04 May 2009, by Eric
Say yes to pitcher Dave Stieb and you can transform his legacy.
Dave Stieb, of the Toronto Blue Jays, is one of the thousands of ex-big leaguers waiting for a sponsor. His page is newly available and for just 18 cents a day, you can give him a chance to escape Baseball Reference anonymity by providing his page with a clever anecdote, fond memory or completely unrelated advertisement.
Player Report:
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Dave Stieb was a very effective pitcher in the 1980s. Besides an unfortunate mullet/mustache combo (forgivable for pitchers of his era and any person who has ever lived in Canada), Stieb has no obvious physical or mental disabilities. In fact, he averaged 230 innings over a 162 game season throughout a 16 year career! He also is the namesake of a very detailed but apparently-too-thrifty-to-sponsor-its-idol Blue Jays Blog, Tao Of Stieb. And don’t let the fact that Dave is tied with Frank Tanana and Kid Nichols for 35th all time in hit batsman fool you into thinking he’s a bad guy -- Dave Stieb is a born-again Christian! Support from a fan like you might remind people outside of the greater Ontario region how good this six-time All Star, the only pitcher ever honored on the Toronto Blue Jay Level Of Excellence, really was.
Some fun facts about Dave:
-Dave is the subject of a really nauseating pop-punk song by a band called Sewing With Nancie!
-Dave had no-hitters broken up with 2 outs in the 9th in consecutive 1988 starts. But in 1990, he finally got one.
-Dave is in the Baseball Think Factory Hall of Merit
-In his one season on the Hall of Fame ballot, Dave received just 7 votes. Ridiculous!
Click here to sponsor Dave Stieb.
28 Apr 2009, by Eric
Short little poem this week by Hart Seely and a link to a website from which it came: Bardball, whose mission is "reviving the art of baseball doggerel."
Anthony Claggett,
Your fastball, they flag it.
It floats like a maggot,
They wait there and tag it.
Throw harder, or bag it.
Anthony Claggett.
Anthony Claggett,
We’ll rip you in agate,
Your body, we’ll drag it.
Meet quim, you best shag it.
Or, otherwise, bag it.
Anthony Claggett.
Take the time to explore Bardball, it's worth more than just a passing look. Seely is worth more than just a passing look too --he's responsible for the fantastic Poetry of Sarah Palin piece from Slate last election season.
24 Apr 2009, by Eric
Great tune from a band of fiddle and accordion playing/soulish/bobby d and the band-esque rockers who actually grew up near Cooperstown. No cheesy John Fogerty stuff or annoying overdone sound effects of a roaring crowd; just a nice acoustic ballad about baseball. The verses, taken by themselves, are almost like little haikus. Here's a smattering:
Oh Ty Cobb, you’re dead and gone.
You had a game like a war machine.
And through the great Hall of Fame, you wandered.
Tigers Field. A girl in heels.
She had a face like a magazine.
And through the long metal stands she wandered.
The ball soars. And the crowd roars.
And the scoreboard sweetly hums.
And tomorrow you’ll surely know who’s won.
I’m on first and you’re on third.
And the wolves are all between.
And everyone’s sure that the game is over.
The catcher’s hard, He’s mean and hard.
And he nips at the batter’s heels.
And everyone’s sure that the game is over.
The Felice Brothers- Cooperstown
If you dig it, the Felice Brothers' new album, Yonder Is The Clock, is worth a spin. Especially for the more upbeat tracks.
22 Apr 2009, by Eric
There’s something beautiful and perfect and symmetrical about a shutout. The line of zeroes on the scoreboard that feels like it could go on forever. The inevitable victory that comes when the zeroes do stop. It’s perfection embodied in the most practical sense – guaranteed victory. No hitters and perfect games are shiny, but underneath the veneer of individual glory, the end result is no different from that of the shutout. Unadulterated Triumph.
But this post is not about the perfect and symmetrical. It’s about the substantially flawed and the barely sensible; baseball and life and where they converge and everything wonderful and fucked up about that place. Not just shutouts with their big-T Triumph, but regular, boring, adulterated triumph. There is a more human glory, a blemished glory to be found in the complete games that aren’t shutouts. But why, if less electric, are these performances more dynamic? And where have they gone?
Last season, CC Sabathia threw ten complete games, becoming the first pitcher to reach double digits since 2002. Five of those were shutouts. In 1976, Randy Jones led all big league pitchers with 25 complete games. It was a mule-like, Cy Young Winning, 300-inning monstrosity of a season. In it, Jones threw 5 shutouts.
The decline of the complete game is not a new story. It has arrived in tandem with the much ballyhooed rise of the bullpen. There were barely closers when Randy Jones was pitching, and there sure as hell weren’t assigned setup men and lefty specialists. Baseball Reference makes this all very easy to track. In 1976, 27% of all starts resulted in complete games and 26% of those complete games were also shutouts. In 2008, just 2.5% of starts resulted in complete games, and 40% of those were also shutouts.
From a more nuanced perspective, this information is practically irrelevant. Statisticians rightfully don’t value a 9-inning, 3 earned run performance as highly as a 7-inning, 0 earned run performance. But one can’t help but wonder why complete games have fallen so drastically, and shutouts (as a percentage of those complete games) have increased. Consider the following chart, comparing the years 1973-82 to the years 1999-2008. I chose to start in 1973 because it was the first year of the Designated Hitter.
And those numbers don’t even take expansion into account.
My suspicion is that managers are much less likely to yank pitchers working on shutouts than pitchers who aren’t. This might seem obvious; any fool would know not to pull a guy who isn’t giving up runs . But what of the pitcher who has thrown 7 innings and allowed just 1 or 2, with a lowish pitch count. He is obviously effective. But I think the runs on the board trigger something subconscious in the manager. I think, with no hard data to prove this (correlation does not equal causation), that pitchers throwing shutouts are often left in a bit too long, and pitchers who aren’t are often pulled a bit early.
Wait a sec. Don’t the strict pitch counts we have in modern baseball completely unwind this argument? Maybe a little bit. But in the same sense that to yank a pitcher working on a no-hitter is unheard of, I’d bet that a shutout gives managers pause before taking that walk to the mound. Or at the very least, on a subconscious level, it shifts the way they view a performance.
The reason I said all that, was to give this context: I miss the flawed complete game. I miss it even though I was never really alive to watch it in its prime. I miss it even though I grew up with fond memories of Todd Worrell and came of age with Eric Gagne. Maybe I’ve read one too many stories about tough 1950s pitchers battling their way through trouble. But I love to watch a pitcher load the bases with nobody out, take a long walk around the mound, tug at his cap, breathe deep, stare up at the stars, then promptly strike out the side. I love 9 IP, 3 ER, 6 Ks, 7 Hs, 4 BBs. That, to me, is a real quality start.
That start has an essence of America that the shutout doesn’t. Start the job and you damn well finish it no matter how bad things get. Imperfections be damned. It’s a rough road, but you either conquer it or go down in the fight. Tom Joad in California. Ahab spotting Moby Dick. Harvey Haddix taking a perfect game into the 13th and in a flash, losing on an error, an intentional walk, and a Joe Adcock double.
Baseball is nothing like life. But these flawed complete games are a lot like life. Things may not end well, but we get to the end. Our innings may not last as long as we’d like, but we play all 9. No clock, no pitch count, barely anything seems to be under our control at all. Sometimes we walk the bases loaded and sneak out of it; sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we throw 0-2 fastballs head-high and our personal Vladmir Guerreros hit them 450 feet. Sometimes we can put our Vladmir Guerreros to rest on a half-hearted hanging curve. Nobody lives a 27 up and 27 down life. Not even the guys on the real field.
If shutouts are the Beatles than complete games are the Stones: dirty and rough around the edges; less expert, but so much more substantive. The kind of game where pitching mounds are to be climbed, where the pouring sweat isn’t just from exhaustion, where fathers are proud of their sons not just for their ability, but for their resilience and work ethic. I mean the kind of game that ends not merely in glory, but in something more personal: Satisfaction.
(Thanks to Scott for data help. There's a bunch more interesting stuff about complete games that I might get into these next few days.)