As I understand it (and I haven’t googled this out, so I’ll welcome correction), there were three AAA minor leagues (next step below major league) for most of the 20th Century: the International League in (eastern) Canada and the East Coast, the American Association (not to be confused with the 19th Century major league of the same name) in the Midwest, and the Pacific Coast League, which strangely enough was in cities on or near its eponymous shoreline.
A decade or so ago, the AA dissolved, and member teams were incorporated into the other two AAA leagues, the eastern ones going to the IL and the western ones to the PCL.
This is a WAG, but if the teams playing were both National League farm teams they could agree among themselves not to use the DH, since their pitchers will have to bat for themselves if and when they get promoted to the majors and might as well get some practice at doing so.
This makes sense to me, but I guess I can’t understand how some teams in the same league could play by one set of rules and other teams (whom they play) play by another set. Makes no sense.
Let’s make sure we know the likely genesis of the Clemens-Piazza feud.
During an interleague game, Piazza won it for the Mets with a grand slam home run off Clemens. The next time they faced each other, which was, I believe a year, maybe two years later, Clemens gave Piazza a concussion with a fastball, causing Piazza to miss playing in the All-Star Game. Then, during the World Series, there was the infamous bat-throwing incident.
IMO, whether it was an intentional miss or not when the pitch went behind Clemens at Shea this year, it worked even better than actually hitting him. It sent the message to him, caused both benches to be warned, thus taking the beanball away from Clemens, and didn’t put a man on base. Pitching to an AL pitcher should result in an out 39 times out of 40, after all.
Having said that, I think Clemens’s hatred of the Mets in general goes back to Game Six of the 1986 World Series. He could have been the winning pitcher in the final game of Boston’s first world championship since 1918. Instead, he gets a no-decision, and Bill Buckner is the Red Sox player everyone remembers.
Wait a minute; obviously I love to be a nit-picker, since I’m even posting this.
Anyway, baseball-reference.com, which I’ve always found to be a reliable site for those of us with WAYYY too much time on our hands, says that in 1901 Nap Lajoie batted .426, not .422.
The only modern-era player to come close was Ted Williams, who hit .406 in 1941. Amazingly, Lajoie played for 21 seasons and had a career average of .338, higher than many players ever go for a single season.
Hmm… it’s easy to get distracted browsing this site. For instance, how does Paul Schreiber play baseball from 1922-1945 and have only three at-bats? Answer: he doesn’t. He plays 10 games in 22 and 23, and then comes back in 45 to play two more games. Also he’s a pitcher, and his first two seasons are with an AL team (which keeps this from becoming a complete hijack–whew!).
Good point; I’d heard that story before but had forgotten who did it. I think dantheman’s point, though, is that while a batter can run to first on a dropped third strike, it’s not actually called a stolen base.
Stealing first from second, though, would probably count.
You believe correct - apparently because of ol’ Germany Schaefer!
I remember that story, now. Thanks for the link, Airman. (In fact, I checked out Germany on Google and found a few other links confirming it - was wondering if it was an urban legend.)
I stand corrected. :o Lajoie did indeed bat .426, an average never matched by Ty Cobb, George Sisler, Ted Williams, or anyone else in the AL; the closest approach was Rogers Hornsby in 1924 at .424.
In the early 60s, when Hank Aaron looked like the best bet to bat .400, an article, apparently in Street & Smith’s Baseball magazine was titled: “.400 Hitters don’t Win Pennants!” Not one 20th-Century .400 hitter was on a pennant club; in 1901 the White Sox, not the Philadelphia A’s, won the AL pennant; Hornsby’s 1924 St. Louis Cardinals finished 6th. George Sisler, of course, never got to be with a pennant winner–he was with the St. Louis Browns–who got their one and only AL pennant in 1944–although, admittedly, the Browns made a good run for the pennant in 1922.
I was under the impression that the designated hitter can only bat in place of the pitcher - that the DH rule is carefully crafted to exclude the possibility of using him to bat for (say) the left fielder.
Actually, searching previous threads, zev and BobT answered it pretty definitively here, where the relevant rule was quoted. It’s long, and doesn’t seem to have a single sentence reading “the DH may only bat for the pitcher,” but that’s the upshot.
Yep, all the way back to the line scores of nineteenth-century games. The reason errors are reported as one of the main numbers about a game now is that they always have been. The reason they always have been is that in the early days of baseball, errors were much more common, and played a much bigger role in determining the outcome of games. In 1887, for example, the fielding percentage for every team in the National League was between .905 and .926 – meaning there was an error on one of every eight or nine balls put in play. The league champion Detroit Wolverines had the fewest errors at 384 in 124 games – an average of just over 3 errors per game.
The worst-fielding team that year was the Boston Braves, with 522 errors and a .905 fielding percentage. The number of runs scored per team per game ranged from about 5.5 to over 7.5, but earned run averages (the number of runs allowed per nine innings that were not the result of an error) were about two runs per game lower: 3.46 to 5.24. In short, errors played a huge part in the game of those days, and the line scores reflected that. As the game changed, however, with better playing fields, the use of gloves and their increasing size, and a host of other factors, the number of errors steadily declined. Last year, the San Diego Padres had the most errors and lowest fielding percentage of any team in the NL, with 145 errors in 162 games (0.895 E/gm) and an FP of .976. They allowed slightly over 5 runs per game, with an ERA of 4.52 (a difference of about half a run, as opposed to the two run/game difference of the early days). Errors are a far less important stat in understanding the general nature of a specific game than they once were, but line scores continue to include them simply because they’ve always been there.
It might not state explicitly that the DH must bat in place of the pitcher, but the whole point of the DH was to keep the traditionally weak-hitting pitcher from batting. Theoretically, someone could have a crappy-hitting LF and have a DH for him (I don’t think it’s been tried, and one would assume the ump wouldn’t allow it), but then the pitcher would have to hit. And he’d have to be one hell of a hitting pitcher to bat instead of a left fielder.
To be honest, I’m neither here nor there on the matter. I enjoy watching the DH used in normal games. OTOH, whenever I play Out of the Park Baseball (a great game, BTW), I always set up my leagues without the DH.
RickQ - In case you’re still around, and care, you can steal almost any time you want, but it’s a good idea to wait until the pitcher’s motion to throw to the batter has started. What exactly constitutes that has started many an argument, but if he stops and doesn’t actually throw to the batter, it’s a “balk”, and the runner is awarded the next base anyway.
Another way to get a balk is for the pitcher to not stop his hands when in the “stretch”, which is what you’ll see them do whenever there’s a runner on first base. If they actually used a full windup then, even Frank Thomas would be a stealing threat.
