With over 350 sets of brothers and more than 100 father-son combinations, major-league baseball has had far more family acts in its history than any other sport. This doesn’t include the rarer examples of nine sets of twins who played the game or the four instances of players over three generations – grandfather, father and son. There’s even a very rare case of baseball spanning four generations (while skipping two) as in the case of Jim Bluejacket, who pitched …
Most baseball fans know that Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers did something last year that no ballplayer has since 1967. He won the batting Triple Crown, which means he lead his league in batting average (.330), home runs (44) and runs-batted-in (RBI), with 139. Oddly enough his teammate Justin Verlander won the pitching Triple Crown – leading in wins, ERA and strikeouts – in 2011. This is not talked about nearly as much and for good reason, the …
One of the perks of working at Osgoode Hall is seeing the grounds in spring and summer, all the beautiful trees and gardens maintained by two very hard-working women. There are about five blossoming crab-apple trees that recently came into spectacular bloom and on Friday morning I saw a flash of orange fly up into one of them. I thought “Baltimore Oriole” right away, but it happened so fast I wasn’t sure. So I walked over and stood under …
Given their dismal record of losing and being almost continual baseball chumps from 1946 to this very day, it might strain belief to suggest the Chicago Cubs had a second decade of success nearly equalling that of the 1904-13 teams. Nevertheless, in the Depression years of 1929-38, the Cubs came close to matching the great run of their predecessors. True, the later teams didn’t win any championships or nearly as many games, didn’t concentrate four pennants in a five-year …
I’ve been reading The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract off and on for over two years now and it just keeps on giving. It’s not the kind of book you read from cover to cover, it’s far too big for that. It has to be digested in small portions, but, even so, I’m still coming across things I’ve missed. It continues to yield surprising and thought-provoking information, such as the following from a short piece about the Chicago …
I wrote this after first making a baseball trip to Buffalo in August of 2011. With the Blue Jays’ AAA farm team now located there, the piece has new relevance, so I thought I’d revive it. Besides, given how awful the big club has been so far, Buffalo may be the nearest place for Toronto fans to actually see something like major-league baseball being played.
While thousands of Canadian baseball fans made the pilgrimage to Cooperstown yesterday to witness …
On the subway the other day I saw someone wearing one of those sweatshirts that say “Member of the All-Harvard Drinking Team”. It got me to thinking of how many drinking men there have been in baseball through the years, so I thought I’d put together an All-Star team of the game’s notable boozers. Generally, it seems that excessive drinking was more widespread in the past, and since professional baseball began around 1860 or so it has always reflected …
Many are familiar with songwriter Dave Frishberg and his baseball songs, the most celebrated of which is “Van Lingle Mungo”. Those who haven’t heard it, should. It’s a delightful masterpiece. The lyrics are all old ballplayer’s names, arranged so artfully and rhythmically that they become poetry, with the pitcher’s name Van Lingle Mungo repeated throughout the song as a kind of haunting refrain and link.
Being a retro-maniac, a mental collector of old ballplayers’ names, I was familiar …
Sometimes history shows us that everything old is new again, and that the roots of what we consider new issues or developments actually go far back in time. This is certainly true in baseball in the case of an old ballplayer named Earl Averill. He’s interesting because at a crucial point in his career he took a gutsy stance on a salary issue which led to a proposed change in baseball’s policy regarding player sales. This change was never …
In the years since I wrote this piece about the underachievement of great pitching staffs, the starting pitching of the Philadelphia Phillies from 2010-11 became another case in point. They assembled a starting rotation that many saw as invincible and was described in some circles as maybe the best ever, consisting of four aces – Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels – plus some other decent starters in Vance Worley and Joe Blanton. They didn’t manage …
This is one of the very first baseball stories I ever wrote and it has jazz content too. I’ve been wanting to post it for a while and thanks to the miracles of modern digital technology, I was able to retrieve it from a dusty old email archive it had been sitting in for about four years. I’ll admit I’ve taken some liberties here in filling in the details as best I can; drinking was most definitely involved in …
Earl Weaver’s death over the weekend was a jarring and unpleasant surprise, but coming as it did on a baseball-themed cruise, it was maybe an appropriate exit. Earl loved to hang out and talk baseball with anybody who would listen – old players, young players, reporters, coaches, fans – I can just see him on the cruise ship, bending an elbow and yakking it up in his scratchy, hoarse voice. There are worse ways to go and given his …
This past weekend brought momentous baseball news – the deaths of all-time Cardinal great Stan Musial at 92 and celebrated Orioles’ manager Earl Weaver, suddenly on a baseball-related cruise at 82. Because Musial was older and his career more distant, I read less commentary on him, so will deal with him first and Weaver later, in a separate entry.
“Stan the Man”, baseball’s “perfect, gentle knight”, suddenly gone at 92. It’s perhaps not appropriate to mourn the passing of …
World Series sweeps are hardly ever expected from the outset, and the one just completed by the Giants was no exception. After all, in theory a least, the World Series pits the two best teams left in baseball against each other in a best-of-seven format. Each team is likely a strong one and given what they must go through to even reach the Series, it would seem likely and reasonable to expect one of the teams to win at …
Had the ghost of John McGraw been magically transported to Game Two of this World Series last night in San Francisco, he would have at first seen much that would have bewildered, outraged, maybe even frightened him, though he sure didn’t scare easily in life. A thousand questions and confounded thoughts would have flashed through the hard-headed old manager’s mind in an instant.
Jaysus, where am I? My Jints are in white, playing at home, but what have they …
This site is devoted equally to both jazz and baseball, and though I have a number of music pieces on the go, baseball will take a front seat for the next little while as, a), it’s World Series time and b), I’m really busy with gigs for the next week or two.
Being busy is a nice problem to have and I’m not complaning, but it always seems to be the case that it never rains but it pours …
To many, the St. Louis Cardinals in this year’s post-season looked to be repeating their celebrated, longshot run of last year. This time around they snuck into the playoffs by an even thinner margin, winning the brand new second wild-card, then beating the favoured Braves in Atlanta in the one-game, loser-goes-home playoff. When they shockingly beat the young and talented Nationals by scoring eight runs in the final three innings of Game Five, erasing a 6-0 deficit, it seemed …
The above tongue-in-cheek headline refers to one of the veteran character actor’s most famous movie roles, “The Invisible Man”; Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez, though the conspicuous centre of a benching controversy, was pretty much invisible in the ALCS (1 for 9) and his replacement Eric Chavez was, believe it or not, even worse (0 for 20.) Yes, I realize Claude Rains has been dead for a long time now, but given the cold wind blowing around the Yanks’ …
As you readers out there are compos mentis and all – sane and normal types, no offense intended, you’re likely not saddled with my baseball name obsession. So you’re probably not aware that the Detroit Tigers lead all of baseball in weird and funny pitcher’s names. It’s really quite something and I only just began to notice. I must be slipping.
Their two best pitchers are Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer. Verlander isn’t really a funny name, but Scherzer …
So there’s bad news and good news swirling about the Blue Jays as their toilet-bowl circling season enters its final, “let’s play the spoilers” phase.
Word broke yesterday that the Jays will be relocating their AAA farm team from Las Vegas to Buffalo, essentially trading places with the Mets. Some baseball friends and I heard rumours to this effect from Buffalo fans during a Bisons game at Coca-Cola Field this summer. It’s something we had all wished for – …
Have you noticed how nicknames have pretty much disappeared from jazz and baseball? What happened, where did they all go? There’s still the odd half-decent one around, like say Joey Bats, or Trombone Shorty. But these days it seems the only celebrities in any number with colourful nicknames are rap or hip-hop “artists”, and I’d happily say goodbye to their soubriquets if it also meant the musical genre would just disappear, forever and without a trace. Forgive my white-ass, …
I’ve done a lot of general reading about my two main interests, jazz and baseball. Histories, biographies, collections of reviews, stories and reportage, you name it. It’s odd, but every once in a while in a lifetime of random reading, two unrelated subjects can intersect and lead to the very same little dot in time, like two different GPS locators of history.
Over the course of thirty-five years of this indiscriminate rambling around in the past, I chanced to …
If the pitcher Rip Sewell is remembered at all these days, it’s for two things – a noted 1934 fistfight with Hank Greenberg, and the 1940s invention of the bloop pitch, which has appeared since from time to time in various guises, under various names.
Sewell was a right-handed pitcher whose career took place almost entirely in the National League from 1932 to 1949. He was a Southern country boy born May 11, 1907 in Decatur, Alabama and like …
I was fooling around doing some baseball research on-line the other day and ended up on a site called baseball.com – how do they come up with these imaginative names? It was a decent enough site, and I noticed it had a Top 100 players of All-Time List, so I checked it out. It included major stars from the Negro Leagues, which is nice – a lot of these lists don’t bother. Otherwise, it had mostly the names you’d …