Posts Tagged baseball

The feature Hugh’s Journals has appeared here on Sundays. For some basic background on Rev. Hugh Bebb Jones and his notebooks click here.

Ted Williams & Joe DiMaggio in 1941

According to his notation, Hugh used this excerpt from his notebooks in a sermon on the first Sunday of September 1941, a few months after DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak ended and just a few weeks before Ted Williams went 4 for 6 on the last day of the season to become the last man to hit .400(.406).

Baseball was on the minds of Hugh’s congregation… baseball and the looming shadow of war.

While it may not seem like baseball season here in the North Country, it is. Friday night between snowstorms the Mets played the Twins in an outdoor, inter-league game. The Mets, who were not even in existence in 1941, defeated the Twins, who in 1941 were the Washington Senators.

Much has changed  in the baseball world since 1941: Jackie Robinson, the DH, the height of the pitching mound, the Red Sox winning two World Series.

Two things have not changed: the Cubs still have not won a World Series, and the “Washington Senators” got embarrassed by a New York team.

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

The unseasonably warm winter continues here in the North Country. Each day the sun climbs just a bit higher and burns just a bit brighter and longer. The longer light lightens the load, quickens our step.

In Florida and Arizona spring training is beginning, another sign of spring. The local 9 coming off an historically bad year look pretty much the same. An addition here or there. It does not engender great confidence. But if Morneau’s issues are finally behind him and if Mauer… if Mauer could become another player than he is….

I wrote last spring here about the Twins 200-million-dollar man (Puckett vs. Mauer). After last year’s debacle, I feel even less confident of the Twins’ future. But since it is spring and the season of hope, I hope to be proved wrong.

Pre-season time is like springtime for a sports fan. So is having a team that is doing well. It puts a little extra bounce in your step, makes it much easier to enjoy the littlest things of life.

Non-sports fans seem always bewildered by this. Sometimes arrogantly so. I never leave a conversation though with someone who says they do not watch sports without shaking my head and thinking, “poor, dumb bastard.”

Life without sports and the arts is an empty thing. Life with just one or the other is a life just half lived.

MontanaWriter as a blog is, as emailers sometimes remind me, unfocused… one day a poetry review, the next a western, the next something about sports or theology. To grow a blog, they say, you need to have one central theme and post everyday. I know the latter is true and something I want to move toward. But the former….

Life is too full of too many fascinating things. There are too many books to be read. Too many poems to be read aloud. There are too many games to watch. And the sky is too big to settle on just one thing under it.

MontanaWriter reaches its two-year anniversary next month. It is still still evolving and settling in… just as its creator is still evolving and settling in.

Pitchers and catchers have reported. Spring is just around the corner. Hope in the air.

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Gary Carter played the best years of his career in a hockey town in another country for a team that was perennially off everyone’s radar list. Yet he managed to get All-Star and MVP candidate votes most every year. That tells you all you need to know about how great a player he was.

I got to see Carter play a fair number of times when I was living is Chicago because the people who passed their season tickets along to me tended to horde all Cardinals, Reds, and Mets tickets while being quite generous with their Expos, Padres, and Astros tickets. I also got to see him play a number of times while living in Houston.

Those Expo teams of the early 80s were fun teams to watch: Carter, Tim Raines, Andre Dawson…. Future 1987 Twins closer Jeff Reardon also played on that team. I was always happy to take any and all Expos tickets that came my way.

Carter was one of those players you were naturally led to watch when you were at a game… both at the plate and behind the plate. He was that kind of special player.

I am thinking now of players I have seen in person who – like Carter – seemed to draw my attention toward them when they were on the field or at the plate.

Kirby Puckett, was such a player. He is gone now….

• Nolan Ryan
• George Brett
• Ryne Sandberg
• Cal Ripken
• Bo Jackson
• Roger Clemens
• Rickey Henderson
• Pete Rose
• Steve Carlton (the Phillies Steve Carlton, NOT the Twins one)

Another great player is gone. The field of our memories seems dimmer….

requiescat in pace Gary Carter.

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Today MontanaWriter is featuring a guest post from Jared Linsly, who has posted here before. An avid baseball fan and transplant to the North Country, Jerry lives in Ramsey County, Minnesota.

Although I spent time living in New England many years ago, I’m still taken aback by the  yin/yang seemingly ‘perfect storm’ of hubris and self loathing that permeates the region (at least regarding sports). Perhaps it’s a product of the combination of Calvinism and Irish (predominantly there) Catholicism – you are apparently not allowed to be happy and should feel guilty if you are. Regional history has often been self-fulfilling, despite the recent remarkable successes of the Sox, the Pats, the Celts, and the Bruins. The glasses, mugs, steins, etc. all seem to be half-empty, despite constant refills . I’m sure the weather is also a factor.  It all combines to create what is known snarkily and joyously anti-PC as “Irish Alzheimer’s” – you forget everything but the offenses, slights, insults, etc.

Contrast the relatively newly populated and innocent Twin Cities, where today there is celebration in the well-earned retirement of John Gordon, the excitement of winning the baseball season’s last game to avoid 100 losses (!?!), the cautious hope for the Lynx, the new promise for the Wild, the possibility that the Wolves won’t torment us this season, and relief that so far the University of Minnesota’s traditional and general ineptitude has not killed the new football coach. Maybe we don’t have the weight of accumulated history to guide us (although the Vikings have been consistently demoralizing). Maybe it’s just a matter of time  before we become like the older sections of the country, and ratchet up the bile, envy, and misery. Maybe our standards are lower and/or more realistic. Or maybe we  acknowledge that life is short as it is, and winter is always lurking, so why try to be more miserable than necessary. I am aware of local bitter nay-sayers but they do not seem to be as pervasive here. I’m glad we are not as ‘cutting edge’ in this area.

Looking forward to the playoffs and the Series.

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Target Field (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

The NFL lockout looks like it is coming to an end. By all accounts the NBA one though, has the potential of taking down all or part of the season. In the revenue strong NFL it was a battle over splitting up an exponentially growing pie. In the much weaker revenue world the NBA lives in, it is a matter of fighting over scraps of a smaller and smaller pie. When bench-riding shooting guards are guaranteed tens of millions to suit up and sit in half-filled arenas, you need to seriously rethink your financial structure… maybe even contract a few teams.

For those of us who live and work in the real world, these off-season battles are mere irritants. Once they interfere with the season however, they become something much more serious.

Before the 1994-95 strike, I followed baseball as closely as I followed… religion. Then they had a “work stoppage” and I learned what many did:  that I could live quite well without baseball. I have never regained even half of my love and devotion to the game, I never will. In my mind and heart the game is forever lessened. Performance enhancing drugs did not make baseball irrelevant, greed did.

I am a hopeless sports fan. In the right context, I can watch and enjoy most any sport. Given a choice, I would choose sports every time over a movie or television program. Unscripted drama is much more compelling. I am glad that there will be football this fall. I hope that there will be an NBA season. If there is a shorter, more meaningful NBA season… say 50 games… everyone would be a winner.

For now there is long summer days and there is baseball. The Twins are playing better and Mauer is transitioning to first base. Greed has meant that I do not get to watch the Twins on “free” television anymore. But for the most part, I do not mind. Baseball on the radio is one of the definitive sounds of summer. I prefer it on the radio, in fact.

Re-invigorated by my recent vacation, I am writing again. Common blog wisdom is that to grow your blog readership you need to consistently and reliably post. Re-energized, I hope to do better. Yet blogs, like sports, also seem to me to need an occasional off-season. At least that is the way I am spinning it to myself.

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The famous swing

This week the upper Midwest and true baseball fans everywhere have been mourning the loss of baseball great Harmon Killebrew… one of the greatest home run hitters ever. In my way of figuring things, number 4 on the all-time list.

Golden Era Home Run Leaders (500 or more)
Hank Aaron         755
Willie Mays        660
Frank Robinson    586
Harmon Killebrew    573

Minnesotans were well aware that Killebrew had just been moved into hospice care, and so the news did not come as a surprise to us. I heard about Killebrew’s death in an email from my friend Jerry, which seems appropriate because Jerry is as great a baseball fan and mind as anyone I have ever known.

I have spent the week listening and reading tributes to Killebrew… and talking to friends who grew up in Minnesota watching him play.

Those who are not sports fans quite often criticize those of us who are for what they perceive as a fundamental shallowness on our part… making such a big deal out of something that really does not matter. Besides being bewildered by such people, I have always felt sorry for them. Like all who are truly ignorant, they do not really know what they do not know.

Of course it can be said that we make too much of sports and sports heroes at times. But in the case of Harmon Killebrew, we do not. By all accounts he was that great rarity, a great man who really was great.

The last time I saw Harmon Killebrew was at the Minnesota History Center at the opening night of the Baseball Hall of Fame exhibit. My friend Dave, who is a member, took me with him. Killebrew was there, along with Paul Molitor, Ryne Sandberg, Tony Oliva, and a host of Twins.

We were not allowed to ask for autographs, which was fine, but we could have our pictures taken with the players. I had mine taken with Sandberg. I did not have mine taken with Killebrew, but I ened up for awhile being the unofficial photographer for those who were having theirs taken with him. A number of people gave me their cameras to snap pictures for them. I hope I did a good job.

It was not that I did not want my picture taken with Killebrew. It was only that I had meet him before and I was having so much fun watching those older than me meeting and talking with him. It is fun to see a 6o year-old woman become an excited girl of 12 again… a 65 year-old man become a beaming little leaguer again as he meets and greets his childhood hero.

Baseball as a game has been diminished this week. We have all grown older.

requiescat in pace Harmon Killebrew.

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Another disappointing season?

The Kirby Puckett vs. Joe Mauer comparison/contrast has been on my mind these last few days. Though positionally they are different players (Mauer a catcher… Kirby center field), Mauer’s recent health issues will  narrow that gap sooner than later. They both played for the Twins… both were the number three hitter in the lineup… both, by far, the most popular players on their respective teams… both all-stars… the face of their respective franchises… both the highest paid players on their teams.

I moved to the Twin Cities and started following the Twins in earnest in 1986. I had followed them from afar because of my previous sojourn in the Red River Valley and through friends who grew up in Minnesota and were life-long Twins fans. Living in Chicago I usually went to Wrigley UNLESS the Royals or Twins were playing the White Sox. I always went to at least a few of those games with friends.

1986 was a good time to start following the Twins in earnest. That was the year before they won their first World Series. It was an over-achieving team of lunch-pail kind of guys that were about the same age as me: Gladden, Brunansky, Hrbek, Gaetti, Viola, Blyleven, and, of course, Puckett. Puckett was worth the price of admission, as a fielder and a batter. He was charismatic, a difference maker, a true super-star.

I assume that today’s fans feel about Joe Mauer the same way. He does stop time when he bats. All eyes in the stands and both dugouts are on him when he steps to the plate. Few players can do that in any era.

As I was thinking about them I looked up their stats. Baseball is, after all, a game of numbers. The first thing I found is that I had forgotten how great Kirby really was. Here are some side-by-side stats after their first 7 seasons with the Twins:

Kirby Puckett and Joe Mauer after first 7 seasons

What you notice in looking at these stats is that Kirby’s batting average after his first 7 seasons is really remarkably close to Mauer’s… but he hits more homeruns AND plays in more games. Kirby brings his batting average and power to more games than Mauer.

Mauer won an MVP in 2009, the year of his historic slugging percentage. That year he put up way more homers than he has at any other time in his career. So I decided to compare Mauer’s best season in his first seven, 2009, with Kirby’s best season in his first seven seasons, 1988. Here is a chart that compares those:

Mauer's best and Puckett's best in their first 7 seasons

Comparing the these two great seasons we see the same trend. Catcher Mauer is not able to play in as many games as the durable Puckett. Over a season that durability adds up to RBI. The number three hitter has one job: drive in runs. Again in 2009, Mauer hit substantially more  home runs than his career average… he more than doubled his career average. He has never come that close before or since. Puckett in 1988 hit just a few more than the number you would expect.

What do the Twins long term need to be competitive as a team… besides dominating pitching? A high average hitting catcher who plays in just 135 games a year? Or a run producing center fielder who plays in 158 games a year? I think the answer is obvious.

At the end of 7 seasons Joe Mauer has 1 MVP trophy… Puckett none. At the end of 7 seasons Mauer has won 1 playoff game… Puckett a World Series.

Man, do I miss Kirby!

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20 years already?!

With last night’s predictable Timberwolves loss, another miserable basketball season in Minnesota has come mercifully to a close. For basketball fans in the gopher state, it has been another long and disappointing season. Only the local semi-professional team, Hopkins High School, had a season worth remembering. The coach and administration of Hopkins High School should probably be compelled by the Minnesota State Legislature to hold a basketball recruitment seminar and invite David Kahn (GM of the Timberwolves), Tubby Smith (Men’s Gopher coach), and Pam Borton (Women’s Gopher Coach) to attend.

Fortunately Spring is here and the baseball season has begun. Though if the first two weeks of the season are any indication… this could well be a long season for Minnesota baseball fans also.

The Joe Mauer dilemma has raised its ugly head a few years earlier than the Twins management would have liked. They know that at some point they are going to have to move Mauer from behind the plate. You can’t have your 23+ million dollar man squatting behind the plate for too much longer if you expect his knees and body to hold up. But the moment you move him he becomes just a high-average singles hitter. The league is filled with those kind of hitters. None that can hit with Mauer’s average… but many, many who can drive in more runs. Singles hitter never make 23+ million dollar salaries, though. They are not worth it… no matter how high their average.

It is a long season, though. Much can happen in 162 games. I have little faith that much will for the local nine, but I hope to be pleasantly surprised. If they give Kubel less playing time, and Thome more at bats… if Mauer could regain just a little of the power he showed his MVP year… if Morneau gets back into the swing of things… and if every pitcher on the staff pitches much better than I think they can… they may be able to get back into the playoffs for a one and done with the Yankees.

1991, Minnesota sports’ last championship season, is 20 years past. At the rate we are going around here, it could be another 20 until we have something to celebrate.

*UPDATE Friday morning: the paper reports that Mauer is going on the DL and has an appointment with a doctor. Man, I miss Kirby!

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Jack Morris

Spring, or the promise of spring, predictably puts me in mind of two things: baseball and fishing. The one I approach only as a spectator, the other primarily as a participant. The pleasure derived from contemplating either is just about equal.

When I put together Montana Poems, there were poems that I wanted to include but did not either because they did not yet seem fully finished or because they did not fully fit. This poem belongs to the former category.

It is hard to know when a poem is finished. For me, who re-writes and re-visits obsessively, it often feels like everything I write is unfinished. That explains why a poem about Game 7 of the 1991 World Series is just now seeing the light of day.

A sunny March day seems like as good a time to let it go as any.

Enjoy!

Game Seven

believing that the universal is revealed in the particular
you watch him set up
he takes the sign
checks the runner
winds up

if that were all it took
you could be Jack Morris

you have watched Game Seven many times
cold winter days
scorecard balanced on your lap
all the angles you could not see when you were there

in video
or in person
it comes down to the pitch
it always does

you rewind the tape
to watch again
certain that you are missing something
uncertain that it matters

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Brooklyn Dodger great Duke Snider, who passed away this past weekend,  played his Hall of Fame career in the shadow of two of the only center fielders in history who could be called better than him, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays.

Bill James in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract ranks center fielders this way:

1. Wille Mays
2. Ty Cobb
3. Mickey Mantle
4. Tris Speaker
5. Joe DiMaggio
6. Duke Snider
7. Ken Griffey Jr.
8. Kirby Puckett
9. Bill Hamilton
10. Jimmy Wynn

Just imagine, New York City once had three of the greatest center fielders who ever lived all playing at the same time, potentially all on the very same day. And if the Giants were playing the Dodgers… well, baseball fans got their money’s worth that day.

Snider made the trip West in 1958 when the Dodgers migrated to Los Angeles. He retired from baseball after the 1964 season. He was the first of the three great center fielders to retire… but he was the last of the three to be voted into the Hall of Fame. It took him 10 years on the ballot to get inducted. One of the great travesties of Hall of Fame voting. It was just Snider’s bad luck that he had to play at the same time in the same city with Mays and Mantle.

Roger Kahn in The Boys of Summer writes a wonderful profile of Snider. Of the prominent players of those great Brooklyn Dodger Teams (Jackie Robinson, PeeWee Reese, Roy Campanella, and Gil Hodges), Snider was the last living one. His passing is the end of an era, for New York baseball fans (real ones NOT Yankee fans), for all baseball fans.

requiescat in pace Duke Snider.

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