The Baseball Digest Archive 9/77

A lot to talk about, so I don’t have enough space today to discuss the new Mets right fielder. It’s truly a new era in Flushing.

September 1977

Sad to say but Yaz did not achieve that one more goal he was searching for on this cover blurb. The next title for the Sox was still more than 25 years away. This was a very generic issue of Baseball Digest. If you’ve been following along you have probably noticed that there were certain types of articles in regular rotation for the magazine. Every few months would see an article discussing pitcher injuries. Every few months would see an article discussing brawls. Every few months would see an article discussing “bending” of the game’s rules. Every few months would see an article discussing some of the wackier moments in the game’s history. The rotations of those articles lined up this time so that many appeared in the same issue.

There is an article here that discusses creating a stat that would credit a batter for advancing a runner; not just for a sacrifice fly. Such a rule has never been instituted, but the article surveyed a group of current players to see what they thought about it. It looks like it was roughly split between guys who were in favor or it and those who were not.

The 1970’s were a great decade if you liked garish baseball uniforms and the Pirates were a prime example. They famously mixed and marched colors and styles from game to game and these photos offered a sampling of some of the looks.

In a sign that this was the beginning of a new era, there is an article here on relief pitchers, presented as the headline describes “a new breed of baseball hero.” The era of the one inning closer was still a few years away, but by 1977 the role of the specialist was firmly in place. One of the pitchers singled out in this article was Sparky Lyle, who in fact would go on to win the AL Cy Young Award in 1977.

The magazine listed their choice for the 15 players who had the greatest 5 year starts to their careers. They ranked them 1-15 but did not specify exactly how the list was tabulated. #1 was Chuck Klein, which was a big reach. His first 5 years not only took place at the beginning of the Live Ball Era, but he played his home games in the bandbox known as Baker Bowl. You have to take his numbers with a grain of salt. Ted Williams at #2 was a better choice.

Finally, I love this photo which accompanied the article on arguments. Manager Leo Durocher and umpire Jocko Conlan kicked each other in the shin. Could you imagine the reaction if that happened today? The outrage generated on the internet could power a medium sized city.

The Ballot Countdown

Newcomer #11 Adam Jones - There was a period of about 5 seasons in which Adam Jones consistently performed at an All-Star level. He was just a tad shy of HOF level - I don’t believe he was ever considered a top 10 player - but he provided above average power and run production and he was also a premiere defensive center fielder. This is also worth noting. His best years coincided with a brief respite in what was a gloomy couple of decades for the Baltimore Orioles. From 1998-2022 the O’s reached the playoffs only 3 times. 2 of those were in some of Jones’s best individual seasons. It’s a good notch in his belt to have provided some hope in such a down era for one of the game’s top franchises.

Of course, the first image that comes to mind when thinking of Adam Jones is his spectacular catch in the 2017 World Baseball Classic, robbing Manny Machado of a home run. That would turn out to be one of the final highlights in his career. His decline came fast once he hit his thirties.

The trajectory of Adam Jones’s career is a good illustration of why I try to avoid using the word “compiler” as a criticism. As good as he was in his prime, he wound up falling shy of career milestones such as 2000 hits, 300 home runs, or 1000 RBI. He was still a fine player, however, and this shows how difficult it is to reach magic numbers. If a player who wasn’t as good as he was still managed to earn enough playing time as he aged to accumulate larger career totals, what’s so bad about that? It’s still valuable. As for Jones, congratulations on putting together the career that he did, but it was certainly not a HOF one.

Holdover #11 Francisco Rodriguez - The positives. He emerged as a vital setup reliever to help the 2002 Angels win the first and only World Series in franchise history, even though he only had less than a month of major league service at the time. He holds the single season record for most saves, one of 3 times that he led the AL in that stat. And he currently ranks #6 all time in saves.

The negatives? He put together a lot of good seasons, but few truly great ones, and I set a very high bar for relief pitchers. There are too many seasons in which he was maybe the 4th or 5th best closer in the game. Making the Hall demands a better track record than that. I would even say that his K-Rod nickname is something of a misnomer. His career K/9 rate of 10.5 is impressive, but it doesn’t stand out that much from the pack among elite closers.

His candidacy has thus far failed to gain traction; he receives enough support to remain on the ballot, but there has been no sign that he has been gaining enough votes to make a realistic move towards 75%. That sounds about right. As impressive of a pitcher as he was, he was not HOF caliber.

A Fine Start

One thing that voters will need to take into account in future years is how to evaluate pitchers as usage continues to change as rapidly as it does. It’s becoming apparent that we have likely seen the last 300 game winner. As recently as a year ago Justin Verlander spoke confidently about his chances of having that finishing kick that he needs, but Father Time remains undefeated. Verlander is still 38 wins shy; do we think he has 38 games pitched left in that arm, let alone 38 victories? Even 200 wins is starting to look like a difficult benchmark. Gerrit Cole stands at 153, so he should be able to reach it assuming good health. But accomplished pitchers such as Chris Sale, Zack Wheeler, and Jacob deGrom will all ultimately fall well short of 200. I can’t imagine what the career win totals of the Paul Skenes generation will look like.

So, being that the traditional career marks that HOF voters have always asked of pitchers are increasingly unobtainable, what to do? As is often the case, Joe Posnanski is doing God’s work. He uses the Game Scores statistic that Bill James developed years ago and is able to make historical comparisons across eras. I’ll briefly summarize because I don’t want to steal his content - if you aren’t already subscribing to Joe’s Substack you really should.

In short, Joe Pos dug in and found the Game Score which best corresponds to wins and losses. In other words, if a pitcher’s score is above this number the team is likely to win and a score below usually results in a loss. The Game Score stat is a simple compilation of a starter’s stat line. It starts at 50 and adds points for innings, strikeouts, etc. & loses points for hits allowed, runs allowed, etc. The stat works for this exercise because even though innings totals for modern starters have dropped, strikeouts have increased so the median numbers haven’t changed much.

Anyhoo, Joe dubbed that magic number a “Fine Start.” He’s still workshopping a better name. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise to see whom some of the pitchers with the most career fine starts are, although the name at the very type might. It’s also instructive to see which pitchers have the highest percentage of fine starts. For any newish stat to work, it needs to be believable. If the names at the top make sense, then it’s easier to sell. It looks to be the case here.

Posnanski mentioned in a subsequent column that statistical guru Tom Tango is taking a look at this and is trying to turn this into a real statistic. I don’t know if this will catch on, but it took years for something like WAR to take hold. Time will tell if a couple of decades down the road when a pitcher hits the ballot instead of his case being dismissed with “well, he only won X # of games” instead part of the discussion will be “do you see how high of a percentage of fine starts he had?” And if this takes hold, it could even inspire voters to take a second look at the cases of pitchers who were initially brushed aside.

Welcome To Cooperstown

Hall Of Fame season officially kicked into gear last night with the announcement that the Classic Era Committee has elected Dick Allen and Dave Parker into Cooperstown. It’s wonderful news for the Allen family, although it is bittersweet. Twice he fell one vote shy of election, once while he was still alive. It is a frustrating aspect of the process that posthumous elections are all too common. (For example, Santo, Minoso, and many others.)

That might also be part of the reason why Parker was the candidate who received the most votes. I don’t doubt that the committee members wished to honor at least living candidate, and not only did Parker have arguably the strongest credentials of the 3 living finalists, but he has also been suffering from Parkinson’s for years. He appeared on MLB Network last night following the announcement. It’s possible he was simply having a bad day, but it appeared that his symptoms are quite advanced.

At the same time it is a borderline travesty that Negro League candidates were ignored this time around. The Hall only reveals the vote totals for those who receive more than 5 out of 16 votes to prevent any embarrassment if anyone is shut out. Neither John Donaldson nor Vic Harris received enough votes for their totals to be revealed. The Hall frequently tweaks the election process; it might be worth considering Negro League candidates on a separate ballot with a voting pool consisting entirely of historians. That could give them a fighting chance.

On a related note, don’t blame me for the results. One of the committee members was Steve Hirdt of the Elias Sports Bureau. Our names sound similar, but I am not him. One time I did actually find myself sitting near him at Shea Stadium. I was tempted to tap him on the shoulder and tell him that I have been mistaken for him more than once, but I respected his space.

Congratulations to Dick Allen and Dave Parker. Figure to see lots of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh fans making the trek to Cooperstown next July. The BBWAA results will be announced in late January. So far only a trickle of voters have publicly revealed their ballots so it is much too early to draw any conclusions beyond the inevitable election of Ichiro Suzuki. Early returns on CC Sabathia and Billy Wagner look promising, but the current sample size is miniscule.

Reviewing Olympic Sports

Water Polo - In a bit of fortuitous timing, my alphabetical run through the sports in the Olympic program reaches water polo this week, as the men’s NCAA championships were completed this past weekend. My alma mater, Fordham, has been one of the top teams in the nation this year and went into the tournament as the overall #3 seed. They made it to the semifinals before losing. It’s rare that I have a chance to brag about Fordham’s athletic prowess, so forgive my gloating. What’s most impressive in this instance is that it happened in water polo, a sport traditionally dominated by schools from Southern California. A northeastern school going on such a run is quite a feat. I know of at least one of my subscribers who was on Fordham’s water polo team when I was a student there. So, I tip my hat to you. You laid the groundwork, it just took a few decades to solidify.

As for Olympic level water polo, as a TV sport it benefitted from the increase in the hours the networks devoted to coverage. In the 1976 Olympics, ABC only aired daytime coverage on weekends, so water polo was one of many sports that was set aside for an “oh yeah, this happened” highlight. In 1984 the network added weekday daytime coverage, so there were considerably more hours to fill and more sports that ABC could cover.

It is a very entertaining watch. The matches are relatively brief; 4 8 minute quarters with few stoppages and a short halftime break. Matches are completed within an hour, so there is not a big time commitment. It is both action-packed and grueling. The players are not allowed to touch the bottom of the pool (the depth makes it impossible anyway) so they have to tread water as well as sprint in the pool to attack on offense or get back on defense. That makes for a great test of strength and endurance. It is also a physically intense battle. Networks love to cut to the camera that shoots below the surface; there is quite a heated battle for position. As an illustration of the physical requirements for this sport, for the 1984 Olympics organizers commissioned a statue to be be placed outside of the LA Coliseum to depict the ideal athletic form. The model for the statue was a water polo player.

It’s an easy sport to pick up on. Because there is so much physical contact, whistles are frequently blown, but most of those are of a “hey, back off” category. The ones to listen for are the longer whistles which result in power plays. That is the chief key to success. The better a team is at taking advantage of power play opportunities, the more likely a victory is. And in water polo having a great goalie is just as crucial as it is in hockey or soccer, perhaps even more so. I’ll let fans of each of those sports fight it out. I’ll just say that it’s quite a sight to see a goalie demonstrate the reflexes to stop a rapid shot or the explosive power to leap high out of the water to save a lob.

In this feature I haven’t gone so far as to actually rank my favorite Olympic sports from first to worst. But if I did I would almost certainly rank water polo very close to the top.

Non-Peak TV - The TV Movies (Part 1)

There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ll break it into 2 parts. Back in the days when the networks had 2 movie slots per week on their schedules, a good chunk of that time featured movies made for television. Cheap and easy, they were a simple way for actors to keep busy in the hiatus between seasons of the series that they were starring in. It also helped actors who did not have current shows on the air; appearing in a TV movie kept their names on the minds of casting directors. This was particularly important in the years before The Love Boat and Fantasy Island served the same purpose. Finally, these movies provided an outlet for performers to exercise different acting muscles. There are lots of instances in which sitcoms stars acted in dramatic movies and vice versa.

None of this is to suggest that these movies were inherently worthless. There were plenty of outstanding made for TV movies over the years, some of them quite prestigious. And it’s not just movies that fell under the Hallmark Hall Of Fame Banner. There were examples of pure entertainment which hold up as well as any theatrical release from the era. Duel was made for TV. Brian’s Song was made for TV. Trilogy Of Terror was made for TV.

It was fun trying to think of some movies to discuss here. There are several that I vaguely remembered, and which I had to check IMDB to confirm the title, or to confirm that it actually existed and not that my memory was playing tricks on me. Such as The Cat Creature. In this one Meredith Baxter was possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian deity and was connected a string of strange murders. Or how about The Stranger Within? Here, Barbara Eden was a pregnant woman who exhibited strange behavior. The key scene in the promos showed her obstetrician noting with some horror that her unborn child had two heartbeats! It turned out that the real father was an alien and the movie ended SPOILER ALERT with her walking onto the spacecraft where she could give birth to her half human half alien child.

While we’re discussing I Dream Of Jeannie stars, it seemed that Larry Hagman was in one of these movies every week. Of course television capitalized on the disaster movie craze, and he was one of the stars of Hurricane. One of the subplots in that movie involved Hagman as a recreational boater, who along with his wife (Jessica Walter!) found himself caught in the storm’s eye. Not Hagman related, but another plot in that movie involved a group of people who threw a hurricane party. When officials knocked on their door to institute a mandatory evacuation they shut the lights so that they didn’t appear to be home. Needless to say, things did not end well. Nothing that Hagman did topped The Return Of the World’s Greatest Detective. He portrayed a motorcycle cop who suffered a head injury. When he came to, he believed that he was Sherlock Holmes. He then set out to solve a murder, because of course he did.

There are several more movies that I will discuss on Wednesday, including some movie length editions of Very Special Episodes, as well as the oeuvre of an actor whose TV movie output was even more impressive than that of Larry Hagman.

Closing Laughs

A new week has begun, let’s make it a good one. Oh, did I mention that the Mets signed Juan Soto? See everyone again on Wednesday.