Random Thoughts About Baseball...

or random links, etc. Ever wonder how many players your college, or the one nearest you, ever sent to the major leagues?

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/college/colleges.shtml

 

http://www.baseball-reference.com/schools/

Here's a link with colleges broken down by state, including major and minor league players. And you youngsters will enjoy a trip to Web 1.0!

 

I knew the Cardinals would be hurting without Jason Motte. I suspected there'd be at least a game every week where the bullpen caused problems. But, really: a 53-pitch 9th inning?

http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/gameday/index.jsp?gid=2013_04_08_cinmlb_slnmlb_1&mode=box

I'm pretty sure the 9-run 4th the Cardinals put on the Giants on Sunday had that many pitches.

 

It pleases me to no end that, as of today, June 4th, the Angels are considerably closer to the Houston Astros in the standings than they are to the division leading Texas Rangers.

 

Well, at least he didn't make the All Star game after all (thanks to vote-stuffing by Braves fans, I would guess). I think Puig has the potential to eventually be an All Star, but I thought that about Oddibe MacDowell and Jeff Francoeur also.

 

The American league is not the Taliban? Then how do you explain something as anti-American as the designated hitter?

 

Not a baseball Random Thought, necessarily, but I have to say... MLS has the best All Star game on the continent.

 

interesting lomgish article about future Hall of Famer* Deacon White from Slate.com

In his excellent book Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero, my friend Peter Morris writes that the Baseball Hall of Fame was conceived, in part, by Deacon’s old battery mate Al Spalding. In 1905, Spalding formed a committee that pushed the dubious proposition that the game was created by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, N.Y. In June 1939, the Hall of Fame finally opened, in Cooperstown.

Grandpa White believed, and rightfully so, that he should have been a shoo-in for enshrinement. The Sporting News certainly thought so, explaining that White “is entitled to be selected as typifying the Spirit of the ‘First Century of Baseball.’ ” By all accounts, Deacon was crushed when he was not selected. (Spalding, no stranger to self-promotion, won election in 1939 via the “old-timers committee.”) Worst of all, Deacon was not even invited to attend the Hall’s inaugural induction ceremony.

Why did it happen that way? No one knows for sure. The best guess is that, almost 50 years after he retired as a player, no one really remembered Deacon White. He played in a time without mass communication. The only real record was in the sports pages. Enshrinement was, and is, determined by the votes of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and not all of them had heard of Deacon White, let alone seen him play. They grew up with Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Honus Wagner. The 19th-century game—that was ancient history.

The month after the Hall of Fame opened its doors, my Aunt Mim was on a train travelling to Oregon. The conductor, a man who appreciated old-time baseball, stepped into her car and announced that the great catcher Deacon White had died that day. His last record: oldest former major leaguer.​

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*As of Sunday.

 

Congratulations to the Pirates for finally breaking their streak of losing seasons.

And I'd like to point out that, the last time the Pirates were in the playoffs was the summer my wife and I moved to Western PA. We moved away halfway through last season to NEPA approximately the same distance from the Phillies' stadium as we were from PNC park.

Check the Phillies record this season. Coincidence? I think so, probably. But just to be safe, I'm not moving anywhere near St. Louis.

 

You might get a kick out of this Onion article...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/yankees-honor-derek-jeter-retire-his-number-forcib,33996/

 

Of course, they have better material on A-Roid...

http://www.theonion.com/articles/yankee-players-boo-when-arod-shown-on-jumbotron,31897/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/yankee-fans-lure-arod-out-of-dugout-with-curtain-c,9794/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/arod-hit-by-78-pitches-during-yankees-batting-prac,33549/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/derek-jeter-denies-report-he-used-to-hate-arod-i-s,22164/

 

The Astros shut out. Actually, they lost 9-2. The shut out was their 0.0 Neilsen rating...

http://blog.chron.com/sportsupdate/...en-nobody-watched-astros-indians-game-sunday/

 

Good article. Though I'm surprised that, given that he didn't know the Dodgers once played in Brooklyn, that he can use the phase "get Wally Pipped" accurately in a sentence.

 

And one click away...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2013/10/goodbye-tim-mccarver.html

Tim McCarver was the Cardinal's catcher when I was first introduced to baseball as a pre schooler. I can still remember the line-up of the 1967 team, for the most part. Hence I liked this part...

go back a good distance with Tim, starting with his twenty-one years as a catcher with five different teams, first with the Cardinals, and I can still see him, young and flushed and awestruck, after the end of the first game of the 1968 World Series, where he’d caught Bob Gibson’s record-breaking seventeen strikeouts against the Tigers​

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. As can I, but as an eight year old, I found it impossible to fathom that a team could dominate a game and then not when the Series... I have a better idea of how baseball works now, though.

McCarver was never my favorite announcer, but pretty much every time he offered an analysis that seemed over the top, something like this happened, which I also remember...

None of his great calls, presaging something startling about to transpire on the base paths or around the outer pastures of the game in progress, have been more hair-raising or remain more widely recalled and cited than what he said in the final moments of the seventh game of the 2001 World Series. It’s the Call of Calls. Mariano Rivera, working against the Arizona Diamondbacks, with the bases loaded and the infielders drawn in, needed just two outs to seal another Yankees World Championship, and McCarver, watching the left–hand-batting Luis Gonzalez about to step into the batter’s box, said, “Rivera throws inside to left-handers, and left-handers get a lot of broken-bat hits to left, into the shallow parts of the outfield.”

Rivera pitched inside, Gonzalez swung, breaking his bat, and knocked the ball past the drawn-in Yankee infielders and into short left field, for the game and the Series and the champagne.​

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