The Baseball Digest Archive 1/80
January 1980
Interestingly enough, even though this issue ostensibly served as the wrapup of the 1979 World Series the cover subject was not a member of the championship We Are Family Pirates team. Instead it was a member of the vanquished Baltimore Orioles, although to be fair Mike Flanagan did win the 1979 AL Cy Young Award. One minor note regarding this issue - there was a production error in the printing of this issue, which means that in my copy several pages were printed twice and just as many were not. So I don’t have the complete issue in my hands.
A case in point is the feature on Brian Downing, which describes his new batting stance. Those of us old enough to remember watching him hit recall that he had one of the most extreme open stances ever seen. I would imagine that this is what the article discusses, but the page which describes his stance is missing.
The article on Scott McGregor involves a then-new pitching metric. WHIP was not in common usage at the time; it didn’t really take off until fantasy baseball became popular, and what was then known as Rotisserie Baseball was not invented until this very year of 1980. McGregor had the best base runners allowed to innings pitched numbers in the 1979 season; it wasn’t calculated as a rate stat here, only as a cumulative total. For some reason, the accompanying chart made 180 innings pitched as the cutoff, but McGregor fell 5 innings short. So he is not listed on the chart.
Which select group of catchers had Darrell Porter entered? In 1979 he became only the 6th catcher to both drive in and score more than 100 runs in the same season. His predecessors make up an impressive list: Cochrane, Berra, Campanella, Bench, and Fisk. Porter was nowhere near as good of a player as those other men were, but when you add this to the fact that he would later win a World Series MVP, that’s pretty impressive. BTW, I randomly looked up some post-1980 catchers and both Mike Piazza and Ivan Rodriguez also accomplished the feat.
Terence Moore’s article in this issue digs deep into major league rosters to see what they might look like if players had never switched teams. The two hypotheticals he led with were the Giants outfield, which could have consisted of George Foster, Garry Maddox, and Gary Matthews, along with the Mets pitching staff, which could have been led by Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan. He also included a potential roster for the Oakland A’s, who were famously decimated once free agency began. How would an outfield of Reggie Jackson, Claudell Washington, and George Hendrick have looked?
Finally, this issue asks the musical question - which current pitcher will be the one to break Walter Johnson’s career strikeout record? It called Nolan Ryan the odds-on favorite to do so, and he did in fact obliterate the record. But remember, it was close. Steve Carlton actually passed Ryan at one point, although in the end Ryan ultimately prevailed. This article stated that Carlton might have a chance, but he was lumped together with Ferguson Jenkins due to their similar ages. They both figured to reach 3000, but “it’s problematic whether they could also add that extra half a thousand to get up into Johnson’s class.” I like reading articles such as this with 20/20 hindsight; predicting the future is always tricky so it’s a treat to see how close a writer comes with these types of guesses.
The HOF Cap Project - Negro League Teams
Before proceeding I should mention that I am far from being a Negro League historian. My picks here are limited to the info I am able to gather from Baseball Reference. Because of that I didn’t make any cap selections for those from the pre-Negro League era; I just don’t have the data that can help me make an educated guess. In addition, there are players such as Cristobal Torriente who spent considerable time in the Mexican League as well, so for those the statistical picture is not fully complete. So, here is me giving it the old college try. No surprise, the two teams with the most Hall of Famers are the two most famous Negro League teams - the Homestead Grays and Kansas City Monarchs.
American Giants (2): Bill Foster, Cristobal Torriente
Bacharach Giants (1): John Henry Lloyd
Baltimore Black Sox (1): Jud Wilson
Cuban Stars East (1): Martin Dihigo
Detroit Stars (2): Andy Cooper, Turkey Stearnes
Harrisburg Giants (1): Oscar Charleston
Hilldale Club (3): Judy Johnson, Biz Mackey, Louis Santop
Homestead Grays (4): Ray Brown, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Smokey Joe Williams
Indianapolis ABC’s (1): Ben Taylor
Kansas City Monarchs (5): Willard Brown, Jose Mendez, Satchel Paige, Bullet Joe Rogan, Hilton Smith
Newark Eagles (3): Ray Dandridge, Leon Day, Monte Irvin
St. Louis Stars (3): Cool Papa Bell, Mule Suttles, Willie Wells
Two quick notes: Buck O’Neil was inducted as an executive, not a player, so I gave him no team assignment. And John Henry Lloyd’s first season with a statistical record was his age 37 season, so he had a full career before the Negro Leagues began play. I may or may not have made the correct choice for him. As far as the official plaques, none of the inductees from the Negro Leagues have actual cap logos.
Well, It’s Happening
The last 2+ months have felt like we have been in a slow motion car wreck. We have been spinning and spinning, each time getting closer to colliding with the highway center divide. That collision will happen at noon today. I’m still utterly mystified that this day has come, but here we are.
I still get terribly sad whenever I see Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff. I nearly lost it when they sat in their seats as the Kennedy Center Honors. To see the joy that they - and the Walzes - project, and compare that with the perpetual sour pusses on the faces of those in the new administration? What we could have had. What we should have had. And like a lot of people, I was giddy with excitement months ago when I noticed that Inauguration Day would fall on MLK Day this year. To go from the possibility of the first black woman taking the oath of office on this day to what we will have instead… Argh!
During his first term, we constantly heard talk of how the guardrails have held, or how the adults in the room put a brake on his worst impulses. Now, those guardrails have been eroded to the point that they are practically nonexistent. And those adults in the room are long gone; only sycophants remain. God help us all.
HOF Day Tomorrow
Better news to come tomorrow. The results of the balloting for the 2025 class of the Hall Of Fame will be revealed at 6PM Eastern and we will officially learn who will be inducted in July along with Dick Allen and Dave Parker. The data that Ryan Thibodaux and his team have compiled continues to indicate that Ichiro Suzuki, CC Sabathia, and Billy Wagner will receive their congratulatory phone calls and that Carlos Beltran is likely to fall just shy. And as always it will be fascinating to dig a little deeper into the final vote totals. Who is making strong progress, who is remaining stagnant, who has enough support to remain on the ballot another year? There will be much to discuss on Wednesday.
50 Years Ago - The Sunshine Boys
Among the effects of this filmed adaptation of Neil Simon’s Broadway play was that it served as a rejuvenation for the career of George Burns. In addition to having been a vaudeville star, he was also a pioneer in the early days of television and a familiar presence on the variety show/talk show circuit. But his film career was long gone; in fact it had been more than 3 decades since he had last appeared in a theatrical movie. Not only did he win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in this movie, but it sparked a thriving movie career which lasted for the next several years.
In this tale, a network was producing a special on the history of comedy and as part of the program they wished to include a reunion of the legendary, yet long estranged, comedy duo of Lewis and Clark for which they would perform their most famous routine one last time. This proved to be easier said than done; the resentment between the two had so metastasized that they could not let bygones be bygones even for this one brief moment.
The fact that the other Sunshine Boy was portrayed by Walter Matthau can’t help but inspire audiences to compare this to The Odd Couple. Simply put, what if Felix and Oscar had finally reached a breaking point that irreparably damaged their friendship? The casting of Matthau is interesting. He was more than two decades younger than Burns, therefore he was acting under a lot of old age makeup. There were several other big names attached to the movie beforehand; in fact Red Skelton and Jack Benny were all set to go before each dropped out for different reasons. That led to Matthau and Burns and the rest is history.
In the end, this was a fairly light movie. I wouldn’t go so far as to classify it as second tier Neil Simon, but at the same time it wouldn’t rank up there with his most significant work. In reality, it’s that George Burns Oscar that gives The Sunshine Boys a little more juice. In the majority of his later film roles he was essentially portraying George Burns, but it’s still nice that this movie resulted in a prolific final act of his career. One of his running gags was that he had booked a gig years beforehand to celebrate his 100th birthday. He did in fact live to see his centennial, but by then he was too frail to actually perform publicly. (There was actually a tongue in cheek network special years earlier which celebrated his 100th, but he was “only” in his 80’s at the time.)
Closing Laughs
Quick reminder - I sent out a brief reader survey on Friday. I’m trying to get a sense of which of my regular recurring features you most enjoy reading. Please take a moment to fill it out if you can. I hope you all, wherever you are, are able to manage this week’s weather well. Be safe, and I will see you all again on Wednesday.
