The Hardball Times -- Don Malcolm

Three more for eternity

Don Malcolm — 2013-05-16T07:12:15+00:00

The results are in.

As wars wind down, as stocks go up in a dizzying cycle, and as another baseball season brings out the best and worst in all of us (on-field, in the front office, and those who ceaselessly jockey for position in baseball’s numbers wars), the Baseball Reliquary stays on course, with an occasional wobble if only to wrest your attention from whatever trifling matter you’re obsessing about.

The Reliquary voters—those anonymous personages who are occasionally compared with the vast legion of the “dis-registered” who used to line the Cook County ballot rolls (and might still constitute a throwback to the old “ghost in the machine” that, among other things, “made this country great”)—have sent in their choices the old-fashioned way.

And, with not even the slightest breath of scandal, or hint of tantrum, or a single reference to Jack Morris, three new members of the Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals have been magically, mysteriously selected.

Never has the mystical been so matter-of-fact—or vice-versa.

Oh, you want to know whom they actually selected?? Sorry, that will cost you extra—a few more mugging feints and dodgy delay tactics from yours truly, who asks only that you throw a few spare coins in the direction of his hollowed-out typewriter, the wan relic of a former golden age.

Besides, anyone who’s followed the Reliquary will already know that the members manage, against great and increasing odds, to keep intact the oddly devotional whimsy and loopy, laser-like points of connection that make its version of the Hall of Fame into something above mere excellence and beyond the reach of metaphor, where the trios selected for induction in any year somehow permit those who observe the process to see the forest and the trees at the same time, with pattern and interrelationship between them shifting in a kaleidoscope of wonder.

(That quality—mystical, yet down-to-earth—is what doesn’t quite come across in Jon Leonoudakis’s documentary about the Baseball Reliquary Not Exactly Cooperstown—see the accompanying review for more details.) It is the Shrine of the Eternals that elevates what would otherwise be the prankish put-ons of two precocious schoolkids (executive director Terry Cannon and his mysterious alter ego Albert “Buddy" Kilchesty, who still answer to that description well into their middle years…) into a visionary anti-organization that comes closest to capturing the soul of the game and the strange-but-true exaltation that its most devout practitioners—the Eternals—manage to bring to it.)

But enough forced-air eloquence: it’s time to put aside the puffery. The three new Eternals are, in ascending order of voting percentage received…

{exp:list_maker}Eddie Feigner, the “King” of fast-pitch softball, whose 50-plus years of barnstorming across America produced a .900+ winning percentage despite playing at a more than two-to-one numerical disadvantage on the playing field;

Lefty O’Doul, late-blooming hitting star (.349 lifetime batting average, mostly compiled after the age of 30) who went on to be the Commodore Perry of Japanese baseball, bringing the game to its shores in the 1930s and returning after World War II to assist in using the game to help rebuild the former Japanese empire into a nation that put baseball on an equal footing with Buddhism;

Manny Mota, the greatest pinch-hitter in baseball history, who (as we note in our lengthier essay about him over at the Big Bad Baseball blog) was quite probably the only bench player to receive regular standing ovations by merely making an appearance in the on-deck circle.
{/exp:list_maker}
As is always the case with those elected into the Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals, each man brings something unique to the game and to life itself. Like their fellow inductees, they are transformative individuals, each and all capable of “containing multitudes” (as Walt Whitman, poet and early baseball fan, once noted about himself, in a moment of candor and bravado)—but also able to give some of that “multitudinousness” freely to others, via their actions and their achievements.

Those who’ve taken the time to keep a close watch on the Shrine of the Eternals project know that every new election contains a seed of doubt, a kernel of vertigo that seems to leer darkly from the center of the Reliquary’s spider web of baseball shamanism. We fret and furrow our brows, trying not to contemplate the possibility that this project, in its almost aleatory execution, will somehow be swayed by an unknown Circean force to then crash against the rocks and capsize—or, to put it in post-postmodern parlance, simply “jump the shark.”

But somehow, some way, it never happens. And this is the yearly miracle that makes all of the other accumulated agonies of life remain barely bearable; the high-wire act in a windstorm that wobbles but never topples over, somehow remaining upright yet down home, encompassing mirth and reverence, critical distance and the rapture of being alive and in the moment. The Baseball Reliquary is all this, and so much less—but so much more at the same time. Via their vertiginous sleight-of-hand, they manage to make Harry Houdini look like a piker, and they do it without so much as breaking a sweat.

If you come, they will build it. And when you leave, it will melt into air. But the memory of something uncanny and unique will settle into the space behind your eyes, the place where things can be seen for what they really are, and you will never forget the feeling that this mysterious project, this mirthful pilgrimage, this ritual of transformation bestows upon those who experience it.

—
The 15th Shrine of the Eternals ceremony will be held at 2:30 pm on Sunday, July 21 at the Pasadena Central Library. For more information visit the Baseball Reliquary website.

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Not exactly definitive

Don Malcolm — 2013-05-16T07:11:15+00:00

Call it “The Curse of the Baseball Documentary.” Whatever the reason—and whatever the subject or scope—whenever anyone makes a real-life film about the game and its “essence,” something takes hold that steers the vehicle off-course.

Like Billy Martin, who wound up lifeless in a pickup truck at the bottom of a ravine, baseball documentarians tend to get a bit too giddy about their subject…too intoxicated by the color and the trappings of the game and the personalities that populate it.

The old adage “forest for the trees” comes to mind—and, alas, Jon Leonoudakis, in making his film Not Exactly Cooperstown about the Baseball Reliquary, has followed in the footsteps of Ken Burns and has “lovable-ized” his subject to a point where salient details are omitted and the full essence of what is being profiled ultimately fails to fully register. (Leonoudakis, whose previous documentary credit was as the producer of The Wrecking Crew, a film about a legendary set of 1960s studio musicians, spent two years developing Not Exactly Cooperstown, which has yet to achieve a theatrical release and is currently available for purchase as a DVD.)

Burns mostly ignored baseball west of the Hudson River in his massive comb-over of the game’s history, falling back on folksiness and nostalgia to such a degree that the DVD box set of Baseball arguably deserved an “R” rating (“R” for “Retch”). Leonoudakis, working with the Walt Whitman-meets-postmodernist Reliquary, the antidote to the game’s penchant for institutional torpor, takes a lamentably analogous approach.

As with Burns, who could have gone a long way toward redeeming his film with a series of simple entre’actes that put the faces of baseball players from the game’s various eras on screen, Leonoudakis omits mention of nearly three-quarters of the Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals (what we’ve taken to calling the “Hall of Fame for the rest of us”).

The film’s biggest failing—just like Burns'—is that it doesn’t consistently put the people who really matter on the screen. The 42 members (now 45: see the accompanying article) of the Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals are reduced to around a dozen. (Several more inductees are shown, but not identified. A few others are identified, but not shown.)

To gloss over the evidence of the Reliquary’s unique synthesis of baseball history as manifested in the incredible breadth and variety of the Eternals is to risk leaving the impression that the project is more whimsical and less thought-out than is actually the case.

Elsewhere, Leonoudakis does a solid job of capturing the “day-by-day” activities of the Reliquary—its prolific and imaginative series of exhibitions that showcase the hidden history of baseball and its assimilative aegis within Southern California’s vast array of ethnic communities. A highlight of the film is its examination of baseball’s “circle the wagons” mentality as demonstrated by the Los Angeles Dodgers’ overreaction to the whimsical “Lasordapalooza” event that the Reliquary hosted in 2009. This sequence, along with the Curt Flood-Dock Ellis footage that covers the initial Shrine of the Eternals induction ceremony, is riveting verité.

As creative (and often culturally subversive) as many of the Reliquary’s “floating museum” projects are, however, they do not and cannot stand in for the Shrine of the Eternals, which embodies the inchoate “grand design” that synthesizes their ongoing efforts. Simply presenting the yearly inductees, three at a time, in reverse order throughout the film, would make this point while building to the powerful 1999 opening ceremony, which featured Ellis’s emotional acceptance speech. Alas, it is an opportunity that is missed in the film’s current form.

Leonoudakis, who also serves as the film’s narrator, lets us know at the outset that this is in some ways more of a personal odyssey, a way back into a game from which he had been estranged, and this is oddly reinforced by the front cover of the DVD package—where the Baseball Reliquary, the ostensible subject of the film, is not even mentioned. While this curious oversight is more than compensated for on the back cover, it’s a strangely telling omission.

Also glossed over is the symbiotic relationship between the Reliquary and painter Ben Sakoguchi, whose “Unauthorized History of Baseball”—a series of more than two hundred “orange crate art” paintings—is inextricably intertwined with the impetus behind the Shrine of the Eternals. Sakoguchi is an intensely private man, so his on-camera absence is understandable, but the appearance of his work in the film without a single word of explanation is baffling.

For the Baseball Reliquary is as much about art and culture as it is about baseball. This point is made fleetingly throughout the film, but we don’t get much sense of executive director Terry Cannon’s arts background (he and fellow Reliquary founder Albert Kilchesty were significant presences in Los Angeles’ experimental film world during the '70s and '80s, and continually find ways to incorporate their artistic inclinations into the workings of the Reliquary.)

The film’s discussion of Cannon’s interpolation of religious trappings into the Shrine of the Eternals ceremony is fitfully amusing, but it doesn’t quite make clear that Cannon and Kilchesty have found a way to have their cake and eat it, too—via an irreverent ceremony that pits its choreography against the possibility of anarchic collapse and creates out of the chaos of its performance an unexpected, spontaneous sense of reverence. This magical, self-enfolding transformation is hard enough to describe, much less depict in a film, but there are enough clips from the various ceremonies (and Leonoudakis has picked those wisely) to provide at least a glimpse of that off-beat emotional power. While you won’t walk away from viewing the film with a full sense of what’s going on, you will at least know that something unusual is happening.

As a result of these omissions, Not Exactly Cooperstown is not quite ready for prime-time viewing. Like the Reliquary itself, it’s still a work in progress, and that’s harder to say to the filmmaker than to the architects of the Shrine of the Eternals, which is supposed to grow and change over time. As I’ve noted in posts about the Reliquary over at my Big Bad Baseball blog, it’s the next 15 years that will determine if this singular “anti-organization” can cement itself into the consciousness of baseball in a way that fixes its purpose without finding itself forced into typecasting or trivialization. Like Walt Whitman, it knows that it “contains multitudes,” even if much of what it reveals must remain hidden from those who would otherwise trample its vintage.

For Leonoudakis’s film to capture that mystery, that lingering soap bubble-like paradox, the tension between what is merely written in stone and the spirit of “all that is solid melts into air” that the Reliquary whimsically demands of all who enter into its spell, it needs to honor all the individuals who make up the public face of this progressive force for the full, open and honest embrace of the whole of baseball history (warts, wackiness, and Wambsganss). It should celebrate all of the inductees, even if only in passing; it should double down on the eloquence of keynote speakers such as Robert Elias and Jean Hastings Ardell, who epitomize the balance between a reverence for the game and a critical perspective on the economic and cultural ramifications that filter through it. It should conclude by asking if an “anti-organization” can survive its original creators, and continue to flourish in the same spirit in which it was originally conceived.

A little more work—some restructuring, plus a few additional voices to explicate the Reliquary’s playful mysteries—and those jammed-up bases will be cleared. A few adjustments at the plate, so to speak, can result in a grand slam. (While that might seem like a harsh assessment of the product in its current state, it’s what needs to be said in order to have a film that does justice to a project that began as whimsical performance art but today—against all odds—stands at the brink of becoming something much, much more. To do this, the film also needs to capture that story arc—and, despite these criticisms, such is definitely within its grasp.)

So hunker down, Mr. Leonoudakis, and give the film another time at bat in the editing process. Once you do that, a theatrical release for the film will not only be possible, it will be compulsory. You (and the Reliquary) will be forced to contend with the vagaries of “prime time”—and that will be a sight to see. It’s time to break the “Curse of the Baseball Documentary.” Once—and for all.

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Shrine of the Eternals 14

Don Malcolm — 2012-07-20T12:10:15+00:00

The earliest possible third Sunday in July found an overflow crowd in Pasadena as the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals ceremony turned 14. As seamless and satisfying as ever, the reverently irreverent anti-institution guided by Terry Cannon brought laughter, pathos, and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cupcakes (supplied by Terry’s tireless wife, Mary).

As sweet as the frosting proved to be, however, the participants (speakers, performers, honorees and audience) were blessed by the one-of-a-kind tartness that mysteriously emerges from the ceremony every year. For 2012, the musical kickoff was provided by a barbershop quartet calling itself American Pastime, with a blend somewhere between the Four Freshman and the Beach Boys, pushing the National Anthem into an unexpected vocal complexity. They followed with a bittersweet original, “There Used To Be A Ballpark,” that pushed further and visibly affected the entire audience, moving the usually dead-pan Cannon to enthusiastic praise as the quartet left the dais to thunderous applause.

Many had come in hopes of seeing a full complement of Eternals on hand for their induction. Alas, Luis Tiant was a no-show, due to a previous commitment. However, there was no lack of star power at the ceremony, what with Tommy John making a much-anticipated appearance to introduce inductee Dr. Frank Jobe.

Mr. Mudcat (Jeff Levie)

John had the unenviable task of following the warm, assured presence of Jim Mudcat Grant , whose humanitarian work and singular personality have only added to the luster of a big-league career most notable for his 21-win season in 1965 for the Minnesota Twins. (He thus became the first African-American pitcher with 20+ wins in the American League). John didn’t miss a beat, tying his own history in with Grant and Tiant, explaining to the audience that it was his miserable 2-9 record as a young pitcher in 1964 that provided Tiant with the opportunity to reach the majors and embark on his 229-win career.

And talk about dovetailing: As Grant concluded his remarks (laden with the type of baseball stories that are all but extinct in today’s game—as the Mudcat kept repeating: “They’d throw us out if we did this today”), Terry Cannon came to the microphone a good bit more quickly than usual, and added a remarkable story of his own.

“It was 1966, and I was a 13-year-old fan in Anaheim to watch the Angels play the defending AL champion Twins. I was on the field with a group of kids trying to get autographs, and as you came by I started to hand you my autograph book. I was jostled by another fan and bumped into you. You were holding a bottle of Coca-Cola in your hand, and as a result of my contact, you dropped the bottle and it spilled on the ground. You looked at me and said: ‘Young man, that’s going to cost you 10 cents.’ But before I could react, you laughed and gave me a wink. And then you signed my autograph book anyway."

Cannon paused for effect, and then continued. “I’ve never forgotten that, ever since it happened more than 40 years ago. So I’m really glad you are here with us today and have become a member of the Shrine of the Eternals, because I’ve been waiting all this time to give you your dime back.” At which point Terry pulled out a dime, and handed it to Grant. The 77-year old author of The Black Aces, a highly-regarded research work dedicated to the group of African-American pitchers who’ve won 20 or more games in a season, broke out into his trademark grin, one undiminished by the passage of time.

Moments such as these, so the credit card commercial asserts, are priceless. But they are also timeless, demonstrating to us that baseball’s greatest gift is to heal the vicissitudes of life and aging by stopping time in its tracks, celebrating the exuberance of its still unyielding place as America’s “hurrah game.” While such time–stopping moments are both fewer and further between than was the case in an age where the media and the pace of life itself were less overwhelming, the Baseball Reliquary insists that they are not lost.

Stories and their contexts provide the engine for connecting baseball to real life, as keynote speaker Kelly Candaele noted in his thoughtful address. 2006 Eternals inductee Bill James once humorously deconstructed the Houston Astros via his bewilderment with jazz; Candaele, after relating several hilarious stories about his younger brother Casey, a nine-year major league journeyman but Hall of Fame-level prankster, turned the tables on James’s formulation and showed how the musical teamwork necessary to jazz was analogous to the workings of a baseball team.

It was an analogy as elegant as a piano solo by Bud Powell, or the magical footwork of a great double-play combination. If only life were so easily explained, or so flexible…

But the flexibility of the Reliquary’s anti-institutional stance allows it to repurpose its other awards to honor outstanding individuals whose lives and deeds have been bound up by an unquenchable love for the game. Thus writer Arnold Hano, turning 90 this year and a baseball fan for 86 of those years, is recognized under the Reliquary’s most elemental award—the Hilda, as it’s abbreviated.

Mr. Hano (Jeff Levie)

It's an award for the most notable and noteworthy fan (it’s named after Hilda Chester, the legendary, leather-lunged, cowbell-wielding fanatic who was a fixture for years in Ebbets Field)—proving that love and irreverence can co-exist, as they did in Hano’s great baseball masterpiece, A Day In The Bleachers.

Hano, a still-vigorous nonagenarian, expressed his gratitude while sending sympathy to legendary Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. “I hear poor Vin is thinking about quitting… after all, he’s turning 84.” (Scully, who mentioned the Baseball Reliquary on the Dodger broadcast the night before the Eternals ceremony, really ought to be considered for the Eternals himself.)

Doubling down on the above premise, the Religuary’s Tony Salin Award—given to the person who has contributed substantially to the preservation of baseball history—was given to Dave Kelly, recently retired from his post as chief sports librarian for the Library of Congress. Kelly, a diffident man with a neatly trimmed white beard, has been the catalyst behind many of baseball’s most significant historical projects for the past 30 years. Paul Dickson, one of baseball’s most accomplished historian/authors, dedicated his recent biography of Bill Veeck to Kelly. These are the people who do more than protect and defend baseball’s living legacy—they preserve it by opening our eyes to stories that have hitherto been hidden from our view.

Mr. John introducing Mr. Jobe (Jeff Levie)

It was another white-haired man, however, whose acceptance speech closed the ceremony with a consummately simple grace. Dr. Frank Jobe, whose pioneering work in orthopedic surgery has literally reshaped the arc of hundreds of major league careers, is a most unassuming revolutionary. Reminding us that the odds in 1974 were thought to be a hundred to one against success for the procedure that has come to be known as “Tommy John surgery,” Jobe attributed the lion’s share of the outcome to the dedication and perseverance of his first patient.

“We had the right man at the right time,” Jobe said simply, smiling at John with an unmistakable twinkle in his eye. He evoked the enduring mystery of chance and opportunity, of design and the residue of good fortune it can sometimes bestow; and he exemplified a life lived well in the service of knowledge and of others.

The Shrine of the Eternals, at 14, is entering an ever-more complicated age—the years that determine the shape and fate of adult lives. While it has been a brilliant child prodigy, its next phase, ensuring its adulthood and sustaining its early success, matters at a point where more orthodox successful institutions often find themselves running on auto-pilot. The Reliquary voters and the incomparable brain trust of Terry Cannon and Albert (Buddy) Kilchesty have created a Shrine that captures a delicate balance of irreverence, historical acumen, and sheer celebration, but there are some signs that the supply of candidates is beginning to wear thin.

So in the spirit of support and concern for ensuring that the next 14 years of the Shrine are equal to its first 14, we’ve taken the liberty of compiling the names of 10 individuals who deserve serious consideration but have yet to appear on the Reliquary ballot. (More details can be found at the Big Bad Baseball blog, in the entry entitled Ten For Eternity.)

1) Max Bishop
2) Tony Conigliaro
3) Keith Hernandez
4) Tommy John
5) Ring Lardner
6) Charlie Lau
7) Katsuya Nomura
8) Paul Richards
9) Vin Scully
10) Charles Somers.

Unlike the Hall of Fame, the Baseball Reliquary is a group that allows the people to participate in the enshrinement process. You are urged to visit the Reliquary web site to learn more about baseball’s most unique anti-institution, whose Shrine is based on imagination, personality, and the more elusive qualities of character that have so often surfaced in the game despite any and all efforts to suppress it. And you are invited to attend the ceremony in person, for there is no way to fully grasp its alchemy otherwise. Each year, when Terry Cannon’s cowbell cuts through the noise of the crowd and demands the audience’s attention, the Baseball Reliquary reminds us that the clamor of baseball is, against all odds, a healing and soothing sound indeed.

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No unlucky 13 for the Baseball Reliquary

Don Malcolm — 2011-07-21T09:05:15+00:00

As we neared "The Day" (as devotees of the Baseball Reliquary are wont to call that third Sunday in July when the world’s most anti-institutional institution convenes to celebrate baseball with both broad and tender devotion), ominous signs were on the horizon.

First, it was Year 13 for the Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals ceremony. While sabermetricians never worry about the symbolic content of numbers, some with a more superstitious bent were exhibiting knitted brows. What if the patented Reliquary formula had somehow run itself out? What then?

Second, there was the complicating scenario of a major Los Angeles freeway closure that had been scheduled for the same weekend as the Reliquary event. With "Carmaggedon" looming, would anyone be able to show up for the ceremony?

Go to your illustrated dictionary and look up the word "unflappable." Next to the definition, you will see a picture of Terry Cannon, the Reliquary’s Executive Director. A past master at analyzing and dissecting hype, Terry has not only invented his own incarnation of it (how else could an organization with no permanent home outside of a post office box be so influential?) but he knows the difference between what he likes to term "real hype" and "phony hype."

"We’ll be fine," he said.

And so it was. "Carmageddon" (or whatever it was) failed to materialize, and when the doors opened to the auditorium in the Pasadena Public Library at 1:30 pm, an even longer-than-usual line of attendees had queued up.

"Phony hype," foiled again.

The folks had come to see two real-life inductees appear and find their own way into the ineffable Reliquary formula of unabashed but not uncritical love—the ministrations of an eternally precocious child who is more adult than the grownups around him while still preferring to wear an existential set of swaddling clothes.

The fans still line up for Maury. (Photos by Jeff Levie)

And these two real-life inductees were special, even by Reliquary standards. Maury Wills, always first, arrived early and worked the crowd, who lined up for autographs. Ted Giannoulas (aka the Famous Chicken, formerly the San Diego Chicken) burst in through the side door in full regalia to a boisterous ovation. He had raced the clock due to his still-hectic schedule and, thanks to the fizzle of "Carmageddon," had made it just in the nick of time.

The basic recipe for a Reliquary induction ceremony is well known by now: Two parts anarchy, five parts love, two parts anti-establishment eye-rolling. It is, as Kirk Douglas said about Robert Mitchum’s character in Out of the Past, time-proof and weather-proof. (And yes, Carmageddon-proof.)

Chris Eskine (Jeff Levie)

There is the Ringing of the Cowbell, followed by Cannon’s observations about the raucous Hilda Chester—remarks that are both more loving and more derogatory every year.

There are the Special Awards, for "fandom beyond the call of duty," given this year to the Los Angeles Times’ Chris Erskine, one of that newspaper’s last remaining treasures, a writer who can live in the world of well-known images and knows how to turn a cliché on its ear, and who lives for baseball.

And for "contribution to the literature and knowledge of the game," awarded to one of the true giants of baseball lore, Paul Dickson, whose Baseball Dictionary is the seminal reference book about the game.

The Reliquary microphone seems to cast a spell of grace and humor over all, and it was no exception for these two vastly different but essential writers: The Reliquary’s skill at contrast works in both broad and subtle ways.

Jean Hastings Ardell carried the heaviest burden of the day, delivering the Keynote Address, which in some way must summarize the mission of the Reliquary without turning it into the fuddy-duddy institution that it so adroitly evades.

Ms. Ardell takes both baseball and American culture seriously, and her shadings emphasized the critical component of engagement with history. There can be no love that is starry-eyed, she suggested, and proposed a provocative metaphor: Patriotism.

A full-blown examination and discussion of a people’s history and culture is needed to preserve the ongoing vitality of that culture—and the Reliquary’s continuation of such a dialogue about baseball and its participation in American life is what Ms. Ardell championed as a just and necessary endeavor.

A ceremonial anti-ceremony, a series of challenging, thought-provoking, issues-engaging exhibitions, a celebration of baseball’s unique ability to poke fun at itself (a trait virtually absent in every other professional sport). These are the tools of a true engagement, a full-blooded patriotism.

The Chicken Speaks (Jeff Levie)

And it was no surprise that as these weighty words still echoed in the air, the Chicken came to the Podium. From patriotism to pandemonium in ten seconds flat! Given a splendid, effervescent introduction by Andy Strasberg (former marketing director of the San Diego Padres), Ted Giannoulas managed to separate himself from his persona without physically revealing himself.

His story is so quintessentially American that it seems that it must be a parody—a fan plucked (ha, ha) out of the stands becomes a media sensation dressed up in a wacky mascot costume, suffers the slings and arrows of fame (read: lawsuits, backlash, and the omnipresent threat of plucked feathers), and settles in to a long-term career that literally could not exist in any other nation that has ever been on the face of the earth.

Giannoulas reminded us that the bond between baseball and the fan is laughter. While his work has come to encompass many sports over the years, he acknowledged that it could never have happened in the first place had there not been a sport like baseball. A game that needs a 900-plus-page dictionary to explicate its language and origins is one that is so deeply rooted within a collective psyche that it cannot help but learn to poke fun at itself.

Giannoulas showed how the game itself sparked his own creativity, relating how one of his most famous gags (confronting an umpire with an eye chart) was inspired by an actual event in a game. Then-Padre manager Roger Craig, seething at his first-ever ejection, stormed around in the clubhouse while Giannoulas was taking a break. It was Craig who pulled down an eye-chart from the trainer’s room and urged Giannoulas to use it.

If there was a weak link in the day—and, to be fair, it was but a minor one—it came during the subsequent induction of Pete Gray, the only one-armed major league baseball player. Gray perfectly embodies the troika of qualities so often found in Reliquary inductees—adversity, extremity, and otherness—and his story ranks in the top five of all extraordinary baseball narratives.

Nelson Gary, Jr., a man with a personal connection to Gray, gave an engaging speech, but it was just a bit too short on details about Gray himself. Mr. Gary, who lost an arm at the age of three but also did not let that deter him from an athletic career, did manage to impart the unprecedented nature of Gray’s achievement—"there was no one to help him, he did it all himself"—and this snapshot, while incomplete, still resonated with the Reliquary’s singular motifs.

Fred Claire and Maury Wills (Jeff Levie)

A standing ovation greeted Maury Wills when he arrived at the podium, after a graceful introduction by Fred Claire, the former Dodger General Manager who is the epitome of what that organization used to be.

While Claire strongly suggested that Wills belongs in the Hall of Fame, the bald facts are that Maury is well down the list of deserving candidates who have been overlooked.

However, as a local hero (despite its "floating crap game" status, the Reliquary is still clearly rooted in southern California), Maury’s exploits remain legendary, and the reaction of those in attendance made this abundantly clear.

The drive that permitted Wills to make use of a limited set of skills in a way that propelled him to prominence and aided the Los Angeles Dodgers to four World Series appearances in the eight years between 1959-1966 was evident in his dynamic conversation with the audience.

(And it was a conversation—Wills would occasionally ask us to supply him with the right word or phrase to fashion his thoughts as precisely as possible—and he would grin with approval when he reapplied the suggestion into his remarks.)

The title of his talk, echoing Claire’s introduction, could have been "Maury Wills Himself Into a Major League Ballplayer." He dug deep, into his childhood, remembering a mostly-forgotten ballplayer named Jerry Priddy (whose career was chronicled notably by Bill James in The Politics of Glory).

"All us kids in the projects," Wills said, "were wondering what this white guy was doin' in our neighborhood. We all decided that he’d lost a bet." But Priddy stayed for nearly two hours working with the young black kids in the Washington D.C. projects.

Paul Dickson defines baseball (Jeff Levie)

He told Wills that he looked like he had the stuff to be a ballplayer—and Maury took those words to heart.

Willis remained determined after more than eight years in the minors, transforming himself with the assistance of a man (Bobby Bragan) who ten years earlier had refused to play on the same field with a black man.

"That’s God’s work," Wills said. "We can all change, we can all make more out of what we are."

Such words seem too simple to be true, too naïve, but they are the hallmark of those who simply stop talking and get to work on being more like God—whoever or whatever that being, or principle, or passage of engagement might be.

And Wills captured the essence of the Reliquary’s idea—placing faith in the power of those who overcome all obstacles, of looking for ways to improve both oneself and the world around them.

These values are not obsolete, they have not calcified into a zero-sum culture—they are alive and well deep in the hearts of ordinary people who still strive to be extraordinary.

And the message behind the impudent reverence of the Baseball Reliquary remains intact: there is no better institution than an anti-institution, lampooning pomp while celebrating circumstance. Its mere existence guarantees that the principle of transformation is alive and well, manifesting itself against all odds. No other entity pricks its own bubble, then grows a new one for the next year and does it all over again.

The secret? "Sugarless bubble gum," says Terry Cannon, with a conspiratorial wink. "There are enough cavities in the world as it is. We’re not about decay."

True enough. And even after its thirteenth induction ceremony, the Baseball Reliquary still gives you so much long-lasting flavor, so much to chew on.

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Hall of Fame, Hall of Mirrors (Part 2)

Don Malcolm — 2009-01-08T04:05:15+00:00

First, The Bad News

Despite a sea-change of historical proportions in a land disengaging from “fear itself”…

...“Black Monday” looms.

Why? The Hall of Fame will announce its voting results that day (January 12).

How? It seems all but certain that the BBWAA writers, who stand in for you and me—and are quite often seen as the Devil in the Deep Blue Sea—will give Jim Rice in excess of the 75 percent vote needed for enshrinement.

From our look at BBWAA voting patterns and the subsequent actions of the Veterans Committee, two scenarios are inescapable:

1) Rice will be elected by the BBWAA in his 15th and last “front door” opportunity.

2) If not, his 72 percent of the vote in 2008 ensures that some version of the VC will eventually admit him.

Despite this, there has never been a more pitched battle in the baseball world’s increasingly concentric (and contentious) circles. It makes Gore v. Bush look like a Sunday school picnic.

While I don’t think Jim Rice is the most deserving Hall of Fame candidate, I simply disagree about the consequences of such an election. We’ll return to this point later; for now, I want to digress (and, face it, what would a Don Malcolm article be without a digression? I know, I know: a whole lot shorter).

I want to present a prediction tool for Hall of Fame voting that puts a few issues into context—and boy, do we need some context on those issues!

Parameters for Prediction

The prediction tool requires at least five years of voting results for an individual player. There are too many possible perturbations otherwise.

And even then, we see that other circumstances can cause things to change course after a long-standing pattern has been in place—as we’ll see with the candidacy of Bert Blyleven, who, for our purposes here, is the “Anti-Rice.”

Let’s put the data on the table first:

Player	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	BTF
Baines	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	5	4	2
Bell	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	2	0
Blyleven	17	14	17	24	26	29	35	41	53	48	62	71	97
Cone	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	14	26
Dawson	--	--	--	--	45	50	50	52	61	57	66	70	37
Gant	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	0	0
Grace	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	8	0
Henderson	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	94	100
John	27	19	27	28	27	23	22	24	30	23	29	31	30
Mattingly	--	--	--	28	20	14	13	11	12	10	16	17	6
McGwire	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	24	24	29	85
Morris	--	--	23	20	21	23	26	33	41	37	42	46	3
Murphy	--	19	22	18	15	12	9	11	11	9	14	15	26
Orosco	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	1	1
Parker	--	16	21	16	14	10	11	13	14	11	14	15	16
Plesac	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	0	0
Raines	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	24	37	100
Rice	43	29	52	58	55	52	55	60	65	64	72	78	11
Smith L	--	--	--	--	--	42	37	39	45	40	43	45	23
Trammell	--	--	--	--	16	14	14	17	18	13	18	20	94
Vaughn G	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	2	0
Vaughn M	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	4	0
Williams	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	--	9	0
1st bal HOF	0	3	0	2	1	1	2	1	0	2	0	1	1
Vote/Bal avg	5.4	6.7	5.6	6.3	6	6.6	6.5	6.3	5.6	6.6	5.4	6.3	6.5
V/B Avg BTF								6.5	5.2	6.8	5.8	6.5

We have here 11 years of HoF voting by the BBWAA, with all of the 2009 candidates shown. Three men have been on that ballot in every year covered: Rice, Blyleven, and Tommy John (about whom, more later).

In 2008, Rice came very close to the 75 percent threshold. The prediction tool, which looks at the pattern in voting results over the past five years and makes an extrapolation, figures that he will cross that threshold in 2009 with about 78 percent of the vote.

While I doubt that any sabermetric types will flee to Canada as a result (besides, Ron Johnson simply doesn’t have room for all of you...), for many it will be a Day of Darkness akin to the one I experienced back in 1972 when I “won” the only lottery I ever participated in—the U.S. Draft Lottery, where my birthday was literally "No. 1 with a bullet."

For those who want to understand (and critique, even) the prediction method itself, a more detailed description can be found in the Resources section. Of course, this method is just one portion of Chris Jaffe's estimable prediction method. I'm just going into a bit more detail.

Along with the predicted 2009 voting results, I’ve posted the vote percentages from the recent Baseball Think Factory Hall of Fame vote (far right column), which can safely be said to epitomize the sabermetric viewpoint.

Rocking the Boat That Rocked The Vote

Before we look at contrasts and contradictions in BBWAA and sabermetric voting patterns, however, I want to note a couple of things that came up in the process of assembling the data.

First, there’s the number of players voted for per ballot. Neither voting group comes close to finding 10 suitable Hall of Fame candidates. The BBWAA averages, shown in the bottom row, average out to 6.1 players per ballot over the past 11 years. The BTF group in 2009, with its “small-Hall” and “big-Hall” factions, has a very similar average (6.5). Its five-year average, in fact, is almost identical to the BBWAA’s 11-year average.

Second, there’s the hard-to-quantify impact of “first-ballot HoFers” on the rest of the candidate pool. What is clear from the player-per-ballot data is that the more “in-on-the-first-try” players there are in a year, the higher this average will be. In years with no “first-ballot” electee in the mix, the player-per-ballot average is down by about 20 percent—in short, one fewer player per ballot.

Interestingly enough, this same pattern exists in the BTF voting records (bottom row of table).

For the 2009 vote, there will be one “first-ballot” selection: Rickey Henderson. There will be little disagreement between BBWAA and stathead here. The pattern in the voting is that with one first-ballot type, long-time candidates tend to get helped a bit; with two or more, they tend to be hurt.

Three long-time candidates—Rice, Blyleven, and Andre Dawson—have been moving up in the voting over the past few years. Each of them weathered the 2007 election, when there were two first-ballot winners, and posted strong gains in 2008.

While the prediction tool suggests that Blyleven will get the biggest boost of the three this time, it concludes that it won’t be quite enough to get him over the 75 percent threshold. Rice and Dawson project to have more modest gains (about 5 percent of the vote instead of Blyleven’s 10 percent), but Rice is close enough that this will push him over the line.

And, as the table shows, for upwards of 90 percent of the sabermetrically-inclined voters at BTF, this will be a singular catastrophe, a blot on existence, a tear in the fabric of the universe, a…

OK, enough already.

What’s notable about the BTF voting is how two players who are much closer to one another in terms of their Hall of Fame worthiness than they are apart can be on such completely opposite ends of the ballot results—97 percent for Blyleven, 11 percent for Rice.

The only possible conclusion available is that ideology has taken over.

The history of the BTF voting indicates that it wasn’t always this way—at least to an extent. Blyleven has been a sabermetric favorite for a long time, with voting percentages in the BTF HoF polls in the 90s ever since the first year of voting (2005).

In that first year, Blyleven received 96 percent of the sabermetric vote. (His BBWAA percentage that year: 41 percent)

Rice received 31 percent. (The BBWAA gave him 60 percent of the vote.)

In subsequent years, Rice’s BTF vote total has, of course, gone into the toilet. He received 23 percent in 2006, fell through the floor to just 8 percent in 2007, 7 percent last year.

This is what a man far wiser than yours truly (but who will nonetheless remain nameless…) termed “the groundswell of groupthink.”

Groupthink in the form of more than a dozen proselytizing articles for Blyleven’s candidacy over the past several years.

And at least twice as many essays dismissing Rice.

So many this time last year that one wag termed it the “winter of dissed content.”

In the world of the BBWAA, though, Jim and Bert are both on the rise. The prediction tool suggests that if Blyleven gets 70 percent of the vote this time, he’ll make it across the 75 percent mark in 2010.

That will be a wonderful victory for "our side." But it will have been won by the use of the same tactics employed by everyone else who has been involved in the Hall of Fame selection process over the past 60 years.

It will simply be playing the age-old "power and influence" game with a new set of tools.

Meanwhile, a pitcher virtually equivalent to Blyleven, Tommy John, has been ignored by the saberites—and has seen his support slip in that community and flatten out in the BBWAA voting. As a result, John will wind up in the black hole of the Veterans Committee.

In 2001, John received a higher percentage of BBWAA votes than Blyleven. Once Bert became the “anti-Rice,” however, it has been mostly a case of "Tommy Who?"

You can call this "marshalling one’s forces" if you like. But, whatever it is, it’s not objective analysis. A more complete analysis would have concluded that both Blyleven and John were worthy, and would have urged the BBWAA to see them as linked.

This massive effort will produce the same result—and the same problem—that Bill James identified in The Politics of Glory: two players with very similar credentials for HoF membership discovering that the door opens for one, but not the other.

Can This Be Fixed?

Instead of focusing on such blatant partisanship, a different approach needs to be envisioned and implemented. Bill James suggested a new approach for Hall of Fame voting in Politics of Glory, but it was too cumbersome and had no practical chance for being accepted by the powers-that-be.

No, the place to fix the HoF voting process (to the extent that it’s possible to do so) is in the Veterans Committee. Keep in mind that from the inception of the HoF until the dawn of sabermetrics (1936-1979), the various incarnations of the Veterans Committee (warts and all) had enshrined 56 percent of the hitters and pitchers (note: those inducted solely for on-field achievements).

Since 1980, the Veterans Committee has accounted for only 31 percent of these inductees. Since 1990, that percentage is 27 percent (12 of 44). Since 2000, it’s down to just 16 percent (3 of 19).

So all this intervention at the front door of the process might result in a lone symbolic victory—enshrining Blyleven. Meanwhile, however, the Veterans Committee has turned into a bureaucratic nightmare straight out of Franz Kafka. The prime mechanism for redressing the imbalances and augmenting the inevitable omissions in the “front door” process is now stuck in a vat of molasses.

What can be done? That bureaucracy has to be torn away, and a new structure put in place that will break this escalating 30-year logjam.

How? By restructuring the Veterans Committee into autonomous working groups that specialize in periods of baseball history.

Wait a minute. Isn’t that what’s already been done, you ask?

Not the way I’d set it up. Instead of having 64 folks trying to reach consensus over a five-decade time frame, I’d create working groups for the 19th century, 1900-29, 1930-49, 1950-69, 1970-89. Those groups would have 15 members each, and, like the pre-1942 committee that just elected Joe Gordon, would have a good chance to reach a consensus.

To bring this to a boil, I’d suggest that BBWAA members be assigned to these working groups on the basis of specialized aptitude tests. By virtue of their demonstrated expertise, they would provide the historical/analytical background for each working group.

Take a guess as to which BBWAA members—those newly-minted BBWAA members who you’ve been hearing about of late—are likely to score highest on such an aptitude test.

The key to a return to a (mostly) reasonable Hall of Fame voting process is not division and self-interest within small enclaves. It is not an “us vs. them” mentality, mirroring the kind of demonization that has afflicted our culture and our politics over the same time period in which the two-party HoF voting mechanism broke down.

No, the key is a kind of enlightened subversion. By creating and exploiting a seam in the election process (as sketched out above), the new BBWAA members can establish a beachhead “behind enemy lines.” When this is accomplished, the Veterans Committee can fulfill its intended role: enlightened augmentation of the HoF selections.

A Silver Lining?

Rice’s impending election is seen by some as a slippery slope for an entire series of increasingly abominable HoF selections. This is part of a pervasive cultural negativism that has been attached to the sabermetric enterprise from the beginning (Bill James gave it sizzle with a dash of substance in The Politics of Glory, and the rest of us ran with it…) and is still in play today, even as advanced statistical methods have penetrated into baseball’s front offices.

In fact, though, Rice’s election may not be a negative. Rice is nowhere near the worst player in the Hall, and while he symbolizes “the wrong thing” to sabermetric types, there are aspects of his career that, if focused on properly, will permit future discussions and arguments to occur that have genuinely transformative possibilities.

Players with shorter careers but higher, more consistent peaks can now be directly compared to Rice, who is a contemporary or near-contemporary of many of these players (Ron Santo, Joe Torre, Dick Allen, Jack Clark, Reggie Smith, Frank Howard, Will Clark, Albert Belle). The fact that BBWAA voters see Rice as a “peak” player opens up an avenue of argument that can be applied to these other players, and that, with patient but relentless repetition, will prove persuasive.

All of this is simply a variation on the old saw that when life deals you lemons, make lemonade. To evoke another old cliché, it’s time to turn swords into plowshares (not Win Shares).

Disaster provides opportunity. So here’s your disaster, front and center. Now that it’s here, it’s time to step up to the plate with a new approach.

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Hall of Fame, Hall of Mirrors

Don Malcolm — 2009-01-07T05:05:15+00:00

History will be made on January 20, 2009 when Barack Obama becomes President—but eight days earlier, the world will have come to an end.

Why? The Hall of Fame voting results will appear, and that day (January 12) is odds-on to be seen (in these here parts, at least) as "Black Monday."

How? Oh, come on, now. I’ve been ducking this one for three winters already, while the sabermetrically-inclined have been tirelessly lobbing grenades.

Obviously we are talking about that stathead anathema, that pariah of low OBP and inflated RBI, the man whom regression-lovers find regressive, passé and ideologically incorrect. In short, the favored four-letter epithet in the ongoing Hall of Fame wars. Or—if this were any 007 film other than the current one—that would be:

Rice. Jim Rice.

The sometimes-feared Boston slugger received 72 percent of the vote from the BBWAA in 2008. The upcoming vote is the fifteent15th and final ballot for him. Only one man has had a higher percentage of the BBWAA vote with remaining eligibility via the "front-door" election process and not been elected. (You can guess who that is for now; the answer can be found further below.)

Part two of this essay will look at a prediction tool for Hall of Fame voting, similar to Chris Jaffe's, and we’ll see how Rice and the other candidates on the ballot—Rickey Henderson, Tim Raines, Bert Blyeven (“the Anti-Rice”), Tommy John, and a dozen or so others—are projected to do.

First, though, it’s time to duck under all that flying fur. Let’s examine the history of the “front-door” Hall of Fame voting process from a perspective that’s a bit different from the prevailing view.

BBWAA Voting Inside Out

The Politics of Glory is Bill James’s most maddening work, a giant airbag of contrary motion that tends to deploy itself on the reader even when there has been no collision. Written in the "fallow" years between the Abstract series and the next wave of James’s research, it’s a curious mixture of muckraking, moralizing, and mathematics, containing James’s all-too-influential salvo against the BBWAA’s rejection of statistics (pp. 319-21).

That interpretation of the BBWAA contains more than a germ of truth, but its influence on subsequent work in the field of sabermetrics (particularly the tone of that work) has been as daunting as it has been widespread. The more measured aspects of James’s critique were quickly set aside by the next generation of stat-influenced writers, and this translated into a level of vitriol that continues today.

The dilemma about the Hall of Fame voting process that has gotten lost in the haste to tar the BBWAA is one that James acknowledges in passing as he exposes every wart. It was a simple, but monumental problem: in 1936 you had 60 years of baseball history to assess, and a ballot with every possible player from the 19th century to the present day on the ballot.

In today’s terms, that would be akin to us voting for all the players in the game for the past 60 years. For the sake of simplicity, let’s use 1955, when Joe DiMaggio was enshrined, as a cutoff point.

There have been 81 players (including DiMaggio) voted in the "front door" since then.

If you had to start with that accumulated talent pool, and you could vote for only 10 players, what do you think those results would look like? Who would you pick?

The 10 best players over what really amounts to a 70-year period (since players who began in the late 30s, like DiMaggio, are eligible)?

Quite a task, to say the least.

That’s what the BBWAA faced in 1936. Their first nine picks—Cobb, Ruth, Wagner, Mathewson, Johnson, Young, Speaker, Lajoie, and Alexander—are right on the money.

But who are the obvious choices now?

Let’s just see to whom the BBWAA gave its highest percentage of votes in the elections since 1955:

Tom Seaver (99%, 1992); Nolan Ryan (99%, 1999), Cal Ripken, Jr. (99%, 2007), Hank Aaron (98%, 1982), George Brett (98%, 1999), Tony Gwynn (98%, 2007), Mike Schmidt (97%, 1995), Johnny Bench (96%, 1989), Steve Carlton (96%, 1994), Willie Mays (95%, 1979), Carl Yastrzemski (95%, 1989), Bob Feller (94%, 1962), Reggie Jackson (94%, 1993), Ted Williams (93%, 1966), Stan Musial (93%, 1969), Brooks Robinson (92%, 1983), Jim Palmer (92%, 1990), Ozzie Smith (92%, 2002), Wade Boggs (92%, 2005), Rod Carew (91%, 1991)

That’s everyone (aside from Roberto Clemente, elected via a special ballot in 1973) with higher than 90 percent of the vote. Frank Robinson, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle are the next three on the list (88-89 percent).

It would be an interesting exercise for an aggregation like BTF’s Hall of Merit to tackle as a side project.

I think the only player missing from a top 10 emerging from such a vote (not counting ineligibles such as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Greg Maddux) would be Joe Morgan, who received only 82 percent of the vote in 1990.

All in all, the BBWAA vote results, despite the perturbations of individual election years, seem rather solid.

It’s the gray areas, the less-than-obvious choices, that drive the controversy, the derision, the endless discussion that presumes that this subtler turf has been mangled.

And it is one of the strengths of James’s operatically dyspeptic Politics of Glory that we can see that there is no other way that it could have been—until, possibly, right now.

Veterans Committee Voting Inside Out

The Veterans Committee is now at its lowest ebb, and badly needs a revised approach. A correlation of their selections with the previous BBWAA voting, however, shows a consistent pattern that has, as far as I can tell, never surfaced in any of the endless discussions of this topic.

What is that pattern? Let’s permit it to evolve through a look at the correlations themselves, organized by decade.

The 1940s had three Vet Committee votes (‘45, ‘46, ‘49). Let’s look at those players selected by the VC, and their highest BBWAA vote percentages.

1945—Ed Delahanty (53), Jimmy Collins (49), Wilbert Robinson (38), Hughie Jennings (37), Hugh Duffy (33), Roger Bresnahan (26), Fred Clarke (25), Tommy McCarthy (0).

1946—Frank Chance (73), Rube Waddell (63), Ed Walsh (56), Johnny Evers (54), Eddie Plank (27), Joe McGinnity (25), Joe Tinker (20), Jack Chesbro (2), Jim O’Rourke (0).

1949—Three Finger Brown (27).

It’s a clear and obvious pattern for this voting phase: the VC is putting in the players with the highest BBWAA vote totals. The only exception to the pattern is Miller Huggins, whose peak vote percentage was 54 percent in 1945 but was passed over until 1964.

It is possible, as James does, to criticize several of these selections, But aside from Billy Hamilton and Sam Crawford, there is no one that the two voting processes missed—and a lot of the reason for that, as James notes several times, is that there was no statistical encyclopedia available to those involved in the decision-making at the time.

The Vets Committee selections, at their peak of BBWAA support in the initial balloting, received an average peak vote of 38 percent. This was the highest such percentage until the decade of the 1990s.

The 1950s and 1960s was a time of instability in the HoF voting process, but the general pattern of following the BBWAA’s lead held in the Vet Committee selections.

50s—Ray Schalk (45%, VC 1955), Chief Bender (44%, VC 1953), Home Run Baker (30%, VC 1955), Zack Wheat (23%, VC 1959), Sam Crawford (3%, VC 1957), Bobby Wallace (3%, 1953)

Schalk is considered by everyone to be a bad pick, but the VC was simply following the lead of the BBWAA here. Another catcher, Hank Gowdy, peaked at 36% of the BBWAA vote in 1957, but hasn’t gotten the call yet. Voters with more support than Wallace (a dubious choice) and Crawford (a BBWAA oversight that VC should get credit for) included: Pepper Martin (16%), Duffy Lewis (14%), Babe Adams (10%), Lefty O’Doul (8%).

The average peak vote for the 50s VC picks: 28 percent.

60s—Edd Roush (54%, VC 1962), Miller Huggins (54%, VC 1964), Eppa Rixey (53%, VC 1963), Sam Rice (51%, 1963), Max Carey (51%, VC 1961), Kiki Cuyler (34%, VC 1968), Burleigh Grimes (34%, VC 1964), Red Faber (31%, VC 1964), Lloyd Waner (23%, VC 1967), Casey Stengel (23%, VC 1966), Waite Hoyt (19%, VC 1969), Goose Goslin (14%, VC 1969), Stan Coveleski (13%, 1969), Heinie Manush (9%, VC 1964), Billy Hamilton (<1%, VC 1961), Elmer Flick (<1%, VC 1964)

The VC starts to founder in the mid-60s, as there is a gap in players with strong BBWAA voting records that shows up at this time. Instead of slowing the process down, however, the VC starts to select players with very little prior BBWAA support. Elmer Flick (actually a good pick) and Heinie Manush (dubious at best) are the tipping point for a series of picks that go against the grain. This trend will metastasize in the next decade.

Players with higher BBWAA vote totals than Lloyd Waner but passed over by the VC (and still not in the HoF): Allie Reynolds (34%), Marty Marion (31%), Johnny Vander Meer (30%), Bucky Walters (24%).

The average BBWAA support for VC picks declined in these two decades: 25 percent in the 50s, 28 percent in the 60s. It was about to bottom out, however.

The 1970s brought forth an explosion of VC selections, including the infamous "Frisch picks" that Bill James (for the most part) rightfully rails against in The Politics of Glory. Cronyism completely trumped BBWAA voting percentages.

We’ll break this into two parts, 1970-74 and 1975-79:

70-74—Lefty Gomez (46%, VC 1972), Ross Youngs (22%, VC 1972), Jim Bottomley (22%, VC 1974), Earle Combs (16%, VC 1970), Dave Bancroft (16%, VC 1971), Chick Hafey (11%, VC 1971), Rube Marquard (11%, VC 1971), Jesse Haines (8%, VC 1970), Harry Hooper (3%, VC 1971), George Kelly (2%, VC 1973), Jake Beckley (1%, VC 1971)

75-79—Al Lopez (39%, VC 1977), Hack Wilson (38%, VC 1979), Billy Herman (20%, VC 1975), Addie Joss (14%, 1978), Joe Sewell (9%, VC 1977), Earl Averill (5%, VC 1975), Fred Lindstrom (4%, VC 1976), Amos Rusie (2%, VC 1978)

As in previous decades, there are a couple of good selections amongst those who received low BBWAA percentages (Averill and Rusie), but for the most part this decade can be summed up with the phrase "…and you thought Lloyd Waner was a bad pick."

The two 70s inductees with consistent support from the BBWAA over a nearly 20-year period were Lefty Gomez and Ross Youngs (much lower than Gomez, but in a tougher vote pool). Both have a more legitimate case than is generally acknowledged.

Players with more than 25 percent of the vote from the BBWAA in the 1970s not selected by the VC: Gil Hodges (60%), Marty Marion (40%), Phil Cavarretta (36%), Mickey Vernon (29%).

The average BBWAA support for VC picks in the 1970s: a whopping 15 percent. Four players with single-digit support got the nod in each half-decade.

The 1980s began what we can now see as an epic retrenchment. The VC actually had a year where they didn’t select someone (1988), a pattern that would soon escalate asymptotically. But, as we’ll see, the correlation to BBWAA voting percentages would start to rise again.

80s—Enos Slaughter (69%, VC 1989), Pee Wee Reese (48%, VC 1984), Johnny Mize (44%, VC 1981), Red Schoendienst (43%, VC 1989), Arky Vaughan (29%, VC 1985), Rick Ferrell (29%, VC 1984), Chuck Klein (28%, VC 1980), Ernie Lombardi (15%, VC 1986), Travis Jackson (7%, VC 1982)

Travis Jackson is a throwback to the "Frisch pick" debacle, where most of the inductees were throwbacks in a different sense of the word. All things considered, this is a much better list, and is more consistent with the results up to 1963.

Players with more than 30% of the vote from the BBWAA in the 1980s not selected by the VC: Gil Hodges (63%), Tony Oliva (47%), Roger Maris (43%), Maury Wills (41%), Harvey Kuenn (39%)

Players in the 20-30% range: Ken Boyer (26%), Lew Burdette (24%), Minnie Minoso (21%).

Gil Hodges is the player with the highest BBWAA support who has not been put into the HoF.

The average BBWAA support for VC picks in the 1980s: 31 percent.

The 1990s brought us to the peak of what an unrepentant phrase-mangler such as yours truly would call “the BBWAA-to-VC PC.” Average BBWAA support for candidates put into the HoF by the VC reach an all-time high at 47 percent. The selections may or may not be correct, but the politics? Flawless.

Some of this, however, is due to a phenomenon that the “24-hour media age” made possible—highly effective bandwagon campaigns. As in politics, so in baseball—except that it takes 75% to be elected, which meant that even the best-organized bandwagon campaign could manage to fall just short of the goal.

This has happened three times in the BBWAA voting—in 1985, 1988, and 1994. Nellie Fox was cruising in the low 40s when a "get-him-in-the-Hall" campaign was organized during his final two years of eligibility. He wound up with 74.7% of the vote in 1985, his final year on the ballot.

The next of these incidents occurred in 1988, and it happened to a pitcher turned…yes, a pitcher turned politician—Jim Bunning.

Making what seemed like an orderly rise toward enshrinement, Bunning hit 74 percent of the BBWAA vote in ’88, and had three more tries to get over the line, but fell short, timing out in 1991 with 64 percent.

In 1992, a campaign to enshrine Orlando Cepeda geared up. After having been languishing in the 30s and 40s for nearly a decade, the Baby Bull shot up to 57 percent, then 60 percent in ’93. The "big push" fell short in ’94, making Cepeda the third member of the “so near, yet so far” BBWAA fraternity.

All three were enshrined by the VC in the late 1990s.

90s—Jim Bunning (74%, VC 1996), Nellie Fox (74%, VC 1997), Orlando Cepeda (74%, VC 1999), Hal Newhouser (43%, VC 1992), Richie Ashburn (42%, VC 1995), Larry Doby (3%, VC 1998)

Players with more than 30% of the vote from BBWAA in the 1990s not selected by the Veterans Committee: Steve Garvey (43%), Jim Rice (43%), Ron Santo (43%), Tony Oliva (41%), Jim Kaat (30%)

The 2000s has brought us into the VC’s "age of molasses." Conquered by division, the VC has been stymied in its attempt to select a player whose career occurred since 1950. Managers, executives and Negro League players have been selected, which has masked this paralysis somewhat—but only to those with blinders on.

00s—Bill Mazeroski (42%, VC 2001), Joe Gordon (39%, VC 2009)

Wrapped To Go

The VC’s checkered history, as shaken and stirred by Bill James, looks like a series of random disasters, but it’s not. It has, with the exception of the 1964-82 time frame, followed the lead of the BBWAA and selected players with the highest percentage of votes in the qualifying elections.

Such a discovery won’t satisfy the sabermetric klatsch, of course. But it’s clear that, for the most part, the BBWAA and the VC selections have been reasonable. Not anywhere close to perfect, of course, but better than advertised by James and those who’ve bonded with his sardonic take on “insider world."

That said, it’s clear that the current VC desperately needs more structural change, but we’ll save that topic for Part II. We’ll also examine the current crop of BBWAA eligibles, feature that prediction system, and return to the Great Jim Rice Conflagration.
Hold on to your heads, kiddies: January 12 is almost upon us.

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RBIs and MVP

Don Malcolm — 2008-12-19T05:04:15+00:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about Pavlov and his dog lately, and it’s beginning to worry me.

All that salivating—sheesh! Aside from the sanitary issues, there’s something depressing about an ongoing knee-jerk reaction that continues even without the application of the doctor’s mallet.

This is what came to mind when I read Dave Studenmund’s intriguing and creative Season Leverage Index. Dave handles math the way I terrorize a dependent clause, and what he’s doing is extremely inventive.

There is an assumption underlying Dave’s work, however, that needs to be addressed. For nearly 30 years now, one of the primary tenets of sabermetrics has been the overrated nature of runs batted in (and please don’t call ‘em "ribbies," makes me think of rib-eye, and that just involuntarily makes my mouth water).

Yes, they are overrated. And yes, there has been a tendency to award Most Valuable Player awards to hitters with league-leading RBI totals.

There has been enough hue and cry on this topic to travel through interstellar space and convince the Klingons that (a) there is life on earth and (b) that earthlings are a bunch of undifferentiated whiners.

While Dave doesn’t focus so much on RBIs in what he wrote, I think this issue has been ingrained enough that it has a kind of subliminal effect on "sabermetric discourse."

As noted, Dave’s idea is exceptionally clever. He wants to use the method to create a dialogue with a group of baseball beat writers who made NL RBI leader Ryan Howard the second-place finisher in the 2008 NL MVP voting.

While that is a worthwhile strategy (and I’d love to read some of the transcripts of those interactions), two things here need to be pointed out.

First, the writers didn’t make Howard the MVP this year. He finished second. Even though there were certainly MVP candidates who deserved to place higher than Howard on the ballot, the fact is that the writers did get it right. They gave the award to Albert Pujols, who was the NL’s best player by almost every conceivable measure.

Second, lurking somewhere within Dave’s purpose is an echo of that long-standing squabble over RBIs and MVPs that assumes the problem is the same as it was 30, or even 20, years ago.

Then a bell rang in my head. As I reached for a napkin to wipe my mouth, I suddenly knew that it was time to crack open the reference books—er, rather, go to Sean Forman’s baseball-reference.com—and find out if this issue is still a matter of, er, "reflexive" truth.

But before I provide the results of the study, perhaps it would be appropriate if you took a "knee-jerk quiz" on the subject. Take a moment to answer these five questions before proceeding further:

1—What percentage of MVP winners (1931 to 2008) led the league in RBI?
2—Does this percentage vary much by league?
3—How many times did this MVP/RBI correlation happen in both leagues during the same year?
4—In what years did No. 3 occur?
5—Has this percentage varied over time or has it remained constant? Is it higher or lower in the last 20 years (let’s say 1990 to the present) than the overall average?

Yes, I realize that No. 4 is a question that only the "rain man" variant of stathead is going to rattle off, but take a crack at it anyway. The answers to all of these questions will be found in various places in the text below, along with a table of results and a few other related facts. Take the quiz first. When the bell rings, you can proceed…

***

Here are the numbers.

Since 1931, when the MVP award as we know it came into being, there have been 156 selections. Fifty-four of these, or just under 35 percent, have been awarded to the player leading the league in RBI.

The figures are very close for the two leagues: 36 percent in the AL (28), exactly one-third in the NL (26).

What’s most interesting, though, is how these percentages have changed over time.

Years           NL    Pct   AL    Pct
1931-55          5    20%    8    32%
1956-89         17    50%   16    47%
1990-present     4    21%    4    21%

As the chart shows, the first quarter-century of the MVP voting (1931-1955) gave the plaque to RBI leaders just over one-fourth of the time (13 out of 50, or 26 percent).

Over the next 34 years (1956-1989), however, the correlation of RBI/MVP that created the howling hounds of "stathead backlash" was, in fact, there for every sore eye to see.

Just under half of the MVP awards went to RBI leaders in that time span. Only twice do we find a gap greater than a year in which no RBI leader won in either league: 1962-63, and 1975-76.

Starting in 1990, however, all this changed. Since 1998, when RBI leaders Sammy Sosa and Juan Gonzalez were named MVPs, there have been only two MVP/RBI alignments: Ryan Howard in 2006 and Alex Rodriguez in 2007.

So that means that, over the past 10 years, the BBWAA has brought the percentage down to just 10 percent.

Overall since 1990, the MVP/RBI correlation is down to just a tad over 20 percent.

For some reason, however, this good news doesn’t seem to be either widely known or, for that matter, something that the number-crunching community wants to feel good about. Sure, it could simply a fluke—go ahead and throw that knee-jerk "small sample size" issue at me. Don’t forget, I was the first sabermetrician with an asbestos suit, and I’ll still—cough, cough—be here after every last one of you is floating in your own saliva.

OK, OK, sorry: all that ringing in my ears just got too much to take… anyway, odds are that the BBWAA may have learned something as a result of all this dogged effort to separate RBI from MVP. Both the AL and NL had the longest streak of years with no MVP/RBI connection in the last decade: eight years (AL: 1999-2006) and seven years (NL: 1999-2005). Both of these represent the longest span of "RBI/MVP separation" in either league over the history of the MVP award.

While continuing a dialogue is a good idea—and Dave’s method to capture the mindset of those with various types of "selection bias" entering into their modes of assessment is downright inspired—I think it’s worth considering that we simply look at these results and take a moment to bask in our success.

It's a success we seem to have been denying ourselves, for reasons known only to the man behind the screen who keeps ringing that damned RBI/MVP bell.

***

A complete list of the RBI leaders and their MVP finishes can be seen in the table below. Look out, it’s a big one.

A few fun facts:
In nine years the MVP has gone to the RBI leader in both leagues: 1941, 1953, 1958, 1964, 1967, 1969, 1972, 1987 and 1998.

Seven players leading in RBI have finished 15th or lower in the MVP voting: Nick Etten (15th, 1945), Vern Stephens (24th, 1950), Gus Zernial (20th, 1951), Ray Boone (16th, 1955), Harmon Killebrew (21st, 1971), Preston Wilson (16th, 2003), Vinny Castilla (23rd, 2004).

The player in the MVP voting period (1931 to the present) with the highest league-leading RBI total not winning the MVP award: Lou Gehrig in 1931 (184 RBI, finished second). Hank Greenberg led with 183 RBI in 1935 and finished third. Highest total post-WWII: Manny Ramirez (165 RBI in 1999, finished third).

Twenty-eight hitters have led in RBI and finished second in the MVP voting, 16 in the NL (earliest: Chuck Klein, 1931; latest: Ryan Howard, 2008), and 12 in the AL (first: the aforementioned Gehrig; latest: David Ortiz, 2005).

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Baseball gold spun from thin air

Don Malcolm — 2008-07-24T05:19:15+00:00

Like any practitioner of magic, the Baseball Reliquary and its "Shrine of the Eternals ceremony" defy rational description. The third Sunday in July has become synonymous with the Reliquary's annual feat of multivalent sleight-of-hand, where baseball becomes a conduit for a communion unlike any other.

Even for the faithful, however, the Reliquary’s 10th ceremony, held Sunday, July 20, at the Pasadena Public Library (just a mile or two away from where Jackie Robinson began his march to a similarly unique baseball destiny), looked to be shaping up as something of a retrenchment from the bold, brilliant juxtapositions that had characterized the organization’s inductees over the past four years.

Neale "Bobo" Henderson sang "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" with Buck O'Neil and is still in great voice 60 years later.

This year's trio (Buck O’Neil, Emmett Ashford and Bill Buckner), at first glance, didn’t appear to have the panache of the 2007 class (Yogi Berra, Jim Brosnan and Bill James), or the thematic depth exhibited in the 2006 crop (Josh Gibson, Fernando Valenzuela and Kenichi Zenimura).

Once the ceremony began, however, with Reliquary Executive Director Terry Cannon bringing the proceedings to order with the ritual ringing of a cowbell (juxtaposing high seriousness with the fervid crudity of Ebbets Field legend Hilda Chester), any skepticism concerning the alchemical forces at work was quickly dispelled.

The properties that make the Baseball Reliquary such a potent "alternative" to conventional/institutional approaches to baseball's cultural history do not depend on any single inductee. Instead, an indefinable warmth begins to suffuse the Donald R. Wright auditorium; it builds into an ad-hoc concerto of celebration and remembrance, its rhythm altered and set loose upon the audience as each participant brings his or her own personality and set of experiences into play.

First inning: Cannon rings the cowbell, and the Reliquary’s off-beat trademark—the playing of baseball’s two most familiar musical showpieces (the National Anthem and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame")—comes off flawlessly as Doug Livingston renders each with especial panache on the pedal steel guitar. (Cannon promises that next year’s instrumental choices will push the envelope even further.)

Legendary Indians noisemaker John Adams never leaves home without his tom-toms...

Second inning: The Hilda Award, given to a fan whose devotion to baseball is almost deviant in intensity. Cannon regales the audience with new documentation of Hilda Chester’s eternal supremacy as baseball’s most flagrant fan, and introduces John Adams, Cleveland’s insouciant, indefatigable cheerleader, who has brought his bass drum to Indians’ games for 35 years, becoming so much of a local fixture that his trusty instrument has its own season ticket.

Adams' passion for baseball, and his appreciation of the bonhomie of the bleachers, ignites the proceedings with the sparkle of shared experience. Those of us in the seats can sense that we’ve got a special game going on in front of us today, and we sit up straighter to soak it all in.

Retrosheet czar David Smith has re-stitched baseball history, and was aptly awarded: a baseball from better days...

Third inning: The Tony Salin Award, given to the person or organization deserving of acclaim for the preservation of baseball history. And there is no one more worthy of such a salute than David Smith, the founder of Retrosheet. Baseball’s play-by-play history had been left in the dust by those in charge, and in the mid-1980s it simply seemed unrecoverable. Enter Smith and his band of plucky volunteers—and, by 2008, more than 100,000 games have been recorded and made freely available on the Internet.

Smith's deeply personal commitment to baseball history brings tears to his eyes and to many in the audience as he relates how he interacted with gruff baseball beat writer Bob Stevens, who permitted Retrosheet to copy more than 30 years of his scoresheets. Stevens allowed as how he’d never known why he’d never discarded these old mementoes—but he floored Smith by a sudden, unexpected shift in tone as he suggested that he must have been saving them for just such an effort.

The audience was floored, too.

Fourth inning: Albert Kilchesty, the mysterious "other half" of the Baseball Reliquary brain trust, delivers a brilliantly unorthodox keynote address that operates as a perfect cadenza—the rough equivalent of a "split-fingered knuckleball." Joining together a schoolgirl's crudely evocative description of a Reliquary art installation with his own pun-laden metaphorical phantasmagoria about the most extreme example of a reliquary known to mortal man, Kilchesty comes closer than anyone in articulating the almost sub-atomic cultural juxtapositions that make the Reliquary so unmistakably unique.

Adrienne Ashford, daughter of pioneering umpire Emmett Ashford, has her dad's smile; she, too, calls 'em as she sees 'em.

Fifth inning: A quick 1-2-3 as some of us in the audience are transfixed by the swirling verve in the arm motions of Mary Cannon (Terry's wife), who is "signing" for the members of the audience who are without hearing. We see her unsuccessful attempt to suppress a smile as she attempts to appropriately convey Kilchesty's most outrageous pun concerning a reliquary whose signature item is (according to him, at least) the actual foreskin of the Son of God: "Everyone was interested in a potential piece of the profit from a piece of the Prophet."

The hearing-impaired laugh right along with the rest of us.

Sixth inning: Buck O'Neil, spurned by the Hall of Fame, enters the Shrine of the Eternals with the highest vote percentage in the Reliquary's 10-year history. Negro League veteran Neale "Bobo" Henderson, who met O'Neil at the age of seven, belies his advancing age by sharing some timeless memories of his first encounter with the incandescent player-manager and future ambassador extraordinaire.

Seventh inning: Emmett Ashford, baseball's first African-American umpire, is celebrated for his love of baseball. His daughter, Adrienne, charms the audience with a speech brimming with grace and warmth. With a wry smile, she acknowledges her father’s "theatrical” tendencies, reminding us that baseball contains a multitude of "performance art" possibilities.

Not quite the Buckner you were expecting: daughter Brittany pinch-hits for her dad.

Eighth inning: The healing of Bill Buckner, Part One, in the immensely capable hands of writer/historian John Schulian. In his beautifully crafted address, Schulian gently but firmly reminds us that there is much, much more to Buckner's story than that one ghastly ground ball in the 1986 World Series. Although Schulian doesn’t give us the exact numbers, it turns out that his comments about Buckner’s "never let up" attitude are spot-on, confirmed by the stats available thanks to Retrosheet: Buckner hit better in August and September, in both the "dog days" and when the chips were down.

Another interesting stat: After being traded by his first team (the Dodgers), he beat them like a drum, hitting .348 against them.

In short, Buckner’s heart—and his pride—were more important reasons for his success than his natural talent, and these were the things that sustained him in a career beset by a nagging ankle injury.

Accepting on his behalf, his lovely young actress daughter, Brittany, remembered how he would soak his injured ankle in a tub filled with ice before going to the ballpark, in water so cold that "I don’t know how he could stand it so long."

Ninth inning: The healing of Bill Buckner, Part Two, an absolution in rhythm delivered with ecstatic precision by poet Jack McCarthy, reminding us of how cruelly unfair it is to focus a single event, a random memory, into a so-called "collective summary" for anyone. The healing power of time, and our need to embrace it in our everyday lives, was the theme driving McCarthy’s prayer-like admonition to all of us who would judge too quickly, and who would caricature the human condition to seek a free pass from the pain of existence.

Two writers at the top of their games, Jack McCarthy and John Schulian, swap baseball metaphors.

It was a moment like no other in any baseball ceremony, and, spellbound in the wake of McCarthy’s magnificent performance, a hush grew to a murmur, as the emotional recognition swirled in the air like a collective lasso, squeezing the audience to its feet for a final salvo of thanks.

Terry Cannon had called it again: McCarthy was the ceremony’s "closer," bringing home victory and vindication with a vivid, vigorous flourish, galvanizing the audience into a commingled consciousness through the closure of a mysterious but sacred ritual, the simultaneous sense of a "peace that passeth understanding" but that was somehow still recognized by all.

Such a ceremony is like the best baseball game you have ever attended, with details and nuances that cannot be transmitted via mere description. Such alchemy must truly be witnessed to be believed... but if you come to Pasadena on the third Sunday in July with an open heart, you will indeed see gold spun from thin air before your eyes.

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Five All-Star games in one!

Don Malcolm — 2008-07-07T04:03:15+00:00

The evolution of postseason play has created some blemishes in baseball’s complexion, and it is going in only one direction (an extra round of playoffs once expansion brings the total number of teams to 32.) Back in 1996, in The Big Bad Baseball Annual, I argued for a non-traditionalist approach to the postseason that would allow for teams in the same league to wind up facing each other in the Fall Classic. In 2008, with the AL possessing four out of the top five winning percentages in the game, it seems unfair that only one of these teams can actually get to the World Series.

But, good grief, I’m digressing right off the bat—a narrative strategy that really works only in film noir, not in essays—and especially not in essays about baseball (where, as we all know, "linearity is king"). We’re supposed to be talking about the All-Star Game, for Crissakes.

So what’s to talk about? Let’s face it: it’s a boring game, even with the wan gimmick of "home field advantage" for the winning league. The length and structure of the contest is poorly proportioned to what is, after all, merely an exhibition: it doesn't allow enough of the available players to make a significant on-field contribution.

Is there a solution? Sure, but it’s radical and non-traditional. (And these are the polite terms that many of you will use to describe this proposal as it unfolds.) As always, though, I remain undaunted.

Here’s what we do to have some actual mid-summer excitement:

Create division-based All-Star squads.

Every year there are approximately two dozen deserving players left off each All-Star squad. If we create divisional squads with roster sizes of 19 players each, we have solved this problem. We’ve also created a big enough roster to get through a series of short-inning exhibitions (see below).

Have them play a three-inning round-robin exhibition to determine a champ.

Now here is where things get a bit baroque. First, remember that an eventual “division” champ is also a "league" champ, so you tradition freaks can still "grandfather" the results into the old model.

Three innings will allow a squad to use a starter for two innings, and a closer in the third, and whatever else is needed in case the game goes further. A 19-man roster will probably have 8-9 pitchers, so there will be enough starters and closers from each division to cover a maximum total of three three-inning games. There’d still be 2-3 more pitchers available for "extra innings." (See my take on "divisional All-Star squads" for 2008 at the end of the article.)

Here’s how it works. The two divisions in each league with the best winning percentage (this year, that’d be the AL East and the NL Central) get a "bye" in the first round. So take a look at how this new "All-Star Exhibition" might play out.

First round:

AL West 2, NL West 1 (4 innings). Ichiro Suzuki singles in Chone Figgins (who doesn’t make the AL squad under the old selection rules) after Rich Harden follows Felix Hernandez and strikes out five in two innings.
NL East 4, AL Central 0. Cliff Lee, ace of the AL Central squad, has a bad first inning and his mates can’t solve Cole Hamels and Billy Wagner.

Second round:

AL West 1, NL Central 0. Justin Duchsherer (saved for "Game Two" by savvy AL West manager Mike Scioscia) and Frank Rodriguez don’t allow a hit and Vlad Guerrero homers.
AL East 6, NL East 5. Dice-K is wild and gives up four in the first, but Johan Santana gives up a three-run homer in the second and Washington’s Jon Rauch does the same in the bottom of the third (to Brian Roberts, who also doesn’t make the AL squad under the old rules.)

As you can see, the AL will “win” the "All-Star game" this year, via two division squads facing off in the final round for "bragging rights."

Championship round:

AL West 1, AL East 0. Joe Saunders and Brandon Morrow (two more guys who might’ve been left off the AL squad under the old rules) give up just one hit, and Josh Hamilton hits a homer leading off the second inning. It’s been a long night for the AL Westies, but they get to do some sweet finger-wagging.

So are five All-Star games better than one?

Make up your own mind. But the advantages seem obvious. It can’t be stressed too strongly that what we’re dealing with here is an exhibition, not a "real game"—so objections that "we’re not playing nine innings" are moot. In fact, the at-bats in these three-inning games will be fraught with heightened meaning, given that we're in what amounts to a "do-or-die scenario."

More players get to actually play, not just sit around. Starters and closers get to make consistently meaningful appearances. Managers have to decide how to deploy their pitchers as if the game were starting in the seventh inning, which will make for interesting choices and a lot more morning-after second-guessing than what happens at present.

What’s the weakness? Games where the pitchers rack up zeroes, creating the possibility of too many extra innings. John Rickert crunched the numbers, and about 15% of all games are scoreless after three innings. As a result, what you’ll see in these games is increased usage of "little ball" strategies—base stealing, hit-and-run, sacrifices—to try to tack on an early run.

As noted earlier, teams will carry at least eight pitchers, so they should have two extra men to cover any "extra-inning" scenarios.

There will be a lot more strategy in these games, and it will force certain kinds of decisions in a compressed way that will be unique to the game.

And that will make this new version of the All-Star Game into a fascinating contrast with the traditional ballgame structure.

I predict that if this approach were implemented, the fans would love it. Some of them—some of you—will hate it, to be sure. But the vast majority of you will come around to it quickly when you realize that you’re getting "Five All-Star Games In One Night!!!".

Sure, they’re bite-sized. But in our "Age of Attention-Deficit Disorder" and "100-Calorie Snack Packs," this may be just what the doctor ordered.

So what is the relevance of such an All-Star game revision to the post-season—you remember that opening digression, now, don’t you? Well, simply put, if the public decides that they can stomach the idea of two divisions in the same league fighting for the bragging rights to the All-Star Game per the above scenario, this might set the stage for something analogous to occur in the postseason. Such a hope may be subversive, or merely deluded; but if there is truly post-partisanship in our future, can a post-league postseason be far behind?

DIVISIONAL ALL-STAR SQUADS 2008

AL East
SP: Jon Lester, Daisuke Matsuzaka, BOS; James Shields, Scott Kazmir, TB; Roy Halladay, TOR
RP: Jonathan Papelbon, BOS; Mariano Rivera, NYY; B.J. Ryan, TOR
C: Jorge Posada, NYY; Dioner Navarro, TB
IF: Brian Roberts, BAL; Kevin Youkilis, BOS; Jason Giambi, Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, NYY; Scott Rolen, TOR
OF: Nick Markakis, BAL; J.D. Drew, BOS; B.J. Upton, TB
Injury reserves: Luke Scott, BAL; Dustin Pedroia, BOS; David Eckstein, TOR

AL Central
SP: John Danks, Gavin Floyd, CHW; Cliff Lee, C.C. Sabathia, CLE; Zach Greinke, KC
RP: Bobby Jenks, CHW; Joakim Soria, KC; Joe Nathan, MIN
C: A.J. Pierzynski, CHW; Joe Mauer, MIN
IF: Joe Crede, CHW, Johnny Peralta, CLE; Placido Polanco, Marcus Thames, DET; Justin Morneau, MIN
OF: Carlos Quentin, CHW; Grady Sizemore, CLE; Magglio Ordonez, DET; David DeJesus, KC
Injury reserves: Jermaine Dye, CHW; Edgar Renteria, DET; Mark Grudzielanek, KC

AL West
SP: John Lackey, Joe Saunders, LAA; Justin Duchsherer, Rich Harden, OAK; Felix Hernandez, SEA; Vicente Padilla, TEX
RP: Francisco Rodriguez, LAA; Brandon Morrow, SEA
C: Kurt Suzuki, OAK; Gerald Laird, TEX
IF: Chone Figgins, Casey Kotchman, LAA; Jose Lopez, SEA; Ian Kinsler, Michael Young, TEX
OF: Vladimir Guerrero, LAA; Ichiro Suzuki, SEA; Milton Bradley, Josh Hamilton, TEX
Injury reserves: Mark Ellis, OAK, Adrian Beltre, SEA

NL East
SP: Tim Hudson, Jair Jurrjens, ATL; Scott Glenn, FLA; Johan Santana, NYM; Cole Hamels, PHI
RP: Billy Wagner, NYM; Brad Lidge; PHI; Jon Rauch, WAS
C: Brian McCann, ATL
IF: Chipper Jones, Mark Teixeira, ATL; Hanley Ramirez, Dan Uggla, FLA; Jose Reyes, David Wright, NYM; Chase Utley, PHI;
OF: Josh Willingham, FLA; Carlos Beltran, NYM, Pat Burrell, PHI
Injury reserves: Matt Treanor, FLA; Ryan Church, NYM; Cristian Guzman, WAS

NL Central
SP: Ryan Dempster, Carlos Zambrano, CHC; Edison Volquez, CIN; Wandy Rodriguez, HOU; Ben Sheets, MIL; Kyle Lohse, STL
RP: Kerry Wood, CHC; Francisco Cordero, CIN
C: Geovany Soto, CHC; Yadier Molina, STL
IF: Mark DeRosa, Aramis Ramirez, Ryan Theriot, CHC; Lance Berkman, HOU; Albert Pujols, STL
OF: Ryan Braun, MIL, Jason Bay, Xavier Nady, PIT; Ryan Ludwick, STL
Injury reserves: Derek Lee, CHC; Brandon Phillips; CIN, Jack Wilson, PIT

NL West
SP: Danny Haren, Brandon Webb, ARZ; Aaron Cook, COL; Chad Billingsley, LA; Tim Lincecum, Jonathan Sanchez, SF
RP: Taylor Buchholz, COL; Takashi Saito, LA
C: Russell Martin, LA; Benji Molina, SF
IF: Stephen Drew, Orlando Hudson, Conor Jackson, ARZ; Garrett Atkins, COL; Adrian Gonzalez, SD; Ray Durham, SF
OF: Matt Holliday, COL; Matt Kemp or Andre Ethier, LA; Brian Giles, SD; Aaron Rowand, SF
Injury reserves: James Loney, LA; Clint Barmes, COL; Khalil Greene, SD

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