Your “of course” fails to take into account players wearing down over the course of a long hitting streak and potentially sustaining injury. Spread that performance out over two seasons and it’s easy to see that it’s liable to not be as physically draining.
Still a long shot to “break” DiMaggio’s record that way, but marginally more likely.
Truly unbreakable baseball records involve endurance feats (notably in regard to pitching). Nobody in MLB will ever win 60 games in a season, so “Old Hoss” Radbourn’s 59 wins are safe. No one will ever pitch over 680 innings in a season either, so Will White can rest easy.
About the only thing Abner Doubleday did for baseball was once ordering some equipment for his soldiers on a post he commanded.
No one suspected Ruth of throwing games. Two Yankee pitchers, Joe Bush and Carl Mays, were but the answer is they almost certainly tired late in a game. When you throw 337 innings in a season, you have to expect a guy to give up three runs in the 8th inning of a World Series game. Manager Miller Huggins didn’t like and in 1923 pitched Mays very little. He got rid of him the following season, Mays bounced back and had a good year and the Yankees didn’t win the pennant. Judge Landis interviewed the accuser in private but apparently felt there was nothing to it.
There was one New York writer who was critical of Ruth missing the last three games of the 1921 World Series. Ruth went to the press box and ripped off the bandage of his arm to show his injury.
Judge Landis is hard to figure out on race. He liked to give his opinions on anything but when asked about integration he said it was an owner’s decision. He may not have had as much power as many people today assume. Later commissioners found if they stepped on owner’s toes, it was time to find a new job. In the 1970s Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to get a team to hire former player Donn Clendennon in their front office; he failed.
Landis did suspend Yankee outfielder Jake Powell for 10 days when he told a Chicago radio station that he was a police officer during the off season in Dayton (he wasn’t) and he stayed in shape using his club to crack n*****rs on the head. Landis also inserted himself when black catcher Josh Gibson was accused of deliberately dropping a flyball. Landis interviewed Gibson and judged him innocent. Gibson was a lot like Mike Piazza…great hitter for average and power, not so great on defense.
Most baseball historians think Bill Veeck’s story of not being able to buy the Phillies because he wanted to integrate it as a story. It was NL President Ford Frick who supposedly blocked Veeck, not Landis. In the two books Veeck wrote in the early 1960s “Veeck as in wreck” and “Hustler’s Handbook “ he is very favorable to Landis, less to Chandler and rates Frick even lower. A search of Philadelphia papers, white and black, shows no mention of Veeck interested in buying. Several years later, Cleveland papers had plenty of stories of Veeck negotiating to buy. Veeck was probably jealous that Branch Rickey got so much credit for integrating and Veeck very little for being the second. It is also interesting that Veeck didn’t sign a lot of black players when he owned the woeful St Louis Browns in the early 1950s.
If you want super hecklers, there was Big Pete Adelis “The Iron Lung of Shibe Park”. He and his brother worked as vegetable and fruit street peddlers and developed loud piercing voices. They used this in Philadelphia and would heckle all players. Neither the Phillies or A’s could really do anything about them although apparently both used them to heckle Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby.
From 1964-1981 the Mets had Karl Erbhardt “The Sign Man”. He worked as a commercial designer and would bring about 60 signs to a game out of a collection of 1,200. If a player like Jose Cardenal struck out, he would hold up a sign reading “Jose can you see?”. If Joe Torre got a hit , it was either :The Godfather has spoken” or “Torre, Torre, Hallelujah”.
A major reason for Ted Williams poor 1946 World Series performance was he was injured. In the National League, Brooklyn and St Louis finished in a tie and played a best of three playoff series. Red Sox GM Eddie Collins remembered 35 years earlier the AL finished its schedule a week before the NL. Connie Mack arranged for some exhibition games to keep the A’ s fresh and they won the World Series. Collins did the same and not only was attendance poor (leaving little money tor charity) but Williams got hit on the elbow by a pitch…errant knuckleball.
Giants owner Horace Stoneham basically decided to do what O’Malley and the Dodgers did. He thought of moving to Minnesota (the success of the Braves drawing fans influenced this) but ultimately he decided to go to San Francisco to make trips out west easier for the other NL teams. O’Malley was trying to get NYC to use its powers of eminent domain so he could buy land in a convenient Brooklyn location (near the Atlantic Terminal for trains and subway where parking was available) and build a domed stadium. It is always a question if he was 100% sincere or made things just a little bit too hard. But Robert Moses, an unelected official with a lot of power to shape New York City the way he wanted it, didn’t like spectator sports. O’Malley wanted no part of a stadium in Flushing, Queens owned by the city. If you look at O’Malley in Los Angeles, he is pretty good. He built a first class stadium in Chavez Ravine (O’Malley was an architect before becoming a lawyer because architect didn’t pay) and didn’t raise ticket prices for the first 13 years. He would take the money from expansion fees and invested it in the farm system ; other owners gave themselves bonuses.
Larsen was often seen as a guy without the determination or “grit” to be a star. He was a good hitter so much that in his rookie season his manager Marty Marion was going to make him a outfielder the next year. Marion got fired instead. Also he was said to be the second fastest Yankee after Mantle.
Maris probably got unfair criticism and in later years baseball learned to control access by reporters. He did win two MVPs though. In fact voting for MVPs in that period you think writers were coming up with excuses not to vote for Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays. I know from personal experience that I went to a Yankee game in early1962 and the Yankee fans greeted Maris with a solid round of boos his first time up. As a kid, I didn’t know about the controversy and was shocked. In some ways Maris coming to New York allowed Mantle to become loved. There was criticism that he wasn’t as good as his publicity was when he was young and even over the fact he never served in the military (the army examined him three times and said his arthritic knees
disqualified him)
I thought most of the commentators were poor choices except for Buck O’Neil.
Billy Martin as a player was pretty decent, mostly for heads up play. In game 7 he made a heads up play, running in and catching Jackie Robinson’s infield fly when. He was always proud of the fact he out hit his counterparts at second base in the World Series (Robinson and Junior Gilliam). When the Yankees lost game 6 of the 1956 World series, Martin told Stengel to bench LF Enos Slaughter and 1b Joe Collins in favor of Elston Howard and Bill Skowron. Stengel did so and Howard hit a solo hone run and Skowron a grand slam. Martin had a surprisingly bit of power for small righthanded hitter.
But Martin was also violent and alcoholic. He had a lot of problems with many blacks and some whites who he thought were “country club” (Jackie Jensen and Larry Gura). I have met a few Yankees from his 1970s teams and while Mickey Rivers liked him, Bucky Dent and Roy White had no use for him. “That man was crazy!” said White in an exasperated voice. White said his best manager was Ralph Houk…treated you like a man
All of the commentators shared a love of baseball. Even Shelby Foote says he met Babe Ruth as a kid. But Buck O’Neill and Bill Lee stand out as being very good; and one gets a hint of where the moniker Spaceman came from. Creamer and Plimpton wrote for SI. But I’m not sure how Billy Crystal expressed his love of the game?
The series discusses an owner conspiracy not to make an offer for free agents, including Carlton Fisk and Andre Dawson. After a lengthy court battle, the players were awarded $280m. How was this figure determined?
I used to love watching Tim Raines, but did not know he “slid headfirst to avoid crushing the cocaine he carried in his pockets”. Really?
Was Pete Rose fairly treated? He had three addictions: gambling, womanizing and perfectionism. He lied about them, which is not that unusual with addictions. He is not the first arrogant athlete. Other players, good ones like Goodden, had cocaine issues. The owners collusion on race and later on free agency were problems at least as big (arguably) as the Black Sox Scandal. Giamatti was brought in to clean things up. A long suspension was in order. But the man helped keep baseball popular. Beat the lifetime hitting record when 44. A lifetime ban is a severe punishment but could be appropriate. If Rose was not a very successful gambler, why shouldn’t his achievements stand and why shouldn’t he go to the Hall of Fame given baseball’s actual standards for purity - and not its lip service?
“In one ten year period, ten different teams won the World Series”. Has this occurred in any other sport?
“Baseball is the only game where the defence has the ball.” Izzatso?
World Series 1975. Really among the best?
How did Americans react to Toronto winning the World Series in 1992?
“After all the hubbub about free agency, in the end players stayed with their team about as long as they always did.” True?
A lot of baseball experts were involved in the series. I thought it was quite good, but not Burns best. He seems to have slandered a few players, and many have pointed out (fairly small) errors. How is the series thought of by the public - too long?
Did Ken Burns get a commission every time they played “Take Me Out To The Ball Game”?
The series discussed baseball up until the early 1990s. Any really drastic changes in the last 30 years? What are the five biggest recent milestones? Did the perennial contender Red Sox have better days?
The big story of the '90s and '00s was steroids and other PEDs. There were an awful lot of home runs hit in the late '90s and '00s, the single-season and career HR records both fell, and a lot of the big sluggers (Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, etc.) were implicated in taking PEDs. Accusations (and, in some cases, admission) of steroid use is what’s kept those three, as well as Roger Clemens and a few others, out of the Hall of Fame.
Regular-season interleague play was introduced in 1997, and it slowly went from being something done only a few times a year, to a staple of the schedule – and, in fact, now that both leagues have an odd number of teams, interleague play happens pretty much every day of the regular season, as it’s the only way to assure that every team can play at the same time.
Sabermetrics (that is, study of advanced baseball statistics) is now a big part of how baseball teams are managed, both on and off the field. The book (and later movie) Moneyball, about the Oakland A’s, is a good read about Billy Beane, one of the first GMs to embrace sabermetrics. As managers now extensively use advanced stats, there have been substantial changes in how the game is played: more frequent pitching changes, complete games becoming nearly extinct, infield shifts becoming common, hitters more worried about “launch angle” (i.e., trying to get the ball in the air, for a possible home run), and the de-emphasis of stolen bases. What’s resulted is a lot of home runs, but batting averages are down, and plays that end in one of the “three true outcomes” (home run, strikeout, walk) are at an all-time high. If you enjoy “small ball,” this is not your era.
And, yeah, spoiler alert, the Red Sox have won four World Series in the past 20 years.
Just to illustrate this point: here is the list of MLB’s all-time home run hitters. Of the top 15 guys on the list, five of them, including the career leader (Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmiero, and Manny Ramirez) are not in the Hall, despite being eligible for years, and it’s clear that their use of PEDs is the reason why.
Yeah, this seems ridiculous to me. Rock Raines used cocaine (as did many other players at the time), but that’s not why he slid headfirst. Here’s what he had to say about it:
It’s undisputed truth that I would sneak a snort in the clubhouse bathroom between innings, but the part about making sure I slid headfirst into bases so as not to break the vial of coke is somewhat exaggerated. Anybody who remembers my style of play knows that I went into bases headfirst long after I stopped carrying coke around with me.
The defense also has the ball in cricket.
Yes. There were a lot of great performances, and the 6th game was one of the most memorable.
I can only give my own opinion. Burns is best at telling stories that have a beginning and an end. The Civil War and Vietnam War series are like this, and are very good. The Baseball series doesn’t have a story arc, nor does the Jazz series (which was very flawed in other ways). The only Burns series without a story arc that I really love is Country Music. The Baseball series is OK, but not great, and is probably too long and slow for anyone who isn’t already a fan of the sport.
The players went on strike in 1994, and the World Series wasn’t held that year. The strike ended on April 2, 1995. The season started late that year, and they didn’t play the usual 162 games per team. Fans were disgusted, and it took a while for attendance to return to pre-strike levels.
Cal Ripken, Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played on Sept. 6, 1995. This helped restore the public’s interest in the sport.
In 1998 Mark McGwire of the Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Cubs engaged in a race to break Maris’s record of 61 home runs in a season. McGwire hit 70 homers that year, and Sosa hit 66. Then Barry Bonds started to hit home runs at a prodigious rate, and in 2001 he hit 73 to set a new record. But all of this was tainted when it came out that all three had been using performance enhancing drugs. In fact, PED use was rampant in MLB. It took a while, but public pressure forced MLB to institute a testing program. PEDs are still used in baseball (someone gets caught every so often), but probably not to the same degree as they were from the mid-90s through the early 2000s.
The Red Sox finally won the Series in 2004, and have won it three times since. And the Cubs won the Series in 2016 for the first time since 1908.
Theo Epstein was president of both the Red Sox and the Cubs when each team broke its curse. Under his leadership, both teams used advanced analytics both to evaluate talent and to influence strategy. Analytics (based largely on the work of SABRmetricians like Bill James) are now a big part of the game.
Defensive shifting, which used to be unusual, is now commonplace. When a left-handed batter is at bat, he often faces three infielders between first and second base. It’s harder than it used to be to get a base hit with a ground ball, so batters focus more on drawing walks and hitting the ball in the air. This has led to an increase in the number of home runs, and also in the number of strikeouts (a batter is more likely to strike out when using an uppercut swing). Some people feel that this has made the game less interesting.
Crystal apparently got an athletic scholarship to play baseball in college (at Marshall University), though he never played there. His father had been a pitcher for St. John’s University.
He played in amateur leagues into his 40s. He’s a lifelong Yankee fan, and has often been allowed to join the team on the field during practices; he had an at-bat for the Yankees during a spring training game in 2008 (and struck out).
He was also the director of 61*, a well-received made-for-TV movie about Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle, and their pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.
Pete Rose gambled on baseball. The ban on gambling on baseball has been iron-clad ever since the Black Sox scandal. The rule is posted in every clubhouse in MLB, and every spring a representative of MLB comes to lecture every team. So 1) gambling on baseball is considered a Very Big Sin; 2) Rose lied about it repeatedly; and 3) Rose bet on his OWN team.
But, the argument goes, Rose only bet on his own team to win. Sure, but did he bet the same amount every time, on all 162 games his team played? If he doesn’t bet on his own team to win on a particular day, what does that tell the bookies with whom he makes the bet? Supposing Rose loses a few too many bets and gets behind in his payments. Then the bookies want some inside information, or worse, want him to play (or manage) to lose.
And, I would add 4) he gambled heavily on his own team, to the tune of at least $2000 a day, and perhaps as much as $10,000 a day. Wagers of that magnitude could have left Rose even more susceptible to influence from his bookies if he’d gotten behind.
Also, at that time, sports wagering was illegal pretty much everywhere in the U.S. (with Nevada as probably the notable exception). This also means that Rose was breaking the law, to a significant degree, given the size of his daily wagers, and bookies who could handle that level of wagering aren’t penny-ante criminals.
The lifetime ban from MLB was absolutely appropriate.
It is, in fact, precisely the same punishment any organization would give you for a similar offense. Gambling on your own games is, in essence, a conflict of interest; you are deliberately engaging in a financial arrangement that calls into question your integrity at your job. The standard punishment for such a thing, in any decent company, is immediate and permanent termination. An enterprise must protect itself from such behaviour.
Whether or not Rose should be in the Hall of Fame is another matter; I can see the argument for that. But he certainly cannot be in MLB anymore, and his banishment was the right move.
Sure, it was among the best, although Burns spends way too much time on the Red Sox in the series.
The best I ever saw was 1991; 2011 and 2016 were amazing, too.
This thread has been fascinating and I’ve learned a lot so thanks to all the contributors. I was happy to read along quietly but as something (admittedly tangential) has come up that I actually know something about, I’ll chip in.
Although cricket has many similarities with baseball, the above isn’t really true. The bowling unit (a cricket team will have four or five bowlers out of 11 players on the field, who will regularly and frequently rotate throughout each innings) are commonly referred to as “the attack”. Getting outs is a much bigger deal in cricket and you can’t win without them so the bowlers are the spearhead. That said, you also win by scoring more runs than the other guy and batters can both defend their wicket (play to avoid outs rather than score runs) and “go on the attack” (score runs quickly to build up a lead/chase a total).
All of which is a long way of saying that in any given cricket innings there is no one side playing defense or attack, so baseball’s status as the only game where the defense has the ball is pretty solid with respect to cricket.
There’s no comparison from Rose to pretty much any of the other people brought up in the “well Cobb/Ruth/Mantle were no saints either” line of reasoning. None of them ever challenged the fundamental integrity of the game the way Rose did, and none of them engaged in a 20-year scorched earth battle against everyone who tried to hold them accountable only to later admit that every allegation against them was in fact true. Rose also spent time in prison for things basically unrelated to betting on baseball and has been credibly accused of statutory rape, so his pleas that “at least I didn’t do X Y and Z” are pretty hollow.
The Hall of Fame delegating its decision-making to the MLB restricted list and refusing to establish standards for things like steroid use is a gutless move, and I don’t really care if Rose eventually gets in somehow, but his ban from baseball and pariah status are fully appropriate even in comparison to people who committed off-field crimes.
I used to love watching Tim Raines, but did not know he “slid headfirst to avoid crushing the cocaine he carried in his pockets”. Really?
He was known for his cocaine habit. I was at a game at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, and there was a large banner in a not-too-accessible area of the stands that read “Raines Goes Better with Coke”. It wasn’t until the third inning that it was finally removed.
I don’t think Americans cared one way or another about Toronto winning the World Series. The Blue Jays seen as an underachieving for several years, starting in 1985 when they blew a 3-1 lead in the ALCS.
I don’t see it. In sports with offense and defense, the team that’s trying to score is on offense, and the one that’s trying to prevent the other team from scoring is on defense. That’s the case regardless of how hard it is to score (and to prevent scoring). It’s true that many more runs are scored in cricket than in baseball, and that getting an out is a much bigger deal in cricket, and that in each innings both teams get a chance to score runs, but I don’t get how that means there’s no distinction in cricket between offense and defense.
Look at basketball, for example. It’s much easier to score points in basketball than it is in most sports. NBA teams often score more than 100 points in a game. Possession of the ball is pretty fluid. Yet the team that has the ball and is trying to score is on offense, and the one that’s trying to prevent the other from scoring is on defense.
There are sports where there’s little distinction between offense and defense. Tennis, for instance. Most racket sports, actually. It’s only on the serve that one player has possession of the ball, and while it’s true that in tennis the server wins most of the points, both players are trying to win the point with every stroke.
Another thing about Rose. He eventually acknowledged that he bet on his team, but when he apologized he made it clear that the only reason was to get off the restricted list and into the Hall of Fame. That is, his apology was insincere. It appears Rose is either too dumb or too egocentric to understand that when making an apology you at least have to appear contrite.
If Rose had handled things better he might be in the Hall today.
Cobb (along with Tris Speaker, Smoky Joe Wood and Dutch Leonard) was involved in fixing a game wherein Cleveland was to lose to the Tigers. It had to do in part with determining who’d finish third in the AL and third-place player shares. Sleazy as it was, it was not an ongoing gambling scandal to compare to Rose’s.
At this point I think a reasonable solution to the Rose situation is to allow him to be voted into the Hall of Fame (his achievements should put him there) but continue sanctions against his being involved in any way with day-to-day MLB activities.
Earlier in this thread I mentioned that PEDs are still in use. MLB just announced that Robinson Canó has been suspended for 162 games (a full season in normal times) because he tested positive for Stanozolol. In 2018 he was suspended for 80 games because he tested positive for Lasix, which can be used as a masking agent.
It’s not that there’s no distinction between offense and defense, it’s that this distinction does not in any way map to “fielding” or “batting”. No-one who follows, writes about, commentates on or plays cricket will ever be found referring to the fielding team as “the defense” or the batting team as “the offense”, or vice-versa. The terms just aren’t used and wouldn’t makes sense if they were. Sometimes the fielding team is attacking (setting fields and bowling in such a way as to maximise the change of getting batters out) and sometimes defending (setting fields and bowling in such a way as to minimise the runs batters can score. Sometimes batters are defensive (blocking and leaving the ball to keep their wicket intact and not trying to score runs) and sometimes they are on the attack (taking risks to score quickly and pile up runs). The game is simply not conceived around “the offense” and “the defense”.
Agreed. It is kind of similar to racquet sports in that respect, in that while ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ play happens, it is not restricted to one particular side or the other, and indeed can switch at a moment’s notice.
