baseball obituaries 2020

(Sheesh.)

Tommy Davis

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/33670296/tommy-davis-2-nl-batting-champion-los-angles-dodgers-dies-83

roger angell (101!)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/sports/roger-angell-dead.html

rip

i want to read his 1975 piece on steve blass (which i just read about, in an obituary). i didn't realize Blass got the yips, and i'd love to see what Angell had to say about that.

rip

steve blass disease!

Dwight Smith, very young:

https://www.tsn.ca/world-series-winning-outfielder-dwight-smith-dead-at-58-1.1828287

Still remember Jerome Walton and Smith 1-2 in ROY voting.

Look at Jerome Walton '94-98: limited playing time, but maybe another why-did-he-retire guy.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/w/waltoje01.shtml

We are deeply saddened by the passing of former Met John Stearns. https://t.co/Bxh4o8rY4V pic.twitter.com/L860TPMU6j

— New York Mets (@Mets) September 16, 2022

Former stolen base king and '62 MVP Maury Wills.

Pretty significant death. It doesn't make sense by modern metrics (39.6 career bWAR), but I know he still has passionate HOF advocates. He and Wes Parker were basically the focus of an excellent book I read last year on the great '60s Dodgers teams, The Last Innocents.

Bruce Sutter:

https://www.mlb.com/news/bruce-sutter-dies

One of the more tenuous HOF picks of recent times, but he definitely was dominant for two or three seasons.

Expecially '77: 6.5 bWAR for a closer.

Especially, even.

i'm less amazed by his hall induction than by his *five* top-10 MVP finishes

The pendulum on the value of closers has swung back and forth two or three times during my years as a fan; Sutter and the late '70s was a peak, the late '80s were a peak, then again whenever Gagne won his Cy Young.

rip bruce sutter. some of my first memories are of him pumping his fist and then catching and holding darrell porter as the catcher jumped into his arms. it was on a tape, a 1982 cardinals VHS, which was on constant rotation at my grandpa's when i was little, years afterward

i was just a kid, but when i first got into baseball he was *the* reliever, and basically (to my knowledge) created the split-fingered fastball

(turns out that with the plastic-coated balls they use through little league, i too could make that pitch dive! but then when we moved back to 60.5 and used leather balls, much less so)

would've been cooler if he'd been a member of hockey's sutter family tho

Closers used to get such a disproportionate amount of MVP consideration, when taking their actual value into account. Not that Sutter wasn’t a really good one, of course.

I will say that for me his most memorable moment was giving up two home runs to Ryne Sandberg in the game that basically made the latter a superstar.

I was just checking the 1984 AL MVP ballot: five pitchers finished, with closers Willie Hernandez winning and Quisenberry finishing third. Stieb (always a bridesmaid) finished tied for 22nd, with Boddicker at #25, and Doyle Alexander tied for 27th with Ripken, whose bWAR of 10.01(!) led MLB.

I would watch a 30 for 30 on that ballot

Willie appeared in 80 games and pitched 140.1 innings so he wasn’t exactly a Gagne.

The exclusively one inning closer wasn't a thing until the 90's. In Sutter's prime they would pitch more than 100 innings. In his CY-winning season he had 9.8K/9IP when the league average was probably around 5.

If anything I think Sutter's HOF case has looked stronger since he was elected, seeing how 300 saves has become even rarer and so many top relievers flame out after a few years.

Yeah true dat. Who was the last reliever to compile 100 IP in a season exclusively from relief outings?

When I was a kid it seemed like Sutter was a Cardinal forever and his Cubs years were just a blip. But he was only in St Louis four seasons, and compiled most of his HOF cred in Chicago.

Gaylord Perry

What an amazing character. Obviously underscores the disconnect when it comes to keeping PED guys out of the HOF. One of the very first things I ever got caught up in as a fan was his '72 season, which is probably still one of the top 15-20 seasons for a starting pitcher in the past 50 years (10.8 bWAR and the Cy Young for a 72-84 Cleveland team).

Wow--actually 6th best, behind Gooden in '85 (12.2), Carlton in '72 (12.1), Clemens in '97 (11.9), Wilbur Wood (!) in '71 (11.8), and Pedro in 2000 (11.7).

Mind blown: Perry tried to hide George Brett's bat in the pine tar game! He was stopped and later ejected.

Perry was one of the great old men of MLB, like Niekro or Hough. I mean they looked like old men when playing.

weirdly Jamie Moyer didn’t despite lasting longer — it trips me out to see that he’s 60 years old now

RIP Gaylord Perry, it's been a terrible two days for deaths.

https://www.mlb.com/video/gaylord-perry-dies-at-age-84?partnerId=web_video-playback-page_video-share

RIP Curt Simmons

Famous quote usually attributed to Simmons: "Trying to throw a baseball by Hank Aaron is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster." (Posnanski says he's also seen the quote attributed to other players talking about someone other than Aaron.)

tom browning, who threw the reds’ only perfect game, 62

https://i.imgur.com/s76ckOb.png

https://nowtakingthefield.substack.com/p/the-baseball-rip-roster-for-2022

frank thomas (not that one, but another famous one)

RIP Frank Thomas.
Born in 1929 in Pittsburgh, played for the Pirates from 1951-58 (three-time All-Star here), blasted 286 homers over 16 seasons in the majors. pic.twitter.com/OBXhES0Trj

— RobBiertempfel (@RobBiertempfel) January 16, 2023

also, journeyman ted savage, who just missed being part of the cardinals WS winning teams in '64 and '67

He just had a stroke aiui

four-time all-star 3B and brewers GM sal bando, 78

I don't know if you can say he was underrated in his day, because he did get a lot of attention and MVP support in the early '70s--finished in the Top 4 three times--but Reggie and Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter and maybe even Fingers got more, and he didn't even draw 1% of the vote in his one year on the HOF ballot. Good chance I saw him play in July of '69 when we were in Anaheim, though I can't pin down the game.

I knew who he was because of the reputation of those 70's A's teams, but didn't realize how good his career was until I checked his stats just now.

The 1987 HOF vote was a weird one, with no slam dunk candidates, I sense a lot of apathy on the part of the voters. Bando has the 4th highest WAR of the 28 candidates who received votes, and he finished 26th.

I didn't look at the top of that ballot--in the year he got 0.7% (3/413 ballots), two ex-teammates went in, Billy Williams and Catfish Hunter (both, as you say, with soft support).

Catfish was kinda the Dave Stewart of his time (albeit better at his best), a very good pitcher who pitched for some great teams and racked up so many wins over a short period of time. His best seasons was actually his last w Oakland and first w NY. Beyond that, two more seasons w a bWAR above 3. Might have earned that HOF spot for more meritorious reasons if he wasn’t done as a good pitcher at 30.

He makes sense in the context of his times, not in retrospect, from an analytical standpoint. With 36.3 bWAR, and I bet even lower on Fangraphs, he's obviously not even close to the HOF bar. In his day, though, there were the five straight 20-win seasons, 4/3/1/2 in CY voting, the four WS titles with the A's/Yankees (his post-season record is good), the perfect game, the huge free-agent contract (one of the first), and--again, back then--definite mystique. So I get it, as I think anyone who watched baseball at the time does.

I'm always more impressed by some of the votes the writers somehow got intuitively right. The first one I think of is the 1965 AL MVP: I was puzzled for years by the Zolio Versalles MVP ("but he only hit .273!"), but bWAR does show him as the best position player in the league. (Sam McDowell's a little higher.) Another one--if you put aside pitchers--is the '85 NL MVP. I think even James mocked Willie McGee winning, arguing that Dale Murphy was clearly more valuable, but McGee was indeed the best position player in the league by bWAR, well ahead of Murphy. (Not even close to Gooden, mind you...)

Sal Bando, on the other hand, got screwed by the time he was up for the HOF. Which, again, is strange seeing as how probably many of the same voters gave him lots of MVP support.

Bando’s bWAR is amazing considering how relatively brief his full-time career was. His chances were probably diminished by playing a lot during a pitchers’ era. But for all the sabermetrics chatter about a third baseman like Darrell Evans being one of the underrated greats, Sal might fit that description even more.

Bando was well respected in his prime, as Clem pointed out, he drew decent support in MVP voting. I'd compare him to a George Springer type of player -- a very good player but not quite a star, who will get some downballot support, and produces in the big moments. You absolutely need a couple of players like that to contend year after year. But nobody thinks of him as a HOFer, and he doesn't end up with the flashy round numbers for his career that HOF voters like.

yeah, he's an interesting case i guess, though not quite getting there, despite a 56.6 bWAR from '69-'78. he's a guy who'd maybe be a reputable HOFer due to that peak value. But he was still a solid tier below for example Rolen, and a couple below Santo.

He was arguably the best 3B in the game for a brief window, but then Schmidt, Brett, and to a lesser extent Nettles were really just much better throughout the '70s. He'd have needed another 4-5 years and he'd have a better case (he'd likely have gone the Santo route tho.)

looking at that 70's Athletics team, it's crazy how similar Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter were; yet only one is in the Hall (neither really should be imho). Blue has actually a stronger case (and not just through modern metrics), really – only difference maker I think is Hunter played for the Yankees...

Hunter: 3.26 ERA, 224 wins, 2012 Ks, 36.3 WAR, Cy Young, ERA crown, 8x all star, 5x world series
Blue: 3.27 ERA, 209 wins, 2175 Ks, 44.9 WAR, Cy Young, ERA crown, 6x all star, 3x world series AND an MVP award.

blue has a much stronger case, but he didn't have a cool nickname. big mistake on his part. they both seem like casualties of having to throw way too many innings in their 20s

catfish had 5 seasons in a row of the magical 20 Wins, that must have helped as well. fangraph's interpretation of "value" (based on FIP) is notable with his 1973 season. hunter went 21-5 with a 3.34 ERA over 256 IP. his fWAR, though, was just over replacement, at 0.5 fWAR. his ERA was way below his FIP, which was 4.40. Oakland's defense must have been pretty great that year...

Catfish Hunter had two things that are sure to get solidly above-average/usually not-amazing pitchers into the HOF: a nickname and a great mustache. not a beard (Blyleven rule) it has to be a bushy stache. i'll die on the hill that a clean-shaven Jack Morris is one-and-done on the HOF ballot. Someone should have advised Rick Reuschel to keep his mustache and make it really really bushy.

Vida Blue is a really cool name, though. Didn't have to dress it up. Much cooler than Jim Hunter.

I don't know if Blue's drug issues figured into that or not. He thought so: "I had some issues in my life that might have had a tendency to sway voting. There are some guys in the Hall of Fame who don’t have halos." His holdout in '72 was a huge story at the time: didn't start his season until May 24--big surprise, I think Finley really screwed him--and didn't get a postseason start until the sixth game of the WS. Glad to know he's 73 and still alive.