The parallels between Mickey Mantle and Mike Trout as great ballplayers are clear-cut; comparisons of the two continue to be drawn and won’t stop anytime soon. Simply put, Mantle was a dominant centerfielder with a rare combination of blazing speed, enormous power and the ability to reach base extremely often, and so is Mike Trout.
Comparing even such similar players as Mantle and Trout from vastly different eras is never easy, or perhaps wholly advisable. This article certainly won’t …
I gather most of the baseball fans out there have heard about the four Hall of Fame inductees elected yesterday, all of them no-brainers – Chipper Jones, Jim Thome (both on their first ballot), Vlad Guerrero (his second) and Trevor (yawn) Hoffman (third ballot.) I’m a little surprised that Chipper did so well (about 95% of the vote) and that he did better than Thome (about 89%.) I knew Jones was good, I didn’t think he was THAT good. …
Hard on the heels of Roy Halladay’s death last week, baseball endured another significant loss when Hall of Fame second baseman Bobby Doerr died Monday in Junction City, Oregon. The news broke today, but unlike Halladay’s case there was absolutely nothing tragic about Doerr’s passing: he was 99 and had been the oldest living ex-major league player. He also had a Blue Jays connection in common with Halladay, though a much smaller one: Doerr was the team’s first hitting …
I was on Reference Desk duty yesterday afternoon when the tragic news came with an eerie, stealthy quietness, but a sledgehammer’s impact. Two emails, one from a library colleague, the other from a baseball/jazz friend, arrived in my inbox 15 seconds apart, each bearing an identical, blunt message: “Roy Halladay died in a plane crash today.” <end>
“What?” Whaaatt?….. oh, no” came out of my mouth. And then I just sat there in stunned silence for a few seconds, …
Every once in a long while a ballplayer will come along and have a season that mixes batting highs and lows of such extremes that statistical norms are warped and long-held baseball principles go out the window. Joey Gallo, the hulking third baseman/first baseman of the Texas Rangers, is having just such a season and in a very real sense has become the poster boy for this season in which both home runs and strikeouts are way up. If …
Baseball is forever offering up reminders of what a hard, unforgiving game it can be, with countless instances where a player does everything absolutely right and still comes up on the short end of the stick. However, not all of these tough lessons are created equal, some are passing while others are painful on an epic, historic scale and come equipped with exclamation marks, asterisks, or bold underlines in red.
It was that way yesterday when Dodger lefthander Rich …
The 2017 baseball season is barely underway and already it feels different than any in recent memory. For one thing, the Chicago Cubs begin the season as World Series champs, something that couldn’t be said for the past 108 years. Even if you’re not a Cubs fan, or a baseball fan for that matter, when an albatross this heavy is finally lifted it puts a spring in your step and brightens the world, if only a little.
And for …
With almost incredible suddenness, spring training is upon us once more, and not a moment too soon – hallelujah! This is comfort enough even for those who don’t follow baseball much, a sure sign that spring is coming despite the fact that many of us are still a mite chilly. There’s a palpable sense that the players enjoy it almost as much as the fans; many of them seem genuinely glad to renew old friendships and shake off the …
I promise to return to jazz matters soon, but first a few thoughts on the currently nutso baseball schedule……….
For years now, the major-league baseball season has been a 162-game marathon, almost twice as many games as hockey or basketball teams play. Part of the reasoning behind this is that, as baseball is (mostly) a non-contact sport, the players can weather playing so much. And fans love the almost non-stop daily flow of action throughout the spring, summer and …
Third baseman Adrian Beltre turned 37 this past April and is playing his nineteenth season in the big leagues. This puts him in the home stretch of his career, but he has shown no signs of slowing down whatsoever. He’s hitting .292, a few points higher than his career average, and clubbed his 25th home run the other day (his ninth season with at least that many.) He also knocked in his 89th run, so it seems likely he …
A Notice/Warning. When I first caught the writing bug about eight years ago, long before this blog site existed, I wrote a lot of pieces about baseball and circulated them by e-mail to a growing list of baseball-fan friends, many of them fellow musicians. All in all, I wrote over 100 of these and kept them archived in a file on a computer at home. I’ve decided to revisit some of the better ones, make some changes and edits …
At 42, Ichiro Suzuki is just a few hits shy of becoming the 30th player to reach the 3,000-hit milestone. He could get there as early as this weekend and, in his sixteenth big-league season he will become the second fastest to achieve this, behind only career hits leader Pete Rose. When he does crank out hit number 3,000, he will join Hall-of-Famers Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Eddie Collins and Paul Molitor as the only players with at least …
David Ortiz, the Buddha-like designated-hitter of the Boston Red Sox known as “Big Papi”, turned 40 last November. Shortly thereafter he announced that this season, his twentieth in the big leagues, would be his last. Ordinarily, when a star ballplayer reaches this stage their decision to retire is greeted by fans with a mixture of relief, admiration and a desire to look back misty-eyed over the satisfying achievements of a long and storied career. We think, “Whew, I’m glad …
So, I’m still making like Herman Punster, playing around with baseball names and song titles. Fortunately for all though, it’s winding down. One of the challenges of doing this is negotiating the difference between how a name looks and the way it sounds. For example, a reader left one I really enjoyed – “Tiant Steps” – after John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” and the ageless Cuban pitcher, Luis Tiant. It works beautifully on paper, a good visual pun, but Tiant’s …
Toward the end of yesterday’s “Diamonds Are A Churl’s Best Friend” post, I confessed to not being able to dream up any song-puns using the names Ron Swoboda or Sandy Koufax, and expressed a wish that readers would help out in this regard.
Well, it didn’t take long…..A first-time commenter sent this brilliant one using Swoboda:
“You Swoboda My Head” – “You Go To My Head” A gem, a pearl, it made me swoon.
It also made me think …
Recently, a good friend who knows I like song puns sent me a list of unlikely ones involving soccer players’ names and old songs, the work of her son and a pal of his. Their puns were very witty and amusing, combining an amazing knowledge of standard tunes with multinational football names – how many people know that much about either? I follow soccer a little, but mostly during the World Cup and Euro Cup, so I was only …
A baseball season is like a vast ocean of plays, numbers and events taking place in games that come at us daily, with the relentlessness of waves breaking on a shoreline. It’s impossible to keep track of everything or take it all in, but if you pay attention randomly, you’re bound to see things that haven’t happened in a long time or perhaps ever, left like nuggets washed up on a beach.
For example, on Thursday night I tuned …
At age 58, it’s probably too late for me to outgrow my infantile fascination with funny baseball names and numbers.
As all of us who care know, baseball stats only mean anything when taken in context and measured against norms, and they have a way of averaging out over the course of a whole year, or a career. But in the early going of a season, like now, they can be wonderfully skewed, either freakishly high or low, because …
The second round of the baseball playoffs continued where the first one left off, with tense, exciting, rollercoaster individual games in two series that didn’t come close to going the full distance. The Royals swept the ALCS against the Orioles, yet the first game was decided in extra innings, they won the second one by breaking a tie with a two-run ninth-inning rally and the final two games were decided by the same bare 2-1 score – not that …
The first round of the baseball playoffs – known as the League Divisional Series (LDS) – have just finished and already, the games have provided a nail-biting cornucopia, enough surprises and thrills to last an entire postseason. There have been lots of extra-inning games, one-run games, lead reversals, nervous ninths, late-inning heroics, close plays, strategic brilliance and managerial blunders, clutch-hitting and clutch-whiffing, great pitching and fielding and not-so-great pitching and fielding. Even some of the bad plays have at …
First of all, I want to apologize for the many typos in yesterday’s post. I wrote it in some haste and to a tight deadline, owing to an early-evening recording session. Also, my editor – namely me – edits like Emilio Bonifacio plays second base, i.e. clumsily.
I also want to apologize in advance to those of you who are jazz fans rather than ball fans, because I’ll probably be writing mostly about baseball the next little while, …
My last baseball piece was a naïve, premature and overly optimistic one about the then-brimming fortunes of the Blue Jays, written as they stood in the sunshine of first place, about fourteen games above .500. They promptly stumbled, then really fell apart in August and, scraping egg off my face, I resolved never to write about baseball again. I felt like a know-nothing hack and a jinx to boot (not that I’m superstitious about baseball or anything, no…).You …
Some random thoughts on the current baseball season……….
There are many ways to spell tough luck in baseball, it’s that kind of game…one of the best ways this year is S-a-m-a-r-d-z-i-j-a, as in pitcher Jeff Samardzija. Coming into this week, he had a brilliant ERA of about 1.64, but absolutely zilch to show for it – a record of 0-4. Of course he pitches for a bad team, in fact the ‘poster-boy’ of all bad teams, the Cubs. This …
The weather around these parts hasn’t consistently warmed up yet (a sort of “Prague Spring”), but already the baseball season has reached the quarter-mark, with most teams having played about 40 games.
The baseball has been similarly lukewarm, so far it’s mostly been characterized by the high number of teams treading water at a winning percentage of .500 or so. Of the 30 MLB teams, 23 are within five games of either side of the break-even mark. If you …
…Sorry, that should be “hope springs eternal”….man, have we needed this. After a harsh winter that tried even the hardiest of souls among us, the Boys of Summer are back with their grand old game and not a moment too soon, Opening Day at last. Cue the massed choirs of the Hallelujah chorus, bring on the William Tell Overture, “Auld Lang Syne“,”Take Me Out To the Ballgame” and whatever other celebratory music seems appropriate. Play …
Yesterday’s post on Roy Halladay as usual contained a few small typos and grammatical mistakes but also a factual error – I posted it in some haste because of the time-sensitve nature of his retirement. The typos I can live with, but factual errors bug me, I try not to make many of those. For some reason, I got it into my head that Halladay had an 18-year career, with 14 seasons in Toronto; it was actually 16 years, …
At 36, pitcher Roy Halladay announced his retirement the other day, signing a one-day contract with the Blue Jays which will allow him to retire as one, a classy move by all concerned. It’s gratifying to local baseball fans that this was clearly important to Halladay, and for one glorious moment there, I thought he’d actually signed a real pitching contract for next year, Lord knows we could use him if he were healthy. Roy cited a chronic back …
In May of this year, I read that 104 pitchers have been on the major-league D.L. (disabled list) since the beginning of 2012, that number likely rose by 50 or 60 more by season’s end. If memory serves, at one point in the 2012 season there were something like 35 pitchers out of action and scheduled for Tommy John surgery, many of them relief closers. That procedure deals with the elbow only and doesn’t take into account frequent injuries …
The Boston Red Sox did some more crazy stuff over the weekend that ties in with the 20-run game I wrote about on Thursday.
On Thursday night, I decided to treat myself to some home theatre, the Red Sox against their nemesis at Yankee Stadium II in the first of 4 games, they’re always like Troy vs. Sparta. It was a four-and-a-half hour marathon with everything except flying elephants and a public beheading. The Sox won 9-8 after being …
On Wednesday night, the Boston Red Sox beat the Detroit Tigers 20-4 in Fenway Park. This is what’s known in baseball as a laugher, so called because these kinds of games are inherently farcical. It’s rare for any team to score as many as 20 runs and usually in these cases the losing team stops wasting pitchers and will use some bench/position players to pitch. This also gets pretty funny, often because these guys are not half-bad and stop …
Don’t look now, but after twenty straight losing seasons, the Pittsburgh Pirates entered August with the best record in baseball at 65-43, two percentage points ahead of the Red Sox. True, they’ve teased their fans the last two seasons by flirting with contention this late, only to collapse down the stretch like a straw suitcase. This year feels different though, for a few reasons to be examined later.
Their last winning season was 1992, the last of three 90-win …
A rare few have had the misfortune to be established and very good at what they do, only to be suddenly eclipsed by a wunderkind and relegated to oblivion through no fault of their own. In fact, if these poor souls are remembered at all, it’s often only because of the greatness of those who supplanted them. One might call this the Salieri-Mozart dynamic, a most extreme case explored in the movie Amadeus. It’s a kind of halo-effect in …
The following article could be seen as a rant or attack on Jays’ catcher J.P. Arencibia, but is not really intended as such. It’s just that his struggles this year and his attitude about these bring up some larger issues about baseball – what’s important in it, how it should be played and so on – that I wanted to comment on. Before going any further though, I want to make two things clear:
1) I don’t dislike Arencibia …
Generally, the ballplayers who hold single-season records in various hitting categories are famous, and rightly so.
Take for example home runs, maybe the most glamorous of these categories. For a long time the single-season record was the 60 home runs hit in 1927 by Babe Ruth, still the most famous ballplayer who ever lived. Just for good measure, The Bambino also holds the all-time seasonal records for total bases, slugging average and extra-base hits. Then along came Roger Maris …
At the end of my last post I wrote, with tongue mainly in cheek, that I wish I could have played major-league ball, but that the chances of this happening were a big fat zero. My friend Ted O’Reilly commented that this was just as well, that my career in music has been much longer than any ballplayer’s, with the possible exception of Minnie Minoso, who managed to play in parts of seven decades. This is true and a …