The Pecan Park Eagle

Who Cares Who Wins The World Series?

October 26, 2015

George Brett (with the same expression he expressed during Game 6 of the ALCS)

George Brett
(with the same expression we saw in Game 6 of the ALCS)

Who Cares Who Wins The World Series?

1.) Players, Fans, and Employees of the Kansas City Royals and New York Mets.

2.) Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred. (He’s paid to care, as long as he remains impartial.)

3.) George Brett.

4.) Some fans of the eventual winner, if that team is the same one that knocked their own club from the playoffs because it gives them the satisfaction of feeling that their boys, at least, lost to the one team that won it all. (Had the Cubs advanced to the World Series, however, it is most improbable that any Cardinals fans would have been pulling for the baby bears to win it all.)

5.) George Brett.

6.) Revenge fans of those clubs who were eliminated by one of the two World Series teams. Unlike their polar opposites who wish to take consolation in knowing that their team lost to the eventual World Series winner, these fans want somebody to vicariously revenge their own suffering by beating up on the club that knocked their favorites from the hunt.

7.) George Brett.

8.) Hotels and relevant service and product industries do not really care who wins. They are just hoping that a lot of people show up and that the World Series runs a full seven games.

9.) NOT – The Pecan Park Eagle!

Editorial Note: Yes, George Brett did receive three mentions in our list of those who care about this year’s World Series. We gave him one listing for each of the three times the TV cameras in Game Six spotted him in his private suite, checking either his pulse or holding his heart during certain tense times in Game Six of the ALCS battle. . Regardless of our current personal dearth of interest, we will be sure to watch, anyway. After all, it is the World Series – and it will be our last lingering taste of professional baseball until next April.

Stay dry, everybody!

____________________

Please Note Too: Important Vintage Base Ball News! The weekend rains wiped out plans for Opening Day of the new Texas Vintage Base Ball Union at George Ranch State Park last Saturday, but, weather permitting, we will make another attempt at the same site on Saturday, November 7, 2015, with for games, two each at 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM. Please put us on your schedule and come see how “base ball” was played without gloves and a few different rules back in 1860.

____________________

Tags: Who Cares Who Wins The World Series?
Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

Bill Gilbert: 2015 Playoff Observations, Part 2

October 26, 2015

Baseball Analyst Bill Gilbert’s Second Comments on the 2015 MLB Playoffs.

Playoff Observations – 2015, Part 2.

~ All four of the LCS teams have blue as the dominant color.

~ Is Daniel Murphy really this good?

~ Why isn’t Mark Buehrle on Toronto’s playoff roster?

~ Ben Zobrist has had an excellent major league career, none of it with the team that originally drafted and signed him – the Houston Astros.

Haircut # 1
Josh Donaldson
Toronto Blue Jays

~ Josh Donaldson has a strong case for AL MVP. He would also have a strong case if there were an award for “worst haircut in the post season playoffs.” *

~ The Mets collection of young power pitchers is scary.

~ Whatever happened to close games?

Bill Gilbert

10/24/15

billcgilbert@sbcglobal.net

Haircut (?) # 2
Colby Rasmus
Houston Astros

* TPPE Editor’s Note: We do have to ask, Bill. Did you forget about the haircut of our Astros own Colby Rasmus in your arrival at this particular observation? – If you ruled out Colby’s coif on the basis that his hair style has nothing to do with haircuts, we will understand.

____________________

Tags: Bill Gilbert: 2015 Playoff Observations, Part 2
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Saturday Night Fever – An Elder Version

October 25, 2015

“WE’LL BE BACK!”

The Pecan Park Eagle is a little “stove-up” this Saturday night, but it’s mostly mental. we were all in gear to start the first league play season of our new Texas Vintage Base Ball Union at George Ranch State Park today, but we had to escape the fate of all the strangling toads by putting an early cancellation of our plans due to heavy rain and common sense. We will try again in two weeks to crank up 0ur 1860s base ball loop with four game at 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM – also at GRSP. So, stay tuned and please come join us.

The other contributing funk factor is the failure of the Toronto Blue Jays last night to force the home boy Kansas City Royals into a Game 7 tonight when speedster Lorenzo Cain scored from first (ala Enos Slaughter) on single to right by Eric Hosmer in the bottom of the 8th that would hold up as the difference-maker in a 4-3 Royals game and ALCS pennant victory. It would have been fun to watch a Game 7 tonight and a nice alternative to the prattle sound of rain against the windows and the deluge of college football on TV.

The vintage base ball rain out did allow me to watch my UH Cougars paste Central Florida, 59-10, at 11:00 AM today, but I had set that one to DVR the one-sided slaughter it turned out be, anyway. So, I could have lived to have watched it in that form as planned. You may have to be another long-suffering Cougar alum or fan to get this one, but I almost regretted that UH had not been forced to rally for a one-point win. Had that been the reality, it might be easier for the fat cat schools to see that our great new head coach, Tom Herman, is not really enough like “God” to be worthy of their imminent coach-poaching efforts. Herman just needs to understand that awakening the sleeping giant of UH support is going to take more than a 7-0-0 start against almost all lesser light names and a history of good coaches leaving to earn back the interest and trust of the thousands who fell away with the shaft ride UH took from the “Big 12” after the death of the SWC. Returning to campus for home games did help, but the successive losses of head coaches Art Briles and Kevin Sumlin simply set the table for people to distrust our UH future and to make it easy for many to stay away from the “George Southern” level teams that began to appear on our UH home game schedule like back yard toad stool mushrooms. As a realist, I will concede this much: UH needs to use its political support to get into a major conference and also to develop a financial plan for becoming competitive with any of the big name schools who come after our winning coaches like hungry wolves.

UH is moving boldly forward as a Tier One academic university, one that is only now in the earlier stages of its growth as a research university. It also is only a short while away from having its own medical school. And its forays into the creative and performing arts already are widely regarded. UH is no longer the “Cougar High” that simple minds and rivals have perceived it to be in derision forever. – We are – The University of Houston – a force to be reckoned with in all the positive ways that are possible as one of the State of Texas and City of Houston’s great contributions to the world – and we have no intention of leaving our future as a top level intercollegiate athletic program in the hands of UH haters and naysayers.

It’s up to us UH people. We know that. Just do us the favor of not trying to bury us while we are working to dig our way out of the cultural hole (everything we just spoke about above) that has created a level of correctable distrust and lack of support among some UH alums that has been fomenting for almost two decades and the collapse of the Southwest Conference. Remember too – the future belongs to our young people – and UH is now involving and graduating thousands of domestic and international students who follow their Cougars as zealously as any of the other state school groups do during their own teams during undergraduate days. – Those young people are our future too! – And thanks for allowing me to rant about them. It may not be mutual, but I love their company at UH home games. Just being around them renews a wildfire of UH hope!

Eat ‘Em Up, Cougars!

And way back to baseball for a final thought that simply went frittering out of a memory closet that just opened of its own accord. Many of you will remember a great power hitting first baseman for the Boston Red Sox named Dick Stuart. His high HR totals and low batting marks might have made him a natural for the 2015 Astros, except for one major failing that might not have slipped past the club brass. Stuart was a terrible fielder. – Now hold that last thought because it is essential as the set up to this actual story:

As I recall it, Dick Stuart was being honored at a post-1963 season dinner in Boston for the 42 homers he blasted that season. It was an event attended by many of his teammates. – While he was at the podium, Stuart wanted to extend some “stood by her man” credit and appreciation to his wife.

“You know the story, folks,” Stuart began. “Behind every good man there’s a good woman.”

“Yours better have a glove,” one of his Red Sox teammates shouted.

It was the best line of the evening after the laughter finally subsided.

And it is the last line of this much quieter evening too.

____________________

Tags: Saturday Night Rambles
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Expansion Clubs in the World Series

October 24, 2015

The 1962 expansion club New York Mets lost 120 games. - Who could have dreamed back then that 7 years later they reach and win the 1969 World Series?

The 1962 expansion club New York Mets lost 120 games. – Who could have dreamed back then that seven years later they (with different players, for sure) would reach and win the 1969 World Series?

The following chart displays the record of modern era expansion clubs in the World Series through 2014. Interesting to note too, no matter who wins the ALCS (which is now early in Game Six at this writing), is the fact that no matter who wins between two the battling AL former expansion teams, that 2015 will mark the first time in modern World Series history that two contemporary expansion clubs shall meet in World Series play. As you know the NL Mets are already there – and awaiting either the Royals or Blue Jays. – Up until now, it’s always been one of the “since 1961” clubs versus one of the original turn of the century 16 clubs that were the MLB for slightly better than the first fifty years of the 20th century.

The Modern Era Expansion Club Record in the World Series, 1969-2014:

YEAR	CLUB	FOE	RESULT	SCORE
1969	METS	ORIOLES	WON	4-1
1973	METS	ATHLETICS	LOST	3-4
1980	ROYALS	PHILLIES	LOST	2-4
1982	BREWERS	CARDINALS	LOST	3-4
1984	PADRES	TIGERS	LOST	1-4
1985	ROYALS	CARDINALS	WON	4-3
1986	METS	RED SOX	WON	4-3
1992	BLUE JAYS	BRAVES	WON	4-2
1993	BLUE JAYS	PHILLIES	WON	4-2
1997	MARLINS	INDIANS	WON	4-3
1998	PADRES	YANKEES	LOST	0-4
2000	METS	YANKEES	LOST	1-4
2001	D’BACKS	YANKEES	WON	4-3
2002	ANGELS	GIANTS	WON	4-3
2003	MARLINS	YANKEES	WON	4-2
2005	ASTROS	WHITE SOX	LOST	0-4
2007	ROCKIES	RED SOX	LOST	0-4
2008	RAYS	PHILLIES	LOST	1-4
2010	RANGERS	GIANTS	LOST	1-4
2011	RANGERS	CARDINALS	LOST	3-4
2014	ROYALS	GIANTS	LOST	3-4

Obviously, no true expansion club ever had the talent to reach a World Series in their first year of existence. The “Amazin’ Mets” of 1962 needed seven additional seasons to evolve into the first of their kind to reach a World Series – and then to become the first to win the 1969 reiteration of our big moment in every baseball season with a collection of incredible plays and “amazin” good fortune that were straight out of a classic early 1950s baseball movie starring Paul Douglas. – Remember “Angels in the Outfield”?

Here’s a link that will allow you to play with the data to your individual heart’s delight:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_Series_champions

There are still a handful of clubs awaiting their first turn at the big wheel – and you may also wish to use the linkage data to chart how long it took each of the clubs who did get there to reach baseball’s Valhalla the first or only time.

Allow me to make an amendment to that Valhalla metaphor from an Astros fan perspective. It’s not “Valhalla” if your club lost its only time there – and didn’t so much as win a single game in the process.

Have fun!

____________________

Tags: expansion clubs in world series
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The Texas Vintage Base Ball Union is Here

October 23, 2015

Manager Bob Copus of the Barker Red Sox models his club's nifty looking 19th century uniforms. All four of our clubs dress for the games as though they just stepped out of a time machine.

Manager Bob Copus of the Barker Red Sox models his club’s nifty looking 19th century uniform. All four of our clubs dress for the vintage games as though they just stepped out of a time machine.

Nothing lives for long until its time comes, but it now looks as though the time has come for vintage base ball, an ancient 1860 rules version of baseball played without gloves or protective gear, is about to get its run-in-the-sun as a fall and spring league activity at the George Ranch State Park, near Sugar Land, starting this weekend.

… If the the creek “don’t” rise from all the convergence of rain in the forecast for this weekend.

Since our “Texas Vintage Base Ball Union” Opening Day first four games for scheduled for 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM, we may get lucky with the latest Channel 2 prediction. Meteorologist Frank Billingsley is now saying that worst of three-day, 20 inches possible flood will not get started until about 3:00 PM this Saturday, Oct. 24th. If that materializes, and there is no significant earlier mist, we should be OK for our part in the George Ranch State Park’s annual fall “Texian Days” festival – a big show that will go on anyway, rain or shine. We should have a better take on those chances by Friday afternoon.

For now, we are on and looking forward to finally getting our Houston area vintage base ball play into league action for the first time. There has been a level of barnstorming play in our area since the now defunct Montgomery County Saw Dogs got things started in about 2007. Our Houston Babies, the reincarnation of Houston’s first 1888 professional base ball club started in 2008 – and the Katy Combine has been around since about 2011. Another club, the Richmond Giants, and the original Saw Dogs club are both now in states of ossified hibernation, or else, eternal rest, but two other new clubs, the Barker Red Sox and the Mo Town Strikers have arisen to make a four-team, round robin league schedule of 6 games to be played on three Saturdays on the two fields at George Ranch Park possible this fall.

The Clubs & Managers:

The Houston Babies are managed by Bob Dorrill;

The Barker Red Sox are managed by Bob Copus;

The Mo Town Strikers are managed by Bob Blair;

The Katy Combine is managed by Dave (Bob) and Tom (Bob) Flores.

Managerial Note. The Flores Brothers of vintage base ball are the spirited equivalents of the movie industry’s Coen Brothers. They bring that special touch of Coen Brothers fire and excitement over the unexpected into every game they play. Neither is really named “Bob”, of course, but we didn’t want to leave them out of the count that every other league manager is named “Bob” by either coincidence, destiny, or fate.

Come share the joy. If you’ve never played vintage base ball, all we can tell you is that it is the closest thing you could do today to recreate the excitement that so many of us grew up with playing on the sandlots – before Little League and all the adults took over our private “field of dreams” as kids and turned the game into a place in which parents could force their children into living out their own adult dreams of becoming big leaguers.

If we get to play this Saturday, come out to George Ranch and watch the action. We welcome visitors and people who may be interested in organizing teams to participate in our second league championship season in the spring of 2016.

The 1860 Vintage Base Ball Rules. Here is one of several links from Google that shows the rules for the 1860 game:

http://www.dirigobaseball.org/about-us/1860s-rules-and-customs-base-ball

The Fall Season Schedule ~ All Games at George Ranch Park:

All Games @ George Ranch Park Fields 1 and 2.

Sat., Oct. 24, 2015

10:00 AM: Babies @ Red Sox / Field #1

Combine @ Strikers / Field # 2

(light lunch – free to players, courtesy of GRP Texian Days)

1:00 PM: Strikers @ Babies / Field #1

Red Sox @ Combine / Field #2

____________________

Sat., Nov. 7, 2015

10:00 AM: Red Sox @ Strikers / Field #1

Combine @ Babies / Field # 2

12:00 PM: Strikers @ Combine / Field #1

Red Sox @ Babies / Field #2

____________________

Sat., Nov. 21, 2015

10:00 AM: Combine @ Red Sox / Field #1

Babies @ Strikers / Field #2

12:00 PM: Babies @ Combine / Field #1

Strikers @ Red Sox / Field #2

____________________

From the Parking Area, Field #1 is further away, across the creek by Foot Bridge. ~ Field # 2 is nearer, close to the main complex.

_____________________

Our Hopes. Over the past seven years, our free range play schedule has carried our Houston area clubs to games in Galveston and Sealy – and we have been especially grateful to a couple visiting clubs from Boerne, Texas who often have joined us or games here. Thank you, Boerne White Sox and Tusculum Freethinkers! Please consider this to be an open invitation to join us for league play next spring, if that is possible. We didn’t adopt the name “Texas Vintage Base Ball Union” for window dressing. We really hope to see the game expand into the other existing pockets of state interest and become a unifying force for spreading the joy of this game across the Lone Star State.

For Further Info. Please contact me anytime for further information on vintage base ball – or how you may easily start you own team and join us for the spring 2016 season.

10/24/15: Rain Out Report. Unfortunately, the flood of rains started drizzling their way into George Ranch Park prior to 8 o’clock this morning and there is a dark blue line of heavy rain coming right behind them on the radar. Opening Day is now officially rained out. Weather permitting, we will resume the league schedule of our games for Nov. 7th in two weeks.

Regards,

Bill McCurdy, Commissioner

The Texas Vintage Base Ball Union

houston.buff37@gmail.com

_______________________

Tags: Texas Vintage Base Ball Union
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Back To The Future Missed on Cubs

October 22, 2015

Cubs Fan at MMP in 2009
~ Make that 107 years (and counting)!

In what may have been “Back to The Future III,” (I no longer exactly recall the number in this three-movie theme sequence) the classic Michael J. Fox time travel movie predicted by their own exploration that they would time-land on October 21, 2015 – on the very day that the Chicago Cubs finally won the World Series, ending their cursed attachment to 1908, the last time they emerged as baseball’s World Champions.

As it turns out, Marty McFly and Doc Brown must have slipped through a wormhole and landed them in an alternative universe. What we now know today from getting to October 21, 2015 by the old-fashioned one-tick-of-the-clock-at-a-time route and no detours is that this date simply turns out to be the day that the New York Mets swept the Chicago Cubs in the NLCS, sending the woe begone North Siders and their loyal fans out into the bars of Wrigleyville to bend a few elbows before going home to sleep it off and wait another year under the weight of their long and rightfully owned umbrage as baseball’s “lovable losers.”

For the record, make that 107 years – and still counting.

Looking back to 1985, the year the original “Back To The Future” was released, it still amazes me how much we missed in our guesses on the look and feel of the everyday life that awaited us, thirty years hence, in 2015. As a past member of a research group back then known as “The World Future Society,” I have to say this – nobody but nobody I can remember really saw the whole landscape of immediacy that would take over our whole lives in what we now call the digital age. Like a lot of people, I had an Apple IIe computer and a dot-matrix printer that allowed me to write without using error correctable “white-out” liquid – and that seemed pretty amazing to me at the time. Of course, my Apple IIe had no hard drive. You had to save any material you wanted to keep on hundreds of floppy disks. – Man! How great was that over typewriters. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

In 1985, we were still waltzing along under the spell of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 best-seller book on the danger of changes that were occurring in the culture at an accelerating rate that could soon possibly exceed or abilities for adaptation. Now that we are still surviving in 2015, we may even be able to reach for the assumption that Toffler may have been using a manual crank-handled adding machine to figure out his taxes at the 1970 time he dove into the future forecasting waters with such an ominously dire prediction.

Toffler did not see the digital technological exponential growth that would unfold as our vehicle for change in a faster changing world, nor could he have seen in 1970 how much it would change all of us and the immediate ways we get our news, communicate with others, or, in many instances, distract people into only “talking” with people who are not physically present with them at the time the “conversation” takes place.

Back in 1970, people who walked down the street talking to someone who wasn’t there were assumed to be psychotic. In 2015, maybe half the people you see on the street are talking to someone who isn’t there. But that observation sort of feeds the counter theory to everything I have been not too heavily expressing here today.

Maybe Alvin Toffler was correct in “Future Shock.” Maybe our change through digital technology is not so much a healthy adaptation to accelerating change in the culture. Maybe it is our mutation into a species of intelligent life that has no attention span tolerance for anything that cannot be expressed in five seconds or less by someone who is not present in the real time exchange – and by a message that is best said in code – or preferably by emoticon.

Some of us are guilty of using far too many words to be heard in 2015, but I make no apologies. I haven’t figured out how to enjoy the use of symbols as replacements for the writing dance that is only available with beautiful words and an earnest attempt to order them together in some kind of whole thought pattern.

This much is clear. – The more things change, the more they remain the same. – The Chicago Cubs are still waiting for their first World Series title since 1908. The New York Mets just swept the Cubbies, 4 games to none, by a Game Four final score at Wrigley of 8-3.

KEEP THINKING ORANGE! GO ASTROS!

____________________

Tags: Cubs Lose. Toffler not-so-much!
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Corruption or Business-As-Usual?

October 21, 2015

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you are talking about.”

Some mornings are filled with the kinds of “sports” news that are equivalently depressing, unsurprising, and deflating to the passions of why so many of us bonded our hearts away to their various attractions on the sandlots of childhood. Today, Wednesday, October 21, 2015, is one of those days for me here at The Pecan Park Eagle.

It started with Page One in the Houston Chronicle and the story of the debate Texas A&M last night between Oliver Luck, a Vice-President of the NCAA for Regulatory Affairs and Jay Silas, an ESPN basketball analyst who favors competitive pay for college athletes that would allow university based athletes to be paid as much as their coaches. Luck spoke for the position that free market pay that converted college athletes into wealthy minors that mirrored the NFL would totally destroy the possibility that most student athletes will remember that they are in college to get an education and earn a degree. Luck favors a more earth-bound stipend increase, one that does not distract from the stated purpose of why these young people on amateur athletic scholarship are in place – and that is, to get an education while they apply their talents in behalf of the school they supposedly represent. Both lawyers, it is reported that both men articulately argued their points for more than an hour in the Rudder Theatre on the Texas A&M campus.

The second non-caffeinated wake up call came from a report we then watched on the Today TV Show which alleges that the University of Louisville basketball program extensively used prostitutes to recruit highly sought players from 2010 to 2014. Coach Rick Pitino’s public statement was that he knew nothing of this kind of thing going on – and that, if it were, the university was prepared to take responsibility for any wrongdoing. Who knows for sure what Pitino knew, and when he knew it. All I know was totally visceral. Pitino was about as convincing as Captain Renaud in “Casablanca” when he announced under political pressure from the Nazis that he was closing down Rick’s American Cafe because he was “shocked to find that gambling was going on.” At about the same time Renaud finishes his closure statement, a casino employee rushes over to hand him a payment check. “Your winnings, Captain!” – “Oh, thank you very much,” Renaud answers, as he quickly puts the money voucher in his pocket.

Corruption or Business-As-Usual? Is that the question – or the heart of the matter in both issues? Of course, one might argue that “corruption or business-as-usual” in sports is not a dichotomy – and that they both are truly one and the same – and that anything we human beings put together as an exercise, an institution, a religion, a club, a charity, a sport, a cause, or a you-name-it – on some level – inevitably finds its own level of corruption because of human egos – and they plays these parts of us write together – in play with each other – once things become political – or exercises in the pursuit of power and money.

All I know for sure is that none of this crap in the news today, no matter how real it is, has anything to do with my love for Astros baseball, UH major sports, and my lesser fondness for certain other athletic activities. Those bonds were born during my childhood sandlot days and the coming-of-age years I spent in undergraduate school. If I think about stories of greed and corruption in sports too much, it is never surprising to hear about the worst breaches of faith, but it does lessen my enjoyment of all the games. It does so because it brings home the reality that these great athletes are not here to play just to win for us fans, or the city, or the university but, understandably, to better their own lives and futures. Sometimes, that’s hard to do. And sometimes, it’s hard for both the individuals who play and coach the sports – and the institution or company that hires them, to stay honest in the way they do things.

And sometimes too, people make promises that they cannot honestly keep over time. It’s no excuse, but it is a fact of human nature.

Example. UH is now soaring again in college football with Tom Herman on board as the new head coach. The Cougars are 6-0-0 and ranked #21 in the country by AP under the former Ohio State Assistant Coach and Offensive Coordinator for the 2014 National Champions, but we also remember what happened to former head coaches Art Briles and Kevin Sumlin the last two times we were ranked and off to great success on the gridiron. – Briles left UH for more money at Baylor and he now has the Bears ranked #2 in the nation. Sumlin dropped UH for Texas A&M where he now has the Aggies ranked #17, if memory serves.

Herman is making more money now than any previous head coach at UH and he has vowed with great passion that he wants to be here to put the Cougars back on the map of big time college football as a winning team and, implicitly, through the time it takes for UH to again find membership in a top level conference.

Will that happen? Who knows? All we know at UH for sure is that some big hurting-for-wins, but money-heeled schools will have their runs at stealing Tom Herman away too – and that hunting season may already have begun with the mid-season retirement of Steve Spurrier as head coach at South Carolina.

As for the Louisville story, I’ll put my take in these words:

Hookers and bling,

They ain’t the real thing,

You ain’t got nothing,

If that’s what they bring.

____________________

Tags: business-as-usual in sports
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The Sporting Life’s Sad Lexicon

October 21, 2015

Baseball’s Sad Lexicon

These are the saddest of possible words:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Trio of bear cubs, and fleeter than birds,

Tinker and Evers and Chance.

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double –

Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

~ Franklin Pierce Adams

______________________________

Back in the summer of 1910, when Franklin Pierce Adams, a columnist for the New York Evening Mail, wrote those now famous baseball lines, he did so on his way to see the Giants play the Cubs at the Polo Grounds, but only because his editor just happened to have chided him as he left about coming up with a column that was a little longer in content than the one he recently had been submitting. When his quickly composed doggerel was included with his column of July 12, 1910, no one, even Adams, thought much of it as a thing of value, but those initial judgments proved wrong. Readers and other papers and writers liked it. – The thing literally did what the written word does ever now and then. It took on a life of its own.

First published as “That Double Play Again,” it was reprinted by the Chicago Daily Tribune on July 15, 1910 as “Gotham’s Woe.” Three days later, after much energetic feedback, it was published again in the New York Daily Tribune by the title that would crown its place in the history of baseball literature as “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon.”

All that being said, it occurred to me today that the poem, in a way, was about two guys named Tinker and Evers leaving the legacy of their talents up to “chance”. If the guy on first doesn’t make the final catch in this three-second performance, none of these three bear cubs are remembered well enough together to all later make it to the Hall of Fame – let alone to have inspired a beleaguered columnist to write the lines under pressure from his boss as column space fillers – only to see them become words that would soon rise to a level of historical stature far exceeding the memory of either the man who wrote them or the newspaper that published them.

The following respectful parody is dedicated to everyone in life, not baseball alone, although our sport has contributed its fair share to the total of those who sadly have frittered away opportunity because they were not able to grow up in time to see what they were doing to themselves until it was too late:

The Sporting Life’s Sad Lexicon

These are the saddest of possible words:

“I tinkered forever with chance.”

Loving to play, I soared with the birds,

“Why go to work? Let’s just dance!”

Restlessly living my life on the bubble,

“I want what I want! Don’t give me no trouble!”

Words that lead only to life on the stubble:

When you tinker forever with chance.

~ Bill McCurdy

Tags: THE SPORTING LIFE'S SAD LEXICON
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Complex Rules May Quash Ambidextrous Pitching

October 20, 2015

Ambidextrous pitcher Pat Venditte
2008 Staten Island Yankees

When an ambidextrous throwing hand closing pitcher came into a June 19, 2008 game to get the last out for his visiting team against a switch hitter for the home club, the only usual circumstance at play here was the fact that both players and their teams had names. Pat Venditte had taken the mound for the visiting Staten Island Yankees; Ralph Henriquez was at the plate for the Brooklyn Cyclone.

What happened when they met under the game circumstances we usually view as “normal” was everything to the polar contrary – and without a first pitch from Venditte ever leaving either hand as a throw to the plate.

When batter Henriquez first stood in to hit as a right handed batter, Venditte shifted his special ambidextrous glove to his left hand to indicate that he now intended to throw right handed. Noting the change, Henriquez simply stepped to the other side of the plate to indicate that he now intended to bat left handed.

Since there were no rules in place seven years ago to prevent this laughable farce, it went back and forth through unreported repetitions until the not-so-happy-about-it umpire finally ordered Henriquez to hold his spot as a right handed batter and take a right handed time at bat against a right handed Venditte. Four pitches later, Henriquez struck out and the game was in the books as a win for Staten Island and a save for Venditte.

This is baseball, remember. The call went out immediately for the creation of rules to govern and control against this eventuality of this same “dance” every time an ambidextrous pitcher came into a game facing a switch hitter. Here’s what the Professional Baseball Umpire Association (PBUC) quickly came up with as the new rules governing this special circumstance after consulting with a number of deep-blue-sea baseball sources, including the Major League Baseball Rules Committee:

• The pitcher must visually indicate to the umpire, batter and runner(s) which way he will begin pitching to the batter. Engaging the rubber with the glove on a particular hand is considered a definitive commitment to which arm he will throw with. The batter will then choose which side of the plate he will bat from.

• The pitcher must throw one pitch to the batter before any “switch” by either player is allowed.

• After one pitch is thrown, the pitcher and batter may each change positions one time per at-bat. For example, if the pitcher changes from right-handed to left-handed and the batter then changes batter’s boxes, each player must remain that way for the duration of that at-bat (unless the offensive team substitutes a pinch hitter, and then each player may again “switch” one time).

• Any switch (by either the pitcher or the batter) must be clearly indicated to the umpire.

• There will be no warm-up pitches during the change of arms.

• If an injury occurs the pitcher may change arms but not use that arm again during the remainder of the game.

All of this information is derived from an informative July 2, 2008 article by Benjamin Hill for MLB.com. My apologies if this story and article is simply old news to you, but we weren’t aware of it here at the Pecan Park Eagle until Darrell “Old Reliable” Pittman sent us all this information yesterday afternoon. – Thanks again, my friend.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/3051858/

Darrell Pittman also has provided us with an historical reference to the few ambidextrous pitchers, going back to the 19th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switch_pitcher

About Pat Venditte. Pat Venditte finally broke into MLB in 2015, posting a 2-2, 4.40 ERA record as a reliever for the Oakland A’s in 26 game appearances.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/v/vendipa01.shtml

Ambidexterity in General. All we care to say about the problematical issue of making sensible room for ambidextrous pitching in baseball is brief. – If their own genetic rarity doesn’t continue to make them a non-issue in the first place, they most probably are going to be governed into normalcy by those oh-so constrictive rules against their best use of that very special power to surprise batters by randomly throwing every pitch they learn at the batter by whim or design – and with either hand – whenever they want. Those opportunities no have been pretty much “ruled out” – and, I’m sorry, I have neither the information nor the time to dig it up this morning to say anything about how, if at all, ambidexterity now benefits Pat Venditte.

Have an exciting or peaceful Tuesday, everybody, with whatever happens to be your compulsion or choice of behaviors on the way to whatever your fate or destiny may be today! This Tuesday is either a day – or your day. Use it as you either choose – or feel you must.

____________________

Tags: an ambidextrous pitcher
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Random Thoughts on a Sunday Morning

October 18, 2015

COSTELLO: “Hey, Abbott! Do you know who’s running for mayor in Houston?”
ABBOTT: “Yes, I do! Who’s a good man!”

Random Thoughts on a Sunday Morning

If a certain candidate for Mayor of Houston is elected in November, “Abbott and Costello” will be governing the State of Texas and its largest city in 2016.
If “Tal’s Hill” is such a terrible threat to the health of center fielders at Minute Maid Park, why hasn’t a single one of them suffered any serious harm beyond an ego bruise in the sixteen full season years of its existence to date?
Gene Elston was the original voice of our Houston MLB franchise from 1962 through 1986 and a Ford Frick Award winner. Milo Hamilton was with the Houston club from 1986 until his 2015 death and the second voice of the Astros from 1987 to 2015. Milo also earned the Hall of Fame’s Ford Frick Award for broadcasters. The two men died recently, only 12 days apart. – Why is it then that only Milo was honored with the “MH” placement of his initials on the team’s uniforms for the balance of the season? – Is “GE” protected from use as the trademark property of General Electric? – Or did Gene Elston simply make his contribution to the team’s history so far back in the past that it no longer matters that he was not equally remembered by the Astros on a level with Milo Hamilton?
Friday night’s televised mayoral candidates debate was encouraging. All the candidates seemed to be in favor of fixing the potholes; greater fiscal accountability; reducing crime; improving mass transportation; attracting new business and industry to the community; creating greater employment diversity opportunity for everyone; while reducing taxes that have chased many lost taxpayers to the suburbs beyond Houston’s city limits. – Based on the promises, it looks like we can’t go wrong with anyone we may happen to elect.
At the mayor’s race TV debate, candidate Sylvester Turner expressed it best when he said: “If we can dream it – we can do it!” … Or maybe it was “if we can do it – we can live in a dream” – or something like that. Whatever it was, it sounded pretty good.
The Astros’ 2015 progress in 2015 has fully re-lighted our hopes for a Houston World Series in the next two-years. The progress, of course, doesn’t guarantee that our Astros will earn their way that far in 2016 or 2017, but it does assure us of one thing: The cost of our hope is going to be more expensive at the game ticket office in 2016 – and especially for season ticket holders.
I’m now pulling for the Cubs to break their 1908 drought this year and get that onerous failure to prolong the curse on to the backs of either the Royals or the Blue Jays. When the Astros go for their first World Series win, hopefully very soon, we don’t need the Cubs to lose this year and set up our Astros to be the same team that performs that same jinx-breaking service for the other team from the Chicago north side too.. We already took care of helping the White Sox break their 1919 Black Sox Scandal curse and the effect it had upon keeping the Pale Hose from winning the World Series since 1917. By allowing the White Sox to sweep them in 2005, the Astros got to be the patsy that helped them break the south side jinx. We want no part of the Astros doing that same favor for Chicago twice!

The morning’s over. That’s all I’ve got – for now, anyway.- Have a restful rest of this Sunday, friends.

Bill McCurdy

The Pecan Park Eagle

____________________

Tags: random thoughts on baseball and Houston
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »