*** VD 13 Commentary Thread ***

[heyelander]

Just go on company time, then you don't need any?

this has always been my rule.

Before moving out here I thought to myself, this bathroom, this stall, here at my office has been the site of more BMs than any other place in my life.... and I lived in my house in Cherry Hill for 15 years, and my house in Virginia for 10... I think they should have put up a little plaque for me or something.

[heyelander]

#27 Mike Trout!

https://theathletic.com/1638463/2020/02/29/the-baseball-100-no-27-mike-trout/

Mike Trout has led the league in at least four major statistical categories every full year of his big-league career. We should take a moment, or many moments, to appreciate just how absurd this is. Many of the greatest players in baseball history — say Hall of Famers Robin Yount or Ryne Sandberg or Ron Santo — hardly ever led the league in a major statistical category.

Vladimir Guerrero, for instance, led the league in four major statistical categories in his entire career. Robbie Alomar led the league in one.

And Trout does a minimum of four major categories every single year. Here, you can see it for yourself:

2012: Led league in runs, stolen bases, OPS+ and both versions of WAR
2013: Led league in runs, walks and both versions of WAR
2014: Led league in runs, RBIs, total bases and FanGraphs WAR
2015: Led league in slugging, OPS, OPS+ and both versions of WAR
2016: Led league in runs, walks, on-base percentage, OPS+ and both versions of WAR
2017: Led league in on-base percentage, slugging, OPS and OPS+
2018: Led league in walks, on-base percentage, OPS and OPS+
2019: Led league in on-base percentage, slugging, OPS and OPS+

...

And you might know that Trout already has a higher Black Ink score — which measures how often a player leads the league in major categories — than Willie McCovey, Ernie Banks, Ken Griffey Jr., Jeff Bagwell, Roberto Clemente, Frank Thomas, Cal Ripken Jr. and dozens of other legendary players. And the guy’s only been in the league for eight full seasons.

...

No, it’s more like, for so many, the Trout conversation has become too much brain and not enough heart. Have you ever tried to explain to someone what chocolate tastes like? It is a profoundly frustrating experience, as each word like “sweet” and “bitter” and “earthy” and “heavenly” takes you just a little bit further away from the actual taste.

And so it goes with Trout and the numbers. There are always more dizzying and overwhelming statistics to talk about. If Trout stays healthy this year, he is likely to pass as many as 23 Hall of Famers on the all-time Wins Above Replacement list, from Jim Thome to Joe DiMaggio to Bagwell to Nolan Ryan to Rod Carew — all this long before he even turns 30.

But does that get us any closer to the taste? The most common questions asked in Trout stories are uncomfortable: Why is he not a bigger deal? Why is he not more famous? Why don’t people appreciate him? What does Mike Trout have to do to capture America’s attention?

...

It has been written repeatedly that Mike Trout has never done a late-night talk show. He turned down “60 Minutes,” which wanted to do a piece on him, and he turned down HBO, too. He’s not the type to spend his free time chasing celebrity endorsements. He has never participated in the Home Run Derby — it just doesn’t interest him; he prefers watching it with his family — and if you type in “Mike Trout controversy” into Google, you will get one hit. That’s when the commissioner of baseball, Rob Manfred, awkwardly poked at Trout’s indifference to fame.

“Mike has made decisions on what he wants to do, doesn’t want to do, how he wants to spend his free time or not spend his free time,” Manfred said. “I think we could help him make his brand very big. … But he has to make a decision to engage. It takes time and effort.”

Yes, we live in a time when someone’s reluctance to make his “brand very big” is controversial.

But it’s unavoidable — this is the knock on Trout. He’s boring. He doesn’t interest the nation. He can’t make baseball cooler. He doesn’t try to be baseball’s LeBron James or Tom Brady. He isn’t in movies. He hasn’t single-handedly made the Angels a contender.

And people will argue about how fair or unfair all this is, but really, I prefer to see what’s left.

And here’s what’s left: Mike Trout is a small-town kid who every single day comes to the ballpark with a smile and the same joy he felt for baseball when he was 12. He signs autographs. He hits home runs. He visits hospitals. He steals bases. He answers questions politely. He makes diving catches. He treats people with respect. He draws walks. He works with Big Brothers Big Sisters. He scores runs. And he’s still just 28 years old.

And he’s on his way to becoming the greatest player in the history of the game.

I mean, if that isn’t enough, well, what does that say about us?

[The Feral Slasher]

no leakage, but trust me, there were many dashes back to the bathroom those 2 days.

Dashing madly back 2 lavatory

[Bene Futuis]

The Stranglers? Meh. Here's the real Golden Brown:

[revo]

Hey Foootwoees, you up

[heyelander]

#26 Glover Cleveland Alexander

“The Winning Team” is a spectacularly bad movie. No, seriously, as bad as you think it might be, it is so much worse than that. Even if you are a devotee of bad old movies — and I like to think of myself as one of those — “The Winning Team” will break your spirit.

It shouldn’t be this bad. The movie stars Ronald Reagan as pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. This is such a wonderful confluence of American history; it makes Alexander the only player in sports history to be named for one president and to have another president play him in a movie.

...

“I can play with these farmers around here,” he would tell the Galesburg manager Jap Wagner (Jap was apparently his real name). “But that’s about as far as I can go.”

Wagner knew better. He had seen how hard Alexander threw with his quick, side-armed motion, but even more than that he saw Alex’s pinpoint control. “Can you just throw it wherever you want every time?” Wagner supposedly asked, and Alexander simply nodded.

And he could. Among his many, many nicknames was “Down and Away Alexander” because he seemed to throw every single pitch down and away. ‘It’s a good spot,” Grover would say, “if you don’t want the hitter to do anything.”

He was an instant sensation. In 1911, as a rookie for the Phillies, Alexander led the league in wins (28), innings (367), shutouts (7) and fewest hits allowed per nine innings (7.0). He was just a natural pitcher in the same way that Jimmy McNulty on “The Wire” was natural police. He mixed velocity and command in the timeless way that transcends the seasons.

...

His style is important to think about when trying to place him in history. When people wonder how someone like Alexander would pitch in today’s game, they might try to estimate the miles per hour on his fastball (undoubtedly a disappointing number) or attempt to take him through a time machine to a moment when hitters study video and work out like triathletes and work their swings into perfect launch-angle feats of strength.

But it might be better to think of how Alexander led his league in strikeouts six times, in fewest walks per nine innings five times, in WHIP five times, in shutouts seven times. From 1915 to 1917, Alexander the Great won the Triple Crown of pitching each year (in my opinion); he’s the only pitcher to win it three years in a row.

In 1915, he went 31-10 with a 1.22 ERA and 241 strikeouts.
In 1916, he went 33-12 with a 1.55 ERA and 167 strikeouts.
In 1917, he went 30-13 with a 1.83 ERA and 200 strikeouts.*

....

After 1917, Pete Alexander went to war and everything changed. He was so close to the action that the booming sounds caused him to lose hearing in his left ear. He took a shell to his right ear, which may have caused his later cancer. He badly hurt his right arm operating a howitzer. Most significantly, he had his first epileptic seizure; his epilepsy might have been sparked by the ball to the forehead he took back in his first year of professional baseball. He never overcame a chronic case of what was then called shell shock and is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

He began drinking heavily in France to numb and forget the pain.

...

His pitching did not deteriorate, however. Alexander led the league in ERA his first two seasons back — winning another pitching triple crown in 1920. And he kept on pitching pretty well for the Cubs. They loved him there, so much so that one year the fans just gave him a car — no special reason, no special occasion, they just announced a Grover Cleveland Alexander Day and gave him a car.

...

Sadly, though, the Pete Alexander story does not end with that Lazzeri strikeout or even his last pitch with the Phillies. Life ain’t like bad movies. Alexander lived two more heartbreaking decades — he died just before “The Winning Team” came out.

In those years, he was arrested numerous times. He was thrown in jail. He was sued for being a “love pirate.” He and Aimee divorced and then got back together and then they got divorced again. He scraped for money any way he could, pitching an inning or two in exhibition games for the House of David. He was broke, he was drunk, and he was in great pain. Alexander is at the heart of perhaps the saddest line in sports literature.

“Aren’t you Grover Cleveland Alexander?” he was asked.

“Used to be,” he said.

He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1938 — he represented the third Hall of Fame class — and while he was honored, he also felt lost. “You can’t eat a tablet,” he said when asked about how it felt to see his Hall of Fame plaque. He died penniless in 1950.

[johnnya24]

Just spent 17 mins of my life watching a dude clean an old Ford Fiesta.

[heyelander]

#25 Pop Lloyd

https://cdn.theathletic.com/app/uploads/2020/02/29111540/pop_100-e1583081490693-1024x683.jpg

“If you mean the greatest in organized baseball, my answer would be Babe Ruth,” Harlow quoted the writer as saying. “But if you mean in all of baseball, organized or unorganized, the answer would have to be a colored man named John Henry Lloyd.”

And there’s one more part to this crazy story to mention. Did you notice in the Wikipedia entry mentioned above, it said both Babe Ruth and Ted Harlow called Pop Lloyd the greatest player ever? Well, where does the Ruth reference come from? It’s hard to tell. Monte Irvin, in his book, “Few and Chosen,” wrote that Babe Ruth said it when being interviewed, yes, on the radio by Graham McNamee. And the exchange is strikingly familiar.

McNamee asked Ruth to name the greatest player ever.

“You mean major leagues?” Ruth asked.
“No, the greatest player anywhere.”
“In that case,” Ruth said, “I’d pick John Henry Lloyd.”

It would be so wonderful to have something tangible, something we can hold onto. There are, as you will see, definitive quotes from people about the greatness of Lloyd. There are a few statistics that have been uncovered and tell a story. But at the center of it all, we know so little about Pop Lloyd. If we want to know how great Pop really was, then, sadly — or perhaps happily, if you want to see the world with optimism — we must use our imaginations.

...

So back to what we do know. We know he was great. We don’t need to hear from Ted Harlow or even Babe Ruth — everybody said so. The Giants’ John McGraw loved him so much that he kept coming up with schemes to try to get Lloyd past baseball’s color line — at different times hatching plots to pass him as Cuban or as Native American (none ever got very far).

The Athletics manager Connie Mack saw Lloyd play and was so overwhelmed that he immediately dubbed him “The Black Honus Wagner.”

Wagner, upon hearing this, was so overwhelmed that he said, “It is a privilege to have been compared with him.”

...

We know that Lloyd could really hit — .400 in several seasons in which some statistics have managed to break through the fog, somewhere in the .340 or .350 range over his long, long, long career. So many of the people who would talk about him in the years to come did not see Lloyd play until he was in his late 40s, but they would generally say the same thing: Even then, he could really hit.

At age 46, while playing for the New York Lincoln Giants, by the best records, he hit .381.

...

And this is what he said: “I do not consider that I was born at the wrong time. I feel it was the right time. I had a chance to prove the ability of our race in this sport, and because many of us did our best for the game, we’ve given the Negro a greater opportunity now to be accepted into the major leagues with other Americans.”

Lloyd (like O’Neil) did hope to be elected into the Hall of Fame before he died. In both cases, it was not meant to be. But O’Neil played a key role in getting Lloyd elected to the Hall of Fame in 1977, the same year that Buck’s protégé, Ernie Banks, became the first major-league black shortstop to be elected.

A man named James Usry accepted the plaque in Lloyd’s honor that day. Who was Usry? He was the assistant superintendent of the Atlantic City school system. He would later become the first black mayor of Atlantic City. He wasn’t a ballplayer … the reason he was there to speak on Lloyd’s behalf is that the two were great friends and had worked together in the school district. Lloyd became a janitor there once he finished playing ball.

Everybody at the school loved Lloyd. The kids called him Pop. And even though he would occasionally tell stories, they never knew just how great he was as a ballplayer. Usry did know. Sometimes Usry would drive by the school and see Lloyd mowing the lawn, and he would seethe. That, he believed, wasn’t how it should end for one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived.

But he also noticed, with wonder, that Pop Lloyd didn’t seem to mind.

[heyelander]

So when we made our list (okay, so it was mostly my list with a bit of Kev and Garp chiming in, I won't blame all of you) here's what we had...

Gibson
Ruth
Wagner
Anson
Cobb
Hornsby
Speaker
Collins
Gehrig
Mantle
Mays
Foxx
Ott
Arod
Bonds
Pujols
Henderson
Schmidt
Morgan
Robinson
Aaron
Musial
Williams
ManRam

Page
Johnson
Young
Alexander
Mathewson
Maddux
Clemens
Johnson
Martinez
Walsh
Mordecai

We (I) missed Bench, Pop Lloyd, and Trout. There's one more name than there is places on the list. I guess that's Manny, but I also assume I missed someone else, so who knows. Still think Manny belongs above Beltran. Cripes.

[The Feral Slasher]

Has "Hey Jude" been picked yet? Oh dang it, wrong thread.

JJ decided not to prepare for Coronavirus because it's possible there are even worst health threats he isn't aware of that he isn't preparing for.

[The Feral Slasher]

It is cool that baseball is back on TV. I was in Tempe last week but they only had day games when I was there and I had to work. I should have planned for an extra day to catch a game or two

[Kevin Seitzer]

JJ decided not to prepare for Coronavirus because it's possible there are even worst health threats he isn't aware of that he isn't preparing for.

CDC = Coronavirus Derangement Complex

[The Feral Slasher]

CDC = Coronavirus Derangement Complex

Cooky Dudes, Can't handle their viruses

[The Feral Slasher]

Cooky Dudes, Can't handle their viruses

how do you spell cooooky ? This is hard to ask by typing I suppose. Not someone who bakes, someone who is mentally not all their

[The Feral Slasher]

how do you spell cooooky ? This is hard to ask by typing I suppose. Not someone who bakes, someone who is mentally not all their

*there