The Cincinnati Stadium Screw Job

Another article discussing the crazy public subsidies for professional sports stadiums features Cincinnati:

When voters approved a sales-tax increase to pay $540 million toward stadiums for Cincinnati’s professional baseball and football teams almost two decades ago, city leaders promised lower property levies and a business district along the Ohio River.
The tax relief hasn’t materialized as pledged, said Todd Portune, a commissioner in Cincinnati’s Hamilton County. Instead, the county government is grappling with annual stadium expenses totaling at least $43 million this year, including debt service, county documents show. Residents have seen a public hospital sold, mass-transit investments postponed and little private development near the stadiums that didn’t involve additional public subsidies, Portune said......
In Cincinnati, Bengals owner Mike Brown took control of the team in 1991, after the death of his father, Paul Brown, a Hall of Fame founder and coach of the Cleveland Browns, who in 1967 headed an ownership group that acquired an expansion franchise in the American Football League. The Reds are owned by Robert Castellini, who led a group that bought a team after the 2005 season that was then valued at $270 million. The team is now worth $680 million, according to a data compiled by Bloomberg.
In the 1990s, each team began pushing for public funding to replace Riverfront Stadium, which opened in 1970 and was shared by both organizations. In March 1996, Hamilton County voters approved a half-percentage point increase in their sales-tax rate to fund the football and baseball venues as part of an effort to revive the area along the Ohio River.
Paul Brown Stadium opened for the Bengals in 2000 and Great American Ball Park opened for the Reds in 2003. The stadiums are about a half-mile apart......
Public costs for Cincinnati stadiums now exceed $1 billion in 2010 dollars, according to Long, the Harvard professor, who tabulated expenses for stadiums for a book titled “Public Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities.”
The NFL stadium proved particularly costly, according to Long. Paul Brown Stadium was the second-most expensive public deal of any U.S. stadium, according to her data, with the public paying $706 million, including land, infrastructure, maintenance and tax breaks. It trails only Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium. Taxpayers also spent about $489 million on the Reds’ Great American Ball Park, according to Long’s data.

And not only has Mike Brown screwed Hamilton County taxpayers (and the IRS), he's been a complete asshole while doing it, and the Bengals have failed to win a playoff game since he took over the team.

Why Barry Bonds Belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame

Jonah Keri:

1. Barry Bonds: On numbers alone, Bonds is one of the three or four best players of all time, and that's before factoring in the quality of competition in his era compared to what Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb faced. Of course, Bonds's candidacy isn't nearly that simple for many voters or fans. OK, let's assume that, despite there being no positive drug test, Bonds took PEDs. Since the two most common arguments pointing to Bonds's PED use are that (a) his numbers shot to the moon at an age when that very rarely happens, and (b) he went from being an athletic, all-around terror to a gigantic home run machine, let's also assume that Bonds started juicing after the 1999 season. That would square with the popular narrative that Bonds was jealous of the attention going to Mark McGwire and Sosa in '98, and that an injury-plagued '99 season would've pushed Bonds to seek chemical help while rehabbing. To further extend this exercise, let's assume that Bonds deserves absolutely zero credit for everything that happened from 2000 on. His remaining career numbers would be:

2,000 games played
445 home runs
1,299 RBIs
1,455 runs scored
460 stolen bases
.288/.409/.559
3 MVPs
102.5 WAR³

Bonds's first 14 years work out to the sum of Jimmie Foxx's entire career. And of course, this exercise twistedly assumes that without PEDs, Bonds would've been eaten by wolves on Christmas Day 1999 and never played again.
Some will argue that players linked to steroids should automatically be disqualified for life from Hall consideration and that even suspicion of use absent a failed test or other concrete evidence should trigger that ban. Those aren't the standards I use to evaluate players' Hall cases, though, so Bonds is the easiest pick for me this year.

His footnote points out that Ken Griffey, Jr. was second in WAR from 1986-99, at 68.5.  To slightly correct that, Griffey only played from 1989 on, so I'd add the next three years of WAR to the total for Griffey.  Unfortunately for him, those were his first three years in Cincinnati, which only netted him an additional 6.8, for a total of 75.3 (although it is notable that he had 5.5 WAR in his first season in Cincinnati, which was better than his last season in Seattle).  Bonds first 14 years are still amazing.  And honestly, I don't care if he was juicing or not, Bonds' 2001-2004 were the most impressive four seasons I've ever watched.  Just like McGwire and Sosa were the most exciting things in 1998, I've got to say that doping or not, it was damn fun watching Bonds at his doping peak.  I've pummeled Lance Armstrong for being a doping motherfucker, but honestly, his performance was amazing.  It was just his sociopathic lying and ridiculously brutal attacks on others who were a little more honest about their and his doping that was so terrible.

The Genealogy of Baseball Teams

An awesome print at History Shots:

 One close-up:

A little background:

The New York Yankees started as the Baltimore Orioles. The Minnesota Twins were once the Washington Senators. But not before they were the Kansas City Blues. And the Cleveland Indians? To some, they'll always be the Grand Rapids Rustlers.
Pro-baseball has seen its share of relocations, new names, and disbanded franchises, enough to confuse even the most history-obsessed fans. Thankfully, information designers Bill Younker and Larry Gormley have mapped it all out for us in one incredible infographic.
Gormley tells us it took over 1,000 hours to put together. The final result is an end-all reference guide for when your friend doesn't believe the Detroit Tigers really have always been the Detroit Tigers (established in 1894), that Brooklyn couldn't stop renaming its team (before the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, they were, at various times, the Trolley-Dodgers, Bridegrooms, Robins, and Superbas), or that the Newark Peppers were a real thing.

 More cool charts they sell here.

Kahn's Big Red Smokeys

Thanks to the generous assistance of commenter Brian, who shared this link, I have this classic bit of Cincinnati Reds history:

If only I could come up with the soundtrack to go with it. (if it isn't playing, click on it)

One Day at Fenway

One Day at Fenway from DGA Productions on Vimeo.

The Schedule Makers

The National Pastime, the Sport of Kings and the Sweet Science

After spending the weekend at the Breeders' Cup, Charles Pierce weighs in on why of the most popular sports of the early 20th century, only baseball maintains much of its prestige:

I wondered at the beginning of the day, as I walked from the parking lot up toward the baroque façade of the old racetrack, Philip Marlowe in my own mind, looking both ways for a blonde in a Packard, why horse racing hasn't been able to weaponize and monetize nostalgia the way baseball has. Back in the day — back when J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson used to (allegedly) whisper sweet nothings to each other in a box at Santa Anita — baseball, boxing, and horse racing were the three major sports in the country, Pete Rozelle having not yet created the universe. Only one of them truly survives today, and I think it's because the other two have the element of mortality. Every boxer can theoretically become Sugar Ray Leonard or Duk Koo Kim. Every thoroughbred can become New Year's Day (who won the Juvenile) or Secret Compass (who broke down and had to be euthanized on the track in the Juvenile Fillies). The people who train them know that. The people who watch them know that. You send a fighter or a thoroughbred out there, in every competition, knowing that you can be sending them out to die. We are far too civilized today for the mortal stakes in our games to be that obvious.

While there is something to that point, what about auto racing?  And what about the risks of football.  We know now that guys are suffering traumatic brain injury, and I think it is only a matter of time before a college or pro player dies on the field.  Anyway, it does take a lot out of a day of horse racing when a horse has to be put down.  It is especially tough when it is the biggest showcase of racing of the year.

The Cheater's Pastime

As part of Pacific Standard's cheaters' week, Tomas Rios looks at some of the strange tales of cheating in baseball:

Circa 1880s: Future Hall of Fame pitcher James Francis “Pud” Galvin becomes baseball’s first confirmed user of performance-enhancing drugs. His cocktail of choice was the Brown-Séquard elixir, a concoction of testicles harvested from dogs, guinea pigs, and, maybe, monkeys. The harvester was Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, an elderly physiologist and neurologist who claimed hypodermic injections of his elixir-prolonged human life. Galvin was praised for his forward-thinking ways in an 1889 edition of the Washington Post and died at the age of 45.

another favorite:

1936-Present: Three consecutive generations of the Bossard family have presided over Comiskey Park, home stadium of the Chicago White Sox. Emil Bossard came first in 1935 and used his encyclopaedic knowledge of the stadium to begin what would become the family business. His greatest hits include using scoreboard signals to tip off the visiting team’s pitches and moving the stadium’s portable outfield fences back to stifle opposing home run hitters.
Next up was Gene, who supposedly invented the frozen baseball trick and routinely water-logged the infield to aid the team’s groundball pitchers: a tactic that earned Comiskey Park the nickname “Bossard’s Swamp.” Stories of tilted foul lines and grass cut to manipulate the speed of ground balls also abound. Current White Sox groundskeeper Roger Bossard says there are 17 tricks of the trade, but won’t reveal all of them. Many of those dirty tricks were invented by the Bossard family: the greatest cheaters in sports history.

There are some other good ones, including Albert Bell getting caught corking his bats, and the strange break-in to try to steal back the evidence.  Good times.

23 Years

October 20, 1990:

Damn, I'm old.  Damn, I hope the Reds win another one during my lifetime.

Wisdom from Whitey

Grantland highlights a classic 1992 profile of Whitey Herzog for the LA Times Magazine in 1992, by Pat Jordan.  There is a lot of classic shit in the article, but this brought back some memories:

 He was born in 1931 and raised in one of those small, pinched, hardscrabble Midwestern towns so well delineated in the stories of Sherwood Anderson — a town where people tend to remember a native son's failures more than his successes. When Herzog returned to his hometown as a big-league baseball player in the '50s, people would say to him, "Your brother Herman was a better player than you." Herzog would snap back, "Why don't you ask him? He's carrying mail right here in town."
New Athens (pronounced Ay-thens), Ill., population 2,100, lies 40 miles east of St. Louis. Sixty years ago, much as it is today, New Athens was a farming and coal-mining town with two lumber mills, strip mines, a foundry, a brewery and 16 bars. Its inhabitants, mostly descendants of German immigrants, were neat, clean, orderly, punctual, hard-working and hard-drinking people who, inexplicably and proudly, referred to themselves as hard-headed Dutchmen. They saw the daily sameness of their lives as comforting, not confining. A day in the mines. Shots and beers on the way home. Checkers on Saturdays at the barbershop. The big Sunday dinner. Laundry on Monday. When Herzog passed through town with a U.S. Army baseball team in 1953, he took his teammates on a tour. He told them who would be sitting where in which bar at what time, and they were. Thirty-four years later, Herzog would write in his autobiography, "White Rat": "And unless they're dead, that's where they are right now."
Herzog is reticent about his parents. He says only that his mother worked hard in a shoe factory and was so fanatically strict about cleanliness that he preferred to stay away from home as long as possible, playing sports and working at the Mound City Brewing Co., where he learned to drink beer like his father. Edgar Herzog worked at the brewery, where he had the distinction of never having missed a day of work. Herzog remembers his father telling him: "Be there early and give them a good day's work, so when it comes time to lay someone off, it'll be the other guy."

So I was in Whitey's old neighborhood visiting a friend from college right after we graduated.  It so happened that we were hanging out on Saturday evening at a campground with his friend from high school, his folks and a bunch of people he grew up around.  We had a good time drinking and shooting the shit.  Finally, at 11:00, he loaded his friend and I in his car to go to the liquor store in town and meet up with his girlfriend.  She left work and we drove for a couple of blocks, then my friend got out of his car, went up and talked to her, then came back and told me to have his friend give me directions to his grandma's house where I could crash out until he got done "visiting' with his girlfriend.

I took the wheel of his car, and followed his friend's directions to my roommate's grandma's house.  When I got there, I parked the car and started to the door, his friend asked if I wanted to head back to the campground for a while.  I figured I had nothing to lose, so I went back out there with him.  After way too many beers, I was arguing politics and sports with one of the boss men from the campground (and I was hitting on his wife).  He found out I was a Reds fan, and made some snide remark about Pete Rose.

That was game on.  I told him that Pete was the best player ever, and when the guy kept giving me shit, I looked at him, and told him that Whitey Herzog was a homosexual.    Now most likely, that wasn't the thing to say about Whitey.  But somehow, I was able to keep the guy from punching me, and then hanging out with him for a while before my roommate's friend and I had to head back to town.  Needless to say, when my roommate and I were sober again, we had a few good stories to tell.

Lacking Material

I haven't done too good of a job finding things to go on here, or finding the time to put anything up.  Yesterday, I went down to the Reds game and watched them suck up the joint against the Mets, and then tonight I ran beans until dark.  I'll look around and see if I can find something to post, but even at work I was still too busy to find much.

Searching For The Origins of Baseball

David Block believes both the Doubleday legend and the Alexander Cartwright derived-from-Rounders stories of the origins of baseball are false.  He thinks some game called baseball was being played in the mid 18th century:

In 2007, Block was on a computer terminal in the British Library in London. He came across a comic novel called The Card, by John Kidgell, which was published in 1755. He found this passage:

… the younger Part of the Family, perceiving Papa not inclined to enlarge upon the Matter, retired to an interrupted Party at Base-Ball, (an infant Game which as it advances in its Teens, improves into Fives, and in its State of Manhood, is called Tennis.)

Did you catch that? A mention of baseball nearly a century before Doubleday's "invention"! The problem was, in The Card the precious word baseball ran up against the right-hand margin. Like this:

… Party at Base-

Ball, (an infant Game …)
The OCR software didn't read it in its hyphenated form, base-ball. It read it as a single word, baseball, which had been hyphenated only because it ran off the page. Ask Ken Burns if he ever had to worry about stuff like that.
What was your first reaction when you found the reference in The Card? I asked.
"Wow, 1755, are you kidding me?!" Block recalled. Then his smile disappeared and his modesty returned. "No, of course I was much more restrained, being in the reading room of the British Library."

He searches through diaries and books to find old references to the game.  All I know is that the evidence against the Abner Doubleday legend is immense.

Kinda Sutra

Folks tell about the outlandish beliefs they held as kids about where babies came from:



The Kinda Sutra from Nonfiction Unlimited on Vimeo.


I don't remember when I understood the mechanics of the baby making process, but I know that by third or fourth grade I was certain about the Insert Tab A into Slot B process. This can be attributed to my best friend watching "The Last American Virgin" on HBO and telling me all about it.

But I'd figured out by about first grade that thinking about girls, especially the parts covered up by bikinis, made my pee-er (the name used at my house when I was a little kid) get a lot bigger, and I was always afraid that my mom would see that if she came into the bathroom while I was taking a bath, and I'd get in trouble for my dirty thoughts.  So by the time I was attending parochial school, I was already doing the Baseball, Margaret Thatcher distraction tricks to try to get the evidence to go away.  I think I had the mechanics understood before my friend regaled me with tales of the movie, but I can't exactly remember when I fully grasped it.  Unlike the one guy in the video, my girls are gross stage went away when I was really young, but the girls' this guy is gross stage pretty much still hasn't gone away.  Damn this cruel world.

Steal Number One

From CBS Sports:

Reds prospect Billy Hamilton has been one of the best base-stealers in minor-league history since being drafted out of high school in 2009. A September callup this season, Hamilton made his Major League Baseball debut Tuesday night.
It gets better, though. Hamilton -- a pinch-runner -- stole second on Yadier Molina and then scored on a Todd Frazier double. The Reds went on to win, 1-0, and creep to within 1.5 games of the Cardinals for the top wild card spot.

Hamilton has done a lot of that, and there should be a lot more to come.

The Next Generation Knuckleballer?

The Columbus Clippers waved vainly at Eddie Gamboa's knuckleball last night:

A good knuckleball is baseball’s version of the gnat. A swing at its darting form generally results in a miss.
The Clippers went hunting for Eddie Gamboa’s knuckler last night at Huntington Park and came up empty more often than not during an 8-1 loss to the Norfolk Tides.
Gamboa (2-3) teased the Clippers’ hitters with floaters that darted in and around their bats in the 66-mph range. He allowed one unearned run and three hits over six innings while striking out seven.
“I’d seen that kid throw last year — a conventional pitcher,” Clippers manager Chris Tremie said. “Sometime between the end of last year and today, he went to a knuckleball. He commanded it pretty well. He threw strikes with it. Obviously, there were some that danced more than others. And basically, he threw strikes with it. “When a knuckleballer throws strikes, it can be a pretty tough day for hitters.”

With only R.A. Dickey and now Steven Wright in the bigs, it is good to see somebody else a step below the majors.  Wright's first major league start earlier in the month went kind of badly:

Wright won his last two relief appearances and had thrown 9 2-3 scoreless innings entering Tuesday's game. But he had trouble with command from the start and walked leadoff hitter Robbie Grossman.

Grossman stole second before advancing to third on the first passed ball of the inning. He then plunked Brandon Barnes and he later advanced to second on another passed ball.
A third passed ball allowed Grossman to score and Barnes to take second. The last passed ball of the inning sent Barnes home before a single by Jason Castro.
Wright walked Marc Krauss, prompting a visit to the mound by Lavarnway. The visit didn't seem to help as Wright soon followed it with a wild pitch that left Castro at third.
He scored on a groundout by Wallace before Wright finally escaped the inning by retiring Matt Dominguez.
It was the third time in major league history that a team had four passed balls in one inning. It last happened on Aug. 22, 1987, when Texas Rangers catcher Geno Petralli did it against the White Sox in the seventh inning. Knuckleballer Charlie Hough was pitching in that game.

Knuckleballers will have days like that.

Fixing A Broken Bat Epidemic

All Things Considered:

A bat that simply cracks isn't too big a deal. But in 2008, maple bats kept breaking apart. Often, they'd break along the handle, sending the heavier upper barrel of the bat flying.
Bat shards struck players and coaches all season. A fan named Susan Rhodes was struck by a bat during a Los Angeles Dodgers game in April. Near the end of June, Brian O'Nora, a home plate umpire, was sent to the hospital after a bat left a gash on the back of his head.
That very day in June 2008, MLB's Safety and Health Advisory Committee had met to discuss the issue. The committee announced that it would consult with bat experts and conduct research with bats and their manufacturers.
One of the first phone calls went to the U.S. Forest Service, which operates a wood laboratory in Madison, Wis., where researchers study things like construction lumber, or ways to use underutilized woods, like the trees killed by pine beetles. The league called up Dave Kretschmann, a research engineer there.
"I have a sense of how wood breaks," he says. "I've broken a lot of wood over the years. So I certainly thought I'd be able to help them out."
Over the following months, MLB sent Kretschmann and his collaborators more than 2,200 broken bats, along with video footage of every break during the season. Other researchers visited bat companies to examine manufacturing techniques.
There was one main pattern to the bat breaks — they weren't splintering apart. Instead, the maple bats tended to break cleanly.
"If you looked at the handle, and the players still held onto the knob in his hand, and you looked at where it broke, there was an oval shape." Kretschmann explains.
That, he says, indicates a break along the grain of the wood. Wood doesn't hold up well to pressure applied perpendicular to the grain. Maple bats tended to have a "slope of grain" issue, where the grain sloped at an angle through the cylinder of the bat — and the pressure of hitting a fastball at just the right angle was enough to split the bat in two.
Kretschmann and the other researchers made , and the rate of bat breaks have continued to drop since then. This season, it's down by half.

Ash is pretty well known for splitting, so I wouldn't have thought that maple, assuming the same grain pattern, would have more issues with splitting.  Glad to know there's a government lab that has wood splitting issues covered.

The Invention of the Baseball Glove

Smithsonian:

The earliest gloves were simple leather work gloves, often with its finger removed to ensure that ball handling isn’t inhabited in any way. It’s hard to say exactly who wore the first glove, but some reports claim that catchers were wearing work gloves as early as 1860. A pitcher for the by the name of A.G. Spalding claims that it was New Haven first baseman Charles C. Waite who, in an 1875 game against Boston, first had the audacity (i.e. common sense) to take the field with a glove. Maybe “audacity” isn’t quite the right word. Though there were no rules against gloves, Waite tried to preserve his masculinity by wearing a tan, flesh-colored work glove, hoping no one would notice. People noticed. And Waite was ridiculed mercilessly by fans and players alike. Nonetheless, he persevered.
Spalding thought Waite might be on to something.

“I had for a good while felt the need of some sort of hand protection for myself. For several years I had pitched in every game played by the Boston team, and had developed severe bruises on the inside of my left hand. Therefore, I asked Waite about his glove. He confessed that he was a bit ashamed to wear it, but had it on to save his hand. He also admitted that he had chosen a color as inconspicuous as possible, because he didn’t care to attract attention….Meanwhile, my own hand continued to take its medicine with utmost regularity, occasionally being bored with a warm twister that hurt excruciatingly. Still, it was not until 1877 that I overcame my scruples against joining the ‘kid-glove aristocracy’ by donning a glove. I found that the glove, thin as it was, helped considerably, and inserted one pad after another until a good deal of relief was afforded. If anyone wore a padded glove before this date, I do not know it.”

The year after Waite’s debut, Spalding and his brothers started a sports equipment company and one of their first products, alongside the first official baseball, was a baseball glove –though Spalding wouldn’t wear one himself until 1877 when he started playing first base. Unlike Waite’s glove, Spaldings was made from dark, almost black leather. Spalding’s reputation kept away the ridicule and in fact, he may be responsible for helping to remove the stigma that came with wearing a glove.

My glove from high school was getting in pretty sad shape, but I dropped $25 on getting it relaced, and it is practically new.  It sure as hell isn't a softball glove (it is a second baseman's glove), but I'll retire before it does.