Friday’s October Baseball
DMZ · October 6, 2006 at 12:54 pm · Filed Under General baseball
Twins at Oakland, 1:09pm, ESPN. I thought this would be the best of the first-round series, with great matchups and two interesting teams. But the Twins may get bumped today.
Derek Jeter and his Yankees at Detroit, 5:09pm, ESPN.
You know, we may have just seen the last pitch of RJ’s career. Yeah, he’s under contract for another year, but he’s also got a bulging disc, no cartilage in one or both knees, an AARP card, and an ERA over 5. If so, thanks for the memories, Randy.*sniffle*
Sweet! Make ’em pay.
Am I the only one still watching? Nice job, Kenny.
Nope. I’ll take any chance to watch Yankees fans worry.
So A-Rod is in a no win spot here. If he homers, everyone will say that it wasn’t important. If he K’s…
How do you feel about Kenny Rogers as a Hall of Fame candidate?
207 wins … but what if he wins a Series this year?
No you aren’t. Kenny had Jeter struck out. Ump blew that call. Good job by Leyland to go out and call him down so he could strike out Abreu.
I can’t see him in the hall, but this game will be one he will be remembered for. He made the Yankees look silly.
#104 I think he would be borderline at best. The whole camerman shoving incident probably nudges him out if he had a chance.
I don’t think those kind of incidents end up mattering much after careerrs are over. But Rogers needs a lot more to make the Hall. If he wins two World Series games this year it’ll help, but not enough.
Villone!
Can anything make me happier than a great series by Carlos Guillen?
Joe Morgan only understands small sample size when it benefits the Yankees.
I imagine he will probably pitch a few more years and be in the same general time consideration as people like Glavine, Maddux, Clemens, and Johnson.
His numbers don’t stack up extremely well in that grouping, even though he may not be in the same year as some of them.
Kenny does have a perfect game (1994 vs. Angels) and 5 gold gloves.
Is this his myspace page or an obsessed fan?
a href=”http://www.myspace.com/kennyrogers37″>KR – Myspace
Is making the Hall of Fame as a pitcher still pretty much about win total? Have we not evolved much in this?
Dangit…KR – Myspace
That would be an obsessed fan.
# 113 I think we as in USSM readers have….not sure about the people who vote players in though. I guess we will find out.
Ok guys… still need one more.
Against one of the best post-season offenses ever assembled, Rogers just… 8K? 2BB? Against those guys?
Amazing. I still can’t believe it.
All that, and the Yankees were shaky as hell defensively. They don’t seem to handle adversity well.
hey, he’s the Gambler. Jaret ‘The Neck’ Wright makes the next start for the Yanks.
and man, does that ‘Man of the year’ movie look bad.
Jeez, that “25 of 33 teams that have won game 3 have gone on to win the series” graphic that they kept displaying was driving me nuts. Just think about that for a second. Suppose the teams are evenly matched: each team has a 50% chance of winning a game, so a team only has a 25% chance of winning two games in a row. And the team that’s down 2-1 has to do exactly that. Note that 25% of 32 is 8, so out of 33 games, if you were just flipping coins to decide who wins, you’d expect the team up 2-1 to go on to win the series (33-8)= 25 times.
In other words, that statistic tells you nothing except that you might as well be flipping coins.
Also, and this overshadows any joy I feel at the Yankees loss:
Buck O’Neil dead at 94 — and still one vote shy of the HOF.
1) Shame on the HOF voters for not giving him that one lousy vote that would have gotten him into the HOF earlier this summer. Shame on them twice if they now vote him in posthumously. He has no offspring; only a brother still living. I hope that brother’s speech is scathing…
2) Joe Morgan was raving early on about how the Yankee lineup was the best lineup ever. It was fun to hear him eating his words later in the game…
3) According to the comments of a lot of Yankee fans elsewhere, they seemed to think that all their team needed to do is show up against Kenny Rogers; the stats certainly favored the Yanks. I guess the players thought the same thing, because Rogers didn’t roll over for them, and they looked pretty nonplussed at his dominance of them.
I think if Randy Johnson wasn’t just pitching on grit and courage, it would have been quite a duel.
SCORE IT ERROR OF OMISSION
JOE POSNANSKI
The living voice of the Negro Leagues did not even blink when the door was slammed in his face one more time. Buck O’Neil just nodded and smiled a little when he was told that he did not get enough votes to be elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
“All right,” he said. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”
That’s the way baseball crumbles. Monday, an 11-member committee of academics and authors (a 12th member, author Robert Peterson, died two weeks ago) gathered in a room in Tampa and voted 17 deceased Negro Leagues players and executives into the Hall of Fame. Seventeen. To give you an idea of how overwhelming that number is … only 18 Negro Leaguers are actually in the National Baseball Hall of Fame which honors 278 former players, managers, umpires and executives. It took 30 years of work – most of it Buck O’Neil’s – to get those 18 inducted.
But even while doubling the Negro Leagues’ Hall of Fame population, the committee could not muster the necessary nine votes for Buck O’Neil, who is 94 and has done more in his life for Negro Leagues baseball than anyone else. One committee member said O’Neil likely fell one vote short. The balloting was secret.
When the voting was finished, no one had the guts to explain why Buck O’Neil was kept out. He was an All-Star player in the Negro Leagues. He was a successful manager for the Kansas City Monarchs. He sent more Negro Leagues players to the major leagues than anyone. He was the first black coach in the major leagues. For the past 50 years, he has been – as author Jules Tygiel calls him in “Shades of Glory,” the Negro Leagues book commissioned by the Hall of Fame – “the primary spokesperson for the legacy of the Negro Leagues.”
In fact, two sources said months ago that the Hall of Fame would have a special Negro Leagues vote with the intention of getting Buck O’Neil in. One Hall official said, “I don’t think the Hall of Fame is complete without him.”
Thus, for the first time ever, the Hall handed over the voting to a panel of baseball historians and scholars with no affiliation to the major leagues or the hall. There was not one former player in the group and not one person who observed the Negro Leagues. The panel was given no boundaries – members were told to vote for as many people as they saw fit.
By dumping 17 persons into the Hall of Fame, they matched the number of persons inducted into the Hall the past seven years. But when it came to why Buck was left out, no one was talking.
“I don’t think the individuals are going to be willing to discuss their individual votes,” said Fay Vincent, who served as a nonvoting chairman of the committee. “We agreed we would not do that.”
In other words, they decided to hide. After this travesty, you could not blame them. On Monday, when it appeared that O’Neil was short the votes he needed, Vincent apparently made a frantic plea to the committee to consider O’Neil’s lifetime achievements and not just his playing days. According to the committee member, he sounded almost desperate.
His words held no sway with this committee. They left him out without a word of explanation. They did, however, vote in Andy Cooper, who was (see if this sounds familiar) a fine player and manager for the Kansas City Monarchs. He died in 1941. The book “Shades of Glory” is 422 pages long, including acknowledgements. Cooper is mentioned exactly zero times.
The committee also voted in Effa Manley, the first woman inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Her credentials? She co-owned the Newark Eagles with her husband, Abe, for 14 seasons. The team won one championship. Also, she was outspoken. Also, her biographer, Jim Overmyer, was on the committee.
And so on. The injustice of Monday’s vote left a trail of disbelief and anger throughout the baseball community, but especially in Kansas City. It had no visible effect on Buck O’Neil, though. He began his Monday morning with a 5:30 a.m. call from a radio show. He came to the Negro Leagues Museum at 10 a.m. and by then he had received more than a dozen congratulatory calls. Everyone seemed sure he was going to get voted in. Buck himself was not so sure. “I’ve been on committees like this,” he said. “I know that anything can happen.”
and from Posnanski about three weeks back:
“He looks me in the eye, this beautiful man I’ve become friends with, this beautiful man all of us have become friends with, and I remember again how much we have to treasure our time with Buck O’Neil. He is our gift. He was denied so many things in his long life_denied an education, denied a chance to play and manage in the major leagues, denied an exalted place in the game he celebrated and honored_and he let the bitterness go. He fought hate with love. Can anyone do more than that?
He tries to do more. Buck has a big project. He raises money for the Buck O’Neil Education and Research Center, which will be an interactive baseball experience and a Negro Leagues library. What excites Buck even more, though, is that it will bring the lessons of baseball and the Negro Leagues to schools. He says this center – which will be built at Paseo YMCA, where the Negro Leagues began – could be the greatest thing he has ever done in his life. “We’re going to teach those kids,” he says.
You can help Buck by going to the Negro Leagues Museum Web site (www.nlbm.com) and clicking on the “Thanks a Million Buck” logo. Also, there’s a fund-raising event indoors at Starlight Theatre on Nov. 11 in conjunction with Buck’s 95th birthday. Details are still being worked out, but one thing for certain is that women will be asked to wear red dresses. This goes back to a story I’ve told about this time in New York when we were walking back into a hotel. Just outside the door, we passed a young woman wearing a bright red dress.
Next thing I knew, Buck was gone. I looked around but couldn’t find him. Finally, I looked back and saw Buck talking to the woman in the red dress. They talked and laughed for a long time, and finally Buck hugged her and walked into the hotel. He asked me if I had seen that woman. I said that I had. He shook his head.
He said, “Son, in this life, you don’t ever walk by a red dress.”
It’s one of the great lessons I’ve learned from Buck O’Neil. You don’t walk by life. You live it. I ask Buck how he feels about all the red dresses that will be there at his birthday party. He smiles. And he whispers: “I’ve got to get well. I’ve got to see that.””
It seemed like the all of baseball admire and respect Buck O’Neil yet he didn’t get into HOF. People were worried that Buck would pass away before getting into HOF, and how unfortunate that happened. He was a baseball legend, and a man who lived his life following his passion for the game. Those HOF voters who didn’t vote for him (why anyone would not think he deserves to be on HOF is beyond me.) should feel ashamed. Even though chances weren’t given to him because of skin color, he had always been gracious and told stories of negro leagues baseball to us with love so we will know.
I’m happy Tigers won today. Now if they can stay calm and win the game tomorrow to advance to ALCS.
Heckuva game for Kenny Rogers’ Roasters. Love it.
#127– the problem seems to have been that it wasn’t the traditional HOF voters. but a special panel of 12…
I’m totally coming late to this party, but… WOO! Great game last night. Now if they can only hang on.