What the Meltdown Means

   Today’s post is the first in what will become a semi-regular feature at the blog: a guest column, categorized as “Brain Food.” The concept is simple: invite baseball historians or writers to contribute something original which is not baseball-related. It’s an intellectual sorbet, if you will; a chance to put away the microfilm, Win Shares and Bill James books for a couple of minutes and cleanse the palette.
            A friend by the name of Dr. David Lawrence has volunteered to be our pioneer.  Dr. Lawrence is a music historian by day, and baseball history wonk by night.  He’s been a frequent contributor to the Baseball Think Factory, and is the author (along with Dom Denaro) of the Eastern Colored League monograph, which was published in conjunction with the release of ABPA’s Negro league set in 2003.
            In his essay, David tackles our troubled economy and the carnage wrought by our high-risk mortgage epidemic.  He wonders if it’s really just the bad home loans (as mainstream media would have some believe), or something larger and more sinister taking place behind the scenes.  
           David takes the same approach to writing about the economy as he does to writing about baseball.  He has a gift for articulating complex concepts in a manner all of us can understand, turning brick walls of ignorance into sliding glass partitions.  In this instance, Dr. Lawrence is to economics what former baseball writer/sabermetrician Nate Silver became to political polling this past election.
            There’s more to baseball people than….baseball.

WHAT THE MELTDOWN MEANS

 

By David A. Lawrence

 

(October 11, 2008)

 

You would think I would have had the sense to use the past four weeks of fiscal carnage to earn some money; you would be wrong. Instead, I’ve spent virtually every waking hour in an attempt to educate myself about what’s going on in the financial markets, even if that means studying material as dreary as macroeconomics and bankruptcy law.

 

The number one insight I’ve had is a profound respect for the power of the idea of an economy based on credit. It’s right up there with splitting the atom in terms of the shaping force it’s had on our world. And like atomic energy, it’s a genie that you let out of the bottle only after having given the matter very careful thought. You’ll understand why in a minute.

 

Back in the day, if you wanted a chicken, but didn’t have money, goods or services to trade for it, you went home without the chicken. Credit changed all that; and if you take that one chicken incident, multiply it by a septillion or an octillion, what you get is the modern world. Virtually anything that exists on top of nature itself was built with a credit economy: the roads, the cars, the factories, the houses, and everything in them.

 

But what I needed to understand was how a business like Lehman Brothers, with control over hundreds of billions of dollars of assets, could collapse over the course of a few days. That’s the story of the genie and the bottle.

 

In a credit economy, if your debt obligations exceed the net worth of your assets, that’s not a problem: you just assume additional debt. But here’s the rub: if the situation should ever occur in which your debt exceeds the sum of your assets PLUS your ability to assume additional debt, that’s suddenly your last day on earth.

 

So now let’s back up and see how this whole mess started. In terms of getting a handle on it, you will need to understand that there are several categories of people, popping up as talking heads in the media, who should be ignored–because they have no idea what they’re talking about.

 

The first group is stock market analysts. I don’t mean to minimize the pain of any of you who have seen large losses in your stock portfolios, but the level of the markets has very little meaning outside of itself. It’s a psycho-emotive barometer of how people feel about the economy. As such, it’s reactive to good or bad events, it doesn’t create events. Any attempt to try to “heal” the stock markets is like trying to “heal” the thermometer in a sick person’s mouth–it makes no sense.

 

The second group is focusing on bad mortgages and the people who bought them. That’s far too narrow an outlook, because the mortgages are a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it; in fact, that’s already happening. It’s true that a bunch of crooks sold deceptive mortgages to unsuspecting (and/or greedy) homebuyers, which is the match that lit this fire. But there are any number of matches that could have ignited this crisis, and it’s important to stay focused on the big picture.

 

Think of it this way: you walk in the front door of a building. There’s a small entry room–perhaps a few hundred square feet. That’s all the bad mortgages and the resulting defaults. But behind that room there’s a 50,000 square foot mansion: that’s the “big problem,” and before we can have any confidence that we’re out of danger, we have to address that one.

 

That big problem takes the form of all the side bets that have been made in exotic financial instruments that banks, hedge funds and investment groups have been selling to one another. This is what’s often referred to as “The Shadow Economy,” and it’s unimaginably huge. These side bets consist of contracts–starting (but not ending) with derivatives such as “Credit Default Swaps“ (CDS)–that wager on the success or failure of an underlying financial transaction.

 

A CDS is an insurance policy against the mortgages it covers going into default. They’re deliberately called “swaps” rather than “insurance” however, because the insurance industry is regulated–an inconvenience the designers of these schemes took pains to avoid. That should have been our first clue that these financial instruments were unsavory.

 

Insurance policies require that the insurer maintain adequate funds on hand to pay out against potential losses. The CDS issuers, by contrast, were bound by no such constraints. In other words, if the mortgages went into default, and there were not funds available to pay the policy holders, those institutions had been sold worthless contracts. And many of the CDS instruments were issued with no assets behind them at all. In other words, they were 100% leveraged: a pretty nice business to be in for the CDS sellers–not so nice for the buyers.

 

If you wanted to be extremely generous to the participants in this crap shoot, you could argue that the economic philosophy behind the issuance of a totally-leveraged derivative like a CDS was built on the false assumption that assets, including homes, will always appreciate in value. Unfortunately, a far more compelling argument can be made that the entire business was a scam from the start: the mortgages were bad, the insurance on them largely worthless, and everybody involved was trying to make a quick and dirty buck.

 

Meanwhile, we’re left with all the toxic debits in The Shadow Economy. Here’s a good way to visualize it: you’re sitting at a poker table. Behind you, there’s a guy taking bets on whether you’re going to win or lose. Behind him, there’s another guy taking bets on whether the first guy is going to be right on wrong about you. And so on, and so on, and so on.

 

Beyond the absurdly risky nature of making all these bets, there are two other aspects of this situation that you need to understand. First, if unexpectedly bad events occur at your poker table, all 17 guys standing behind you, each one making bets based on the success of the guy in front of him, could fall down like a row of dominos.

 

The second danger, which should be formulated in traditional economic terms, is that neither you nor the 17 bettors behind you are producing any goods or services. That’s how we got into our current situation, in which 21% of our Gross Domestic Product consists of financial transactions that are side bets on other financial transactions. A financially sound economy produces things; it doesn’t stand around and make wagers on what other people are doing.

 

Now we’re at the heart of the matter. Experts put the size of this Shadow Economy at somewhere between 50 and 75 trillion dollars. That’s “trillion,” with a “T.” I warned you it was unimaginably huge. If the Shadow Economy’s debts all had to be paid off, there are not enough financial assets on earth to do that. We’d have to sell our planet to another planet.

 

But wait, it gets much worse. In order to grow this crazed subculture of side bets, the instruments themselves have become progressively more complex. It’s now standard practice for that 17^th contract–based on the outcomes of the 16 contracts in front of it–to be 300 pages long, and understandable only to the one person who actually wrote it. In other words, the banks, hedge funds and other financial institutions that are holding these instruments really have no idea what they own, or in terms of their balance sheet, what that means.

 

So we’ve come a very long way from that transaction in which one person gets a chicken and the other person gets a nickel. These institutions will now admit, if pressed, that they simply don’t know what assets and liabilities are on their books, because they own thousands of these contracts, and it’s impossible to decipher them, much less evaluate them.

 

That’s exactly where we are right now. What the credit crisis is about is that Bank “A” is simply unwilling to make a loan to Bank “B,” because “A” doesn’t have any idea what kind of garbage “B” has on its books. Worse yet, “A” strongly suspects that “B” doesn’t know what’s on its books either. And without credit flowing from one entity to another, you have no capitalization of the economy. And given that the economy runs on credit, without capitalization it slows, and then eventually stalls out. We call that “The Great Depression.”

 

I hope it’s obvious, at this point, that a firewall has to be built in the house of finance, between the bad mortgages in the entry room, and the hopelessly tangled Shadow Economy mess in the rest of the mansion. We can solve the problem of the mortgages, but not if all the CDS and other derivative side bets come trailing along after them.

 

A lot of my studies have been devoted to possible solutions to the problem of the Shadow Economy; it’s going to have to be addressed somehow. The first realization, in this respect, is that a normal litigation process that would resolve the debits owed and the credits due is not within the realm of possibility. Since it would take an expert on contract law a year to decipher even one of these instruments, and there may be millions of them, that’s a process that would take centuries.

 

In real terms, what that 17^th contract looks like, is that a bank or hedge fund or investment group owns some portion of a side bet on whether 27.4 percent of 13 thousand people will or will not pay off their mortgages. In other words, they either have a net debit or a net credit, flowing from the many outcomes on which this contract is based. But, even if it’s a credit, given how many ways these mortgages have been chopped up and repackaged, they would find it nearly impossible to find out who the co-complainants are that own the other 72.6 percent of that contract, much less who the debtors are from whom they’re trying to collect. No attorney, no matter how desperate for business, would take that case.

 

What I have proposed, instead, is called “The Mortgage-Attached Contract Nullification Act of 2008.” If passed by the Congress and signed by the President, it would simply wipe out all those side bets, and destroy the looming disaster that the Shadow Economy poses if it stays attached to the mortgage crisis. The tricky little problem with my proposal is that it’s almost certainly unconstitutional.

 

I could find only two cases in American history in which an attempt has been made to nullify an entire class of contracts through legislative or executive action. The first is the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which withstood the constitutionality test for a set of very complex reasons. The second, in 1932, consisted of Franklin Roosevelt’s attempts to staunch the bleeding from a liquidity crisis much like our own. That one did not pass the constitutionality test, and probably represented the worst policy failure of FDR’s presidency.

 

There is only one other possible alternative to my proposal, and it’s not pretty. That’s to pass all the Shadow Economy contracts through bankruptcy courts. In a sense, this is a pretty realistic option, since they obviously can’t all be paid. Unfortunately, it would require either a thousand-fold increase in the number of bankruptcy courts, or else the handling of the litigation by bundling it into huge classes of similar cases.

 

Anyone familiar with how bankruptcy works knows the term “cram down.” It’s what a defense attorney does in order to get his client’s creditors to take the smallest possible settlement on the debt he owes. The key is always to try to minimize the cram down percentage. Using only my wits and my handheld calculator, it seems to me that something like one percent of the total debt owed would be about the right cram down percentage in this instance. I realize that’s a very small number, relatively speaking. But anything much larger would represent more money than even the healthiest of the debtors could afford to pay.

 

In other words, this process would be a bloodbath. A pretty substantial portion of the debtors wouldn’t be able to meet even that very low standard, and those businesses would go bankrupt. At the same time, the creditors would be screaming about how deeply discounted their repayments were going to be. If they were both creditors and debtors at the same time–which is extremely likely in the cases of many financial institutions–they would be doubly screwed.

 

What would the end result of such a process be, and how would it look to the rest of us? Given the huge number of bankruptcies that would result, we could see 15 to 20 percent unemployment on a national scale, within a recession that might last somewhere between 18 months and 10 years. Whole sectors of the economy would be devastated.

 

Perhaps more importantly, what would the societal consequences be? Well, first of all, we would witness the flushing of a very big toilet on Wall Street–with everything that’s in there disappearing forever into the sewer. That would certainly be met with loud cheers from most of us, and would represent, I think it’s fair to say, a progressive socio-political event.

 

But the second consequence would be a profound redefinition of the role of credit in our society, and that one’s not so simple to parse. Just as both Washington and Wall Street have become dangerously comfortable with spending money they don’t have, so has Main Street. The average American household carries debt equal to 129 percent of its total net worth. As with Lehman Brothers, that’s OK until the day comes when you can no longer find people to lend you additional debt to pay off your debt. In effect, we may have to go back to paying for our chickens with actual nickels.

 

To give you the flavor of the problem, in one of George W. Bush’s State of the Union speeches, he laid out the goal of having every American own their own home. It’s fairly astonishing that this is a Republican president articulating an ideal that would have brought a smile to the face of Karl Marx. Never mind that he probably said it for a whole variety of cynical political reasons: the fact is, he said it. And what it clearly implies is that nobody really has to worry very much about whether they can actually afford to pay for what they’re buying.

 

That’s precisely the problem with letting the credit genie out of the bottle. If people, at any level, get the idea that credit is limitless, and that the endless accumulation of debt is somehow not a problem, by the irrefutable laws of economics there will eventually come a day of reckoning. The reason such massive fear set in as we watched gigantic and venerable financial institutions being eaten alive is that they made many of the same mistakes that some of us are making–just on a far larger scale. What’s so scary is that, in a worst case scenario, we are all Lehman Brothers.

 

 

© 2008, David A. Lawrence, PhD

 

(David A. Lawrence has served on the faculties of several universities, including UCLA and Stanford)

 

Satchel Paige- 1960

Satchel Paige with Salina, 1960.

I’ve got a new piece on Satchel Paige posted over at seamheads. The essay focuses on one of Satchel’s “lost seasons,” 1960, a year mostly glossed over in the biographical stuff on Paige.  The man had an interesting life, and even in a *down year* his travels and tribulations are more compelling than most ballplayer’s peaks.  He becomes a father for the 7th time, gets lost in the foggy hinterlands of southern Wisconsin, is robbed and writes a book.  I hope you enjoy the piece.

Interview: KJOK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First a confession. When I learned KJOK was a rabid St. Louis Cardinals fan, I was surprised to discover he could not only read and write, but was a proficient numbers analyst as well. Having grown up in an ultra-conservative Chicago Cubs household, I was raised to not trust those who lived south of Springfield, or west of the Mississippi. Cardinal fans were said to be communists, immoral, and known for their heinous cruelty to animals. We were taught they ate with their hands, lived in caves, and eschewed the use of soap. We were not, under any circumstances, allowed to interact with Redbird worshippers; unless, of course, the interaction involved pelting them with rotten cantaloupes.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become an agnostic baseball fan (that is, I’m not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of the Cubs), and often seek out activities which challenge my old prejudices.  Such was the case with my KJOK e-mail exchange.  Turns out he’s a decent guy.  Not just decent, but an actual human being named Kevin Johnson.  He sent me a picture as evidence, and although I’ve sent it to a Washington, DC laboratory for authentication (it’s hard to break old habits), I’m 95% sure it’s him.

We’ve got a few things in common; he’s a family guy, has a job, used to play softball.  He also enjoys researching baseball.  His internet handle has become a brand name, recognizable on many baseball sights.  What I like about Kevin- and all bullshit aside here for a moment- is his versatility.  Whereas a lot of baseball nuts find their particular niche; whether it be focusing on minor league ball, sabermetrics, negro leagues, whatever, Kevin deftly ventures into many different areas of baseball history.  Not only does he have a broad palette, he actually gets stuff done; posting articles, commentary and statistical information on a wide variety of baseball themes.  A lot of his original work can be found at www.seamheads.com, where he is one of the founding contributors.

I haven’t shared this with KJOK until now, but his work on SABR’s minor league database is one of the big reasons I finally decided to join the group.  Seriously.  I saw the thing (through a link at www.agatetype.typepad.com, and said, “If this is what they’re doing now, I’m in.  Sign me up.”    

If you take all of the crap I’m going to post on this blog over the next ten years and combined it, it won’t be anywhere near as valuable to other baseball researchers and writers as the SABR minor league database Kevin helped build.  It’s a pretty astonishing achievement.  KJOK was kind enough to put some projects to the side and share some of his time:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KJOK.  It’s become a brand name of sorts on the internet.  First off, I have to know: is KAY-JAY-OH-KAY, or KAY-JOCK?  

When coming up with an internet handle, I took Kevin Johnson from Oklahoma to create KJ-OK, so it’s supposed to be KAY-JAY-OH-KAY, but I think most people read it as KAY-JOCK

 

 

Ok, cool, I guess I’ve had it right the last couple years.  I’m sort of curious about the man behind the initials.  Who is KJOK?  Can you share some non-incriminating details from your past.  Where are you from?  What college did you attend?  And finally- I know this sounds like I’m asking you out on a date, but… what was your major?

I’m from St. Louis County in Missouri.  I attended Washington University in St. Louis.   My major was Business Administration with an emphasis in Mangement Information Systems.

 

I understand you followed the Cardinals as a wee pup.  Who was your favorite player growing up? 

My favorite was Lou Brock, probably because I was a speedy, non-power hitting outfielder myself.

 

And who would you have in your all-time Cardinals starting line-up?

KJOK’s All-Time Cardinals starting Lineup:

C – Simmons

1B – Pujols

2B – Hornsby

SS – Smith

3B – Boyer

LF – Musial

CF – Lankford

RF – Slaughter

P – Gibson 

 

Where the heck’s Lou Brock?  Is it hard leaving him out of the line-up?

Lou is definitely on the team.  But he can’t beat out Musial, so he’ll be doing a lot of pinch-running I guess.

 

 

Ok you’ve already stated you were a mini-Lou Brock growing up.  I always like to ask about people’s tour of duty in Little League, because it’s part of the genesis of why we still follow the game as adults.  There’s the good, bad and ugly of it that makes it so unforgettable. What was your LL experience like? 

I was fortunate to join a team that almost never lost.  We either went undefeated or had just 1 loss every year.  There were already ‘all-star’ players at all of the infield positions, so I got put into the outfield.  I was a decent fielder with a strong arm, but not much of a hitter.  Offensively, I mostly walked, bunted, and stole bases.  My claim to fame is I was never thrown out stealing.

 

After Little League, did you continue playing ball?  When did you finally hang up the cleats?

I played football and soccer in high school, but once I graduated, I started playing softball.  Some years I played on 3 different teams at once.   I finally hung up my cleats in my early thirties due to low back problems.

 

 

What is your day job today?  On your seamheads.com bio, it says you’re married with two children—how do they deal with your baseball obsession? 

I work for a travel technology company, mostly crunching numbers to analyze work load and performance trends.   My wife is an early to bed, early to rise person, while I’m a ‘nite owl’, so I’m able to feed my obsession at night when the rest of the family is in bed.

 

I know you’re in Broken Arrow , OK .  Ever bump into Warren Spahn before he got called up to the big leagues in the sky?

No, my ‘touch’ with fame in Broken Arrow has been seeing Brad Penny pitch when he was in high school, and being a co-worker for awhile with Patsy Brewer, who is the widow of Jim Brewer, former Dodger pitcher.

 

When did you first get involved in SABR? 

I first became a member around 1986, after reading about the organization in one of the Bill James Abstracts.  I took a 10 year break from 1991-2001, but have been a more active member my second go-around.

 

When did you get involved with the minor league database?  How many people are working on this project? 

 I became involved with the Minor League Database over two years ago.   There are four ‘main’ people working on the project, plus another 5-10 volunteers at various times who are massaging specific pieces of data, such as ballparks, for example.  We need more volunteers!

 

If somebody is interested, how would they get involved in the minor league database project? 

Email sabrmilb@gmail.com.

 

What is the most important thing you’ve learned while working on the minor league database? (this could be anything, from the logistics of managing a large project, or something about baseball history you may not have known)  What can expect from the database in the future?

The most important thing I learned may be that there is just SOOO much data that is available, but not in digitized form. It’s a very slow process to get data ‘cleaned up’ and entered into the database.  The other thing I’ve learned is how knowledgeable some people are about biographical info of minor league players.  It’s a huge issue to try to figure out instances such as if John Jacobs from 1948 Louisville and Jack Jacobs from 1948 Des Moines are the same player, or two different players, etc., but there are actually experts out there who are great at figuring these things out, and that’s a tremendous help to getting a good database.

 

What can expect from the database in the future?

In the future, I’m hoping we can continue to see leagues, teams, players, ballparks, etc. added bit by bit to the database.   The best line to use is that this is a PROJECT, NOT an Encyclopedia.  It probably won’t be ‘complete’ in my lifetime, as there’s just so much that can be added in.

 

You’re not just a minor leagues guy, of course, you’ve also written a quality piece on the 1928 St. Louis Stars play-off series, and done some nice work with MLEs.  Can you talk a little bit about your diverse interests?

When I ‘came back’ to to baseball research in the early 2000′s, in addition to continuing my ballparks research, I wanted to focus on areas I didn’t really know much about, so I got involved in learning about the 19th century, Japanese Leagues, and Minor Leagues.  A Negro League expert by the name of Gary Ashwill was in a historical simulation league with me, and he turned me on to researching the Negro Leagues, which is probably my favorite area of research right now.

 

You’ve done some biographical stuff on blackball stars, including Andrew “Rube” (Bishop?) Foster, what other kind of Negro League-related projects do you have in the works?

Finding out Rube Foster’s real birthplace possibly being La Grange was just a lucky accident.  I was searching Google Books for anything related to the Negro Leagues, and found a sociological study of race relations in Chicago following the race riot of 1919, and one of the example anonymous  subjects, with occupation “baseball mogul”, was obviously Foster.   Gary Ashwill then found the “Bishop” name in the 1880 census taken near La Grange.

 

Most of my blackball work is statistical as opposed to biographical.  I have a book manuscript I’ve been working on, tentatively called “Lost Leagues:  1928 Negro National and Eastern Colored Leagues”.   It uses statistical research done by Gary Ashwill to do a ‘Bill James Abstract’ type of treatment on the 1928 Negro Leagues.

 

Bud Selig calls and says YOU can vote five more Negro League players into the Hall of Fame.  Who would they be?

 

Bill Monroe, Quincy Trouppe, John Beckwith, Alejandro Oms, Dick Redding.

 

Let me give you a choice: Chino Smith or Dick Lundy?  It’s “Super Star” for a couple years versus “Star” for a long, long time… 

I’d have to go with Lundy, as he was such an important figure, and he managed too.

 

You’re a very active participant on www.seamheads.com.  If somebody is a baseball history buff, but has not yet stumbled upon the site, how would your describe it to them?  What is it about?

We hope it’s a site for even already knowledgeable fans to learn about baseball.  It is a history site, but that includes CURRENT history, as we have articles about current teams, fantasy baseball, etc. in addition to articles that go back and re-examine more distant events, and events that may not be that well-known. 

 

What’s the story behind the site?  What do you envision in the future for the site?

Seamheads is really the creation of my friend Mike Lynch, who is the author of the book “Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson, and the Feud that Nearly Destroyed the American League”.   Mike first started an OOTP historical simulation league called ‘Diamond Kings’ that I was part of, then he created a spot to host the league data and message boards, and called it seamheads.com.  When he was ready to launch a baseball site, the URL and the cool name was already his to use, and he graciously asked me to join him in the initial launch.  We now have over 20 writers contributing to the site.  Besides high quality articles, we envision this will be a site to get some baseball data you can’t get from even Baseball-Reference.com, such as detailed ballparks data, including minor leagues, Negro League World Series/Playoffs data, Negro League Major League Equivalents (MLE’s), pre-1984 Player Salaries, etc.  

 

What, specifically, can we look forward regarding the historical MLEs? 

There are 3 other guys that have done detailed MLEs.  I’m very hopeful that we’ll have a database available on seamheads.com by early next year that contains the 4 different MLE’s for 100 or so Negro League players.

 

Any other things coming up that we should know about?  Books?  Upcoming articles?

My current article on seamheads.com is on the 1927 Negro League World Series.  I’ve recompiled the batting, pitching and fielding stats from play-by-play accounts.  

 

I’ll also have a small section in the New Negro Leagues Book coming out sometime next year I believe.  I’m writing the section on the history of the St. Louis Stars franchise.

 

Is the Negro Leagues Book a revised edition of the Lester/Clark book from 1994?

Exactly.   It’s been 14 years, and a lot of new research has happened since then, so hopefully this will be the new definitive book on the Negro Leagues.

 

Ok, you’re on a deserted island: Give me your top 5 baseball books to bring along.  

This is the toughest question!

 

Baseball is a Funny Game

The Glory of their Times

Bill James Historical Abstract

The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia

Ball Four

  

Finally, taking in ALL of baseball history (black, white or other), give me your all-time greatest starting line-up.  Eight position players, one DH, two starting pitchers, and a closer.

C – Josh Gibson

1B – Lou Gehrig

2B – Rogers Hornsby

SS – Honus Wagner

3B – Mike Schmidt

LF – Stan Musial

CF – Willie Mays

RF – Babe Ruth

DH – Ted Williams

SP1 – Walter Johnson

SP2 – Lefty Grove

CL – Mariano Rivera

 

Thanks, Kevin.  Please come back down the road…

Brock in 1967

The House of Beards

There was once a group of bearded religious zealots who traveled around the country, playing baseball, entertaining people, hocking merchandise, and spreading the good news that we were all going to die in the very near future.

            When we talk about the House of David, one of the things we forget (one of the things softened by time) is that they were actually a doomsday cult.  Their ballclub was traveling the backroads of the nation, trying to raise money, and save souls.  The were attempting to recruit members; and by *recruit* I mean convince families to sell all their wordly possessions, move to Benton Harbor, Michigan, and give all their money to the cult’s corrupt spiritual leader, Benjamin Purnell.

            Purnell, among other things, believed he was the brother of Jesus Christ.  Prior to starting the cult, Jesus’ brother had apparently been a broom salesman and traveling preacher in Kentucky and Indiana.

            After signing on with the colony, and giving the place all your money; you had to abstain from sexual activity and become a vegetarian.  Plus, you were encouraged to grow a really cool beard.

            If all this sounds eerily similar to David Koresh’s Waco Wackos- aka the Branch Davidians- well then, you’re thinking much too clearly.  You’re starting to get it.

            Now on to the diamond…

            Their baseball team (actually, they sometimes had 2 or 3 traveling around the country at the same time), was really a big deal.  Up there with any of the big name Negro League clubs in terms of traveling gate attractions, and like any barnstorming team worth its weight in salt, claimed to win upwards of 80-85% of their games.

            They lied.  Oh, they had a number of former minor leaguers on their roster (hired to play on behalf of the colony), and a few washed up big leaguers.  They even hired Satchel Paige for a few weeks and won a tournament.  They had good years, that much is true.  But they didn’t win anywhere close to 85% of their games.

            I’ve got over 1500 box scores and game accounts in my collection (please don’t ask why) and I’m pretty confident they won more than they lost against semi-pro competition.  But when they stepped up the comp, played against the Negro League teams, white minor and major leaguers; the tune was a little bit different.   In fact, their ballclubs got an ass-whippin’ of Biblical proportions:

 

OPPONENT	W	L	PCT
Vs. Major League	3	27	.100
Vs. Negro League	7	37	.159
Vs. Minor League	12	31	.279

 

In games where the attendance was listed, they averaged 9500 fans vs. MLB ballclubs and 4097 vs. Negro League teams.

Interview: Gary Ashwill

Gary’s Favorite Cookie

If you have a serious interest in Negro League or Cuban baseball history, but haven’t yet discovered the work of Gary Ashwill, you might be in jeopardy of having your Baseball Dork Membership revoked.  Ashwill was a member of the Negro League Research and Authors Group (NLRAG), a team charged with the responsibility of collecting and compiling statistical information from the pre-integration black leagues.  Sponsored by MLB and the Baseball Hall of Fame, this historic study was used during the selection process in 2006, when 17 players and executives from the apartheid circuits were inducted at Cooperstown.  After completing his work with NLRAG, Ashwill has continued to be an active researcher, contributing to conversations at the Baseball Think Factory (Hall of Merit), as well as posting copious amounts of ground-breaking material to his popular blog, www.agatetype.typepad.com. Ashwill has always let the integrity of his work speak for itself and has seemingly shied away from crass self promotion.  Today, this elusive researcher- the Beethoven of Blackball Stats- lets down his guard a little bit, sharing information about the past, present and future of all things Gary A.

Gary, first of all, thanks for being a willing victim here at the blog.  There’s a number of us who’ve loitered around your site over the past couple years, a gaggle of baseball history drifters and ne’er do-wells… but we know more about your work than we do about you the person.  I’m sure you prefer it that way, but I was hoping you could share some non-incriminating details from your past.  Where are you from? What college(s) did you attend?  What was your major?

 I’m from Kansas City. I went to the University of Kansas for undergrad, Duke University for grad school.  Oddly, I am not really that much of a college basketball fan, though I root for the Jayhawks in a kind of disconnected, not-that-intense way.  I was an English major.

What baseball team did you follow as a child?  Who was your favorite player?

The Royals.  My favorite player was (who else?) Amos Otis.  I also liked Dan Quisenberry and Frank White (still the best defensive second baseman I’ve ever seen) and, when I was really young, Cookie Rojas, mostly, I think, because his name was “Cookie.”  And of course there was the Mad Hungarian, Al Hrabosky!  And Dirty Kurt Bevacqua.  Whitey Herzog remains my favorite manager.  One of the greatest moments in my life was when George Brett crushed that 3-run home run off Goose Gossage in game 3 of the 1980 ALCS.

Oh, I was a Cookie Rojas guy myself.  When he finally hung up the cleats, after 16 years as a replacement level player, he became a replacement level coach with the Cubs here in Chicago.  He had the horn-rimmed glasses, looked like an electrical engineer, and never said a word.  We loved the guy!

Now, in between fawning over Amos Otis and the Quiz, you must have played some ball as a kid.  What kind of ballplayer were you growing up?  What position(s) did you play?

HA HA HA.   I didn’t do sports that much as a kid due to health reasons, but I did play some in Little League.  I was a second baseman, could run & field pretty well, but had a crappy arm and couldn’t hit.  Which would make me the little-kid equivalent of…Sparky Anderson? (As a player.)  If I could be any kind of player, I would be a soft-tossing lefty junkballer with an unorthodox delivery and an arsenal of weird breaking pitches. (In reality, I’m right-handed.)

I want to jump back really quick to the whole Kansas/Missouri thing for a second.  I was just wondering, what is it about that area and baseball people?  Bill James, Rob Neyer, Larry Lester, Phil Dixon, and Kevin (KJOK) Johnson have all lived (or passed through) there at some point in time.  Please tell me I’m simply not adjusting for context here. That if I looked at NYC, for instance, I’d discover a significantly larger group of influential baseball writers and researchers.  Can you put your finger on anything, or is it really a matter of coincidence (or context)?

Patrick Rock also lives in KC (on the Kansas side), I believe.  I’ve thought about this, too, but really, I have no idea.  Kansas City is historically a great baseball town (though David Glass has done his level best to put an end to that), so that’s probably got something to do with it.  Thinking about the Negro Leagues, the Monarchs were a more prominent institution in the black community than teams in other cities, and lasted longer.  Your NY Black Yankees fans, for instance, were probably never very passionate in the first place, given that the team sucked & that there were so many other options, plus that fanbase would have dissipated pretty quickly, whereas the Monarchs were still around through the 50s.  So there’s a lot more civic consciousness of the Monarchs there than teams elsewhere.  None of that really explains anything, though.  Just think of KC and its eastern Kansas hinterland as the San Pedro de Macoris for baseball nerds.

KC is the San Pedro de Macoris for baseball nerds?  I think we’ve got a bumper sticker idea in the works.

What is your day job today?

I work as a freelance editor, mostly consulting with academic writers.

Married or single?

I’m married.  My wife doesn’t much like baseball, aside from the World Series, but she loves basketball, football & tennis.  We also have a lot of fun following the English premiership.

How old are you Gary?

41.

How did you first get involved in Negro League research? When did you get involved with the Negro League Researchers and Author’s Group (NLRAG)?

I started doing Negro League research on my own in 1999 or 2000, when, while working as an RA for a Duke professor, I noticed the Chicago Defender in the microfilm stacks.  One of the first years I read through was 1921, and it was a big surprise to find just how much coverage there was– two or three full pages, dozens of box scores, all these teams I’d never heard of.  Within a year or two I posted some fielding stats to SABR-L & the Negro League Yahoo group.  John Holway & some others were kind enough to discuss them with me, and soon Dick Clark wrote to ask if I wanted to help with the NLRAG project.

What did you learn while working on the HOF/Negro League project with NLRAG?

 Well, a great deal, obviously.  Those were the first two seasons I finished (1928 & 1934).  One thing that stood out was how much sketchier 1934 was than 1928, for a lot of reasons.  In the 1920s you will find box scores for the vast majority of Negro League games in mainstream daily papers as well as the black weeklies, and most of those box scores will be pretty good.  In the 1930s a lot of daily papers cut down on their box scores of non-major league games (a lot of the space was taken up by large photos), and even the black weeklies weren’t as complete in their coverage.

During my work with Strat-O-Matic, I’ve had to struggle with the stark contrasts between the pre-Depression and post-Crash coverage myself.  Now, what other things did you discover during your research?

If you mean specific findings, to me one of the biggest discoveries was that the 44-year-old John Henry Lloyd did *not* hit .564 in 1928.  You see that stat quoted a lot, so it’s kind of important.  He hit well, but not THAT well.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about the Hall of Fame data.  Have I (and the other 17 people around the country who are interested in it) blown things out of proportion with our angst over not having access, or should we still be fighting for it?  Over the past couple years (having busied myself with a ton of my own research), I now view that data as having become a garage full of stale, domestic beer.  I mean, there’s a lot of it there, but…it’s freakin’ Budweiser.  If I’m going to indulge in the spirits of baseball past, I’m resigned to focusing on the occassional vintage bottles of wine; like Phil Dixon’s work on the ’05 Philadelphia Giants, Patrick Rock’s monumental Replay achievement, or even David Lawrence’s statistical modeling efforts for APBA.  Is that fair?

Well, no, it’s not fair.  When the NLRAG statistics are published, they will be the Negro League equivalent of the original Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, one of the most important books in the history of baseball research.  It’s a fundamental necessity.  It won’t be even close to the final word on anything, of course.  It won’t have pre-1920 stats, it won’t have Latin American data (I’m assuming). But it will give everyone a baseline to start with.  You could look up Rap Dixon’s or Oliver Marcell’s or William Bell’s career stats, which you can’t do now (except in the outdated Negro League sections of the Macmillan)–and see them in the context of their teams and leagues.  You could look up the starting line-up of the 1928 Cleveland Tigers.  Or whatever.  All (or most of) the things you can do at  baseball-reference.com or in the ESPN baseball encyclopedia for major league players.  And, like the Big Mac, it will have an influence.  People will say, “Who’s this George Scales guy? How come I never heard of him?”  Or Charles Blackwell, or Bus Clarkson, or Leroy Matlock.

On the earlier part of the question: I don’t know why it hasn’t been published yet, though I’ve heard various explanations.  I would say that everyone who’s interested should keep on expressing that interest, so that the decision-makers get some inkling that there is an audience for it.

Obviously, I was being a bit facetious with my question.  I think we both agree there’s a market for a Negro League Encyclopedia, and can appreciate the historical significance of it.  When you consider this country is going through one of the most dramatic changes in it’s history right now: I think the thirst for knowledge in this particular area is only going to increase with time.  Now, my personal frustration rests with the fact that whenever anybody contacts the Hall of Fame, MLB or Larry Lester, they seem to get a) the brush off, or b) a finger pointed at one of the other two groups.  It all seems eerily similar to the leadership of the actual Negro National League in the late 30s and 40s, when despite entering a strong financial period in the history of the league, the leadership struggled to put aside their personal interests for the sake of the greater good.

Ah, whatever, I’ll get off my soapbox…

Let’s make a bee-line for some fun stuff: You’re a very active blogger, sharing a lot of original research material through your public web space, can you tell me how (in terms of time, emphasis, or however you wish to define it) your research efforts have changed since the HOF project wrapped up in 2006?

I started my blog well after my involvement in the NLRAG was over.  The two biggest shifts in my research since I started the blog have been 1) delving into Cuban baseball and 2) more of an emphasis on biographical work: identifying players, finding birth & death dates, separating out players who have been mistakenly combined, etc.  The Cuban stuff started because there was an opportunity–one of the libraries I use happens to have important Cuban newspapers on microfilm.  The biographical work was originally a consequence of the statistical compilations.  I couldn’t help but notice, for example, when players’ names appeared differently in box scores than in The Negro Leagues Book or Riley’s encyclopedia or other reference books.  Or when somebody supposedly played for two different teams on the same day several hundred miles apart, meaning of course that they were really two different people.  It was also a matter of opportunity, with the relatively recent appearance of digitized databases of historical records (census records, passenger records, draft cards, etc.), especially at Ancestry.com, to which I was introduced by Patrick Rock.

If somebody is interested in baseball history, but has never seen your blog (www.agatetype.typepad.com), what would you want them to know about your work?

I apply rigorously empirical methods to a subject that tends to be dominated by tall tales and legends.  This involves anything from compiling playing statistics to investigating old mysteries to identifying players who only appear as last names in reference books.  Some of it resembles Rob Neyer’s recent book on baseball legends, I guess, like investigating what really happened when Ty Cobb when to Cuba in 1910, where he was supposedly thrown out stealing two or three or seven or eleven straight times by Bruce Petway.  Some of it is probably mostly intestering to obsessives like me, such as figuring our the identity of a guy named “Poree” who pitched in one game for the 1921 St. Louis Giants, or uncovering evidence that Rube Foster was really born in La Grange, Texas, rather than Calvert (orginally uncovered by Kevin Johnson & reported on my blog), and the earth-shattering revelation that his middle name might have been “Bishop.”

I think guys like you and Patrick Rock represent “Generation Next” (for lack of a spiffier catch-phrase) of Negro League researchers.  Having done a couple tours of research duty myself, I sometimes think about how challenging this stuff must have been for the pioneers; people like John Holway, Dick Clark and the late Robert Peterson.  I believe our work is easier these days, thanks to excel, the internet, web-based listings of library microfilm resources and digitized newspapers.  We’ll, let’s be honest, it’s also easier because of the foundation of information laid down by people like Larry Lester, Donn Rogosin, James Riley and Phil Dixon.  Considering how much our understanding of the segregated leagues has evolved over the past 38 years, when Peterson published the watershed Only The Ball was White, where do you think we’ll be in the next 38 years?  Hell, where will our understanding and resources be in the next five years?

In the near future I hope that more and more research files and newspapers are digitized and made accessible.  Also, I’m hoping that more genuine archival finds are made.  After all, Neil Lanctot, as I understand it, uncovered the 1926 Hilldale scorebooks only in the 1990s.  There must be more treasures like that out there, moldering in someone’s attic or forgotten at the back of some filing cabinet.  Or maybe newspaper runs we don’t have now, like the Pittsburgh Courier 1920-22.  And Latin American baseball.  I think a LOT of great data (in addition to what we’ve already got) will become available about Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican & Venezuelan leagues in the next few years.

In 38 years we will be travelling back in time machines to record the games ourselves.  Except the butterfly effect will cause all the results to be different, therby invalidating all our previous research. D’oh!  Or maybe somebody will travel back to beat up Cap Anson, and segregation will never have happened in the first place.

Oh man, time travel sounds cool!  Actually, I think the simulation world in 38 years will allow us to do something as close to time travel as humanly possible.  I think we’ll be able to pitch to Josh Gibson or Babe Ruth in a three-dimensional world.  We’ll be able to sit in the bleachers of old Yankee Stadium and watch the ’27 Yankees.  We’ll bat against Nolan Ryan or Satchel Paige.  It’s going to be the combination of physical athletics, video game technology and I-Max theatre stuff.  Everything will be customized; whether you want to be a player, a GM, a fan—you’ll select your own reality.  If you’d like, you’ll even be able to sleep with Claire Ruth.  It’ll be creepy…

Ok, back to the research; the data collection or “coding” we’re doing today that’s going to make all of the future stuff possible and realistic.  What’s the next challenge in blackball research?

Trying to compile and make sense of games against white semi-pro opponents.  Park factors.  Interpreting fielding stats–will my obsession with them result in any useful insights about, for example, how good a third baseman Ray Dandridge really was, or whether Oscar Charleston was really a great center fielder?  In general, interpretation of the data, especially in the form of major league equivalencies.  There’s already good work on this, as you know, at the Hall of Merit by people like Chris Cobb, Brent Moulton, and Eric Chalek.  But that’s only the start.  Like Mao supposedly said when asked about the consequences of the French Revolution: “It’s too early to tell.”  And since there’s never been a *complete”, systemic examination of the whole record for all the players, there are bound to be surprises.  I have a feeling there might be a couple of pitchers who turn our to have surprisingly good batting records, for example.  If we had enough data, players like Candy Jim Taylor, Bill Pettus, or Water “Steel Arm” Davis might turn out to be better than we think.  Of course, those are just hunches, informed guesses; the point is, we don’t know yet.

There are also interesting questions to ask about the larger theoretical issues, such as: what effect did not having access to good statistics have on managerial decisions?  My own feeling is that in a Negro League (& semi-pro) context, pitching and flashy fielding were considered much more important than hitting.  Sure, they wanted good hitters, but that’s actually soemthing that’s a little hard to judge without good statistics.  It’s like Bill James said: nobody *looked* like a better hitter than Moose Skowron.  When sportswriters and managers discussed the best Negro League first baseman, they were primarily talking about *fielding.*  For every Mule Suttles, you had a dozen guys like George McAllister or Lemuel Hawkins or Chance Cummings.  Was it just the talent available, or were they making conscious choices in favor of flashy fielding over better hitting?  Also, given the small rosters, they tended to emphasize flexibility.  So instead of stocking, say, left field with the best slugger they could find, they were more likely to keep a LF who could also fill in at shortstop or maybe pitch or whatever.  Anyway, I think it’s another challenge to try to account for the Negro Leaguers’ unique requirements for roster construction and player evaluation.

Another challenge will be presenting the data, organizing it, and making it readily accessible to a larger audience.  This might be through some Negro League version of Retrosheet, or new reference books, or (preferably) both.

We could probably talk about players all night, but allow me to throw out a couple names that have been hotly debated in recent years, Cool Papa Bell and John Beckwith.

Does Cool Papa Bell get an unfair shake by viewing him with today’s sabermetric tool box?

He was a good player, no doubt about that.  What little fielding data I have on him suggests that he may have been a great center fielder, at least in terms of range (as you would expect).  But was he really so fast that the records system breaks down in his case, and his case only?  Is there anybody like that in major league history?  Does Rickey Henderson or George Case or Lou Brock or Ty Cobb or Maury Wills or Luis Aparicio or Willie Wilson get an unfair shake?  Nobody seems to think so.  I know people will say, well, they were really sloppy about stolen bases, and didn’t count all of them.  One time Cool Papa Bell stole 5 bases in a game but they didn’t bring the scorebook.  That’s definetly true in the 1930s.  But we actually have a pretty good record of the 1920s.  And St. Louis box scores were very good about recording stolen bases.  Bell may have stolen more bases than anyone else in the NNL of the mid-to-late 1920s.  But not a LOT more.

There were other fast guys at the time.  I can show you a newspaper column from 1929 in which Dizzy Dismukes says (I’m paparphrasing), “There are these two speed merchants, James Bell of St. Louis and Eddie Dwight of Kansas City.  St. Louis fans will say Bell is faster, KC partisans will say Dwight.  I’m going to remain neutral.”

 Having done some work on Bell myself, I know he didn’t steal as many bases as the casual fan thinks.  There’s really no question he had explosive speed, but he was stealing bases at the rate of about 40-50 per 154 games, sometimes less.  I believe the teams he played for had a huge impact in how he was utilized at the top of the order.  He spent the vast majority of his prime hitting in front of guys like Willie Wells, Mule Suttles, Oscar Charleston, Josh Gibson and Buck Leonard (usually two of these men at any given time).  I mean, he was leading off in front of a veritable “who’s who” of the greatest hitters in the history of Negro League ball.  I don’t think it was worth the risk running with that type of lumber behind him.

Now, a quickie here: Why isn’t John Beckwith in the Hall of Fame?

Questions about his “character” and defense, and also, if you are undertaking a serious analysis, a relatively short career (13-14 year) at the top level of black baseball.  As a hitter, he was regarded as one of the four or five biggest stars in the Negro Leagues in that decade, just as famous as Charleston or Rogan or Joe Williams.  The character stuff is complicated; he was involved in a lot of turmoil, and switched teams frequently.  But the same owners he fought with (Cumberland Posey, for example) often hired him again, or tried to.  He also managed a lot; after he wasn’t a big star anymore, he continued managing second-tier clubs into the 1940s.  There doesn’t seem to be much support for the more fanciful stuff about his supposed frequent troubles with the law and so on.  As I understand it, Beckwith’s friend Al Fennar admired him and objected strenuously to these accounts.

As for his defense: well, Negro League fielding sometimes resembles what Bill James calls a “bullshit dump.”  It’s where people go to assuage their anxiety that they’re overrating Negro League players. As in the case of minor league superstars like Buzz Arlett, anybody who wasn’t constantly praised for their great fielding gets turned into a legendarily horrible fielder.  It’s also a bit like something else James talked about, how when Dick Stuart hit 66 homers in the minor leagues people couldn’t process it, and dismissed it as meaningless, essentially pretending it never happened.  Beckwith was a slugging shortstop/third baseman; if you actually give credit for the positions he played, he begins to look like a pretty great player.  Since he was probably not a fantastic shortstop (he didn’t play the position his whole career), that turns into, “Well, he must have sucked.”  Which, for some, then turns into, “He was just a hitter, and had no defensive value at all.”  But compare him to a contemporary who’s in the Hall of Fame, Judy Johnson.  Everybody thinks Judy Johnson was, at the least, a very good third baseman.  Looking at his whole career, he played mostly third base, but with a fair number of games at shortstop (which was where he started out).  To cite Bill James again, this is a good shorthand for evaluating a player’s defensive abilities–how many games he played at tougher positions than his regular one.  Then turn around and look at John Beckwith–as a third baseman.  His proportion of games at tougher positions (shortstop, as well as catcher) is MUCH higher than Judy Johnson’s.  (You can do the same thing with Bus Clarkson and Ray Dandridge.) This doesn’t prove that Beckwith was a better third baseman than Judy Johnson.  For one thing, Beckwith also spent some time at easier positions (first base and corner outfield).  It does strongly suggest, however, that there couldn’t have been a HUGE difference between them in their defensive value.  And there is no doubt that Beckwith was a much better hitter than Johnson.

(Just because he was almost certainly a better player than at least one Hall of Famer doesn’t necessarily make Beckwith himself a Hall of Famer, of course.)

Well, I could go on, but should probably spare you.

Well, if you could vote for five more Negro Leaguers to be included in the HOF, would Beckwith be on YOUR list?  Who would the others be?

I don’t care who’s in the Hall of Fame.  They’ve made such a muddle of the standards over the years that it really doesn’t mean much of anything.  Plus the players I know most about aren’t around anymore to enjoy the honor.  I don’t even care who’s in alternative Halls of Fame like the Hall of Merit, because the line dividing who’s in and who’s out is arbitrary and ends up splitting players who are really not that different.  I *am* interested in some of the questions and issues that arise when people argue about it, though.

But I’ll play along, just for you.  So, how about: Grant “Home Run” Johnson, John Beckwith, Bill Monroe, Dick Lundy, and Ed Bolden.

If we’re looking for managers, Candy Jim Taylor won more games than anyone else in the organized Negro Leagues (through 1948), and three World Series.  His brother C.I. Taylor was a legendary manager, though it’s harder to quantify his achievements since they were mostly not in organized leagues.  It’s not altogether clear that the Hall got the right Taylor brother.

Finally, taking in ALL of baseball history (black, white or other), give me your all-time greatest starting line-up.  Eight position players, one DH, two starting pitchers, and a closer.

C Josh Gibson

1B Lou Gehrig

2B Joe Morgan (I could go with Eddie Collins, too)

SS Hans Wagner

3B Mike Schmidt

LF Barry Bonds

CF Willie Mays

RF Babe Ruth

DH Ted Williams

SP Walter Johnson

SP Lefty Grove

RP Hoyt Wilhelm

If I could add two more starters, they would be Satchel Paige and Pedro Martinez.

Oh, one more thing, I know you have a couple manuscripts in the works, are you able to share any details about what you’re working on?  Do you have a publisher?

I’m currently working on *The Negro National League, 1920-22: A Statistical and Biographical Guide* for McFarland.  It will include full statistics, including the kinds of breakdowns you’re doing for Strat (H/R, vs. L/R pitchers, etc.), park factor information, etc., plus a HUGE amount of new biographical data on players.  What I’ve put on the blog barely scrapes the surface of what I’ve got, frankly.

I’m looking forward to it.  Thanks for your time, will you come back when the McFarland book is released?

Sure.  You know where to find me.

 

 

 

Kid K: 1998 to 2008

 

Eulogy time. 

 

I don’t usually write about modern baseball, because I’ve sort of lost contact with it over the past few years, having found more interesting things to occupy my time.  But I’ve got this ridiculous urge to break with form and briefly chime in on the apparent end of Kid K’s pitching career here in Chicago.

 

Stumbled across a newspaper story this morning (remember those things?), and discovered the Kerry Wood era in Wrigley Field has finally come to an end.  Apparently the brass at Clark and Addison has signed Kevin Gregg, a man with two first names, to handle the closing chores.

 

I’m writing this more for those of you who aren’t from Chicago, to give you a sense of Wood’s place in the hearts of Cub fandom.  It wouldn’t be an understatement to say he is one of the most beloved Cubbies in history, especially with those for whom history began in 1998.

 

If you poled the bleacherites (and trust me, there’s a few of ‘em I’d like to pole out there), Woody would be counted among the Ernie Banks and Billy Williams and Ryne Sandberg’s of the world.  Seriously: He’d be in the starting line-up of many Cubs’ fans all-time teams.

 

He was a very likable guy, loyal, good in the community.  And he used to have a 99-mile-an-hour fastball.  Listen, I’m among the top 15 cynics of all-time, and even I’ve got a soft spot for the man.

 

He wouldn’t be anywhere near my all-time teams, of course; unless it’s the all-time roster of “what could have beens.”  And even that’s a stretch, because he really, honestly, never could have been anything other than what he was.

 

Quick rundown of the numbers: Wood was 77-61 in his career with a 3.65 ERA.  The team made the play-offs four times during his 10 active years.  He struck out 20 guys in one game once, and hit 99-mph on the gun during the early part of his career.  When he was healthy, he was wicked tough.  His fastball had become a surrogate penis for many.

 

The problem is he had a bum flipper.  He had arm trouble in high school, arm trouble in the minor leagues- then spent eleven years struggling with a sore elbow and creaky shoulder and an ouchy back.  He had, like, 56 surgeries along the way, pitching a little bit in between.  He often struggled with his control. The fact he lasted so long; lasted long enough to earn enough money so that his kids and grandkids may never have to work, is as much a testament to his character as it is modern medicine.

 

This is really the essence of his appeal.  Aside from the John Holmes fastball and Chip Hilton personality, he was flawed, like you and I.  Whether or not it was true, he became the paragon of untapped greatness.  The promise of what still could be.  He was hope, dressed up in baseball pants.

 

When Cubs fans pulled for him, prayed for him to stay healthy, wished that he might one day return to his form of early ’98 and finally put it all together for one triumphant Cy Young season, they were really rooting for themselves.

 

Who among us doesn’t secretly believe there’s a greater version of ourselves locked up inside?  If we could only stay healthy, quit smoking, lose weight, work harder, get a break in our careers, be given an opportunity to shine.  Who among us isn’t secretly, irrationally hoping to “put it all together” one day and triumph over fate?   

Pimpin’ What’s Next…

We’ve got some fresh baseball information on the way! In the next couple days, we’ll have an interview with Negro League expert Gary Ashwill, a former member of the Negro League Authors and Researchers Group (NLRAG), and author of an upcoming book from McFarland.  Plus, I hope to tickle your fancy with some House of David information- mined from the metal file cabinets in my closet!  Other non-baseball stuff on the way too… so as to not scare away the baseball-haters.

Update, 1:04pm, Central Time: KJOK has a nice piece on the 1927 Negro League World Series posted at www.seamheads.com.  In a related matter, KJOK will be featured in an upcoming interview here at the blog, where I promise to uncover the man behind the initials…

J.K. Rowling’s Money

Not figuring on too many people reading this one, so I’ll just go balls out and cut it loose here…

 

At Halloween I posted a true story about a house I once lived in; an old place where things went bump in the night, doors slammed shut and potted plants moved before one’s very eyes. Once in awhile (and this is really creepy), mice would finish your dinner if you left it sitting on the kitchen table overnight. Now, I still don’t believe in poltergeists or any of that stuff, but I DID move out of the place. Like an agnostic who secretly prays a little bit every night, it’s better to cover all your bases, right?

 

The ghost folks, they claim the spooky stuff is energy; the ectoplasmic, electromagnetic, superfunkadelic residue of lost souls. Could also just be a poorly insulated, mice-infested structure, shifting on its crumbling limestone foundation.  But what do I know?

 

Although I’m not entirely persuaded by hauntings of the Amityville variety, I’ve come to embrace the spooks of a different sort. I’m referring here to the ghosts of essays past. More specifically: old entries in writing contests.

 

Back when we lived in the old house where strange things occurred, we bled money. Not to fend off spirits so much as fending off crumbling lead paint-covered walls, a dangerously obsolete electrical system, decaying porch, faulty water heater, moldy bathrooms, decrepit floors, yellow well-water, and… spiders.  Big, hairy, cigarette-smoking spiders.  This is about the same time a group of jihadists flew airplane tours of Manhattan and the Pentagon, or shortly thereafter.  The little business I’d been running out of a small office upstairs was in a free-fall and we needed cash…fast.

 

Having run short of notches, we really couldn’t tighten the belt any further, and the only plastic card we had was pushing the saturation point.

 

Every morning I’d walk a block to the Marathon gas station and pick up a newspaper, to stay in touch with what was happening in the big city.  What was happening one day, according to an article in the humanities section, was the answer to my secret little agnostic prayers.

 

There was going to be a writing contest….with a CASH PRIZE!

 

Eureka!

 

I’m Jethro Bodine, now, in the well-worn ruts of a stale Beverly Hillbillies TV plot.  My little acorn brain has dun come up wit a plan to get us outta this here crazy money mess!  I’ll win the writin’ contest and everythin’il be o-kee do-kee!  Maybe we could even buy a see-ment pond fer the backyard!

 

This was at the very height of the Harry Potter craze, and like every other business which depended on marketing at the time, the Chicago Tribune decided to clamp on to J.K. Rowling’s titties and milk em for all their worth.

 

There was another Potter book set for release, and the premise of the writing contest was to creatively explain (in 250 words or less) the “secret” Dumbledore was going to reveal to young Harry.  I’m not exactly sure which book it was, but I want to say “Harry Potter and the Temple of Beaver.”

 

Anyway, although I’d never read the books, I put in an entry.  They never really specified the prize, but I figured I could win $500 or something.

 

I’m a little bit smarter than Jethro Bodine, and I knew the contest wasn’t going to solve all of our problems, but I was still dumb enough to think I’d succeed in everything I tried.

 

So what happens is, I send in the entry and I win.

 

Okay, there were several winners.  They had different categories, and my piece got tossed in the “humor” bucket.  No big deal, I’ll take it.  My head starts swimming with the possibilities, five-hundred dollars is now seven-fifty.  I mean, they were very vague on the entry form, but the Chicago Tribune is part of a major media conglomerate, right?  Maybe the prize is a thousand bucks!  With a thousand bucks, I could pay a bill, buy us groceries for a month and score us some additional time to get the business back on track.

 

Fast forward a couple weeks and I get an envelope from the Tribune.  It’s the prize all right: Inside, a photocopied certificate of congratulations (off-center) and (drum roll please)… a fifty dollar gift card to Borders Books.

 

Insert your own fart noise here.

 

Long story short, the fam and I dine on stuffed pretzels and Seattle’s Best Coldbrewed Caramel Mochas at the Borders café for three or four straight days.  Life in the fast lane for a cham-peen, short story scribbler.

 

Now what sort of frosts my nuggets is that this contest winner is still out there, floating around the super-magnetic-inter-highway. Fifty lousy bucks and almost six years later, it rears it’s ugly head, reminding me of those awful days gone by.

 

If I can’t stop those old essays from haunting me, I figured I might as well reclaim it.  Take ownership of the thing and re-post it here, at my own site.  Maybe it’ll lead to some of the same magic dust J.K. Rowling caught wind of.

 

Here it is… in its entirety, the $50 winner…

Originally published in the Chicago Tribune,  early 2003-ish.

By Scott Simkus

 

Harry shifted in the chair, blinked his eyes, then lifted his hands onto the wooden arm rests, trying his best to remain calm.

“I wanted to wait for the right time,” explained Dumbledore. “I’ve seen too many children in your position — with your gifts — crushed under the pressure of such revelations.”

Dumbledore turned and shuffled toward the corner of the room.

“It’s come to my attention,” the Supreme Mugwump continued, his raised voice echoing off the walnut panels encasing the study, “that you’ve begun to suspect you’re not a real boy, after all, but rather a fictional character.”

The aged wizard twisted around to look at Harry.

“Is this true?”

“Yes sir, it is,” Harry replied, not knowing whether an honest response was in order at this juncture.

 

“Well, that’s good, son.”

Harry exhaled, not realizing he had been holding his breath, and felt the muscles in his back relax.

“Because the truth is,” Dumbledore continued, making his way toward Harry’s chair, “we’re all fictional characters here . . . but you’re the one who has made us immortal. Our legacy has been etched in stone, for we’re destined to enchant the imaginations of boys and girls — and adults, for that matter — for countless generations to come.”

“But you must realize you are more than a mere fictional character, Harry. You are video games, Halloween costumes and birthday theme parties. You are an action figure (a doll, really, but boys don’t go for such labels) and trading cards. Your magic sells not only books, but magazines and movie tickets.”

“Harry, you are more than just a literary figure.” Dumbledore knelt down and gently grabbed the boy’s forearm. “You are the most supreme of modern human creations –.”

Dumbledore paused to consider the gravity of what he was about to disclose.

“You’re a COMMODITY!”

 

Simkus Inks SABR to 1-Year Deal

Simkus, seen here researching American baseball history, has signed SABR to a one-year deal.

CHICAGO- In a deal rumored to have been in the works for several months, Scott Simkus has officially signed the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) to a one year contract.  Although the particulars have been kept private, sources close to both parties say the deal includes a one-year, $65 base compensation package, peppered with incentives, including discounted membership to newspaperarchive.com, geneologybank.com, as well as several other unspecified options. 

 

In a statement released by his representatives, Scott Simkus said “I’m happy to have finally landed a deal with SABR.   I’ve admired their work from afar for many years, and to finally consummate this relationship is a dream come true.”

 

There had been several unsubstantiated stories prior to the signing, claiming Simkus was reluctant to work with SABR, having confessed that “he didn’t want to belong to any club that was willing to have him as a member,” but things took a dramatic change in recent weeks.  According to one anonymous source, dead sports writer Ring Lardner facilitated a clandestine meeting between Simkus and the popular baseball organization, where several key sticking points were discussed and the two groups finally agreed in principle to the historic 12-month deal.

 

Lardner, reached via a medium, would only say “Simkus is stubborn SOB” and “He should have signed on with SABR a long time ago.”

 

John Zajc, the Executive Director of SABR, was unavailable for comment at press time.

Home Cookin’ with Cool Papa

Cool Papa sent me this card back in the 1980s.

As some of you know, I’m under contract with the Strat-O-Matic Game Company, helping them prepare a Negro League All-Star simulation game based on some extensive original statistical research.  Most of the stuff is proprietary to the game company and must be kept under the vest.  If I leak some of the good stuff, I run the risk of winding up duct-taped, naked, and severely beaten inside the trunk of a car in New Jersey. 

 

Fortunately, there are a couple of older studies (some of the “rough drafts” of what would eventually contribute to the SOM studies and set), which I can share.

 

To follow are some home/road goodies for James “Cool Papa” Bell, circa 1925 to 1930.  It’s a study that has some flaws (unbalanced number of home/road games, the inclusion of a few “non-league” or post-season games, albeit against Negro League competition, etc.), but I still believe it’s of value.

 

As many of you know, they played in an odd little ballpark, famous for high-scoring games and home runs.  Stars Park, located at the SE corner of Compton and Laclede Streets in St. Louis, featured an inviting, 269-foot fence down the left field line, just in front of a tin-covered trolley barn which became a favorite target of right-handed sluggers.  Hall of Famers Willie Wells and Mule Suttles had two of the greatest home run seasons in Negro League history while playing in St. Louis.

 

Cool Papa, who was a switch-hitter, took advantage of the little bandbox in St.Louis just as much as anybody else.  I’m not really doing any analysis here, as the numbers speak for themselves.  Hopefully one of you can use this data in your studies or conversations about Hall of Famer Bell. Just make sure you give a shout-out to Scott Simkus for use of the research.  You know, the guy duct-taped inside the trunk of the car in Trenton.

 

BELL	AVG	SLG	G	AB	H	2B	3B	HR
HOME	.358	.546	147	628	225	46	12	16
ROAD	.299	.387	84	354	106	11	7	2