Category Archives: Baseball

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: “The Numbers Game”

The Numbers Game by Alan Schwarz is on my shortlist for best baseball books of the last 10 years. In fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of any that can beat it. The main reason: while so-called traditionalists deride or dismiss the sabermetric approach to baseball, Schwarz’s book shows that stat obsession has existed as long as the game has. He even makes a convincing argument that baseball’s number-rich nature is the main reason it became America’s pastime in the first place.

The book is a brief history of baseball statistics: how they began, how they evolved, and who pioneered what. Schwarz points in particular to one largely unsung founder of baseball as we know it, Henry Chadwick. As early as the 1840s, newspapers published rudimentary “abstracts” about baseball games. It took Chadwick to refine these abstracts and turn them into the box score that we still use today.

In Schwarz’s estimation, the simple comprehensiveness of the box score meant that it could (a) be printed in the newspapers without taking up too much real estate, and (b) give the reader a concise but thorough sense of what happened in the game. So the average working stiff (who lacked the money and free time to go to a ballgame) could follow a team even if he could never attend a game in person. It is probable the biggest factor in turning baseball from a game to a sport.

Chadwick also became an evangelist for baseball, and tried to develop and perfect the way it understood itself through stats. Some metrics he developed caught on, others never did, and still others would wait 100-plus years until the game understood their merit.

Schwarz also shows that every era has had its own Nerds vs. Jocks debate. He traces the roots of fantasy sports all the way back to the 1940s, and highlights a few lonely Bill Jamesian figures throughout the game’s history who have, for the most part, been completely ignored by the MLB establishment and statheads alike. And he also shows that Billy Beane and his methods of team construction didn’t appear out of thin air.

In short, Schwarz shows that the history of baseball’s stats are really the history of the game itself. It is a thousand times more interesting than a book about math has any right to be. You can easily plow through this book in a day or two, and you’ll wish it lasted longer.

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Stadium Statues

Does anyone make statues anymore? Chances are if you’re wandering through a park and you see a statue, it’s a good 50 years old. I don’t know if the blame lies with Vietnam or the soaring cost of bronze, but at some point, the idea of immortalizing a HERO in art form became passe. If you do see a more recently completed piece of public artwork, it’s likely a large cube or abstract figure, with a purposefully vague one-word title like FREEDOM or PRIDE.

Well, there is one place where you can still see a freshly constructed, representational statue: a baseball stadium. All sports refer to its stars as “heroes” when what they really mean is “guys who play good”, but only baseball backs up that ethical confusion by literally putting its “heroes” on pedestals.

According to this post at Wezen-Ball, all but five MLB teams have at least one statue in their home park. Admittedly, the definition of “statue” is stretched pretty wide in some cases, as in this bizarre thing seen at Toronto’s Rogers Centre (entitled “The Crowd”), or this outfielder that patrols the Tropicana Field bathrooms.

There are also a few “scene” statues with anonymous figures, like this one outside Whatever They’re Calling The Place Where The Diamondbacks Play Now. (A cute idea, but the D’Backs logo on the player’s uni is already outdated. Ooops!) Or this one outside Miller Park, saluting the hard working (and presumably hard drinking) workers of Milwaukee. However, the vast majority of stadium statuary are depictions of legendary baseball players.

The Tigers’ Comerica Park has the most statues of all–seven–and all of them are dedicated to former Detroit greats. (The Phillies also have seven statues, but two of them are generic depictions of baseball action that used to live outside the now-demolished Veteran’s Stadium.) The White Sox run a close second with six, and have the statue portraying the most recent event: their 2005 World Series title. Click here to see not-yet-disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich unveil the statue and get the shit booed out of him by a South Side crowd that had him pegged as a Cubs fan.

Surprisingly, the Yankees only have two (unless you count the plaques in Monument Park, which I do not). And they’re really one large, detached statue: a rather bland depiction of Don Larsen tossing to Yogi Berra during his perfect game in the 1956 World Series. But I’m sure one day there will be a bronze recreation of when Derek Jeter drove all the snakes out of the Bronx.

The Nationals have three statues, despite only existing for five years. Two are of old Senators (Walter Johnson and Frank Howard) and one is of Josh Gibson, a Negro League legend who played for the DC-based Homestead Grays. These statues tried to be adventurous and capture “movement”. An admirable experiment, but the results are kind of terrible. They all wound up looking like multi-limbed cement monsters.

George Brett’s statue gets my vote as the most picturesque, as it looks over the waterfalls of Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium. A close second would be Roberto Clemente’s statue outside PNC Park, which greets fans as they cross the Pittsburgh bridge named after him. Juan Marichal’s statue in San Francisco is an eyeful, as it captures his unique, super-high kick delivery. Stan Musial’s statue is also impressive, although his name on the pedestal, chiseled in huge letters and adorned with gold leaf, makes it look like the title of a musical.

The worst? There’s none that are horrible, honestly, but a few that tip the Weird Scale. The dead, hollow eyes of Steve Carlton’s statue in Citizen’s Bank Park will haunt my dreams forever. Red Schoendienst’s statue outside Busch Stadium is pretty great, showing him turning a double play. But in order to portray that motion in statue form, the sculptor supported him on a column of hardened Play-Doh.

harrycaray.jpgBut for pure WTFness, nothing beats Harry Caray’s statue outside Wrigley Field. If this piece of art just stopped at his torso, it wouldn’t be that bad, although his arm gestures make him look like he’s trying to imitate the redesigned Jesus in Dogma. But the sculptor’s acid must have kicked in when he reached the belt, because all of a sudden, Harry’s pants start MORPHING INTO OTHER HUMANS. AAAAAAAAH!

I don’t know what this is is supposed to convey. Harry rose to the heights (?) of announcerdom because of his fans? Or he stepped in a still wet, small-scale proletarian version of Mount Rushmore? Or he absorbed multiple twins in the womb, and they are just now asserting themselves? I really don’t know how to explain this, but whatever the real story is, I think David Cronenberg should make a movie about it.

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter

Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Topps’ Photo Retouching Skills

A recent post at Mets Guy in Michigan concentrated on what may be the worst Mets-related baseball card of all time (and perhaps the worst baseball card of all time, period): a Hostess-produced card for Rusty Staub in which the photo retouching is abysmal. I won’t recount the story here; just click on this link and marvel at how horrible it is (and the interesting hypothesis forwarded to explain its hideousness).

The post also touched on a longtime feature of baseball cards: the hastily altered player photo. Back in the days of no Photoshop and longer production schedules, it wasn’t always possible for the baseball card people to get a picture of a player in his new duds if he was traded in the offseason. Or even if he was traded the year before, since back then, most baseball card photos were taken during the previous season. And by my own amateur sleuthing, most of them were taken in either New York or LA. So if were swapped midseason and never made another trip to either coast, there might be no pics of you in your current uni.

69_rusty.jpgFor a good chunk of the 1960s, Topps (the biggest baseball card producer) didn’t much care for verisimiltude. If a player was suddenly traded before the cards were made, they just used a generic, hatless picture, or blacked out his hat entirely, as evidenced by Rusty Staub’s 1969 Topps card (seen to your right). Rusty went from the Astros to the Expos in a very late offseason trade (January 22), and since Montreal had yet to play a game, Topps–rather than find out what the Expos’ uniforms might look like–scraped away the Houston logo on his helmet and called it a day.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Topps either decided this method was not worthy of their standards or hired some very ambitious/anal art directors. Because at this time, they began to document a player’s new home to the best of their abilities–as ham-fisted and transparent as those efforts might appear.

When I was a kid and mired in a baseball card obsession, I bought a whole box of cards from 1977 for like five bucks. Why 1977? Because (a) that’s the year I was born, and (b) it was the first year the Blue Jays and Mariners played, which at the time was the last MLB expansion. This historical fact fascinated me for dumb little kid reasons.

Topps wanted to document the freshman year for those two teams, of course. But since neither had yet taken the field, they had to improvise. In some cases, they did so admirably. In others, not so much.

Even as a young’un, I could tell something was off about some of these cards. I even recognized bad paint jobs on some of these unfortunate players. It was necessary for the aforementioned Toronto and Seattle squads, since this was their inaugural year, but they weren’t the only teams treated to some paintbrushery.
Continue reading Warm Thoughts for a Cold Winter: Topps’ Photo Retouching Skills →