Friday Stuff
Monday
We began the week with a do-over. Many moons ago, when the Interwebs were young, I wrote a piece called “The Schalk-Schang Redemption,” in which I compared Wally Schang and Ray Schalk and took the old Veterans Committee to task for electing the wrong one of them to the Hall of Fame. The piece pretty much stunk, but I loved the title, so I wrote a different version of it for Monday’s edition.
Modern athletes mostly look like underwear models. There are exceptions thanks to some offensive linemen and the Kyle Schwarbers of the world, but most of them work out so much and have such detailed nutritional intake that they look sculpted. Long gone are the days of players like Al Benton, whose 113th birthday was on Monday. Benton might have been around to enjoy it if he’d treated his body the way modern athletes do, but, alas, he looked more like your neighborhood waste management professional.
That didn’t stop Benton from pitching in the big leagues for 14 years, making two All-Star teams, leading the league in saves, and being part of the Tiger’s 1945 World Series-winning team. He also served two years in the Navy during World War II, sold used cars, was arrested on suspicion of stealing a car and passing bad checks, and died after being burning in an explosion in a motel room. It was quite a life for Al, underwear model or not.
Tuesday
There could be a great debate about how starting pitchers are used in modern baseball. There are some pros to pulling them early, like protecting their arms, allowing them to throw harder when they are in the game, and increasing your team’s chances of getting through the later innings with fresh relievers. There are also cons, like the constant pitching changes, surge in boring strikeouts, and generally disrupted game-viewing experience for fans. Regardless, for anyone wanting to make the point that pitchers were more durable and/or better back in the day, please be sure to use a different example than Denny McLain in your argument, as one unfortunate Twitter user did earlier this week.
Tuesday marked the 60th anniversary of the passing of the great John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, one of the best shortstops in the history of baseball. Known in his day as “The Black Honus Wagner,” a comparison that Honus Wagner himself found flattering, Lloyd’s best years took place before the founding of the Negro Leagues in 1920. He was already thirty-six by then, playing for the independent Brooklyn Royal Giants. One year later he joined the Columbus Buckeyes of the Negro National League, and played mostly in the NNL until he was forty-five. Let’s give you an idea of exactly how good he was by comparing his years in the Negro Leagues to the performance of Wagner, generally viewed as the greatest shortstop ever, at the same ages.
At the age of thirty-seven:
Wagner batted .334/.423/.507 for the Pirates.
Lloyd batted .348/.392/.448 for Columbus.
At the age of thirty-nine:
Wagner batted .300/.349/.385.
Lloyd batted .367/.403/.507.
At forty:
Wagner - .252/.317/.317.
Lloyd - .366/.415/.463.
At forty-one:
Wagner - .274/.325/.422.
Lloyd - .331/.406/.437.
At forty-two:
Wagner - .287/.350/.370.
Lloyd - .326/.386/.408.
At forty-three:
Wagner - .265/.337/.304.
Lloyd - .306/.330/.423.
Af forty-four:
Wagner - Retired
Lloyd - .383/.431/.541.
At forty-five:
Wagner - Still Retired
Lloyd - .365/.416/.525.
It’s worth noting that Lloyd also managed his teams in each of these years, posting a combined .517 winning percentage. He also continued playing outside of the organized Negro Leagues for three additional years, batting a combined .345 between the ages of forty-six and forty-eight. He was just a dominating force, easily in the argument for the title of Greatest Shortstop Ever.
Wednesday
I decided to get whimsical with my latest piece for the daily newsletter the
puts out, , and focused on the unfortunate players who have a career ERA of infinity. There are only 26 of them, and I struggled to find an equivalent measure of futility for hitters that had a similar number of members in the club. I found it though, and wrote about it in Wednesday’s edition.Keeping the narrative of less-than-athletic players from back in the day, let’s briefly discuss Bob Fothergill. Wednesday marked the 86th anniversary of his passing at the age of just forty, an early demise possibly related to the fact that he was listed at 5’10” and a charitable 230 pounds, dimensions that earned him the mean-spirited nickname “Fats” during his playing days.
The things is, though, that Fothergill could really hit, dimensions be damned. Never really a full-time player (he got as many as 500 plate appearances in a season just once), he was a deadly platoon and pinch hitter. He batted .300 in nine of his twelve big-league seasons, including a career-high of .367 in 1926. He did this strictly with wicked line drives. In over 3,500 plate appearances, he only hit 36 homers, but he rarely walked (202 times) and struck out even less (177 times), blasting gappers to the tune of a .325 career average and 115 career OPS+.
I can’t begin to imagine the kind of player he might have been with modern training habits.
Thursday
For Thursday’s edition we continued the series on Late Bloomers, this time focused on Tony Phillips. He was a unicorn, the only player in major league history to play at least 100 games at six different positions. He’s also the only big leaguer ever drafted from the tiny New Mexico Military Institute, and yet has been left out of that school’s Hall of Fame for some reason.
Manny Sanguillén turned 80 on Thursday. He was a critical and often overlooked part of the Pirates teams of the 1970s that won six division titles in that decade. That club was dominated by Roberto Clemente early, and Willie Stargell and Dave Parker later, with characters like John Candelaria, Al Oliver, Phil “Scrap Iron” Garner, and Dock Ellis absorbing a lot of attention as well.
But Sanguillén was an incredible contributor, giving them offense from the catching position that most teams couldn’t dream of at the time. From 1969 to 1976, only Johnny Bench caught as many games as Sanguillén, and he was one of just a handful of regular catchers* with an above-average OPS.
Gene Tenace, 136 OPS+
Bench, 133
Thurman Munson, 120
Ted Simmons, 110
Sanguillén, 109
He also threw out attempted base thieves at a better than average rate, was wildly popular among his teammates, and had a .375 career batting average in the World Series. So let’s all please raise a glass and wish Happy Birthday to Manny Sanguillén, key cog of The Pittsburgh Lumber Company.
(*Note: Carlton Fisk and his 131 OPS+ would join this group if he played enough, but he averaged just 68 games per year during these eight seasons. The same goes for Duke Sims and his 112 OPS+ mark, but he played just 66 games per year in this span.)
Friday
Finally, today is the 52nd anniversary of the horrible decision by the Red Sox to trade lefty reliever Sparky Lyle to the Yankees. Let’s set the scene:
It’s Spring Training, 1972. The Red Sox are an offensive-minded team. They were third in the league in runs the year before, while their pitching staff was tenth in ERA. Lyle is easily their best reliever, having led the team in saves each of the last three seasons. He is only twenty-seven years old.
The organization is awash in hitters. Carl Yastrzemski is still anchoring the lineup, along with Reggie Smith, Carlton Fisk, Rico Petrocelli, and George Scott. Cecil Cooper, Ben Oglivie, and Rick Miller arrived as rookies the year before and pushed for playing time. The organization has Dwight Evans at Triple-A and ready for a job, and has just spent their first-round draft pick on Jim Rice. Offense isn’t a problem. They desperately need pitching.
Given this picture, the team decided to trade Scott just after the season ended. He was sent, along with several other players, to the Brewers for outfielder Tommy Harper, and pitchers Lew Krausse and Marty Pattin. The deal didn’t really add any depth to the staff, though, since two of their leading pitchers from the year before, Jim Lonborg and Ken Brett, went to Milwaukee as part of the deal. The Sox didn’t do anything else to help the staff, and the 1972 season was about to begin.
So, of course, they sent Lyle to their hated rival in New York in exchange for yet another hitter, Danny Cater.
If you’re scratching your head, that’s the right reaction. The move further weakened the pitching staff while blocking Cooper from getting regular playing time and creating a logjam of hitters that resulted in Smith, Oglivie, and Cooper all eventually being traded away in the next few years.
Predictably, the Sox led the league in offense in 1972, but dropped a spot to eleventh in the league in ERA. Lyle, meanwhile, saved 141 games for the Yankees over the next seven years, won the 1977 Cy Young Award, and helped New York to back-to-back World Series titles.
Welcome to my childhood.