This is the kind of news you never want to hear. I have to make it brief, because I'm blogging from work, but Cardinals righty Josh Hancock, was killed this morning in a car accident outside the city. Hancock was the workhorse of the Cardinal's championship team in 2006, enjoying his first breakout year with 62 appearances, a 4.09 ERA and a 1.21 WHIP. He is the second pitcher in less than a year to be killed at a young age, as the Yankees' Cory Lidle died in a plane crash in October.
Tonight's Cardinals game against the Cubs has been cancelled. Our thoughts of course go out to Hancock's family and friends.
Read the mlb.com story here and see Hancock's career stats here.
Tonight is Phil Hughes' first appearance in the majors. Long-regarded as one of the top prospects in baseball, Hughes' has also served as a vindication for defenders of the New York Yankees' oft-maligned farm system. Tonight is by no means the be all end all on Hughes; it is merely an exciting event, as all call-ups of "the next big thing" are.
I will be liveblogging the first 30 minutes of the game, at which point I will sign off. A lifelong Detroit Red Wings fan, my allegiances lie elsewhere when the puck drops on Round 2 of the Stanley Cup Playoffs at 7:30.
Lost in all of this is that Hughes is facing an excellent pitcher in A.J. Burnett. A solid start by Burnett, combined with the Blue Jays' underrated offense and the Yankees' current slump, could spoil the first major league start for young Hughes.
TOP 1ST
-Here comes the first pitch. Low for a ball. Clearly doesn't have what it takes.
-A line drive to Rios, and he's given up his first hit. Good to get that out of the way.
-No throw from Posada on the steal by Rios, and we have a runner in scoring position with no outs.
-Niiice 12 to 6 curve. That right there is potential, and he's got a delivery that's twice as deceptive as Barry Zito's.
-And the first major league K comes on a 94 mph heater.
-The kid certainly looks like he has all the resolve I keep hearing about. Check, glare in, reach back, strikeout.
-Number 65? Booooooring.
-Johnny Damon is a nightmare. Not that Bernie Williams would have caught that, but Damon truly looks lost in center.
-They said on YES (or MY9, whatever) that Vernon Wells is the best hitter Hughes has ever faced. I would rank Frank Thomas as much more intimidating, 2006 or no.
-Close call on an inside fastball that could have rung up Thomas, but who do think is going to get the call in this situation?
-He's making The Big Hurt work for it.
-There's the obligatory "nice piece of hitting" comment from Michael Kay, which usually means "lucky piece of hitting." Still only one hard hit ball in this inning, and it came from Vernon Wells. Two runs are in, but Hughes has been solid.
-Nasty changeup with really nasty screwball-type movement at the end. That pitch will serve him well. Shades of Pedro.
-The pressure finally gets to him, makes his first bad pitch of the inning, a 55-foot fastball that goes to the screen. Runner on second, one out.
-Stupid little groundout by Overbay on that great curve. Michael Kay has said that Hughes is "struggling", but I've been impressed so far.
-This Liveblog is taking my attention off how worried I am about the Wings. I like that.
-Oh yeah, Mientkiewicz is good at defense. WHO CARES.
-Overall a very solid inning from Hughes. The only hitter he didn't win the battles with was Wells; some other stuff squeaked through.
Okay, that's all I'm going to have time for. My diagnosis: bad babysitting! No, seriously, he looked great. The fastball has life, the curve is deadly, the two seamer moves about four to six inches, and the change looks to be his best-kept secret. Maybe the call-up wasn't such a bad idea, but the fact that he was kept at below 90 pitches for his whole career is a bit worrisome. Expect the occasional meltdown this year if he stays with the big club, but overall Hughes looks as good as advertised.
First of all, I'd like to state that the plural of RBI is: RBI. I can't stress that enough. "RsBI" looks and sounds stupid, and "RBIs" really messes with my brain. The "R" stands for "runs", not "run". It's like saying "Rio Grande River" or "ATM Machine". Please, everyone in the baseball community, let's make a stand. The plural of "RBI" is: "RBI".
Now, RBI, to me, is a very minor part of a baseball player's performance. What is more important than the number of runs a player... bats in is the number of times a player can safely reach base (one of the primary reasons being that when a batter-runner reaches base safely with runners in scoring position, an RBI is likely to result). Beyond that, extra-base hits are the next-most-desirable result, being that extra-base hits will almost certainly score RISP, as well as place the batter-runner in scoring position himself.
RBI measures up to all this as simply a peripheral and somewhat chance-oriented manifestation of overall offensive production. It is true that to some extent, the players with the most RBI are also the most productive hitters; hitters that have the skill to take advantage of RBI-scoring opportunites simply because they reach base safely and productively a greater percent of the time. There are, however, factors not under the batter's control, the two most prominent being a) whether there are actually runners on base and b) the batter's place in the order, which both determines how many plate appearances a batter will have and which batters will hit ahead of him, each of whom have their own skill levels and therefore likelihood of reaching base.
Thus it stands to reason that at a local level, RBI tells us very little about a hitter's production. It is obvious that someone that had 100 RBI had a better year than someone that had 20, but what I mean by a local level is that in a group of hitters of similar skill, RBI alone would be useless in separating hitters within the group. There are too many factors that are out of the batter's control. What would be better would be if players could be compared as to how many times they create RBI when they have the opportunity. This is crude at best and is not even close to being a new, interesting stat, but hell, it's better than RBI. The sample I took to examine is the top 50 RBI-getters of 2006. The table below shows their RBI, their plate appearances with RISP, and finally how many RBI they created per such plate appearance. This system also rewards players that create RBI without RISP by considering it additionally in the division. Here's the chart (due to me not being an HTML whizz, the three pages of it will appear with a slight separation):
Now here's the chart sorted by RBI/OPP:
Now my motives might start to sneak through. Last fall I argued ad nauseum that Albert Pujols should have been the NL MVP instead of Ryan Howard, and that anyone should have been the AL MVP instead of Justin Morneau. Interestingly enough, I didn't properly emphasize the extreme favor the writers seem to give to RBI during the voting, ignoring all of the evidence above. When I sort the players by RBI/OPP, Pujols shoots to the top, and six American League players move in front of Morneau. This is, of course, not to say that Howard and Morneau are not great players. They are. This isn't even to say that they shouldn't have won their respective MVP awards; besides the fact that the MVP award is essentially meaningless, there are many more factors to consider anyway.
The last chart sorts the players by the amount of spaces on the list they were displaced with the new criteria:
An interesting thing is that on each pole of the chart, we see players that had uncharacteristic seasons. (A career year for Brian McCann and an off-year for Alex Rodriguez.) On each extreme, we see that the new way of looking at RBI re-enforces common opinion rather than disproves it. It is more towards the middle of the chart that we see players unfairly represented by their RBI totals (Adam Dunn, Travis Hafner, Jeff Francoeur, Howard, Morneau, Derek Jeter). This speaks to the simplicity of the improvement and the crudity of any evalutaion derived from RBI. This method is only slightly better than looking at pure RBI (which leads me to wonder what use RBI has at all). Even the intangible idea of clutch hitting has better evaluators attached to it.
Of course, RBI being a cumulative stat, it falls victim to things like injuries. This is just another indicator that stats like OBP and SLG are much, MUCH better indicators of overall production than RBI. Every stat should be considered alongside games played, but at least with the more over-arching rate stats you don't have to do as much thinking to really figure out what's going on.
Epilogue
Oh and also: now, I'm a big fan of Rodriguez. But anyone that tries to rationalize his 2006 by saying "well look, he still drove in 121 runs" is officially barking up the wrong tree, or even forest. His lineup helped his numbers tremendously in 2006.
Ladies and Gentlemen, he's not going away. RadarOnline reports that outspoken Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is putting forth a serious effort to buy the Chicago Cubs. While Cuban was quoted on February 9 at TheStreet.com as saying "I'm always interested in iconic teams or teams from my hometown, but it's a 'nice to do,' not a 'have to do,'", Radar says that a source close to the matter commented that "Mark is desperate to buy the Cubs. He wants this so bad." Cuban recently was also reportedly interested in buying the Pirates, but the deal did not happen for whatever reason.
This would be AMAZING for Major League Baseball. In no other sport are the owners so publicly crotchety, old, Machiavellian, stubborn, and old. The seemingly biennial labor wars are no help to this cause. Despite Bud Selig's best effort to "internationalize" the game, the sport is losing the popular culture war to both the NFL and the NBA, and, God help us, the NHL can't be far behind. An animated, flamboyant owner like Cuban would to more to take baseball to the casual-to-simply-aware fans than Selig or Donald Fehr ever could. And for him to take the helm of one of the game's most storied, high-profile franchises in the Chicago Cubs, well...I...excuse me, I gotta wipe all this drool off my keyboard.
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Sorry. My point is that Major League Baseball should be really excited about this deal, but they no doubt won't be. The old guard is firmly entrenched in one of the most ridiculous monopolies in American history, and Mark Cuban is just the kind of new face they DON'T want to see. Maybe that's why I'm so excited about it.
----
I will not be posting for about a week due to a serious amount of work I have to put into other matters. "How is this different from normal," you may ask? "Shut up," is how I would respond to that. Mr. Walsh and I will be back once March gets past this "lion" stage with season previews and predictions. Just four and a half weeks until Opening Day!
...for posting this, but there's a lot about this video that I love:
First of all, it's a classic moment every baseball fan remembers (mostly because it was only four months ago... four months?! Is that all?!) from a different angle. And even though it's on video, watching such an important pitch from that angle really reminds you of what it's like to be at a game, and a game like that. Secondly, there's the huge crowd buildup and then... red herring. Mets lose. What deflation. And finally, nothing like the guys around the cameraman, going through the six out-of-order, circular stages of sports-related grief:
1) Stunned silence. (Denial) 2) Booing. (Anger) 3) "Cardinals are going to the World Series." (Acceptance) 4) "Hope your plane crashes!" (Bargaining [with a hint of malice]) 5) "This sucks." (Depression) 6) "I'm not watching this." (Denial)
After constructing this list, it really does strike me that denial comes at the beginning and at the end for sports fans, probably because there's always a new season coming (except for fans of any NHL team but Tampa Bay in 2004).
Case in point: My former boss, a Yankees fan, turned off his TV before Luis Gonzalez's game-winning single off Mariano Rivera hit the ground, and then avoided ESPN for a week afterwards. He claims still never to have seen the Texas-leaguer land. A couple years later, when the Yankees went back to BankOne (Chase?) for an interleague matchup, I remarked, "It's going to be tough to get a game in around all their former selves still frozen in time," just to make him feel better.
THEORY REVISION: In some cases anger comes before denial, as evidenced by my hat that no longer has a top-button, or my buddy's 135-degree angle TV antenna.
DISCLAIMER: I hereby pre-emptively rebut all charges that this rips off Bill Simmons' "Levels of Losing" column. 1) This is a different idea, and 2) Bill Simmons blows.
By the way, ya gotta love the guy that says "Hope your plane crashes!" I classified it as "bargaining" because honestly, the idea of the Cardinals' plane crashing is about the only thing that would make that guy feel better right now.
1. Pedro Martinez, 1.0258 2. Johan Santana, 1.0985 3. Curt Schilling, 1.1322 4. Greg Maddux, 1.1362 5. Randy Johnson, 1.1641 6. John Smoltz, 1.1688 7. Roger Clemens, 1.1697 8. Mike Mussina, 1.1765 9. Roy Oswalt, 1.1787 10. Ben Sheets, 1.2055
Fully SIX members of this list of active leaders in a rate stat are over 35 years old (actually, places three through eight), and Martinez is 34. A testament to the brilliance of each of those pitchers.
Now, courtesy of Prospectus, let's look at the luckiest and unluckiest pitchers of 2006 as measured by BABIP (batting average on balls in play *[explanation below]):
Unluckiest:
1. Ryan Madson, .364 2. Victor Santos, .362 3. Byung-hyun Kim, .350 4. Sheets, .342 5. Joe Blanton, .341 6. Brian Moehler, .340 7. Zach Duke, .336 8. James Shields, .334 Paul Maholm, .334 10. Andy Pettitte, .333
A couple things about this list:
1. Smart fantasy owners, meet Ben Sheets. Ben Sheets, smart fantasy owners.
2. The Yankees made a good move.
3. THREE of the top ten are Pirates pitchers. Nothing is going Pittsburgh's way lately.
4. Blanton has been the biggest disappointment of the Moneyball draft so far, and here's part of the reason.
Overall, fantasy owners, this list is a good one to look at for bargains that will slip under the rug. As Voros McCracken theorized and later proved, pitchers have little to no control over where the ball is going once it's hit. Pitchers with a high BABIP have been, therefore, unlucky, and will likely regress to the mean the following year.
And now the top ten LUCKIEST pitchers of 2006:
1. Chris Young, .232 2. Jered Weaver, .239 3. Anibal Snachez, .243 4. Chuck James, .250 Scott Elarton, .250 6. Michael O'Connor, .254 7. Taylor Bucholz, .258 8. Carlos Zambrano, .259 9. Josh Beckett, .265 Kenny Rogers, .265
Now, don't get me wrong, these are all very good pitchers. Just don't expect quite the production out of them this year. They had a lot of help from a combination of good defense and luck that kept their WHIPs ridiculously low.
A lot of my steroids rhetoric has been based on the "innocent until proven guilty" idea. I recently read an article in Prospectus' seminal book Baseball Between the Numbers that spins that argument into a more accurate light, which I think nails on the head why I argue that we shouldn't be so quick to indict Bonds or Giambi. The article, called "What Do Statistics Tell Us About Steroids", was written by Nate Silver. This is the concluding paragraph:
However, it is best to reserve judgment on these players. Not in the "innocent until proven guilty" spirit; the evidence that Giambi, Palmeiro, and Bonds have used steroids would hold up in a court of law (though Bonds has testified that he used one such substance contrary to how a player seeking performance enhancement would use it). Rather, I mean it in the conservative sense of the scientific method: We cannot reject the null hypothesis that the spectacular performances of players like Barry Bonds is the result of something far different than steroids use, such as good, old-fashioned determination and hard work. One of the beauties of baseball is its unpredictability. Every time we thought we'd seen everything, we see something else, whether it's the Red Sox and White Sox winning the World Series in consecutive seasons or a thirty-six-year-old shattering the home run record. In the Juiced Era, we have the right to be skeptical, but it would be a shame if we've become so cynical that we can no longer enjoy these achievements.
That last sentence there is pretty much exactly how I feel about the whole issue. The article is inconclusive about steroids, but provides some insightful data and asks some very original questions. Again, if you want to get an introduction to sabermetrics, insight into modern baseball thought, or even if you're a seasoned statistician, this book is an absolute must-read, broaching topics from Joe Torre's skill as a manager to players' performance in walk years to Alex Rodriguez's true financial worth to a ballclub. Info on buying the book is here, but it's also probably available at your local library.
I'm back at it with the unnamed sportswriter! Remember, I may be wrong, he does bring up some good points. Not enough, though! Let's watch:
Hello, it's me again!
I just took a little issue with your flippant reply to Bengie Molina in this excerpt:
Action: New San Francisco Giants catcher Bengie Molina says Barry Bonds is "probably the best player of all time. ... For me, it's exciting just to share the same field and be in the same lineup with a guy who changed the game."
Reaction: Molina obviously is no student of baseball history and isn't aware of how Babe Ruth dominated the sport in the 1920s. Bonds is the best player of the steroids era, possibly because he had the best steroids. He didn't "change the game" until, many of us believe, he began using performance-enhancing drugs.
Now, let me start off by saying that I totally agree with the fact that Babe Ruth, not Barry Bonds, is the best baseball player of all-time. Not, however, for the reasons you think. What I take issue with here is your seeming assumption that Bonds doesn't even come close to having the effect Ruth did on their respective leagues. This is just not true. He comes very close. Damn close.
You're also assuming (this is something I'm just now realizing; honestly this gets more interesting as I go along) that Molina has the same definition of "best player" that you do. Maybe Molina doesn't give a damn about who dominated the sport, he just wants to see who the best, objective player was in baseball, something that will always be changing. Now, this is something that I also happen to agree with you on, but who knows what Bengie thinks. I assume you've never spoken to or met Bengie Molina (please correct me if I'm wrong on this), but him saying something that you don't agree with hardly means that he is no "student of baseball history".
Let's compare Bonds and Ruth by the numbers, eschewing for the moment the steroid argument because, as I'm sure you know, Barry Bonds has never been proven to have taken steroids and, unfortunately for sportswriters, people in this country are innocent until proven guilty. Modern baseball research has enabled us to compare players from different eras, so I'm going to use some of those methods right now. Perhaps the easiest to use and most straightforward is BaseballReference.com's new "neutralize stats" feature. Basically they take the numbers from any given season and reconfigure them as though they had taken place in a year with average offense, ballparks, etc.
So: Barry Bonds' best year was 2002, in which he hit .370/.582/.799 with 46 HR in the NL's worst offensive year since 1991. Babe Ruth's best season came in 1920, when he hit .376/.533/.849, his career high slugging percentage, with 54 HR. Using BBRef to neutralize the stats, we get this:
If Bonds and Ruth had been playing in the same time, Bonds would have outperformed Ruth in each of their best seasons (hitting-only, of course). How about career numbers?
Notice how, in order to even the playing field, Bonds' numbers go up and Ruth's come down. This indicates that Ruth had the advantage of a much more offensive-happy era than Bonds. This feature even adjusts so that Ruth's figures project to a 162-game schedule.
WARP3, Baseball Prospectus' stat, calculates how many wins a given player is worth, adjusting for era, over the average AAA player of the time. This is just a quickie, but Ruth's career WARP3 was 234.2, while Bonds' is 233.1. Note that this is a cumulative stat, and Bonds' career is not over. And this includes fielding, in which the Babe was quite good, probably as good as or better than Bonds, and baserunning, in which Bonds is much better.
The biggest reason that Ruth is a superior ballplayer was his pitching. Prospectus' seminal book, Baseball between the Numbers, does an extensive study comparing the two players. On hitting and fielding merits alone, Bonds comes out on top. But the Babe's pitching contributions push him ahead. I said earlier that Ruth's best season was 1920. In a way that's true, but look at 1916: Ruth threw an ERA of 1.75 with NINE shutouts, as many as Nolan Ryan's 1972 career high, and one shy of Cy Young's 10 (also a career high) in 1904. That is why Ruth is undoubtedly the better player. If you want to talk about out-homering teams, that's fine, but then take a look at Bonds' IBB numbers in the early 2000s for a similar reflection
Now let me ask you: are you a student of baseball history? I assume that you are, which means that you must surely know that the only era in which offense was as favored as the so-called "steroid era" of approximately 1993-2002 was the so-called "live ball era" of the 1920s, when Babe Ruth was in his prime. You say that Bonds is the best player of the "steroids era" very dismissively. Well, Ruth was the best player of the live ball era, the only era that favored offense more than the one Bonds played in. Were steroids a part of Bonds' rise? Maybe. Probably, even. But that doesn't mean the balls didn't leave the park. So much of the offense in the 90s also has nothing to do with steroids: expansion led to depleted pitching staffs, and ballparks got smaller and smaller along with the strikezones.
When Ruth played, three countries were represented in MLB. Now there are players from over 10. Not to mention the hundreds of African-Americans that couldn't play in MLB until 12 years after Ruth retired. How much would he have "dominated" were he forced to play against the best pitchers and alongside the best hitters from the Negro Leagues?
The answer is nobody knows. Just like nobody knows how much worse Bonds would have been without steroids. The only events we can judge are the ones that happened. Even with all those comparative numbers up there, they're not perfect. An extra 8 games per season could have been Ruth's downfall, who knows. But your dismissing Molina's statement so readily is simply irresponsible, and further indicative of your goal, along with countless other sportswriters, to make a scapegoat out of and assassinate the career of Barry Bonds, the greatest baseball player since Babe Ruth.
Carnival Matleuse
The response!
Hey, Carnival, I'm a "flippant" guy. ... In 1921, Babe Ruth hit 59 of the AL's 477 HRs...1922, Ruth hit 35 (bad year for him) of the AL's 525 HRs....in 1923, Ruth hit 41 of the AL's 442 HRs...In 1924, he hit 46 of the AL's 397 HRs....I 1925, he was sick much of the season and only had 25 of the AL's 533 HRs....In 1926, he hit 47 of the AL's 424 HRs....In 1927, he hit 60 of the AL's 439 HRs...In 1928, he hit 54 of the AL's 483 HRs....In 1929, he hit 46 of the AL's 595 HRs....If that was the "live ball era", Ruth must have been swinging at the XXXX-juice balls....His percentage of total HRs is off the charts and Bonds doesn't come close. Measured against their peers, Ruth was far away the better power hitter EVEN AFTER BONDS BEGAN CHEATING!!!!...I don't recall Bonds being rated among the all-time four of five all-time ELITE players until after he took advantage of several years of performance-enchancing drugs. For a guy who loves stats, if you can't see the power surge that defies all logic....Regarding "innocent until proven guilty", no one is talking about throwing Bonds in jail for cheating. He might serve some time for other things but not for using steroids...no offense, if you don't think Bonds used the juice, YOU'RE the one who is naive. There's a guy sitting in a cell who could turn Bonds' world upside down simply by telling us who BB is on all his records...If Bengie Molina says something I absolutely disagree with and defies logic, my job is to respond. Sorry you seem offended. Well, not really sorry, but more like incredulous.
"XXXX-juiced balls??" What?!
The response!
I think Bonds used steroids, but what I think doesn't matter until it's proven that he did. And I believe that the way he played, steroids or no, from 2000-2004 is amazing. That's all I'm saying. And yes, Babe Ruth's home run numbers compared to Bonds' are much more impressive. But what's more important for the "best player of all-time", bald home run numbers, or overall production? On the latter point there can be a fine debate between the two. And you saying objectively that Bonds "cheated" as though there is no argument to the contrary is just as irresponsible as if I were to say there was no argument that he DID cheat, which I never did.
How can you say that Bonds played in such an easier offensive era? I'll do the work for you:
1920-1935: 4.854 runs per game 1993-2002: 4.859 runs per game
.005 runs per game more in the 'steroid era'. I'd call them pretty comparable, wouldn't you? And consider that while Babe Ruth outhomered every team in his era, Barry Bonds out-IBBed every team in his. Now what if he had had Lou Gehrig hitting behind him instead of Jeff Kent?
As far as the cheating argument goes, you obviously don't think Mark McGwire should be in the hall... I don't know if you feel that way about Bonds or not. Do you think Whitey Ford and Gaylord Perry should have their plaques removed? Keep in mind that Perry goes on national tours bragging about how he cheated. That, to me, is far more of a stain on the game than Barry Bonds wowing a generation of baseball fans with a little hormonal augmentation.
Nobody will likely care about this but me, but the highly popular and respected d3sports.com has launched a new branch: d3baseball.com. What Pat Coleman's brainchild brought to the world of people that actually care about, follow and are knowledgable about Division III Football and Basketball now comes to the less popular baseball. The site features recaps, previews, articles and, perhaps most exciting for yours truly, the same message board feature that makes DIII Football season such a hoot. For me. (The message board for baseball has always existed, but hopefully this will bring more traffic.)
The technical aspects of the site are overseen by "guru" Coleman, while Jim Dixon will be the main content supervisor. I don't know if there's going to be a poll the way there is on d3football and d3hoops (these polls are actually the most respected by media outlets in Division III), but it would probably better than the coaches poll, which follows the "top eight in the national poll have to be number ones in each of the eight regions" policy, which is dumb.
So I encourage you to go follow your alma mater (if you happen to have gone to a DIII baseball school) and give support to what really can be some good baseball. If you're wondering where MY allegiances lie, I will only say that you may be able to see me in this picture:
Find what school that group of fans belongs to and you will find your answer.
What Walsh did was pick situations in which an outfielder has the most leeway to make a difference on a play by throwing someone out. He used:
1. Single with runner on first base (second base unoccupied). 2. Double with runner on first base. 3. Single with runner on second base. 4. Fly out with runner on third base, fewer than two outs. 5. Fly out with runner on second base, fewer than two outs (third base unoccupied).
He then compared how each outfielder fared in those situations against the league average. Some results:
Right Field
Best: Alexis Rios Worst, actually worst in any outfield position: Shawn Green Interesting: Brad Hawpe comes in at number two, and actually played more than Rios. J.D. Drew showed up fourth from the bottom, much worse than Trot Nixon, whom he is replacing. Drew (ironically) played more, though.
Center Field
Best: Willy Taveras Worst: Johnny Damon Interesting: Juan Pierre and Torii Hunter land squarely in the middle of the pack. Mike Cameron? Third-last. Johnny Damon brings nothing to the Yankees. Put Hideki Matsui in center and Melky Cabrera in left. Lead off Derek Jeter. There, I fixed the Yankees.
Left Field
Best: Andre Ethier Worst: Scott Podsednik Interesting: People weren't just BSing about Manny Ramirez, he comes in at third. A very impressive rookie season for Ethier. And it turns out no amount of stolen bases makes up for the fact that Scott Podsednik is a left fielder with no power that can't field.
Book Review: Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig by Jonathan Eig
As the author quotes, the phrase "never get to know your heroes" does not apply to Lou Gehrig. A biography can often become suspected of revisionist history when painting its subject to be an irrepressible, hard-working, all-around swell guy, but Jonathan Eig's2005 account of Gehrig's life (cover: $26.00; list: $15.00; amazon.com: $9.09) is more than thorough enough as to the source of its material that one knows this not to be the case.
To get the crticisms over with first: when I began the book I feared the overly clunky writing would be really annoying throughout. This paragraph describing Gehrig's father's background illustrates what I mean:
Heinrich left Germany at the age of twenty. He may have emigrated illegally, since there appear to be no records of his journey in either Germany or the United States. He settled first in Chicago, didn't like his prospects there, and soon tried New York. Long after most men his age had married, Heinrich remained single. No doubt his pokey work habits made him something short of a princely catch. He had no known family in the United States and probably lived alone, renting a bed or sofa from a family that needed whatever pittance he could afford to pay. In 1901, at the age of thirty-four, he finaly met the woman he would marry.
It has a real "Sentence. Sentence. Clause, clause. Sentence." feel to it. It would prove, however, to merely be reflective of the utilitarian nature of the passage. The rest of the book was a nicer read, with a few exceptions.
Those exceptions lie in one major facet and one minor facet. The major facet is Eig's tendency to fall into the romantic, as biographers are wont to do. Eig doesn't get as drippy as many (such as the to-be-discussed Mitch Albom), but it's there. The worst offense is documented below:
Traveling with the Yankees in 1932 was like traveling in a time machine with the dial stuck on "Good Old Days."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
The minor facet has to do with Eig's other tendency to, um, describe Gehrig's body in a detailed manner. Observe:
His torso formed a perfect V. His shoulders and forearms were as taut as a rope. His chest looked like a hunk of marble. His stomach revealed not an ounce of fat. Yet while his upper body looked like something out of an anatomy textbook, his lower body appeared to belong to another species, neither man nor ape. Each thigh was bigger than many a man's waist, each calf the size of a Christmas ham. Here was the hidden source of his tremendous power and durability.
It's as if Eric Byrnes was temporarily inhabiting the author.
But it's time to return to a more serious tone. The above is unfair. Eig has provided a delicate, sincere, and informative account of Gehrig's life and death. Throughout the first half of the book, Gehrig's modesty, naïvete, work ethic and desire to please all those that counted on him are described and reiterated just the right amount. His unwavering drive to not let the success that surrounded him engulf his easy-going personality is a foreground theme in the book, to the point that Eig depicts many cases in which Gehrig's shyness cost him opportunities and prevented him from warming to many of his colleagues. This effort finds its huge payoff during the second half, when Gehrig's slow but inevitable disintegration pushes itself painfully into the limelight. Every stumble is painful to read about, and equally tough is each account of Gehrig's steadfast resolve throughout the ordeal. This paragraph itself seems to have devolved into rambling lip-service, but, as this book as confirmed for me, if any man deserves it, it's Gehrig.
The research within helps clear up a lot of details; for instance, Gehrig'sWikipedia article maintains that his wife, Eleanor kept the sordid details of his disease from him until the end. Luckiest Man debunks at least the dogmatic part of this theory:
By now, [Gehrig and his doctor Paul O'Leary] had probably discussed the details and dynamics of ALS. Gehrig had probably begun reading literature on the disease. He was beginning to get a sense of what would happen to him.
It may be true that Eleanor never told Gehrig that ALS was fatal.
The book of course comes to a head on Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day (pictured above). I'm just going to reproduce the speech here, in full. It is one of the most meaningful speeches I have ever heard, read, or heard about, especially when considering how much effort it took him to give it.
"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for seventeen years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans.
"Look at these grand men. Which of you wouldn't consider it the highlight of his career just to associate with them for even one day? Sure, I'm lucky. Who wouldn't consider it an honor to have known Jacob Ruppert? Also, the builder of baseball's greatest empire, Ed Barrow? To have spent six years with that wonderful little fellow, Miller Huggins? Then to have spent the next nine years with that outstanding leader, that smart student of psychology, the best manager in baseball today, Joe McCarthy? Sure, I'm lucky.
"When the New York Giants, a team you would give your right arm to beat, and vice versa, sends you a gift - that's something. When everybody down to the groundskeepers and those boys in white coats remember you with trophies - that's something. When you have a wonderful mother-in-law who takes sides with you in squabbles with her own daughter - that's something. When you have a father and a mother who work all their lives so you can have an education and build your body - it's a blessing. When you have a wife who has been a tower of strength and shown more courage than you dreamed existed - that's the finest I know.
"So I close in saying that I may have had a tough break, but I have an awful lot to live for."
A perfect, perfect farewell.
My final praise for the book comes at this chronological point as well. For most baseball fans, and indeed most Americans, the legend of Gehrig stops there. But the biography, and Lou's life did not. You read about opening his car door and just crumbling out of it. You read about asking photographers to prop pencils in his fingers so it looked like he could use one. You read about him losing the power to speak, and ultimately the (for me) quintessential haunting image of the brash, unflappable Babe Ruth pushing to the front of the line at Gehrig's wake and weeping at his casket.
For fans of Yankee history and of the Iron Horse himself, this book is a must-read. For baseball fans, it's a must get-around-to. For regular Americans looking at a profile in courage, it's top notch. I wrote a couple months ago about how Steve Yzerman was my hero. This book left me wishing I had grown up seventy years earlier so that I could idolize this man. ALS has claimed thousands, but no accounts are more courageous than this. Other prominent cases are the famous Dr. Stephen Hawking, who has lived incredibly long with the disease, and Morrie Schwartz was the featured afflicted individual in Albom's best-selling book, Tuesday's With Morrie, in which another incredibly courageous and touching individual is portrayed.
I'll close here with streak-breaker Cal Ripken, Jr.'s words on the night he broke the Iron Horse's consecutive games record.
Tonight, I stand here, overwhelmed, as my name is linked with the great and courageous Lou Gehrig.
1. Barry Bonds (41), .4429 2. Todd Helton (32), .4300 3. Frank Thomas (38), .4242 4. Albert Pujols (26), .4186 5. Lance Berkman (30), .4161 6. Jason Giambi (35), .4134 7. Bobby Abreu (32), .4124 8. Manny Ramirez (34), .4110 9. Jim Thome (35), .4089 10. Brian Giles (35), .4083
One name conspicuously absent? Ichiro Suzuki, who it turns out almost never walks.
And if there's one disclaimer about rate stats, it's that shorter careers have the advantage. Can I then get one big "holy shit" for Bonds and Thomas, still getting on base at an outstanding rate. It's too bad Dusty Baker would never have those two "clogging up" his basepaths! Yes-sir-ee.
