Baseball history as life

Tuesday 9/16/25

I'm writing a book called The Diamond Mirror: Baseball History as Life (Essays). It begins with essays about my man Dave Kingman and Carlton Fisk--well, the Fisk one is about a lifelong love for catchers. But these works--and this work--ranges far and digs deep, like baseball's history itself.

Baseball history is enlivening. In baseball, the past seems to give life--and add to life--in the present. And this is far more true with baseball than any other sport. Baseball's past is never really dead and gone, because of what you find there, the stories, the stories within the stories, all of which can have bearing on a life in the present. That's how baseball gets passed on from parent to child--it's in those stories, that life. They don't "date."

People who are passionate about baseball history are always young in a way. They're full of life. That's part of what makes baseball and baseball's past amazing and wonderful. People will talk about (and overrate) basketball players they grew up watching--and by that I mean, started following when they were twelve, thirteen. But those same people aren't having discussions--with others, and with themselves, after a fashion, in their own thoughts--about who was the best passing big man thirty years before they were born.

With the others sports, most people need to have been there in order to talk about those before-times, or to want to. Baseball...no. It can like talking about characters from a beloved book or movie.

Baseball is the life sport. It can play a role in how you think, how you are. What you are and who you are. And because so much of baseball's wonder is tied to the deathless characters and stories of its past, its history itself becomes a form of life.

And that's what I'm tapping into and exploring with the book. It has plenty of hardcore, "inside baseball" information, nuggets, and expertise, but it's all deployed practically and inclusively and, I believe, musically. Poetically. Stirringly. So that you don't have to be someone who will tell anyone who'll listen that the 1908 Cubs were in actuality overrated or know that the Cubs existed in 1908. But it's also cool if you do.

I thought I'd mention that up front here before going into a number of historical matters pertaining the game now and the game then. Because even in this short form of sharing a few anecdotes, some facts, some stats, you see that life component. Like it's inescapable. Baseball and its history reflects back on us. And that, to me, is the best thing about it.

Aaron Judge has gone ahead of Joe DiMaggio and his 361 home runs to take over fourth place on the all-time Yankees list.

Seems like that happened fast, didn't it? Judge is one of the great batch home run hitters in baseball history. He hits them in big-season batches. A feat like this sort of sneaks up on us because of the time Judge has missed, but the copious batches explain how he got here.

People tend to have no clue about this, but DiMaggio only played for thirteen seasons. He missed three to wartime service and he retired after his age thirty-six season of 1951.

Why then? I think pride had much to do with it. DiMaggio wasn't a player who would handle losing his skills well. He wasn't cut out, with that pride--some would call it insecurity, others arrogance--to be less than elite. Further, 1951 was Mickey Mantle's rookie year, which meant that DiMaggio's place as the Yankees' best outfielder--the big star out there--was about to be usurped.

During his thirteen years, DiMaggio won nine World Series and an additional pennant. Think of that championship batting average: 9 for 13, with a bonus World Series appearance. Upon his retirement, the Yankees, who had just won three straight titles, would add on two more, to make it five in a row.

After his player career, DiMaggio had it stipulated in the contract for his public appearances that he'd be introduced as baseball's greatest living player. He was no such thing. But that's how prideful--and I think we can say ultimately insecure--he was.

The manner in which DiMaggio played the game--with his elan and grace--was of larger impact than his cumulative numbers. And larger cultural impact. Had DiMaggio not moved as he moved, and looked as he looked while he was doing it, he wouldn't have cut the figure he did in American culture and this nation's sense of itself--at least at the time. He was what I'll call an embodiment player. A kind of wish fulfillment player.

Hank Aaron led the league in home runs four times, RBI four times, batting average twice, runs scored thrice, slugging four times, on base percentage four times. He led the league in WAR once. That stat didn't exist at the time; well, it didn't in a sense, it just hadn't been mathematically commodified. Aaron didn't lead the league in any of the aforementioned categories the year he led it in WAR. He did lead it in doubles, though.

Jeff Burroughs' 1974 AL MVP is among the most disputed. He's often cited as one of the worst choices for a winner, without there being a satisfactory answer/alternative as to who should have won. It's one of those "It shouldn't have been that guy!" types of years, though who the guy should have been isn't clear to such folks either. Similar cases: the 1984 AL MVP, and both the AL and NL 1987 MVPs, though I think the right choice was definitely made in the first instance, and I don't see a problem with the second two, though Alan Trammell could have been a better choice than George Bell.

But back to Burroughs: He hit 25 homers with a league-leading 118 RBI in 1974, to go along with a .301 batting average. His OPS+ was 162. And I know that's a stat that measures you in relation to everyone else in the league for that given year, but 162 as an OPS+ feels to me like it stands out more--which, I admit, is somewhat counterintuitive--coming from that era than it might now. These were lean years for offense.

On the basis of these numbers--because there wasn't much else to his game--Burroughs had a WAR of 3.6 that year.

Huh. That doesn't seem like much, does it?

Further perspective: Remember recently when we were talking about who was the most underrated player in baseball history, and I floated the name of Jim Sundberg? He was Burroughs' teammate that year on the Texas Rangers. It was his rookie year, in fact. Sundberg hit 3 homers with 36 RBI, batted .247. Somehow, he managed a 99 OPS+, which you'd expect would have been worse given his paltry production. He walked 62 times in 449 plate appearances, which was pretty good and certainly helped.

Sundberg had the higest WAR of any Rangers regular at 4.0. A lot of his value--the majority--was his defense, but there's no one at the time who would have thought it at all possible that a rookie catcher who got 368 at-bats and put up the numbers Sundberg did was more valuable--from any perspective, high-falutin' stats-wise or otherwise--than the guy who won the MVP. And I'm not saying he was. I'm simply looking at different strands of baseball's story.

Willie Mays would get my vote as baseball's best ever athlete. A great athlete doesn't always make for a great baseball player; they can have surprisingly little to do with each other, at least insofar as we usually think of the qualities that makes an athlete great. How fast they run, how high they jump.

Rarely do we consider such things like vision and hand-eye coordination, which I'd argue are usually more important factors. It's funny, like with hockey, that people don't think Wayne Gretzky was this great athlete--he was just smart. Which is absurd.

I don't think Bo Jackson was much of a baseball player. He was a hard swinger. Brawn. But he didn't play the game like a baseball player does. And I think he's a very overrated athlete, which is neither here nor there for the purposes of this entry.

But Willie Mays was both a great baseball player and a great athlete. I have him down as the fourth best baseball player ever. Many would place him as number one. He's picked for that spot perhaps more than anyone else.

As great as Mays was, isn't it a curious thing that Mickey Mantle, at his best, was better than Willie Mays? Or, again, you could make the argument. Did Mays ever reach the heights that Mantle did in 1956 and 1957? I lean towards no. Mays, with all of the completeness of his game, didn't have any seasons where he equaled Mantle's WAR total in either of those campaigns. Does this mean for a time that Mantle was the best baseball player there ever was or has been? It doesn't--that wouldn't hold up to much scrutiny--but sometimes it's fun to float a notion whose behalf one can at least make some kind of argument or claim. Cause someone else to pause for a few seconds, lend an ear, raise an eyebrow.

Davey Johnson's recent passing has reopened discussions about whether he should be in the Hall of Fame. When people have this debate regarding Johnson, they speak about him as though he were only a manager, but the player career ought to factor in as well, I think, with people (Joe Torre, Gil Hodges) whose candidacy is really two-fold (even if one of those things would have been enough on its own).

Johnson was a slick fielder--it feels like everyone was on those Orioles teams--who won three Gold Gloves, and had a career year offensively with the Braves in 1973, hitting 43 homers, which was outrageous for a second baseman. The Braves had three forty home run guys--Darrell Evans and Hank Aaron being the others. Take that as you will, given that their home ballpark was dubbed "The Launching Pad," on account of how readily balls flew out of there.

Johnson's candidacy, though, rests on his managerial career, and he has a strong case. I'd say that his big problem is he only won one World Series title, that being with the 1986 Mets. You always had this idea that those Mets underachieved. They should have had a run of two or three World Series in four or five years. Then again, that couldn't have been an easy team to manage and the Mets were fortunate to get their lone title during Johnson's stewardship, thanks to the charitable contributions of my Boston Red Sox and Messrs. Schiraldi, Stanley, Gedman, McNamara (Buckner would be fifth at most).

The Mets won their division again in 1988 and everyone figured they'd have no problem beating the Dodgers, but that's not how it went. Then everyone thought the A's would have an easier time beating the Dodgers than the Mets should have had, and again people were wrong.

Johnson won a lot of regular season games wherever he went, compiling a 1372-1071 record, which is better than I bet a many would have thought. 300 games over .500 for a manager who bounces around some and didn't skipper a traditional power is impressive. In addition to the Mets, he went to the playoffs with the Reds, Orioles, and Nationals. A two-year stint with the Dodgers was less successful, but he still finished two games over .500 with them, so it's not like it was that bad.

But you kind of need that second World Series title, you know what I mean? But I'd definitely support Johnson's inclusion. He had some influence, too. Went with platoons and utilized what we'd later call analytics, without being a willing slave to it. That is, he used his head and his gut and his intuition as well.

The manager I'd put in before any other would be Danny Murtaugh. He managed the Pirates off and on between 1957 and 1976. Why do I say off and on? Because he had health issues, and sometimes he wasn't around, or it looked like he might not come back. That's a hell of a long run, though, and he did win two World Series titles, with the first--in 1960 against the vaunted Maris and Mantle Yankees--being an epic victory in which the Bucs were slaughtered if we're going by aggregated score, but since we aren't, they found a way to come out ever-so-slightly ahead where it matters most. And that's four game to three, baby. Doesn't matter if you lose three of the games by 1000 combined runs, if you win the others by at least a combined four.

His career record--over fifteen years, so you see what I mean about missing time--was 1115-950. Healthy record. The Pirates were not an organization that fielded a juggernaut year after year. They had some fantastic players--like Roberto Clemente--and then later on Willie Stargell, as well as the greatest defensive second baseman--and maybe the best fielder at any position, period--in Bill Mazeroski, and some very good players like Dick Groat, but quick, name a big-time star Pirates pitcher from the 1950s, 1960s, or the first half of the seventies...can't do it, right? Their top pitchers were solid rather than great. Bob Friend, Roy Face, Vern Law, Dock Ellis, Steve Blass.

Speaking of Willie Stargell: Has anyone ever had more raw, bestial power than "Pops"? Here's something I find fascinating: Stargell finished in the top ten MVP voting seven times, winning--along with future 1986 Met, Keith Hernandez--in 1979, and I don't want to hear how he shouldn't have won that year because he damn well should have. Stargell led that team. Led them to baseball's promised land. How do you get more valuable than that? Take Stargell off that team, and they become a different thing. That team had swagger and balls and resilience, and much of that had to do with Stargell's leadership. He was the man on that squad, and they had some super players. But this is what I'm getting at: All of Stargell's top ten MVP finishes came in his thirties. Isn't that nuts? I can't imagine there's a player about whom something similar can be said.

Steve Carlton went 27-10 during his famous 1972 season, which is largely famous because the team he played for, the Philadelphia Phillies, were so bad, going 59-97. I'm sure we can all do the math, but that means Carlton had nearly half of his team's total wins, which is worth bringing up next time someone tells you that a pitcher has extremely limited say in his win total, which is hogwash. The funny thing is--and it's been this way for 150 years--is that the best pitchers...seem to almost always find a way to win a bunch of games. Strange! Are we going to have a discussion about Nolan Ryan in 1987 now and Rick Reuschel generally? But this is how it's usually gone and I think there's much truth to be gleaned therein. Carlton is an extreme example, but an irresistible one.

I was looking recently at his 1972 season on a start-by-start basis, curious to how he got to that final record. Season begins in April, and Carlton goes 3-1 for the month. Cool. Wins his first two starts in May to improve to 5-1, and this is going great! Then he drops five starts in a row--that's not a losing streak you expect to see with someone who went 27-10. Then a no decision, before he begins winning again with his second start in June. There he was on June 7, 1972, sitting right at .500 with a 6-6 record.

Carlton had two complete games in which he threw eleven innings. He won the first and lost the second. They were basically within a month of each other. 346.1 innings pitched on the year.

Speaking a bit more about streaks: The 1977 Red Sox have to be one of the streakiest teams in the game's history. I love this team and that era. And not just because Carlton Fisk is my all-time favorite player in any sport. Yes, I love him even more than I love Dave Kingman. The 1977 Red Sox were 97-64, which sounds great, only it didn't get them into the playoffs, and if they hadn't been as streaky as they were--couldn't have ironed out that streakiness--then it could have been them instead of the Yankees winning AL East and then the World Series and 1986 wouldn't have had to be what it was. Then again, we wouldn't have had 2004.

The 1977 Red Sox lost four straight right out of the gate. They had a seven-game win streak followed immediately by nine-game losing streak. Who does that?! Then they snapped the losing streak and won four in a row.

That's the kind of team they were. Later they had an eleven-game win streak. That was in August. The same month in which they then had a seven-game losing streak! These guys were nuts with this stuff. Had there been a Wild Card, they might have won it all. Or they might have taken a 3-0 World Series lead and then lost four in a row. Weird team. Did the so-called twenty-five guys/twenty-five cabs culture have something to do with this?

I'm always puzzled by that label, because it seems like these guys were pretty close. They look to be buddies to this day. Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Dwight Evans, Fisk. I don't know what was going on there. They all love Yaz and talk glowingly about him. He was the big star--or at least the big star in that he'd been around the longest as a big star--and conceivably could have made the clubhouse unpleasant but like I said, the faces of these other notables from that era glow when Yaz's name is brought up. Luis Tiant was there and he was obviously fun. Rick Miller married Fisk's sister, so you'd think they were friends or else that wouldn't have happened. Strange.