Baseball Trivia of Various Degrees of Significance

Major League Baseball has has tucked another season under its belt and we're headed into the postseason. This weekend the Wildcard Playoffs will eliminate four of the 16 teams in contention for the World Championship. The division playoff will follow and eventually the World Series. 

As I like to say, I've been a baseball fan since my infancy. My parents adorned my crib with four teddy bears, each named after the starting rotation for the then Cleveland Indians who are now the Cleveland Guardians. Three of my four teddy bears became Hall Of Famers. Cleveland had some great teams back then. 

So, to mark the moment... a little baseball trivia is on the menu.

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In 2019 the Washington Nationals won the World Series. Today, only three years later, they have the worst record in baseball. What happened?

What a surprise (for me) to learn that Ty Cobb was only second in most career triples. First place in that category was his teammate Sam Crawford, the only player with over 300 triples (309 total), a record that will likely never be broken.

To give you an idea of how much fear Barry Bonds generated in opposing pitchers, check out these stats. In 2004 he was intentionally walked 120 times, which is 25 more walks than the American League leader in walks. 

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That's nothing compared to this: In 2004 Bonds got on base more times than he had at-bats. Baseball is funny in that way. If you go to the plate and draw a walk, then it is not counted as an at-bat. 

In my first year of Babe Ruth League, for example, I struck out 50% of the time and walked 50% of the time. I hadn't hit my growth spurt yet, so even though I had been a Little League all star, I was not ready for the next level. And yet, based on my record that year my on-base percentage was .500 even though I never once hit the ball into play. My record: 15 walks, 15 strike outs. 

Barry Bonds did hit the ball in play, a lot. And he got on base a lot... in fact, he reached base more times (376) than he had at-bats (373). In addition to those 120 intentional walks he walked another 112 times (by not swinging at bad pitches), plus had 129 hits, was hit by a pitch 9 times and got on base via an error 6 times.

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In 1999 The Sporting News named Ty Cobb as #3 on their list of all-time greatest ballplayers. 

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Pitcher Mickey Lolich played for 16 years and never hit a home run in over 1,000 major league regular-season plate appearances, but in his first ever World Series at-bat in 1968 he homered off St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Nelson Briles. He stepped to the plate 452 times prior to his World Series homer, then another 565 after and failed to hit another.
(Source: Mike Lynch on Quora)

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April 23, 199: Fernando Tatis hit two grand slams in the same inning. I think the interesting thing is that the pitcher, Chan Ho Park, was still pitching when Tatis came to the plate again with the bases loaded. 

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In 1918, while Babe Ruth was with the Red Sox, he pinch hit in the tenth inning, a runner on base. Back in those days, the game would be over as soon as the winning run crossed the plate, so when Ruth hit a blast out of the park the game was over before he rounded the bases. His homer only counted as a hit, with a run batted in, and not a homer. 

I know that many people think of the Babe as a beefy, somewhat lumbering power hitter loping around the bases. Evidently he had more quickness and agility than we've imagined. Babe Ruth had 10 inside the park home runs in his career, four in 1923 alone!

This season, the big man Aaron Judge finally broke the American League single season home run record. Roger Maris did it '61 with 61. This past week Judge made it 62.

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In 1879, the Cincinnati Gazette wrote, "The baseball mania has run its course. It has no future as a professional endeavor." Maybe some day, but that day is not yet.

Important Dates in Baseball History -- July (For Those Who Are Missing Their Favorite Game)

These notes were assembled by the late Robert Lookup, a very special person whom my wife and I befriended for the last 10 years of his life.  Links to important April and May dates can be found at the end of this entertaining collection of baseball trivia.

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IMPORTANT DATES -- JULY

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Roberto Clemente, right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates

July 1, 1997
Tiger's Bobby Higginson homers in first inning against the Mets to become 23rd Major League player since 1900 to homer in four consecutive At Bats over two games.

(EdNote: I remember listening to a Pittsburgh Pirates game in which Roberto Clemente hit three home runs in his first three at bats, and being bummed with his fourth at bat was a long fly that caromed six inches from the top of the wall and he only got a double. The greatly respected Puerto Rican all star was my favorite player in the second half of the 60s.)

July 4, 1905
Ossie Schreckengost caught all 29 innings in a Double Header vs. the Red Sox, without shin guards.

July 5, 1993
Ricky Henderson of the A's opens both games of a Double Header with a Home Run to become the first player to do this in 60 years.

July 8, 1918
Babe Ruth hits a Home Run but loses it to the antiquated rule that an extra inning game can only be won by one run. (Previous to 1920 an extra inning home run was recorded as a single if a man was on base.)

Hall of Fame pitcher Cy Young

July 12, 1901
Cy Young of the Red Sox records his 300th win, besting the A's 5-3. (EdNote: His lifetime win-loss record was 511-315.)

July 13, 1963
Early Wynn records his 300th win, Cleveland besting the A's 7-4. (EdNote: Early Wynn was the name of one of my teddy bears, named after the Cleveland Indians starting rotation when I was born in September, 1952. The week before, my family went to see him pitch in Cleveland, in hopes that he would achieve this career milestone. I can still remember our box seats just to the right of the Indians dugout and watching him stand on the mound facing the plate.)

July 16, 1920
Babe Ruth hits 30th home run, breaking his record of 29. The Yankees beat the Browns 5-2. Ruth goes on to hit 54 home runs in 1920.

July 17, 1941
Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak of 56 games is stopped by Al Smith and Jim Bagby of Cleveland, in Cleveland.

July 17, 1990
Twins become the first team in Major League history to pull off two triple plays in one game. The Red Sox still manage a win, 1-0.

July 18, 1970
Willie Mays gets 3000th hit off Montreal Expos' Mike Wegener to become the first Giant to accomplish this feat. He is still the only Giant in this esteemed club.

July 18, 1987
Don Mattingly ties Dale Long's 31-year-old Major League record when he homers for the 8th straight game in a 7-2 loss. Ken Griffey Jr would later tie this record in 1993.

July 18, 1918
Frank Baker is last player to lose a home run to the antiquated rule that said extra inning games could only be won by one run. It was labeled a single.

Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach

July 19, 1927
Ty Cobb of the Philadelphia A's doubles for the 4000th hit of his career.

July 20, 1998
Brian Hunter of Detroit goes 0-13 in a 26 inning double header against the Yankees.

July 25, 1941
Lefty Grove wins 300th and last game, beating Cleveland 10-6.

July 30, 1980
Astro pitcher J R Richard has a stroke during a workout at the Astrodome. Doctors removed a blood clot behind his right collarbone.

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"On many summer day, I played baseball starting at 8 in the morning, running home at noon for a quick meal, and again with fielding and batting until it was too dark to see the ball."--Carl Sandburg

"Baseball suits the character of this democratic nation. Democracy is government by persuasion. That means it requires patience; that means it involves a lot of compromise. Democracy is the slow politics of the half-loaf. Baseball is the game of the long season where small incremental differences decide who wins and who loses particular games, series, seasons. In baseball, you know going to the ballpark that the chances are you may win, but you also may lose. There's no certainty, no given. You know when a season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time; the worst team is going to win a third of the time. The argument, over 162 games, is that middle third. So it's a game you can’t like if winning is everything. And democracy is that way, too."--George Will

Related Links
Historic Interview with Roberto Clemente
Important Dates in Major League Baseball for the Month of April
Important Dates in Major League Baseball for the Month of May
Important Dates in Major League Baseball for the Month of June

Important Dates in Major League Baseball for the Month of June

One of baseball's true greats, Ty Cobb

Good heavens, we should be rolling into the second week of the season, and what have we here? A COVID-19 global tsunami. This is the third "Important Dates" blog post in this series.

You can read Important Dates for April  and Important Dates for May or you can jump right into June after these warmup pitches...

"The baseball mania has run its course. It has no future as a professional endeavor"
--Cincinnati Gazette, 1879

"Nearly everyone's son wants to be a baseball player. Why not? What other profession could he choose where he can slide around in the dirt, never work when it rains and spit whenever he wants?"
--Erma Bombeck

"I grew up in central Illinois midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made an historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinals fans and grew up happy and liberal and I became a Cubs fan and grew up embittered and conservative."
--George Will

"Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off."
--Bill Veeck

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IMPORTANT DATES -- JUNE

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June 1, 1925
Lou Gehrig bats for PeeWee Wanninger in the eighth inning, replacing Wally Pipp at 1st base to start his streak of 2,130 consecutive games.

The Iron Man, Lou Gherig. 1933 Goudey baseball card.

June 3, 1932
Lou Gehrig becomes the first Major League player to hit four consecutive home runs in a game, giving the Yankees a 20-13 win over the A's.

June 3, 1932
John McGraw resigns as manager of the New York Giants

June 4, 1974
Darin Erstad was born.

June 8, 2001
Damion Easley, Detroit second baseman, hits for the cycle. First time a Detroit player has done this since July 28, 1993.

June 17, 1914
Sherwood Robert Magee hits a home run, but it is taken away from him by the antiqued rule that says an extra inning game can only be won by one run. Rule was changed in 1920.

June 24, 1955
Harmon Killebrew hits his first Major League home run off Billy Hoeft in Griffith Stadium. Tigers, however, beat the Nationals 18-7.

June 26, 1916
Cleveland wore numbers on their sleeves.

June 26, 1976
Rangers' Tobey Harrah, shortstop, plays a Double Header without handling a batted ball from the White Sox.

June 29, 1941
In a Double Header against the Nationals, Joe DiMaggio tied, and then broke, the American League record of hitting in 41 straight games. Batting 1 for 4 in the first and 1 for 5 in the second, he broke the record set by George Sisler in 1922.

June 29, 2001
Dave Burba of Cleveland gives up four home runs in one inning to Kansas City's Sweeney, Dye, Ibanez and Beltran.

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"Baseball can be summed up in one word — youneverknow."
--Joaquin Andujar

"You know what baseball is? It's playing cards, sleeping, watching TV. Dress. Batting practice. Fool around with the fans. Joke with teammates. Football is a little different. Before the game, everybody sits on the floor, quietly, thinking whose head they're going to take off."
--Bo Jackson

Trivia: Did you know Bob Dylan once recorded a song about a Major League pitching star? What was his name and who did he play for?

Throwback Thursday: The Greatest Baseball Player of All Time

My junior year in high school at BRHS-West I wrote a paper for English class on the theme, "Who was the greatest baseball player of all time." I was passionate about my theme because I was, at that time, passionate about the Great American Game. I researched my butt off, wrestling with the problem of establishing criteria for comparing stats of old timers and current players. I likewise had to determine how much weight to give fielding skills, leadership, base running and pitching.

When all was said and done, I wrote what I thought was a stellar paper. Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, was the greatest. And when all was said and done, Ms. Saltzbart graced that paper with a U and U-. U (Unsatisfactory) for research, and U- for the writing itself.

Now for the record, up until that time I had always been an A student. I was in the honors programs, and even in Ms. Saltzbart's class I had almost all Aces throughout the year so that my final grade averaged to be a C in the fourth quarter even with these bad marks, my first C in high school. And like the dutiful "good kid" I was, I accepted my fate... except, I had to ask why this happened. Where had I gone wrong?

When I went to speak with her after class the following day she replied that I failed because, "Joe DiMaggio is the greatest baseball player of all time." That was the sum total of why I failed. She had nothing more to say.

All these years I dismissed her conclusion as wacko. Until today, actually. It may be that all my rambling comparisons of baseball stats missed something important. In Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning Old Man and the Sea, Santiago took inspiration from DiMaggio, the man who never gave up. The theme song from the Oscar-winning The Graduate features this Paul Simon line, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" The great pop culture status icon Marilyn Monroe even married the guy. In other words, I never factored in the effect Joe DiMaggio had had on the broader culture.

Seven player strikes and all the wrangling over contracts, salaries and taxes for stadiums has taken a lot of luster off the Great American Game. There was a time when It Happens Every Spring played on Saturday Night at the Movies the weekend before the season opener. There was a time when everyone knew more than a few of the stars. And literary giants wrote about the men who played it.

One such literary giant of our century past was John Updike, and the player he wrote an incredible baseball essay about was Ted Williams. Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is a must read if you were ever a fan of baseball. The essay, which begins as follows, appeared in The New Yorker in 1960 back when I was reading Casper the Friendly Ghost comics. The opening is wonderful.

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox's last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW, and, most cloyingly, MISTER WONDERFUL, would play in Boston. "WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK" ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams' retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

Ted Williams was another of the great ones. It may be that had I read Updike before writing about Ty Cobb I would have produced a better paper. Or if I had taken a typing class freshman year instead of senior year, since my handwriting may have been a tad too illegible for a teacher staring at a pile of term papers through eyes befogged by cocktails. ("Objection! Calls for speculation.")

I would strongly encourage you to follow this link and bookmark the Updike piece. It's a masterful work and one of the greater bits of baseball literature ever written.

Trivia: Joe DiMaggio's contract, when making appearances, stipulated that he be introduced as "the greatest baseball player of all time." May we ourselves never be quite so vain.

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This blog post was originally published on August 11, 2010.
Check out this page to see who Encyclopedia Britannica's editor picked as the Top Ten Baseball Players of All Time.

Physics: It's Not Always Rocket Science

Physics
1. The science of matter and energy and of interactions between the two, grouped in traditional fields such as acoustics, optics, mechanics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism, as well as in modern extensions including nuclear physics, cryogenics, solid-state physics, particle physics and plasma physics.

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In high school one of my favorite teachers was my physics teacher Mr. Dennison. I don't recall all that much from the class other than a few films in time-lapse photography of a bullet piercing an apple, and clouds across the autumn skies. Something about velocity and gravity. Nothing about rocket science.

The reasons we like teachers vary, but in this case it may have been the special interest he showed to me. And it may have been that he was a baseball coach and I'd spent years dreaming that one day I would grow up to play baseball. Mr Dennison, my junior varsity coach in baseball at B.R.H.S.-West in New Jersey, had been a minor league pitcher for seven years. At the end of that seventh year he was brought up to the major leagues for a week, joining Boston's Red Sox bullpen the last week of a non-significant season and getting a chance to pitch part of an inning.

Evidently his dream had to be abandoned, because after this brief brush with the majors he let it go. Looking back on my own life I see any number of dreams embraced and abandoned, and understand now what I did not understand then. Perhaps this experience of pain made him a better coach and better teacher. He was certainly both, and an influence on my life.

It seemed as if he'd taken an interest in me. As a student, one tends to feel oneself to be a lost particle, insignificant as dust. To be singled out is a big thing. Especially by your J.V. coach.

My last period class was study hall and Mr. Dennison would take Joe Sweeney and I out of class to give us batting practice. Mr. D threw more junk at us than a carnival barker. His curves were impressive and the knuckle ball was a phenomenon. Both sophomore and junior years I had the second best batting average on the team and lowest strikeout percentage. Joe Sweeney had the best batting average, a healthy .500 or better junior year, and Skip Hoy similar our sophomore year.

But it was apparent we weren't going to be superstars. Late in the season I was brought up to varsity, played respectably at shortstop and earned a letter. The following year, however, the head coach was going to be re-building and it didn't take rocket science to see my future was not going to be in baseball.

I learned some valuable lessons from Mr. Dennison, a few in the classroom and some important ones out on the baseball diamond. His investment of time made an impact, and imparted some positive energy into my soul, an interaction that helped contribute to my own efforts years later as a coach, teacher and role model. Thank you, Mr. Dennison.