Friday Stuff - Lost in Left Field
Monday Monday marked the 56th birthday of both Jeff Bagwell and Frank Thomas, two Hall of Fame first basemen who were born on the exact same day. I think we’d be hard-pressed to find two better players who share the same birth day and year, considering they each had over 70 WAR for their careers.
Educating Twitter: Negro Leagues Stats Are Finally Official
With the announcement that the statistics from the seven Negro Leagues that were recognized as major leagues in 2020 have finally been incorporated into official major league statistics, all sorts of folks came out of the woodwork in places like Twitter to voice their complaints. They broadly fall i..
Ballpark Review: Minute Maid Park - Lost in Left Field
You would think that a baseball park with a train full of oranges running along the top of the outfield wall would be pretty memorable. Alas, Minute Maid Park simply isn’t. We went there in September of 2022, and attended a game on the Sunday after the juggernaut Kansas Jayhawks football team destro..
First Gloves: Greg Luzinski, Infielder - Lost in Left Field
In my last First Gloves entry, Brian Vaughn commented that he was lucky enough to own a Greg Luzinski infielder’s glove back in the 1990s. It likely looked something like this: That’s simply outstanding, and a wonderful mental comic relief image for those of us who saw Luzinski actually play basebal..
Baseball Remembers: Udell Chambers, and What Memorial Day Is About
Udell Chambers was a really good ballplayer. He wasn’t big, only 5’ 8” and 150 pounds, but he was so good that one of his brothers said the kids around their neighborhood in Kirkwood, Missouri, outside of St. Louis, would all stop what they were doing to come watch him play on game days. Once he got..
Friday Stuff - Lost in Left Field
Monday Monday would have been Bobby Murcer’s 78th birthday. He was a really good player, but he’s rarely included in the list of players who lost stats to military service. Murcer spent the entire 1967 and 1968 seasons serving in the Army during the Vietnam War. Upon returning he was instantly a suc..
Decisions, Decisions: Albie Pearson's Rookie of the Year Award
I think Albie Pearson won the 1958 American League Rookie of the Year Award because he was short. Like, really short for a major league player. Like, short enough that he wrote a feature about himself in the August 3, 1958 edition of the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine
The Aaron Judge Double Play Watch - Lost in Left Field
One of the dumber things we do as baseball fans is attach team accomplishments to individual players. The pitcher win statistic is one of the more obvious examples of this. Sure, pitchers are often the primary reason why a team won a game, and that was especially true back in the days when starting ..
Educating Twitter: Phony WAR Complaints
Many of the really dumb things you’ll find on Twitter regarding baseball revolve around statistics. And when I say statistics, what I mean is modern statistics. Things they are newer and harder to understand than the basics of batting average, home runs, and RBI. This same sort of outrage isn’t happ..
Retroactive Morality and the Hall of Fame
Let’s start by asking a simple question: Does this pitcher belong in the Hall of Fame? 192-111 record in 13 seasons 2,590 strikeouts 38 shutouts 3.12 ERA 143 ERA+ 5 All-Star games 3 Cy Young Awards 1 MVP 80.8 WAR Before finalizing your answer, here are some similar pitchers who also played in the Cy..
Friday Stuff - Lost in Left Field
Monday Monday marked the 69th anniversary of Mickey Mantle homering from both sides of the plate for the first time in his career. He did it again later that season, and twice more the following year, and once in each of the three seasons after that, too. Before Mantle came along, the trick had been..
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..
