“Grady did not know that. Grady had ignored Paul’s prodding to scout the players his computer flushed out. Paul had said the scouts ought to go have a look at a college kid named Kevin Youkilis. Youkilis was a fat third baseman who couldn’t run, throw or field. What was the point of going to see that? (Because, Paul would be able to say three months later, Kevin Youkilis has the second highest on-base percentage in all of baseball, after Barry Bonds. To Paul, he’d become Euclis: the Greek god of walks.)

Good nicknames in baseball are somewhat of a rarity these days. One of my favorite sections of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is “nicknames.” Nicknames like “Earache,” “Firebrand” and “The Grey Eagle” resonated a lot more than today’s silly trends of shortening people’s names, or adding “Y” or “IE” to the end of them. One notable exception was Kevin Youkilis. Blessed in the above passage in Moneyball as “The Greek God of Walks” nearly a year before his major league debut, the baseball world sat up and took notice of a previously anonymous player before his major league debut. No pressure. While that might not seem like much of an achievement in today’s prospect- and media-saturated world, things were quite a bit different back in 2003. Yesterday, it was reported that the Ohio native had retired. Throughout his career, he served as the perfect example for several well-worn baseball lessons.

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On April 2nd, 2014, just one day removed from April Fools’ Day, the Houston Astros turned in the lineup for their game against the New York Yankees. Dexter Fowler would bat leadoff, Matt Dominguez would hit second and Robbie Grossman would bat in the three hole. The cleanup spot would be filled by Jose Altuve. Altuve is listed at five feet, five inches tall. Since that fateful day on April 2ns, he is now tied with Freddie Patek as the shortest player to bat cleanup since 1974.

Here comes the caveat that the Astros are doing their own thing at the moment and what they do should not be seen as some sort of new-age thinking in regards to winning baseball games. Short dudes in the four hole are not the new market inefficiency. Altuve’s odd lineup placement is just a phase. Like that one weird cousin of yours, Houston is taking some time to figure some stuff out right now.

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The first season of South Park debuted in 1997. I was a freshman in high school. An episode came out in December of that year that involved the school putting on a Christmas program, only all the parents wanted it to be either non- or universally-denominational, so the whole thing ended up being performed in unitards and it was all very cold and strange. One of the jokes circled around the fact that the music was composed by Philip Glass. Out of the group with which I was watching, I was the only one who laughed at that joke, because I was the only band nerd in the group who had any idea who Philip Glass was.

The joke fit the narrative. This was a play stripped of all decoration and pomp being accompanied by minimalist music. It was also an easy joke, because jokes about minimalist music are fairly easy to make. There’s no guitar riffs, there’s no hook, there’s no chorus. It starts with an idea. That idea is built upon, added to, modified, deconstructed, rearranged. Then, at the end, it’s right back to where it started. No matter how different or unique things get in the middle, that original idea is just under the surface — always present. It imitates life more than any other style of music. Life throws us all kinds of garbage, but it’s tragically repetitive. Babies, new jobs, weird guys on the bus, movies — they are all tiny differences, tiny theme changes, from the pulsing march of our lives. Baseball, more than any other sport, mimics that as well. There’s a beginning, there’s a bunch of wonderful and heartbreaking stuff in the middle, and then it ends. The day before Opening Day is the day after the last World Series game. Over and over — rinse, repeat. Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend, I saw an interesting article in colleague Mike Petriello’s Twitter timeline. It was from retired Detroit News sportswriter/columnist Jerry Green, who was — for the 15th and final time — advocating for Jack Morris‘ Hall of Fame candidacy. Without getting into a line-by-line critique of the article, there were several things in the article that I did not agree with, but one thing did catch my attention:

I think it is quite sad that Morris will be left out. That the best baseball team I ever covered —the 1984 Tigers — will have not a single player in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. Only Sparky Anderson, the manager, has been elected to the Hall of Fame. And forced to choose, Sparky opted to go into the Hall as the once-manager of the Cincinnati Reds.

Now, Green didn’t out and out declare that every World Series winner should have a member of its team in the Hall of Fame, but that was certainly the tangent that I led myself on in thinking about that passage. So, I decided to investigate — does every team have a Hall of Famer on it?

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In the afternoon of Saturday, October 10th, 1931, the Cardinals took on the Philadelphia Athletics at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis. This would be the seventh and final matchup of these teams in that year’s World Series. Philadelphia had gone 107-45 that season (beating their Pythagorean record by 10 games), behind the one-two-three punch of catcher Mickey Cochrane, a young Jimmie Foxx, and outfielder Al Simmons. They also boasted a pitching staff including the likes of Lefty Grove and Waite Hoyt. Though they had won six less games, the Cardinals were no slouches, either. Hall-of-Famers Jim Bottemley and Frankie Frisch manned the infield, with Pepper Martin in the outfield in his first full season. Paul Derringer and the fantastically-named (and HOF spitballer) Burleigh Grimes anchored the rotation for St. Louis. The Athletics were favored to win the series somewhat heavily, as Connie Mack’s club was coming of two consecutive world titles, and had beaten the (more-or-less) same Cardinals team the previous year. It was a fairly evenly-matched series all-in-all, save for Game 6 when the Athletics kicked around the Cardinals to the tune of 8 – 1. Al Simmons was hitting out of his mind that series, and would eventually end up with a 1.030 OPS for the fall classic, while Pepper Martin posted a 1.330 OPS with the Cardinals. Grimes was dealing, allowing only one run over 18 innings, while Grove and George Earnshaw were racking up the strikeouts for the Philly (well, as much as you could rack up strikeouts back then.) Read the rest of this entry »

With the exception of the return of the Pittsburgh Pirates to playoff contention, perhaps the biggest story of this postseason is the cavalcade of young starters taking the mound. There have been 46 postseason starts so far (23 games at two starters a piece), and 18 of those 46 were started by someone 25 years old or younger. That list includes the likes of Michael Wacha, Gerrit Cole, Sonny Gray, Danny Salazar, and Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw, Mike Minor and Joe Kelly are all 25, while Wacha and Julio Teheran are the babies at 22. Almost 40% of the postseason starts were from young talent this year, though that number will go down now that Kershaw, Kelly, and Wacha are the only young starters left. Still, the 2013 postseason is another indicator that the trend of young starters is making a comeback.
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When I worked for the Rockies, we spent a lot of time talking about Todd Helton’s hall of fame candidacy. When Helton recovered from a hairy intestinal issue in 2006 to post the seventh four-win (or better) campaign of his career in 2007, the going thought was that if he was able to just to do that a few more times, he would be a shoo-in for the Hall. He stood at 51.1 WAR through the end of his age-33 season, and had plenty of other accolades on his resume — five-time All-Star, three-time Gold Glove winner, four-time Silver Slugger, one of just 10 players to play in the Integrated Era to be a career .300/.400/.500 hitter, 10th all-time in on-base percentage, etc. Honestly, some of the debate was which statistical markers were the most impressive. And with the Rocktober run in the books, Helton was no longer the longest tenured player to not have played in the postseason.

But then age caught up to Helton in a big way. In the past six years, he has been able to add just 5.1 WAR to his ledger, and now after a poor swan song he stands in the gray area from a hall perspective. However, it hasn’t all been doom and gloom these past few years. So rather than wallow in what-ifs, I thought today we could look at five of the best moments from the final five seasons of Helton’s career.

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Well, we made it. We’re here. If you missed the first three installments, you can peep them here, here and here. Today, we wrap things up with pitchers who amassed between 60 and 69 WAR, and pitchers at 70 WAR and above.

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Now it’s the pitcher’s turn. Today I’ll cover the 30, 40 and 50 WAR groups, and we’ll leave the 60 and 70+ WAR groups for the final installment. If you missed Part One and Two on hitters, you can find them here and here.

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Yesterday, I began the first of what will be a four-part series on the final seasons of a player’s career. You can check out part one here for the back story and players with the worst final seasons among those who posted between 30 and 69 career WAR. As I was wrapping that article I thought I would split it out, partially because it was already fairly long, partially to give the absolute best players a little bit more attention and partially because when I broke things out by 70+ WAR only, none of the 100+ WAR players ended up in the bottom five. So I thought there was no harm in one additional tier.

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