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< Earlier Kibitzing · PAGE 167 OF 914 ·
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| Apr-18-10 | | Jim Bartle: Haller hit righties better, Bailey lefties. Or vice versa. That was the reason. 1962 Giants are thought of as a run-scoring machine. But look at the rotation: Sanford, Marichal, O'Dell, Pierce. Best they've ever had in SF. The lineup was homegrown except for Kuenn and Bailey, but Marichal was the only farm product in the rotation. |
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Apr-18-10
 | | Phony Benoni: Mets and Cards 0-0 after 1. Here we go again. |
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| Apr-18-10 | | Jim Bartle: Nah, now it's a slugfest. 3-3 in the 6th.
Giants-Dodgers played a good game today. Manny 2-run homer in 8th gave LA a 2-1 win. It's great to see Zito pitching like he did with the A's, finally. |
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Apr-19-10
 | | WannaBe: Too bad that we didn't get to see Schmidt pitch like he did with the Giants! Go (Trolley) Dodgers!! |
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Apr-19-10
 | | keypusher: I clicked on PB's link from February and saw a Jim post in which he mentioned <Foul> by Connie Hawkins. Only reason I even knew who Connie Hawkins was is that I read <Loose Balls: A History of the ABA> years ago. It seems like this would be a good place to ask people about their favorite sports books. I've read <Ball Four> and <The Boys of Summer> and part of <Paper Lion>, but not much else. Some old stuff, like <Run to Daylight>. |
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| Apr-19-10 | | Jim Bartle: "Foul" was actually about Connie Hawkins, written by David Wolf. Not a book, but I just read a great article on boxing trainer Teddy Atlas, by David Remnick, showing the depths of psychology needed to succeed. Only an abstract online, unfortunately: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/20... Remnick wrote a biography of Muhammad Ali, which I haven't read but I would guess is very good. "Paper Lion" really was great. I read it when it first came out, then again a year or two ago. Pro football really has changed from the mid-60s. |
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| Apr-19-10 | | Travis Bickle: Bulls Joaquin Noah says "Cleveland Sucks"!! Joaquin also said 3 times in an interview "Kevin Garnett is a dirty player"! |
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| Apr-19-10 | | Jim Bartle: Here's something I really hate about baseball, that sometimes you can't just buy a ticket to the game you want. Apparently to see the Yankees when they come to LA in June, you have to buy a package of seven games, with just one from the Yankees series: http://losangeles.dodgers.mlb.com/l... I don't know if other teams do this, but it's not right. Wonder if this will work for the Dodgers, as fans have six opportunities a year to drive over to Anaheim and see the Yankees. I can see it working in NL cities with no AL team. |
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| Apr-19-10 | | Travis Bickle: Hey Phony, what's your take on the Redwings? |
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| Apr-19-10 | | Jim Bartle: Some sports books which come to mind:
“A Sense of Where You Are” John McPhee (Bill Bradley at Princeton) “Hustle” by Michael Sokolove (biography of Pete Rose, very evenhanded) “Season on the Brink” John Feinstein (inside look at a season with Bobby Knight at Indiana) “You Know Me Al” Ring Lardner (absolutely hilarious novel, letters from an uneducated rookie on the White Sox, circa 1915) “Veeck as in Wreck” Bill Veeck (wild stories from the baseball owner) “You Could Have Made Us Proud” Joe Pepitone (amazing, though more about sex than baseball) “The Glory of Their Times” Lawrence Ritter (interviews with baseball players from the early 1900s) “The Complete Armchair Book of Baseball” Great variety of selections “You’re Missing a Great Game” Whitey Herzog (great stories of St. Louis and Kansas City) Any of the anthologies of New Yorker articles by Roger Angell. Haven't read it, but very highly recommended is "Strokes of Genius" by Jon Wertheim, on the 2008 Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final, but also covering the players' lives and the tour in general. A couple which I would <not> include are “Summer of ‘49” by David Halberstam (very sloppy) and “The Hero’s Life” by Richard Ben Cramer (tacky biography of DiMaggio; author has little baseball knowledge). |
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Apr-20-10
| | Phony Benoni: An unusual game. The Red Sox defeat the Athletics 6-4, with one Boston player driving in all six runs. http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/... OK, maybe it's not <that> unusual, but this time it is! |
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| Apr-20-10 | | Jim Bartle: The pitcher drove in all six runs?? |
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| Apr-20-10 | | playground player: <Phony Benoni> Before looking at the box score, and after <jim bartle's> comment, I guessed the pitcher had to be either Wes Ferrell or Danny MacFayden. Turned out to be Ferrell, with his brother Rick catching. It wasn't a hard guess. W. Ferrell was one of the best-hitting pitchers ever. Probably only Babe Ruth was better. |
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| Apr-20-10 | | Jim Bartle: I didn't know that about Ferrell.
Has anybody seen Adam Wainwright of the Cards hit? A couple nights ago he was ripping the ball all over the park. |
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Apr-20-10
| | keypusher: <Jim Bartle> Thanks, figured you would have some good candidates. Anyone else have some sports books they could recommend? Also, Jim, have you seen Bill Simmons' basketball book? I would kind of like to understand the modern NBA (though it would be another time sink). |
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| Apr-20-10 | | Jim Bartle: I've put that book on order for anybody traveling down here. Sounds great, the sort of book you can open at any page and find something interesting. One book there I really recommend is Herzog's. A lot about how to run a team, plus great stories about Jack Clark, Joaquin Andujar, George Brett and others. |
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| Apr-20-10 | | A.G. Argent: <Wainwright> The best arguement against the bloody DH and the superiority of the NL, baseball purity-wise; pitchers that can help themselves at the plate. They're not all automatic whiffs. La Russa has even used Wainwright as a pinch-hitter on the odd occasion. |
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| Apr-20-10 | | Jim Bartle: From what I saw on (I think) Sunday, if he were in the AL Wainwright could DH on the days he didn't pitch. He really stung the ball twice. He's a good pitcher, of course, as well. But his fielding, not so sure. In this game he took an overthrow behind home plate and promptly rifled it deep into rightfield, trying to get the runner on first. |
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Apr-20-10
| | Phony Benoni: The 1968 Tigers would have been even better with the DH, having four excellent outfielders. And on the days Earl Wilson pitched, they could have DHed for Ray Oyler and made everybody happy--probably including Oyler. Besides Ruth, Lefty O'Doul was a pitcher who made his name as a hitter. Another you might not know readily was George Sisler. One book I constantly read as a kid was John Carmichael's compilation <My Greatest Day in Baseball>, in which players selected their most memorable games. Sisler picked the day he outpitched Walter Johnson and won 1-0. Johnson was also a decent hitter, with a .235 lifetime average and a peak of .433 in 1925. Here he wins the game with a pinch-hit, two-out home run in the ninth inning: http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/... By the way, I don't have a lot of books to recommend. An interesting one I recall was <My Life in Baseball>, Ty Cobb's autobiography ghosted by Al Stump. Lots of self-justification and whitewashing (if you can find it, read Stump's account of the writing of the book; frightening), but there were a number of interesting tidbits on Cobb's use of psychology. The man may have been a number of nasty things, but he was also smart and played the game intelligently. For instance, he admitted that he could never hit Walter Johnson the first few years. Then he learned that Johnson was a kindly, soft-hearted man who lived in fear that one of his fastballs would kill a hitter. After that, Cobb crowded the plate, knowing Johnson wouldn't brush him back. Johnson stuck to pitching outside, and Cobb was able to hit him better. <Travis> You asked about the Red Wings. Please don't. They aren't going to be around much longer anyway. |
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| Apr-20-10 | | Jim Bartle: Was Stump's story the basis of the movie "Cobb" with Tommy Lee Jones, the one with the wild ride on an icy road? |
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Apr-20-10
| | Phony Benoni: <JB> Sounds like it; that story was in Stump's article. |
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| Apr-20-10 | | Jim Bartle: Looked it up. It starred Jones as Cobb, Robert Wuhl as the terrified Stump, and was written and directed by Ron Shelton, who made "Bull Durham" and "White Men Can't Jump." |
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Apr-20-10
| | Phony Benoni: It would make an effective movie. The article alone scared the whatever-you-want-to-call-it out of me. I read the book several times back in the 1960s, and being a literal kind of person and a Tigers fan wanted to believe Cobb's account of being unjustly persecuted. But I recall that, despite Stump's best efforts, the sense of paranoia still showed through. Stump added a short postscript after Cobb's death, stating that from all the baseball world only three men came to Cobb's funeral. That's probably more indicative of what those who knew him best thought of him. |
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| Apr-20-10 | | Deus Ex Alekhina: Well. Just read "Lost survey reveals one in 5 librarians have had sex in the stacks". (Just be very, very quiet) |
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| Apr-20-10 | | Jim Bartle: Texas has stolen 8!! bases vs. Boston, and it's still in the fourth. The record against one catcher is 13, don't know what the most steals record is. |
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