The Baseball Digest Archives 3/81

March 1981

The cover blurb on this issue accurately describes Rickey Henderson as a “base stealer de luxe,” but there is not a Rickey feature per se in the magazine. Instead, he is one of the players mentioned in an article about negative stats. More specifically, in the 1980 season, which was Henderson’s first full major league season and a year in which he stole 100 bases, he also led the American League in times caught stealing. To be fair, the article also points out that this fact is misleading; a guy who attempts as many steals as Henderson did is bound to get thrown out a lot. For perspective, even though he was caught 26 times, that is still a success rate of almost 80%. That pattern lasted throughout Henderson’s career. His greatness is not just because he was a prolific base stealer, but that he was an efficient one as well.

The March issue traditionally included the annual rookie preview. I always like to see which prospects the magazine’s editors overrated and underrated. The best way to start is to see what they wrote about the players who would go on to be that season’s rookies of the year. The 1981 winners were Fernando Valenzuela and Dave Righetti. Righetti came out of nowhere; he was only the 3rd highest ranked Yankee prospect behind Greg Cochrane and Andy McGaffigan. As for Valenzuela, his scouting report reads “has shot as a starter.” Ya think? There were 2 prospects singled out in the article’s subhead: Tim Raines and Randy Bass. One out of 2 ain’t bad.

The letters to the editor section in Baseball Digest would run for more than 10 pages in each issue, and they included a wide range of questions or comments from readers. One question here asked for the magazine’s choices of the greatest fielders in league history. Obviously the selections from 1981 will read much differently than those today - it was too early in their careers for either Ozzie Smith or Keith Hernandez to be viable choices - and yet, Willie Mays only second team? Pie Traynor stands out as well. Baseball historians had a strange fixation on him; I am old enough to remember there was a time when he was considered by many to be the greatest overall third baseman in history. A lot of that is due to his .320 career batting average, which when taken into the context of the era in which he played is terrific but not a historical outlier. Same with his defensive numbers; they are solid but nothing close to second greatest of all time. OK, ranking Mike Schmidt that highly in 1981 would have been premature, but what about Ken Boyer or Ron Santo?

Now for the rapid fire portion. I was pleasantly surprised to see an article dated in 1981 extolling the virtues of slugging percentage. It’s a sign of the rise of fantasy baseball; smarter fans were starting to recognize that slugging percentage is a more accurate gauge of a hitter’s value than batting average is. “They led league in wins while pitching for losers” listed every pitcher who were league leaders in wins despite a sub-.500 record for their team. Steve Carlton’s 1972 season led that list; several other Hall of Famers appeared as well, included twice each by Bob Feller and Grover Cleveland Alexander.

A recently retired baseball writer from Milwaukee named Lou Chapman bid farewell by listing his personal choices for the game’s best double play combos. He covered the game from 1953-1980, so keep that time frame in mind as well as geography. Only one of his top 10 (Glenn Beckert and Don Kessinger) had played as recently as the early 1970’s, 6 of his top 10 played in the Midwest, and his #1 choice was the old Cubs combo of Billy Herman and Billy Jurges. Finally, Rick Cerone had the unenviable task of replacing Thurman Munson as Yankees starting catcher. It’s never easy to replace The Guy, but he did pretty well for himself in 1980. He had a big year at the bat, and he became a bit of a fan favorite as well as a Madison Avenue darling. (Remember his TV ads for 10 jeans?) It would be short lived; he stuck around the game for another dozen years but was essentially a journeyman.

I’ll end with another edition of an intermittent feature that Baseball Digest would run, a reprint of one of Gene Mack’s old cartoons of classic ballparks. This one is well timed in light of the next segment in today’s newsletter, Detroit’s Briggs Stadium. The toon was drawn in 1950, so there is no reference to Reggie Jackson’s 1971 All-Star Game home run, but the familiar elements of the park - the right field overhang and the centerfield flagpole - are here in all their glory.

Most Memorable Moment - Detroit Tigers

MLB’s Original 1976 Choice: Mickey Lolich wins Game 7 in 1968

My Updated Selection: Same

As one of the 16 legacy franchises, the Tigers have a long and storied history, and they produced a number of moments that could be reasonable choices for consideration. There is Magglio Ordòñez’s walk-off home run that ended the 2006 ALCS. There were 2 separate moments which bookended the Tigers’ wire to wire 1984 World Series run. Jack Morris threw a no-hitter in April, which stood out even more because it aired on the NBC Game of the Week. In those days it was unusual for a national audience to collectively witness such a feat. There was also Kirk Gibson’s massive home run off of Goose Gossage in the World Series which all but ended the Series.

It’s always a big deal when a franchise icon achieves a major milestone, so one could also consider Al Kaline’s 3,000th hit, or Miguel Cabrera reaching either 3,000 hits or 500 home runs. That’s not to mention any of the career records that Ty Cobb had reached. But the Tigers choice would have to come from one of the most significant seasons in franchise history.

I think the healing powers of a sports team can be exaggerated. The Saints’ Super Bowl victory did not change the tragic results of Katrina, nor did the Yankees’ 2001 pennant win change what happened on 9/11. But there is still something to be said for the success of a local team serving as a brief feel good moment to take one’s mind off of the bad news if only for a few hours. That’s what the 1968 Tigers did. There were some terrible race related riots in Detroit in 1968, but the city rallied around the success of their team, and it didn’t hurt that one of the key players on that team was Detroit native Willie Horton.

Mickey Lolich was the biggest star in the World Series. He won 3 games, becoming only the 12th pitcher to achieve that feat. (That includes pitchers who won 3 games in years in which the WS was best of 9.) More impressively, in the decisive Game 7 he outdueled Bob Gibson, who was one of the greatest clutch pitchers in history and had won 3 World Series games himself only 1 season before. Lolich is a very underrated pitcher. Let’s just say he wasn’t the most athletic looking guy, and his name is mud in New York because the Mets traded beloved franchise icon Rusty Staub to obtain Lolich just as his decline phase accelerated. Yet he was one hell of a pitcher, and if you compare his record head to head with that of Jack Morris there is little difference between the two - and his postseason record is just as impressive as that of Morris.

Not that I am trying to suggest that he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, only that he should be better acknowledged as the great pitcher that he was. He did produce the most memorable moment in Tigers’ history, which is a nice consolation prize.

For Your Reading Pleasure

I still have one more postmortem on the Rock & Roll HOF election results to come, but in the interim here are a couple of related items that I found interesting and I hope you do as well. The first is this interview with Hall chairman John Sykes. He isn’t fully transparent - there are no specificities concerning the results - but he tries to reveal as much as he is allowed to. And I got some chuckles out of John Mulaney’s observations about the vote. Sadly, he did not make any references to his own famous routine on Patrick Stewart’s introduction of Salt-N-Pepa on SNL.

What’s In a Name?

For some time ESPN has been promising an eventual launch of a separate streaming app, which had been informally known as ESPN Flagship. Last week they finally confirmed the name of the service; official start date is still TBD. The name will be, drumroll please…. ESPN. Bet it took them a long time to come up with that one. Give the PR team a collective raise.

Snark aside, I’m cool with that. If you have a recognizable brand, why tamper with it? The HBO name is synonymous with prestige TV; it made no sense to call their streaming service HBO Max when the first thing most people think of when they hear the name Cinemax is softcore erotic thrillers. It made even less sense when they later dropped the HBO name entirely so that it is now simply Max. With ESPN any cord cutters who want access to the Worldwide Leader’s content know exactly what they should expect to get.

The Oscar Mulligan - 2010

Best Picture: The King’s Speech

Other Nominees: 127 Hours, Black Swan, The Fighter, Inception, The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, True Grit, Winter’s Bone

Increasing the number of nominees to 10 per year broadened the range of movies honored, but the Academy had yet to lose its addiction to awarding the big prize to the generic Important Movie. The King’s Speech was better than most, in that it told a historical story about an event that not everyone is familiar with; King George VI overcoming a stutter to help rally British citizenry in the early days of World War II. Most people think of any number of famous Winston Churchill speeches, not George’s radio address.

I found this movie somewhat relatable. I myself have been a lifelong stutterer, and although I have never been asked to inspire my country in her time of need (not yet at least) I have found myself in situations in which I have had to push through and force myself to speak publicly. The movie does what it intends to very effectively, but there are several other movies on this list which are more worthy of the Oscar.

I’ll narrow it down to 3 choices, but let me first recognize the others. Winter’s Bone is exactly the sort of movie which benefitted from the additional nominations. It was such a small movie that it would have been easily overlooked in earlier years. There were nominations for movies made by directors whom I admire greatly, but have also produced better work in my opinion: 127 Hours, Inception, and True Grit. The Fighter and The Kids Are All Right are both overflowing with great performances, but each fall a bit short of the other nominated movies.

Here are the honorable mentions. Black Swan was thrilling, and it was a superb mixture of multiple genres. It was unique, and you were never sure where it was going to go next. The Social Network made the bold statement that Mark Zuckerberg is an a**hole, but it is also a compelling look at how some truly despicable people built a successful company while stabbing each other in the back.

In the end, 2010 is one of the easier choices. Normally I would feel slightly uncomfortable awarding the 20/20 hindsight Oscar to a Pixar movie 2 years in a row, but when the movie in question is Toy Story 3 I have no hesitation. I went into it prepared for the fact that the ending was going to be emotional but I was still devastated. I have no qualms in saying that I was sobbing at both gut punching moments: when the toys hold hands in solidarity as they were sliding towards the incinerator and when Andy gave away his toys. (I still have not seen Toy Story 4. I’m sure I eventually will, but since the original trilogy ended so perfectly, I don’t know what a fourth movie in the series could possibly add.)

We learned to love these characters over the course of the first 2 movies, and each one of us could relate to the story in the third movie. All of us eventually outgrew our childhood toys, just as all of us still maintained an attachment to whichever toy was our favorite. It’s not just Andy that we relate to, we can just as easily relate to the toys themselves. As we move into adulthood, it is an underlying fear we have that we will one day become obsolete, just like Rex or Hamm.

The best of the Pixar movies are not simply great children’s movies, they are great movies period. Eventually the studio’s nearly flawless track record of classic after classic after classic came to an end, but during that peak era Toy Story 3 just might have been Pixar’s single greatest achievement. Regardless of whether it is better than The Incredibles or WALL-E or whichever Pixar movie you most admire, it is easily the cream of the 2010 crop. It deserved to have won.

Closing Laughs

We have all had our fun making the Chicago Pope jokes, especially once we learned that he is a White Sox fan. Not just a Sox fan, but a Sox fan born in 1955. There is a non-zero chance that Leo attended Disco Demolition Night. Have a great day everyone. See you again on Wednesday.