RIP

The Twins replaced Campbell in 1977 with Tom Johnson, who went 16-7, 3.13 in 146.2 relief innings. They got Mike Marshall in 1978, and he came up with a Marshall year in 1979: 10-15, 2.65 in 142.2 innings. And Doug Corbett in 1980, 8-6, 1.98 in 137.1 innings.

yeah, Campbell pitched an "astounding" 167 2/3 innings in relief in 1976 - 3 years after Marshall pitched an astounding 179 innings in relief for the Expos, and 2 years after Marshall pitched an astounding 208 1/3 innings of relief for the Dodgers.

I guess for fans under age 50, all of these figures do seem "astounding."

A 17 wins/20 save season is certainly noteworthy. Is "astounding" perhaps a bit hyperbolic? Sure. Worth shitting on a guy's obit? No F-ing way and shame on you.

"shitting on a guy's obit" - wow.

note that 17 W/20 SV, which indeed is remarkable, or even astounding - is nowhere to be found in TFA's quote of the part that says "He pitched in 78 games and an astounding 167⅔ innings."

the author is specifically telling us to be astounded by the inning total. and if you're old enough to remember Marshall, then Campbell's relief IP total - which is what the author is describing - did not astound at the time.

reading is fundamental.

also, you might want to try a cup of decaf or two.....

reading is fundamental.

Indeed. And the sentence that precedes the one that you are being an asshat about: "Campbell became the only pitcher in major league history to record 17 wins and at least 17 saves (he had 20) in a season." Do I really need to point out to you that ONLY PITCHER IN ML HISTORY to do something conveys "astounding" -- in fact it's unique. That he is not the only pitcher to have thrown an "astounding" number of relief innings in one year does not mean it was not an "astounding" total.

But feel free to continue your semantics battle. While you do, please realize that the dictionary definition of astounding is "surprisingly impressive or notable." 167 and 2/3 innings of relief seems to fit that definition but perhaps you want to get hung up on whether it was "surprising" or not.

This guy neatly fit my card collecting years. So I remember him well. Pretty darned good pitcher. AVERAGED and astounding 67 games a year for his career. Sorry.......seemed appropriate

The deaths of these guys are getting closer and closer to my age. I don't like the trend. I had a friend (who's a gulf war vet) tell me a while ago that for a long time it was WWII and Korea vets who were dying and then Vietnam. He said it's getting scary because there are fewer and fewer Vietnam deaths and more and more gulf war deaths happening now

Campbell had one more great year for the Red Sox in 1977, then the workload caught up with him, but he gamely hung on for a few years after that.

He pitched in the Cardinals Game 7 meltdown in the 1985 World Series. IIRC, he started the rambunctious fifth inning.

RIP. Too many of the players in my childhood Topps card sets have been going. :(

Sad coke to Duke.

"shitting on a guy's obit" - wow.

I'd say not quite RDP, but also nothing you would want to share with Mrs. Campbell at the wake.

RIP to one of (if not the absolute) first big FA signings by the Red Sox.

Noting that Marshall pitched more innings before Campbell isn’t denigrating Campbell, IMHO, just providing a bit of historical context that the article didn’t address. I very much doubt that any of us intend to raise such issues with Mrs. Campbell, here or elsewhere.

His glory years were before my time but I remember him from the 80s. I recall being impressed by his delivery, busy in a way I imagine the saberscouts would sneeringly label "high-effort;" sorry, Soup, but you only got on the "others of mention" (30ftv) section on Fangraphs 1973 Minnesota Twins prospects list (that exists only in my hatery headcanon and, perhaps, in some horrible alternate universe). A good example of a classic 70s fireman, maybe a bit unusual in that he was a very good middle reliever for a substantial period after his fireman phase and presumed loss of stuff. RIP.

He threw his featured pitch — the screwball as a changeup — so often that his right arm was no longer lined up normally.

I'd like to know more about this. AFAIK no one throws a screwball anymore, it was always an unusual pitch, and those few who did throw it seemed to almost always be lefthanded. Of Campbell's contemporaries, I can only think of Marshall and Mike Norris as righty screwballers. I would also like to see a video (vintage, since Im wishing) of someone who threw it well to explain and slowly demonstrate the pitch rather than read a description of it full of kinesiology jargon I dont understand and frankly dont want to learn.

Campbell's 1977 season was an AL record for relief innings at the time, and is still just 2/3 of an inning shy of the current record.

It seems this is the final version of the 2022 Heavenly Choir:

c - John Stearns
1b - John Wockenfuss
2b - Julio Cruz
3b - Pete Ward
ss - Maury Wills
lf - Tommy Davis
cf - Gerald Williams
rf - Hector Lopez

sp - Gaylord Perry
sp - Curt Simmons
sp - Joe Horlen
sp - Dick Ellsworth
sp - Tom Browning
rp - Bruce Sutter
rp - Bob Locker

Mgr - Maury Wills

Deaths in 2022

It seems this is the final version of the 2022 Heavenly Choir

Ugh, my birth year team backup catcher (Stearns) and 5 players younger than me. RIP all.

So this weekend, a child acting star from Eight Is Enough, Adam Rich, passed away at age 54. He had a very troubled life.

My wife is 51, and I am 48. That's not much of an age difference, but once in a while, there will be some event or TV show or song where the three years difference actually makes a pretty big difference in our perception of things. Eight Is Enough was on from 1977-1981, and my wife liked watching it - so when Rich passed away, she had a legitimate reaction to it as somebody who watched him every week as a near-peer on the TV screen. Meanwhile, for me, the show went off the air when I was seven - not 10, like my wife - and I never watched the show. I felt bad that he had passed away so young, but I had no visceral reaction beyond that. The three years made all the difference in that small example.

Bill Campbell is sort of the same thing compared to people commenting on this thread. By the time I got into baseball (~1981), he was on my favorite team (Boston), but was no longer the guy who had excelled on the Twins. To me, he was another guy in a bullpen that included Mark Clear, Bob Stanley, and Tom Burgmeier. In fact, I mixed him up with Steve Crawford, because they sort of looked alike, and their names seemed similar. I was aware that he had been one of the better pitchers in the league for a bit, and if I had been born in 1970 instead of 1974, I would've probably had a much different perception of him.

I suspect this is more of something you see in pop culture, sports, music, TV, movies, etc., than in stuff like "What did you think of Ronald Reagan?", but it does come up a lot.

Anyway, like a lot of you, there is an increasingly different feeling I get when I see the news of a former player passing away. Increasingly, they are players who I remember seeing as a kid - players who were, in their own small ways, part of the memories of my childhood. It's also a reminder that the days are long, but the years are short. RIP, Mr. Campbell - and thanks for the memories.

I'm 48 too, and I started watching baseball in 1982 and 1983 in the Chicago area. I remember Campbell as a fine reliever with the Cubs, but not too different from a lot of other pitchers. I probably only noticed him because he shared a name with the cans of soup our school wanted us to buy and collect labels from. I must have gotten his baseball card at some point and learned he'd been a bigger star before I was paying attention. Those Cubs teams seemed to have a lot of those guys, especially Rick Reuschel and Fergie Jenkins. And seemingly half the team played on the 1980 World Series champs.

The age thing is interesting. My very first job was the year our company splurged for a few "suitcase" PCs from Compaq (complete with floppy disks) Within five years everyone had a real PC. My first job I was a financial analyst responsible for two foreign subsidiaries in South Africa and Australia. In order to communicate with them, I would drop off telexes to the telex room on my way out. The girls in the telex room would type them up and send them off. Next morning I would come in and pick up my new telexes. There were two groups of three ladies managing the telex room when I started. Within three years they were gone. My favorite "the world has changed" story is that there was only one way to call home when traveling internationally. The famous hotel phone which costs (at the time ) like $7 a minute. A small expense statement fortune. So when you travelled, you were GONE. You actually got to make decisions because somebody had to. My boss would be gone for 2-3 weeks without any comms (unless he went to a place with a telex room!).

Cellphones didn't exist yet, PCs were in their infancy, and e-mail was a figment of people's imagination. How long ago was this ? My first year at work was 1985

I dont think its fair to label HOwie's comments as sh!tting on someone's obituary namely because this is a sabermetric site and lord knows we pretty much spend our entire mental energy deciding how great or how bad some player is/was. That' what we do here.

what if someone were to say "Willie Stargell's 48 HRs werent all that impressive because Killebrew and Mays hit 49 a few years before and Foster hit 52 a few years later. Eh. Its an opinion perhaps a bit harsh but its' not shittin on Willie Stargell's legacy because that's what we do.

A few days ago Walt was pointing out that Mookie Betts DRS numbers were perhaps inflated. And that he couldnt possibly be worth 30 runs on defense. Is that supposed to be some personal insult to Betts?

Perhaps more on pt. A couple years ago some player died who was HOVG but not quite Hall of Fame caliber someone started pointing this out in the obit thread. ANd some other people got affronted by this. That an obit is some sort of sacrosanct place. BUt it's not really.

Cellphones didn't exist yet, PCs were in their infancy, and e-mail was a figment of people's imagination. How long ago was this ? My first year at work was 1985

But Im pretty sure we had faxes that year although you had to run down to some special place to pick them up. Im not sure Kinko's was around although those post office places started to spring up a year or two later.

Did you not use faxes at that point in time?

I didn't think there was anything wrong with Howie's comment. If anything, it was a shot at the author of the article, not at Campbell.

The 2022 Heavenly Choir would win a good number of games. There's no true middle-of-the-order thumper, but no weak spots either.

Filling out the 25-man roster:

Denny Doyle
Dick Schofield senior
David Green
Gene Clines
Lee Thomas (DH/GM)
Joe Pignatano (backup C; my choice to manage instead of Wills)

Ralph Terry
Odalis Perez
Mark Littell
Jim Corsi

The pitching staff - seven quality starting options, and four shutdown relievers - really stands out.

Campbell's nickname was (what else?) "Soup", but somehow "Soup" Campbell never sounded quite right, unless he'd been Chinese or something.

In the 1970s, facsimile machines were used mostly by Fortune 500 companies for getting and sending urgent documents. The expensive machines--about $18,000--took six minutes to transmit one page and weighed about 100 pounds.

The early ‘80s brought the copy and scan function to fax machines, creating the very first all-in-one devices. These were peak years for faxing, and these faxes were used for all types of office communication, until cell phones began to replace landlines in the late ‘90s.

So yes by the mid 80s they were around but using them internationally still cost the same as a phone call per minute if I recall

Mgr - Maury Wills

Ouch. Didn't anybody who managed in the minors die in 2022?

Campbell's nickname was (what else?) "Soup", but somehow "Soup" Campbell never sounded quite right, unless he'd been Chinese or something.

I thought it sounded fantastic, and I much more readily remember his nickname than his given name. In fact, I saw "Bill Campbell" in the title, with the reference to the Twins (I'm a Sox fan and only knew him from that), and wondered "Is that Soup?"

I thought it sounded fantastic, and I much more readily remember his nickname than his given name. In fact, I saw "Bill Campbell" in the title, with the reference to the Twins (I'm a Sox fan and only knew him from that), and wondered "Is that Soup?"

It depends, were you thinking of the other Soup Campbell? (The really good color man who worked for ESPN radio for many years, the former Padre/Tiger/Card/Astro Dave Campbell, was also Soup)