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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Archdeacon of Doom is back! As Jon Daly does a bang-up job on speedster Evar Swanson.
On Sunday, September 15, 1929, there was a field day held at Crosley Field between games of a Reds-Braves doubleheader. The club offered $100 if anyone could circle the bases from a standing start in less than 13.8 seconds and beat Hans Lobert’s 19-year-old major league record. Among the participants were Swanson and outfield mate Ethan Allen. Like his teammate, Allen was a sprinter in college. Swanson was able to circumnavigate the bases in full uniform in 13.4 seconds. This tied a record that Maurice Archdeacon set eight years earlier at Rochester in the International League. (Marty Hogan of Indianapolis in the Western League was credited by some sources for circling the bases in 13.2 seconds in 1898. Ben Morgan of the National Association may have disputed that claim when doing a study of field day records.)
A sore shoulder shortened Swanson’s 1930 season. He missed much of spring training and part of the season and only appeared in 95 games. But he was picked up in November by Columbus of the American Association to be their center fielder in 1931. While in Columbus he was involved in another field day on September 21st at Neil Park in the Ohio capital. This time he circled the bases in 13.2 seconds. To this day that record stands, although there is an unverified claim that Cool Papa Bell broke the 13-second barrier during his career. Over the years some players have come close. Maury Wills circled the bases in 13.4 seconds in 1953. George Case and Cliff McClain did it in 13.5. But no one has bested Swanson’s record.
Repoz
Posted: August 20, 2008 at 02:48 PM | 22 comment(s)
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A shame no one asked Bo Jackson to try, then.
With a stopwatch and MLB.tv and enough time, one could easily get the average home-to-first time of every baseball player. If you were very industrious you could also get home-to-second, first-to-third etc times. (Obviously you could only use plays where it was clear that the player was truly hustling)
You could do a couple things with this. One, you could just list and rank all of these times. That alone would be fascinating.
The other thing you could do would be to time yourself on a field, and mock all of the players you can outpace.
Bengie Molina
Frank Thomas
0.000001% of the population is significantly less than the actual number of MLB players.
In fact it's about 3.
What I would be really interested in is how fast someone like Fernando Tatis is. He isn't a Molina-style plodder, but doesn't seem fast on the field by any means. How much faster is he than an average man? It's impossible to tell in the context of other MLB players
Did they have sundials back then?
Can't speak for anyone else, but in all honesty, I don't think I'd be up to the standard.
One of his sons is still alive (as is a sister!) I emailed him and a local historian from his hometown. Newspaperarchive.com also had some Galesburg newspaper as part of their collection.
Galesburg is, of course, best known for being Carl Sandburg's place of birth.
I have heard that Slaughter holds the record among BBHOFers with 7 marriages, so the odds of him being married to a girl from any particular area are pretty high.
Looks like the only two he hit against the Cubs were in '97 and '98, which I think predates the MLB.TV library. You'd probably need a connection in Chicago or Pittsburgh TV to get that video. Or maybe someone at the Worldwide Leader.
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