When Reggie Jackson Made the Orioles Great Again
Lots of words and phrases come to mind when you hear the name Reggie Jackson. Home run hitter. Star of the Oakland A’s. MVP. Billy Martin’s nemesis. Hall of Famer. Mr. October. Yankee. Charlie Finley’s nemesis. The Straw That Stirs the Drink. Five-time World Champion. Oriole.
Educating Twitter: Nolan Ryan and Quality Starts
Nolan Ryan was incredible. He had a mythical quality about him. A larger-than-life aura of invincibility and greatness unmatched by many pitchers in major league history. And he has the Bunyanesque accomplishments to match that reputation. Seven no-hitters.
First Gloves: Steve Carlton, Gold Glover
In my last piece about first gloves, which was focused on the fact that Robin Yount was probably athletic enough to play shortstop left-handed if he’d tried, Scott Polk commented that he also had an illogical glove when he was younger. His was a Steve Carlton
Late Bloomers: Buzz Arlett - Lost in Left Field
One of the best home run hitters ever had a very late start to his big league career, and a very fast finish. But his baseball career started by throwing spitballs. As a teenager growing up in California, Russell “Buzz” Arlett was originally a pitcher, and a pretty good one. When visiting his brothe..
Friday Stuff - Lost in Left Field
Monday Here’s a fun exercise to kick off our review of the week. Let’s take a look at the National League from the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s. A solid decade, let’s say from 1955 to 1964. Here are the league MVPs from each of those seasons, or the top-finishing position player in the cases of 195..
Baseball Remembers: Willie Horton - Lost in Left Field
Franchises need players like Willie Horton. Of course that means that they need players who make four All-Star teams and finish in the top-10 in MVP voting a couple of times. Players who drive in 100 runs a few times, and play hard every day, and have an OPS over 1.000 when the get to the World Seri..
Ballpark Review: Yankee Stadium - Lost in Left Field
I really, really wanted Yankee Stadium to be special. Love them or hate them, the Yankees are inarguably the best franchise in major league history. They have legendary players, managers, owners, announcers, fans, and moments. They deserve to have a ballpark as special and storied as the franchise.
Decisions, Decisions: A Reliever MVP - Lost in Left Field
Given the evolution of pitcher usage in the major leagues, I think it’s safe to say that, barring a shift in thinking or usage, no single pitcher could ever be considered a team’s most valuable player again. Their individual roles have simply been diminished too much.
Educating Twitter: On Harold Baines and the Definition of "Better."
Let’s talk about quantity versus quality. In most aspects of life, we generally have to choose between the two. For instance, sure, you can eat nothing but asparagus and live ninety years, but ice cream is so tasty that it might be worth clogging up your arteries and chopping a a few years off your ..
Friday Stuff - Lost in Left Field
Monday Monday was all about shortstops and good-hitting pitchers. Among the shortstops, it was the birthday of Luis Aparicio and Rick Burleson, and it was the anniversary of Troy Tulowitzi turning an unassisted triple play. The fact that Aparicio and Burleson shared a birthday was fitting, because t..
First Gloves: Robin Yount, Lefty? - Lost in Left Field
If you watched a fair amount of baseball in the 1970s, 1980s, or even the early 1990s, then you certainly saw Robin Yount play. Despite playing his entire career in the relative obscurity of Milwaukee, Yount was pretty much everywhere in those years. He won a couple of MVP awards, rapped out more th..
Late Bloomers: Joe Nathan - Lost in Left Field
Some really good pitchers just were not meant to be major league starters. Joe Nathan was clearly one of them. In fact, he didn’t view himself as a pitcher at all. Nathan wanted to be a major league shortstop. After playing the position all through high school and getting almost no attention from co..
Baseball Remembers: Pat Patterson - Lost in Left Field
Part of the magic of the Negro Leagues is the storytelling. There is a rich oral tradition of passing along the stories and legends of those leagues, which inevitably grow and change in the re-telling until we’re convinced that Cool Papa Bell really was so fast that he could turn of the light and be..
Ballpark Review: T-Mobile Park - Lost in Left Field
All cities are cool in their own way. They all have sights, and history, and fabulous places to eat, and interesting people, and local traditions, and if you take any time at all to learn about them, you stand a really good chance of having a great, interesting time if you visit.
#ibwaa #mlb #baseball #history #baseballhistory #philadelphiaphillies #halloffame
Friday Stuff - Lost in Left Field
Monday Always admit your mistakes, folks. It’s much healthier than the alternative, especially when those mistakes lead to happy accidents. That’s what Mondays’s edition was about, me screwing up a post that was supposed to publish on Monday, but stumbling happily into a great idea for another serie..
Decisions, Decisions: Trading David Cone
It was the 1986 season that broke the Kansas City Royals. Until then, they were the model of how to build a new franchise from scratch. The Royals had been around for seventeen seasons and had eleven winning records and seven playoff appearances. They were routinely in the top half of the American L..
Educating Twitter: Tony Pérez and the Hall of Fame
There are a lot of people on Twitter who are just mad. Mad at the world, mad at their team, mad at their life, mad at everything. And Twitter gives them a place to go be mad anonymously. They can create a profile with a phony name (often with a lot of numbers tacked onto the end), and a phony profil..
Baseball's Missing Managers - Lost in Left Field
In 2014, the Hall of Fame’s Expansion Era Committee elected three recently-retired managers to the Hall of Fame. For each of them, it was the first year they were eligible to appear on the ballot, but no one questioned whether or not they belonged. Joe Torre’s teams
A Happy Accident - Lost in Left Field
I screwed up last week. To explain how I screwed up, I have to give you some background on how I work here. Those of you who have been subscribed for a while probably noticed that I don’t typically post anything on the weekends. I’ve developed a strictly Monday-to-Friday routine, both in writing and..
Friday Stuff - Lost in Left Field
Monday I was traveling back from Arizona on Monday, returning from my latest trip to see all of the active ballparks in the major leagues. I’ve been slowly knocking off parks for nearly fifty years, and this is the year I’m finally going to finish. Monday was the birthday of Willie Davis, the under-..
And Now Available for Pre-Order... - Lost in Left Field
It seems somewhat surreal to announce this but… My book, Cooperstown’s Back Door: A History of Negro Leaguers in the Baseball Hall of Fame, is now available for pre-order. You can find it at the McFarland Books site as well as Barnes & Noble. Here are the links:
Baseball Remembers: Amos Otis - Lost in Left Field
Mobile, Alabama, has churned out some remarkable baseball players. Henry Aaron. Willie McCovey. Billy Williams. It was Ozzie Smith’s birthplace, too, before he moved to Los Angeles. With that kind of talent coming from Mobile, it’s easy for Amos Otis
Educating Twitter: Gary Carter Was Great
There were a couple of problems with Gary Carter’s career that prevented him from getting all of the recognition he deserved. The first was that he played his best seasons in Montreal. Not a lot of people outside of Canada were paying attention during his prime years, and by the time he played under..
Ballpark Review: Chase Field - Lost in Left Field
As a venue, there really isn’t anything wrong with Chase Field. It’s modern, and comfortable, and has great sight lines. It’s got great food options, and a big scoreboard, and it’s super easy to get to, especially if you ride the Valley Metro Rail. It’s right downtown in Phoenix, so driving there ca..
The Big Ballpark Tour - Lost in Left Field
At the beginning, there was no conscious decision to do this. When my kids were younger, if we went on a vacation that happened to be near a major league ballpark, I’d make a point of getting tickets to see a game there. No big deal, just another thing to do on vacation. “Hey, we’re seeing Mickey an..
Friday Stuff - Lost in Left Field
Monday We began the week by taking a look at the 1990 American League Cy Young Award, which was a classic case of the voters seeing a gaudy win total for a pitcher and losing their minds over it. Those days are long gone since pitcher wins simply aren’t what they used to be, but in 1990 pitcher wins..
Late Bloomers: Matt Stairs - Lost in Left Field
It sounds like a Disney movie. A short, stocky, balding, hockey player from New Brunswick decides he would be better at baseball and ends up setting a major league home run record. He marries a girl from his hometown, they have three daughters, and he retires back to New Brunswick where he gets his ..
Baseball Remembers: Clint Thomas - Lost in Left Field
The little town of Greenup, Kentucky, wound up playing an outsized role in remembering the Negro Leagues, for no other reason than it was the birthplace of Clint “Hawk” Thomas. That fact, plus his personality being one that his peers decided to honor later in his life, led directly to the explosion ..
Educating Twitter: Hating on WAR - Lost in Left Field
When people really don’t like something, or, conversely, like something a lot, they tend to do silly things. Things like extending those feelings to anything remotely related to the thing they like or dislike. “That really cool athlete drives a Mustang? Then I love Mustangs.”
Decisions, Decisions: The 1990 AL Cy Young
All alone, as just another statistic to consider when evaluating pitchers, there’s nothing really wrong with crediting pitchers with wins. It certainly isn’t what it used to be, when pitchers were expected to finish their starts, and batted for themselves, and there was far more reason to claim that..
