Baseball 2016

[Eddie Teach]

Right, I just meant he'd root for NY teams. And yes, I've forgotten the 1908 series. 

[derspiess]

Taft was our first baseball president anyway.

[The Minsky Moment]

Good god fahdiz needs to act like Cubs have won something before...

Well...they haven't.

How soon we forget the back to back championships of 1907-1908.

The curse of Johnny Evers.

[Sophie Scholl]

Teddy had no home state pride, just like Benedict Arnold? 

I like the Buffalo Sabres!

[derspiess]

Okay I'll try to make this the last post about my kid in the baseball thread.  But I just had to share the following.

He had his first game Friday and his select 8u team lost to the select 9u team, as expected.  Team played great considering the circumstances.  Tommy went 0-1 with two walks-- the 9 year old pitchers were just throwing too hard for him to put the bat on the ball.  They brought him in as the second pitcher, and I felt bad because I had been coaching him pitching from a distance of 43 feet instead of the 46 feet distance that was used in this game.  At this age, 3 feet makes a huge difference.  Anyway, he struggled, walked in a couple runs, and just about any strike he pitched was put into play.  He was nervous, intimidated, and frustrated but he stuck it out through the inning.  I told him as tough as that experience was it would pay big dividends later on. 

So in his Saturday game on his regular team he got his first hit and played first base, which he likes. Then in the 6th (and final) inning they brought him in to pitch with his team up by a couple runs.  Whatever was going through his mind, he was dialed in.  He faced three batters and struck out all three.  I was practically giddy

 

[CountDeMoney]

Okay I'll try to make this the last post about my kid in the baseball thread.

Why bother, it's better than the Orioles. 

[Sophie Scholl]

I like their unis.   (Although I love the current "throwback" alternate ones they wear.  I'm also a devotee of the block C)

[jimmy olsen]

Good god fahdiz needs to act like Cubs have won something before...

Well...they haven't.

How soon we forget the back to back championships of 1907-1908.

There is literally no one left alive that can remember this.

[derspiess]

I like their unis.   (Although I love the current "throwback" alternate ones they wear.  I'm also a devotee of the block C)

Kind of surprised in this day & age that the Chief Wahoo logo is allowed on the kids' jerseys and hats.  But then again the local high school still has "Redskins" as their mascot, so I guess that's not a huge concern in our neighborhood.

[alfred russel]

Cool story/pictures derspiess.

[alfred russel]

Braves have a 3 game winning streak, the longest in the national league and the second longest in baseball after the twins.

I'm gearing up for the inevitable rematch of 1991--twins v. braves in the world series.

[sbr]

I thought this was pretty interesting.

This is the first couple of paragraphs of a 5 page article.  I figure anyone interested enough would follow the link, anyone not interested wouldn't bother to read everything I copy/pasted anyway.

http://imprimis.hillsdale.edu./who-was-ty-cobb-the-history-we-know-thats-wrong/

Who Was Ty Cobb? The History We Know That's Wrong


The following is adapted from a speech delivered at Hillsdale College on March 7, 2016, during a program on "Sports and Character" sponsored by the College's Center for Constructive Alternatives.

Ty Cobb was one of the greatest baseball players of all time and king of the so-called Deadball Era. He played in the major leagues—mostly for the Detroit Tigers but a bit for the Philadelphia Athletics—from 1905 to 1928, and was the first player ever voted into the Hall of Fame. His lifetime batting average of .366 is amazing, and has never been equaled.  But for all that, most Americans think of him first as an awful person—a racist and a low-down cheat who thought nothing of injuring his fellow players just to gain another base or score a run. Indeed, many think of him as a murderer. Ron Shelton, the director of the 1995 movie Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones in the title role, told me it was "well known" that Cobb had killed "as many as" three people.

It is easy to understand why this is the prevailing view. People have been told that Cobb was a bad man over and over, all of their lives. The repetition felt like evidence. It started soon after Cobb's death in 1961, with the publication of an article by a man named Al Stump, one of several articles and books he would write about Cobb. Among other things, Stump claimed that when children wrote to Cobb asking for an autographed picture, he steamed the stamps off the return envelopes and never wrote back. In another book—this one about Cobb's contemporary Tris Speaker—baseball historian Timothy Gay wrote (implausibly, if you think about it) that Cobb would pistol-whip any black person he saw on the sidewalk. And then there were the stories about how Cobb sharpened his spikes: before every game, numerous sources claim, he would hone his cleats with a file. In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson says that Cobb wasn't invited to the ghostly cornfield reunion of old-time ballplayers because "No one liked that son of a bitch." The line always gets a knowing laugh.

When I pitched my idea for a book on Cobb to Simon and Schuster, I was squarely in line with this way of thinking. I figured my task would be relatively easy. I would go back to the original source material—the newspaper accounts, documents, and letters that previous biographers had never really looked at. I would find fresh examples of Cobb being monstrous, blend them with the stories that Al Stump and others wrote, and come up with the first major Cobb book in more than 20 years. But when I started in on the nuts-and-bolts research with original sources—the kind of shoe-leather reporting I had learned working at Newsweek in its heyday—it didn't even take me ten minutes to find something that brought me up short.

[Eddie Teach]

A peach of a man. 

[derspiess]

sbr you're going to get blasted for posting something from Hillsdale.  That aside, there has been speculation that Cobb's main biography was basically a hit piece and either stretched the truth or made shit up completely.  I think it was last year something came out that called Stump into question even further.

[jimmy olsen]

sbr you're going to get blasted for posting something from Hillsdale. 

I don't know anything about them, what's up with them?