dblplay1212 for better or worse I know you're a Yankees guy, was watching 61* for the first time in years (great movie) and Elston Howard mentioned Mantle went to the bus to eat dinner with him when some asshole in St Pete during spring training wouldn't let Howard in the restaurant. Is the gist of the story that Mantle wasn't a racist true?
Honestly not sure. Never really read much either way. I know him and Howard were good friends but don't know much past that.
Fair enough, I assume they wouldn't put that in if he'd had any racist tendencies. He obviously had his demons but good to see, especially for his time. Fast-forwarded to the exchange in the movie.
Yea I've probably watched that movie 200 times. Shortly after it came out on DVD, I was dead broke and couldn't afford cable. I had that and Field of Dreams so I just played them over and over to have sound in my apartment. Went to sleep to it every night. Haven't watched it in probably 10 years though. Might ha e movie night tomorrow night now.
Goddamnit I'm too old for this shit, I remember watching it with my buddy at my house when it premiered on HBO after some middle school party. It's a legit very good sports movie which is relatively rare especially for something that didn't get released in theatres.
It really is. HBO did a good job. The DVD had a second version where the director talked over the film. They used the old Tigers Stadium iirc. I watched that version when I needed something new lol. Another good HBO one from around that time was Rebound, about Earl Manigault. If you can find it, watch it. Don Cheadle was the lead.
Yep it was Tigers Stadium. Not to get non-baseball related but they also made the best John Gotti movie with Armand Assante for a fraction of the money compared to dumbass studios. It's really tough to imagine the tension those guys were under when Ruth was basically the GOAT and people had nothing else to follow nationally except the home run chase.
I got to meet Mantle once in the early 1990’s about two years before he died. Steinbrenner owned the hotel where I waited tables and used it as his base when the Yankees had their AAA team in Columbus. Steinbrenner had him in town for a charity event. Really nice guy, very unassuming for being “the” guy everyone wanted to see at the event.
Especially with all the PED guys not getting into the hall of fame, we should probably get Roger Maris in there.
Ehh idk he had like 3 good seasons. Obviously 61 was unreal but it's tough to put him in on one season.
I agree he probably didn’t do enough over his career to get in. Too many injuries and just doesn’t have the career stats. Won 2 MVPs and still holds the non-PED home run record though.
I’m working on an all-time MLB roster spreadsheet and wanted to share what I have so far. I dumped a ton of FanGraphs stats into another spreadsheet to generate ratings for each player. Batters’ ratings are based on WAR and pitchers’ are based on ERA-, FIP-, K/9+, BB/9+, and HR/9+. Batters ratings’ are based on their position, so a player with a 1.00 rating means they have the highest rating at their position, and every other player’s rating is a percentage of the position leader’s rating (so right now it isn’t good for comparing players across positions, but I can change that easily if y’all would prefer it that way). Each player is only assigned to one team, usually the team they accumulated the most WAR with. Batters’ positions are just whichever position they played the most over their career. This sometimes causes players to show up on a team at a position they didn’t play primarily for that team (see A-Rod with NYY), so sorry for that confusion. I’m also not anywhere near done with assigning players to teams, but the best players have been covered, at least. Let me know what you guys think, especially if you have any suggestions for changes to my methodology.
Salvy being 3rd best Royals catcher is asinine. And I like Mac too but I would rather have Salvy than any catcher on the planet. I do like the Joe Randa love though, that guy was ridiculously underrated.
Also Greinke is the most entertaining pitcher since Nolan Ryan, like to see that too. Wade Davis gets the shaft on these rankings too. At his peak, he was the best reliever since Rivera and it’s not close.
Most home runs in the 1970’s than any other player. He played in Forbes before 1971, which was 460 to center. Probably wasted at least 100 home runs there.
RIP, Mr. Perez. Had a few good seasons in the early 2000s for the Dodgers, including one All-Star campaign in 2002. Personal anecdote I always think of when I see his name: I collected baseball cards as a kid, and around 2003 I was really looking for an Odalis Perez card, probably since it was coming off his sole All-Star season in 2002. At the same time, my dad coached my youth baseball team (we were all around eight years old in 2003), and one practice he asked us all who our favorite pitcher was. Some kids said Pedro, others Maddux, Rivera, etc. When he got to me, I said Odalis Perez. He made me run a lap.
I have a baseball at home signed by the 1982 Orioles. It has Weaver, Eddie Murray, Jim Palmer and Ripken. One of my friends had an uncle who was a friend of an Oriole on that team. His uncle, dad, and him went to a game and got it signed when he was like 8. He had a bad relationship with his dad, and at 14 brought the ball to a wiggle ball game like he was going to play baseball with it. I gave him $5 for it. I periodically offer to give it back, and he refuses, so I keep it.
Another cool picture. Yankees did Casey dirty, though. “I’ll never make the mistake of being 70 again.” —Casey Stengel
Jim Kaat won 16 straight Golden Glove Awards from 1962-1977, in both the AL and NL, and used the same glove for 15 seasons.
Hate to just continually post videos from the same Twitter account itt, but I mean it's such a good follow.
Ranking the Best Outfield Arms since 1915 I’ve just concluded a big project on outfield arms using advanced fielding stats from Baseball-Reference that took several days to complete. I wanted to rate outfield arms based on two main things: 1) how many runners tried to advance when the given outfielder had the ball 2) how often the outfielder was able to throw out runners attempting to advance To gauge outfield arms with this in mind, I used three main stats: 1) runner advances (runner gains an extra base) 2) runner holds (runner did not advance) 3) runner kills (runner thrown out on advance attempt) I totaled these stats for every MLB outfielder since 1915 for five types of plays: 1) a single with a runner on 1st 2) a single with a runner on 2nd 3) a double with a runner on 1st 4) a fly out with a runner on 3rd and < 2 outs 5) a fly out with a runner on 2nd and < 2 outs I then generated a runner advanced %, runner held %, and runner kill % for each player’s individual season and divided those by the league average to get plus/minus stats (to tell me how above or below average that player was each year in each category). I was then able to create career runner advance, runner hold, and runner kill stats for each player. Since I want to use this information to rank outfield arms, I also want to emphasize a player’s peak, so that a player who was still playing in their later years doesn’t have their career numbers penalized for longevity. To do so, I created a peak season rating, which takes the average of their ten best eligible seasons (minimum of 100 plays from the previous 5 categories) and swaps their career average for any of those ten seasons which rated below their career average. I did this in three separate spreadsheets, one for each position, but put the results together in this linked spreadsheet. I then created overall career and peak runner advance, runner hold, and runner kill ratings for each player that combined their ratings from LF, CF, and RF. What you see on the first sheet is a ranking of every outfielder based on their scores in the three arm stats, with a minimum of 500 career plays (the 5 categories previously mentioned). Let me know what you think, and especially any interesting observations (like players ranked higher or lower than expected). I for one was surprised to see Bo Jackson and Ichiro Suzuki’s rankings, as their reputations would’ve led me to believe they’d be in the top 15 or so. I was also surprised to see how high the likes of Juan Lagares and Leonys Martin were. If you read all of this, thank you for taking time out of your day to peruse my project. It took a lot of work and I hope it can shed some light on outfield arms from throughout baseball history.
As a kid, I remember Dave Parker gunning out guys from the warning track at Three Rivers Stadium. I had a chance to play a charity softball game there years later right before they tore it down. Hit me how incredibly far a distance it was to throw from the warning track to home plate.
This went over my head in the year 2000, but I never knew how big of an asshole that Joe DiMaggio was. I only realized that during my rewatch of *61 when Whitey Ford was talking all of the shit about him. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/oct/20/books.booksnews
Because I'm watching said movie, I decided to look up Bobby Richardson's stats. This man was a 5x All-Star and even got 2nd in MVP voting in 1962. Suuuper mediocre player with a career bWAR of 8.1 over 12 seasons.