There Used to Be a Ballpark Again

Posted on November 23, 2019 by rightoffthebatbook

Don’t let the discus-thrower throw you. It’s one of the 1930s-style art-deco flourishes of a baseball stadium that recently served as a backdrop to cricket, Bangladesh-style. Then baseball again!

“How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!” (Lamentations)

William Carlos Williams is the author of an epic poem about Paterson. It is one of the cities “left behind.” Maybe not anymore.

In fall 2019, it was announced that plans are full-steam ahead there to restore a neglected monument to the history of baseball: Hinchliffe Stadium. Back in the day, Hinchcliffe had been one of the hubs of the Negro leagues. Today, in the shadow of its glory, Hinchliffe watches over cricket played by immigrants from Bangladesh. Soon, if things work out, these ruins will give rise to a multipurpose-sports facility; though some doubt.

Construction is “in time for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Negro leagues.* On May 29, 2024, Negro leagues statistics were officially included in the MLB record book.

Once home to the New York Black Yankees and the New York Cubans, Hinchliffe was host to…Monte Irvin, Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, and Paterson’s own Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League.

(The largest-recorded attendance at a minor-league game is 57,000. Satchel Paige, aetat. 50,  pitched. The date, far as I [Evander] can tell: August 7, 1956. The all-time single-game baseball-attendance record reached 120,000. This was during the infamous 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics Games, a then-rare night game. In 2008, 115,000 watched the home-team Dodgers play the Boston Red Sox at the Los Angeles Coliseum. The 1964 Olympics, hosted by Japan, saw a crowd of 114,000 at one amateur ballgame in Tokyo.)

“Previous efforts to bring the field back to life faltered, leaving residents, even young ones, fatalistic about its future. ‘When this place is fixed, I’ll be forty,’ laments fourteen-year-old Saleh Ahmed.” (This according to the New York Times.) To paraphrase from the start: maybe not this time, kid.

*  With a Negro leagues museum, Hinchliffe Stadium reopened May 19, 2023. The New Jersey Jackals took on the Sussex County Miners. It’s hoped that the New York Mets and New York Yankees would don Negro leagues uniforms for a tilt at Hinchliffe in 2025. Obstacles remain. If not 2025, then 2026? Or do fans wait to 2027 and beyond?

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Great Stadiums (11): Big Beautiful Shea Stadium

Posted on May 25, 2019 by rightoffthebatbook

A rendition of Shea Stadium (named for William Alfred Shea) with the dome that never was: looking suspiciously like the Houston Astrodome.

I (Evander) went wild first visiting the then-new home of the New York Mets (short for Metropolitans), something like 55 years ago at this writing.

Ground was broken for “Flushing Meadow Park Municipal Stadium” on October 28, 1961.

Shea was McLuhan-cool.

It had escalators.

It had big-sized suburban, Horace Greeley-style parking.

It had exterior-’60s-colored Go-Go panels (aluminum-siding!) suspended by cables that you could shake from the ramps: an incentive to avoid the Everest-peak escalators, especially on the post-game way down and out, before filling in all the game-stats on our scorecards riding the 7 train.

The game—or anything happening on field-level—was a rumor from the nosebleed seats of the upper deck.

A few years into its run, Tom Seaver would qualify as everybody’s nutty older cousin. On the first Earth Day-game at Shea, Tom Terrific would strike out the last 10 batters he faced.

It hosted the Beatles two times and was rumored to star a-rockin’ Bob Dylan (to prove that the times they were a-changin’) a year later.

Here Nolan Ryan struck out his first batter, fellow-rookie pitcher Pat Jarvis (no relation, as far as ROTB knows, to organist Jane Jarvis).

It was set up for the New York Jets, a team that switched its name from “Titans” so that only a consonant need be changed above the concession stands. Joe Namath passed for a stunning championship comeback in the permafrost and wind of December 29, 1968. The season before, only his third and best, Namath passed for a then-astounding 4,007 yards, roughly half of these at always-hip Shea.

Shea in early fall: reaching out to Namath.

A couple spins round the sun and peekaboo-safety panels were retrofitted to permit fans on lower levels a view into the bullpens.

There was almost no day-game shade on ticket lines or in the parking lot; these to-be-pitied urban trees reminded me of the sparsely treed and, frankly, often cheesy Freedomland of the northeast Bronx, whose Satellite City featured a metropolis under a hard-plastic, see-through cover that was almost out of  DC Comics, and precursor to a humongous housing-development called Co-op City.

Shea was intended to be domed, as was built in Houston, with a concrete or steel velarium inspired by ancient Rome. (Buckminster Fuller designed a so-called Dodger Dome to retain the Brooklyn team from migrating to Los Angeles. This and proposals similar to Fuller’s are found online.)

The Eighth Wonder of the World: No one could see balls hit high in the air during day games for the translucent-dome panels and girders. Even the grass died later, tho almost everyone could buy a behind-the-massive-dugouts seat.

The planes taking off from nearby LaGuardia Airport were obnoxiously loud.

It was next door to the 1964 New York World’s Fair, which was where the celebrated first Fair of modern times was held in 1939.

There were no fuddy-duddy bleachers at the beginning. Much later, there were friendly outfield stands, a picnic area, and those late-1990s-early 21st-century Piazza-tent shots.

Three indelibly memorable World Series were played there as well as the first-ever National League Championship Series.

Johnny Callison homered and sent a medley of delirious National League fans to the exits in walk-off fashion during the World’s Fair-year All-Star Game. A month before, teammate Jim Bunning hurled a perfect game on Fathers’ Day: first time it had been done since Don Larsen accomplished same in a World Series eight years prior, and just the seventh in MLB history. (Such were two non-preludes to the epic final-week collapse of Callison and Bunning’s Phillies. In June and July, who knew?)

Not one of the several concrete ashtrays of the era, Shea Stadium, by any objective measure, may yet have been the worst park in which to see a major-league game. To top (or bottom) things: The matronly years had not been kind to Shea, which always was big but, OK, not so beautiful…except in the eye of this once-young beholder, even to his ever-rockin’ ear.

Ha, ha, ha, you and me, / “Little brown jug” don’t I love thee? /  Ha, ha ha, you and me, /  “Little brown jug” don’t I love thee?

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Great Stadiums (10): Daphne du Maurier Stadium (Oracle Park in San Francisco)

Posted on May 6, 2019 by rightoffthebatbook

One can sense (Wilhelm) Richard Wagner’s Valkyrie (Die Walkuere) in the background: amidst too much fowl territory!

Daphne du Maurier wrote “The Birds,” a short story expanded upon by Alfred Hitchcock to a film of eco-psychology that features his greatest special effects, glamorous skulduggery on Mount Rushmore notwithstanding.

Oracle Park—Pacific Bell, then SBC; after those corporate-naming auspices were exhausted, AT&T, the latter noted in the accompanying photo and video—is the real-2019 name, not Daphne du Maurier Stadium, of the San Francisco Giants home field.

Oracle’s a stunner by the Bay and a vast improvement over elevated Candlestick Park, which saw gale-force winds and freezing night-game temperatures during its run, especially before it was enclosed as a multipurpose stadium. Oracle is the only not featuring grass (Tifway Bermuda Grass) cut in a pattern, the idea being to emulate the Polo Grounds (see more on that stadium, below). Oracle grass is cut by a robot at night. So far so good.

Yet, Oracle has one big-time flaw. (Read on.)

Willie Mays, almost as magnificent a centerfielder as the great [as Hemingway calls him) Joe DiMaggio (a San Francisco native and as stylish as any element of that most-stylish city), surely lost a number of homers off his career total of 660 by playing years of games at Candlestick. Mays’s exciting trademark basket-catches were put to the test every night. Playing conditions were no Rice-A-Roni treat.

It wasn’t supposed to be that way: a home-field disadvantage to the best ballplayer of the 1960s.

Ironically, Candlestick opened in April 1960, to kick off that tumultuous decade: with then-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon tossing the first ball no less, and the Beatles performing their last paid-show there, on August 29, 1966. Famously retold is how, a decade before, Horace Stoneham was shown the site of his new ball field, with all that parking, on the way from the airport past the Daly City Cow Palace, in the smug sunniness of Northern California daytime. Who knew? Chub Feeney got the gone-with-the-wind details from somebody among the stadium-construction team.

Back to the present…such a marvelous place, Oracle, night or day—except for (that big-time flaw) the seagulls that swoop and swarm during late innings. No one quite understands how the birds understand when the game is wrapping up. Scraps of food, the absence of humans, all contribute. They’re smart birds!

It’s said the proliferation of seagulls, all unplanned and (if difficult to believe) unanticipated by the stadium architects (Stoneham returns), has to do with newer-ecological city-disposal ordinances and the quick burial of food-waste. Thus, the birds arrive elsewhere (i.e., the Oracle bleachers) for late-game nourishment.

There’s been a reciprocating-issue in neighboring Oakland for similar reasons: its Athletics, a franchise that, for many additional reasons, raw-sewage leaks and the existence of Oracle among them, has threatened to move for years; and will, officials say, to Las Vegas starting 2028.

Again ironically, the old Polo Grounds in upper Harlem, where the Giants played till 1957, was a pigeons’ paradise. Fans in the grandstands, certainly by the time the Polo Grounds was home to the New York Mets in 1962, wore newspaper-hats to avoid what T. S. Eliot calls “their liquid siftings.”

A skein. A gaggle. Even human-fans have been flocking to this great stadium….Really no bird lover, I (Evander): If I were on hand at Oracle, after the seventh-inning stretch, I’d be Alfred Hitchcock-terrified.

A strange bird the pelican,
His beak can hold more than his belly can:
I don’t know how the hell he can.

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Honoring Jackie Robinson on His 100th Birthday

Posted on January 31, 2019 by rightoffthebatbook

Wrong sport? a natural athlete; the one and only

“Back in the days when integration wasn’t fashionable, he underwent the trauma and the humiliation and the loneliness which come with being a pilgrim walking the lonesome byways toward the high road of Freedom. He was a sit-inner before the sit-ins, a freedom rider before the Freedom Rides.” These, the words of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

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Good-bye, Mel

Posted on January 15, 2019 by rightoffthebatbook

A class act

One of my (Evander) heroes, Mel Stottlemyre, is gone. With a 2.97 ERA and possessor of one of the great sinker balls, Mel was headed for the Baseball Hall of Fame if not for shoulder problems. I remember his first game vividly, a classically hot August day-game in 1964. Mickey Mantle hit what might be his longest home run in Yankee Stadium, over the distant center-field wall. Mel would win nine games his first season and be called on to start two games in the World Series: to repeat, as a rookie. He would see two sons in the major leagues and become one of the outstanding pitching coaches for both the Mets and Yankees. R.I.P.

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Baseball and Pythagoras; or, Finger Painting the Word Picture by Numbers

Posted on November 10, 2018 by rightoffthebatbook

Journeyman as Most Valuable Player. The unexpected: What did you expect? (And you can bet on it!)

The Right off the Bat (ROTB) project was angled toward the hallowed halls of Cooperstown this week. Since we have rescheduled for 2019 or probably into the early 2020s (Then the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by endemic, would enter the picture: Who knew?) and obviously past those years, permit me (Evander), in this our 601st blog and with little else to do but count them, to consider baseball-by-the-numbers and its impact on a sport, on the major-league level, which is in revenue-and-national-interest decline if regular-season attendance and World Series-viewership figures are to be believed. (Preceding’s a classic run-on-sentence. Yet to the point, attendance fell by more than three million: below seventy million for the first time since 2003. Already-dismal Series ratings plummeted 23 percent from 2017.)

Before considering this jaw-dropping numeric Decline of the West (or Western Divisions), here on numbers….

The earliest king of figures in space (geometry) and time (music), Pythagoras of ancient Greece and Egypt, defined numbers in three ways: quantitative (counting things), mathematical (abstract calculations), and qualitative (number as symbol: the refined-differentiating aspect of each number).

But aren’t numbers informing an orderly cosmos exclusive markers of the predetermined? The predictable? The fatalistic? The zzzzzz? Is reality solely expressible in rational (“ratio”) units? Whence lieth the elements of Mystery? Shakescenian (apologies to pamphleteer/playwright Robert Greene) Drama?

None exists in a platonic, Newtonian, or pantheistic (cf. Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus) cosmos; nor, Does God play dice with the universe? Hello!

So what does any of this have to do with baseball? It is still a most-day-in-day-out-lifelike sport of the unpredictable and “intangibles,” right? The miraculous? We don’t know who will win or lose, correct? Or do we? Was the 2018 postseason the most predictable in memory? Yes, yes, and yes; and the trend is clearly turning off the fans.

Since the dawning of Bill James, baseball, especially professional baseball, has been dominated by increasingly head-spinning analytics. James, whose real value to all us overzealous fans has been the creation of a platform-of-comparison for professional players’ talents from different eras, begot Michael Lewis and Moneyball. Organizations hired younger, faster, “scientificker” general managers and managers who’d spend hours, in mathematical-statistical stress and strain, crunching the numbers. (A colorful debater and Shakespeare scholar, the late Irvin Leigh Matus, earlier drew keen conclusions from numeric observations. ROTB is always to quick-pitch these [ir]relevant-literary references.)

These can go rogue-sophisticated. ROTB surveyed some of this trendy modulation 5 years ago in (Im)probabilities, a genially impudent and mostly subjective look at objective probability. A portion from that blog on stats, with some latest developments in jargon additional, will leave all but the most spectral-eyed, angle-of-incidence seamheads to number their days among their favorite pastime:

Twenty-first-century major-league talent is now regularly monitored via Statcast (essentially, a refinement of traditional Sabermetrics/analytics/metrics as is the ultra-complex BP: analyses of teams) with such generally accepted as well as esoteric stats as WAR (wins above replacement, sometimes rendered WARP, and a well-known stat today as are bWAR and rWAR); secondary average; ERA+; xFIP; holds (an unofficial stat related to pitching in relief); FIELDf/x and Reaction Analysis (respectively measuring a player’s defensive value and how much ground is covered, as well as how quickly); DRS, UZR, and ISO (Isolated Power, derived by subtracting batting average from slugging percentage); BACON Batting Average on Contact, which is BABIP but with home runs included, the formula being H/(AB-K+SF); Contact Rate; Hard-hit Rate; Barrel Rate; Chase Rate (Chase %); pull-side power (Pull %); Launch Angle and Exit Velocity (both commonplace and likewise self-explanatory); batting runs above average/fielding runs above average/baserunning runs above average (they “/” more or less self-explanatory); less-commonplace but, again, self-explanatory find barrel-percentage and squared-up rate (or “%”); line-drive rate and contact rate (once more self-explanatory); SR (spin rate; almost certainly with no long-banned Spider Tack to increase it); swing-path; swing-and-miss percentage; ground-ball percentage; game score (a 100 for pitching is phenomenal, but higher is possible); vertical-approach angle (VAA); Skill-interactive Earned Run Average (SIERA); outs above average (OAA); Pitching+; Stuff+; Location+; wRC+ (Weighted Runs Created Plus: a stadium [as is ERA+]- and league-adjusted power measurement); PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) projections; JAWS developed by someone named Jaffe to determine extended-value excellence and Cooperstown worthiness; UBR (Ultimate Base Running: self-explanatory); Scoring Efficiency (SE); and a mound of others, even a little older, like one of the first of the new-breed stats WHIP (walks-hits-innings-pitched: the lower, and even below “1,” the better: another older ueber-stat) or DIPS (defense-independent-pitching-statistics); BAbip and FB% (fastball percentage); EVA (exit-velocity against); pitch tunneling (more a concept); or, for offense and often-encountered, OPS and OPS +, which combine on-base-and-slugging percentages (with the “+” adding a bit for good measure); QS (quality start) and Tough Losses. For improving pitching-performance the Sabermetric way, there’s Driveline Baseball.

Beyond attendance (“I must be in the front row!”), think I’m exaggerating? Amid all the numbers, the records’ keeping, once more permettez-moi to disclose that 2018 featured more MLB strikeouts than hits. Trends continued till many rules were changed in 2023, further modified in 2024.

Did you know that for the first time ever, in 2018, 8 teams lost 95 games? In contrast three won 100, and the Boston Red Sox set a franchise-hallowing record of 108. We have not seen this degree of quality-polarization, haves/havenots, since the 1950s, when perhaps three or four clubs dominated a decade and attendance fell off the (multiplication) table.

It all became too…probable and predictable.

Two of the three clubs that spent the largest sum in payroll, needless to say, were the Red Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers.

There’s another number, which is music to no one’s ears, and it involves the measurement of time: A hyperedumacated Baby Boom Generation, which supported baseball for decades, is passing. Youngsters largely find baseball a droning irrelevance. There are a number of reasons for this and out of this unfortunate truth.

Some at the top obviously hold sports gaming or the fantasy service DraftKing would be the way out of predictability, the ho-hum predetermination (humankind’s eternal concept, again: freewill; or, Does God play dice with the universe?). This reality and thrill of gambling would be injected: no one fathoms what would happen next. Yet we do know that professional baseball and gambling have a long (and rich) history of being, well, at odds. Fans trust they are seeing results at the same time the players do. We soon “celebrate,” if any word could be right, “acknowledge” maybe (?), the centennial-conspiracy of the Chicago Black Sox Scandal. (This anniversary would’ve coincided with our pilgrimage to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.)

Other wet-blankets maintain, perhaps correctly, that analytics may be the end of Hot Stove League leverage among even elite-level free agents. The numbers don’t lie. Baseball is an ever-more data-driven endeavor. There may be a logic  behind long-term-contracts negotiating-collusion among owners. Analytics show certain indubitable patterns with respect to players’ fall-off in production. That age is 32. We won’t be seeing the Joe Nuxhalls or Bob Fellers anymore. Only the NBA signs teens. (The baseball players’ union ought to examine its CBA with respect to when a player becomes eligible for full free agency. It’s all time and numbers, yes?)

MLB, as always (from ongoing discussions between Martin and me), could take lessons in the entertainment-department (Did you know Shakespeare [that name again!] used-an-unusual-number-of-hyphens as proved by downloading his phraseology? Just countin’ and sayin’.) from the cricket-world: successes and cautionary-tales. To counter the time-defying universe of test cricket, T20 was hatched in the early 2000s. The more-fluid defensive positioning in cricket came way ahead of analytics-bred defensive shifts. (Tho there are negative whispers, to put the shift into the same category as the old pre-3-point-play-zone defense of basketball. In fact, that’s what would happen in 2023.)

Note: International cricket has had its recent share of gambling-related woes. So has baseball in 2024 involving a Japanese personal-translator.

Of course, MLB could always juice the ball. The so-called dead-ball era ended a hundred seasons ago next year with that Chicago Black Sox Scandal.

The stats, along with the times, were a lot simpler then. “Hit ’em where they ain’t!”

I’ll say it: Baseball is clearly in danger of becoming an old exercise in paint-by-number. Henry Chadwick, the stickler of Beadle’s Dime Base-ball Player, turns over in his grave.

Whence goeth the fun?

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Ripeness Is All

Posted on August 8, 2018 by rightoffthebatbook

Jimmy Anderson offers a few words of advice.

Relentlessly, the English medium-fast bowler James Anderson is climbing the list of all-time wicket takers (in Test cricket). At the time of this writing, he’s placed fifth (with 544), a mere 19 wickets below the great Australian quick Glenn McGrath, and in sight of becoming the fast bowler who’s taken the most Test wickets. What’s more, Anderson’s body shows no signs of breaking down or his heart of losing interest, in spite of the fact that he just turned thirty-six  and has been playing international cricket since 2003.

In fact, although the pace at which Anderson delivers the ball has slowed to the low- to mid-eighties (m.p.h.), he not only keeps on taking wickets, but keeps on improving. One lingering asterisk over his greatest-of-all-time status has been the number of runs he’s conceded per wickets taken. Anderson’s career got off to a very rocky start. Between his debut against Zimbabwe fifteen years ago and the last day of 2009, his average was an unremarkable wicket every 34.65 runs conceded—a consequence of tinkering with his action that caused him to slump in form and confidence. Between 2010 and today, however, his average has been a world-class 24.33 runs per wicket—an improvement of a full ten runs per wicket. The result is that Anderson is not only the most durable, reliable, and successful of England’s Test bowlers, but (with an aggregate average of 27.19) at the heavily policed border of unquestionable GOAT territory.

Anderson’s continued improvement is not only a testimony to his extraordinary fitness, intense enjoyment of the game, and fine cricketing brain, but also to the elegant and efficient mechanics of his bowling action and his remarkable control over the ball as it leaves his hand. Able to swing the ball both ways, he is now no longer reliant on England’s cloud-cover and cool temperatures to make the ball do enough through the air or off the pitch to fool the batsman—although he still remains more successful in English conditions. His best-ever figures (7 wickets for 42 runs) came last year (beating out his 7–43 of 2008). Not only did he average a miserly 17.58 runs per wicket in 2017, but he allayed the skeptics during the dismal England tour of Australia in 2017–18, when he was his team’s most successful bowler in harsh conditions. He is now a man for all pitches and climates, maintaining tight discipline over the line and length of his deliveries, and making scoring runs off him difficult.

The three bowlers above McGrath in the list—Anil Kumble (619 wickets), Shane Warne (708), and Muttiah Muralitharan (800)—were all spinners of the ball, an art and science with less wear-and-tear on the body than for those who run up to the wicket, ball after ball after ball. The spinners’ records, each a testament to their greatness, are unlikely to be beaten, although Kumble and Muralitharan were thirty-eight when they played their last Tests. It’s, therefore, conceivable that Anderson could play for another two years, and, if he maintains his current trajectory, would end up with an astonishing 626 wickets. Given England’s ongoing trouble with finding a frontline seam bowler to replace him, and Anderson’s ever-ripening skills, it’s not out of the question that he could take more wickets, even more rapidly, and go on even longer. Either way, it’s hard to imagine another fast bowler will ever catch him.

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The Thousandth Test

Posted on August 7, 2018 by rightoffthebatbook
IPL Fireworks

It’s all cricket!

On March 15 1877, Charles Bannerman and Nat Thomson strode out to open the batting for Australia at Melbourne against an England team, in what is generally acknowledged to be the first “Test” match—a cricket game of two innings each between nations. Over the course of four days, slightly more than 20,000 spectators saw Bannerman score the first century (over a hundred runs in an innings) and witnessed a couple of records that have still not been broken: Englishman James Southerton remains, at 49 years old, the oldest person to make his Test debut; Bannerman scored almost 70 percent of his side’s runs as they beat England by 45 runs.

On August 1, 2018, Alastair Cook and Keaton Jennings walked out to open the batting for England at Edgbaston, in Birmingham, England, against a team from India in the thousandth Test match that England has played. This match, which also lasted four days and saw England eke out a victory by 31 runs against the best team in the world, was watched by 75,716 people at the ground and millions (mainly in India) on television.

Needless to say the world has changed a great deal for England between the first and thousandth Test match. A game that began as an aristocratic, private pursuit morphed into a public spectacle; the amateur pastime changed into a professional pursuit; and a sport defined by white privilege became a means by which members of the territories of the British Empire could beat their colonial overlords (literally) at their own game and assert their independence. The center of gravity has also shifted: from the hundreds of thousands of fans in England and Australia to the more than a billion fans worldwide; from a game controlled by white men to one played by rainbow nations of men and women from Barbados to Colombo, Hong Kong to Cape Town; and from a leisurely occupation over several days to the fast-paced, televised spectacle of T20 competitions, in which a match is done and dusted in about four hours.

Amid the financial flood of endorsement packages, TV rights, and multimillionaire superstars playing for franchises around the world, Test cricket finds itself increasingly marooned. The thousandth Test match was played before an appreciative and substantial crowd, but many Test matches not featuring India, England, or Australia (the three most well-financed cricketing nations) are played in virtually empty stadia. People have jobs to do, the tickets are too expensive, and the fact that one might show up to watch a day’s cricket and not see a result is unsatisfactory to most contemporary fans. Cricket authorities are tinkering with the format (introducing day/night games, considering four-day-only matches, proposing a world championship) but it’s hard to argue with the all-round family oriented entertainment value of limited-overs cricket.

The irony is that Test matches remain the yardstick by which international crickets measure their greatness. It’s called Test cricket because it remains the ultimate challenge for a cricketer: the discipline, concentration, stamina, skill level, and tactical nous are—so cricketers say—an order of magnitude above that of the other forms. When England captain, Joe Root, and Indian captain, Virat Kohli, walked off the pitch following the match at Edgbaston, they both acknowledged that the excitement and tension, the seesawing of advantage throughout the three days and one session of play, and the ebb and flow of performances from different members of the two elevens, had been a great advertisement for the format.

It goes without saying that no one knows what the future for Test cricket will be, although prognostications are grim. However, it’s doubtful any player in the first Test match (played on the first day in front of a “crowd” of 4,500) could have imagined their sport would ultimately engage more than one-seventh of the world’s population. Right now, it’s hard to believe that England will play another hundred Test matches, let alone another thousand. And if they do, perhaps those games will be as rare and select as that initial match in 1877.

Posted in Australia, Cricket, England, India, One-Day Cricket, Stadiums, T20 Cricket, Test Cricket | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Tab, Joe, Joe, and Joe

Posted on July 21, 2018 by rightoffthebatbook

The original Mike Trout: Joe Hardy played by the late Tab Hunter

The synchronicity of nostalgia. Events that rhyme in time. A circling of the sun. The revolution of the cold-blooded moon. Fantasy and fact orbit one another!

It is 60 years ago today, July 21, 2018, that “Joe Boyd, a middle-aged real estate salesman, met the man who was to change the course of his life and, indirectly, the standings of the American League.” It is also 13 days since the death of Tab Hunter, who plays Joe Hardy in Damn Yankees, a musical based on the novel from which the quote is taken. It is one of Hunter’s signature roles.

The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant was published by W. W. Norton & Co. in 1954. That was one year the New York Yankees did not win the pennant.

Author Douglas Wallop, whose surname, according to family legend, was earned by ancestors for what they did to the Normans at the Battle of Hastings, was peering even further ahead for Yankees’s failure…to 1958, when the truly cataclysmic would occur: the lowly Washington Senators (several times removed from the present-day Nationals, definitely not patsies) would take a league championship from the Yankees.

(The word pennant is rarely evoked these days. In real life, the 1958 Yankees stormed back to retake the World Series from the Milwaukee Braves.)

The movie-musical and the novel from which it derives are fresh and entertaining. Wallop’s influences were several, real-life and fictional: the burgeoning Adonis-myth of Mickey Mantle (in My Favorite Summer 1956: “I was never much for plays. People said the author patterned this Joe Hardy after me. I don’t know if that’s true.  Another thing I don’t know is why the club would want us to see a play where the Yankees lose the Pennant.”); the sizzling and (ultimately) doomed relationship of Joe DiMaggio (who, 77 years and 3 days ago at this writing, embarked on a less-famous 16-game batting streak, thus to hit in 72 out of 73 games) and Marilyn Monroe; plus a nocturnal-cynical narrative of bad karma and redemption called The Natural (1952), which itself would be adapted as a 1984 film.

I have no idea if Tab Hunter is routinely compared to Robert Redford, who stars in The Natural: respectively, leading men in much-different times. Hunter’s death, along with others of a generation, represents a closing of the Hollywood studio-system mind.

Below, Ray Walston, the Yankees #1 fan, muses on the bad-old days.

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Prospect Pipeline

Posted on March 7, 2018 by rightoffthebatbook

As the 2018 MLB season dawns and hope springs eternal, it precedes the draft by nine weeks (June 4 to 6). Months before that and earlier in blooming careers, Perfect Game, once a term solely relating to pitchers mowing down 27 (or more) straight hitters, is the late-September go-to source/showcase for/of talent. Held in Jupiter, Fla., PG brings prodigious high-schoolers to the attention of college programs as well as to the pros. Since 2003, David Rawnsley, tho he may not be a household name among even more-than-casual baseball fans (he’d be known locally for his 1990s stint with the Astros), is vp over 60 full-time PG staff and hundreds of part-timers. (Baseball America is another well-accepted source of talent-rating as is Prospect Watch, among players closer to MLB-level.)

The sort that they look at: 2017 high-school prospect Jake Eder. The setting is jetBlue Park.

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