Get yer ya-yas out!
Your post is a tour de force of posts. I'm going to stick to the fringes in my comment.
"When we didn't have enough guys for a game we studied the numbers."
So when don't you have enough guys for a game? You need no more than three. Each is his own team. A batter who throws the ball up and hits it. Two guys in the "field," since we were all right handed, everything to the left of "second" which usually was some object found in the real field. One of the guys played nominal short and the other guy was a kind of texas league outfielder. There weren't any homeruns into the tomatoe field because the one collective ball was a bit mushy and we were all, how to put it, untalented.
Second, Cardinals? I refer you to 1968 and the World Champion Detroit Tigers, featuring Mickey Lolich, Denny McLain, Willie Horton, Bill Freehan and I think in my distant memory, still, the one and only Al Kaline. George Kell and Erni Harwell announcing. Ya'll had Bob Gibson and he wasn't enough.
About Bonds. Your post put some stuff in perspective for me.
I'm not sure if you know this, but I have as much interest in sports as I do poking my eyes out. I read through your entire post, however, and it was excellent writing. It sucks that all of those things that made baseball great don't mean anything anymore.
I'm incredibly sad that you can't find boys playing out on the playground these days. You know though, with 'them' outlawing tag during recess, because its dangerous, I'm not sure what to expect.
Very good post! I'm not a rabid, not even an avid fan of the game, in that I don't follow this team or that, usually don't pay a lick of attention these days to who the big players are. Although from your post -as well as from Dave's comments -I remember many of the names of the players mentioned, as in Denny McLain whose name was a code between the guy I was dating back in about 1971 for him to call me, as I would contact his office and leave a message for him to call Denny McLain's secretary.
But, I grew up learning about the game from my grandfather who sat by the big radiator in our sunporch with the old radio perched atop the radiator in order to enable better reception between the constant static as he followed the Pirate and the Philadelphia A's. Yes, this was many years ago, wasn't it before the A's moved to Oakland. I played baseball with the kids in my neighborhood, boys and girls alike, in the mid-50's and in high school, switched to softball since that was the girl's sport. Not that I was good, but I did enjoy the game. I don't remember where I was when Mantle and Maris had their big competition, nor when "Hammerin' Hank" beat Ruth's record, but I do remember it happening. I also remember the scandal with Pete Rose and feeling sickened that a player with the prowess he had went and did something so obviously illegal.
Cal Ripkin was a household name in Baltimore back in 1994-95 when I was working in that city. I have been to one major league ballgame in my entire life - a Senators' game (don't recall now who they played) in which former President was in attendance at that game and probably garnered more attention than did the lackluster old Washington Senators.
Through all the years though baseball is the only sport I feel I really understand -for the most part. And, I am a die hard fan of yet another team that seems to love to be a "cellar dweller" -those pathetic Pirates from Pittsburgh. It is sad to think that even with the personality issues Bonds appears to have with the fans and media alike, that his breaking Aaron's record would still not give him much better recognition though.
So much for a quick comment - now you know my life history as seen through the sport of baseball. LOL
It was still a really interesting post though - very much so.
Excellent post!
I love, love baseball, and with the way my son can swing a bat, we will most likely be a big baseball family. Every year we go to baseball games and my husband keeps is baseball card collection to give to Mr. P.
I was always suspicious of both McGwire and Sosa, not liking either of them. And anybody who wanted to see could tell that they were using 'roids.
My husband called it early on, as steroids had been and still are fairly rampant even on a high school level. He played on a state-level championship football team in high school and three quarters of his team were on steroids, and this was in the late 80's.
I have always loathed Barry Bonds, a man with not much respect for the fans of baseball. Not to mention class and etiquette.
Dr. Sardonicus? This is Mr. Skin calling. Sorry, the comment is off topic but might you perhaps be a Spirit fan?
Dave: in our neighborhood if you didn't have enough guys for a regular game you had Whiffleball. We could do that with as few as two - hits and outs we determined by where you hit the ball and how far you hit it.
You had 1968, but we had 1934 and 2006.
Crayons: The "outlawing tag" thing to me always sounded like a bit of an urban legend. Probably because I first heard that story from Rush Limbaugh. Sadly, kids don't play at recess as they once did, but I think that comes more from fear of child snatchers and concerns about being sued for playground injuries.
Jeni: Thanks for stopping by! Denny McLain, now he was a piece of work. He was the last pitcher to win 30 games in a season - nobody's ever going to do that again. He also was involved in a number of unsavory activities - spent several years in jail for racketeering, IIRC. McLain lived hard, played hard, and died young.
Gina: I love high school sports, but it's true, steroids have filtered down to the high school level, and it makes me sick. Some programs have this win-at-all-costs mentality and they're ruining these kids in order to maintain their reputation as a football factory. These programs are ruining kids' health pumping them up with steroids and need to be severely punished by their state associations. Unfortunately, there's money in it for the schools with winning programs, which makes it a subject they'd rather not talk about.
Chris: Ya know where I been. One of my earliest posts explains where Sardonicus came from. I really should link this on my sidebar; maybe I'll do that whenever I have the time and inclination to figure out how to do such things.
I was just a kid when Hank Aaron broke the home run record. Too young to understand that there was any racial thing involved, I was just happy that it was our guy who did it and he was a local hero, at least among the kids. I don't remember hearing about any undercurrents at the time - must have gone way over my head.
But now I am an adult. In my mind, the real record holder is still Hank Aaron, and will be until someone without the taint of steroids comes along and breaks the record honestly. Baseball should have dealt with this problem years ago and there would not be this feeling of ambivalence now.
the Cardinals' slugger admitted to using the drug, an over-the-counter steroid, to increase muscle mass.
You might want to fix this, as it mars an otherwise excellent post. Andro is not a steroid. It sounds like nit-picking, but in the context of everything else here, it comes off as a bit uninformed.
This was an excellent post- good enough to delurk me!
I am a huge baseball fan and have very mixed feelings about the whole Bonds issue. On one had I feel kinda bad for the guy because he has such an obsession with being the best at everything he does. So much so that he practically sold his soul to the devil. A Greek tragedy couldn't have been written any more obviously than life has played out for Barry. But I can't feel too bad for him because he's an utter jerk.
I hate the steroid era but an argument can be made for putting an asterisk next to any record from the size of the ballparks, to the quality of pitchers, to playing pre- and post- the Jackie Robinson era when white players didn't have to compete with black players. Imagine the great pitchers of the 20s and 30s up against Griffey, Manny, Arod, even Bonds before he turned freaky.
The evolution of baseball is natural. We can't keep the game in a vacuum, but baseball (both the commissioner AND the players unions) needs to be a little more aggressive about weeding out the cheaters.
Welcome, magnetbabe. I like it when people delurk...
You make good points about how factors such as differing ballparks and the breaking of the color line affected the game of baseball and its statistics. One of the things that makes baseball unique (and one that I don't think the current generation of players and owners appreciates so much) is the wealth of statistical information that baseball has generated over its history. Between the numbers and the relative continuity of the game, we can compare players between eras unlike in any other sport. Because of that continuity we can make an educated guess as to how Babe Ruth or Ted Williams may have fared in the modern era, yet it is hard to make meaningful comparisons between Sammy Baugh, Johnny Unitas, and Peyton Manning because the styles of play in football varied more between eras, and the statistics don't provide as complete of a story.
Baseball has these statistical norms that developed over the last century; what made the steroid-era players so outrageous is that their performances were beyond those norms. When one or two exceed those norms, we figure it's the mark of a great player, but an entire group doing it begins to look suspect. One thing I think everybody overlooks, though, is that steroids were legal in baseball until 2005. Baseball's leadership was well aware of the problem, yet they chose to look the other way for years because they were more interested in restoring the bottom line that took a beating from the 1994 strike.
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