.
- Kluber era under 1 entering this game (!) - this was prime Kluber (and it made me sad watching him a bit, having watched his Red Sox non-season this year). He was pitching well but they got him.
- Rizzo to Fowler: WE NEEDED THAT - lol Dexter Fowler’s first inning homer. Rizzo was so much the heart and soul of this team. You can see it a mile off and seven years out.
- Kyle Schwarber stole a base?! - lol
- Jose Ramirez the best hitter “out of nowhere” - I was like, wtf, but then I looked up his br page and his 2015 was horrific.
- Ramirez pickoff - this was cruel but funny
- Schwarber TOOTBLAN - some guys can try for two, but not everyone can or should!
- Bryant slide at home - this was pure magic, what a perfect bit of baserunning
- “irregardless of what happens on the pitching front” - Smoltz 😑
- David Ross micd up talking to Rizzo (Rizzo: I’M AN EMOTIONAL WRECK RIGHT NOW) - this was the cutest omg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQKhf--Gxw0
- Bryant scoring from 1st (more baserunning masterclass)

Also the intentional walks used to be a joke? They used to make the guy stand there at the plate while they threw four balls?????

We have letters from my grandfather (lifelong Cubs fan) he wrote home from Sicily and Italy while fighting in WW2 where he says, "maybe this is the Cubs year?", so it was so awesome that he got to see them win it all at age 98. I wasn't a Cubs fan but I was rooting so hard for them that series for his sake. Even my Mom stayed up to watch Game 7 and she dngaf about baseball.

That’s incredible. I’m so happy he got to see it!

There's definitely an entire generation of Chicago baseball fans whose parents or grandparents never saw their preferred hometown team win a World series title. The White Sox won in 1917 and then finally in 2005, and of course the Cubs hadn't won in 108 years when they won in 2016. My dad's mom, a Northside Cubs fan, was born in 1911 and died in 1994. My mom's parents, southside Sox fans, born in 1918 and 1920, died in '98 and '99.

Also the intentional walks used to be a joke? They used to make the guy stand there at the plate while they threw four balls?????

― mojo dojo casas house (gyac), Monday, November 6, 2023 4:57 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

it was silly that they had to stand there but if not for that we never would have had this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6YzVvtxoaY

lol, was that considered against the unwritten rules

Or this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR0jGrfQCu4

That was the trade-off: 100 years, 10,000 boring IBB, two memorable highlights.

Also the intentional walks used to be a joke? They used to make the guy stand there at the plate while they threw four balls?????

And we liked it that way!

We have letters from my grandfather (lifelong Cubs fan) he wrote home from Sicily and Italy while fighting in WW2 where he says, "maybe this is the Cubs year?", so it was so awesome that he got to see them win it all at age 98. I wasn't a Cubs fan but I was rooting so hard for them that series for his sake. Even my Mom stayed up to watch Game 7 and she dngaf about baseball.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR), Monday, November 6, 2023 2:23 PM bookmarkflaglink

Love this so much

They used to make the guy stand there at the plate while they threw four balls?????

was there ever an instance of a catcher being busted for stepping out from behind home plate too soon?

5.02 (a): the catcher must stand with both feet within the lines of the catcher’s box until the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand.
PENALTY: Balk

the ritual of the intentional walk is so good, hate they got rid of it

OTM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJBMm70kRgo

PLAY THE GAME

Bruce Bochy w/ Murph & Mac on former Giants reaching out following World Series win:

"Buster sent me a nice message, as Bum did too. Man, I tell ya, Timmy is one you don't hear from as much and for him to send one...Like I said it was overwhelming." 🥲

— KNBR (@KNBR) November 7, 2023

Indeed. Miss Bochy so hard right now, what a legend

His first boys texting him like that especially knowing how much he loves them all (was Matt Cain too busy though? Cmon…)

tbf Cain's arm still doesn't work after that 285 pitch CG.

Weak sauce, pretty sure Cain never threw as many pitches in a cg as Lincecum (148!)

Good baseball names I have seen on my daily trips around BR:

- Bullet Joe Bush
- Jimmy Outlaw
- Hank Shanks
- Bugs Raymond
- Snake Henry
- Sack Morgan
- Big Train Jackson
- Big Boy Davis
- Hooks Wiltse
- Rube Marguard
- Smead Jolley

Reading about the Ichiro inside the park home run at the ASG

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiwO2BjcweU

Chris Young, the 6’10” former basketball player from Princeton, was making the first and only All-Star appearance of his career, and his nerves might have shown in the fifth inning when he took the mound and issued a leadoff walk to Baltimore’s Brian Roberts.

Ichiro already was 2-for-2 when he batted with one out. Would he try to bunt for a hit? Maybe slap a single to the left side? Instead, he faced a power pitcher and tried to supply his own. Young threw a first-pitch fastball and Ichiro turned on it, driving the ball over Griffey’s head and toward the right-field arcade. Griffey had played enough games at AT&T Park to know that whenever the ball hit the bricks beyond the sixth archway, it almost always kicked toward center field. He backed off and drifted toward center, like a power forward getting ready to box out for a defensive rebound. But the ball had other ideas.

The drive glanced off the seventh archway, and under normal circumstances, it would have taken a dead bounce off the chain-link fence. But the league installed additional signage in the form of plastic sheeting that was wrapped tightly around the bottom of the archways. Ichiro’s ball hit the signage and instead of deflecting toward center, it kicked hard right. A phrase flashed through Griffey’s mind.
“It’s a four-letter word,” he said, “and ‘oh’ is in front of it.”

Third-base coach Ron Washington said he never had a doubt about waving Ichiro home with the first inside-the-park home run in All-Star Game history. Ichiro didn’t even need to run full speed or slide. “Noooo, no, no,” Washington said. “That was riding a bike over there.… He ended up walking into home plate. There was no doubt. You’re looking at a guy who plays as hard as he can and he wasn’t going to cheat himself. If you’ve got any kind of speed, you should be able to make it in there. That wasn’t just normal speed. You had exceptional speed right there.” Griffey, upon returning to the NL dugout, made eye contact with Bonds and they shrugged at each other. All those asymmetrical quirks of the ballpark, the ones that Magowan insisted upon during the design stage, created one of the most thrilling moments in All-Star Game history. Ichiro, with a straight face, joked that he felt the slightest bit of disappointment. He thought the ball had a chance to clear the arcade.

among the pitchers to throw a no-hitter in the pacific coast league are:

Sea Lion Hall (twice)
Red Toner
Bill Malarkey
Skeeter Fanning (twice)
Suds Sutherland
Death Valley Jim Scott
Tiny Bonham
Cotton Pippen
Kewpie Dick Barrett
Red Munger
Bubba Church
Luis 'Foreign Object' Tiant

― mookieproof, Wednesday, January 13, 2016 9:51 PM (seven years ago)

Rube marquand was a dude

Why is no one spelling his name right? it's Rube Marquard

Legendary entry in "The Glory Of Their Times" obv

give this clip some time once the replay angles start showing up, some eye-opening things abound lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjOeJTsKDE8

Steve Shasta I have covid and my brain is working at like 5% capacity, what am I missing here :(

Miggy's flat-footed attempt at fielding is something but Delmon Young's throw-in is an all-time WS highlight. These were the 2 best teams in baseball ~10 years ago.

Feel better soon, try to get Paxlovid if it's still available to you.

now see normally when my female Red Sox friend sends me a clip with a caption like that it’s usually to highlight that some player’s dick is visible through their pants - none of these morons wear cups anymore

xp oh I’m fine, I’m just full of mucus, we’re really in bad cold territory

ty though :)

Feel better. Here are two quality names I found in my baseball reference travels:
Jack Glasscock
And possible time travelling Eminem alias, Slim Sallee

I found out thanks to good baseball Twitter user Brent Rooker that all players get their uniforms tailored to fit them and this has both been glaringly obvious and also incredibly revelatory? It explains why the uniforms photograph so well and how a guy can slide face first into home and his uniform shirt will stay put.

I also didn’t realise that they wear the same sets of uniforms all year, but it makes perfect sense if they’re tailored.

It really makes a big difference aesthetically; baseball players come in a variety of shapes and sizes but nobody has a belly hanging over their belt, nobody looks bad or uncomfortable or awkward. When you look at a picture of a player during a game, the line of the uniform follows the form of the body and there’s no messiness or distraction. Photos of players in motion always look incredibly dynamic to me in part because the uniforms photograph so well and follow the form.

Genuinely think the aesthetic game is underrated regardless of how players interpret it.
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/Francisco-Lindor-2.jpg

https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/03142023_cal_160528.jpg?d=1020x1530

Isn't there something in Ball Four about that? Maybe Pepitone refusing to take the field unless his uniform was form-fitting?

i’ve still never understood how you can have a professional sport where people slide into each other etc and part of the uniform is a leather belt with a metal buckle

xp yes you’re right!

xp I was watching a video with Lucas Giolito and Tyler Glasnow talking about their huge feet…Glasnow said when he was in the minors they didn’t have cleats in his size so if he left them behind he’d squeeze his feet into cleats that were two sizes too small “cos otherwise you get yelled at”…they both fondly reminisced about the special spare belt with elastic that clubs carry for guys who lose theirs.

Jokes aside that’s probably why Judge has his number on his belt, right? You’re not finding another one for him in a hurry.

Second London series trip next year - Mets/Phillies, you have no idea how much I’ve been praying for Shohei not to sign with the Mets before the tickets went on sale today

Looking forward to a good time with users Tracer Hand, SV & Fongles

Odor was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, on February 3, 1994.[1] His first name is a combination of his grandfather's name, Douglas, and his grandmother's name, Nedia; in keeping with the family custom of giving boys names that begin with the letter "R", the "D" in Douglas was changed to an "R," yielding Rougned.[2]

His father, also named Rougned, played college baseball for the University of New Orleans.[3] He has a sister[4] and a younger brother, Rougned José Odor,[5] who signed with the Texas Rangers organization on February 19, 2015.[6] His uncle, Rouglas, played for eight seasons in Minor League Baseball for the Cleveland and Milwaukee Brewers organizations

If Rougned Odor has multiple sons I hope they are all named Rougned as well.

Just one of the best Wikipedia entries ever.

'rouglas' is a legit great name

Looking forward to a good time with users Tracer Hand, SV & Fongles

As am I! But... what's this "Fongles" business

It’s in relation to what I discussed with you earlier

oh no what did fizzles do now

didn’t know my surname despite us having met double digit times irl & attended baseball together

Watching this video of Manny being Manny and I’m nearly in tears at the Damon cutoff interception, what the fuck was he doing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQjTXct8e3k

From the Athletic history of the Idiots:

Arroyo: Millar had all these quick little sayings he’d say in the dugout. We were playing the Orioles and they were just making a bunch of errors. It looked like “The Bad News Bears” out there. Bill Mueller hit the ball and there was another error. Millar said something like: “Look at this! They’ve got the Dancing Bear and the poodle with extra long ears!” He was referring to a circus. But anything he would say, if it got a laugh, Manny would repeat it. For the next two years, every time Bill Mueller would get a hit, you’d hear Manny go…

Millar: “Papi, Papi, the poodle with the long ears and the dancing bear!”

Arroyo: He thought Millar was talking about Bill Mueller.

Timlin: Every time (Manny) would walk by, he would say: “Billy, you’re the dancing bear.” And Bill would laugh and smile and Manny would walk off and he’d go: “I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”

the thing about that cutoff is that damon’s arm really was that bad

this is the one i always remember. manny finds time to high five a fan in the middle of turning a double play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md8j_Sq5Nbs

Lmao fuck Aubrey Huff

I’m into Bobby Valentine lore this week. What a weapon!

According to CBSNews.com, Bobby Valentine threatened to punch WEEI host Glenn Ordway in the mouth after comments about his managing style in regards to him being late to a game in Oakland. Valentine was quoted as saying:

What an embarrassing thing to say. If I were there right now, I'd punch you right in the mouth. Ha, ha. How's that sound? Sound like I checked out? What an embarrassing thing. Why would somebody even, that's stuff that a comic strip person would write. If someone's here, watching me go out at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, working with the young players, watching me put in the right relief pitchers to get a win, putting on a hit-and-run when it was necessary, talking to the guys after the game in the food room—how could someone in real life say that?

Boston Red Sox players blasted manager Bobby Valentine to owners John Henry and Larry Lucchino during a heated meeting called after a text message was sent by a group of frustrated players to the team and ownership in late July, three sources familiar with the meeting told Yahoo! Sports.

The owners called the meeting for Boston's off-day in New York on July 26 after first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, texting on behalf of himself and some teammates, aired their dissatisfaction with Valentine for embarrassing starting pitcher Jon Lester by leaving him in to allow 11 runs during a July 22 start. It was the latest incident in a season's worth of bad relations bubbling between Red Sox players and Valentine.

From the beginning of the Red Sox's courtship of Valentine this offseason to the double-barreled votes of confidence last week, the match of the hard-nosed Bobby V with the laissez-faire Boston clubhouse seemed tenuous at best. It has proven far worse, personified best perhaps by a picture circulating around via text message, according to a fourth source.

Pedroia, notorious among teammates for his wit and humor, is in the foreground with a giddy smile, his tongue wagging and both thumbs up. Next to him is allegedly Valentine, face down on a table, apparently asleep. A caption accompanies the picture: "Our manager contemplating his lineup at 3:30 p.m."

Former MLB skipper Bobby Valentine, who most recently managed the disastrous 2012 Red Sox, is now the athletic director of Sacred Heart University—but as evidenced by this random bar video, he still loves sharing anecdotes about his old MLB charges. When a fellow patron brought up Dustin Pedroia, Valentine divulged some interesting (and NSFW) stories about the second baseman:

He's like the windup baseball player...He's in uniform at 10 in the morning, and he's walking around with his batting gloves on and his bat. And it'd be a night game. It's f*cked up.

His handshake is much weaker than the waitress who's waiting on you guys. It's not a dead fish. It's a handshake, just like this girl's handshake.

He gets hit with like 95-mph pitches on his hand, the hand looks like this, you think it's broken in eight places. The next morning, it's not swollen. He says, 'Oh, I'm different than everyone else.'

Valentine, 62, crashed his bike in Central Park on Tuesday while reading a text message from second baseman Dustin Pedroia, according to The New York Times.

The report said that Valentine ended up with his bicycle at the bottom of a ditch after "he had to swerve to avoid the umbrellas of two French tourists walking in front of him. The bike skidded, and he lost his balance and went careening head over pedals down the side of the hill by the road."

Valentine suffered minor injuries to his knees and hips.

"I shouldn't have been reading a text while I was riding. That's the wrong thing to do," Valentine said, according to the Times. "But at least I was wearing my helmet."

gyac, I assume you're aware of one of the most famous Valentine moments when as Met manager he was ejected from a game and snuck back into the dugout wearing a disguise?

Literally Tracer Hand’s first question, incredible stuff! And yes.

The 2012 Red Sox thread has gems like this

Sean McAdam ‏ @Sean_McAdam
For those who've asked about lineup switch: Valentine admitted he thought MINN starter Liam Hendricks was LHP, hence 1st card filled w/ RH

Also? Going here

https://clementemuseum.com/

The 2005 Japan Series will always be near and dear to my heart and I was pretty sure there was a thread on here about it but maybe that was on the sandbox? but hell yes, I rank it as one of the best series in the past 20 years and for that reason I hold BobbyV in esteem higher than most everyone else on here. Unfortunately the english language coverage is pretty scant at best*. I'm on the road but I will try to find some good video recaps when I'm home later.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Japan_Series

I actually did a short, three-minute interview with Bobby Valentine the one and only time I was on a major-league field as press. ("Press"--a short-lived Canadian monthly called Innings.) '86, I believe, when he was managing the Rangers. The memory stands out because he snapped at me over one question, and that was more or less the end of the interview.

Me (paraphrase, too lazy to go hunting downstairs): "You came up with the Dodgers at a young age, played semi-regularly for a couple of seasons, and then seemed to not really get a chance after that. Do you think that has made you more open as a manager to giving younger players a chance?" (Texas had at least three up-and-coming potential stars at the time: Ruben Sierra, Oddibe McDowell, and, sort of, Pete Incaviglia.)

Valentine (glaring): "Not at all."

lol. I read so much stuff about how he talked to reporters like that during this year and it seems vmic.
The managers who survive, lots of them are very hard-bitten tough guys but almost none of them came across as badly as Bobby V.

Idk how other Sox managers have done it (though I know Tito was HIM) but with Alex Cora he usually comes across as reasonably calm even if they’ve had a terrible result because you are just feeding a frenzy in that media market. The classic Cora bit is when he’s tired of answering questions about his terrible teams and goes “we’re good?” which is Cora code for get me the fuck out of here.

https://streamable.com/rmf3ep

The question was well-intentioned--in my mind, I was complimenting him as a manager--but I can see now where Bobby Valentine the player could take offense, especially if his sporadic playing time later had more to do with injury.

Thought this would be a good thread to post this and hope others share as well.

Just proves I watched way too much baseball and need a life:

https://i.imgur.com/4uZrPpL.png

I’m jealous I haven’t had mine

Til willie mcgee is a 34 win player

I was watching an old episode of Chris Rose Rotation with Lucas Giolito earlier and during this episode he dropped a piece of info that had previously been hinted at by other players but only today confirmed: most players don’t wear cups

Ranked list of Red Sox starters I want to see in Pittsburgh in order of preference:

1. Bello
2. Sale (if good)
3. Kutter Crawford
4. Giolito
5. Sale (if bad)
6. Pivetta

We are seeing three games so I have a 60% chance of seeing Bello at least. When I complained about not knowing who the starters would be more than a week in advance my better half was like, who cares about who the starter is? But wtf can you really expect from an Astros fan.

Things i learned about baseball this week: it’s really really really really really really really really hard to hit a ball.

Went to a batting cage in Akihabara yesterday to try hit a few dingers. First time I picked up a bat since I was 11, and back then it was just primary school softball for one session of Physical education. Good lord that ball comes at you fast. Managed to get the bat on a handful and put one or maybe two in the air with a few of grounders and a few foul-tips along the way. This sport is impossible and anyone hitting anything above 62 mph is a God amongst men. Wife was getting itchy feet after three rounds; thus ends my baseball career. Figure I’ll stick to watching

Sadly there were some Americans putting on a good show in the cage next to me during all of this. At least they were polite, giving me some grace probably due to the Aussie accent

In LL, our grade 6 (11-12yo) #1 pitcher was this massive country boy whose FB was clocked at 80mph... but was wild af, which worked to his advantage as most kids we faced were absolutely terrified to be in the box with this aggro manchild throwing straight gas at your head at ~3/4ths of the distance of an MLB mound.

I had to hit against him during practice and I only got one XBH hit off him (oppo bloop/dying quail).

lol i think the most i was ever overwhelmed -- to the point where i kind of had to decide to swing ahead of time and hope i could stop myself if it was a ball -- was against n1ck v1zz0cca as a 12yo in LL on a 45-foot mound

on the bright side, i guess, there was no need to worry about anything off-speed

If you want real fun go into the 80mph+ cages. I think it’s easier bc the ball doesnt move as much and it’s easier to track from launch to bat

^frmr hockey goalie advice so ymmv

Aubrey Huff update: lmao

Occasionally I’ll stumble down a rabbithole Twitter conflict goldmine.

Today’s is fantastic:

Retired MLB player calls out girl for thirst trap video. Turns out he had slid in her DMs on Christmas Day and he’s married.

He deleted his account. pic.twitter.com/Nf4o6oR5BQ

— Jack Raines (@Jack_Raines) January 1, 2024

The whole Aubrey Huff thing is both wildly funny and sad. In Joan Ryan’s Chemistry book which covers the 2010 Giants, she writes about Huff. Like, you can see a real person under the bravado and she did so:

Not everyone sees the thin layer of paranoia that coats certain clubhouses, but Aubrey Huff did, and right away. His history and personality had conditioned him to expect it. He reflexively scrutinized teammates’ words and tone of voice for the subtle derision, the hidden agendas. He was still in many ways the uneasy, awkward kid in Mineral Wells, Texas, whose father had been shot and killed at the apartment complex where he worked as an electrician. Aubrey was six years old. On weekend nights during high school, he preferred the batting cage behind his mobile home to the minefield of teenage social life, swinging the bat beneath the floodlights long after his mother, grandmother, and sister had gone to bed. He was the most valuable player at the three-thousand-student Vernon College in north Texas before transferring to the super-competitive baseball program at the University of Miami. He felt like a sheltered hick among the brash, frat-boy athletes. He adopted an arrogant, hard-partying, sarcastic alter ego he called Huffdaddy. That’s the person I met when he arrived at the Giants’ spring training facility in January of 2010.

I happened to be in the hallway when Huff arrived at the Giants’ Scottsdale, Arizona, ballpark for his first day of spring training. He strutted toward the clubhouse like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: shoulders back, chin up, grin wide, as if crowds might part to make way. This was Huffdaddy, the swaggery guy with armor around his insecurities. He was girding himself for a fourth new clubhouse in five years. He stuck his head into a side room where coaches were drinking coffee around a conference table. “Aubrey Huff,” he announced to each man, circling the table and shaking hands like a seasoned salesman. In the clubhouse, a few other early-arriving players were changing out of their street clothes. Huff knew they’d be well aware of his reputation as a shitty teammate. He set down his equipment bag at his locker and braced for the chore of introducing himself to men who might be less than excited to have him on the team. He was stashing deodorant and shaving cream when pitcher Matt Cain appeared with his hand out, welcoming him to the squad. Then Tim Lincecum came by. One by one, players greeted him. “There was an aura in the air, the way everybody talked to each other,” Huff said later. “The way everybody looked at each other. It just felt so much different than anything I’ve been a part of.” Later, he watched as players from all different backgrounds squeezed shoulder to shoulder around a table in the middle of the clubhouse, slapping down cards in high-stakes games of booray and hearts…

By the end of spring training, Huff was periodically joining the card games and lobbing sarcastic Huffdaddy remarks across the room. But he kept a safe distance. He knew he was just a replacement part and operated as he always had, like an independent contractor loyal only to himself. Early in the season, however, that changed. The Giants were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates in San Francisco. Huff crushed a pitch to the right-field wall. As the ball caromed past the fielder, he rounded first and made for second. Already gasping for air, Huff tapped second and headed to third. His eyes bulged at the sight of the coach leaping wildly and waving him home. He chugged down the line and slid across the plate with the grace of a sandbag, completing one of the most entertaining and least likely inside-the-park home runs in history. Teammates swarmed Huff in the dugout, roaring with laughter and slapping high fives. Huff sank onto the bench, red-faced and heaving, but also laughing. Someone handed him a cup of Gatorade. Young third baseman Pablo Sandoval fanned him with a towel. In the clubhouse after the game, the barbs and howls erupted all over again each time the TV showed replays of Huff’s runaway-beer-truck trip around the bags. The funniest digs came from Huff himself. “That’s when I felt finally that I was really part of a team,” Huff said later. “I finally felt part of the guys.” …

Over time, he began to feel an ease he hadn’t known since, well, maybe ever. He became more open to the everyday signals of trust and became more trusting, more accepting, and less self-centered in return. His life outside of baseball was a mess — he was still drinking and popping Adderall, and his marriage was still crumbling — but with his teammates he could be the person his teammates seemed to think he was. He began arriving at the park early and leaving late. He rediscovered his power at the plate and led the team in doubles, triples, and home runs. Most surprising, he found teammates gravitating to him for advice or a laugh, as if he were a leader. “They’d ask me about things,” he said, “and that had never happened to me in my life.”

Epic Huff content not expected but very appreciated!

It’s the use of a personal kind of dumping ground thread, the Aubrey Huff multi paragraph post I apparently had in me 🫡

this is kinda funny ('huffdaddy') but good lord

imagine having to create a whole new persona for yourself simply to not be an asshole. and then still utterly fail

The book says he was intimidated by Pat Burrell who was the real deal ito being a huge jock, and later they became friends and Huff was influential in Burrell being picked up by the Giants in 2010, where he flourished, became a leader of that team and hit like 18 home runs from June onwards. Yet even though Burrell was meant to be quite crass and such, he was also known to help younger players and gave money to SF’s homeless and so on.

Burrell arrived in the clubhouse seeming not a bit humbled by his failure in Tampa Bay. Broad-shouldered and square-jawed, he commanded the attention of every room he entered. His good looks and regal bearing brought to mind the prince in Beauty and the Beast, though he was princely in few other ways. Like Huff, he had a vulgar bent that stood out even by baseball standards. But he had a reputation for playing hard and smart, for being a winner. He blossomed in his new environment, just as Huff had. He rediscovered his passion and energy. He radiated confidence. And the clubhouse, like the superorganism it is, absorbed that passion, energy, and confidence and became something new. Not radically so. More of a shift, the way a dinner party changes when a particularly charismatic guest arrives.

Burrell would round up teammates for pregame stretching with an old-fashioned “C’mon, boys!” When the team lost, he let no one hang his head: “We’ll get ’em tomorrow.” He slung an arm around the bench players about to pinch-hit in a tight game. “You got this,” he’d say matter-of-factly, more reminder than exhortation. He pushed the players to look out for each other. After a Giants pitcher struggled through a long inning, wearing himself out throwing way too many pitches, Burrell barked at upcoming Giants hitters, “You have to take pitches! Give our guy time to catch his breath!”

Was talking to my friend about missed calls and I had to tell her about this legendary bungled call from the 2nd base umpire here. Posey himself thought he was out! Yes, The Lincecum Game isn’t The Lincecum Game without those 9 scoreless innings and 14 ks, but that miserly Giants offense would have wasted it if not for this utterly hilarious missed call!

https://streamable.com/yast4i

https://i.postimg.cc/W4q31WPT/IMG-4044.jpg

For some reason, I thought I’d posted about Gregor Blanco’s catch in Matt Cain’s perfect game before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu2wRJoDVH0

How did he read that play to get back in time?

"And this is hit out into the alleyway," announced Duane Kuiper, his voice charged with alarm.
The flight of the ball offered no hope. The sight of Blanco, racing over from right field, did.

"A long run for Blanco..." Kuiper continued, "and Blanco's gonna dive...and he MAKES THE CATCH!"

Blanco was the right fielder, but the ball wasn't caught in right field. When Blanco skidded on his stomach to a stop on the warning track, he wasn't far from straightaway center. Years earlier, the Giants figured out before anyone else that it made sense to play the right fielder well off the line at AT&T Park. But Blanco's positioning was flat-out ridiculous. He wasn't supposed to be there, and yet there he was, holding aloft the little white prize so that umpires could see it.

"Everybody kept telling me, What are you doing, playing there?'' Blanco said. "Coaches told me that with Schafer, play a little more to the gap. I think I played a little (farther)than that.

"Melky caught his ball. I told myself, You have to catch this one, too. In the dugout, Bochy turned to bench coach Ron Wotus and asked if he'd ever seen an outfielder make a catch in that part of the field. They were in agreement. Neither had.

gyac are you ready for things I learned about in fantasy baseball this week/how i learned to stop worrying and love fantasy baseball?

Are you trying to recruit me to your league, Mr Shasta?

Yes! And massive thank yous for recognizing me as the rightful founder of the league!

don’t do it gyac it’s a trap

do NOT listen to that other person, he will try to convince you to watch endless Red Sox games! ...a fate that will end in tears (and boredom).

Steve Shasta my literal dn refers to a Red Sox prospect in double A and I have tickets to watch the bad team play three games at pnc in April, it’s way too late for that.

But also, I may pass, I don’t play fantasy anything and it seems too involved for me, I can barely make myself play immaculate grid when I get into a rut. Have you asked mookieproof? Clemenza?

Back to Matt Cain's perfect game. I did miss the game live but was recording every game so I had it on DVR and watched it later. I also own every World Series box set and they included that game on one of them.

Thanks for the memories gyac!

You saw the ten year retrospective video about the game right?

No, link

I had to clear 7gb off my phone to install an update today, so I ended up deleting or moving a load of photos. While I was doing that, I kept coming across what I’ll kindly call “baseball debris”, pictures and assorted junk I picked up and kept on my phone since late 2022, I guess? Anyway you know what they say about one (wo)man’s trash and all that, but this really is just…stuff. Putting behind the hide tag cos why not. 99% SFG, ofc.


Bryzzo A Softer World comic

https://i.postimg.cc/vmtvPpSw/IMG-3875.jpg

ASW Fenway:
https://i.postimg.cc/pdHZJ2CB/IMG-3904.jpg

Classic outfield prank:
https://i.postimg.cc/MKfmkcrD/IMG-4018.png

Dress up like Pablo Sandoval Day, Buster Posey edition:
https://i.postimg.cc/KzYt04Mt/IMG-5151.jpg

IT’S TRUE THO
https://i.postimg.cc/XNzkDKxq/IMG-5472.jpg

Or neither
https://i.postimg.cc/4y7VTMwd/IMG-7275.jpg

Gerrit Cole is a man of culture
https://i.postimg.cc/bvmtS8Br/IMG-8577.jpg

GUESS WHO
https://i.postimg.cc/DZmbqD9g/IMG-8206.jpg

Bring your kid to work day:
https://i.postimg.cc/BbKLzFQP/IMG-9007.jpg

Short lived two Barry era
https://i.postimg.cc/mDq1VjRG/IMG-9018.jpg

The McCutchen dreads 🫶🏻

xp sorry fella I just saw your reply when I came to post:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTNyk1oklQA

i've been watching some world series games from the late 2000s/early 2010s, and it's interesting how even just a couple of years after the recent pace of play rule changes, these games from 15ish years ago feel so slow. so much time between pitches, so many throws over to first base when there's a baserunner, so many meetings at the plate. another interesting thing is that they don't put the pitch count up on the score chyron - i keep finding myself wondering what the pitch count is and there's no way to know.

A NON-SCIENTIFIC AND AGENDA-BASED STATS INVESTIGATION

A little while ago TH & I were talking about the first AL player to get a splash hit in what is now Oracle Park: David Ortíz in June 2010.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SFN/SFN201006270.shtml

While watching the video of this game, he made the observation that Lincecum would have been fine in the era of the pitch clock. Sure enough I went through his 2010 starts and even though he was a guy who threw a ton of strikes and pitched a lot of innings, there’s plenty of evidence to support this.

Digging into some random data, there’s a start from 2009. 9 IP, 95 pitches thrown, game time: 2 hours and 6 minutes. That’s crazy.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLN/SLN200906290.shtml

Looking at BR’s aggregate team data, the average SF game was 2.49 in length in 2009, good for 4th shortest timing in the league. By 2019, the average shortest game time was 3.02 and the Red Sox games averaged 3 hours 25 minutes. In fact the Red Sox were constantly top of the list for the longest average game times according to BR:

2019 - 3.25 (1st)
2018 - 3.13 (1st)
2017 - 3.20 (1st)
2016 - 3.12 (2nd)
2015 - 3.06 (4th)
2014 - 3.17 (2nd)
2013 - 3.15 (1st)
2012 - 3.09 (1st)
2011 - 3.13 (1st)
2010 - 3.10 (1st)
2009 - 3.06 (3rd)

Then I started thinking about the other side of the equation, hitters. Between the same period, the Red Sox were placed as follows in the pitches/plate appearance leaderboards:

2019 - 3.94 (15th)
2018 - 3.92 (10th)
2017 - 3.97 (5th)
2016 - 3.94 (5th)
2015 - 3.95 (2nd)
2014 - 4.05 (1st)
2013 - 4.01 (2nd)
2012 - 3.89 (3rd)
2011 - 3.95 (1st)
2010 - 4.02 (1st)
2009 - 3.93 (3rd)

What caused the dropoff? Well in 2018, Dustin Pedroia (career ave 3.97 pitches/PA) suffered a career ending injury. In 2016, David Ortíz (career ave 4.05 pitches/PA) played his last season. Who played 2B after Pedroia? Eduardo Nunez (3.52/PA), Brock Holt (4.12/PA but with fewer than half the PA).

DH? JD Martinez, 3.88/PA.

IN SUMMARY

The dominance of the Red Sox in the 21st century and specifically Dustin Pedroia and David Ortíz are to blame for the pitch clock.

lol there’s some truth in that. the premiere matchup in those years was Sox/Yanks and those games were famous for lasting well past midnight.

You can blame Brett Gardner as well (4.26). Jeter, Arod, Ichiro, Melky - all of these Yankees had much lower pitches/PA than you’d expect. Ofc, you don’t need to be a tough out if you can hit like they do.

get Ichiro’s name out of the Yankees’ mouth!!

“patience” was really the prime virtue in those years, nobody talked about launch angle or even plate discipline as such. it was like the more pitches you saw the better

i think you can also blame Nomar Garciaparra and the velcro on his fucking batting gloves

Why not both
https://i.postimg.cc/CLGBFfRT/IMG-5138.jpg

Triston Casas vs Johan Oviedo#DirtyWater

Home Run (1) 💣

Exit velo: 105.8 mph
Launch angle: 44 deg
Proj. distance: 350 ft

This would have been a home run in 26/30 MLB ballparks

PIT (3) @ BOS (5)
🔻 1st pic.twitter.com/9H9bePWYC3

— Would it dong? (@would_it_dong) April 4, 2023

(No I’m not saying 44 degrees is optimal, it’s just funny)

Attending at least two (and up to three) baseball games this year with real (American) baseball fans. The remaining game, alas, is with the Astros fan I married.

19/4/24-21/4/24 - Red Sox @ Pirates

9/6/24 - Mets v Phillies (in London)

gyac - I just wanna say, as a Giants fan who lived through those glorious WS years, I adore the fact that you've stumbled upon baseball fandom by reading about and watching those teams. I'm obviously biased, but that era was pure magic here in SF (aside from a celebratory bus burning or two), and it's impossible for me to know how it looked from the outside in. Your perspective and awe is making me even more appreciative, grateful and nostalgic for those years.

Also as a followup (I've largely overlooked this thread of late) I'm really impressed how much you GET baseball and the beautiful things that make it unique as a sport and its general vibe. Some of the posts and discussion here are just beautiful to read and relive. So ... thanks! I look forward to reading and posting here more this year.

My condolences for marrying an Astros fan though

Octobeard, these are the nicest comments! I’m so happy. I really just started this as a general sort of dumping ground for my stupid thoughts about baseball/two time Cy Young winner of my heart Tim Lincecum and current fixations. I’m genuinely touched any time anyone besides me gets anything from it. ❤️❤️❤️

My condolences for marrying an Astros fan though

Ha! I love it. ❤️❤️❤️ right back at ya. I bet you both are fun to watch games with!

FWIW Timmy has also stolen my heart too. And so many others. The passion for him out here in the Bay is unique and unparalleled. It felt like he was truly one of us in a deep, culturally connected way that few pro athletes remotely touch. You definitely have great taste. Good luck to your Mariners! One of these years I'd love to catch a game up there.

BTW I know you're a fan of Grant Brisbee's so if you haven't yet seen it yet, here's one of his all time legendary moments during the 2012 run predicting (accurately) the outcome of the World Series:
https://www.sbnation.com/2012/10/24/3549608/baseball-nation-predicts-the-world-series

One of the many joys of those years was watching Grant's rise as an amateur blogger to big time baseball writer with pizazz. He catalogued so many beautiful moments with intense personality and humor, I feel he was truly a part of the magic of those times.

I love Bochy so much 😭

Texas Rangers manager Bruce Bochy made his first appearance at Scottsdale Stadium wearing a uniform other than the Giants since 2006.

“I didn’t get lost coming here, I’ll say that,’’ said Bochy, who wound up entering through the stands with two of his coaches. “Great memories.

“I mean, (Brandon) Belt could have a statue here for what he did in spring training. And my first year, I’ll never forget the first two fly balls hit to (Barry) Bonds, he didn’t draw leather on them. I said, 'Oh, geez.’

“And (Tim) Lincecum, too. Even before he pitched for me, he’s warming up, and (pitching coach Dave Righetti) goes, 'There’s your No. 1 pick.' I looked out there, and I say, 'There’s no way.’ He weighed about 140 pounds. Then, I saw that arm action, and I said, 'Whoa!'’’

Bochy, who won three World Series titles, received a huge ovation when introduced to the crowd.

https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1bu5qx3/pirates_release_the_renegade_a_foot_long_fusion/

I SAW THIS

But I will not be trying it

And yes I see REAL AMERICAN BASEBALL in REAL AMERICA this month 🥳🥳🥳🥳

Welcome and enjoy :)

For reasons best understood by herself my friend decided to text me her updated rankings of player positions by sexiness
https://i.postimg.cc/CxfV4GTM/IMG-8655.jpg

Well, that makes her next birthday easy: Alejandro Kirk poster(s)

Mariners catcher I’m afraid

Lol. My gf I think is legit jealous of my feelings for him

Kirk or Raleigh? I have to admit I love watching Kirk run the bases

Kirk rounding 3rd base is one of my favourite things in baseball. But Cal is the way to go if your thinking of getting me a poster for my birthday!

I thought Blue Jays fans feared Cal Raleigh!

It can be both!

Came home today & found this:

https://i.postimg.cc/43RcD9cc/IMG-8956.jpg
on my desk, part of a really thoughtful gift from clemenza.

Article should in theory be display on the vault, but none of this issue is.

https://vault.si.com/vault/1977/07/18/43697

I’m going to read it tomorrow, and will report back. I need to work out how to handle and take care of it properly since this magazine is quite literally older than I am. Clemenza also sent me an incredible amount of baseball cards which I’ll go through and photograph my faves off tomorrow for that thread. There’s an incredible Bumgarner rookie card in there which reminds me of this:

https://i.postimg.cc/PxQYd5Hq/IMG-7275.jpg

Since starting this thread I’ve been the recipient of incredible generosity from posters across ILBB and it means the world to me that you’re all so willing to share your knowledge, trivia and baseball cards with me. Thank you so, so much. ❤️

It can be both!

I love this.

aww <3

Also by this time next week I will be in Pittsburgh! I just checked and Brayan Bello is lined up for a start in that series which is great, hopefully Devers is back from his shoulder injury. Too bad about Story, guess I’m going to hope the bats have woken up by then and that clown fielding doesn’t dominate as it has all week (it will).

i realize the chances of this happening are infinitesimal, but as john sterling will tell you, you can't predict baseball

if you find yourself in a situation where a ball is coming your way, and you are standing anywhere near zack hample, it is your duty to prevent him from getting that ball by any means necessary

i think he only cares about home run balls, so if you're sitting in left field, be aware (tbf he was in pittsburgh last weekend, so you're probably safe)

I’m aware of Zack Hample but I also do not want to be on TV elbowing him out of the way

you would be a hero to millions tho

most importantly, to me

162 is hard! It’s wild to read and read about seasons past when teams were slumping and got out of it, because the time that must have lasted eternally for them passes in an instant for you looking back, but even when they’re playing every day, it’s tough.

I remember, perhaps even at the very beginning of this thread, someone very wisely advising me to not pay close attention. Reader, I wish I had taken (or even was capable of taking - ocd) said advice, but alas.

The only part of the season that really matters is in aggregate when it’s over. Does it mean anything that George Kirby had two terrible starts and two good ones? Who knows/cares, it’s four games. Does it mean anything that Raffy Devers may be rusty because he missed six games due to a sore shoulder? Who the fuck cares? Yet these questions and more, the trivia and the detail of the almost meaningless fraction of the season? They plague me.

I’m sure this is something people who follow from childhood get out of the way very quickly. You learn not to live and die on every pitch, you stop paying attention for weeks or even months. Maybe you’re like Tracer Hand claimed he was and only check in once it’s summer. But man, it is painful atm and I’m very glad to have this thread. How do you care less?

To end this, a list of things I have enjoyed at this early part in the season:

Justin “I can’t believe the Mets traded him” Slaten:

Justin Slaten's Filth

5Ks in 2 innings. pic.twitter.com/dWS2hl3wKK

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 7, 2024

Some catch probability numbers on Ceddanne Rafaela this season:

1) Rafaela diving forward to rob Cal Raleigh - 35%

2) Game-saving grab against Shea Langeliers - 50%

3) Leap against the wall to take a hit away from Brent Rooker - 95% pic.twitter.com/qbc8hbdtr1

— Tyler Milliken ⚾️ (@tylermilliken_) April 6, 2024

Wilyer Abreu's catch and Kutter Crawford's amazed reaction. pic.twitter.com/S0JyQolzyX

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) April 15, 2024

Jung Hoo #Lee’s double !! 👏🏻 5-game hitting streak 👊🏻 pic.twitter.com/Ex76dU4MDK

— Joseph Kim (@blackwings2011) April 13, 2024

OH YEAH HOW DID I FORGET TO POST ROMAN ANTHONY

Roman Anthony hits his second homer of the day pic.twitter.com/tF8cO17Eag

— Red Sox Stats (@redsoxstats) April 14, 2024