Sports past

Saturday 11/7/26

Longtime Mets (among other teams) pitcher Jerry Koosman passed away. This guy was good. How good? He won 222 games, had a career ERA of 3.36, and a 110 ERA+. Regarding that last number: he pitched into his age forty-two season, so it’s not like we’re talking all prime here. There are going to be pitchers from today's game with lesser stats than Koosman who'll go into the Hall of Fame while Koosman never will.

Best hitter—which is obviously different than best player—never to win an MVP: has to be either Mel Ott or Johnny Mize. The latter is the most underrated great hitter of all-time. Ted Williams had both in his personal top twenty.

People typically have no idea what it means to be among the best hitters of all-time. Ask them, and many will say Tony Gwynn or Pete Rose. They lack the critical thinking skills to even realize that power is a thing. A huge thing. As big a thing as there is. You can't be one of the best hitters there ever was without significant power. You need it all.

As for someone like Rose, he was barely a career .300 hitter with little home run power. Like I've said, his value as a hitter was in the number of doubles he hit, but you also rarely see this mentioned by anyone. Pete Rose was Pete Rose because of doubles above anything else.

Cedric Maxwell was doing the color commentary the other night on a Celtics TV broadcast. He made this reference to Tom Brady and Rob Gronkowski, saying how Brady would just throw the ball up to Gronkowski.

This seems to me a complete mischaracterization of how they worked together. When you say that a quarterback throws a ball up to a receiver and the receiver goes up and gets it, you're talking a jump ball which usually means the receiver has his body turned and is facing the line of scrimmage. This happened with Brady and Randy Moss.

Whereas Gronkowski ran precise routes and had a special skill for finding seams in the defense. Gronkowski would run along one of those seams, Brady would hit him in stride, and down the field the Patriots would go.

Both players were in part so great because of their fundamentals. Their connections were fundamental based with each knowing how to play the game at a heady level. So basically you just had a Celtics broadcaster trying to do some cross-sport reference without knowing what he was talking about.

I'd spoken in the previous entry about the prevailing ignorance and just-like-your-cousin-at-the-cookout quality of the current day sports host/talking head and we should add that these people never know anything about sports before their lifetime.

I find this unthinkable, personally. In fourth grade, I rapaciously devoured everything I could lay my hands on regarding the history of sports. I could have given you chapter and verse from the 1965 World Series, hashed it out long after the fact with someone who'd sat in those stands.

What does sports history have to do with sports today? What does history have to do with today? Politically? Kind of a lot, right? And much to do with any proper understanding of our times.

But it's always the same with these guys (they're usually guys). If they're fifty-six, their "knowledge" of anything, sports-wise, as such, begins from when they were old enough to watch seriously, if you want to call it that, or with personal investment, which is probably a better way to look at it.

Experts know it all. They know as much as possible. It seems to me that if you're going to be paid a lot of money to be a sports expert--again, such a ridiculous concept with, say, a Michael Felger, but he doesn't have those gigs because his employers have classified him as a sports ignoramus--you should, maybe, I don't know, be an actual expert? Be someone who bothered to look into things? Find out some stuff?

There's a YouTube channel that is this fantastic library of upscaled vintage NFL games. I don't want to give the name of it here, because I don't want to risk it being taken down (especially before I'm able to download all the games I want for my personal collection). This is one of the only positives to certain newly available technologies. Preservation and enhancement without fundamental doctoring. Whether that's a Cowboys-Vikings clash from the early 1970s or a Beatles concert at an all-boys school in 1963.

I love seeing one of my all-time favorites in Alan Page wreck savage havoc on the football field. Amazing player. You're talking a top twenty-five type of guy in league history regardless of position. Those Purple People Eaters Vikings teams were enthralling.

Among these games is the Patriots-Broncos playoff tilt from the 1986 season. Look, I know a New Englander is supposed to feel a certain way about him. And there was that infamous comment from John Hannah regarding his toughness. But Tony Eason could throw the hell out of the football. He had what irritating NFL podcasters today who do "takes" would call arm talent. Powerful arm, impressive touch.

True, he'd turtle and stop, drop, and roll and wasn't some master of pocket awareness and stepping up/finding space in said pocket, but I think if he played in today's era, you're looking at one of the best quarterbacks in the league. Eason did have two standout years, which old school Patriots fans seem to have forgotten or banished from their brains as it doesn't fit their Eason narrative.

Anyway, in this game, Eason drops a ball into receiver Stanley Morgan's proverbial basket for a touchdown that is as silky smooth a play as you're going to see from start to finish by all parties. That Stanley Morgan isn't in the Hall of Fame is a football travesty. I've written about this a number of times, talked about it on the radio, because he's right at the top of the shortlist of puzzling omissions. He remains the greatest wide receiver in Patriots history (I factor in longevity with a team in these matters).

The looks of these games--we'll call it their mise-en-scène--has much greater appeal than what we see during the football season now. Everything in our society trends to the corporate; to blandness, mono-speak, the reduction of individuality. In something like this Patriots-Broncos playoff affair, you all but smell the grass. There are grass stains. Mud.

A player runs out of bounds and he's not far from an ordinary chain link fence. It's akin to football in the backyard or down at the local park on Thanksgiving before dinner, only on this larger, grander scale. I maintain that feeling is essential. That this--what this is, I mean--is paramount to a sport. Take it away, and you make the sport something else that's inorganic.

When I watch football now, I see this homogenized companion piece to app-based gambling. It looks app-y. I think most people who viewed these games would feel the same way. It's not a "having been there" thing. Often I wasn't around yet.

A baseball history forum I follow is doing a member-voted survey of the 100 greatest position players in baseball history, which they last did in 2016. Results are complete for the first twenty-five players. What's been interesting this year is the surge of support for guys like Cal Ripken, Gary Carter, Rickey Henderson. One person had Carter as the best catcher in the game's history. I had recently mentioned in a piece for the New York Daily News that he has a dark horse case.

Is Carter the actual best catcher in the game's history? No. He's someone whose legacy has surged in the analytics era, though. When he played, he wasn't spoken of as this future Hall of Famer. And when he did get in--which took a little while--there was criticism.

I would say that Carter was the best all-around baseball player in the world in the early 1980s, peaking in 1982. I expect this survey will have him as one of the top thirty players. That would have been unthinkable when he retired, and that's without including, of course, all the great players who came along after.

Ripken is the player I'd say is most abetted by analytics. When he played, he was overshadowed by that stupid streak, and yes, I said stupid. I never thought it was what everyone else did. Like, would have have been a lesser player if he played 155 games a year instead of 162? Of course not.

Analytics have given Ripken's career a huge boost, especially as per his defense. He's now consider this top ten defender regardless of position, and more like top five. No one thought of Ripken's defense in that regard during his playing days. He also gets another leg up via positional value and being rated against other shortstops of his era. When he played, the thinking was that Ripken was inconsistent from year to year, kind of like Carlton Fisk. He'd have a monster season, then maybe hit like 21 homers with 80 RBI and a .264 batting average.

Sure, he'd be picked for the All-Star game and usually voted in as the starter. One of the fixtures of the midsummer classic and close to an automatic selection. This seemed more like the way of things, though, and largely because of the position he played than out and out greatness, like being a regular All-Star as an outfielder or first baseman. Then again, Fred Lynn made it a lot, and he wasn't great. But the guys who are "he's a given" type of All-Star picks year in, year out, are the Willie Mays and Hank Aaron types. And Ripken at short, because he played short.

I feel like many people want George Brett to have been better than Mike Schmidt. Not that Schmidt is disliked. But the truth is that Schmidt was the superior player/third baseman by a comfortable margin. Take 1980, when Brett had one of those pantheonic years. Was he even better than Schmidt then?

I love Gary Carter, but the Carter love is going too strong in the opposite direction now. These things can be cyclical. Mike Piazza is also getting a big spike of support now that analytics says, "Hold your horses, naysayers! This player wasn't as bad defensively as you always thought/regurgitated!" and the consensus is he's the best offensive catcher the sport has ever seen.

I'm a bit dubious. There are these intrinsic aspects to being a catcher that go together with everything else to make a catcher perhaps the most important position player on a team. I would have a hard time, for example, placing Piazza above Yogi Berra. To put it simply, he wasn't as catcherly, if that makes sense. I think that's a thing. A very real thing.

I always liked Davey Lopes (who also died earlier this year). He got a late start. You could have copious talent and still be stuck in the minor leagues in that Dodgers organization of the 1970s. They were loaded with fine players, and yet they didn't manage to win a title until 1981. I think the quality of play in baseball in the 1970s was perhaps the highest in the game's history.

You'll find--though you won't find where anyone else has said this--that the sport of baseball is at its best and the play is at its highest during periods when the catching position is strong across the league and there's arguably been no better time in baseball for any position than there was for the position of catcher in the 1970s, which I'll expand upon in a future entry.

Back to Lopes. His rookie year was 1973--his age twenty-eight season! This is pretty nuts, especially for a guy so talented. You could make a case for Lopes--when you factor in his entire game--having Hall of Fame talent. Bob Johnson was another player who had a late start, with his career beginning in his age twenty-seven season of 1933 with the Philadelphia Athletics. Johnson should be in the Hall of Fame. To me, he's one of the most glaring omissions. Dynamite hitter. Finished with a career 139 OPS+.

Here's the Lopes stat (which has several components to it) that I mind mind-blowing: During his age forty season with the Cubs, he swiped 47 bags and was only caught 4 times! It gets more unlikely, though, because Lopes played in a mere 99 games that year.

You could win a lot of games with him during his prime as one of your better players. Strong fielder at second base, strong fielder with a Gold Glove in 1978, career 107 OPS+ (which if you know about these things you understand is really strong for a second baseman, especially one who didn't play for most of his twenties and was active for several seasons into his forties when there's normally a lot of drop-off to pull that career number down), and more than anything else, a great baserunner.

People usually take that to mean someone stole many bases, and Lopes did lead the league twice, in 1975 and 1976 with 77 and 63 respectively, but there's way more to baserunning than that.

You don't need to even be fast to be a great baserunner. It's reading the ball off the bat, being smart, taking the extra base, knowing when it's safely available to you, doing the little things to get into scoring position, situational awareness, knowing your opponent, how the outfielders throw and how well.

He had some speed for a catcher because he was such a great athlete, but Carlton Fisk, for example, was no Rickey Henderson and he was a strong baserunner. Maury Wills was an outstanding baserunner, something which is, ironically, overshadowed by his steal totals.

Davey Lopes was a very cool player. Exciting. I wouldn't say flashy. Nowadays when people describe a player as exciting, they're usually talking about the ostentatious stuff. In football, it's the diva wide receiver with his off-the-field life of excess and borderline criminality, salary demands, etc. Plus--and this is a big plus for me--Lopes played on one of my favorite teams...the 1984 Oakland Athletics!

What kind of sicko are you, one may be asking. The 1984 A's? Seriously, guy? Yes, those A's! Obviously I like Lopes a goodly amount. And among his teammates that year was Dave Kingman, and no one loves Kong more than I! This was a huge year for Sky Kong, his second-best season after the legendary campaign of 1979. My baseball book, The Diamond Mirror: Life Truths Gleaned from Baseball's Reflective History will begin with several thousand words about Kingman that are out and out literature of the highest (moonshot?) order.

I'm going to give you Kingman's stats from that year mostly because I like seeing them: 35 homers, 118 RBI, a .268 BA, 133 OPS+. He struck out 118 times. That's right, big bad strikeout monster Dave Kingman--the player your coaches told you never to be like because of all those whiffs--fanned what would now be a piddling 118 times. Today, that would be cause for the hitting coach to say, "Dave, you're doing it wrong! Let's get the tablet and break down your launch angle!" Hell, Kingman was practically a contact hitter by present day standards. He'd be the batter part of a hit-and-run play.

You had forty-year-old Joe Morgan at second. Sure, he hit .244, but that OPS+ was still 104. Morgan's spot on the roster meant that the thirty-nine-year-old Lopes played all over the place: right field, second base, left, center, third. Carney Lansford was there and hit .300. You got Rickey Henderson with his 6.0 WAR and league-leading 66 steals (which made for a down year, theft-wise, for him).

Dwayne Murphy, a stellar fielder whose defensive acumen is rarely cited by baseball historians, patrolled center. Mike Heath was a decent and appealing catcher who also played some third and some corner outfield. Former MVP Jeff Burroughs tallied a few at-bats. Tony Phillips, who went on to become a damn good player, was a short. A really fascinating ball club, despite their 77-85 record.

Lopes played baseball as baseball, not as this game of whatever it is presently with its lack of fluidity. We spoke of motion the other day and there was a lot of motion (and juice) to Davey Lopes' game.