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Post by Lark11 on Oct 9, 2014 11:55:45 GMT -5
Particularly the game action film of Johnson, not unique but rare enough... Yeah, great, great quality. You can see how loose-limbed he is and just how free-and-easy his delivery is. It's very whippy. Even when he's just standing there with his arms down at his sides, his arms seem a bit longer than average (or, maybe he just likes to wear his pants hitched up!), which would give him longer levers.
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Post by psuhistory on Oct 9, 2014 12:09:22 GMT -5
Yeah, great, great quality. You can see how loose-limbed he is and just how free-and-easy his delivery is. It's very whippy. Even when he's just standing there with his arms down at his sides, his arms seem a bit longer than average (or, maybe he just likes to wear his pants hitched up!), which would give him longer levers. I guess he did have some injury problems later in his career, but the number of innings and level of performance, given the pressures created by the sidearm motion, do suggest that some unique physical aspect of his delivery explains the longevity. It looks like a blueprint for an elbow injury...
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Post by psuhistory on Oct 11, 2014 9:18:22 GMT -5
Grantland article about the many deaths of baseball announced in the media over the years. The theories about change become interestingly weird at the end. Although Freud's theories of human nature have been discredited, he continues to exercise a powerful influence on how we explain both the present and the past... grantland.com/the-triangle/the-dead-ball-century-mlb-baseball-playoffs-john-thorn-mlb-historian-baseball-decline-articles/The Dead Ball CenturyOctober 7, 2014 by Bryan Curtis You know John Thorn. Official historian for Major League Baseball. Mustachioed guy in the Ken Burns documentary. I went to his big house upstate last week because Thorn wanted to show me something. It was evidence of a “lively corpse,” Thorn called it, “or fabulous invalid.” Let me explain. As you read this, someone somewhere is writing an article that claims baseball is dying. Or in decline. Or just plain irrelevant — having “fallen out of the national conversation,” as the New York Times put it last year. Baseball-is-dying articles always appear around playoff time. The writer gathers Nielsen ratings, listens to the moans of the game’s sages, and files a fresh obituary. Craig Calcaterra took an elephant gun to such stories last month. But I’d come to see Thorn because he had a collection of old newspaper clippings that revealed something more about sportswriting than its occasional resistance to logic. It turns out the press has been announcing baseball’s death decade-by-decade, and sometimes year-by-year, for nearly the entire history of the game. Baseball’s rogues — its gamblers, faux-founding fathers, and steroid users — are the kind of people that get John Thorn excited. For him, they don’t besmirch baseball history but write a counter-history all their own. Baseball’s obituarists are no different. So it was with excitement that Thorn described to me the words of Pete O’Brien, captain of Brooklyn’s championship Atlantic club: Somehow or other, they don’t play ball nowadays as they used to some eight or ten years ago. I don’t mean to say they don’t play it as well. … But I mean that they don’t play with the same kind of feelings or for the same objects they used to. … It appears to me that ball matches have come to be controlled by different parties and for different purposes... O’Brien wrote this, the first known baseball death notice, in 1868. ♦♦♦ Thorn sat in his second-floor study, surrounded by antique sports prints and shelves sagging with baseball books. We began our tour in the 19th century, because that is Thorn’s favorite century. It was a boom time for baseball-is-dying stories. Eighteen years after O’Brien’s lament, the poet H.C. Dodge wrote in Puck magazine: Oh, give us the glorious matches of old, when love of true sport made them great, And not this new-fashioned affair always sold for the boodle they take at the gate. What did the press think was killing baseball? I asked Thorn. “It was the extreme violence of the game, which is very amazing because we see it now with football,” Thorn said. “Baseball was thought of as violent in the days before gloves and masks. I have a wonderful series from the New York Times from 1881 saying, ‘Baseball must be on the wane, because hospital admissions have declined.’” Baseball, the Times sniffed, “was in the beginning a sport unworthy of men, and...it is now, in its full developed state, unworthy of gentle-men.” “Then it was owners trading players — treating players like chattel,” Thorn said. “You’re only a quarter of a century removed from the Civil War.” The image of a man bought and sold carried an unseemly resonance. “You cannot put him up like a slave on auction block,” the Milwaukee Journal warned in 1890, in a story called “The Decline in Baseball Interest.” During the Gilded Age, people feared that the U.S. economy was being controlled by monopolies like Standard Oil. It was the same with baseball: By the 1890s, the National League had driven out its competition. Fans suffered through shenanigans like the Robison brothers looting the Cleveland Spiders of good players and transferring them to the other team they owned, the St. Louis Perfectos. “The rage for base ball appears to be dying out,” the Omaha World-Herald declared in May 1890. A month later, the Arkansas Gazette imagined “the ghost of Baseball dead and gone come back for the benevolent but solemn purpose of exhibiting itself as an awful warning to its successor.” The cover of a 1913 issue of Puck noted, “No class of labor feels the grip of grinding monopoly more than our underpaid, overworked ball-players.” An illustration showed ballplayers snared in chains made of baseballs. Just as the NBA is said to be gaining on baseball today, baseball’s journalist-coroners charted the progress made by other sports. In 1892, the Boston Journal noted — in an article titled “The Decline of Base Ball” — that bicycling was the true sport of the age. In 1917, the Colorado Springs Gazette argued that baseball was losing ground to trap shooting. “The modern young man takes up a sport that he can actually do,” the Gazette reported. “No longer is he to be a bench warmer.” Thorn said, “So if trap shooting is a perceived rival, and bicycling is a perceived rival, then it’s no surprise that the NBA and the NFL are eating baseball’s lunch somehow.” Before we left the deep past, Thorn identified one more perp that was going to kill baseball: the car. “The automobile and golf are commonly held responsible for the decline of baseball,” the Aberdeen Evening News reported in 1928. “But it wasn’t because people were motoring about,” Thorn said. “It was because they were screwing in the back seat!” Only the prudery of family newspapers spared us the headline “Base Ball Demised by Sex.” ♦♦♦ As you read through Thorn’s morgue files, you notice a funny development. Something that was supposed to kill baseball — say, players being treated like chattel — is mitigated. But then players start asking for more money. And this opposite force is also going to kill baseball. In 1922, when the Yankees were paying Babe Ruth $75,000, a Michigan paper argued that baseball had birthed a “salary-frankenstein.” The headline read, “Enormous Salaries May Mean Death of Base Ball Business.” “Oppressing the player, or allowing the players to oppress the public,” said Thorn. “It’s the obverse and reverse of a coin. You just flip it and see the way it comes out and that’s the way you argue in a particular decade.” These days, you hear baseball is vulnerable to new media — first TV, which loves the NFL more, and then the Internet, because MLB is more tight-fisted with highlight clips than the NBA. This is also an old argument. “The movies were regarded as a big challenge,” Thorn said. A scout told the Colorado Springs Gazette in 1917 that people preferred nickelodeons to stadiums. The 1920s produced a spate of stories saying kids had given up baseball, a development that would kill the sport at the roots. “Decline of Baseball As Major College Sport Foreseen,” read a 1925 headline in the Miami News reported. A year later, the Associated Press found baseball “showing signs of dying on the sandlots.” A decade after that, a former major leaguer told a Delaware paper, “Baseball as an interscholastic sport no longer exists in many of our larger cities.” In 1945, the conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler mused on the death of baseball. Pegler alighted on what would, in succeeding years, become the greatest serial killer in baseball history. Call it the American character. The theory goes like this: Something about America changed — its mood, maybe, or the pace of life — and baseball got left behind. “I detect a sad and desperate admission that the game, itself, is outmoded,” Pegler wrote. As Pegler saw it, the kids of ’45 were too easily distracted for street ball. “Frankly, baseball, love it though you may, is a complex game requiring more organization and enthusiasm than boys today are willing to give it,” Pegler wrote. This is before BioShock Infinite, the iPhone, and the catalogue of demon-toys that allegedly make today’s young punks surrender their gloves. In 1955, a Kansas paper announced, “We predict that within 25 years there’ll be no organized baseball except the major leagues, if even they’re in existence then.” As a doomsday prediction, it was topped only by that of a Virginia magazine: “In a few years the only place you will be able to find a first baseman’s mit [sic] will be in the baseball museum at Cooperstown, N.Y., and the deeds of Mickey Mantle and Stan Musial will be recounted the way we now speak of buffalo hunters.” But let’s go back to that ’55 death notice. It’s interesting because it was published at a summit of baseball’s so-called “Golden Age”: the year Brooklyn finally beat the Yankees in the World Series; the year Mantle and Willie Mays led their leagues in homers; a period from which we modern fans feel Boomers will never let us escape. Even Golden Agers thought baseball was fatally anachronistic. “The game is getting to be outdated by other forms of entertainment,” the paper noted, “which are more exciting, more accessible, and — in many cases — cheaper.” It suggested that baseball would be usurped by the drive-in theater, the swimming pool, and the airplane. ♦♦♦ The fact that baseball was your father’s game, your father’s Oldsmobile, I think we started to see this in the 1960s,” Thorn said, “as baseball on the field seemed to be in a declining stage as measured by offensive stats.” In the ‘60s, baseball was going to die because of over-expansion. The winnowing of the minors. Outfield fences pushed back in bigger stadiums. “If baseball dies,” the columnist Jim Murray wrote, “the murder weapon will be real estate.” In the ‘70s, it was the winnowing of the minors (again). Bigger stadiums (again). And that elusive American character — now warped by Oswald, Vietnam, and Kent State. “While baseball hasn’t passed,” a Toledo Blade writer noted in 1972, “its current decline tells a lot about the changed American character. It’s the collapse of small-town America, the rush to violence in sport, film, and other entertainment, the diminished competitive urge, and the lessened credibility of the American dream.” Note the shift: Where once America was too easily distracted for baseball, now it was too cruel, or too heartbroken. At times, the sportswriters got tired, as one put it, of driving “the verbal hammer of nails into the proverbial coffin.” So they picked up the dugout phone and called a higher authority. “Baseball is doomed,” media theorist Marshall McLuhan claimed in a syndicated article in 1969. “It is a dying sport.” McLuhan settled on a culprit: the American character. “Baseball,” he said, “is just too individual a sport for our new age.” The five-tool historian Jacques Barzun became an unlikely player in the baseball death industry. Barzun had once written, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Afterward, whenever baseball had one of its periodic crises, journalists would call and ask how the crisis explained America. Barzun in 1976, amid a sluggish economy and a spring-training lockout: “Perhaps it is an expression of disillusionment, that the American dream has failed.” In 1993, amid chatter of free trade and free agency: “Atoms hang together much better than teams today.” The last bit was an unintentional quotation of Jim Murray’s ’63 obituary: “Atomic physics is no more abstruse than the far reaches of the Baltimore roster.” After 125 years of declaring baseball dead, you’re bound to double-dip an analogy. By the 1980s — well, I’ll be honest. Before we reached the ‘80s, Thorn and I got tired of talking about death and went out for sandwiches. I present those murder stories as a newsreel: August 26, 1987: “Hall of Famer Sewell says baseball declining” July 4, 1995: “An aging population adds to the decline of baseball” May 1, 2003: “Where are the fans? Baseball’s declining attendance” And finally we arrive in 2013, when Daniel Okrent, a fine writer and co-creator of fantasy baseball, told the New York Times, “We are a shouting culture now” and that “baseball is quiet and slow.” But you’ve already heard about the American character being out of tune with baseball. In 1972. In 1945. In 1868. ... ♦♦♦ Why is baseball’s death such an appealing premise? Well, “Baseball Is Dead” is an editor’s idea of a good headline. Trend stories depend on rubicons being crossed, on scattered data revealing a shocking truth. Of course, after a game like Royals-A’s the other night, the same editor might ask for a headline that reads, “Baseball is back from dead.” Declaring baseball dead allows us to imagine we’re present at a turning point in history. We’re the lucky coroners who get to toe-tag the game of Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Kurt Bevacqua. “We are not at a historic moment,” Thorn said. “The popularity of anything will be cyclical. There will be ups and downs. If you want to measure a current moment against a peak, you will perceive a decline. J.P. Morgan was asked, ‘What will the stock market do this year?’ His answer was: ‘Fluctuate.’” Baseball’s repeated death throes, Thorn argued, are symptoms of its own innate nostalgia. Pete O’Brien thought baseball’s true glories lay in an unreachable past. We modern fans do, too. “I think it’s this Garden of Eden thing,” Thorn said. “Things are not as they used to be. It is a solace that lies behind the church, as well. The precepts of the good book are largely in decline today, but once upon a time...” It’s not just the spryness of the game we find lacking. It’s modern players. This is why Hank Aaron is wielded like a weapon against Barry Bonds, why an otherwise clear-headed argument against Derek Jeter’s canonization turns into a seance for Red Ruffing. “The Garden of Eden notion that giants walked the earth in the old days — we need this to be true,” Thorn said. “Now, we don’t think it’s true in football or basketball. We don’t think it’s true in Olympic sports.” That’s because those sports’ big numbers have already fallen: Usain Bolt is faster than Jesse Owens. “Baseball statistics tend to provide this camouflage,” Thorn said. “Back in 1887, ten men hit .400. Boy, they must have been great!” The final reason is the opposite of nostalgia, more like a kind of anti-nostalgia. If baseball really is our father’s game, then saying it’s dead is a statement of selfhood. Every man kills the thing his father loves. “You grow up by not following in your father’s footsteps,” Thorn said in his study, “but finding ways to separate and have turf you can declare your own.” Filial angst is perfectly legal. Today, it’s often exercised by embracing the NBA — a league, by the way, that was repeatedly pronounced dead or declining. There’s just one hitch. Our dads thought baseball was their fathers’ game. (From 1969: “Now I know why old people like baseball. It’s a sanctuary for the listless.”) And our grandfathers thought baseball was their fathers’ game. (From 1917: “The day of the proxy sport has passed for the live-wire American.”) By declaring baseball dead, we haven’t broken with our fathers at all. We’ve reconciled with them. We’re two obituarists meeting in a magic Iowa cornfield. “Hey, Dad,” we venture, voices cracking. “You want to write a think piece?”
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Post by FoulBalz on Oct 11, 2014 11:08:01 GMT -5
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Very nice post above.
People love to cry wolf.
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Post by Lark11 on Oct 13, 2014 13:21:46 GMT -5
www.udel.edu/udaily/2015/oct/satchel-paige-photo-101314.htmlA Paige from historyUD's McKenna finds rare photo of baseball legend in Baltimore 9:49 a.m., Oct. 13, 2014--Just as Major League Baseball, and fans in Baltimore, progress through the postseason, a University of Delaware professor is publicizing the discovery of a photo of the legendary Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige in a Baltimore Black Sox uniform. Bernard McKenna, associate professor of English, has been researching the history of baseball’s segregated years with an eye to writing a book on the subject. A lifelong baseball fan who grew up near the Baltimore Orioles’ old Memorial Stadium, his work has focused on that city. McKenna earlier got wide attention in the world of baseball history for his research into old aerial photos of Baltimore, which he used to find the locations of two former Negro League ballparks — Maryland Park and Westport Park — whose sites had never before been pinpointed. During that research, McKenna found a 1930 photo in the archives of the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, showing five players with the Black Sox standing in a row in Maryland Park. Paige is on the far left, holding a baseball. The caption misspelled his last name as “Page,” which may be why the photo apparently was never publicized earlier. McKenna believes it may be the only image of him in a Baltimore uniform; Paige had an unusually long career and played for many teams, but only stayed one season in Baltimore. The Afro-American recently gave permission for the photo to be reprinted. "Satchel Paige made his reputation as a pitcher for the Kansas City Monarchs, so it seems appropriate, as the Kansas City Royals battle the Baltimore Orioles for the American League pennant, that we see Satchel Paige in a Baltimore uniform," McKenna said. Next, he may write a scholarly work on Baltimore baseball history and racism in that city, which in 1911 enacted strict segregationist laws. “You can’t talk about baseball without talking about civil rights,” McKenna said.
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Post by psuhistory on Oct 13, 2014 19:23:44 GMT -5
"Satchel Paige made his reputation as a pitcher for the Kansas City Monarchs, so it seems appropriate, as the Kansas City Royals battle the Baltimore Orioles for the American League pennant, that we see Satchel Paige in a Baltimore uniform," McKenna said. Great find, Paige had some seriously long arms. I guess I would have said that Paige made his reputation as a barnstormer and playing in Pittsburgh during the early '30s. He'd injured his arm in Mexico and turned himself into a junkballer by the time he pitched for the Monarchs. Great second career though, remade himself in KC...
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Post by psuhistory on Oct 13, 2014 19:40:34 GMT -5
And George Suttles, in the center, could mash with the best: 6'3"/215, he hit a home run to center at La Tropical in Havana that cleared the 60-foot wall, 500 feet from home plate, and kept going. A commemorative marker was placed where the ball landed around 600 feet from home...
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Post by Deleted on Oct 14, 2014 12:34:01 GMT -5
I love the Walter Johnson footage. Muddy Rhule SP? scored the winning run for Washington. You can't tell from the footage where everyone looks fast but it has been said that he might have been the slowest runner in baseball history.
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Post by psuhistory on Nov 1, 2014 8:45:23 GMT -5
Interesting article on the limitations of baseball as a "national pastime" in southern states after the Civil War. Over time, the "national" project promoted more uniformly white crowds as well as clubs, and integrated crowds like the one that generated the 1869 riot in Charlston didn't trouble the NAPBBP during the 1870s. Online version of the article includes illustrations and a boxscore of the Savannah/Carolina game that preceded the riot... www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/charlestons-baseball-riot-1869Charlston's Baseball Riot of 1869by Ryan Swanson, The National Pastime Museum In July 1869, one of the strangest brawls in baseball history occurred in Charleston, South Carolina. The “base ball riot,” as the Charleston Courier described it, took place on the grounds of the Citadel. Racial tensions boiled over when Charleston police attempted to arrest a drunken fan. Partisan epithets filled the air, and thousands of black and white Charlestonians spilled onto the playing field. Baseball bats became weapons. And to make matters more bizarre, the fracas involved a marching band composed of black musicians. This “Washington Cornet Band” traveled in support of the visiting, white ballclub from Savannah; the band played its rousing rendition of “Dixie” repeatedly. The end of the American Civil War had jumpstarted baseball’s development in the United States. Soldiers returned home anxious to get back to work and eager to resume their pastimes. Baseball clubs organized by the dozens. Tournaments sprang up throughout the North. Baseball enthusiasts worked hard to organize the game’s rules and customs. Henry Chadwick and other leaders of the National Association of Base Ball Players (founded in 1857), determined to make up for lost time and momentum, declared that baseball must be “national in every sense of the word.” But national unity after the Civil War (750,000 killed) was no easy task. Geographically speaking, baseball was intensely regional. The game emanated from New York City. It blossomed in cities such as Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the 1860s and ’70s. Below the Mason-Dixon line, however, the game grew haltingly. The residents of former Confederate cities such as Atlanta, New Orleans, and Richmond embraced baseball, but on their own terms. “The base ball fever has attacked the rising generation of Charlestonians, and there are nearly a dozen clubs, white and black . . . ,” the New York Times reported. “The Citadel-green, erst the Campus Martius of Confederate battalions, is now daily the scene of the peaceful pastime.” While usually peaceful, baseball became a means to celebrate the “Lost Cause” and to commemorate the fallen Confederacy in the South. Racial politics loomed beneath the surface of baseball negotiations over land and leagues. National reconciliation in baseball, as in the nation more broadly, proved to be an elusive goal. In this context, nearly four years after the end of the Civil War, the Savannah Base Ball Club visited Charleston for a game against the Carolinas Base Ball Club. The Citadel hosted the match, although the best that could be said of the ball grounds was that it was a relatively level and dry parcel of land. Charleston did not have a baseball stadium. The contest attracted a large crowd, and as the game proceeded, the throng repeatedly pushed through the loose rope used to separate the playing field from the spectators. As the numbers grew, the Charleston police requested crowd control support from the U.S. Army regiment stationed in the city. The game was a lopsided affair; the ballplayers from Savannah romped to a 35–17 victory. Then the trouble began. When the game ended, Charleston officials attempted to keep the ball field clear of spectators. The teams planned to settle a bet regarding which of its players could throw a baseball the farthest. But between the end of the game and the beginning of the contest, hostilities broke out. Charleston police tried to arrest a drunken fan, Rafe Izzard. Izzard, a black Charlestonian, did not go easily. The black community in Charleston certainly had reason to suspect the motives of its city’s police force. The black citizenry rushed to the support of Izzard. The mixed-race crowd turned violent. As word of the escalating situation spread, Charlestonians descended upon the ball grounds by the hundreds. Quickly an estimated 3,000 (newspapers disagreed on the exact number) black Charlestonians had gathered. Looking to defuse the situation, police officials and soldiers provided an armed escort for the ballplayers, moving them to a local hotel. There, the players shared a meal and made their customary toasts, even as the crowd outside continued to protest. As the afternoon wore on, the target of the black Charlestonians’ ire shifted from the ballplayers and police to the Washington Band. The black band members were Democrats. Or so went the rumor circulating through the mob. The baseball fans began to throw rocks at the band. “Several shots were fired on both sides,” the Atlanta Constitution reported. The band members fought back with their instruments. Columbia, South Carolina’s Daily Phoenix captured one rather bizarre scene for its readers: “The player on the trombone seized that instrument by the small end with both hands and swung it around, knocking down several assailants.” Protected by the police, the Savannah Base Ball Club and the Washington Band left the hotel in the early evening and headed for the harbor. They did not leave quietly. Despite the tension (or maybe because of it), the Washington Band played a controversial tune. Loudly. “The band, with their battered instruments piping ‘Dixie,’” headed for their awaiting steamer. This only stirred up the crowd further. Upon hearing “Dixie,” played by a black band of Democrats, “The colored mob yelled, ‘Rally Round the Flag, Boys.’” And, according to the New York Times, “with the vilest and most insulting cries, [the mob] endeavored to bring on a conflict.” The Charleston baseball riot of 1869 made clear the challenges that faced the baseball community as Chadwick and others pressed to make the game into a “national pastime.” Reconstruction struggles over race and rights pervaded every aspect of society. The black fans of Charleston could not overlook the partisan alliances of the Washington Band. Southern baseball contests took place in a distinctively post–Civil War context. Not surprisingly, the black fans at the Savannah-Charleston game took offense at the juxtaposition of Confederate memory and baseball. As Charleston’s Courier explained, somewhat befuddled, “Their especial cause of enmity against the band seemed to because ‘they were a d—d Democratic crowd,’ and played ‘Dixie’ for those ‘d—d rebels in gray uniforms.” The Savannah ballplayers and band members made it out of Charleston relatively unscathed. Journalists reported on cuts and bruises and damaged band and baseball equipment. Despite these rather minor injuries, however, newspapers above and below the Mason-Dixon line picked up the story. The headlines (“Riot in Charleston,” “The Base Ball Riot,” “Another of Those Southern ‘Negro Riots,’” etc.) emphasized the racial chaos in the city. Writers questioned whether the white baseball clubs of Charleston could promise safety to visiting teams. Accordingly, white leaders in Charleston rushed to defend the reputation of their community. A quick invitation was dashed off, inviting the Savannah Base Ball Club and the Washington Band to visit Charleston again. The invitation broke the visit-then-host tradition in baseball circles. The baseball men of Savannah agreed to return to Charleston. In preparation for the do-over, the white citizenry of Charleston raised $160 to replace the damaged equipment of the Washington Band. “I do not err in saying that no community can regret more than ours the disgraceful scenes that took place . . . ,” explained a note sent to Savannah with the funds. Charleston’s baseball honor, it seemed, hung in the balance as the second visit neared. When the steamer carrying the Savannah men pulled into the wharf at Charleston on August 12, 1869, Charleston’s white citizenry and baseball men stood ready. A police battalion and two regiments of U.S. soldiers, “armed with Winchester rifles and bayonets,” secured the dock. The Savannah ballplayers and their accompanying “Dixie”-playing band made the walk toward the ball field without disruption. Charleston’s black citizenry got the threatening message. “The negroes generally kept within doors, and very few were to be seen on the streets,” reported the Chicago Tribune. The game, a mere side note to the racial posturing of the situation, went off without a hitch. The Charleston “base ball riot” revealed plenty about the baseball climate of 1869. Racial tensions were paramount. Instability threatened the emerging baseball community in the South. Civil War memories certainly lingered. In short, despite the plans of Chadwick and his fellow baseball leaders of the North, baseball in 1869 resided a long way off from emerging as a true “national pastime.” Ryan Swanson, assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, is the author of When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a “National Pastime” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014).
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Post by psuhistory on Nov 3, 2014 20:25:00 GMT -5
Article on Korean baseball from today's paper, parallel to the news about Kim's posting: interesting points about the greater proportions of young people and women in Korean baseball crowds, as well as the cheap tickets. Dating Korean baseball from 1982 relates only to the recent professional league: during the 1920s, the Japanese imperial regime in Korea founded an amateur baseball league to teach Japanese values to Korean youth... www.nytimes.com/2014/11/03/world/asia/to-understand-korean-baseball-head-to-the-stands.htmlIn Korean Baseball, Louder Cheers and More Squidby Choe Sang-Hun, NY Times, November 2, 2014 BUSAN, South Korea — It was the bottom of the ninth and the home team was behind, 10-6. In an American ballpark, fans might have started glumly filing out of the stands to beat the traffic. But here at Sajik Stadium, home to the Lotte Giants, drums were thundering, plastic trumpets were blowing and thousands of people were singing, chanting and catcalling themselves hoarse. “I come here to scream the stress out of me,” said Ok Hyun-ju, a 44-year-old math teacher sharing beer, chicken and roasted squid with her friends on a September afternoon. “When it comes to shouting whatever you like, never minding what other people might think of it, there is no place like a ballpark.” The Korean Series, which starts Tuesday, signals the end of another season in a country where baseball remains the most popular spectator sport. But understanding South Korea’s version of the national pastime requires a visit to the stands, where the festivities are both raucous and organized to a degree that American fans might find startling. The infield stands are in a constant uproar, with the opposing fans engaging in “cheer battles.” The crowds chant and sing in unison, doing synchronized hand moves and banging out a rhythm with noise-making plastic tubes. Meanwhile, cheerleaders dance on raised platforms like choreographed K-pop groups, often with suggestive moves that older Koreans might frown upon. “There is much more music, much more dancing, much more singing and much more cheering,” said Daren Hoelscher, an oil and gas engineer from Houston who was watching the Giants play. By comparison, he said, “Baseball in America is mostly quiet.” Professional baseball in South Korea dates from 1982, when President Chun Doo-hwan threw out a ceremonial first pitch in a Seoul ballpark. From that unpopular dictator’s point of view, one benefit of the game was to give the people something to rally and shout about besides his regime. (He provided tax incentives to team owners, along with other forms of support, encouraging baseball to “entertain the people.”) That did not work out for Mr. Chun; widespread political protests continued, eventually leading to South Korea’s democratization. But baseball thrived, building on a national tendency to identify strongly with hometowns — and a fondness for mass singing and dancing. Ms. Ok, the math teacher, remembers the sense of liberation she felt when she first went to a game as a high school student in the late 1980s, and later worked part time at a ballpark selling ice cream. “Except for the ballpark, there was no place where women could shout in public and didn’t have to worry about ‘face’ in our Confucian society,” she said, referring to the traditional decorum that had required women to look coy in public. In those early years, the crowds were almost entirely male and known for drinking, smoking and brawling. Today, smoking and hard liquor are banned, and teams actively market to women and to couples. About 40 percent of spectators are women, somewhat lower than the percentage in the United States and roughly comparable to that in Japan, which has its own proud baseball tradition — including organized mass cheering. Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story But South Korean crowds are considerably younger than in either of those countries. An Olympic gold medal in 2008 — the last for baseball, which was dropped as an Olympic sport afterward — lifted the game’s popularity among young South Koreans, who are known for their particularly fervent patriotism when Korean teams compete internationally. Tickets are cheap, starting at about $7.50. And in a distinction that Americans might find downright revolutionary, fans are allowed to bring in their own food and beer (though stadiums do sell their own, including Korean standbys like dried squid). Some ballparks provide seating at tables with built-in grills, for those who want to do their own cooking. The Lotte Giants fans in Busan, a port city that is South Korea’s largest after Seoul, are widely considered the country’s fiercest. (While South Korea’s nine teams are strongly associated with their home cities, their names are derived from their owners, conglomerates like Samsung and Lotte, which is best known for its department stores.) Each Giants player has his own cheer song, which the crowd sings as he steps to the plate. A curious Giants tradition is for fans to inflate orange trash bags and strap them to their heads, which results in a bobbing sea of orange as they jump up and down while singing. When the game is over, they use the bags to pick up their trash — the reason the Giants handed them out in the first place. Japanese fans rarely boo the opposing team, but South Koreans act as if they can change the game’s outcome through sheer volume. During the recent game in Busan, when the pitcher for the visiting SK Wyverns made a pickoff attempt to first base, Giants fans pointed to him three times in unison with a menacing “Ma!” meaning “Hey you!” (The opposing fans will often respond to this with “Wa!” meaning “So what?”) One long-struggling team, the Hanwha Eagles — sometimes mocked as the Hanwha Chickens — recently tried to improve its fortunes with cheering robots. The “fanbots” held up screens that scrolled messages of support, uploaded by fans who weren’t at the game; fans were also encouraged to send selfies, which appeared on the robots’ screen faces. The robots were also programmed to do “the wave.” So far, they have failed to lift the Eagles out of last place. Historically, the Giants haven’t had an easy road either, despite the high spirits at Sajik Stadium. The team has not won the Korean Series since 1992. In the early 2000s, the Giants spent four consecutive seasons in last place; angry fans responded with boycotts, and one game was played in front of just 69 spectators. The Giants finished in seventh place this year, their worst season since 2007. Fans lamented a “dark age” for the team and demanded the ouster of the current management. Last week, some of them set up a protest site outside a Lotte department store in Busan, complete with funeral wreaths. Giants management issued a statement saying that it “humbly accepts their admonishments.” “The hardest time being a Giants cheerleader is when the game is going badly and some drunken fans look at us full of anger and try to boo us offstage, as if that’s our fault that the team is losing,” Park Ki-ryang, 23, a cheerleader who has her own fan club, said at the game in September. Bae Sin-kyu, a 54-year-old fan, knows that anger well. “When we lose a game, I spit and swear that I will never come again,” Mr. Bae, whose blue jersey was studded with Giants pins, said while waving flags during the game against the Wyverns, which ended in a 10-8 loss for the home team. “But I know I will be here for the next game,” he said. “I can’t help it.”
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Post by psuhistory on Nov 8, 2014 9:50:21 GMT -5
Further discussion of the introduction of baseball in Korea as an aspect of its interrelationship with Japan during the early 1900s... www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/sports/2014/11/600_167644.htmlWhy Koreans Call Baseball 'Yagu'By Patrick Bourgo, Korea Times, November 6 2014 With the Korean Series underway between the Nexen Heroes and Samsung Lions, one is likely to hear the word "yagu" wherever one goes, from offices to watering holes. "Yagu," meaning baseball, is a familiar term for anyone with a passing interest in the sport in Korea. However, few know where and when the term originated. The answer to that question is a fascinating one, illuminating the history of the sport here and echoing the nation's own turbulent past. Baseball has been played in Korea since the late 19th century, toward the end of the Joseon Dynasty. The earliest reported use of the word baseball in a newspaper in Korea, in English, occurred in the mid-1890s, but at the time, the old fashioned spelling ㅡ "base ball" ㅡ was used. When looking at the history of a particular word, it is important to remember that many Korean words have Chinese characters (called "hanja" in Korean), and can be written in either hanja or hangeul. It also should be noted that until recently, it was common for hanja to be used in published writing, such as newspapers, instead of hangul. The word "yagu" is comprised of two Chinese characters. The first syllable means "field" and second means "ball." So yagu can literally be translated "field ball." However, this breakdown doesn't explain where and when the term originated. To answer these questions, a good place to start is with Phillip Gillett, a man who has been credited with introducing baseball to Korea (although it would probably be more accurate to credit him with popularizing a sport that was being played before his arrival on the peninsula). As in other countries in the early days of baseball's introduction, such as Japan, a number of different names were used in Korea before "yagu" became the standard. When baseball started taking hold among Koreans in the early 1900s, it was primarily being played by young people. In its nascent days, it was played by students at schools and academic institutions such as the now-famous Hwangsung Young Men's Christian Association, language institutes, Kyungshin School and Whimoon School. It is in connection with these schools that we find some of the earliest references to baseball in the Korean language. According to some, Gillett, the head of the YMCA at the time, used the term "tagu" for baseball, and one of the earliest references to the game came in 1906, when a Korean newspaper referred to the sport as "tagu." The literal translation of tagu could be "hit ball." Another term, "tugu" was also used in the early days. A possible translation of tugu is "throw ball." However, to better understand the origins of the word "yagu," we should look at the origin of the term in Japan. Numerous sources state that baseball arrived in Japan in the early 1870s. The game of baseball is called "yakyu" in Japan and uses the same Chinese characters as "yagu." Tadaoka Koki is credited by some as the first person to use these characters to refer to the game of baseball in Japan, although he pronounced it "nobooru." Chuma Kanoe , inducted into the Japanese Hall of Fame in 1970, is widely credited with coining the word "yakyu" in 1894. He used the same Chinese characters as Tadaoka, but pronounced them "yakyu," which continues to be the word used for baseball in Japan to this day. Even before the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910, many young Koreans went to study in Japan, where baseball was also being played, and would come back to Korea and play the game. One of these groups of Korean students from Japan visited Korea in 1909 and played baseball with Koreans, and even had their own baseball song, a kind of team anthem. They traveled around Korea playing and teaching people how to play baseball and shared their song as well. Newspapers reported about the students and their love of the game. One paper wrote about the group under the headline, "Baseball team's song." It was in one of these newspaper articles that we can find one of the earliest uses of the Chinese characters for yagu. In as early as 1910, it is possible to find references to yagu in Hangul. It was after these exchanges with Korean students playing baseball and studying in Japan that the Chinese characters for the word "yagu" would be seen in print in Korea. After this point, other terms for the game, such "tugu" and "tagu" appear to have gone out of use. Today, baseball is one of the most popular sports in Korea. Like the game, the word "yagu" appears to be here to stay.
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Post by psuhistory on Nov 8, 2014 10:19:21 GMT -5
Interesting article about the National League's first great labor uprising, 1889-1890. Ward was a good writer, his book (recently back in print) highly recommended as a document of American baseball's early history... How a Secret Brotherhood's Revolt Nearly Destroyed the National LeagueW.M. Akers, Deadspin, November 4 2014 Today marks the 125th anniversary of the formation of the Players' League, the most radical experiment ever attempted by baseball's major leagues. It was a rebellion led by a slender, brilliant shortstop, who had begun pondering revolt nine months before, in the shadow of the pyramids. The bulletin was posted on the evening of February 8, 1889, in the lobby of Cairo's Hotel d'Orient: Base-ball at the Pyramids. The Chicago and All-America teams, comprising the Spalding base-ball party, will please report in the hotel office, in uniform, promptly at ten o'clock to-morrow morning. We shall leave for the hotel at that hour, camels having been provided for the All-Americas and donkeys for the Chicago players, with carriages for the balance of the party. The Pyramids will be inspected, the Sphinx visited, and a game played upon the desert near by, beginning at 2 o'clock.Around the notice huddled 20 travel-weary ballplayers, baseball missionaries brought by Albert Spalding to spread the national pastime around the globe. They had traveled from Hawaii to Australia, from Ceylon to the Suez, exhibiting their game—and Spalding's sporting equipment—whenever they got the chance. In Australia they had played for thousands, but in Cairo they were curiosities who passed their time like all American travelers: shopping in the bazaars, screaming at beggars and complaining about the food. Tomorrow would come an exhibition that nobody asked for, which remains one of the strangest in the history of American sport. Among them was one whose mind was not on sightseeing. John Montgomery Ward—shortstop, lawyer, and president of the nascent players' union—was transfixed by a short item in the American newspaper, the first he had seen in months, which said that the National League had taken advantage of his absence to enact a salary cap that would cut his income in half. As his teammates prepared to greet the Sphinx, the most remarkable mind in baseball was taking the first steps to a revolution. Ward broke into the game as a pitcher, a crafty curveball artist in a time when overhand pitching was still barred. After winning 47 games for the championship 1879 Providence Grays at age 19, he was washed-up as a pitcher by 24, having thrown 2,400 innings over six grueling seasons. An original New York Giant, he holds the rights to the franchise's first RBI and first home run—an inside-the-park walk-off. He discovered Old Hoss Radbourn; he pitched the second-ever perfect game; he is the only man in history to collect 100 wins and 2,000 hits. This slender man, with jug ears and a modest moustache, relished what today are called "off-field distractions." He wrote articles, married a Broadway actress, and in his spare time studied at Columbia, where he took degrees in law and political science. (This in spite of the fact that he had been expelled from Pennsylvania State College for stealing chickens.) "He was never quite one of the boys," writes Bryan Di Salvatore in his excellent biography A Clever Base-Ballist. "He was never loved." Though hard-nosed about the business of baseball, he did his best to maintain an innocent love of the game. "It is not a calculation but an inspiration," he said in Base-Ball: How To Become A Player, a best-selling guide to the game which he opened with a sparkling bit of pastoral imagery borrowed from Homer: O'er the green mead the sporting virgins play, Their shining veils unbound; along the skies, Tost and retost, the ball incessant flies. Poetry aside, Ward's book is a practical one, giving position-by-position instructions and imploring young players to "Keep away from saloons" and treat the sport as "more of a business and less of a pastime." To this end, in 1885 he founded the Brotherhood of American Base Ball Players, a secret society that would stand up for player's rights in a time when they had few. These were the days of the reserve clause, which bound players to clubs in a state that Ward could not help but liken—endlessly and with no apparent sense of irony—to slavery. "There is now no escape for the player," he would write. "Like a fugitive-slave law, the reserve-rule denies him a harbor or a livelihood, and carries him back, bound and shackled, to the club from which he attempted to escape." The reserve clause allowed owners to indulge their every miserly whim. They forced players to pay for their own hotel rooms, their own uniforms, and their own medical expenses. They fined players for drinking, for cursing, for using the wrong utensil at dinner. In Boston, the owner saved money by requiring players to leap into the stands after foul balls. When the Louisville Colonels faced insolvency, their owner fined his players for every loss, soaking them until their entire salaries had been repossessed by the club. For players less famous than Ward, complaints meant the blacklist, and a permanent ban from professional baseball. "The player has become a mere chattel," he wrote. "He goes where he is sent, takes what is given him, and thanks the Lord for life." In this atmosphere, the Brotherhood had a ready appeal. A year after its founding, over 90% of the league's players had joined, giving the union enough strength to publicly announce its existence. When the National League refused to negotiate, Ward brought them to the table by threatening to strike. Most of the concessions he won were quietly repealed, but by the end of 1888, Ward felt emancipation was within reach. All he needed was ownership's ear. There was no owner more powerful than A.G. Spalding, sporting goods magnate, ambassador of baseball, and owner of the Chicago club. A former player himself, he had a boy's love of the game, which he had chosen to share with the planet by means of his months-long round the world barnstorming tour, which would pit a team of all-Americans against his Chicagos. Ward had just led the Giants to another pennant and a World Series victory, and Spalding asked him to play shortstop for the all-Americans. While he was abroad, trying to convince the game's most powerful magnate of the evils of the reserve clause, there was treachery back at home. Three days after the tourists sailed for Australia, the National League enacted the Brush Classification Plan, named for the famously stingy owner of the Indianapolis Hoosiers, who once responded to a player's illness by docking his pay and fining him $100 for getting sick. Designed to help small-market teams save money, the plan rated players from Grade A to Grade E, and set their wages accordingly, from $1,500 to $2,500. Grade A players like Ward would have their salaries slashed. Grade E players would be required to sweep the ballpark. Players were given three weeks to sign their new contracts or retire from baseball. Without their union president there to advise them, most caved. "Won't Ward and the others be mad," mused New York pitcher Tim Keefe. *** On the morning of February 9, 1889, there was chaos outside the Hotel d'Orient. "The hotel porters swore alternately in French, Greek and Arabic," wrote the New York Times correspondent. "Hackmen forced their way through the throng slashing their whips right and left. Spalding yelled pidgin Egyptian at the chief dragoman at the rate of 100 words a minute, and the players used vigorous and emphatic language to the crowd of beggars as they forced their way among the animals, crying for 'backsheesh.'" Unable to endure the jolting camel ride, Ward abandoned his mount. While his teammates amused themselves with a camel race, he walked alone in the sand. Had the entire trip been arranged to separate the Brotherhood from its leader? Spalding would later deny knowing anything about the Brush Plan before sailing, but Chicago infielder Fred Pfeffer did not doubt there had been a conspiracy. In either case, Ward had no business marching across the desert, when his brothers were being swindled at home. The barnstormers arrived at the pyramids bruised, sweaty and hungry. They picnicked on hardboiled eggs, "thick Dutch-looking sandwiches," cheese, bananas and "heavy water that had the appearance of lemonade and looked as if it might have come from St. Louis." So fortified, they took to the hastily-scrawled diamond, whose infield was desert and whose outfield was the lush grass of the Nile river valley. As Mark Lamster writes in Spalding's World Tour, "The Great Pyramid, Cheops, would stand as a distant backstop behind home plate, with the Sphinx down the third-base line and the sunken tombs of the Fifth Dynasty pharaohs somewhere beneath the players' feet." The game was planned in honor of the khedive, viceroy of Egypt, but he and his party had stayed at the palace, meaning there was no audience but a few British travelers, and a handful of curious locals. "Away up on the pyramids a few tourists were congregated," wrote Ward, "while a small band of Bedouins, looking exceedingly fantastic with their long rifles and white bournous, gazed at the players in astonishment. Every time a long fly was hit they would run their horses out into the field to see how it was caught." "In such cases game was suspended," wrote correspondent Harry Palmer, "until the teams had attacked the mob in a body and rescued the ball." Despite the small crowd and the dusty infield, the players were "out for blood." For the sake of a pun, John "Egyptian" Healy, a native of Cairo, Illinois, pitched for the All-American team. (Giddy newspaper reports suggest that this was, apparently, hilarious.) Ward had two hits and two errors in the five inning game, which his team won, 10-6. Their business finished, players reverted to tourists. They climbed the Great Pyramid, and failed to throw baseballs over it. They pegged balls at the Sphinx's right eye, and clambered all over the majestic statue to pose for a group photo. And then, the pyramids. In 1889, a traveler didn't climb the pyramids—he was dragged up them, with two attendants yanking his arms and another pushing from behind. Ward was the first to the summit. "With an ecru tinted villain holding me by the wrists and a libel on humanity boosting me in the rear," he wrote, "the ascent consisted of more ills than I felt my flesh was heir to. Every step meant a spasmodic heave on my arms and a well meant but misapplied volley underneath. They dragged me over the last step and laid me out on the pinnacle as limp as a rag." It was foggy. There was nothing to see. One teammate complained that Egypt had nothing on the Arizona desert, which could beat it easily "on general vacuity and flatness." Another summed up the Nile, the desert, the pyramid and the Sphinx in a single word: "Rats," he said, and they climbed back down. They were a long way from home. *** Ward bolted the tour in Paris, saying his reasons were strictly personal. (This was not entirely a lie. His marriage to Helen Dauvray, the Broadway star for whom the first World Series trophy was named, was disintegrating.) He refused to comment on the Brush plan. While his comrades called for action—a statement! a strike! revolt!—Ward reigned the firebrands in. "Ward knows that the Brotherhood wants him at home and he is going there," said an unnamed player, according to Palmer. "What Ward will do on reaching New York? I don't know, but you can rest assured that he will act promptly. The League has made a mistake and the moguls have got to correct it." Throughout the '89 season, the Brotherhood leadership shared outrage at Engel's Home Plate Saloon on Broadway and 27th St. They talked of Yank Robinson, whose teammates nearly declared a wildcat strike after he was fined and suspended for wearing a dirty uniform. They talked of Jack Rowe and Deacon White, sold to Pittsburgh against their will. And they talked of Ned Williamson, the home run king, whose career was ruined by an injury suffered during Spalding's grand tour, which saw him left behind in London, responsible for his own medical bills. The season would have a "cloak-and-dagger air," writes Di Salvatore, marked by "secret meetings at obscure locations; carriage trips that meandered through the streets of Manhattan to throw off tailing hawkshaws; interrogation room tactics on both sides." In late June, the Brotherhood formally requested the abolition of the Brush Plan. During a four game series in Chicago, Ward met privately with Spalding, a free-spending owner who considered a salary cap "not only impracticable but positively dangerous." He told Ward to be patient, to wait for the off-season—when the players' leverage had disappeared. Rumors spread—a coming strike. Refuse to play on July 4, when crowds filled the ballparks for the traditional Independence Day doubleheader, and ownership would be forced to listen. But the fans would never forgive the players who had spoiled their Fourth of July, and Ward did not want his Brotherhood tarred as un-American. Rather than strike, he sat, pulling himself out of the lineup with a sore arm. At every stop on the roadtrip, Ward met with local businessmen to ask them an irresistible question: "How'd you like to own a ballclub?" On July 14—Bastille Day—the Brotherhood voted on a secret manifesto, declaring that "we have determined to play next season under different management." For the rest of the season, as he led the Giants to a hard-fought pennant, Ward would spend his free time cultivating eight groups of backers, each of whom were asked to put $25,000 towards a new, Utopian circuit. They would call it the Players' League, but it would be inevitably nicknamed "the Brotherhood." *** The Fifth Avenue Hotel towered over Madison Square Park, a society fortress that a Times of London correspondent had once called "a larger and more handsome building than Buckingham Palace." On November 4, 1889, its wood-lined halls were filled with ballplayers who had come to throw off their chains. Ward ran what the Times called "a most harmonious gathering … with the grace that characterizes his work in the short field." The Brotherhood ratified a plan for an eight-team league, playing in New York, Brooklyn, Boston and other National League strongholds. The players would share in the league's revenue, and "the octopus clutch" of the reserve and classification systems would be abolished. It was the start of what would be a months-long battle for the rhetorical high ground. "There was a time when the League stood for integrity and fair dealing," read the announcement. "To-day it stands for dollars and cents." King Kelly, the hard-drinking Boston slugger, appeared at the meeting in "a tight-fitting pair of imported trousers, a tall silk hat, [and] a beaver overcoat." Gladhanding outside the meeting, he ripped into the son of one of the Boston owners. "Tell pop that I'm sorry for him," he said. "If he wants a job next season, I'll put him to work on one of my turnstiles. I'm one of the bosses now. The whirligig of time brings ball players to their level. Next year they will be in command and the former Presidents will have to drive horse cars for a living and borrow rain checks to see a game. Good-bye, chappie, I'm going inside to manipulate the wires that will startle the baseball world." As he watched his league splinter, Spalding prophesied doom. "You fellows don't know how to run a league," he said. "It takes brains as well as money to run baseball." For the next six months, the three leagues battled for players, backers and the attention of the fans. As often as possible, the National League scheduled its games to conflict with the Players' League, and launched a series of failed lawsuits to prevent Ward and his fellow stars from escaping their contracts. And every day, they used the press to hurl mud at the other side. "[The Brotherhood] realized that with each year they were becoming too old and rusty to play with the crop of youngsters springing up all over the country, from New-England to California," read a typical broadside, from an anonymous quote in the ownership-friendly New York Times, "and that if they did not take some measures to prevent it they would all be permanently laid up on the shelf." Countered an anonymous member of the Brotherhood: "The League men do not know, however, how broad the movement among the players is." By opening day, 1890, more than half of the National League's 200 players had jumped ship. The Pittsburgh Alleghenys were particularly hard hit, retaining just one regular player. They nearly folded during the season, in which they went 23-113 and were twice sued for failing to make payments on equipment. To fill out their rosters, both leagues raided the American Association, which would fold altogether after 1891, and the thin talent pool meant that fans had their choice of three lousy leagues. By the end of the season, several clubs on both sides were nearly bankrupt, but Ward was optimistic. If the gate returns had not matched the rosy forecasts of the prior winter, his new League had survived, and the Brotherhood remained united. Meetings were scheduled to bring peace, and the Sporting News wrote confidently that "the greatest war in base ball history" would soon be over. No one was prepared for unconditional surrender. Among the Brotherhood, it would be blamed on the treason of Buck Ewing. One of the most talented players of the era, Ewing had been elected player-manager of the Brotherhood's New York club, which was given the unpleasant assignment of competing with the Giants. Both teams suffered, with the National League club requiring a mid-season bailout by the other NL teams to finish the year, and by the off-season, they were ready for peace. In mid-October, a few days before the scheduled peace talks between the two leagues, the two New York clubs agreed to merge, and play next season in the National League. It was a separate peace. The Brotherhood was broken. One by one, the other clubs would follow, merging with their National League counterparts or simply folding. On January 16, 1891, the Players' League was officially finished, and Ward gave the cause of death: "Stupidity, avarice and treachery," he said. That night, they got drunk. At Nick Engel's Home Plate Saloon, the core of the Brotherhood traded toasts and sang sentimental songs. From the back room emerged Spalding, backed up by his loyal first baseman, Cap Anson. With the ease of men who have been winning their whole lives, they traded handshakes with the vanquished Brotherhood. One of Ward's men raised a glass, saying, "We four are all that is left of the greatest base ball league that was ever formed." "Pass the wine around," said Ward. "The League is dead, long live the League."
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Post by psuhistory on Nov 21, 2014 10:18:59 GMT -5
More evidence of the obsession with lists. This one doesn't contain any real surprises. It shows an informed, balanced view of baseball's history in the United States, including the influence of officials and administrators of various kinds, changes in sports medicine, and writers, as well as athletes. In the full poll results, you can see the impact of MLB's star system more clearly... The results also suggest a lack of awareness of baseball's global history, not so much a criticism as an observation of how baseball's past (and its present) are often viewed: MLB predominates as the essence of baseball and US history as the standard of importance. The link includes sources for the full results of the poll: 332 individuals received votes from 262 voters... baseballpastandpresent.com/2014/11/10/25-important-people-baseball-history/The 25 Most Important People in Baseball HistoryGraham Womack, November 10, 2014 More than 17,000 people have played Major League Baseball. Countless others have contributed to the game from working in front offices to writing about baseball and more. It’s hard to say who matters most, players or everyone else and it’s an age-old debate. Personally, I believe both groups are important. Few people can play at the highest level. And without a range of support, they wouldn’t do so professionally, at least not in a league that generates close to $10 billion annually. That said, I decided recently to take this debate public. I spent several weeks asking anyone interested to select the 25 most important people in baseball history. I distributed a 190-person reference ballot with write-in candidates welcome and anyone eligible. There wasn’t a set criteria for importance. I prefer that voters for my projects work independently and make their own determinations. In all, 262 people voted in this project. Here’s how the top 25 came out: 1. Babe Ruth, 259 votes out of 262It’s difficult to overstate Babe Ruth’s importance to baseball. The Boston Red Sox sold Ruth to the New York Yankees months after the 1919 World Series. While that Fall Classic is the most infamous example of players rigging games, gambling had long polluted baseball. The 1905, 1914 and 1917 World Series all had rumors of gambler presence. Baseball needed saviors in 1920. It got Kenesaw Mountain Landis as commissioner and he immediately began banning crooked players. And baseball got its greatest star, perhaps the greatest star of any sport ever. With Landis acting with autocratic precision and Ruth out-homering entire teams– 14 of 16 in 1920, for instance– baseball quickly transformed, becoming more popular than ever. If that sounds like hyperbole, consider that while no team attracted 1,000,000 fans in a season before 1920, three broke the mark in the ’20s with a number of other teams seeing spikes in attendance. One can only wonder what might have been without Landis or Ruth– especially Ruth, who was always larger than life, ideally suited to be baseball’s king. 2. Jackie Robinson, 257 votes out of 262The impetus for this project came after Ken Burns referred to Jackie Robinson as “the most important person in the history of baseball.” I think voters for this project got it right, though that’s not to take anything away from Robinson. His breaking of baseball’s 63-year color barrier in 1947 is one of the greatest stories of any sport. Robinson then forged a legit Hall of Fame career, with his contributions above stats actually making him a little underrated. Like Ruth, Robinson transformed baseball for the better. And like Ruth, baseball’s fate hung in the balance with Robinson. Branch Rickey knew when he signed Robinson that the wrong player could set back integration in the majors by 20 years. Robinson’s stoicism as he endured systemic verbal abuse his first two years with the Dodgers paved the way for numerous star black players. 3. Branch Rickey, 224 votes out of 262Many people spoke of signing black players between 1884 and 1947. John McGraw had a list of players he wished he could sign. Bill Veeck tried to buy the Philadelphia Phillies in 1942 and stock the team with black stars, but commissioner Landis scuttled his plans. Perhaps Landis’s death in 1944 and the looming civil rights movement made integration in baseball inevitable. That said, Branch Rickey helped accelerate the process by signing Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in October 1945. Where others spoke, dreamed or quietly accepted the injustice of baseball’s color line, Rickey acted. It didn’t just benefit Robinson. Every black player in the majors before 1970 owes at least part of his career to Rickey. If helping integrate baseball had been Rickey’s sole contribution, he might make this list. He rates so highly for everything else he did, including: creating baseball’s farm system while general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals; hiring the game’s first sabermetrician, Allan Roth in 1947; and helping spur baseball’s expansion by getting involved in 1959 with a proposed third league, the Continental League. 4. [tie] Hank Aaron, 195 votes out of 262Much as some people despise Barry Bonds, he encountered nothing of the same vitriol Hank Aaron did in breaking the career home run record. Aaron spent 1973 receiving hate mail as he chased Ruth’s 714 homers. It got so bad that in spring training in 1974, with Aaron still one homer shy of Ruth, the Braves hired Atlanta Police Department detective sergeant Calvin Wardlaw as Aaron’s bodyguard. Aaron, typically low-key, played it down saying, “Ah, he’s a friend of mine and he’s on vacation down here anyway.” Aaron got his record, cherished enough that some still consider him home run champion. Late in 1974, Aaron also gave an interview where he decried the lack of black managers, telling reporters: I don’t think baseball has moved as far as it should have since Jackie Robinson’s time. Facts are facts. We have Monte Irvin in the Commissioner’s office and we have Bill Lucas in the front office [of the Atlanta Braves] and that’s all. There’ve been four managerial changes so far this year and a black man wasn’t considered for any of them. To be absolutely honest about it, I wouldn’t like to manage. But I know other blacks in baseball who would, and could. Nine days later, the Cleveland Indians named Frank Robinson player-manager. 4. [tie] Kenesaw Mountain Landis, 195 votes out of 262Kenesaw Mountain Landis is the highest-ranked person here whose impact on baseball was both significantly positive and negative. On one hand, Landis’ role in excising gambling from the majors after the 1919 World Series cannot be denied. The job of commissioner was created for him, to replace the three-man National Commission. Seventy years after the former federal judge’s death, he remains the standard for commissioners. As longtime baseball writer Fred Lieb noted in his 1977 memoir Baseball As I Have Known It, “None of the men who succeeded him has had anything like the Judge’s czarlike authority and domination.” That said, Landis may have done more than any man in his lifetime to keep baseball segregated. While it’s no surprise someone named for a Civil War battlefield held bigoted views common to his time, a more progressive commissioner may have allowed Negro League legends like Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Cool Papa Bell into the majors. The quality of play in the majors suffered for Landis’s racism. 6. Ty Cobb, 179 votes out of 262Some people may forget that in the first Hall of Fame election, Ty Cobb finished first with 98.2 percent of the vote. Just four voters failed to select Cobb on their ballots. Early Hall of Fame elections were chaotic, with all players eligible and 30-40 future HOFers generally receiving votes. Still, one must wonder what those Cobb-less ballots looked like. Cobb’s overwhelming Hall of Fame support was a credit to his much-celebrated 4,191 hits, .367 lifetime batting average [though there is some dispute over these stats] and more. Some fun facts with Cobb include that he won 12 batting titles in a 13-season span, hit .387 for the 1910s and once smacked five home runs in two days after saying he could hit homers if he tried. One newspaper writer noted after Cobb’s home run binge: All the old fellows in the American League and some of the young ones, too, are crowing raucously and joyously because of the stunts Ty Cobb is doing with the bat. It is the reaction of ball players who have had Babe Ruth’s feats waved before their eyes until they have covertly expressed their annoyance. 7. Marvin Miller, 175 votes out of 262The Veterans Committee has famously turned down Marvin Miller several times. I’m curious how much longer it takes for Cooperstown to honor the late Miller, who served as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966 until 1982. I doubt any person in the past 50 years has done as much to change baseball as Miller, who led the charge to topple the game’s reserve clause in the 1970s. Baseball’s more equitable for his efforts. 8. Bill James, 159 votes out of 262I’ll admit it. It may look absurd that a former amateur statistician and one-time pork and beans factory night watchman got more votes for this project than many of the men listed below him and plenty more who didn’t make this list. That seems oddly appropriate for paying tribute to Bill James, who’s made a career of spurning conventional baseball wisdom and encouraging people to think differently. While James’ methods and findings have sometimes been unorthodox, they’ve been used to great effect by teams like the Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics. James has also inspired countless baseball researchers and writers. Sean Forman, founder of Baseball-Reference.com [who, by the way, finished 47th in voting here] told me via email: Bill James is the central figure of sabermetrics and always will be just as Shakespeare is the central figure in English Literature. All of the work that preceded him fed into his work and all that follows flows from what he did. 9. Ted Williams, 155.5 votes out of 262Between being baseball’s most recent .400 hitter, winning two Triple Crowns and writing “The Science of Hitting,” Ted Williams might be the most famous hitter ever. He batted .344 lifetime and was remarkably consistent, offering roughly equal adjusted rates of offensive production for both halves of his career, a 193 OPS+ for his first nine seasons and a 187 OPS+ for his final ten. Without service in two wars costing him roughly five seasons, Williams also may have broken Ruth’s home run record. I have Williams at 668 homers without military service and I assume Williams would have played longer than 1960 if he’d had a reasonable chance to catch Ruth. After all, the Splendid Splinter had an offer to pinch hit for the Yankees in 1961. There’s more to Williams’ legacy than hitting, though. In his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1966, Williams said, “I hope that some day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro League players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.” Negro League inductions began five years later. 10. [tie] Willie Mays, 141 votes out of 262The Say Hey Kid’s low rank strikes me, as he’s dominated two of my previous projects. In 2012, Mays got the most votes for a proposed Hall of Fame inner circle. Mays was also selected in 2012 as center fielder for an all-time dream team, besting Ty Cobb by a 4-1 margin in votes. I’m not sure what led to the switch this time, though I didn’t have Mays in a personal top ten list I that posted in September. Perhaps that influenced votes. So we’re clear, I think Mays or Ruth is the greatest player in baseball history. I go back and forth on this, but it’s clearly a two-man race to me. Robert Creamer said in an interview here in January 2012 that Mays was the best player he covered, noting, “He could rise to a pitch of intensity that was almost unbelievable, creating an excitement that I have never forgotten.” Like Williams, Mays also may have broken Ruth’s home run record without missing time for military service. But this project is about more than simply being a magnificent player. While I set no parameters, encouraging voters to determine their own criteria for importance, there seems to be a trend of honoring people who made contributions beyond the playing field. It’s hard to find anything Mays did to transcend baseball beyond playing it better than anyone of his era, if not ever. 10. [tie] Curt Flood, 141 votes out of 262Reading votes for this project, I was reminded how many people were at least peripherally related to the fight to end baseball’s reserve clause. To name a few, there are Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, at the center of the 1975 arbitration case that led to free agency. There’s Catfish Hunter, who became a free agent because of a contract glitch in 1974, though it’s worth adding his case set no precedent. Then there are lesser-known figures such as New York Giants outfielder Danny Gardella who sued baseball challenging the reserve clause after being barred for jumping to the Mexican League in 1946. For all the important figures of baseball’s labor movement, though, Curt Flood gets a lion’s share of the attention even if he was unsuccessful in his efforts. Flood’s refusal to report to the Philadelphia Phillies after a trade in December 1969 and his subsequent lawsuit against baseball to challenge its reserve clause effectively ended his career. It’s a common misconception that Flood’s case ended the clause. Flood lost 5-3 in the Supreme Court on June 6, 1972 and the reserve clause and baseball’s exemption to anti-trust laws remained. That said, Flood helped affect change. While it can be argued that arbitrator Peter Seitz acted independently of Flood’s case when he abrogated the reserve clause in 1975, creating free agency, Flood’s case cast attention. It also had an unexpected benefit for players, as noted in this New York Times piece: It gave owners false confidence heading into the McNally-Messersmith case. 12. Lou Gehrig, 120 votes out of 262Most consecutive games played until Cal Ripken Jr. Gave best speech in baseball history. Arguably the greatest first baseman of all-time. Rather than say more, I encourage people to read what Frank Graham Jr. wrote for my all-time dream team project about his boyhood friendship with Gehrig. 13. Al Spalding, 116 votes out of 262With Abner Doubleday long since debunked as baseball’s founder and Alexander Cartwright’s status as the game’s true founder dismissed in recent years, there’s a question of who could rank as baseball’s most important 19th century figure and pioneer. The honor could go to Spalding, a Hall of Fame executive, one of baseball’s first star players and a sporting goods magnate. As John Thorn wrote in Baseball in the Garden of Eden, Spalding also backed the Abraham G. Mills Commission which anointed Doubleday as baseball’s founder in 1908. Thorn wrote: It has turned out that Spalding and Chadwick– like the calculated exponents of Doubleday and Cartwright– were not mere liars and blowhards. They were conscious architects of legend… They were trying to create a national mythology from baseball, which they identified as America’s secular religion because it seemed to support faith for the faithless and unify them, perhaps in a way that might suit other ends. If in the process of crafting this useful past, certain individuals, events, ball clubs– even competing versions of the game, like those played in New England or Pennsylvania– had to be left along the road in the name of progress, so be it. As a footnote, Thorn wrote of four people with a better claim to inventing baseball than anyone mentioned thus far: Doc Adams, William H. Tucker, Louis Wadsworth and William R. Wheaton. 14. Dr. Frank Jobe, 110.5 votes out of 262Not counting Al Spalding or Babe Ruth– or Ted Williams or Ty Cobb, who each pitched briefly in the majors– Jobe got more votes here than any pitcher. In a sense, the doctor who developed Tommy John Surgery in 1974 and, later, reconstructive shoulder surgery is responsible for more wins than anyone. David Schoenfield noted for ESPN.com upon Jobe’s death in March that more than 500 pitchers have had Tommy John Surgery. Jobe isn’t in Cooperstown, though some like Schoenfield think he belongs. 15. [tie] Ban Johnson, 108 votes out of 262Since its founding in 1876, the National League has faced many competing leagues. Most have quickly disappeared, such as the Union Association of 1884 which had teams that didn’t make it through the season. Ban Johnson established the only competitor that’s lasted, transforming the minor Western League into the American League in 1901. Johnson steered his circuit well enough for it to survive an ensuing war with the National League over the next two years. When peace was settled, he helped institute the World Series. 15. [tie] Cy Young, 108 votes out of 262With few exceptions, Deadball Era pitchers were done in their mid-30s. Christy Mathewson, Kid Nichols and Ed Walsh all last pitched at 36. Chief Bender and Rube Waddell left the majors at 33. Cy Young, however, pitched until age 44. As such, he holds records for wins, losses, games, innings pitched and a staggering 29,565 batters faced. No active pitcher has faced half as many. There’s a reason the top award for pitchers is named for Cy Young. 15. [tie] Henry Chadwick, 108 votes out of 262The Bill James of 19th century baseball statisticians, Chadwick modernized the box score and invented a number of basic stats, such earned run average, batting average and the RBI. Chadwick has been in the Hall of Fame since 1939, one reason I think James will eventually be enshrined. 15. [tie] Roberto Clemente, 108 votes out of 262The Pittsburgh Pirates plucked Roberto Clemente from the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system in the rule 5 draft in 1954 after Clemente hit .257 for Montreal. Clemente needed several more years to become a star, hitting .282 with an 89 OPS+ through 1959 for Pittsburgh. A weird thing happened, however, as Clemente aged– he got better as conditions for hitters grew significantly more challenging. After the size of the strike zone was increased in January 1963, causing run totals to plummet, Clemente hit .331 with a 149 OPS+ over his final 10 seasons, winning three of his four batting titles. Clemente built a reputation beyond hitting, too. A cannon-armed right fielder, he won 12 consecutive Gold Gloves and, according to the Baseball-Reference.com Play Index tool, Clemente’s 205 defensive runs saved are fifth-best in baseball history. Clemente was also a veteran leader for Pittsburgh until his death in a 1972 plane crash. He had been en route to help victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. Appropriately, baseball’s annual humanitarian award is named in Clemente’s honor. 19. [tie] Barry Bonds, 107 votes out of 26219. [tie] Pete Rose, 107 votes out of 262It seems fitting that two of the more controversial players in baseball history would wind up tied here. Barry Bonds and Pete Rose are both regulars in another project I do having people vote on the 50 best players not in the Hall of Fame. For what it’s worth, I predicted recently that Bonds and Rose will both be in Cooperstown within 20 years. I see a special steroid era committee enshrining all-time home run leader Bonds and a number of other players like Roger Clemens and Mark McGwire who, for better or worse, defined and dominated their era. In addition, Bonds was a Hall of Famer before he likely began using performance enhancing drugs. Bonds’ use of steroids obscures that younger version of him. In a sense, Bonds is underrated. As for all-time hits leader Rose, someone who admitted to betting on games his teams played in is less attractive as a Hall of Fame candidate than a steroid user. But there’s no proof Rose bet on his teams to lose. Rose’s actions, while egregious, aren’t on the same level of Shoeless Joe Jackson, who took $5,000 to help throw the 1919 World Series. Time diminishes outrage, too. I see Rose being inducted by the Veterans Committee shortly after his death. 21. Bud Selig, 105 votes out of 262Say what you will about Bud Selig who will retire in January after 23 years as baseball commissioner. He’s extremely polarizing and he’s presided over some of baseball’s darkest moments in the past quarter century, notably the 1994 strike and the steroid era. Some like Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated have laid blame for steroid use in baseball on players, noting that baseball banned steroids in 1991 and that the players union wouldn’t agree to testing until 2004. Selig deserves some share of the blame in my book. Major League Baseball had to have some idea what its players were up to. It was on Selig to blow the whistle, ask for federal help, perhaps from the Drug Enforcement Agency to address baseball’s steroid problem. Instead, Selig placed profitability first and that, ultimately, relates to what he will be remembered for. As CEO, in effect, of a multi-billion dollar enterprise, Selig has been very successful. Total MLB revenues were around $1.2 billion annually– about $2 billion in 2014 dollars– when Selig became acting commissioner in 1992. Today, MLB revenues are around $9 billion annually. From a pure business standpoint, Bud Selig is the best commissioner in baseball history and it isn’t close. He’ll be in the Hall of Fame soon, this year, maybe next. 22. Satchel Paige, 99 votes out of 262A retired scout once asked me to name the most durable pitcher in baseball history. I thought for a moment and suggested Walter Johnson. “Nolan Ryan!” the scout chortled and our conversation was effectively over. I thought more about it later and it occurred to me that the answer had to be Satchel Paige. The legendary hurler debuted in 1926 and was pitching in exhibitions as late as 1969, estimating he won 2,000 games. Counting exhibition play, he might be the only pitcher to strike out Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. 23. [tie] Bill Veeck, 95 votes out of 262He wasn’t the most successful owner, not by a long shot. He might not have been the most creative one either, with Charlie Finley and Chris von der Ahe each giving him a run for this honor. But Bill Veeck was a masterful enough promoter and showman to still be talked about more than 50 years since he did anything of note, aside of course from his role in the infamous Disco Demolition Night of 1979. Finer moments for Veeck include helping break the American League color barrier in July 1947 by signing Larry Doby, giving Satchel Paige a long overdue shot in the majors, having midget Eddie Gaedel hit, creating the exploding scoreboard and building pennant winners with the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox. 23. [tie] John McGraw, 95 votes out of 26225. Connie Mack, 94 votes out of 262It’s hard to choose the best manager in baseball history. Joe McCarthy, who never had a losing season, has the top winning percentage at .615. Readers here selected Casey Stengel as manager for the all-time dream project. Tony LaRussa, meanwhile, got the most votes of any write-in candidate in this project with 19. I’ve found a person will get three to four times as many votes, sometimes more, if they’re on the ballot for my projects, so it’s conceivable LaRussa would be the top-ranked manager here if I’d included him. I don’t know if I see LaRussa getting more votes, though, than McGraw or Mack who’ve had more than a century to build their lore. Mack has nearly 1,000 more credited wins than any manager in baseball history, sitting on the Philadelphia Athletics bench until months before his 88th birthday in 1950. He built [and for economic reasons dismantled] two dynasties, winning nine pennants and five championships. While Mack had few winning teams and was mostly a figurehead after 1932, McGraw stayed competitive throughout his 33 years managing the New York Giants and Baltimore Orioles. He had just four losing years, winning 10 pennants and three championships.
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Post by jsmith on Nov 23, 2014 8:39:39 GMT -5
Very cool thread! On the above list I think you could make a case for Marvin Miller being higher. I also wouldn't have thought to include Dr.Jobe or Bill James on my list, but both certainly deserve to be.
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Post by psuhistory on Dec 7, 2014 10:46:32 GMT -5
Interesting overview of Minoso's career on the eve of the Veterans Committee's decision. Minoso's stature has grown with the use of the new metrics that more accurately value his offensive contribution... seamheads.com/2014/12/03/the-minnie-minoso-dossier/The Minnie Minoso Dossierby Bryan Soderholm-Difatte, 12/3/2014 Minnie Minoso, who turned 89 on November 29, is being considered for the second time in recent years by the Veteran’s Committee for inclusion into baseball’s Hall of Fame. Although often remembered for the sideshow of playing three games as a designated hitter for the White Sox in 1976 at the age of 50 and pinch hitting in two games four years later (so it could be said he played in five decades), Minoso should be remembered–and indeed honored–as one of the game’s best players in the 1950s, when he faced the twin challenges of being one of the first black players in major league baseball and of being a native Cuban having to adapt to American culture. Minnie Minoso was one of only five black players making their major league debut before Jackie Robinson retired in 1956 to become a core regular on an American League team for as many as five years as of 1960, which was indicative of that league’s go-slow approach when it came to integration. Originally signed by Cleveland in 1948 out of the Negro Leagues, Minoso played a handful of games for the Indians in 1949, excelled in the Pacific Coast League in 1950, had an exceptional rookie season in 1951, and was one of the AL’s premier players for the rest of the decade. According to similarity scores developed by Bill James to compare players, the player to whom Minnie Minoso was most similar from when he was 28 through the age of 36 was Hall of Fame outfielder Enos Slaughter. After being acquired from Cleveland in a multi-player three-team round-robin of trading on the last day of April in 1951, Minoso immediately made his impact felt in helping to turn around the fortunes of the Chicago White Sox. Still haunted by the 1919 Black Sox scandal that sent the American League team in Chicago to purgatory for decades in mostly the nether regions of the league, the White Sox had finished a dismal sixth the previous year, 34 games below .500. After changing uniforms, Minoso’s batting average of .359 in his first two months with Chicago was instrumental in the White Sox reaching and staying in first place for virtually all of June and remaining competitive until August. The White Sox finished the season in fourth place, out of the running, but with a winning record for the first time in eight years. The rookie outfielder’s .326 batting average was second in the league to Philadelphia’s Ferris Fain (.344). Batting third in the line-up, he was second in runs scored with 112, one behind Boston’s Dom DiMaggio. Fifth in both on-base and slugging percentages, Minoso had the third highest overall combined on-base-plus-slugging percentage in the American League. Showing off his speed, he led the league in triples with 14 and in stolen bases with 31. Third in total extra-base hits, his 34 doubles were two short of the league-leaders (three players had 36). His player value of 5.5 wins above replacement (WAR) was sixth in the league, and fourth-best among position players. Minnie Minoso was better in all of these categories than any other rookie in baseball, including Willie Mays, but it was the pennant-winning Yankees’ versatile infielder Gil McDougald who spent the winter polishing the AL’s Rookie of the Year award. The White Sox were still a work in progress, but with Minoso and second baseman Nellie Fox as two of the American League’s best position players, and southpaw Billy Pierce one of the best pitchers, they were increasingly competitive as the decade advanced. In 1954 Minoso, with a .320 batting average and the most total bases, was the best player in the league based on his 8.2 WAR as the White Sox won 94 games. Perhaps because his team finished third in the standings, however, Minoso finished fourth in the Most Valuable Player voting; ’twas Yogi Berra on the second-place Yankees got to spend the winter admiring the AL’s MVP award. Minoso was at his best between 1954 and 1959 with a six-year average annual player value of 5.7 wins above replacement. Among American League players, only Mickey Mantle and Al Kaline had more wins above replacement during those years. When the White Sox finally did escape from under the weight of the Yankees and Indians–who were first and second in the standings every year between 1951 and 1956 (with Cleveland first and New York second only the one time in 1954)–Minnie Minoso was no longer in Chicago to enjoy the American League championship they finally won in 1959. Despite having another strong year in 1957 with the fifth of his eight .300 batting averages and the fifth time his on-based percentage exceeded .400, Minoso was traded back to Cleveland for outfielder Al Smith and future Hall of Famer pitcher Early Wynn. After a pair of .302 seasons in Cleveland, Minoso returned to Chicago in yet another trade and, at 34 years old in 1960, led the AL in hits with 189 while batting .311. The 1960 White Sox fought valiantly in defense of their American League crown before slipping out of the pennant race in mid-September, thus ending Minoso’s last chance to play in a World Series. The following year was the last that Minoso was a regular. He missed most of the 1962 season, now playing for St. Louis, with a broken wrist and never recovered to play close to the level he had. Age will do that to you, if you’re a baseball player and on the other side of 35. With a .298 lifetime batting average, Minnie Minoso never got more than 21 percent of the vote when he was on the Cooperstown ballot of the Baseball Writers Association of America. That was in his fourth year of eligibility. Among the 16 voters on this year’s Veteran’s Committee are Al Kaline and Jim Bunning, both of whom played in the American League in the last half of the 1950s. Bunning might remember that Minoso touched him up for a .333 average, six home runs and 18 runs batted in. The only other pitcher who Minoso tagged for that many home runs (also six) was Early Wynn, except Minoso had 85 more plate appearances against him than Bunning. And Kaline might remember that Minoso hit more home runs in his career against the Detroit Tigers–37–than any other team, along with 159 RBI and a .308 average, and 24 of those home runs Minoso knocked out at Tiger Stadium. The Veteran’s Committee Hall of Fame selections, if any this year, will be announced on December 8. Should Minnie Minoso be elected, it would be hard to argue with that.
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