The No. 1 reason to endorse the arrival of the Internet in the mid-‘90s is that it brought us baseballreference.com. This has made covering the Grand Old Game easier than a hanging slider, compared to the days of looking through old scorebooks and microfilm to find details of a long-ago ballgame.
One drawback of Baseball Reference is this: It has been the ruination of many tall tales.
...This is brought up as a way of making a confession: Baseball Reference has caught another person in a storytelling lie.
Me.
It goes like this: Phil Miller has a story in Monday’s Star Tribune on MLB’s new rule outlawing the fake-to-third, throw-to-first pitcher’s maneuver that consumes time and doesn’t fool base runners. I was in the Strib office on Sunday afternoon, talking with Kevin Bertels, the domo of the sports desk, about Miller’s story.
And I repeated a tale that I spread as gospel for over three decades: Gene Mauch was the godfather of this maneuver. And in the hundreds of times I saw the Twins try it in Mauch’s years as manager, I saw one runner get picked off _ Cleveland’s Charlie Spikes, twice in the same series at Met Stadium.
I decided to find the games on Baseball Reference. Turns out, I owe Charlie Spikes an apology ... sort of.
On April 27, 1976, Cleveland had a runner on second and Spikes at first, and Charlie was picked off as the trail runner by Twins reliever Bill (Soup) Cambell.
On July 18, 1976, Cleveland had a runner on second and Spikes at first, and Charlie was picked off as the trail runner by Twins starter Jim (Bluegill) Hughes.
It is a grievous sin against baseball to be picked off as a trail runner, but Spikes wasn’t done in by fake-to-third, throw-to-first, so ... sorry Charlie. I promise to stop spinning that yarn.
Repoz
Posted: February 25, 2013 at 06:19 AM |
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1. John Northey Posted: February 25, 2013 at 08:01 AM (#4375510)I've consciously decided not to look that one up at baseball-reference because I'd hate to ruin my fond memories.
Apparently I was off a bit, Catalanatto was thrown out stealing, not picked off. Maybe it was a botched hit and run?
And no, I'm not mistaking it for that home game against Toronto in 1983 where he picked off three batters in one inning with Kiko Sakata catching. I ain't that senile (yet).
Game the 1st
Game the 2nd
Yeah, I was wondering about that. I guess I didn't realize that B-R had game logs, I always thought people went to Retrosheet for game logs and B-R for stats.
If he was picked off and headed toward second, got into a rundown, etc... it would be scored as a caught stealing.
Reusse is a noted curmudgeon and usually has nothing positive to say unless the athletes are high school kids.
Covered in #4 but it's actually listed as "Caught Stealing, C-2B".
What I didn't know is who pitched that day for the Cubs. At the time, he was just some no-name random starter so I paid little attention. 20 years later, thanks to retrosheet, I learned it was some kid named Greg Maddux. There was also a young Rafael Palmeiro in the Chicago lineup, who I had forgotten even *played* for the Cubs. Yes, a mediocre (77-85) Cubs team had 3 Hall of Famers in the lineup that day (Maddux, Dawson, Sandberg) and one who probably should be in (Palmeiro).
So, yeah, it's kinda cool to see the facts about these games, because it's easy to forget or 'misremember.' I did remember the Braves lost, because, well...they always lost back then.
I almost never read somebody's recollection of an old game without trying to look it up myself.
Dodgers were in town the next day, so Tommy was 'scouting' in the stands. I think he was just hanging out and enjoying the game myself. Being it was Atlanta, he was pretty much left alone, though he was certainly friendly and chatty to those who came up to him. The stadium was so empty (I'm guessing 2-3k tops) there wasn't anyone sitting near him, and he was sitting alone. You probably wouldn't see too many managers hanging out in the stands today.
Maddux threw a 3-hit shutout that day against a pretty putrid Brave lineup, though he did walk 6 batters. It's amazing that Braves team finished last in runs scored despite hitting in the Launching Pad. Wow, were they bad. Bad bad bad.
Neyer wrote a big book on these, which I greatly enjoyed.
Its fascinating to me. Memory is terrible, amd the research has shown that memories described as vivid,or with 100% confidence are no more reliable than the typical memory.
It would have been cooler if you'd just learned via Retrosheet that Lasorda never managed the Braves.
Getting picked off first base with a runner on seoond? I never thought I'd say this but that is 10 times stupider than getting suckered in by the third-to-first move. I mean, how does this even happen? The 1B is not even holding the runner on in this situation. Somebody put a tracer on this tracer because I don't think I've ever seen a runner picked off first with a runner on second.
Yes, a mediocre (77-85) Cubs team had 3 Hall of Famers in the lineup that day (Maddux, Dawson, Sandberg) and one who probably should be in (Palmeiro).
The nice thing about the Cubs is that they've almost always featured at least one star, often a big star. The mid-late 70s were a bit dry but even then we had Madlock, Reuschel and Sutter (who was kinda amazing when he first came up). Until 2005, this was the main difference between the Cubs and White Sox history -- the Sox just never had truly great players, never set any milestones. The Cubs were as bad or worse a team but we had somebody to be proud of.
American judges generally claim that memory's fallibility is common knowledge - so common that defense attorneys in an eyewitness case are barred from putting on expert testimony to explain just how fallible our "memory" really is (because that would be a total waste of time, on account of it is so obvious).
I do think people understand this in the abstract, but we tend to make exceptions for ourselves. And for people who cry, or use a phrase like "I'll never forget that face."
I think the same article had a line I've always loved. Talking about Oquendo's 4 inning pitching performance: (almost words for word) The Cardinals conceded in the 16th. The Braves won 4 innings later.
Late 80's were a tough time to be a baseball fan in Atlanta. I was a in High School in '88 north of Atlanta and remember nothing but crap coming from the launching pad.
I grew up watching on TBS. My high school basketball coach told us we had such a bad baseball team because we all spent out time watching the Braves. It was bad enough that in 1991 I never, ever believed they would win the division. I was in college by this point, had a girlfriend and a job, so I wasn't paying close attention. My roommate was a Dodger fan who kept being nervous. I would tell him not to worry. He and I were actually watching the game that clinched the division for the Braves and I said something like they'd still blow it. He hit me. It took that to shake me out of it and realize that they'd actually won the division. It is incredible, in hindsight, how fast they went from joke to dynasty*. Has any franchise ever been so different one decade to the next?
EDIT: From 1981-1990, the Braves average winning percentage was .4474. From 1991-2000, it was .6140. Striking. The highest 80s percentage (.549 in 1982) was lower than the lowest winning percentage in the 90s (.580 in 1991).
* if you so consider it. whatever it was, it was very different than the 80s.
Level of play caveats aside, my son's high school team did this ~6 times last year. You have to have the 1B playing behind the runner. After a verbal cue, the pitcher - without ever looking at first, which I think is important - starts a count with a sudden head motion toward the guy on 2nd. If you get the timing aspect down between the pitcher and the first baseman, the ball is on the way before the runner even knows they are thinking about him, and it's a race to the bag that he can't possibly win.
Damn it.
I think I'll remember that Oquendo game for as long as I live.
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