From: Grantland

Immigrant Misappropriations: The Importance of Ichiro

By Jay Caspian Kang
POSTED JUNE 14, 2011

Ten years after Ichiro Suzuki broke into the majors, a reflection on the 2001 Mariners, Jackie Robinson, the Four Noble Truths and the cultural impact of baseball's most enigmatic player.

Like most 6-year-olds in the METCO-serviced suburbs of Boston, I spent the last two weeks of October 1986 with a Red Sox cap on my head. When school let out, those of us who did not take the early bus into the city huddled up in the pick-up/drop-off circle and practiced our lines. Most of us could list only the names of the ballplayers and our arbitrary preferences, but those boys who had been born into families of fanatics wowed us with jargon that seemed to provide them with a greater stake in the excitement of those two weeks. The morning before Game 3, I got up early to read the sports section and came to school with these phrases locked up in my head: "Let's get out the Oil Can! Rocket is throwing tonight, watch out! Can Hendu recreate his ALCS magic?" When I tried them out in the bus circle, the kids nodded along. That night, I asked my father to teach me how to read a box score. He complied with the sincerity and gravity expected of that situation. The mornings after Games 4 and 5, I came to school with a ripped-out square of newspaper in the pocket of my raincoat and ran my classmates through the significance of those numbers and columns. The Red Sox were up three games to two. We in the bus circle were just starting to feel invested in the team.

Then Mookie Wilson's grounder rolled through Buckner's legs and I joined in as all of Boston exhaled bitterly.

Ichiro Suzuki arrived in Seattle in the spring of 2001 to mixed expectations. When news of the signing broke the previous winter, Bobby Valentine, then the manager of the New York Mets, declared to the media that the slightly built right fielder was one of the best five players in the world. Despite Valentine's endorsements, baseball pundits around the country openly questioned how a player who had spent his entire career hitting fastballs that rarely hit 92 mph on the radar gun would adjust to the power pitching in the major leagues. Rob Dibble, who in the early 1990s joined up with Norm Charlton and Randy Myers to form a hard-throwing Cincinnati Reds bullpen known as the Nasty Boys, spoke for the doubters when he predicted Ichiro's batting average would never break .300. A week before the season began, Dibble, then a commentator on ESPN's Baseball Tonight, made the following statement on the air: "I will run naked through Times Square in the dead of winter if Ichiro wins the batting title." Nine months later, Ichiro took home the lion's share of the postseason hardware and Dibble made his run, albeit in a speedo. In addition to the batting title, Ichiro took home the American League MVP award, a Gold Glove, the stolen-base title and the AL's Rookie of the Year. No rookie had won both the MVP and Rookie of the Year awards in the same season since Boston's Freddy Lynn did it in 1975, and no player in baseball history has taken home all five awards. More impressively, the Seattle Mariners, a franchise that had lost three first-ballot Hall of Famers in Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., and Randy Johnson over the course of the previous three seasons, broke a league record by winning 116 games. At the center was an enigmatic, 160-pound man from Japan who spoke only through an interpreter and was rarely seen without his trademark wraparound sunglasses.

I moved to Seattle the November before Ichiro's arrival because I had been kicked out of a small, liberal arts college in Maine that I, in part, had chosen to attend because it offered me a chance to be surrounded by Red Sox fans again. I don't remember much about that first winter in the Pacific Northwest, except that I waited it out alone. I spent most of my time in used bookstores because I was convinced that I could feel balls of radiation hurling out of the lead paint that hung in cracked sheets on the wall. On Sunday mornings, when the hallways of my converted hotel filled with the dull stink of Nag Champa, I walked down to Aileen's Sports Bar on Broadway and watched football on a shaky 13-inch TV screen, accompanied by a cast of regulars who reminded me of what might happen if a Raymond Carver story collection collided with a Russ Meyer film set. My favorite of these characters was a weekend transvestite named Karla. During halftime of a Patriots game, she insisted that we drive my car across the country to live with her sister and her husband in Nashua, N.H.

The nights I stayed in, I sat in the armchair, shucked oysters for dinner, and went through the canon of juvenile manuals of detachment. I read Dr. Alan Watts, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Chogyam Trungpa. I transcribed all the block quotes in Franny and Zooey into a memo book — the type with that irresistibly nostalgic black marbleized cover — and went to the used bookstore down the street to buy up all the texts Salinger referenced. During my walks to the bookstore, I suppressed the hope that the girl with Bettie Page bangs and discolored thin arms that reminded me of dandelion stalks would be behind the counter. Her unbalanced recommendation shelf — Denis Johnson, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Shirley Jackson — reminded me of someone back east who I had recently decided to stop talking to. For reasons still not clear to me, I stopped eating pork and red meat and practiced breathing every morning.

I listened to the Ichiro talk on the local sports talk radio station every morning during my drive to work. Throughout the winter, most of the writers and talk-show hosts echoed Dibble's skepticism that a Japanese position player could come over and make the adjustments necessary to become an impact player in the major leagues. When the small, but vocal throng of Ichiro supporters brought up Hideo Nomo's success for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1995, the conventional wisdom replied that the situations were different because Nomo relied mostly on gimmicks: an exaggerated windup in which he turned his back completely to the batter, and a baffling split-finger fastball the likes of which most major leaguers had not yet seen. It is a truism in baseball that in an at-bat in which both the pitcher and the batter know nothing about one another, the batter is at a disadvantage because he must react to anything the pitcher might throw. Ichiro would be learning on the job. But for the most part, this was not the argument made in the papers or on the radio. A month before Ichiro flew stateside to take his first cuts at the Mariners spring training facility in Arizona, one of the local sports radio hosts summed up the prevailing sentiment when he said, "Nomo could get by his first year by whirligigging around and throwing foreign junk at the American hitters. They hadn't seen it before, and so he did all right. Now that Nomo's been in the league a couple of years, the batters are starting to tear into his Japanese bag of tricks. Ichiro's not going to have that luxury. The first time he sees a Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens fastball, he's going to see that Japanese tricks don't cut it over here."

By the first week of June, Ichiro had piled up three four-hit games, back-to-back hitting streaks of 15 and 23 games, a .361 batting average, and was on track to break the major league record for hits in a season. In an April game in Oakland, he unleashed a throw from right field that traveled at a seemingly impossible low and accurate trajectory to nail a stunned Terrence Long at third base. After the game, a bewildered Long told reporters, "I'm not the fastest guy in the world, but that's got to be the best throw I've ever seen." On the eve of the All-Star break, Ivan Rodriguez proclaimed, "Ichiro is the best player in baseball right now." The city of Seattle, which usually splits its sports enthusiasm between the Seahawks and the University of Washington's football team, went Ichi-Gaga, prompting many Asian-Americans in the community to come forward with praise for the city's embrace of a Japanese sports idol. Shawn Wong, a professor of English at the University of Washington, went as far as to credit Ichiro with a heightening of cultural awareness within the city. In a guest editorial that appeared in the Seattle Times, he wrote, "I'm learning something about race, ethnicity and understanding that I didn't know. As a professor, I think it's important for my students to articulate their opinions and understanding about what it is they learn. I often use theoretical terms such as 'racialization' to explain the dynamics of race, culture and society. Now I'm beginning to think an entire city can understand how race changes their culture and society, and they can embrace and even encourage that change, but not necessarily understand how to describe that change."

Like Wong, I believed I was witnessing the collapse of stereotypes about Asians. My letters back to the East Coast, which during the winter had alternated between a weird austerity and cloying anger, focused now on the importance of sports in a society: How a meritocracy like baseball offered anyone a chance to showcase the talents of a people.

The Bookstore Bodhisattva life I had tried over the winter gave way to the restorative energy offered up by the start of baseball season. (Strangely, I find that the warier I become of Opening Day's nostalgia-trap, the weaker I feel in the knees whenever I walk into a stadium. It is almost as if my resistance to baseball's sentimentality is also what feeds it.) Ichiro was my guy. I attended every home game that spring, usually by myself, and even enjoyed those rare nights when Ichiro went 0-for-5 and let us all down.

Before a sold-out Sunday afternoon ballgame, my fifth in a row to watch Ichiro, I spotted a kid loitering underneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct. He had on an oversized velour sweatshirt printed by a hip-hop label and a black-on-black fitted Mariners cap, two items of clothing that I usually associate with young gamblers and ticket scalpers. As he saw me approach, he produced a single ticket out of one of his cargo pockets and handed it over, muttering under his breath, "Thirty-five, best price for today's game." After looking over my shoulder, I palmed over two twenties crumpled into a sweaty ball. When he told me he didn't have any change, I waved him off and told him to just remember my face for any future transactions. He nodded, pumped his fist, and said, "Go Ichiro."

The seat was in Area 51, the section of bleachers directly behind the right-field fence that still serves as the unofficial Japanese cheering section. An older Japanese couple sat to my right. Both wore blindingly white Ichiro jerseys and flat-billed Mariners caps. They nodded, using the jerky, polite motion that many older Japanese use when greeting young Americans, and the husband offered me a bite of his plate of garlic fries. When I said, "No, thank you," his wife smiled, revealing a gold canine tooth that reminded me, strangely enough, of a photo of my great-grandmother taken when she lived on an orchard in what is now North Korea, a few years before the Japanese occupation during World War II that forced her to flee to the South. In the photo, her hair is pulled back tightly and she is smiling and pointing at a yellowed tooth that my father explained was a gold implant and not the product of some old-world hygienic deficiency.

When a group of Japanese students sitting in front of me passed around a red sign on which some indistinguishable Japanese slogan had been written, obscuring my view of the field, I could do nothing but sit back and mutter astonished, bitter words into the back of my hand. It finally occurred to me that I had been ignoring the elephantine irony of this happy scene: I was born in Korea to Korean parents, meaning the only history I share with Ichiro is that on several occasions over the past thousand years, his people have brutally occupied my home country. Rooting for a Japanese baseball player because he fit in the same constructed minority category was like if an Irish ex-pat began rooting for Manchester United because the good people of China couldn't distinguish between his accent and Wayne Rooney's. And in most ways, it was a lot worse than that.

When I got home that night, I thumbed through my copy of James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and read the following passage, heavily underlined back in my days as a malcontent freshman: "If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have deliberately been constructed to make you believe what white people say about you… Please try to be clear, dear [nephew], through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you." As I read that passage, I realized that the images of the Civil Rights Movement and the multicultural education I received as a child in Boston had never lost their buoyancy, always floating on the surface of my consciousness, but that the rhetoric that underscored those images etherized, not completely into the air, but into a strange, misappropriated residue. I could watch Ichiro stretching in the on-deck circle and conjure the image of Jackie Robinson sliding home in 1947, but that association never brought hope, but rather a wariness that both told me that the association was wrong and that the only reason why I was cheering for Ichiro was because someone, something else had lumped us together.

Even back then, at the age of 19, I knew that the comparison was catastrophically wrong. But I still made it, and even today, when I certainly am old enough to know better, every time I see Ichiro, I still feel both the warmth and the embarrassment of that particular misappropriation. In my defense, I will say that when you are a first-generation immigrant, the templates for assimilation always belong to somebody else. You can staple your assimilation to Ichiro, Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, or Hank Greenberg, but you will always be wrong. But I don't know how else anyone is supposed to stumble toward American-ness than through these categorically wrong, sentimental avenues.

Ten years later, it seems to me that what I should have done was to shrug off Baldwin and understand that some ideas are better left on the pitch of the academy, where no score is kept and nothing is really ever at stake.

I also understand that doing so would be dishonest.

Philip Roth, in an essay entitled "My Baseball Years," wrote that he loved the game for "the mythic and aesthetic dimension that it gave to an American boy's life — particularly to one whose grandparents could hardly speak English. For someone whose roots in America were strong but only inches deep, baseball was a kind of secular church that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound millions upon millions of us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms and antagonisms. Baseball made me understand what patriotism was about, at its best." For those who might find Roth's quote as overexplanatory and nostalgic as I do, there is the first line of Don DeLillo's Underworld. As far as first lines to epic American novels go, "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful," might not rank up there with "Call me Ishmael" or "In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice," but as far as baseball writing goes, there isn't a line written that better captures the nation-mending appeal of the game for those that might not always feel included in other places. The boy with the halfway hopeful shine in his eye is a black boy from Harlem named Cotter who jumps the gate at the Polo Grounds to witness Bobby Thomson's "Shot heard 'round the world." He finds a seat in the bleachers next to a seemingly well-meaning white man named Bill Watterson, who buys him a soda and says nice things like, "[You and I are] a couple of sportsmen taking their ease." When Thomson's home run lands in their section, Cotter and Watterson both get a hand on the ball. A struggle ensues with Cotter eventually wrestling the ball from Watterson's hands. A frustrated Watterson reneges on his good will and chases Cotter out of the stadium. Following Cotter for several blocks, he tries to cajole and then intimidate the boy into giving him the ball. Cotter runs back home to Harlem, ball in hand, leaving Watterson behind.
The metaphor is obvious, but all baseball metaphors are obvious. Few are as accurate. If baseball is indeed America's testing ground for understanding — as almost every piece written on Jackie Robinson in the past 10 years has argued — DeLillo is right to point out that those on the outside will only be able to muster up a halfway hope about the follow-through.

Still, it is Roth's feel-good story that is the most common to baseball writing, and undoubtedly the most compelling. As long as baseball has been said to exist, writers have tried to wrest patriotic metaphor out of its history, its players, its stadiums, and its fans. Roth languishes in the redemptive possibilities that a shared interest in baseball might offer people who are separated along other lines. Similarly, my own stake in baseball comes from the fact that I am the foreign-born child of Korean immigrants, and that sometimes finding acceptance in this country is as simple as shouting out in a crowded bar that you know who started each game of the 1986 World Series because you, like the rest of the people there, watched every game on TV and talked about it the next day at school. Although nearly 25 years have passed since Buckner's error, I do not think I have been removed very far from the pick-up/drop-off circle. The kids still nod along. It would be incorrect, however, to say that my participation in the dialogue surrounding the national pastime makes me feel like "more of an American." The phrase is too abstract for me to grasp.

At the same time, I cannot bring myself to mirror Baldwin's rejection of acculturation, or the bitterness expressed by Jackie Robinson in his autobiography about playing in his first World Series game, because this sort of scorn comes naturally only to those for whom the national promise of baseball is either a given or a nonapplicable. The irony of our multicultural education is that it provides us with only the vocabulary of the thoroughly entitled and the thoroughly disenfranchised. Asian immigrants stand somewhere in between, but lack the context and the words to express our place.

I don't feel comfortable evoking James Baldwin or Jackie Robinson or Philip Roth to explain my relationship with baseball. I understand there is a militia of smart people who will line up to bash me over the head with the word "problematic." I suppose what I am asking is this: How else am I supposed to talk about it?

Perhaps, then, the best way to enjoy the game is to simply stop reading about it. Or, if at all possible, to follow the advice of Steven Jay Gould, who wrote "the silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness and so on, seemingly ad infinitum." (Gould, for his own part, later wrote his own lengthy essay, published posthumously, about the meaning of his love for baseball and his relationship with his father.) After all, one of baseball's gifts is that it allows its fans to immerse themselves completely in the demands of the game. For those of us who may not have the résumés to participate in the nation-building or the father-son euphoria that surrounds the National Pastime, there are still the processes, the numbers, and the play on the field. A young lefty gets called up from Pawtucket because the aging DH lands on the DL after pulling his hamstring doing wind sprints during the pregame warm-ups. However, the fan knows this is most likely a cover-up to protect the pride of the aging DH, who has been in a 3-for-45 slump. Besides, the wind sprints excuse is total garbage because, as everybody knows, the manager always excuses the aging DH from any sort of pregame running exercise. Most likely, the GM wanted to try out the young lefty, who has been hitting .320 over the past month at Pawtucket (.386 against righties), against the team coming in for the weekend who has three right-handed pitchers lined up. All of this is extrapolated from one line in the small print page of the sports section: Transactions: Boston Red Sox: Called up 1B Morgan Burkhardt from Pawtucket. The discussion of this one line can be stretched out over a dinner or over the course of days. A friend of mine from college and I have been arguing about Eddie Murray's induction into the Hall of Fame for 10 years. And as long as the talk remains on the action between the chalked lines, and as long as I can put out of my mind what has been written about the national part of the National Pastime, I feel included in a running dialogue that started back when I asked my father to explain the box scores to me.

If going to 81 baseball games a year would offer me a glimpse of Roth's aesthetic and mythic inclusion, I would reroute my paychecks to the Red Sox season-ticket office. Conversely, if I fully believed — again in the sociologist's terms — that the spectacle of the game served only to put a false shine on a rotten apple, I would never step foot in a ballpark again. Perhaps, the curse of the fan that identifies Ichiro as "my guy" is that he can recognize the promise and the betrayal of baseball only in the way that one picks up a song through a wall: missing out on the immediacy and the volume, but recognizing the resonance. But he keeps trying. This season, I will watch the game for the stats, the umpire-specific strike zones, the infield shifts, the pitching changes, and the numbers on the scoreboard. But, when I hear the occasional racist comment in the stands that I might reflexively place upon myself, my intellect will begin to pull apart baseball's patriotic metaphor. But thankfully, the process is cyclic, because whenever an Asian player is met with applause, or when I see a young white or Hispanic or African-American kid in a Choo or Kuroda or Matsui t-shirt, the flood of inclusive, metaphoric language will seal the gaps shut and I will once again be awash in halfway hopeful reverence.

Jay Caspian Kang is an editor at Grantland. His debut novel, The Dead Do Not Improve, will be published by Hogarth/Random House in Summer 2012.

From Cleveland.com:

This spring, we asked readers to tell us their best memory at an Indians game. More than 600 of you responded. All season, The Plain Dealer will publish fan memories -- one each day the Indians are scheduled to play. Here is Sunday's essay by Jeff Taylor of Seattle.

1987... June, perhaps July.

Obviously, enough of the season had passed to place the Indians out of contention. Therefore, a group of 12-year-olds' attention was focused more toward such topics as if Kenny Schrom could be better than Steve Carlton or who else was on Chris Bando's rookie card. These were always very heated and important arguments.

The A's were in town and, as always, a group of four or five of us took the rapid shuttle from University Heights to the Terminal [Tower]. Amazing now when I think our folks used to let us do this unaccompanied. We'd plan to arrive at the park as the gates opened, buy a $3 junior general admission seat and rush through the turnstiles to the bleachers to be in a position to shag a few bombs from the visiting team's batting practice session.

A few souvenirs later, we'd plop ourselves in the front row, first section inside the left-field foul pole. I'm not sure if these were technically in the GA section or just close enough to where no one seemed to care. Regardless, we'd love to run our 12-year-old mouths to the opposing bullpen, outdoing each other by calling Rick Honeycutt "Honey-Butt" and Eric Plunk ... Well, I'm sure you can imagine how much fun we had with that name.

On this day, my friend Steven was with us. It was actually the first game he could join us that year, having recently completed a round of chemotherapy. I actually don't remember what kind of cancer he was diagnosed with about a year prior. At that age, I'm not sure such details were important. I just knew that he was sick and we went on with our business, having fun and creating trouble as if nothing was different.

Around the eighth inning though, after several chants of "Honey-Butt" to try to get a rise out of him, Rick Honeycutt acknowledged us and walked up the railing. I remember feeling apprehensive as I thought we were about to get an earful if not more. Then, to my surprise, Rick smiled at us, called Steven closer, shook his hand, offered some encouraging words and gave him a ball.

Thinking back now, I can't tell you anything about the game itself, although I think Mark McGwire hit a home run.

Steven passed away later that year. I'm 35 today and, despite my hundreds of memories of that old park and of the all the mischief that my friend Steven used to try to pull, the image of him smiling after talking with Rick Honeycutt is always the first that pops in my head when I think of my friend or my childhood of rooting on the Tribe.

Family and life outside of baseball is usually the difficult stuff to come up with, and I can't tell you much of anything that isn't already covered on Brouthers' wiki page.

In "The Ballplayers", the SABR researcher states that John McGraw put him in charge of the press gate at the Polo Grounds after his playing days. In "The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract", this is translated as being a watchman:

"Rusie, by the way, is now assistant watchman at the Polo Grounds. Dan Brouthers is the other watchman. Often we get together and talk over old times. Always I have had a deep sentiment for veteran ball players, and I try to get them a good place any time there is a chance -- John McGraw, "My Thirty Years in Baseball" (1923, Boni and Liveright)

Other than his Irish Setter, I don't know anything about his family... but, speaking of SABR, they easily come up with the most thorough histories on players, and their on-going biography project is usually unmatched when it comes to detailed information about players' families and life before and after baseball. Unfortunately, they haven't yet completed an entry for Brouthers. Oddly enough, their home page rotates old baseball pictures through nine squares, and when I first went to the page to see if they had an entry for Brouthers, one of the pictures was Big Dan himself. Anyway, you might want to contact them, as someone could be working on it or already have some of that research at hand.

*

Thought this was a fun article about Julio's career from the Akron Beacon Journal's Sheldon Ocker, who's known Julio better than most.

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Interesting... a couple of factors that I don't think could be replicated in simulations would be media pressure and in-game strategy, both of which probably work against players today. I think DiMaggio's hitting streak could be broken, but also suspect it's less likely than the simulations show.

When Joe Baseballstar feels a twinge today, it will be reported globally within ten minutes... there's a lot of demand on any player who even approaches a 30 game hitting streak (not that there wasn't a lot of media attention on DiMaggio's streak).

I think the biggest factor though, might be relief pitching. I can't find splits for DiMaggio's career, although I think it's safe to say he hit both RHP and LHP pretty well. With more emphasis on particular matchups in today's game, and also maybe with fresher pitchers/relievers, I think there's an increased probability that an opposing manager is going to find the right combination to get the guy out one of those nights.

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From The Onion

NEW YORK—Citing a need for physical and spiritual cleansing after a Boston Red Sox fan entombed a David Ortiz jersey in the floor of the new facility, the New York Yankees buried former centerfielder Bernie Williams under 4,650 pounds of concrete Wednesday in the foundation of the new Yankee Stadium for good luck.

According to team sources, the instant the 39-year-old Williams was completely submerged in the rapidly setting structural material, stopping his voice as his lungs and mouth filled with concrete, the sun broke through the clouds and shone on the yet-incomplete field. Yankees part-owner Hank Steinbrenner called the occurrence a sign indicating that the "Curse Of A Red Sox Fan's David Ortiz Jersey" had been reversed, and that God was once again on the Yankees' side.

"Any attempt to put a hex on the New York Yankees has been successfully averted," Steinbrenner told reporters while standing over the still-wet concrete slab beneath which, judging by the sluggish ripples and lopsided bubbles in the hardening agglomerate, Williams still struggled. "Not that this organization believes in curses. We're the Yankees. We believe the success of our team is based purely on our players and their on-field performance. And we act accordingly."

"However," Steinbrenner continued, "Bernie was on our last World Series team in 2000, so we figured burying him under our new home certainly couldn't hurt. Also, he was available, and his appearance fee was quite reasonable."

The burial ceremony, which delayed the completion of the stadium approximately three weeks and cost roughly $1.5 million—$1,000 of which will go to Bernie Williams' family—involved placing Williams into a six-foot-deep concrete hole directly where the tattered Red Sox jersey was found.

Dressed in his full Yankees uniform and batting helmet, and clutching an autographed ball signed by all members of Yankees' 1996 World Series team, Williams was lowered into the ground and then covered with a combination of concrete, fly ash, slag cement, and coarse aggregate consisting mostly of gravel limestone.

Though Yankees officials did not allow Williams' family to attend the burial, citing the fact they were not "true Yankees," they permitted the former centerfielder to take with him a picture of his wife and three children after Williams provided video evidence proving that all of his family members were present and cheered during the Yankees' championship run between 1996 and 2000.

"Now, we're not necessarily hoping that having him in the foundation will mean our outfielders will start throwing like Bernie, our hitters will begin hitting like him, or our faster baserunners will start running like him," Yankees first-year coach Joe Girardi said. "Most of our guys are already better than he was. We just know—and this is what I told Bernie's family—that the good deed of letting a former Yankee permanently come home will be recognized by the baseball gods and will translate into Yankee victories, which will be good for the entire human race."

Williams, who was smiling from the moment he arrived at the new stadium until his face could no longer be seen, was grateful for the opportunity.

"I would do anything to help this ballclub win another World Series," Williams shouted up to reporters while standing in rapidly filling pit. "Just to be part of this organization again in some capacity is an honor and privilege. And even though I haven't received a thank you from the Steinbrenner family, I know they are appreciative."

"This is what it means to be a lifelong Yankgluh [sic]," Williams attempted to add.

According to Yankees president Randy Levine, the organization had been discussing various ways to exorcize the curse of the buried Red Sox jersey, under which the Yankees went an "unacceptable" 4-4. Levine said that it was Hal Steinbrenner who suggested submerging a former or current player in concrete as a good luck charm.

Interoffice e-mails confirm that players who made the short list were Yogi Berra, Paul O'Neill, and current Yankee outfielder Shelley Duncan.

"Truth be told, we didn't even think of Bernie," Levine said. "But then we got a call from his agent. It took a bit of convincing on their part, but in the end it seemed like this fulfilled both of our needs."

"By giving Bernie this chance, we have once again proven why we are the classiest organization in all of sports," Levine added. "Lesser teams would have overreacted to this whole curse thing and buried Derek Jeter."

When asked if burial in the new stadium guaranteed that Williams' No. 51 would be retired in the new Monument Park, both Steinbrenners had no comment, saying only that they appreciated Mr. Williams' commitment to the team.

From: nytimes.com with cool graphs.

A Journey to Baseball’s Alternate Universe

With the baseball season under way and the memory of scandal in the sport so fresh, many fans yearn for an earlier era, a time when mythology mingled with baseball. The sport’s most mythic achievement is Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, a feat that has never come even close to being matched. Fans and scientists alike, including Edward M. Purcell, a Nobel laureate in physics, and Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, have described the streak as well-nigh impossible.

In a fit of scientific skepticism, we decided to calculate how unlikely Joltin’ Joe’s achievement really was. Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer. In essence, we programmed the computer to construct an enormous set of parallel baseball universes, all with the same players but subject to the vagaries of chance in each one.

Here’s how it works. Think of baseball players’ performances at bat as being like coin tosses. Hitting streaks are like runs of many heads in a row. Suppose a hypothetical player named Joe Coin had a 50-50 chance of getting at least one hit per game, and suppose that he played 154 games during the 1941 season. We could learn something about Coin’s chances of having a 56-game hitting streak in 1941 by flipping a real coin 154 times, recording the series of heads and tails, and observing what his longest streak of heads happened to be.

Our simulations did something very much like this, except instead of a coin, we used random numbers generated by a computer. Also, instead of assuming that a player has a 50 percent chance of hitting successfully in each game, we used baseball statistics to calculate each player’s odds, as determined by his actual batting performance in a given year.

For example, in 1941 Joe DiMaggio had an 81 percent chance of getting at least one hit in each game (this statistic can be calculated using his total number of hits in the season, the number of games he played and his number of plate appearances). We simulated a mock version of his 1941 season, using the computer equivalent of a trick coin that comes up heads 81 percent of the time.

But the right question is not how likely it was for DiMaggio to have a 56-game hitting streak in 1941. The question is: How likely was it that anyone in the history of baseball would have achieved a streak that long or longer?

To answer this, our simulation repeated the coin-flipping experiments for every player in the history of the game, for every season in which he played. This is what we mean by a simulation of the entire history of baseball.

To tease out the meaningful lessons from random effects (fluky streaks that happen by luck), we redid the whole thing 10,000 times. In each of these simulated histories, somebody holds the record for the longest hitting streak. We tabulated who that player was, when he did it, and how long his streak was.

And suddenly the unlikely becomes likely: we get a very long streak each time we run baseball history. These results are shown in Figure 1. The streaks ranged from 39 games at the shortest, to a freakish baseball universe where the record was a remarkable (and remarkably rare) 109 games.

More than half the time, or in 5,295 baseball universes, the record for the longest hitting streak exceeded 53 games. Two-thirds of the time, the best streak was between 50 and 64 games.

In other words, streaks of 56 games or longer are not at all an unusual occurrence. Forty-two percent of the simulated baseball histories have a streak of DiMaggio’s length or longer. You shouldn’t be too surprised that someone, at some time in the history of the game, accomplished what DiMaggio did.

The real surprise is when the record was set. Our analysis reveals that 1941 was one of the least likely seasons for such an epic streak to occur.

Figure 2 shows the number of times, out of 10,000 simulations, that the longest streak occurred in a particular year. The likeliest time for the longest streak to have occurred was in the 19th century, back in the misty beginnings of baseball. Or maybe in the 1920s or ’30s.

But not in 1941, or afterward. That season was the miracle year in only 19 of our alternate major-league histories. By comparison, in 1,290 of our baseball universes, or more than a tenth, the record was set in a single year: 1894.

And Joe DiMaggio is nowhere near the likeliest player to hold the record for longest hitting streak in baseball history. He is No. 56 on the list. (Fifty-six? Cue “The Twilight Zone” music.) Two old-timers, Hugh Duffy and Willie Keeler, are the most probable record holders. Between them, they set the record in more than a thousand of the parallel baseball universes. Ty Cobb did it nearly 300 times.

DiMaggio held the record 28 times. Plus once more, when it counted.

On July 23, 1884, Providence Grays pitcher Charley Radbourn begins what may be the most remarkable feat in baseball history. "Old Hoss" pledges to pitch every game for the rest of the season if the Grays would agree not to reserve him for the following year. He pitches in nine straight games, winning seven, losing one and tying one. He takes a "day off" and plays right field before returning to pitch six more consecutive games. He plays shortstop for a single game and then pitches in 20 more consecutive games, winning 10 before having his 20-game win streak stopped. He would lead the NL in wins with 60, an ERA of 1.38, innings pitched with 678.2, strikeouts with 441, complete games with 73 and winning percentage with a .833 mark. The Grays would win the pennant by 10½ games over the Boston Beaneaters.

Source

"Delehanty's relatives hint at foul play, but there is nothing in the case, apparently, to bear out such a theory."

I can't find where I've read it now (which makes it a little difficult to say how credible the source was), but supposedly the night watchman was found to have one or two of Delahanty's belongings in his possession.

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Ping Bodie was known for and by a number of things. However, his real name didn't happen to be one of those.

As you can see above, he was born as Francesco Stephano Pezzolo, which was Americanized to Frank Stephen Bodie. He picked up the "Ping" when he started playing baseball, because it echoed the sound the ball made off of his bat. "Bodie" had become his last name because it was one of the California towns he had lived in, and his uncle had played ball under that surname as well, because Italians weren't always welcome in the game at the time.

Bodie had also lived on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, which led to one of his two interesting nicknames -- "The Rockefeller of Telegraph Hill" -- although I have no idea what the source is for the Rockefeller part. Maybe it was simply because of Bodie's reputation as a braggart.

The other nickname that Bodie picked up in those days before political correctness was "The Wonderful Wop". The fun-loving Bodie was sometimes referred to as the first Italian in the major leagues, although he clearly wasn't. Ed Abbaticchio had reached the majors 14 years earlier, and was the first known major leaguer of Italian ancestry. Both Abbaticchio and Bodie were first generation Americans. However, it is possible that Bodie opened the pipeline of West Coast Italians to the New York Yankees (Lazzeri, Crosetti, DiMaggio).

Bodie is one of a few different players purported to be the inspiration behind Ring Lardner's fictional baseball hero Jack Keefe. Considering Bodie's time with the White Sox, while Lardner covered baseball for the Chicago Tribune, it's probably a bit more credible than some of the other candidates, although Keefe was no doubt an almagamation of sorts.

There are at least two timeless lines associated with Bodie. As Babe Ruth's first roommate with the Yankees, Bodie was once asked what the experience was like, to which he replied, "I don't room with Ruth; I room with his suitcase." Also, when Bodie was retired easily on a stolen base attempt, Bugs Baer wrote: "There was larceny in his heart, but his feet were honest."

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From CNNSI

Coolbaugh dead at 35
Tulsa Drillers' first base coach killed by line drive

NORTH LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- Tulsa Drillers coach Mike Coolbaugh died Sunday night after being struck in the head by a line drive as he stood in the first-base coach's box during a Texas League game with the Arkansas Travelers, police said.

The game was suspended in the ninth inning after Coolbaugh was struck by a hard-hit foul ball off the bat of Tino Sanchez and taken to Baptist Medical Center-North Little Rock.

Travelers spokesman Phil Elson said Coolbaugh was hit on the right side of his head or on the forehead -- "I'm getting conflicting reports," he said -- and fell to the ground immediately.

According to a report posted on the Drillers' Web site late Sunday, Coolbaugh was knocked unconscious and CPR was administered to him on the field.

Sgt. Terry Kuykendall, spokesman for North Little Rock police, said Coolbaugh was still alive when he was put in an ambulance, but stopped breathing as the ambulance arrived at the hospital.

"They tried to resuscitate him, but he was pronounced dead at 9:47 p.m.," Kuykendall said.

Coolbaugh, 35, played 44 games in the major leagues for the St. Louis Cardinals and Milwaukee Brewers over two seasons. The Drillers' Web site said Coolbaugh joined the Tulsa staff on July 3 as a batting coach. He played for the team briefly in 1996.

Tulsa is a Colorado Rockies affiliate.

A native of Binghamton, N.Y., Coolbaugh went to high school in San Antonio and was drafted in 1990 by the Toronto Blue Jays in the 16th round.

He played third base and bounced around the minors for a decade, before making his major league debut with the Brewers in 2001. He played five more big league games for the Cardinals in 2002. He hit two home runs in 70 major league at-bats.

Coolbaugh's older brother, Scott, also played 167 major league games over parts of four seasons with Texas, San Diego and St. Louis in the early 1990s.

The Travelers, an Angels affiliate, led 7-3 at the time the game was suspended with no outs and a runner on first in the top of the ninth inning. Officials said a date and time for finishing the game had not yet been chosen.

Coolbaugh is survived by his wife, Mandy, and two young sons, Joseph and Jacob. Mandy Coolbaugh is expecting another child in October.

Of all players who have started their careers since 1957 (the first season I can find complete game logs for), it would appear that no one has maintained a higher career batting average than Juan Pierre. In fact, his career average has never been lower at the end of a game than the .300 he's currently sitting on after last night's game.

Pierre singled in his first major league at-bat (which is what trips up most players) in 2000, and was 2-for-5 in the game. He would collect 3 hits over his next 12 at-bats, dropping him to .294 (5-for-17). That's the lowest average of his career, and he only dipped below .300 again a couple of days later when he was 8-for-27 on the season (.296). His .310 average at the end of the season was actually the lowest batting average he ever had at the completion of any game.

Pierre's current career batting average is .3004. If he goes hitless in his next six at-bats, it would technically drop below .300, but he would have to go hitless in his next 14 at-bats before it would round down to .299.

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I can't believe I screwed this up. I swear I looked up his first game to verify that he had a hit in his first at bat. That pretty much invalidates everything in my first post. Nevermind...

Is that a record? Who would have a shot at beating that?

Joel

Nolan Ryan's seven no-hitters:

May 15th, 1973
July 15th, 1973
September 28th, 1974
June 1st, 1975
September 28th, 1981
June 11th, 1990
May 1st, 1991