Month: July 2015

This day in baseball: Misleading scouting report favors Brooklyn

July 18, 2015

In order to protect his own job on the Boston infield, Red Sox player-manager Joe Cronin filed a scouting report on Pee Wee Reese that understated the 21-year-old’s abilities.  As a result of this report, on July 18, 1939, the Red Sox traded Reese to the Brooklyn Dodgers for $35,000 and a player to be named later (Red Evans), as well as three minor league players.  Reese would go on to help Brooklyn win seven pennants during his 16 seasons with the team.

Image from a 1950s television commercial for Gillette Super-Speed Razors
Pee Wee Reese (Image from a 1950s television commercial for Gillette Super-Speed Razors)

The Literature of Baseball

July 17, 2015

School will be back in session before we know it, and this fall, I will be sitting in on a class at the University of Kansas called “The Literature of Baseball.”  I won’t actually be taking the class for credit, but I contacted the instructor for the course and managed to get permission to sit in on the class.  Naturally, I’ll be reading the material as well.

Suffices to say, I am ridiculously excited about this.

The class is taught by James Carothers, an English professor at KU.  He has been teaching the course for decades, and apparently even taught Bill James when James was at KU.  I found a great article about Dr. Carothers and the class that was published a few years ago here.

The booklist for the class is as follows:

– Baseball: A Literary Anthology, ed. Nicholas Dawidoff
– The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg
– Eight Men Out, by Eliot Asinof
– The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence Ritter
– I Had A Hammer, by Hank Aaron
– The Natural, by Bernard Malamud

baseball literary anthology

Little League Player Registration Form

July 16, 2015

I came across this faux application for Little League the other day on Sports Pickle, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the tongue-in-cheek sarcasm.  It’s a reflection of the insane ideas that parents seem to sometimes have about youth sports and some of the realities that kids learn about when they play them.  I particularly like the questions about parental participation and about the expected time parents will be picking up their kids.

sportspickle.com
sportspickle.com

2015 Home Run Derby

July 13, 2015

It’s Home Run Derby day!  This year’s participant’s are…

Source: ESPN
Source: ESPN

Last week, Major League Baseball tweeted the bracket for this bit of friendly competition taking place at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati:

HRD

And in case you missed it, there’s a new format to this year’s Derby.  MLB Communications provided an overview of the format and the rules:

HRD format

The time Babe Ruth played chicken with a concrete wall

July 11, 2015
Babe Ruth knocked out, 1924 (Library of Congress)

On July 5, 1924, the Yankees found themselves in Washington’s Griffith Stadium for a doubleheader against the Senators.  In the fourth inning of game one, the Senators’ Joe Judge lined a ball just into the seats down the right-field line.  In pursuit of the line drive, Yankees right fielder Babe Ruth slammed right into the concrete wall and was knocked completely unconscious.  The New York Times described the event as follows:

The Babe ran into the pavilion parapet with the full force of his body, and dropped unconscious to the grass. Uniformed policeman ran to his assistance and kept back the crowd that seemed disposed to leave the chairs and get a close-up of the injured warrior. Several photographers happened to be on the spot and they snapped the Babe as Trainer Doc Woods ran up with the water bucket and the little black bag of first aid preparations.

At first it was thought that Ruth had been knocked out by a blow from the concrete on his chin, but it was sooon discovered that he had been knocked out by a jolt in the solar plexus. His left leg was also hurt at the hip.

In spite of the collision, once revived, Ruth refused to come out of the game.  He finished the game 3-for-3, and even went on to play the second game of the doubleheader.  According to the Washington Post:

The Bambino was knocked unconsciuos [sic] for about five minutes and badly bruised his left hip, but gamely insisted on sticking in that game and also in the second.

Talk about nerves of steel!  Any player knocked unconscious for five minutes today would be given no choice in the matter — he’d be carried off the field on a stretcher.

Injuries and inside-the-parkers

July 10, 2015

It’s not every day that we see an inside-the-park home run, but Jarrod Dyson managed to pull one off a couple nights ago against the Tampa Bay Rays.  In some ways, it was kind of a bittersweet moment, because the reason Dyson entered the game in the first place was due to an injury to Alex Gordon that will keep Gordon out of the Royals lineup for the next two months.

You get kind of a funny pit in your stomach when you see such a great player go down like that.  It was one of those moments that had me feeling like this:

Of course, if you’re Dyson, this is an excellent time to do things to help solidify your position in the lineup, and an inside-the-park home run is a good way to make a statement.  It takes him all of fourteen seconds to round the bases in this awesome display of speed.

So congratulations to Dyson and the Royals as they continue to expand their lead in the AL Central!  Fingers crossed that it continues even after the All-Star break.

Quote of the day

July 9, 2015

Every great batter works on the theory that the pitcher is more afraid of him than he is of the pitcher.

~Ty Cobb

Ty Cobb, 1916 (public domain / Wikimedia Commons)

How to handle getting hit by a pitch

July 8, 2015

Here’s a cool little video from a Pac-12 baseball game this past May.  When Washington State pitcher Layne Bruner hit Arizona State outfielder Johnny Sewald with a pitch, Sewald caught the ball between his body and his arm.  Sewald then proceeded to casually toss the ball back to Bruner before taking off for first base.  Perhaps the most amusing part of this feat, however, is the reaction of the broadcaster.