Hanging with Score Card Harry

I'm on the road this weekend, spending a couple days up in sunny Northampton, Massachusetts, at my friend Nick's mother and stepfather's place. Interestingly enough, Nick's stepfather is the great-grandson of Harry M. Stevens, the famed sports concessionaire. Stevens occupies a prominent place in the creation of the baseball experience. He is credited with introducing both hot dogs and scorecards to the sporting public, and built an empire around these staples.

There are a few pieces of Stevens-related memorabilia hanging in a hallway here. There's a bio of "Score Card Harry" from the New York Clipper, dated June 27, 1896. It details the growth of Stevens' operation, beginning in Columbus of the Ohio State League, in 1887, and continuing through his gaining the right to sell scorecards at the Polo Grounds in 1895. Also on the wall is the cover of one of those 1895 scorecards for the New York Base Ball Club (the Giants), featuring a full-color illustration of a ballfield from the first base side. A spectator with top hat, moustache, and cigar is in the foreground.

The item which has caught my fascination for the better part of this afternoon is an even older scorecard. This one is a 2-color card from 1892, the offical score card of the Washington Base Ball Club (the Senators). It features a photo of Boston catcher and future Hall of Famer Mike "King" Kelly on the cover, and the scorecard is unfolded into four panels. On the front side are ads for sporting goods, alcohol, and tobacco. The back is also visible thorugh a cutout on the other side of the frame. The lineups for a game between the Senators and the Cleveland Spiders are printed. Here they are (I used Baseball-reference.com to fill in the first names):

Senators:
Paul Radford, 3B
Tommy Dowd, 2B
Dummy Hoy, CF
Henry Larkin, 1B
Jocko Milligan, C
Charlie Duffee, LF
Danny Richardson, SS
Frank Killen, P
Patsy Donovan, RF

Spiders:
Cupid Childs, 2B
Jake Virtue, 1B
George Davis, 3B
Ed McKean, SS
Jimmy McAleer, CF
Jesse Burkett, LF
Jack O'Connor, RF
Chief Zimmer, C
George Rettger, P and Cy Young, P (both listed)

The Washington lineup isn't much, befitting a team which went 58-93 and finished 10th out of 12 teams. The most recognizable name is that of Dummy Hoy, a 5'4", 148 lb deaf-mute outfielder who, according to the Baseball Online Library, was the reason umpires adopted hand signals for safe, out, and strike calls. Hoy went on to rack up over 2000 hits, played in four major leagues (NL, AL, Players League, and the American Association), and lived to the ripe old age of 99. He even got to throw out the first pitch of a World Series game in 1961, the year of his death. The only other Senator I recognize, but who wasn't in the lineup that day, is Deacon McGuire, a catcher who played in 26 seasons. McGuire's last appearance in the bigs is one for the annals; in 1912, when he was 48 years old, he was part of a one-game makeshift team fielded by the Detroit Tigers. The regular Tigers were on strike in support of a suspended Ty Cobb, and the replacements were pounded 24-2 by the Philadelphia A's.

The Cleveland lineup is much better; they went 93-56, and finished second in the NL. Cy Young you know about (511 wins, and an award named after him, for you rookies out there). George Davis was in the second year of a Hall of Fame career which included over 2600 hits. Jesse Burkett was even better than Davis, hitting over .400 three times (the only other man to do that that Cobb fella). Burkett, known as "the Crab" for his cheerful disposition, ran off a seven-year span in which his hit totals ranged from 198 to 240, and he finished with 2850 for his Hall of Fame career.

The Spiders' lineup was incredibly stable. Only two bench players saw any action, and of the seven pitchers, two appeared in only one game and another (the aforementioned Rettger) in five. Young pitched in 53 games, completing 48 out of 49, going 36-12 with a 1.93 ERA. They just don't make 'em like that anymore.

Returning to the scorecard, the back has several alcohol ads, including one for Faust Beer, "the Healthiest and Finest Drink you can offer your friend," brewed by Anheuser Busch, and Pabst Milwaukee Beer, which "leads them all, and everybody uses it." For those who use too much of it, there are ads for the Silver Ash Institue for the Cures of Alcohol and Opium Habits, and the Blackstone Gold Cure Institute for the Cure of Liquor, Opium, and Morphine Habits. I don't know about you, but I'm picturing an opium den under the bleachers of Boundary Field, where the Nats played.

The scorecard itself is only partially filled out, listing what appears to be a line score for each team; if this is to be believed, the Senators scored 11 runs in the first inning, added two in the sixth, and five in the seventh (I'm a bit skeptical). The Spiders apparently managed only one in the sixth and three in the seventh, making the final score 18-4. Another possiblity is that the scores are cumulative, and that the 11 in the first is actually a tally of two, in which case the final would have been 5-3. The inning-by-inning boxes aren't filled in, but there are some dots in totals columns (AB, R, 1B, TB, SH, PO, A, E) which reveal that whoever was scoring lost interest fairly early (two players have three at bats, the rest one or two).

Anyway... Stuart Rose, Stevens' great-grandson, obtained the scorecards and other items at an auction after the business (which was passed down to Stevens' sons upon Harry Stevens' death in 1934) was sold. Stuart was kind enough to break out the auction catalog, which includes some amazing reproductions of the types of memorabilia more likely to wind up in a Sotheby's auction than an eBay one:
• the cover of the program from Opening Day at Yankee Stadium (April 18, 1923)
• an autographed photo of Babe Ruth hitting his 60th home run (!!!), inscribed "To my second Dad, Harry M. Stevens, from Babe Ruth, Dec. 25th, 1927"
• a photo of a giant hot dog which reads:

50 Years Old
Look How He's Grown
Golden Jubilee Testimonial Dinner to the Stevens Boys 
on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Hot Dog 
by the New York Baseball Writers. 
Hotel Commodore, Jan. 14, 1941.

Will the Sun Still Shine on the Crime Dog's Ass?

The biggest news over the All-Star break not related to the pageant itself was a rumored deal between the Chicago Cubs and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays which would send first baseman Fred McGriff to Chicago in exchange for prospects. On the surface, this appears to be a no-brainer: the opportunity to go from a last place team to a first place team. Not just any last-place team, either--one so awful it has a realistic shot at being the worst team in modern-day major league history.

The Cubs are surprising contenders, and they've probably been playing a little over their heads. By their own admission, they're a bat short--Ron Coomer and Matt Stairs may be swell guys to have in the clubhouse, but neither of them can offer the protection in the batting order that Sammy Sosa needs. McGriff, on the other hand, carries a big stick (432 career home runs) and has enjoyed a resurgence this year despite his putrid surroundings--.330, 15 HR, 53 RBI, 940 OPS for a team dead stinking last in the AL in runs scored. He's no stranger to the postseason, having played in two World Series with the Atlanta Braves and racking up a solid .303 with 10 HR in his October experience. He's an obvious solution to the Cubs' needs.

From the Devil Rays' standpoint, this deal makes sense as well. McGriff is in the final year of a $6.5 million contract, and any opportunity to rebuild the wretched Rays and shed salary at the same time is golden. But the hitch is that McGriff has a no-trade contract, and the reports out of Chicago and Tampa today are that the Crime Dog will invoke his right to remain in Tampa Bay. His reasons are understandable: "I have a wife and two kids I have to think about," McGriff told the St. Petersburg Times. "I'm tired of traveling."

The rub is that McGriff is a borderline Hall of Fame candidate based on his numbers right now. At 432 home runs, he's nearing the magical Dave Kingman Line (442 HR), above which every single hitter except for the still-active Jose Canseco has made the Hall. Canseco passed Kingman last season, and will probably bear the new standard for being on the outside looking in.

Bill James developed something called the Hall of Fame Monitor. It's a system to analyze the likelihood a player will make the Hall, rewarding the types of accomplishments voters tend to look for. Each season of batting over .300 is worth 2.5 points, each season over 30 HR is worth 3 points, having 500 HR is worth 20 points, and so on. A score of 100 indicates a high likelihood of making it in. It's far from perfect, but it's a very good system and a fun toy to boot.

Baseball-Reference.com includes each player's HOF Monitor score on its player statistic pages. McGriff currently scores an 85, and would receive another 8.5 points if he has a second half similar to his first. Not quite there yet, but very close (for purposes of comparison, Jose Canseco is at 103. The leaderboard is here.) Another season like this one might be enough to put him over the line, and a couple more years, with him passing 500 HR, would probably seal the deal.

But it shouldn't. If McGriff rejects this trade, it will show that he no longer cares about playing on a winning team. Despite the Devil Rays' misery, the Crime Dog is comfortable there and apparently content to play out the string, padding his career totals while miles away from even the faintest whiff of a hint of a trace of a pennant race. Passing up this opportunity to play for a winner while he's still got plenty of gas in the tank should spell it out--there are a hundred players, including several of his teammates, who would leap at the opportunity he's been presented with, no matter how tenuous their shot at a championship (we ARE talking about the Cubs here).

If the Crime Dog chooses not to go to the Windy City, let that be a mark against his name. It doesn't invalidate what he's already accomplished on the diamond, it doesn't make him a terrible person; McGriff's always been a classy player, a credit to the game. But it should cast a pall on whatever numbers he piles up from here on out, because numbers are all he's really playing for.

The sun doesn't always shine on the same dog's ass, as the old proverb goes. But it's the dog's own fault if he doesn't find a new spot to keep warm.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 11:04 AM Link

The Toy I Was Born To Have

Here's something so cool and handy that I just can't stop playing with it. Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference.com, the amazing online baseball encyclopedia, has written a bookmarklet to use with his site, allowing you to look up any player in the BR database from anywhere on the web.

I'd never heard of bookmarklets until a couple days ago. They're fairly simple, in that they run on JavaScript, are platform-independent, and can be written by just about anyone. One thing they can do is allow a user to define his or her own hyperlinks. First, you drag a bookmarklet from a page to your browser toolbar, where it can rest among your most popular bookmarks. Then, you can highlight text on any web page (it doesn't even have to be hyperlinked), click on the bookmarklet--and presto, you arrive at the results page of a search. In this case, by highlighing the name of a player on any web page (say, a news article), clicking on the "BR.com Search" bookmarklet, you're taken to that player's complete statistics from the Baseball-Reference web site.

There are other kinds of bookmarklets, and hundreds of them available for the taking at the Bookmarklets web site. I pulled a search-engine one, which lets you either highlight text or else enter your search string before going to the page, and a dictionary one which is pretty handy. But the BR.com Search one is the type of tool/toy I've been dreaming of for a long, long time.

Statheads everywhere already had reason to bow before Sean for his awesome site, which is fast, easy to use, chock-full of a million different types of useful baseball data, and the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now they have another reason. Thank you, Sean!

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 6:57 PM Link

Site Admin Notes

I'm extremely pleased with the response this site has gotten so far. Between the home page and this web log I've gotten well over 500 hits in the past two weeks--not a huge amount, but definitely enough to confirm that my site is quickly finding a nice little niche in the online baseball world. Thank you to everybody who has helped pass the word along, and a special thanks to those who have listed my site among their links.

I've redesigned the home page to highlight the most current content. I'm quite pleased with it. Check it out.

I have been extremely frustrated with the level of service I've received from NameZero, who administer my domain name. Particularly with regards to my email account--several people have reported their replies bouncing back. If that happens, please email me at jayjaffe@nyc.rr.com. Apologies to anyone who has sent a message and then given up when it bounced.

I will be switching the site to a new host in the very near future and hopefully the email problems will go away. More importantly, all of the site's departments will have "www.futilityinfielder.com" prefixes. I'll have a few more tools at my disposal, and will be able to do things like email forms and perhaps even set up a discussion area.

Anyway, thank you for your support and keep checking back!

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 11:23 AM Link

The All-Star Game

Amid all of the controversy surrounding the selection of the All-Star team, I meant to get around to putting together my own version of the squads. But I've been to two ballgames in the past three days and thus unable to set this down for posterity's sake. Better late than never, here it is, with a few caveats:

• I didn't consider injured (Pedro) or "injured" players for selection
• Even with that in mind, I kept to the requirement of representing every team no matter how putrid (that is, I had to choose replacements for Tampa Bay and the Mets)
• I stuck to true position for my starting outfielders
• I kicked Cal Ripken upstairs to Honorary Captain/Pinch Hitter to match Tony Gwynn for the sentimental folks out there.

AMERICAN LEAGUE
Honorary Captain: Cal Ripken

STARTERS: C Ivan Rodriguez; 1B Jason Giambi; 2B Brett Boone; 3B Troy Glaus; SS Alex Rodriguez; LF Manny Ramirez; CF Bernie Williams; RF Ichiro Suzuki; DH Edgar Martinez; SP Roger Clemens

BULLPEN: Freddy Garcia, Tim Hudson, Andy Pettitte, Brad Radke, Keith Foulke, Jeff Nelson, Troy Percival, Kazuhiro Sasaki, Mike Stanton

BENCH: C Jorge Posada, Robert Fick (need somebody from Detroit, and he beats out Clark & Higginson); 1B Jim Thome, Mike Sweeney, Fred McGriff; 2B Roberto Alomar; 3B Jose Valentin (gotta put him somewhere); SS Christian Guzman; OF Shannon Stewart, Juan Gonzalez, Matt Lawton.

NATIONAL LEAGUE
Honorary Captain: Tony Gwynn

STARTERS: C Paul LoDuca; 1B Ryan Klesko (1094 OPS Away more impressive than Helton's 1239 OPS at Coors); 2B Jeff Kent; 3B Larry Jones; SS Rich Aurilia; LF Barry Bonds; CF Jim Edmonds; RF Sammy Sosa; DH Luis Gonzalez; SP Randy Johnson

BULLPEN: Jon Lieber, Greg Maddux, Wade Miller, Matt Morris, Chan Ho Park, Ben Sheets, Antonio Alfonseca, Robb Nen, Billy Wagner, David Weathers.

BENCH: C Mike Piazza; 1B Todd Helton, Sean Casey; 2B Craig Biggio; 3B Albert Pujols; SS Jimmy Rollins; OF Lance Berkman, Cliff Floyd, Brian Giles, Vladimir Guerrero.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 8:26 PM Link

The Fragile Equilibrium of Unhappiness

It's not one of humanity's more noble traits, but schadenfreude certainly has its place in a pennant race. And when it comes to rooting against a team, clubhouse dissension is almost as much fun to watch as a prolonged slump on the field.

So it is with the Red Sox, especially when it comes to Carl Everett, who has an ass as red as... well, his socks. Everett has been sidelined by a knee injury for almost three weeks, joining a crowded infirmary which includes Nomar Garciaparra, Pedro Martinez, Jason Varitek, and about twenty different reclamation projects from the Sox pitching staff. Boston has slumped since Everett went down, and has been overtaken in the AL East race by the streaking Yankees.

In true panic-button fashion, the Sox players have begun to speak to each other through the media. Outfielder Trot Nixon told the Boston Globe that Everett needed to work harder at rehabilitating his knee. "We need Carl in the lineup," Nixon was quoted as saying. "We're doing well since he's been hurt, but if something is wrong, we've got to find out what the problem is. Waiting around and not rehabbing or anything isn't helping our ball club and isn't helping Carl at all... You've got to want to get back on the field."

Everett responded by taking the high road, telling the Globe that they should apologize to Trot for "trying to make [Nixon] look like a bad guy." But good ol' Carl, not happy unless he's not happy, then lashed out at reporters. "...So what you all need to do is take your old Boston same old (expletive) out the door. There ain't no controversy here. It's just you all starting the same (expletive). Goodbye. Toodle-oo."

In a bizarre twist, Nixon responded by saying that he was quoted accurately and felt no apology was necessary. Meaning, I suppose, that he was either trying to publicly cast Everett as a malingerer or else simply trying to get a rise out of him. So now I'm waiting, like the rest of the world, for Carl Everett to fire his next salvo or perhaps land Trot on the DL with a folding-chair-induced headache.

Yes, friends, it's a dirty job, to hope that an enemy team can preserve its fragile equilibrium of unhappiness long enough to fall further behind in the race. And, to paraphrase one of my favorite movie lines, I deserve all of the dirty pleasure I get out of it.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 3:39 PM Link

First Caller Wins!

Tonight I will be headed to Coney Island to see the Brooklyn Cyclones with a bunch of friends (the Official Futility Infielder Focus Group, more or less). As it stands, we have an extra ticket. Anyone in the New York City area who feels like checking out this brand-new stadium and can make it to the ballpark by 7 PM can claim the ticket by emailing me at jay@billstudio.com.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 10:41 AM Link