$5000 a day sounds really sweet, but it’s such a tiny percentage of what guys like Trout and Cole would be pulling down in a normal year. Teach your kids to spin the ball, friends and neighbors.
I’m really starting to believe the next time we see major league baseball will be in 2021.
And, for shits and giggles, Aaron Boone’s pennant clinching home run in 2003 in a side-by-side HD/SD comparison. It’s a amazing how fuzzy tv used to be and we thought it was pretty great.
In the absence of MLB games, I’m making do with baseball trivia.
Saluting the memory of Double Duty Radcliffe, a Negro Leagues player who would pitch one game of a doubleheader and catch the second. He wasn’t a huge star, but was a competent pitcher and good defensive catcher and clutch hitter.
Radcliffe reportedly had a Wilt Chamberlainesque penchant for women (of which he was proud) and appears to have been the oldest man to appear in a professional baseball game (at age 96, throwing one pitch for the Schaumberg Flyers of the Northern League).
I saw my current cc statement, and there was the MLB.TV charge. I emailed them and asked if they were planning an adjustment for the 2020 season? Or should I tell the cc folks to deny the charge?
I like comparing Negro League layers to their MLB equivalents to get a sense of what they were like, but Radcliffe didn’t have one. There’s never been anyone else like him.
The greatest Negro League player with a really close MLB equivalent was Pop Lloyd, who was just like Honus Wagner, and I do mean JUST LIKE. They were, aside from one guy being black and the other white, the same player. They were contemporaries, more or less; Lloyd was a few years older. They were both shortstops, righthanded hitters, and all-around exceptional players, both frightening at the plate and amazing defensively; basically everyone in baseball, black or white, agreed that you could have either guy at shortstop and would be just as well off, which is saying a lot about Lloyd because Wagner was the best shortstop ever. Wagner found the comparison flattering. They were the same height and both were very, very strong, and both men were unusually attentive to physical fitness by the standard of the time. Both were also, by the standards of that very rough time, unusually kind, sportsmanlike, and generous with teammates. They even kind of looked like, aside from the amount of melanin.
On another trivia note, Lloyd played for a lot of teams - typical of Negro League players, who were not subject a reserve clause and so would sign where the money was - and more than half of them were called the “Giants.” Negro League teams loved calling themselves the Giants. There were the Chicago American Giants, and the St. Louis Giants, and the Baltimore Giants. You had the Birmingham Giants, the Chicago Giants (not the same team as the Chicago American Giants) and the Leland Giants. There were the Cuban Giants and a spinoff team, the Cuban X-Giants, who despite the name had nothing to do with Cuba; the name was just meant to sound cool. You also had the Lincoln Giants, who played in New York, the Bacharch Giants, who played in Philadelphia, and the Cleveland Giants, who unfortunately did play in Cleveland. And way more. I’ve no idea why there was such a lack of imagination in nicknames.
RickJay - have you been enjoying Joe Posnanski’s Top 100 series on The Athletic? He’s put out an article each day, counting down the top 100 baseball players in history. I think he’s done an exceptional job including players from the Negro Leagues, and providing a level of information about them to justify their individual rankings. Certainly more information than I’ve been exposed to. Many of the articles are incredibly well written, and it’s a shame it was derailed by the delay to the start of the season - Joe had originally planned for the #1 player to be revealed on Opening Day. It has been a real passion project for him, and it shows.
The same is mostly true for suspended players, like Domingo German. In the event of a shortened season, he’ll still miss 63 games. If the entire season is wiped out, so is his suspension and he can play all of 2021. That doesn’t feel quite right, but thems the breaks.
C’mon guys, Hall of Famer Al Kaline. I don’t remember him playing, but I remember being intrigued as a kid by someone named alkaline. Some parents just can’t resist.
399 home runs. 498 doubles. .297 BA. Thank God he didn’t wind up with 2996 hits.
What has your local radio or TV station been putting on to replace games? The Mariners home station (KIRO Seattle) has been putting vintage games going back to 1990. This week, they’re doing the complete 1995 ALDS between the Yankees and Mariners.
