Thursday, May 23, 2013
Richie Ashburn’s Widow in Tears Over His Endangered Gladwyne Grave
(blogs.phillymag.com)
Read More...It has been nearly 16 years since Philadelphia lost Richie Ashburn, one of the greatest Phillies players of all time. The beloved Hall of Famer, who played for the team from 1948 through 1959, died of a heart attack in 1997 after broadcasting a Phillies-Mets game from Shea Stadium. His family buried him in the cemetery outside of Gladwyne Methodist Church, where all was quiet until some developers announced plans to turn the church into condos and put a parking lot next to the cemetery. ...
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< 1 2 3 4 >I get that. McGwire is a player that motivated me to drive 4 hours to St Louis and pay for a hotel for no other reason than to watch him hit. I'm not a Cardinals fan, they were a middle of the pack club in 1998, and didn't have any other reason to visit STL (I did see other things, but would not have made the trip except for baseball).
But I'm undecided on how to weight that against his actual value in terms of wins and losses. While breaking the HR records he was a big negative at everything other than what he did in the batter's box. His peak was less likely to lead a team to the postseason than someone who was a good hitter combined with being a plus everywhere else, like Chase Utley's peak.
I'd vote for Mac, but he's not one of my top 10 choices on the current ballot.
Agree with Ray again. This is a bad habit.
Palmeiro 1988-2003 - 10,651 PA 135 OPS+ Worst season 104 OPS+ Best 5 160, 150, 146, 145, 144 Primarily 1B with about 400 games at DH
Rusty Staub 1965-1981 - 9808 PA 130 OPS+ Worst season 100 OPS+ Best 5 166, 153, 148, 139 137 Primarily OF with about 475 at DH
Raffy is clearly better, but not by much.
I used to have that same problem with Ernie Banks. I only really remember him from 1969 on, so I figured he was always a creaky old first baseman who happened to hit a lot of HR. And I still can't picture that guy playing SS.
And I don't know where people got the idea that Palmeiro is a DH candidate. He had 2350 games in the field - mostly as a good fielder.
Yes I can.
See.
What I have trouble with in most people thinking here, is that many are placing the steriod cheaters in the same group as the spitball, reds, corked bats maybe, and non-clean player "cheaters".
Besides thinking that the morals, honesty, and integrity factors are being over-looked for the steriod group and not the others, is that the steroid group shattered the history and records that game has placed a high value on.
Copperstown, MLB and BBTF groups and organizations are all separate entities, separate thoughts and rules persist. This makes it great for debate. I'm justing backing the Cooperstown idealogy until I have further proof or information. Steriod users out, suspected steriod users not in until further proof. Although I hate playing "God" on the suspected group, I try to use reasonable thinking.
Let the debate continue, I'm glad writers are sharing their ballots, I give them the uptmost repsect.
Yes by much. To start with, you have a 25 WAR edge to Palmeiro that you need to deal with. 66 to 41.
But the same can be said for the "greenies era" as well. 755, 104, 118, 383, 5714, 61,...I think you can make similar arguments about the 50s-70s relative to the history and records that you can you make regarding the 90s. Pre-steroid era 4 of the top 5, 7 of the top 10 and 8 of the top 13 career HR leaders started their careers in the 50s.
If it's about the records, Rose broke the all-time hits record using amps.
AAron broke the all-time home run record using amps.
Brock had the all-time SB record and played in the Amps Era.
Pitchers were throwing 300 innings and winning 300 games throughout the amps era. Ryan broke the single-season strikeouts record in this era, and finished with 5,700 Ks.
"blame the local newspaper for doing 0 investigative work. That clubhouse was crawling w PED. Crawling."
"there's 0 chance JB=clean"
"Find a trustworthy baseball contemporary of Jeff Bagwell's who believes he was clean. Then let's talk."
"The good news for all who disagree: I don't have a Hall of Fame vote. So my voice means a big fat stinkin' nothing. And Bagwell will get in"
At the end of the day, I just think it's generally best to side with the sinners than the stone casters...
If I had a ballot, steroids wouldn't factor into my vote -- beyond an extreme instance where I might be trying to decide on a 10th name and my final two candidates were players so similarly valuable and one I knew to have used PEDs and another I knew to be clean (and such a scenario, in and of itself, is so outlier/such an exercise in futility that it would probably amount to a coin flip).
I think I'm fairly versed in baseball history - when you grow up a Cubs fan, you don't have a lot of choice but to learn Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance, know the bio of Mordecai Brown, or try to relive the homer in the gloamin' to find your glories... but the truth is -
The flawed nature of MLB 'records' doesn't really require much thought to call into the question the whole lot of them.
Should we have tossed all pre-1947 records when MLB eliminated the bar that kept plenty of luminaries - from Josh Gibson to Satchel Paige to plenty of others from besting Ruth, Hack Wilson, et al? And in truth - wouldn't it have been better to reset the books a few years after '47, once the color barrier hadn't been just breached, but annihilated in total?
Whither Ford Frick and his asterisk? Certainly - there was a difference between 154 games and 162 games, even if Frick was a hopeless Ruth fanboy for it.
What of the rather unsavory ownership moves and reserve clauses that most certainly impacted some careers?
Changes in ballparks? Expansion? Perfectly legitimate and accepted medical advances? Strikes and lockouts?
The only real ironclad morals clause I place above others is the one that keeps Jackson and Rose out of the Hall -- but frankly, I think I might even let that one go in exchange for a complete and lasting peace on the PEDs era.
Baseball history is a patchwork of good and bad, just like everything else in life. It seems terribly wrong to just black out an era - even if only selectively - because this one involved hypodermic needles, while the other ones involved owners run amok, racism run amok, gamblers in the hallowed halls, dilution/expansion, etc.
Better to take it all in, appreciate the good, accept the bad -- and let the Hall be what it ought to be: the collective history of a still great game and the men who played it.
For me, personally, the late 90s and early aughts was a baseball rebirth. I'm not going to pretend I didn't enjoy the Sosa/McGwire race in '98 -- though, in truth -- I was a lot happier with the WC than I would have been with Sosa topping McGwire... and I wouldn't want future generations of fans to have this black hole of deleted on field history any more than I would have wanted to grow up with a black hole of deleted on field history of the 20s/30s or whatever because we've got only scant accounts of barnstorming games where Paige, Wood, or Rogan faced Ruth, Hornsby, etc...
For 2 guys who played next to each other so long, the guilt by association problem strikes each of them. Beyond that, any reason to suspect Bagwell but let Biggio slide by comes down to 1) Bagwell was bigger and 2) Bagwell hit more homers.
From the players who have been caught by testing it seems the idea that one can tell by looking at a player or his stats should be dead. Look at the Phillies last year. Ryan Howard didn't test positive, but Freddy Galvis did.
The Hall of Fame is living history, and like all history, the questions surrounding it are often fought and re-fought with each generation as new facts emerge.
If we don't see Bonds in the Hall in 2013, all that means (objectively) is that for one voting season, 25% or more of the BBWAA hasn't been convinced by the sort of arguments that you and the great majority of Primates here have been advancing. Kind of like the way we felt after the 2004 and 2010 elections, but disgusted as we were with the voters those years, those results didn't invalidate the process's legitimacy.
If the arguments you're making are really all that great, then at some point they're bound to win the day. This isn't a case of trying to convince anyone of Bonds's statistical qualifications. Barry Bonds isn't Tim Raines or Allan Trammell, appreciated more by connoisseurs than by the sort of half-informed writers who make up a big chunk of the BBWAA. Paradigms can change over time, but until they do in this case, you're just going to have to keep plugging away and hope for some revelation about some current HoFer that will shift that paradigm closer to your perspective.
But we do see plaques of known amps users such as Mays and Aaron and known cheaters such as Gaylord Perry and Babe Ruth and at least one known steroids user - Mickey Mantle.
Why? There's absolutely no reason to believe this.
But we do see plaques of known amps users such as Mays and Aaron and known cheaters such as Gaylord Perry and Babe Ruth and at least one known steroids user - Mickey Mantle.
Great, now all you need to do is to get 75% of the BBWAA to buy into that sort of argument, but for your sake I hope you've got better ones than that.
If the arguments you're making are really all that great, then at some point they're bound to win the day.
Why? There's absolutely no reason to believe this.
As usual, you ignore the operative "If" word.
But here I thought that you'd been buying into Bill James's inevitability argument, which says that once younger and less sabermetrically challenged voters replace the anti-steroids voters on the current BBWAA roster, we'll start to see known steroids users being voted in. Were you arguing against James when he wrote that? It's been the basis of several threads at least.
I didn't ignore it at all. You said that "if" the arguments are that great, then they will win the day. So your rule is that great arguments - you may not agree that they're great but your premise assumes arguendo that they are - will win the day. I see no evidence that that's true.
In what way did they shatter the records? All time homerun record was shattered by a guy who used an illegal bat(Ruth) and then by a guy who used amphetimines(Aaron) and finally by a guy who was a roider (Bonds) You could probably say the same thing about the single season record. Nobody posted 30 wins in a season, nobody broke the single season rbi record(or even mounted a serious challenge to it) yes the single season hit record did get broken, so there is that case of a cherished record going down, and the consecutive games record was broken near the start of the "roid" era.... but I'm just not seeing the shattering of favored records.
Not on the seasonal, or career rate wise. There might have been some team homerun records set, or league records set in that time frame or something silly like "most people with more than 40 homeruns in a season"...but these aren't records that anyone cares about.
Heck even numbers that usually indicate excessive offense, didn't happen, 400 total bases is the standard of offensive excellent in my mind.... it's a combination of health, power and not walking too much.
Sorted by year.... If you sort it by total bases, it's even more ridiculous. 2 of the top 13 are post 1950(Sosa and Luis Gonzalez)
Rk Player TB Year
1 Sammy Sosa 425 2001
2 Luis Gonzalez 419 2001
3 Barry Bonds 411 2001
4 Todd Helton 402 2001
5 Todd Helton 405 2000
6 Sammy Sosa 416 1998
7 Larry Walker 409 1997
8 Jim Rice 406 1978
9 Hank Aaron 400 1959
10 Stan Musial 429 1948
11 Joe DiMaggio 418 1937
12 Joe Medwick 406 1937
13 Hal Trosky 405 1936
14 Lou Gehrig 403 1936
15 Lou Gehrig 409 1934
16 Jimmie Foxx 403 1933
17 Jimmie Foxx 438 1932
18 Chuck Klein 420 1932
19 Lou Gehrig 410 1931
20 Chuck Klein 445 1930
21 Hack Wilson 423 1930
22 Lou Gehrig 419 1930
23 Babe Herman 416 1930
24 Rogers Hornsby 409 1929
25 Chuck Klein 405 1929
26 Lou Gehrig 447 1927
27 Babe Ruth 417 1927
28 Rogers Hornsby 450 1922
29 Babe Ruth 457 1921
IMO, players, owners, writers and fans are all blameworthy for not objecting to PED's at the time. But I'm puzzled that so many castigate writers for making moral judgments when BBWAA voters are explicitly told to assess a player's integrity, sportsmanship and character.
It's the hypocritical nature of the writers. Where were they when it was happening? If it's anyone's job to report on the usage, it's the writers and they traded competency and integrity for access a long time ago, to moralize after they have gotten all they could get out of the players, and have very little use for the retired players, is hypocritical.
Ultimately it's going to have to be that it's the roid era, and people have to accept it as part of baseball lore, good or bad, just like segregation, the wars, 2 foot high mounds, etc.
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If the arguments you're making are really all that great, then at some point they're bound to win the day.
Why? There's absolutely no reason to believe this.
As usual, you ignore the operative "If" word.
I didn't ignore it at all. You said that "if" the arguments are that great, then they will win the day. So your rule is that great arguments - you may not agree that they're great but your premise assumes arguendo that they are - will win the day. I see no evidence that that's true.
But your premise assumes that only by accepting your worldview on steroids can the BBWAA ever redeem itself. There is no other possible outcome that can ever be "legitimate" in your mind, or in your closed circuit world.
The more generic point here, as mulkowsky alludes to, is that the whole steroids / PED question is inherently subjective, and that nobody can "win" this argument "objectively." They can only "win" the argument by convincing the BBWAA. And both sides have perfectly coherent POVs, even if you and some of the equally self-referential writers don't want to acknowledge it.
Ruth openly used an innovative bat for a short while, and stopped using it when it was ruled illegal. He was not the only one to use such a bat, and presumably not the only one to stop when the ban was announced. Kind of like certain innovative training techniques that were quite popular for a few years in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Just scroll back up the page a few posts:
And the test of trustworthiness? Why, thinking that Bagwell used steroids of course! Pearlman doesn't have a vote, but his thinking is sadly representative of too many who do. That's why we castigate them.
This is of course the exact same assumption that the sanctimonious wing of the BBWAA makes about those who disagree with them. So are we done yet?
This is of course the exact same assumption that the sanctimonious wing of the BBWAA makes about those who disagree with them. So are we done yet?
I wish we were. In fact I only wish that Ray and some of those writers would just get a room and a cat o' nine tails and pleasure themselves to their heart's content. They're pretty much two sides of the same coin, even if both of them would consider that thought to be a blood libel.
Raffy had the one year he was mostly a DH with Lee Stevens playing 1b. Got a GG anyway.97 maybe?
There are a variety of reasons. One that I find particularly frustrating is that steroids are the ONLY time they do that. Cocaine is OK. Wife beating is OK. Spitballs are OK. Amphetimines are OK. Corked bats are OK. Racism is OK. I could go on and on but for whatever reason steroids is the one absolute disqualifier.
'99 when he played 28 games at first base. That was a laughable awarding of the Gold Glove but doesn't change the fact that Palmeiro played over 2000 games at first base. It's the equivalent of calling Rich Gossage a starting pitcher because of '76.
Well, not quite. He is credited with 2831 games played, and 2351 in the field. It's more than just '99
They never did before.
The steroids issue is not unique, and yet it's being treated as such. Players have always tried to gain an undue edge; have always cheated; have used illegal drugs to better their production. It never mattered to HOF voters before.
No, Andy, the principles involved -- with respect to amps, corked bats, or spitballs, for example - are similar to steroids. So you can't make up new standards for steroids use and hide under the cover that this is all "subjective" and expect to be taken seriously.
False.
The lack of any sort of fact-finding body to determine who used and who didn't also figures into my thinking. We'll just never know whether anyone used steroids, absent confessions. I think it's more likely than not that Bagwell used, but there's no actual evidence and he shouldn't be banned based on weak inference. And then you've just made the Hall of Fame the Hall of players who we don't have good evidence cheated in one particular way. It's not a good way to define the institution.
That seems on its face to be a fairly ludicrous position to take. And by bringing up Staub and then making the statement, you give the impression that they were close as players, when that was not the case.
Yes.
Plus it was never clear they were going to. If all the players knew doing 'x' would hurt there HoF chances that is one thing (looking at you Pete Rose), but the retroactive assignment of guilt and penalties just annoyes me.
But, still, 9 wins for 6 points of OPS+ and 200 PA? The oWAR difference also demands explanation. Where does it come from?
+ 306 Bat - 21 Run + 308 Rep - 134 Pos = +459 RAR (Staub)
+ 400 Bat - 10 Run + 328 Rep - 152 Pos = +566 RAR (Palmeiro)
I'd have to go deeper into the numbers to see where Palmeiro gets 100 batting runs over Staub. That seems like too many, based on just eyeballing things. But maybe I'm just missing something.
EDIT: Breaking down component batting runs and adjusting for era is more work than I feel like doing this afternoon. Fangraph's batting runs agree precisely with B-Ref's, finding Palmeiro to have created almost exactly 100 more runs above average than Staub over their comparable runs. Most likely OPS+ is obfuscating the issue somehow.
Wasn't there a poster on this site who didn't like WAR and preferred to use OPS+ and games played to evaluate players?
I never claimed that WAR was useless or that it wasn't a good blunt tool or that a 25-point difference in WAR wasn't something substantial that needed to be explained if one were taking the position that the two players were close.
But thanks for the non-responsive response. Mocking people for using your stat is a great way to boost interest/usage of your stat, I guess is what your marketing research is telling you.
Staub hit into 65 more DPS, and Palmeiro stole 50 more bases than Staub while getting caught 7 more times. That's about 25 runs that should be part of their batting runs that's not reflected in OPS+.
Interesting thought, and list. Tghough the "not walking too much" has some obvious exceptions - Ruth, Gehrig, Foxx, Barry. 10 such seasons in total and only Foxx with 96 in 1933 failed to reach 100 BB.
Also interesting is the clustering of 400 TB seasons:
-None in the deadball era - surprise!
-19 from 1921-37, 17 seasons. 1.118/yr
-3 in 59 seasons, 1938-96. 0.051/yr
-7 in 5 seasons, 1997-2001. 1.4/yr
-Zero in the past 11 seasons, and only 2 within 10 TB during that time. Going into another 40s-80s drought? Probably not.
It's all about the needles, baby!
Sorry Ray and Jose and just getting back to you, I've been away for a few hours>
--- Good point about amps users vs. Steriod and HGH users. But I still feel the single season HR record that was smashed was tied directly to steriods. Maybe the amps users like you mentioned may have been assisted during the the 50's - 60's but the many seasonal records I tied into the fact the the schedule 154 games vs 162 games enabled many of those. The pitching records other than longevity, was a result of the mound being higher and the strike zone being larger during those times.
I don't think so. Pretty sure they would be included in oWAR, but not in batting runs.
That's a possibility but not one I'm comfortable just accepting as fact for a couple of reasons;
1. There was a pretty dramatic increase in offense/home runs at the same moment (1993). I think expansion and the baseballs being juiced are more likely to have created such a sudden and widespread leap.
2. If steroids are truly "performance enhancing" then why did they help hitters more than pitchers when the anecdotal evidence suggests that pitchers were using at least as often as hitters?
Also, you noted the strike zone in your discussion of the 60s. It's entirely observational on my part but it seems that the strike zone decreased in size dramatically during the 90s. I don't know if others feel the same way but I think that's true. The "high strike" seems to have completely gone away.
Yeah but the moral judgements aren't supposed to swamp out everything else. It's fair, I guess, to ding someone 10-20 wins in the character clause for taking steroids. That would be enough to keep Raffy and Mac out of the HOF. That's not *nearly* enough to keep Bonds and Clemens out.
I agree that character can be used as part of the criteria. I don't agree that it should be a disqualifier.
I wish we had PitchFX going back far enough to study the issue, but my recollection is that the strize zone started dropping vertically (and expanding horizontally) when the AL Umps stopped using the outside balloon chest protector and that trend accelerated when Tony Pena and other catchers started moving their crouches lower to the ground. Just as I can't believe steroids could have a dramatic, league wide change in such a short period, I don't think that the gradual change in strikezone would explain the sudden increase in offense in '93 / '94. I think this supports your (and plenty of others') juiced balls theory.
There are a variety of reasons. One that I find particularly frustrating is that steroids are the ONLY time they do that. Cocaine is OK. Wife beating is OK. Spitballs are OK. Amphetimines are OK. Corked bats are OK. Racism is OK. I could go on and on but for whatever reason steroids is the one absolute disqualifier.
Well, the spitting incident was definitely mentioned a lot with Alomar, and I've seen and recall references to cocaine and Dave Parker, so it's not accurate to say that steroids are the ONLY time this gets mentioned. I think it's a reasonable position that steroids are worse than greenies, scuffing the ball or corking a bat. Part of the volume on this issue now certainly is that so many said nothing before and now are guiltily covering their tracks. But that fact doesn't mean that there isn't a decent, honest argument that a player's steroid use could cause a writer to flunk him on the integrity, character and sportsmanship clauses.
Even if Bonds flunks that clause there's no way he's not a HOFer unless you're counting those things at 90% of the criteria. In that case be prepared to embrace a David Eckstein, Dale Murphy, Sean Casey HOF.
Sorry, mulkowsky, but our geniuses here have the exclusive BTF copyrght on honesty, and only dishonest people can possibly disagree with their logical© interpretation of everything relating to steroids. You haven't really been initiated into BTF until you're been called "dishonest" by Ray DiPerna.
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Even if Bonds flunks that clause there's no way he's not a HOFer unless you're counting those things at 90% of the criteria. In that case be prepared to embrace a David Eckstein, Dale Murphy, Sean Casey HOF.
Yeah, that's just what we're going to get. And Vegas will be glad to take your money if you choose to cash in on this astute analysis.
I'll bite: What is the "decent, honest argument" of such, taking into account established precedent?
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