The Baseball Digest Archive 9/79

Dec 23, 2024

Holiday Week Schedule

With Christmas on Wednesday, I’m making some slight tweaks to the usual schedule. I won’t send out a regular Wednesday newsletter this week. Instead, I will send out a new edition tomorrow with my recap on this week’s SNL along with my thoughts on the great Rickey Henderson. I’ll probably be too busy to put something together in time for Friday morning so the Friday newsletter will go out on Saturday morning this week only. Adjust your own schedules accordingly.

September 1979

Tommy John: The Bionic Wonder. As of 1979 John was only 5 years removed from the surgery which would eventually bear his name. It was still a rare procedure, and it had not yet been colloquially known as Tommy John Surgery. There was still a great deal of wonder surrounding his operation; how did such a revolutionary surgical technique save a pitcher’s career? Little did we know at the time how many additional pitchers would benefit. The cover story in this issue focused on more than just John. It checked in on other top pitchers recovering from injury, such as Ferguson Jenkins’ Achilles tear and Mike Marshall’s back surgery.

One topic that often fascinates me is the attempt to determine how much of a difference a manager really makes. There is an article in this issue in which 3 then-current managers were asked precisely this question - how many wins or losses are a manager directly responsible for? It’s a small, non-scientific survey but the range of answers is interesting. Joe Torre said 12, Ken Boyer said none, Tommy Lasorda said who the hell knows?

Two different articles in this issue discuss a similar issue in different ways. Baseball is a team sport that relies heavily on individual achievement. The diamonds in the rough article looks at pitchers who had strong W-L records on losing times. The most famous example is Steve Carlton’s 1972 season, the chief focus here was on J.R. Richard who in 1978 had completed his third consecutive year with at least 18 victories for Astros teams whose win totals ranged from 74-81 in each of those seasons. Later on there was an article which listed players who had accumulated at least 50 RBI more than their closest teammate. In 1959 Ernie Banks drove in 143 runs, the Cub with the second most that year had only 52. Banks had an astonishing 91 more ribbies than his next best teammate. No wonder those Cubs teams were so poor; Banks was practically a one-man offense in his best years.

Speaking briefly on 2 other pieces from this month’s issue: Calling Ed Kranepool the last original Met is a matter of semantics. Yes, he made his MLB debut in 1962, but he was still in high school when the season began. To be a true Original Met would that necessitate having been selected in the initial expansion draft? Or to appear on the opening day roster? Or is appearing at any point in that inaugural season sufficient? You decide. I was a little surprised to see Roy Smalley classified as a good field, good hit shortstop. My recollection of Smalley was as a guy who was a good hitter for a middle infielder, but not much of a glove man. Taking a look at his record I see that he led the AL in assists for 3 consecutive seasons so perhaps my memory was a bit off.

Finally, there is this tidbit. The article on Manny Mota mentioned in passing that earlier in his career he was placed in a “ghoul pool.” It’s a list of players meant to replenish a roster if the worst happens and a team is killed in a plane crash. I have been trying to find if such a list actually existed, and if so if/when the league put the kibosh on that but so far I haven’t had any success. I would imagine it happened when the reserve clause was eliminated, but that’s purely a guess in my part.

The Ballot Countdown

Newcomer #5 Brian McCann - Brian McCann joins fellow ballot newbie Ian Kinsler as a candidate for the Uptight Dude Hall Of Fame. One of his most famous moments was the time he showed his displeasure with Carlos Gomez for admiring a home run by standing with his arms crossed in front of home to prevent him from touching the base.

That stuffy image detracts from his accomplishments as one of the best hitting catchers of his time. In a 12 year stretch he hit between 18-26 homers in each season, which helped him rack up 7 all-star appearances (including an MVP nod in the 2010 game) and 6 Silver Slugger awards. Fielding metrics also show him to have been a premiere pitch framer, and that is a skill which adds up when it comes to preventing runs. In short, he was an ideal two-way player for a significant stretch of time.

I’m torn by his candidacy. The Hall could probably stand to induct more catchers - the physical toll the position takes means that catchers generally have shorter peaks than players at other position have, and therefore they seldom have huge numbers in any of the counting stats. Even acknowledging that fact, I don’t think he reached a level of greatness that warrants election often enough. He was a valuable contributor to winning teams - he appeared in the postseason 8 times - but not HOF worthy.

Holdover #5 Andruw Jones - Now on his 8th season on the ballot, Jones has consistently been my toughest call. He has some impressive credentials along with some noticeable drawbacks. He has been making steady improvement in his vote totals, enough that I believe it is more likely than not that he will gain election before his 10 years run out. Still, I’m not quite ready to say that he is a “yes” for me.

He was a precocious player, hitting 2 home runs in the 1996 World Series at the age of 19. He topped 30 homers for the first time in his age 21 season, and he continued to put up huge numbers, culminating with a 51 homer season in 2005. But that’s not where most of his value came from. He was a sublime center fielder, easily gliding to each fly ball hit his way. 10 Gold Glove awards only tells half of the story; advanced fielding metrics rate him up there with Willie Mays as the greatest defensive center fielders in history. This is a case where the eye test matches what the numbers tell you; he made fielding the position look so easy. He always arrived exactly where the ball was hit at precisely the right time.

The problem is that he fell off a cliff at a relatively young age and was out of shape and barely useful once he passed 30. I usually don’t get too heavily caught up in career numbers; I prefer to judge a player by how great he was when he was great. And a young Andruw Jones was a magnificent player. But I find it difficult to ignore how sudden and how rapid that decline was. It’s similar to what I said when I looked at Torii Hunter. I believe both Kenny Lofton and Jim Edmonds were better overall players than Andruw Jones was. If neither of them are in, then Jones should not be in either.

Reviewing Olympic Sports (Finished At Last!)

Wrestling - It seems appropriate that my alphabetical run through the sports in the Summer Olympics program ends with wrestling. With the exception of track & field, wrestling is the sport most closely connected with the Ancient Greek games. One of the 2 techniques is known as Greco-Roman, for goodness sake.

Just like boxing, wrestling - or at least freestyle wrestling, being that it most closely resembles the form of the sport as it is competed in American high schools and colleges - used to make up a sizable chunk of programming in the ABC days, but NBC has gradually reduced its footprints with each successive Olympiad. Now it has been basically stuck on the USA network if there is a free half-hour in between more prominent events.

That’s essentially how I treat wrestling as well. I’m not the hugest fan of these mano a mano combat sports, so I only watch wrestling if there is a gold medal match on and I have 15 minutes to kill. I can also never get this thought out of my head. With all of the perspiration, there has gotta be an overwhelming stank in the gym.

When I started this project I had thoughts of going right into a similar writeup of the events in the Winter Olympics, but I began to lose interest in this segment about two thirds of my way through the alphabet, so I will save that for a later time. Instead, beginning in the new year I’ll commence a little project I’ve been working on that I hope will be a fun read. Hint: it involves the Hall Of Fame.

I Must Not Get My Hopes Up

I learned a valuable lesson after all of the buzz over The Flash movie from a couple of years ago. Trailers for super hero movies generally look good. But… the new Superman movie looks… promising? Now that James Gunn is the grand poobah of the extended DC universe, we know that the characters are in good hands, so there was already reason for optimism.

There’s a lot riding on this one. Superman has always been a tricky character to portray in movies; his nature doesn’t lend itself to the dark, gritty vibe that was the default mode in the Zack Snyder era. That’s why the Henry Cavill Superman movies were so terrible; wasn’t Cavill’s fault, the movies were ill-conceived. What we saw in the trailer at least gives us a Superman that we recognize.

The movie will tell us if David Corenswet is worthy of the cape, but the casting of the other 2 leads is promising. Rachel Brosnahan, fingers crossed, could very well be the Lois Lane that Amy Adams should have been. And Nicholas Hoult promises to be an infinitely better Lex Luthor than Jesse Eisenberg was. I also like seeing some of the deep bench DC characters that will be in the movie. All this and Krypto too. Once again, I’m guardedly optimistic. I have stated multiple times that as an old school DC fan I’ve looked at the dominance of the Marvel movies with envy and that I’m concerned that the potential creative rejuvenation of DC content is coinciding with superhero fatigue at the box office. Next summer will tell us if it is in fact superhero fatigue or merely Marvel fatigue.

‘Tis the Season

One of the chief reasons why I try to avoid talking about politics here is that I’m trying to make this a happy place. I steer away from potentially contentious topics. With that hesitancy in mind I will now kick the hornet’s nest and risk speaking on the sort of subject which has been known to end friendships. So, here goes. Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

I don’t really believe that the majority of people who argue over this topic truthfully feel all that passionately about the subject, they are just having fun. The Die Hard debate is a good natured throwback to a time when internet arguments were not blood sport. My take? There is a difference between a Christmas movie and a movie that happens to take place at Christmas. Look at it this way. If you’re sitting in front of the TV on a random April evening and trying to decide on a movie, no one is going to suggest Miracle On 34th Street. But Die Hard is a viable option any time of year. Ergo, Die Hard is not a Christmas movie.

A similar question is what is and what is not a Christmas song. Does a Christmas song need to specifically reference the holiday, whether it be a religious or a secular reference? Or is it sufficient to vaguely speak of winter & snow? The litmus test is probably a simple one - if a song is locked in a box as of December 27 not to be heard again for another 11 months it’s probably a Christmas song.

I think back to that one year when the song Baby It’s Cold Outside found itself on the front lines of the War On Christmas. For a while people were having some good natured fun over the lyrics, specifically how uncomfortable they are. Finally, one year a radio station in Denver announced that they would no longer play the song during the holiday season. That immediately fired up the Outrage Industrial Complex. How dare the PC police take that song away from us!

The problem is that the song’s addition to the Christmas song canon was fairly recent. I have no recollection of that song appearing in regular rotation when I was younger. I highly doubt that people would have even noticed its absence had the station not made that announcement in the first place. This is all to say that a song’s designation as a Christmas tune is a fluid concept. Take a look at the lyrics to Baby It’s Cold Outside. There are zero Christmas references to be had; other than the wintry vibe to the song I would hesitate to call it a Christmas song. Court is adjourned.

Tending The Herd

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