Dang that Cardinals bullpen is smoke. Look out if that team squeaks into the playoffs.
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So for all of you baseball aficionados, look up Ted Williams Cooperstown speech. He mentions the negro leagues and Gibson and Paige by name. That was in 1966.
Dang that Cardinals bullpen is smoke. Look out if that team squeaks into the playoffs.
Yeah, they are strong there. Fuck, I hate the Cards. They somehow (almost) always find a way to be a strong club. Their kids kinda shit the bed so far this year as well. (Big time hitters they have in process....maybe they end up being AAAA players but it they turn into the MLB players they were meant to be we will have to swallow good Cards teams tor a while longer.)
Dang that Cardinals bullpen is smoke. Look out if that team squeaks into the playoffs.
Yeah, they are strong there. Fuck, I hate the Cards. They somehow (almost) always find a way to be a strong club. Their kids kinda shit the bed so far this year as well. (Big time hitters they have in process....maybe they end up being AAAA players but it they turn into the MLB players they were meant to be we will have to swallow good Cards teams tor a while longer.)
Speaking of cards. Whats up w Aerenado? Lots of errors.
What about race? It is “common knowledge” that Cobb was “an avowed racist”—but when and where did he make such a vow and where is it recorded? A 1984 biography of Cobb, written by a college professor named Charles Alexander, is typical. It describes three people who fought with Cobb—a night watchman, a bellhop, and a butcher—as being black. Such evidence was enough for documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose made-for-PBS series Baseball described Cobb as an embarrassment to the game because of his racism and cast Cobb as the anti-Jackie Robinson.
But Burns, like so many others, was letting himself be misled by the oft-repeated myth. Looking into census reports, birth certificates, and contemporary newspaper accounts, I found that all three of the black fighters cited by Charles Alexander were in fact white. Yes, Cobb had also fought with two black men during his life, but those fights didn’t have racial overtones, and Cobb—who had an extremely thin skin—fought with many more white men. So how did such a distinguished author make such obvious mistakes? When I asked Alexander about this, he simply replied, “I went with the best information I had at the time.”
But what about Cobb’s 19th-century Southern roots? How could someone born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? What I found—and again, not because I am the Babe Ruth of researchers, but because I actually did some research—is that Ty Cobb was descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob.
Cobb himself was never asked about segregation until 1952, when the Texas League was integrating, and Sporting News asked him what he thought. “The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly,” he said. “The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and whose [sic] to say he has not?” By that time he had attended many Negro league games, sometimes throwing out the first ball and often sitting in the dugout with the players. He is quoted as saying that Willie Mays was the only modern-day player he’d pay to see and that Roy Campanella was the ballplayer that reminded him most of himself.
Cobb was, like the rest of us, a highly imperfect human being. He was too quick to take offense and too intolerant of those who didn’t strive for excellence with the over-the-top zeal that he did. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he thought too many others fools. He was the first baseball celebrity, and he did not always handle well the responsibilities that came with that. And yes, he once went into the stands and repeatedly punched a man who had been heckling him for more than a year, and who turned out to have less than the full complement of fingers—hence the story of him attacking a handicapped fan. This is a mark against him. But was he a racist and an embarrassment to the game? Far from it.
More of the quote and context:
Five years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, Cobb publicly supported blacks and whites playing baseball together, adding, "Certainly it is okay for them to play. I see no reason in the world why we shouldn't compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man; in my book that goes not only for baseball but in all walks of life."Using even stronger language, Cobb told the Sporting News in 1952 that "the Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly." In 1953, black newspapers cited his praise for Brooklyn Dodgers' catcher Roy Campanella, who Cobb said was "among the all-time best catchers" in baseball. Following Campanella's accident that left him paralyzed, the Dodgers staged a tribute game where tens of thousands of spectators silently held lit matches above their heads. Cobb wrote the Dodgers owner to show appreciation "for what you did for this fine man". Cobb also stated that Willie Mays was the "only player I'd pay money to see". In the obituaries that ran in the black press following Cobb's death, he was praised for "[speaking] in favor of racial freedom in baseball".
Really good info! I'm always happy to learn something new. The story of Cobb fighting the "handicapped" man is that he was triggered by the guy calling him a "half ******". I'm really interested in researching all this more.
Spectrum 10/27/09; New Orleans JazzFest 5/1/10; Made in America 9/2/12; WF Center 10/21/13; WF Center 10/22/13; Baltimore 10/27/13; WF Center 4/28/16; WF Center 4/29/16; Fenway Park 8/7/16; Fenway Park 9/2/18; Asbury Park 9/18/21; Camden 9/14/22; Las Vegas 5/16/24; Las Vegas 5/18/24; WF Center 9/7/24; WF Center 9/9/24; Baltimore Arena 9/12/24
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So for all of you baseball aficionados, look up Ted Williams Cooperstown speech. He mentions the negro leagues and Gibson and Paige by name. That was in 1966.
Really good info! I'm always happy to learn something new. The story of Cobb fighting the "handicapped" man is that he was triggered by the guy calling him a "half ******". I'm really interested in researching all this more.
That story is true. His teammates stood up for him, lol.
So for all of you baseball aficionados, look up Ted Williams Cooperstown speech. He mentions the negro leagues and Gibson and Paige by name. That was in 1966.
he sucks. there’s a reason why he’s been on six teams in the last four years.
If I had known then what I know now...
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he sucks. there’s a reason why he’s been on six teams in the last four years.
He's not a punk, like many of the players. Talk shit, deal with him. You know you like that about him. Also, I can't stand that catcher.
Or, the punk Joc who got slapped for breaking sacred ff rules. You can't make this shit up. Pham is entertaining!
That was a cheap play by Pham, no?
In todays rules he should have been sliding away from the catcher not move in the baseline and hitting him?
After looking at it again, agree that they could have called Pham out for not avoiding the contact when there is a clear path to do so. Catcher set up fine. Runner is allowed to run inside the baseline but he clearly could have slid away and he didn't. That stated, he doesn't plow him, which would have been cheap. He was out. Good tag and position by catcher Debateable on if Contreras is justified to talk shit. I don't think so, the dude didn't plow into him. Either way, I don't like Contreras and I do like Pham. Colors my perception in the play.
Good point on him being in the wrong on his angle to the plate, though, I missed that when watching the highlight originally.
An insider I know says that players are going to get suspended for gambling on games. Should be interesting.
Check your feeds. They are announcing bans in MLB now.
gambling is a cancer.
(no offense to the degenerates around here)
If I had known then what I know now...
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Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
oh, good…the d**gers acquired a guy I already dislike.
If I had known then what I know now...
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VIC 07
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Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
I normally like the Cubs. But I'm glad the Brewers are in 1st place with their new manager and Counsel is in 4th place. Even though I would have liked Mattingly for the job
Fifty years ago, on June 14, 1974, Luis Tiant and Nolan Ryan engaged in a pitchers’ duel unlike any that has taken place since or will ever occur again.
Ryan, the Angels’ imposing righthander, logged 13 innings in which he struck out 19 and walked 10 while unleashing an astounding 235 pitches. Tiant, the Red Sox’ workhorse, outlasted his counterpart, going the distance but absorbing a crushing loss when the Angels scored with one out in the 15th inning for a 4-3 win.
The performances are incomprehensible in the contemporary game, when pitchers only occasionally are entrusted with navigating an opposing lineup for a third time and almost never see a batter a fourth time. Tiant and Ryan each faced multiple hitters seven times in that contest.
“I’m kind of envious,” said Red Sox starter Lucas Giolito. “I wish I could get in a time machine sometimes just to watch some of those games live, to see a Tiant or a Nolan Ryan or a Bob Gibson.”
A half-century later, the outcome is less meaningful than the preposterous notion that such a game could even take place. Tiant recalls it philosophically.
“It’s what character you have,” said Tiant. “When you’re pitching, you want to win. You fight. One inning, two innings, or 15 — it doesn’t make no difference.”
Though Hall of Famers Carlton Fisk and Carl Yastrzemski played for the Red Sox and Frank Robinson was in the Angels lineup, the enduring legacy of the game was defined by the starting pitchers.
A matchup of workhorses
Ryan, who in 1973 had set a major league record with 383 strikeouts, was a workhorse (72 complete games in 119 starts from 1972-74) amid a run of three straight seasons and five of six in which he punched out at least 300 batters. His fastball was a blur rendered terrifying by his inability to control it.
“He was uncomfortable,” said Tommy Harper, who batted twice for the Sox in that game. “He didn’t know where it was going when he pitched inside.”
Hitters’ discomfort against the Ryan Express made them all the more vulnerable to a curveball that looked like it would concuss them before breaking over the plate and to the bottom of the zone.
“I remember Al Kaline being on second base one time after Nolan walked him and the guy behind him,” recalled Bobby Valentine, an Angels teammate of Ryan’s in 1974. “I asked him how Nolan was throwing. He said, ‘If they don’t make one of those two pitches illegal, he’ll throw a no-hitter.’ He was amazing.”
But the Sox entered the game feeling good about their chances. Ryan had started nine games against them and lost six.
“We beat him all the time,” said former Sox pitcher Bill Lee. “He played on terrible teams.”
Moreover, they had Tiant on the mound. After a rough stretch from 1969-71, the righthander was having a mid-career resurrection. He led the AL with a 1.91 ERA in 1972, the start of a three-year run in which he completed 60 of his 92 starts (65 percent).
Entering the June 14 start, Tiant had thrown eight straight complete games — and he (like Ryan) was in a four-man rotation, getting three or occasionally four days of rest between starts.
He matched Ryan’s determination to outwork his opponents, building endurance by running up and down the stairs in empty ballparks every day — and earning the deference of Sox manager Darrell Johnson.
“He knew me,” said Tiant. “He watched me. He wasn’t stupid. When I was in a situation, he’d talk to me. I’d say, ‘No, no, no. Go back over there, sit down, and watch the game.’ The other guys would laugh — Fisk, Yaz, the others.”
Ryan recorded all three outs by strikeout in the first inning and punched out six through three scoreless frames. Tiant, meanwhile, was surgical, retiring the first nine batters.
Ryan faltered in the fourth. He walked the first three batters, and after a strikeout, he issued a bases-loaded walk to Terry Hughes to give the Sox a 1-0 lead.
“A run batted in against Nolan Ryan! Hughes jumped with joy,” Clif Keane wrote in the Globe.
Though he’d once struck out 19 batters in a 10-inning start for Cleveland in 1968, Tiant was the opposite of Ryan — an artist and magician who changed speeds and used precision and deception to confound hitters, eliciting weak contact in short at-bats to make complete games a regular occurrence.
“When the hitter sees you three or four times, it’s not easy to fool the hitter anymore up here,” said Tiant. “You had to use your brains — not just velocity.”
Tiant gave a dizzying array of looks to hitters. He rotated his back to the batter at the start of his delivery, then unspooled with a mix of overhand, three-quarters, and sidearm deliveries. His mix — fastballs, two curveballs (a looper and hard breaker), sliders, changeups, and occasional knucklers — from all of those release points created a seemingly limitless number of pitch shapes.
Tiant faced the minimum nine hitters from the sixth through eighth innings, but with Ryan still on the mound and the Sox trailing, 3-1, entering the ninth, the Sox righty seemed destined to absorb a hard-luck loss. But Ryan walked leadoff batter Rick Miller and allowed a tying two-run homer to Yastrzemski.
Tiant quickly dispatched all three Angels in the bottom of the inning.
Nine innings proved inadequate for resolution — not necessarily a happy development given the 8 p.m. start time.
“We go, ‘Oh [expletive] — now we’ve got to stick around?’ ” said Lee. “Everybody had dates.”
Ryan and Tiant proved unaccommodating.
That was particularly true of Ryan and one unfortunate target in the Red Sox lineup — first baseman Cecil Cooper. A future five-time All-Star who was then in his first full big league season, Cooper struck out five times in nine innings (tying an AL record), fouled out on a bunt attempt in his sixth plate appearance, then struck out for a sixth time — matching a single-game record — in the 12th inning.
Angels manager Bobby Winkles approached Ryan — who’d never thrown more than 12 innings in a game — after that frame.
“I said, ‘That’s it,’ but he said, ‘No, I want my record. Last year I threw 242 at Detroit [in 12 innings],’ ” Winkles relayed to the Anaheim Bulletin.
Winkles relented, though the argument was nearly rendered moot. The Angels loaded the bases with one out in the bottom of the 12th against Tiant. But the righthander got Valentine to fly to shallow left, then induced a ground out to send the game to the 13th.
Ryan worked a perfect 13th but Winkles would let him go no further. The pitcher retreated to the clubhouse.
“I remember him sitting in his locker with a towel around his neck, being pissed off,” said Valentine. “He wasn’t a happy camper. He didn’t have very nice things to say about the manager.”
Tiant would have no such dispute. The game was his.
“It comes to the point, they let you stay in the game no matter what, because they figured out there’s no other option better than you,” said Tiant.
Tiant logged a scoreless 13th, stranding a runner at second with back-to-back strikeouts — two of his five strikeouts that night. When he returned to the dugout and saw reliever Barry Raziano replacing Ryan, Tiant sniffed a finish line.
“With the way [Ryan] was pitching, I was thinking, ‘I’ve got more of a chance to win the game,’ ” said Tiant.
But Raziano retired six straight hitters in the 14th and 15th. Tiant matched him in the 14th but in the 15th, he yielded a one-out single to speedy leadoff hitter Mickey Rivers before Denny Doyle lofted a fly ball to left that, according to the Associated Press game story, “eluded the desperate lunge” of Yastrzemski. It dropped for a double, and Rivers scored.
With little pomp, the game — after 4 hours and 2 minutes — was over, shortly after midnight in California. There were no players showered with Gatorade, no walkoff histrionics. It was just … done.
“A relief that it was over,” said Valentine.
For Tiant, who estimated his workload at 220 pitches, the conclusion was painful.
“It was hard,” he recalled. “We all want to win. We all want to look good. But that’s not always possible. You pitch a good game and you lose. That’s how it goes.”
At the time, the performance was rare but not unprecedented. Many starters pitched to and beyond the ninth.
“That’s what we did,” said Lee. “It was, ‘Pry this ball out of my cold, dead hands.’ ”
No one imagined Tiant’s outing would be the last of its kind — the last time a starting pitcher recorded an out in the 15th inning. For that matter, no starter has recorded an out in the 10th inning since 2012.
A half-century later, despite the disappointment of the loss, Tiant takes pride in what the game said about his unrelenting desire to compete — a statement further reinforced in his next start. On four days’ rest, Tiant logged 10 innings for a 2-1 win over the A’s on June 19.
“All those guys I played with or against, they respected my performance,” said Tiant. “They knew I went to the mound trying to beat you — and I’d go to the end.”
@cutz…what about spahn vs. marichal 7/2/63? marichal 16 innings, zero runs. spahn 15.1 innings, lost on a mays walk off, bottom of 16.
on a related note, I hate my current Giants. no one seems to know how to play the game and bob melvin doesn’t seem inclined to teach them.
If I had known then what I know now...
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Comments
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/40264442/tommy-pham-fighting-words-brewers-play-plate
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Fuck, I hate the Cards. They somehow (almost) always find a way to be a strong club.
Their kids kinda shit the bed so far this year as well. (Big time hitters they have in process....maybe they end up being AAAA players but it they turn into the MLB players they were meant to be we will have to swallow good Cards teams tor a while longer.)
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/who-was-ty-cobb-the-history-we-know-thats-wrong/
What about race? It is “common knowledge” that Cobb was “an avowed racist”—but when and where did he make such a vow and where is it recorded? A 1984 biography of Cobb, written by a college professor named Charles Alexander, is typical. It describes three people who fought with Cobb—a night watchman, a bellhop, and a butcher—as being black. Such evidence was enough for documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, whose made-for-PBS series Baseball described Cobb as an embarrassment to the game because of his racism and cast Cobb as the anti-Jackie Robinson.
But Burns, like so many others, was letting himself be misled by the oft-repeated myth. Looking into census reports, birth certificates, and contemporary newspaper accounts, I found that all three of the black fighters cited by Charles Alexander were in fact white. Yes, Cobb had also fought with two black men during his life, but those fights didn’t have racial overtones, and Cobb—who had an extremely thin skin—fought with many more white men. So how did such a distinguished author make such obvious mistakes? When I asked Alexander about this, he simply replied, “I went with the best information I had at the time.”
But what about Cobb’s 19th-century Southern roots? How could someone born in Georgia in 1886 not be a racist? What I found—and again, not because I am the Babe Ruth of researchers, but because I actually did some research—is that Ty Cobb was descended from a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob.
Cobb himself was never asked about segregation until 1952, when the Texas League was integrating, and Sporting News asked him what he thought. “The Negro should be accepted wholeheartedly, and not grudgingly,” he said. “The Negro has the right to play professional baseball and whose [sic] to say he has not?” By that time he had attended many Negro league games, sometimes throwing out the first ball and often sitting in the dugout with the players. He is quoted as saying that Willie Mays was the only modern-day player he’d pay to see and that Roy Campanella was the ballplayer that reminded him most of himself.
Cobb was, like the rest of us, a highly imperfect human being. He was too quick to take offense and too intolerant of those who didn’t strive for excellence with the over-the-top zeal that he did. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he thought too many others fools. He was the first baseball celebrity, and he did not always handle well the responsibilities that came with that. And yes, he once went into the stands and repeatedly punched a man who had been heckling him for more than a year, and who turned out to have less than the full complement of fingers—hence the story of him attacking a handicapped fan. This is a mark against him. But was he a racist and an embarrassment to the game? Far from it.
More of the quote and context:
Five years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, Cobb publicly supported blacks and whites playing baseball together, adding, "Certainly it is okay for them to play. I see no reason in the world why we shouldn't compete with colored athletes as long as they conduct themselves with politeness and gentility. Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man; in my book that goes not only for baseball but in all walks of life."Using even stronger language, Cobb told the Sporting News in 1952 that "the Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly." In 1953, black newspapers cited his praise for Brooklyn Dodgers' catcher Roy Campanella, who Cobb said was "among the all-time best catchers" in baseball. Following Campanella's accident that left him paralyzed, the Dodgers staged a tribute game where tens of thousands of spectators silently held lit matches above their heads. Cobb wrote the Dodgers owner to show appreciation "for what you did for this fine man". Cobb also stated that Willie Mays was the "only player I'd pay money to see". In the obituaries that ran in the black press following Cobb's death, he was praised for "[speaking] in favor of racial freedom in baseball".
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You know you like that about him.
Also, I can't stand that catcher.
Or, the punk Joc who got slapped for breaking sacred ff rules.
You can't make this shit up.
Pham is entertaining!
In todays rules he should have been sliding away from the catcher not move in the baseline and hitting him?
That stated, he doesn't plow him, which would have been cheap. He was out. Good tag and position by catcher
Debateable on if Contreras is justified to talk shit. I don't think so, the dude didn't plow into him.
Either way, I don't like Contreras and I do like Pham.
Colors my perception in the play.
Good point on him being in the wrong on his angle to the plate, though, I missed that when watching the highlight originally.
(no offense to the degenerates around here)
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Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
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Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
Recalling the epic Luis Tiant-Nolan Ryan pitchers’ duel in 1974 — something it’s safe to say we’ll never see again
on a related note, I hate my current Giants. no one seems to know how to play the game and bob melvin doesn’t seem inclined to teach them.
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14