Author: Levi Stahl

WWBD?

That’s What Would Bud Do? Thursday afternoon game that’s the home season finale. Unlikely to be well-attended, even though this year’s Brewers team has been a lot of fun to watch.

I’m guessing Bud would do . . . nothing. Adjust his hairpiece, maybe fire off a fax to the Wisconsin state legislature about how maybe the state should pay for the Brewers to have weekday games.

New Brewers ownership, however, is smarter. They’ve announced that tickets to that game will be free. Absolutely free. And they’ve already distributed 23,000.

If you’re going to be in Milwaukee September 29th, call the Brewers ticket office.
If you’re not going to be in Milwaukee September 29th . . . why not? What have you got to do that day that’s better than free baseball?

Luck

At last night’s Cubs/Reds game, two rows in front of me, sitting with a couple of season ticket holders whom I recognize but don’t know, was a guy who had neglected to bring his shirt. He had, however, brought–and was displaying in their full glory–his late-seventies porn-star curls and moustache and his oddly incongruous gothic-lettered “Chi Town” tattoo, which was in the spot on the back where a tramp stamp would go on a gal.

His appearance alone, and his obvious joy in it, would have been worthy of note. But then he added to his allure by catching not one but two foul balls. Our section hardly ever gets foul balls hit anywhere near it, but last night Mr. Chi Town No-Shirt got one while strolling the aisle just to the left of us and a second that bounced right up to him in his seat. I had hopes that he would trade one of them to a drunk for a shirt, but it was not to be.

Motivation

Wonder how your favorite team keeps motivated over the long season?

Now you know.

PS

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If I’m very, very lucky, I’ll get to see the Cardinals clinch their fifth division title in six years at Wrigley Field Thursday night.

Paging Corey Patterson

“A talented player, he projected as a rookie who would hit, but didn’t seem to react well to the challenge of earning the job. Well, let’s not be coy about it. I don’t know how much truth there is in this, but what I was told is that, with a job virtually handed to him, he displayed what we might call a Miguel Dilone syndrome. He wouldn’t put out any extra effort as a show of good faith., wouldn’t

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take extra hitting practice or work on his defense; he just acted like the job was his. The worse he played, and he played quite badly indeed, the less receptive he became to help. When a young player does that, people say that it doesn’t seem like he wants the job. Well, of course he wants the job; every young baseball player wants to play. What this behavior suggests to me is a player with a deep-rooted lack of confidence. Men who are consumed with a fear of failing often protect themselves from the failure that they subconsciously anticipate by adopting a pose of indiffernece and hostility; any attempt to reach out to such a player would be interpreted as an attempt to force him to make an emotional commitment to the job, and thus would feed the fear and force the player to fortify his defense mechanisms. Such a player would exhibit external signs of self-confidence, and would refuse to make any special efforts to cooperate, as to do so would be a tacit acknowledgment of his unsteady position. Not until the player sheds the label of a hot prospect, and nothing more is expected of him, will the fear subside and the ability once more begin to assert itself. What can be done about it? I don’t think anything can. If a twenty-two-year-old athlete doesn’t believe in himself, deep down, I doubt seriously that there is anything anybody else can do about it that will change that fact. He has terrific talent. He might have a big year sometime. If he can have two straight big years, he might even grow into the confidence that he needs. But I doubt that anybody will ever be able to control his talent.” –Bill James, in 1985, writing about Angel Salazar, whose career line ended up, over five seasons and 886 at-bats, being .212/.230/.270. He finished his career as a Cub, in 1988.

Ten games for Steroids, Six for Milk

A Marlins batboy has been suspended for attempting to

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drink a gallon of milk on a bet before a game.

Many, many things about this story seem wrong to me.

Mookie!

From Bill James, again, from 1982: Talk about your eerie coincidences. Mookie’s real name is William Wilson, but they can’t call him that, for obvious reasons. There is another major league player who does and doesn’t do exactly the same things that this guy does, and who is the same age and color, and that man’s name is Willie Wilson. To use the same name would invite unnecessary and unattractive comparisons. Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story about a man who was haunted by another man of the same name, same build and talents and face. The idea was that you were supposed to catch on that his personality had split, and he was merely projecting himself into another character of the

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same description. The two men’s names? William Wilson. Swear to God.

Skates

Through the efforts of a friendly librarian I know, I recently was able to check out a Bill James collection from 1989, This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones: Bill James without the Numbers. There’s some good stuff in there about 80s baseball, much of it still of interest and still applicable today.

But some of it is just plain fun as a trip down memory lane with the irascible James as a guide. I’ll share some of it over the next few weeks, until the book’s due back at Bezazian Library.

So here’s James on Lonnie “Skates” Smith, writing in 1986, when Smith had been a Royal for a few years:

I wouold try to tell you what a bad outfielder Lonnie is, expect that I confess that I would never have believed it myself if somebody had tried to tell me. I will say, though, that the real cost of Lonnie’s defense is not nearly as great as the psychic impact of it. He makes you wail and gnash your teeth a lot, but he doesn’t really cost you all that many runs.

One reason for that is that he recovers so quickly after her makes a mistake. You have to understand that Lonnie makes defensive mistakes every game, so he knows hot to handle it. Your average outfielder is inclined to panic when he falls down chasing a ball in the corner; he may just give up and set there a while, trying to figure it out. Lonnie has a pop-up slide perfected for the occasion.

Another outfielder might have no idea where the ball was when it bounded off his glove. Lonnie can calculate with the instinctive astrophysics of a veteran tennis player where a ball will land when it skips off the heel of his glove, what the angle of glide will be when he tips it off the webbing, what the spin will be when the ball skids off the thumb of the mitt.

Many players can kick a ball behind them without ever knowing it. Lonnie can judge by the pitch of the thud and the subtle pressure through his shoe in which direction and how far he has projected the sphere.

He knows exactly what to do when a ball spins out of his hand and flies crazily into a void on the field. He knows when it is appropriate for him to scamper after the ball and when he needs to back up the man who will have to recover it.

He has experience in these matters; when he retires he will be hired to come to spring training and coach defensive recovery and cost containment. This is his specialty, and he is good at it.

The days they come, the days they go

Some days, you look out your office window and wish you’d taken the day off to go see the Cardinals and Cubs at Wrigley Field, like you used to always do back when tickets were more readily available after the first day of tickets sales and such outings didn’t, therefore, have to be so rigorously planned.

Other days, you don’t.

Suckah!

The gloy of the hidden ball trick was shewn forth again last night at the Marlins/Diamondbacks game. The simplicity of it was, as usual, its beauty: Mike Lowell took the throw from the outfield, then simply didn’t toss the ball to noted homophobe Todd Jones. Seconds later, he applied the tag to an unsuspecting Luis Terrero.

Harold Reynolds on Baseball Tonight broke it down nicely, pointing out the way Jones noticed what Lowell was up to and, instead of heading to the mound, casually circled it. One thing I learned from this is that, if the pitcher steps on the mound, the ball is dead; his presence on the mound suggests that he intends to pitch, and therefore being on the mound while the ball is elsewhere is, apparently, a no-no.

National goddam treasure Retrosheet.org has a list of all the known successful hidden ball tricks here. Ozzie Guillen, whom I believe Bill James pointed out as one of the dumbest baserunners ever, was caught three times. Fool Ozzie once . . .