The Infield Dirt with T.S. O'Connell - Monday, March 15, 2010

   It ought to be the kind of thing I like, since raising the possibility of an even-up trade of Albert Pujols for Ryan Howard prompts pundits to look back in time when speculation about that kind of blockbuster swap wasn’t quite as fanciful as it may be today.

   But, in truth, it strikes me more the product of a slow news day as much as anything substantive. I saw some online stories talking about the rumored trade that were as adequately sourced as the mainstream media stories over the last week that contended Tiger might make his return to the PGA Tour at the Masters. Way to go out on a limb, guys.

   I know that the expiration of contracts and the status of impending free agency can sometimes make MLB officials do things that otherwise might appear unthinkable at first blush, but Pujols for Howard? Not gonna do it.

(Ted Williams original artwork by Darryl Vlasak.)

   One of the news stories I read used the silly rumor as an entree to take another pass at an even sillier one from another generation: Ted Williams for Joe DiMaggio.

   The thinking here was that Williams would have benefited handsomely from the short right-field stands at Yankee Stadium, and Joe D would have had a gay old time playing pinball with the Green Monster. He would also be bidding farewell to the cavernous center field and left-center Death Valley at Yankee Stadium that had robbed him of extra-base hits on a boatload of occasions over the years.

   Again, an unthinkable swap that would have enraged the fan bases in the American League’s two great franchises.

   And while it wasn’t quite in the same ballpark (figuratively speaking) as Williams for DiMaggio or even, for that matter, Pujols for Ryan, the big trade from a half century ago between Detroit and Cleveland was a dramatic and heartbreaking event for thousands of fans from both cities.

   On April 17, 1960, Rocky Colavito, the home run champion of the American League was sent to Detroit, and Harvey Kuenn, the 1959 AL Batting Champion, moved from the Motor City to the Indians, and at least at the start it seemed like nobody at all was pleased with the switch.

   Cleveland GM “Trader Frank” Lane expressed his bewilderment at all the uproar, which in the early days of the 1960 campaign included dummies with his name scrawled on them hanging from lampposts in Cleveland and picketing at the stadium. “What’s all the fuss about? All I did was trade hamburger for steak.”

Monday, March 15, 2010 7:55:31 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Please do not kill the umpire ...
Posted by T.S.

   You don’t need to look any further than inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C., to know that when the powers-that-be huddle up, it usually means headaches for the rest of us. I mention this because Major League Baseball officials continue to mumble about adding instant replay in some fashion in order to avoid a replay of what happened in the postseason last year.

   MLB even sacked three umpire supervisors recently, almost certainly connected to some degree to the blown calls last fall.

   You know, these hyper-inflated, self-important bozos who have done so much over the last two decades to safeguard the integrity of baseball, and now they are caterwauling about the possibility of a blown call actually affecting the outcome of a game.

   I’ve got news for them: umpires’ mistakes have been a part of baseball history since the beginning, and you can make a pretty good case that the integrity of the game fared a lot better – generally speaking – between 1950-80 than it has for the last 30 years.

   Actually, I’ve probably misstated the time frame, since you could make a pretty good argument that the arrival of the Designated Hitter Rule in 1973 heralded one of the first great postwar goofs by MLB. Like it or not, having two different set of rules for the American and National Leagues was a first sign that MLB was content to pay major-league lip service to the game’s storied integrity.

I would contend that the intrusion of technology into the game’s on-field governance would be a major first step that would only lead to more steps later on. In short, the upside of being able to occasionally overturn a disputed home run or fair or foul ball would be far outweighed by the addition of a ponderous review process that only makes the games run longer. And make no mistake about it, once we put our big toe into the idea of video-aided umpiring, things only go in one direction after that.

   And the real chuckleheads then opine that maybe just having video review in the postseason would take care of their problem, again tossing out the hoary notions about integrity by having the regular-season odyssey adjudged to be significantly less important than the Playoffs and World Series contests. Phooey.

   In theory it might be a noble goal to try to eliminate all possibility of error when it comes to umpiring, but in practice the human element routinely prevails ... and for good reason. Anybody out there pushing for absolute certainty when it comes to foul calls by NBA officials?

Thursday, March 11, 2010 4:04:50 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [1]

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Goose could be lonely guy in Cooperstown ...
Posted by T.S.

   You would think that all grumpy old men would stick together, but I haven’t been able to find much of a kinship with 2008 Hall of Fame inductee Goose Gossage.

   Oh, he was great fun to watch at the peak of his game 30 years ago or so, but I think the combination of my general disdain of the save statistic and the Gossage-induced absurdity of complaining about nuance within the already questionable interpretation of the usefulness of the same statistic, and, like Goose, I start to honk a bit.

   That and Goose did a good deal of bitching and moaning about the HOF voting results in the years that didn’t quite bring him to the 75 percent threshold. I’m not quibbling with the idea that he should be in the Hall of Fame, but merely noting that his carping about other candidates – and potential future candidates – borders on the disingenuous.

   In a brief interview in the March 7 New York Times, he sidestepped a question about whether Mariano Rivera is the best closer in baseball history with his traditional lament about the enfeebled one-inning save vs. the manly two-inning variety that was the norm during his time. I mean really, would it have diminished Gossage at all to have simply said, "Yeah, the historical record would seem to have laid that question to rest some time ago."

   And speaking of the tainted one-inning save, how many times do you suppose Warren Spahn finished off yet another complete game under circumstances that would provide for a “Save” to be awarded? It’s just changes in strategy and tactics of MLB over the course of the game’s evolution.

   But my real beef with Goose comes when he – now safely installed in Cooperstown – grandly pronounces that hardly anybody else should be. I could argue that, in terms of his impact on the managerial ranks, Billy Martin’s footprint in MLB was no less imposing than Goose’s, but the reliever decrees that Martin doesn’t belong because “we didn’t get along” and “he didn’t handle (pitching) staffs well.”

   I’m not even a Martin apologist or advocate for his HOF chances, merely commenting that guys who manage to get their plaque ought to be a bit more gracious about some of those still on the outside looking in (figuratively speaking).

   Gossage also insists that Mark McGwire and any of the other steroid users should not be admitted.

   Yikes. That could mean for some quiet midsummer weekends in Central New York in the years ahead. Many of the biggest names in Major League Baseball over the last two decades would be excluded by Goose, to say nothing of whoever might be on that list of 104 names that we don’t know about ... yet.

   For a guy who played smack dab in the middle of an era when guys were popping Greenies like they were going out of style – fortunately they actually were – Gossage is pretty strict about denouncing anything that might be considered performance enhancing.

   Anybody want to take a stab at suggesting that amphetamines aren’t “performance enhancing”? I'm hardly an expert – not my mood enhancer of choice or temperament – but I understand that they are generally useful in enhancing a number of different kinds of performances.

   And to forestall any criticism, I’m not suggesting that Gossage popped anything more potent than a Tylenol. But vast numbers of his contemporaries did, and I’ve never heard any complaints from him about the effect of all that on the integrity of the game.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 4:58:02 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [2]

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

SABR and the Dr. Harold Seymour controversy ...
Posted by T.S.

   The Society for American Baseball Research is one of my all-time favorite organizations, so I did a double take when I saw that SABR had wound up on the first page of the Sunday New York Times Sports Section two days ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/sports/baseball/07sabr.html

   According to the bylined Times article, Dorothy Jane Mills, the widow of famed baseball historian Dr. Harold Seymour had objected when SABR announced the names of the organization’s Henry Chadwick Award winners – what the Times called SABR’s de facto Hall of Fame – and the citation about Seymour had included only “glancing mention” of his wife’s role in the writing of his acclaimed three-part history of the game of baseball.

   I was familiar with the unusual circumstances of the controversy, having read about it many years ago, though I don’t recall where. Dr. Seymour’s trilogy, produced over a 30-year span starting in 1960, was an undertaking that had its genesis as his doctoral dissertation at Cornell University.

   When the first volume, Baseball: The Early Years, was published in 1960, it listed only Seymour as the author, the same situation that prevailed for the second leg, Baseball: The Golden Years, published 12 years later. While she was listed in acknowledgments in both, her contention was that the more accurate role should have been as co-author.

   By the time the final piece of the trilogy was published in 1990, Dr. Seymour was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and Mills insisted that she had written most of the final book herself. She asked her husband for co-author credit, but he would not agree. After he died two years later, Mills remarried and 12 years later revealed in her autobiography A Woman’s Work, that she had been the primary researcher and essentially the co-author of all three volumes.

   When I first read about this so many years ago, I was intrigued by such an awkward situation involving a husband and wife and, what the Times article described as “intellectual spousal abuse.”

   SABR officials navigated these treacherous waters about as well as anybody could have hoped, with the legendary John Thorn, a member of the committee making the Chadwick awards, diplomatically announcing after the initial uproar that Mills would be honored equally with her deceased husband.

   I was surprised at nothing in the story, since my initial amazement had come years earlier when I first read about the disputed authorship. Talk about being put in a tough spot: SABR found itself having to make a decision about the authorship of an iconic book trilogy nearly two decades after Dr. Seymour’s death.

   My own theory, formulated back when I first read about it years ago, was that since the “book” had started out as his dissertation, the important questions about authorship got magnified even more. At the time I thought it was a heartbreaking story, with a woman from well before the feminist era seemingly finding herself relegated to decidedly second-class status when it comes to the recognition of such an historic work.

   I read all three books, the last two at roughly the time of their individual releases, and was just awed by the scholarship involved. I had been reading about baseball history since I was old enough to read at all, and there was a boatload of stuff here that I hadn’t known. If you haven’t read the books, I’d urge you to do so.

   And as a final note, if you love baseball history and the numbers that go with it, I’d similarly urge you to join SABR.
http://www.sabr.org/

   In terms of being a first-class operation, I’d liken it to the National Geographic folks, who along with creating a vibrant organization, provide their membership with an annual roster of publications that are worth infinitely more than the membership fee.

   And for a really good time, go to one of their National Conventions. In its own way – with commerce relegated to a decidedly peripheral role relative to scholarship – it’s on par with our own National.

Tuesday, March 09, 2010 5:03:05 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, March 08, 2010

They should change the name of that movie ....
Posted by T.S.

   The recently released film "Cop Out," with a minor plot device involving baseball cards, got me to wondering again about what I would regard as a more promising hobby-linked vehicle, the 2008 release “Diminished Capacity,” starring Mathew Broderick and Virginia Madsen, with Alan Alda playing the Uncle with a valuable T206-style card that gets lost.

   That movie got an extremely limited release nearly two years and has been languishing on the shelf ever since, but with high-powered talent like Broderick, Madsen and Alda, it’s hard for me to believe it won’t eventually get a wider look. I suppose it could go right to DVD, but I don’t think many movies with that pedigree go that route. And just as soon as I had composed the previous sentence, I checked on some of those online commentary sections on the "Diminished Capacity" website, and some of the readers were talking about having seen the DVD of the film. Go figure.

   I tried even more Googling to get some updated information (I know using "Google" as a verb upsets lawyers and maybe even English teachers, which is all the more reason to do it), but there wasn’t much there at first blush. I had read last year that the movie was bought by another studio – or distribution company – and was supposed to get another turn at bat, so to speak.

   And here’s my 2-cents worth on that. Change the title and give it another try. I don’t know how much precedent there is for changing the name of a movie after an initial, albeit limited release, but I think they should consider it. “Diminished Capacity” is a lousy name for a movie, and I say that with conviction because in two years I’ve never been able to remember the name of the movie.

   And no jokes, please, about the apparent irony of my own diminished capacity.

   Just over 30 years ago, the movie "The Great Santini" with Robert Duvall in the lead role was released, but I have been convinced that it had an earlier, obviously limited theatrical release under a different name. It was the late 1970s, so maybe this was some kind of flashback or similarly disruptive emotional event, but I was pretty certain I had seen the film under another, way clunkier name, and then it got renamed and proved to be a considerable artistic success.

   The fact that I wasn't able to confirm this via Internet searching barely discourages me at all. Most of the information in the Solar System can be found there, but not all. Any help?

Monday, March 08, 2010 3:25:49 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [1]

Thursday, March 04, 2010

MLB claims victory against Upper Deck ....
Posted by T.S.

   A nine-month stretch of utter confusion in the nutty world of modern baseball cards has presumably come to an end with word yesterday that Major League Baseball has settled its lawsuit against Upper Deck.

   Press releases can present wildly divergent interpretations outcomes, but the MLB version seems fairly straightforward in outlining the terms of the settlement, with barely a lick of spin added and a minimum of official gloating.

   Upper Deck will pay MLB Properties more than $2.4 million from unpaid licensing fees prior to 2010, and will ante up a “substantial sum of monies” to pay for the unlicensed cards (three sets) already issued in 2010, the total undisclosed as part of the confidential end of the settlement.

   That settlement payment apparently permits the three products to avoid an ungainly recall situation, which while maybe not as difficult as rounding up millions of Toyotas, is still a giant pain in the butt that probably serves no one very effectively.

   I got a kick out of the seemingly redundant wording that the settlement for the infringing 2010 cards would be addressed by payment of a “substantial sum of monies.” As opposed to taking in a couple of thousand 1989 Upper Deck Ken Griffey rookies in trade, I guess.

   Anyway, I don’t mean to be flippant about it, and I am really rooting for Upper Deck to figure out a way to produce viable baseball cards under the newly agreed-to restrictions, which include no use of MLB logos, uniforms, trade dress or club color combinations. I am a little fuzzy on what “trade dress” means, but taken in context with the rest of that particular clause I guess I can figure it out. In addition, Upper Deck forswears using the various and sundry airbrushing techniques on logos (that’s a vast sigh of collector relief you’re hearing), nor will they be allowed to alter or block MLB marks in future products.

   Yikes! What avenues are left would seem to be fairly limited. Upper Deck’s curious press release about ostensibly the same ruling concedes that they are going to “see how innovative and create they can become now.” He ain’t kidding.

   If Upper Deck can figure out a way to produce and market a nationally distributed mainstream baseball card release under the aforementioned constraints, it will be the most impressive “Save” in major league history.

   I’m not a big fan of that particular statistic, but I’m rooting for them nonetheless.

Thursday, March 04, 2010 3:29:21 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [2]

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Baseball cards at the movies revisited ...
Posted by T.S.

   So naturally, I had to go to the movie "Cop Out" the other day, in part because a baseball card reportedly was featured as a plot device and so I wanted to see how our hobby was portrayed.

   Bruce Willis, playing himself playing the same cop he’s played for 20 years (I’m reminded of John Wayne, who usually played himself playing the same cowboy over and over), is the owner of the alleged 1952 Topps Andy Pafko that gets stolen pretty early on, and Willis needed to sell it to pay for his daughter’s $48,000 wedding. Ahem.

   Anyway, about the extent of our hobby’s presence was a brief scene at a card shop where Willis presents it to the store owner for inspection. For those keeping score at home, the actual movie prop was a 1952 Topps Reprint, which is maybe ironic or more likely just understandable since they wouldn’t want to wave around a genuine $50,000 card if they didn’t have to.

   I thought about hollering at the screen, “Hey, that’s not a real Pafko; that’s a reprint!” but somehow it seemed like it might have been inappropriate. They also showed a kind of sepia-toned flashback sequence were youngsters are looking at their 1952 Topps cards on the steps of a typical Brooklyn brownstone, and explained that the Pafko card got ill treated by ruthless rubber bands because he was card No. 1.That was a nice enough nod to the hobby.

   But that’s about it. I wasn’t disappointed in the minuscule presence the card actually claimed in the script, because I hadn’t expected more more. I saved most of my disappointment for the movie itself, where it turned out the whole was way, way less than the sum of its parts.

   I won’t diverge too severely into a movie review, other than to say Willis was tolerable in a role he’s played with only minor alterations so many times, but some of the dialog almost reached the point of non sequitur, and that Tracy Morgan just annoys me something fierce. In a role that might have been phoned in by Chris Rock, he seemed so wildly buffoonish and absurd that it strained credulity even for cinema.

Wednesday, March 03, 2010 3:32:02 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

Gold, silver and bronze Part Deux ...
Posted by T.S.

   As promised in yesterday’s blog, herewith is my own entry into the dizzy world of awarding medals in amateur athletic competitions, and as I hinted, this is not a flattering episode for yours truly.

   I would guess it was nearly 30 years ago, probably in 1982, during the Winter Empire State Games held in Lake Placid, N.Y., at the same venues as the Winter Olympics from two years earlier.

   As the public relations coordinator for the Games, I was charged with directing media operations from our headquarters at the Lake Placid Club. While the scale of the Winter Games was much smaller than the Summer program, which would typically bring more than 6,000 athletes to Syracuse for the finals, it was still a brutal schedule for us in the several weeks we spent in Lake Placid every winter. During the Games themselves, 16-plus hour days were the norm. I’m not complaining, just establishing what minimal grounds I have for a defense: I was really, really tired.

   Anyway, I was being interviewed on the phone by a reporter from a Syracuse newspaper about a young girl who had competed that day in figure skating. “The good news,” I started off breezily, “was that she won a bronze medal. The bad news is that there were only two skaters in that particular division.”

Haw, haw. It was one of the nuances of the arcane world of figure skating that somebody could win a bronze medal when no silver had been awarded, but as odd as that sounds to a lay person, my answer was way past ill advised. I could add, though it again is irrelevant, that the choice of wording about “Good news, bad news” wasn’t nearly as hackneyed in 1982 as it is today.

   I had been on a friendly basis with the reporter, half thinking that my flip remark was sort of off the record, but that too was the product of being way too tired. Just dumb.

   Next morning, there it was in black-and-white on the pages of the Post-Standard for all the world to see. To this day I hope that the little gal who won the medal and her family didn’t see it, though that’s probably a long shot.

   My boss, Mike Abernethy, arguably one of the most influential names in amateur sports in the country at the time as the executive director of the prototype state games program, was a good sport about it. He didn’t even bother to scold me much, since he could tell how bad I felt about saying something so dumb.

   It probably didn’t hurt that he had a pretty good feel for just how tired I was, since he was working longer than 16 hours a day at the same time.

   I would tell the story over the years in instances were public relations and dealing with the media was the topic du jour. Good reminder, I would solemnly intone, that even when you are talking with media types that you consider friends, it’s best to consider that everything is fair game for reporting purposes.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010 3:59:31 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Monday, March 01, 2010

Seinfeld Olympic bit may have inspired academic paper ...
Posted by T.S.

Jerry Seinfeld probably doesn’t need any help from me in the self-esteem department, but if he did it’s hard to imagine many things cooler than having one of your comedic riffs turned into a full-fledged Ivy League academic paper.

   I can’t offer any proof that’s what actually happened, but it makes for swell conjecture, given that the comedian did a bit on the disappointment of those Olympic athletes winning silver medals, and now – many years later – three professors come up with a study that says bronze medal winners are generally happier than the ones who get silver.

Photo by Claudio Villa/Getty Images

   I have never seen the Seinfeld bit, but I did read the transcript online after hearing about it on Wisconsin Public Radio yesterday afternoon. This morning I figured out that USA Today had also done a piece on the study, though reading that online didn’t show any mention of the comedian.

   I’ll quote directly from the article: Research by three U.S. academics, who analyzed heat-of-the-moment reactions, medal-stand temperament and interviews of Olympians, shows that bronze-medal winners, on average, are happier with their finishes than silver medalists. Take silver, and you tend to fixate on the near miss. Score bronze, and you are thankful you were not shut out altogether.

   “When you come in second,” said Thomas Gilovich, chairman of Cornell’s psychology department and one of the study’s co-authors, “it’s the most natural thing in the world to look upward. ‘I got the silver and that’s what it is, but what is it not? It’s not the gold.’

   “With the bronze, the natural place to look is downward. ‘I got the bronze. That’s what it is, but what it isn’t is off the medal stand.’ “

   Psychologists describe it as counterfactual thinking; Seinfeld offered more of a layman’s interpretation.

   “I think, if I was an Olympic athlete, I would rather come in last then win the silver. If you think about it ... if you win the gold, you feel good. If you win in the bronze, you think: ‘Well, at least I got something.’

   “But if you win that silver, it’s like: ‘Congratulations! You ... almost won. Of all the losers, you came in first of that group. You’re the No. 1 ... loser. No one lost ... ahead of you.' ”

   There’s a lot more, but you get the idea. I’d love to know if the authors of the paper had seen the Seinfield episode in question and if they make any reference or footnotes to it. If anything I'd ever written had inspired any of the denizens of academia to bona fide research, my head would get so big I'd be hard to live with. Best I've ever done is get footnoted in a couple of ostensibly serious studies about the impact of racism on baseball cards. Whoopee!

   I also got a kick out of another piece of the story that noted the researchers had interviewed Empire State Games athletes as part of the study. On the morrow, I’ll offer my own gold-silver-bronze anecdote from one year of the Winter Games segment of New York’s pioneering amateur athletic competition, and unlike Jerry Seinfeld, it’s not something for me to boast about.

Monday, March 01, 2010 3:51:26 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [0]

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Way past time to forgive Shoeless Joe ...
Posted by T.S.

Eight Men Out.jpg

   With all the talk about forgiveness that hovers around the sports world and its real-world counterpart of politics, it seemed like a good time to revisit the one guy that been most visibly left out of that circle for nearly 100 years: Joe Jackson.

   Imagine that. More than a half century after his death, we still can’t bring ourselves around to cutting Shoeless Joe a bit of slack for whatever his misdeed entailed a full 91 years ago.

   So while we ponder what do make of a dozen or more All-Star ballplayers from the steroid era – and 100 or so others whose names on a certain list have somehow miraculously avoided the light of day – we seemingly ignore a guy whose guilty role in the taint surrounding the 1919 World Series has never been all that clear cut.

   Eventually the Hall of Fame is going to have to come to terms with the distorted statistics from a decade-plus of pharmacologically enhanced batting skills, so here’s hoping that whenever that happens, there might be an attendant push to revisit Jackson’s alleged malfeasance.

   This all comes up because I am working on a feature story about Shoeless Joe for this week’s issue (March 19) of Sports Collectors Digest, plus he’s also in the news a bit these days thanks to Upper Deck. The Carlsbad, Calif.-based company will make cards of the baseball great, starting with its 2010 regular-issue product that also includes pasteboards of Pete Rose and Sarah Palin. Don’t ask.

   Personally, I think the continued condemnation of Jackson’s hotly debated role in the 1919 World Series is nothing short of silly. I would call it malicious, except that Jackson’s been gone for so long that seems like a stretch. Still, I have no doubt there are descendants of the great ballplayer who would like see his rightful place in baseball history reconfigured a bit to account for the ambiguity surrounding the admittedly sordid maneuvering in 1919.

   The only remotely rational explanation I can see for continuing Jackson’s “Permanently Ineligible” MLB status is for deterrence, and I think that would be a bit of overkill. A lifetime ban plus 50 years would likely be sufficiently scary to any ballplayers coming up today to keep them from being seduced by gambling interests.

   And just to keep it all in perspective, who exactly is the preeminent gambling proponent in 21st century America? Why, that would be 39 or so of our beloved states, all promoting the various games of chance as a means of shoring up sagging state revenues.

   We ought to re-examine Joe’s situation for no other reason than to avoid having our collective brains explode from the mind-numbing hypocrisy of having such finely honed moral outrage about activities so ardently embraced by our elected officials.

Thursday, February 25, 2010 4:18:45 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)

Comments [3]

Free Updates

Navigation

Search

Archives

More Links