Month: May 2016

A League of Their Own reunion

May 13, 2016

Earlier this week, cast members from A League of Their Own got together for a little reunion baseball game.  The event was organized by Geena Davis, who played Dottie Hinson in the 1992 film.  The game took place at the Bentonville Film Festival, which Davis co-founded.

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Megan Cavanagh and Geena Davis (Getty Images)

Along with Davis, Megan Cavanagh, Anne Ramsey, Tracy Reiner, Ann Cusack, Freddie Simpson, and Patti Pelton all showed up to play.  The women were also joined by one of the original Rockford Peaches, Gina Casey.  Casey threw out the first pitch for the reunion game.

Casey LoTO
Gina Casey (Gossip & Gab)

Through the Bentonville Film Festival, Geena Davis has focused on a message of female empowerment.  The message and plot of A League of Their Own fits right in with this theme!

Full cast
ABC News

Your salary vs. an MLB player’s salary

May 11, 2016

Here’s an interesting site I came across — and by interesting, I mean thought-provokingly depressing.

This site allows you to compare your salary to that of any MLB player during the 2013 season.  Not only that, but you can even break that player’s salary down per game, per at-bat, per hit, etc.  For example, in 2013, Derek Jeter earned $265,545 per at-bat.  The site further explains that at my current salary, it would take well over six years for me to earn that same amount.  It would take more than 16 years for me to earn what Alex Rodriguez earned per game.

It sure puts things in perspective.  Especially when you consider that the average U.S. firefighter’s salary is about $45,000, and the average U.S. police officer’s salary is $48,000.

Check it out here: http://www.osmguy.com/2014/03/salary-vs-mlb-players-salary-visualization/

Quote of the day

May 10, 2016

Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be a pitch or a person, stealing is legal and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire’s eye or on the ball.

~Jim Murray

Jim Murray
LA Times

‘Mickey and Willie,’ by Allen Barra

May 4, 2016

For the last few weeks, I spent my commutes to and from work, as well as my time in the car running errands and driving back and forth to Kansas City, listening to an audiobook: Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age by Allen Barra.  For some reason, it never occurred to me to consider the two men simultaneously.  I suppose that it didn’t fully click that they played Major League Baseball at the same time (funny how clueless I can be about something that I usually feel I know so well!).  But I am glad to have come across this biographical study of how the lives and careers of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays paralleled each other in so many ways.Mickey and Willie

In spite of the fact that their backgrounds differed so greatly, Mantle and Mays were virtually the same age, practically the same size (though Mantle was slightly bigger), and they both arrived in New York at the same time.  Both played center field and both had close relationships with their dominant fathers as they grew up in the South.

They even paralleled one another in the ways that they differed.  Mantle was white, Mays was black.  Mickey drank heavily, while Willie couldn’t stand alcohol.  Mickey stayed married to one woman, but was a notorious womanizer.  Meanwhile, Willie Mays married twice, but if there were any extramarital affairs, he kept them private.

The biggest thing these men shared in common was their celebrity and the expectations that came with that fame.  Both players experienced the fickleness of celebrity, being cheered one moment and booed in the next.  Each had a song written about him (“Say Hey (The Willie Mays Song)” and “I Love Mickey”).  When Mantle was rejected for military service, fans turned on him for being a draft dodger.  When the Giants moved from New York to San Francisco, Willie Mays was booed for not being Joe DiMaggio and, likely, for being black.

The question of who was the better player comes up frequently in the book.  The answer Barra seems to hint at appears to indicate that it was Willie Mays, though Mickey Mantle would’ve had the title if only he would have taken better care of himself.  Mantle himself publicly conceded that Mays was the better player.  Mays, evidently the more prideful of the two, hated the idea of anyone being considered better than himself.

Barra puts his own personal touch into the book as well.  He discusses his own idolization of Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.  He even admits that, the older he became and the more he learned about the two ballplayers, the more disillusioned he became.  Even in spite of this, he continued to admire them, accepting the fact that, in spite of their greatness on the diamond, Mantle and Mays were only men, after all.

All in all, I found this book a worthwhile read (or, in my case, a worthwhile listen).  The reader gets biographies of two players simultaneously, and it is done in a fashion that presents a perspective not usually found in biographies.

“A Few Meditations on the Tightly- Wound Baseball,” by Bill Meissner

May 2, 2016

As a hitter, there’s nothing like that feeling of the ball launching off your bat and sailing farther than you ever thought you had the strength to hit it.  I like how this piece speaks to that feeling.  Written by Bill Meissner, it was published in the journal NINE in the Fall of 2013.

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The tightly-wound baseball is the ball that always seems to poke a hole in the sky when you hit it. It’s the ball, in Little League, that gives you your Magic Swing, flying farther than you’ve ever hit a baseball before.

There’s a logical explanation for the tight-wound, of course. Perhaps the climate was unusually hot in Haiti, or Costa Rica, or perhaps the women in the baseball factory were upset with their husbands or frazzled by their children, angry at the looseness of the world. On a specific morning at one spool, a woman wound the yarn tighter than she’s ever wound it before, tugging at it with each rotation until the pain subsided, and in its place appeared a perfect, firm sphere.

The tight-wound is the baseball that spins during your afternoon nap; sometimes it unwinds as it spins, spooling out yards of blue yarn, but by the time you wake, it will have rewound itself, slipped its leather clothes back on and sealed them again, seamlessly, with red stitches.

The true tight-wound can be sensed by an uneasy pitcher as he squeezes and rotates it with his hand; the true tight-wound speaks to the lines on the palm. When a pitcher senses the taut leather of a tight-wound between his fingers, he wishes he could toss it away among the tall weeds.

But for the batter, the tight-wound is prized. He wants to see it rotating with that flip-flopping smile. The batter’s eyes widen as the ball reaches the plate, and for just one instant, wood falls in love with leather as his bat meets it and sends it up, up, up, high enough to land in the bleachers of his dreams.