Baseball And Football Today …

As is customary in these parts, we take a moment on this day every year to remember Broderick Crawford…

The Phillies ended an 11-year streak of missing the playoffs this year clinching a wild card slot in the NL Playoffs over the weekend.  Meanwhile, late last week, the Mariners ended a 20-year streak of missing the playoffs by securing their presence in the AL Playoffs.  Both teams struggled early in the season.  The Phillies changed managers after about 50 games and had two hot streaks in July and August that got them where they are now.  Likewise, the Mariners looked out of it until about July 4^th and then things fell into place for them.

Meanwhile, the Yankees have 3 more games on their schedule in the regular season and Aaron Judge only needs 1 more home run to break Roger Maris’ AL home run record of 61 blasts in a season.  The Yankees end with a split double header today and a final game tomorrow against the Texas Rangers in Arlington, TX.  So far this year, the Rangers have averaged 24,538 fans per game; it will be interesting to see if they draw significantly larger crowds for this last series as people there might want to “see history being made”.

Speaking of baseball, I ran into a former colleague while on a quest to restock my wine cellar; we chatted for a while, and he told me that he had run across a baseball stat he found astonishing:

• For his career – one which ran from 1939 through 1960 minus three years in the midst of WW II – Ted Williams had an OBP of .496 in games played in Fenway Park.

My first reaction was that it would take me far more time and energy than I was wiling to expend to verify that number and my second reaction was that even for Williams who was the best pure hitter I ever saw play, that was amazing.  Think about it, over a span of 19 seasons in about 1400 home games, Williams would have come to bat approximately 5000 times.  That stat says he would have been on base for half of those plate appearances.  WOW !

My top-of-the-head calculation made me a bit incredulous, so I went to baseball-reference.com to check some numbers and – as the song says – “ … Now I’m a believer”.  Here are some career stats for Ted Williams that I found there:

• Plate Appearances = 9792  My  guess of 5000 home plate appearances is reasonable.
• Career OBP = .482  Not unreasonable to believe he was slightly better at home.

Just for a little sauce on those stats above, Williams’ career OBP of .482 is an all-time record for MLB.  A major contributor to that OBP record is the fact that in his career Williams drew a walk on 2021 of those plate appearances and only 258 of those walks were intentional.

Switching gears …  In last night’s NFL game between the Niners and the Rams, the game was interrupted briefly by a fan who ran onto the field carrying a pink smoke bomb.  Naturally, the security guards were in hot pursuit, but the “fan” was running free near the Rams’ bench on the sideline.  At that point, Rams’ linebacker Bobby Wagner took a few steps onto the field and knocked the fan to the ground allowing the gendarmes to apprehend the fan and remove him from the stadium.  I was watching the Manning-cast at that point, and they showed a replay of the fan and the tackle there; I don’t know if that was shown on the main broadcast feed with Joe Buck and Troy Aikman.

For those of us of a certain age – – that age being really old – – this brought back memories of a Baltimore Colts’ linebacker, Mike Curtis, who played for the Colts in the late 60s through the mid-70s.  Curtis was not nearly as ferocious as Dick Butkus of that same era, but just so you can get a feeling for Curtis, his nickname among his teammates was “Mad Dog”.

In a Colts game, Curtis and the Colts’ defense was on the field; the ball had been spotted and the offensive team was in the huddle calling their play.  A fan ran onto the field and grabbed the ball that had been placed by the officials and started to run off with it;  Unfortunately for him, he ran in the direction of Mike Curtis who absolutely unloaded on the guy ending his attempted run to glory. Take a moment and Google “Mike Curtis tackles fan” for several links to video coverage of that incident along with written descriptions of the “event”.

I recall reading an account at the time where someone asked Curtis why he did what he did.  Curtis’ response was along the lines of:

• That guy was breaking a municipal ordinance and I decided to enforce the law.

Last night, Bobby Wagner channeled his inner Mike Curtis.  Good on you, Bobby Wagner…

Finally, earlier this year, Mike Trout had hit a home run in 7 consecutive games for the Angels and was seeking to tie the MLB record of 8 consecutive games.  He failed to hit a home run in that eighth game and here is how Dwight Perry described that situation in the Seattle Times:

“Angels star Mike Trout, trying to homer in a record-tying eighth straight game, instead flew out three times and walked.

“Apparently the creel limit for Trout is seven.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………