things I learned about in baseball this week/how i learned to stop worrying and love baseball

What I remember most at the time about Timmy local scouting reports when he got drafted was that he was an injury risk waiting to happen. He was of below average height and tried to compensate for the lack of arm torque with an absurd stride length. I forget what finally did him in, I'm guessing his hip/back?

Yeah his hip in theory, though Andrew Baggarly thinks his premature decline before this was due to losing flexibility with age and obviously having a delivery extremely dependent on being incredibly athletic. But he also wouldn’t have made it to the big leagues without that delivery. Baggarly wrote this in his magnificent piece about him:

Lincecum didn’t look like what a starting pitcher should look like and he didn’t throw the way a starting pitcher should throw. Scouts knew he didn’t fit the pattern. The Giants knew when they drafted him that his career probably wouldn’t last a decade. But they also knew the peak would be so, so high-impact. You just had to appreciate him while you had him, which is why the Giants didn’t hesitate to bring him to the big leagues when they did in 2007 — even though that decision cost them $10 million in arbitration down the road.

Non-exhaustive list of stadiums I want to visit based on the stadiums themselves:

Fenway
Wrigley
Oracle/whatever it’s called
PNC

Stadiums I would visit based on them being in places I would like to go to:

Yankee Stadium
Citi
T-Mobile/whatever it’s called now

Where my husband wants to visit based on places he wants to go:
-wherever the Marlins play
- Minute Maid
- Chase Field (“it has a pool and they play techno!”)

You can see my difficulty here.

Happy to host y'all in SF, I can usually pull pretty good seats unless the Dodgers are in town.

Fenway is the best. PNC is stunning.

San Diego's stadium I thought I'd hate but is really quite nice.

Wow! That’s so kind but honestly the expense of SF puts me off a bit. If we end up going to any of these places I’ll post about it here.

PNC looks great, heard Pittsburgh is nice to visit too. Really regret not visiting Wrigley last year (a whole three months before I got into baseball).

xp also Tracer Hand can confirm I am very annoying in person

i just went to wrigley for the first time a couple of weeks ago! my third (or fourth if you count "former") mlb park. game was 6:15, we got to our seats at 5:30 to get the pre-game "experience" of watching people roll in etc... and it got rain delayed until 9pm.

vibes were nerdier and more wholesome than expected (the concert the night before was drunk and vaguely aggressive, we were starting to get a weird vibe for the city for a sec! and 6 hours of potential drinking is never good!), wrigley is charmingly janky (i didn't have to sit in my seat, thankfully instead sitting a couple rows behind, because the roof was dumping all the rain water ON MY SEAT), 10/10 for vibes, 5/10 for comfort, 2/10 for ushers asking for our tickets in the 9th inning when we tried to get close to take a picture (we got to the 200s without a ticket anyway), 11/10 for the dj playing country roads at about 7:30 and all of the stadium singing along as we waited for what truly seemed like it was gonna be a rainout

also i was there with two of my fantasy leaguemates and me and one of them brokered a deal where i traded him dansby swanson before the game, felt kinda dirty trading a guy i was about to see play

100% incorrect it was a delight

unless I see someone wearing a Lincecum shirt in public!

xxp I love this, I really liked Chicago, 10/10 city, so would gladly put up with rain and whatever! Also Country Roads being a thing in stadiums fascinated me, Jarred Kelenic started doing it in Seattle as his walk up song to get people to sing along and in a recent game every time he got on base or did something they played it. Think it got played six times one evening.

the Mariners played “Take Me Home, Country Roads” every time Jarred Kelenic was at bat, again when his out at second base got overturned to be safe, and again at the end of the game

the crowd sang along every time lol

last night’s game was so fun https://t.co/tdawxQh2ti pic.twitter.com/ZialQ0frRn

— The Hottest Jerrica You Know 😘 (@JinkiesJerrica) June 28, 2023

Speaking of Wrigley, I did not know until just now that Cubs fans return opponents’ home run balls! Prompted by watching Sox-Cubs highlights and this fan’s amazing expression:

Straight Cas, homie. pic.twitter.com/7nRCNKNrDG

— Red Sox (@RedSox) July 15, 2023

The tradition, like so much else in the Cubs history, apparently traces its roots back to 1969, the year the Cubs collapsed in the last part of the season, blowing a 10-game lead over the Mets.

That season at Wrigley, Hank Aaron hit his 521st career home run, tying him with Ted Williams. The ball was caught by Ron Grousl, a 24-year-old bartender who was a denizen of the left-field bleachers.

Grousl said he offered the ball to Aaron after the game as the slugger was making his way to the Braves’ bus, but Aaron refused, apparently angry that fans in right field had dumped beer on him when he ventured near the wall.

The next season, when Aaron hit a home run at Wrigley Field and Grousl caught it, he said he was still so upset with Aaron’s rejection (and maybe everything else that happened in 1969) that he threw the ball back onto the field.

“I just thought: ‘Get this out of here. I don’t want it,’” Grousl, 70, said in a telephone interview. “I just threw it back.”
Asked if, after all these years, he regretted throwing back a home run hit by one of baseball’s greatest players, Grousl said: “No. I went to every game. I caught a lot of home run balls. You were just mad about the whole thing in ’69.”

SF native so biased but Oracle is an unbelievably beautiful ballpark. T-Mobile is also really fun and has a great atmosphere. Yankee stadium I went to recently and was a little disappointed by, though the subway going by in right field is neat.

NYS blows goats and u shd go to queens and/or coney before u consider going to the bronx

Yeah you are right Jimmy, I kind of wanted to see the short porch but I heard Citi was easier to get to and in an area with more to do?

xp I really want to, the arcade, the right field with the canoes, the iconic (?) Coke bottle, obvs has the bronze plates for Timmy’s no-hitters, but honestly the cost is the only thing tbh

Biased Met's fan here, but Citi is a great stadium with great food, plus Flushing is nearby with amazing Chinese food. It's easy to do both in one day.

Coors Field is a really great place to see a game, especially if you like home runs.

Plus, Denver is the bomb. It's transformed since I lived and worked there in the late 80s/early 90s, thanks in no small part to the ballpark.

xxp for some reason I didn’t realise you were a Mets fan…I’m really sorry

Coors is interesting to me, it’s just that Denver isn’t somewhere I think I would go, so I might never make it there, but yeah I know about the conditions and the Rockies mascot is legit. Then again, maybe I’ll have to see that fucked up airport in person?

Man I bet they were fun to watch during the Arenado/Story/LeMahieu years though.

Without a doubt the funniest profile description going
https://i.postimg.cc/6qjTH41c/IMG-5632.jpg

Why’s he wishing happy Valentine’s to their dog 💀
https://i.postimg.cc/PrJCCKPR/IMG-5633.jpg
https://i.postimg.cc/ZKQCp3NK/IMG-5634.jpg

for a second i was like… “two beautiful girls? is he talking about…. her tits?”

Then again, maybe I’ll have to see that fucked up airport in person?

It's not worth the trip by itself, but the entire mythos surrounding the airport and its construction is hilarious. They even play into it; there is currently construction going on, and so there are signs up saying "Pardon the mess, the lizard people keep stealing our tools."

Then again, I just recently spoke to someone who swears she saw a group of handcuffed people being hustled off the plane on the tarmac there and . . . into a tunnel entrance. So who knows.

Fellas I’m sorry but I’m thoroughly into the Red Sox in a really shameful way 😔 I am reading about Ted Williams, I am fully Teddy Ballgame-pilled. DID U KNOW:

- he was half Mexican
- the red seat he hit is a matter of dispute as to whether it happened, supposedly no less a source than David Ortíz tried for it multiple times with an aluminium bat & couldn’t get anywhere close
- supposedly there was also a “wind tunnel” that aided the ball’s carry, if it did happen
- learning that one of the greatest hitters of all time got hated on by the Boston press, what the actual fuck

“Oh, I hated that Boston press,” Williams wrote in his autobiography, “My Turn At Bat.” “I can still remember the things they wrote, and they still make me mad. …

“I didn’t hit in the clutch. I wasn’t a team man. I was `jealous.’ I `alienated’ the players from the press. I didn’t hit to left field. I took so many bases on balls. I did this. I did that. And so on. And so unfair.”

I read "My Turn At Bat" a million times as a kid. It's not so much an autobiography as an extended Twitter rant before there was such a thing. There isn't another baseball book like it as far as I know.

It's true, the press hated his guts for so many years, and it was love/hate with the fans a lot of the time too (possibly spurred on by the treatment he received in the press). This is why his appearance at the 1999 All-Star Game in Boston was such a big deal and a completely unforgettable moment to everyone who saw it, Ted was finally vindicated and got the adulation he deserved.

It was also upsetting in the 90's, as a Ted fan and a Yankee hater, to see DiMaggio (wife beater and general egomaniac) and Mantle (perpetual drunk, adulterer) get treated as living legends while Ted was something of a niche topic for baseball hipsters to talk about. But by the summer of '99, both of them were dead and I think people realized that they should appreciate legends like Ted Williams while he was still around.

IIRC, when DiMaggio made public appearances, he insisted on being announced as the "greatest living ballplayer" because he was just that much of a prick. He would have been announced as such at the '99 ASG but he died earlier that year, so Williams got the spotlight all to himself and was announced as "the greatest hitter who ever lived" without any objections.

It was also upsetting in the 90's, as a Ted fan and a Yankee hater, to see DiMaggio (wife beater and general egomaniac) and Mantle (perpetual drunk, adulterer) get treated as living legends while Ted was something of a niche topic for baseball hipsters to talk about.

Who are the great baseball players who are well-regarded as people? Cal Ripken, Jr., maybe? Jim Palmer? Actually, I'm sure there are a lot, but the assholes seem to get the most attention.

Clemente, famously

Stan Musial, Ernie Banks, and Sandy Koufax, at or near the top of the list.

I was watching the dire Sox-Yankees game & broadcast was talking about Casas’s approach to the plate & hitting. I linked the Fangraphs article about his hitting approach in the Casas thread, but the broadcaster said he was a “new school hitter, believes in hitting on the planes like Ted Williams”.

I’ve never read the Art of Hitting and suspect it would be both too technical and difficult to understand for me (a person with subnormal spatial ability) but I was like, huh, didn’t know that was his approach cos I thought Williams was the standard-setter for modern hitters.

So anyway I googled ‘Ted Williams plane hitting’ and the results were both expected and funny.
https://i.postimg.cc/J47MxgCd/IMG-9340.jpg

Ha.

This piece must have been linked before somewhere but if you haven't read it, it's a doozy - https://www.esquire.com/sports/a5379/biography-ted-williams-0686/

This thread is almost a year old and I felt like writing…something…So why not write it here?

I got into baseball last year via the mediums of both insomnia and Ohtani. I spent most of last year in love with the 2010s Giants and Tim Lincecum remains my favourite, of course.

This year was different: I came into it intending to follow the Mariners and Giants but I watched a whole slew of teams, most notably the Red Sox who I took up watching when they were on one of their good streaks.

As an Irish person, watching loser teams doesn’t really bother me much. It’s what it is, unless you follow rugby or golf. I don’t have any geographical connection to any of the teams I follow.

This year has been tiring because although I’m trying to be a 162 person, I have followed every game. I read the box scores like I used to check in on twitter every morning. I’m excited for the hot stove season. I know not just the rosters but the front offices, the beefs, a lot of the lore. I guess I’m a fan, in the sense of the abbreviated true meaning of that term.

However, I’m not complaining. The past year has been very difficult for me and my family for reasons I can’t post publicly but some of you know. Baseball takes up time and space in my life that I might otherwise spend tied in knots about this. It distracts. It makes me happy, it rarely makes me sad. I love when I watch Brayan Bello’s changeup dip like it’s Timmy’s. I love when I see a reliever come into a jam and get out of it. I love when a batter grinds and grinds at an AB and you see the pitcher visibly frustrated. I especially love how, even if that AB doesn’t pay off for the batter, his teammate is likely going to come in and benefit from it. I loved watching the Red Sox-Astros game where Framber Valdez was dealing, Triston Casas struck out, and he went straight back to the dugout steps and told Justin Turner about something he noticed in the AB - and JT got the first hit of the game in his next time up.

All these things are very small, but the season is so long, and through it you can see players develop, not always for the better. You can see how teams that play each other regularly adapt and respond. You can see the duels between batters and pitchers that know each other well and how tense they can get. I love texting my friends who watch the games when a pitcher gets a great hitter out, or gets out of a bases loaded jam and we always say “That was a big out!” I haven’t followed a team properly in so long, not since my beloved Man Utd extinguished any remaining love I had for them by bringing back Ronaldo and through the Mason Greenwood shitshow. It’s nice to have something to follow along with other people and to be able to talk about it, and for it not to be that deep. It’s just ball.

The philosophy of the game is quite different from other sports I’ve followed. More than anything else, baseball is a grind. I was talking to my parents about this months ago and they were genuinely shocked by how many games are played. You hear players and managers talk about “flushing it”, “that’s 162” and so on - you have to move on. You can’t dwell in this game. And you can’t get in your own head about it or the game will pull you down fast. I found that attitude really helpful in dealing with my own problems this year, and perhaps explains both why I like baseball so much beyond all the stuff that happens in the games.

I made the thread about Triston Casas cos I saw this young player with his painted nails and thought, “wow that is a tough fucking thing to do in a sport like this, fair play to the young fella.” I still think this, and many of the people I admire in life tend to be people who have the courage to be themselves or speak out for what they believe in. Lincecum, Votto, Casas - all occupy a similar space in my mind. And there are more players like this all the time and I think it benefits the game.

To see the parameters of the sport shift according to the young players who are always coming in and changing things has been fascinating to me too. The new rules have encouraged the running game like nothing else. Pitch clock keeps it moving. It’s the philosophy of 162 transplanted to the field of play itself and it’s breathed new enjoyment into this season for me. That’s obviously a big part of why I’ve been able to watch so many games this year - if they are under three hours then it’s no hardship at all.

I wrote all this and I don’t really even know what I said so if you want a tl;dr it’s that baseball has been a huge addition to my life and has got me through some very bad times and for that I’m extremely grateful.

gyac, I (we?) are here for it!

One thing (and perhaps I'm showing my age here) is that I always opt for the audio (radio) feed as it allows you to keep one ear in during the 162 slog yet maintain some semblance of productivity (work, chores, parenting, etc.) that video does not allow. Also attending the games in-person can be a wholly different immersive experience but for me that's just down to a handful of games a year at home and even less when on the road (except in Japan because nothing compares to the NPB game experience).

The Irish-RedSox connection is vast and makes a ton of sense, especially for immigrants (speaking as a great-great-grandchild of one who made it from Ulster to Boston but ended up in Mississippi as that was where he could find work, picking cotton).

I admire your passion and dedication, your energy is a very welcome spirit to this board.

Thank you Steve! I appreciate this sweet post.

So I watch all my games via the MLB app cast to my TV mainly, and when you do that you can’t select the radio feed. Obviously when I watch Giants games I’m hoping for Kruk and Kuip anyway.

So the Red Sox being an east coast team actually means I have been able to watch them more as well. That’s a lot more important to me on a simple practical level than the diaspora connection. There’s plenty of Irish in SF as well!

best wishes gyac. I v much enjoy your baseball posts maybe even more so because I don't watch baseball anymore and have never done twitter so you getting really into it via ilx has allowed me to kinda reconnect with it in a background kinda way.

Thought of another good one for the "great baseball players who are well-regarded as people" question: Willie Stargell. I think he was revered by just about everyone who played with him, and probably by most everyone who played against him. Posnanski has a good column a couple of weeks ago about his idea for the Willie Stargell Award: "So I guess I would want to give the Willie Stargell Award to a player whose 'leadership, presence and ability to rise to the moment are comparable to the qualities exhibited by Willie Stargell in 1979.'" It'd basically be a parallel award to the MVP, but where character and narrative do count for a lot (which they're not necessarily supposed to in the actual MVP voting).

https://open.substack.com/pub/joeposnanski/p/introducing-the-willie-stargell-award?r=1jtu0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

I mean, c'mon.

https://i.postimg.cc/7ZCrr5ST/willie.jpg

otm

<3 Pops

Good post Gyac. Relate to a lot of that as a relatively new (2016) international follower.

I need to radio feed more. It’s my go to if I’m driving while a ballgame is on (as happened today) and it’s just a whole nother way to experience it! I (sadly) don’t get/take too many opportunities to use my visual imagination these days, but those radio calls let me see the runner on the third base with the umpire beside him, the fans in the stand and the dodger stadium center field space with its 76 signs and tarps covering the seats on the inner edges (which I just learnt were put there as when Randy Johnson pitched, his particular arm slot made the ball hard to see with those particular center field seats). In the mariners/dodgers game today, there was an infield hit in extra innings with a runner on third. The runner was caught in a run down, touched the plate but ran outside the base path in the process. The suspense of the radio commentator having to figure out what was going on himself before relaying it made it far more entertaining to listen to than to watch. That extra separation, being told a story, verbally, that is presently happening is a unique joy.

Anyway, baseball is great and makes my life much better and today I learnt about another field that had to change its centre field backdrop to benefit batters vision

best wishes gyac. I v much enjoy your baseball posts maybe even more so because I don't watch baseball anymore and have never done twitter so you getting really into it via ilx has allowed me to kinda reconnect with it in a background kinda way.

Who are the great baseball players who are well-regarded as people? Cal Ripken, Jr., maybe? Jim Palmer? Actually, I'm sure there are a lot, but the assholes seem to get the most attention.

― immodesty blaise (jimbeaux), Tuesday, September 12, 2023 11:34 AM (five days ago)

if anybody has anything bad to say about tony gwynn, i don't wanna hear it!

Wonderful post gyac. Better than 99% of baseball writing I've read anywhere this year. It got me thinking about how a baseball season lets you get to know players on a level that I've not felt with other sports. It's the length of the seasons, sure, the ups and downs, the slumps it seems they'll never get out of, the joyousness of the clutch play, all of which pretty much everybody who plays a good number of games will get to experience in one way or another cause there are just so many goddamn games, so no matter who you follow, teams or players, you'll get taken on this ride with them.

But there's something else too, there's a personal side and a camaraderie that you see in the dugout that I dunno, I just don't really recall seeing Premiere league players hamming it up with each other on the sidelines, or NFL dudes. You get a little of this in the NBA. Maybe it's because there's so much downtime, even for starting players, there's a sense that you're all locked in this dream with each other together and you might as well make the most of it. Endless handshakes and in-jokes and superstitions and shared moments. And I love how you've picked up on all this stuff, and all the kinds of bits of personal background that people like Vin Scully and Joe Castiglione were/are masters of, eg which racist high school did this kid attend, what restaurant are those rookie teammates hanging out at, who moved out of his family home because his parents were such assholes, which team had the best clubhouse chemistry. If you wrote a Pop Bitch for baseball i would sign up for the Patreon.

This post almost brought me to tears! I think I probably am like that overused Moneyball line in being romantic about baseball! Thank you to you for sending me stuff throughout the year and being my Red Sox enabler. Our big boy will rake again!

Grant Brisbee & Andrew Baggarly both wrote different pieces about Lincecum that really got to the heart of how I feel about my favourites doing well & more broadly the joys of sports fandom, I guess.

Brisbee:

If this all seems overwrought, well, yeah. You should either pick one athlete who makes you absolutely lose your mind like the Beatles just landed at JFK, or you should question if sports are really for you. And once you get to that point, a Hall of Fame doesn’t matter. It’s like your favorite movie winning an Oscar. It makes for a neat section on the Wikipedia page, but it doesn’t make you enjoy the movie more.

Here is one final element: my favorite person had to have a good heart. He had to be easy to love. He had to form an endearing and durable connection with fans. He had to be someone people wanted to read about.

In 1994, Buck Showalter, then the manager of the Yankees, complained about the way the Seattle Mariners’ star player, Ken Griffey Jr., wore his hat backward and his “shirttails” untucked. Showalter said it showed a lack of “respect for the game.” For this, he was booed during a road trip to Seattle. Griffey told reporters that Showalter was “jealous because he doesn’t have a 24-year-old who can carry my jock.” Griffey became one of the most marketable stars in the league; two years later, Nike ran an advertising campaign premised on a Griffey run for president that prominently featured his backward hat.

The Griffey showdown was one in a long line of coded racial arguments, minor battles between two types: the “standard” white player and his nonwhite foil. The archetype of the white baseball player has always been a study in negative space. He does not flip his bat after home runs. He does not insult the hard-working fans with talk about politics. He never takes more than one day at a time. As a result, he cannot exist without a foil to embody all those “flashy” or “hot­headed” or “provocative” things he is not. The foils, of course, have generally been black. But as the demographics of the sport have changed, so, too, has this dynamic.

good posts, good thread

Baseball on radio is the best. I remember my grandfather's deep trance as he listened to the Twins on his transistor radio's earbud, lying on the couch with his eyes closed. Was he asleep? Following the game? Dreaming about it? All I could tell was that he had attained a state of contentment too deep to be disturbed by small children playing in the same room.

Born in 1900, Grandpa would probably be a little disoriented if he could be presented with a 2023 Vikings game televised in 4K, but I don't think he'd detect many changes in baseball on the radio. Some things are timeless.

Unordered list of less common baseball terminology that have made the jump into my daily usage. NB some of these might not be baseball exclusive/might be American sports twitter terminology but I learned them through baseball, so.

Lit up (which I pronounce as per the people of my region “li’up”) - everyone knows this one, I don’t need to explain it.

Glazed/to glaze - you see this on the comments of the official mlb Instagram and Twitter all the time. Refers to lavishing positive attention on someone that really doesn’t need it for a minor achievement. Usually used for stuff like MLB posting six times about Shohei in an hour or something.
https://i.postimg.cc/sf5qZyRF/IMG-9832.jpg

Inverted commas (pejorative) - I have no idea of the etymology of this but it’s incredibly rude. Basically used to disrespect a player, eg:

I can’t believe we’re getting no-hit by “Chris Flexen”

Nice piece of hitting, a - broadcasters use this all the time and it’s such a weird little phrase I use this all the time now approvingly. I used it in a voice note to my mother and she was like, “what the fuck are you talking about”.

Man knows ball (pejorative?) - usually in reference to someone who generally does NOT know ball but who has had a rare good take. Kind of like a tip of the cap but less sincere. The most famous example of this is:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1727DVakAIomQg?format=jpg&name=small

Playing backyard ball with my kid, I used the terms "duck snort" and "can of corn" and when I explained I learned them from listening to "hawk" on TV it didn't help his mystification.

YES! Can of corn I hear a lot!

"Bag of balls" has always been one of my favorites, as in, "they traded him for a couple of prospects and a bag of balls."

Those prospects, of course, are inevitably slapdick.

I always loved "worm-burner" for that particular type of grounder

A buddy of mine played golf once with Jim Rice, who explained what a "slump buster" was.