This short piece is what led me down this road in the first place.  It was just uploaded yesterday.

Here’s a recent review of a book about the baseball that Bobby Thomson hit on October 4th, 1951 AKA the Shot Heard ‘Round the World.  They say that there’ve been a ton of books written about that game and the National League pennant race.  There was much more going on that year, but I’ll have more on that later.  The book that I’m most familiar with is The Echoing Green by Josh Prager.  As one netizen AndrewJ said here:

Prager’s book is overwritten and overresearched and overwrought.

And I couldn’t get enough of it.

It’s better than Maranniss’s Clemente biography, better than Leigh Montville’s biography of the Babe. And those were two excellent books.

Aloha.  Unlike basketball or football, baseball is fairly easy to analyze statistically.  There are a number of systematic (and unsystematic) rankings of players out there.  I’m gonna go with Bill James’s Win Shares here, mainly because he has a section in that book where he lists players by birth year and this saves me a lot of legwork.

10. Jeff Burroughs (196)

The number in parens is the number of Win Shares.  Burroughs was Rookie of The Year once, but didn’t have a long career.

9. Jim Sundberg (200)

Good defensive catcher.

8. Goose Gossage (223)

Should probably be ranked higher, bt I’m not sure how high.  One of only two Cooperstown inductees born in 1951.  I think some people tend to overrate relievers, but I’d rather have Goose on my team than acouple of other guys with more Win Shares.

7. Bill Madlock (242)

I’m an AL fan, so I mainly remember him as a batting champ.

6, Cesar Cedeno (296)

I was surprised to see him ranked so high.  When these guys were young, he was probably the one most likely to make it to the Hall of Fame.  He had 139 Win Shares before turning 24, but ran into some personal problems.

5.  Buddy Bell (301)

Buddy Bell??  Win Shares likes his fielding.  And he played for a long time.  Intuitively, this ranking looks wrong.  I know you’re not supposed to use straight Win Shares, but I have to get ready for work soon.

4. Dave Parker (327)

Marginal Hall candidate.  May have had the best prime of any of these guys, then got fat.

3. Bert Blyleven (339)

Cause celebre of Rich Lederer and others.  And for good reason.

2. Dwight Evans (347)

Unlike some people, I am not wetting my pants because Jim Rice made the Hall of Fame this year.  But Dewey had a better career.  He was a late bloomer, not really hitting his stride at the plate until Walt Hriniak took him under his wing.

1. Dave Winfield (415)

Born the same day that the Giants won the pennant.  Seagulls beware.

You can’t.  It is a prime number.  Here’s a list of the unfactorable years in the 20th and 21st centuries.  If there are any similarities between the years, let me know:

1901      1907      1913      1931      
1933      1949      1951      1973      
1979      1987      1993      1997      
1999      2003      2011      2017      
2027      2029      2039      2053      
2063      2069      2081      2083      
2087      2089      2099 

There is a good chance that you might have the opportunity to hear me speak.  But you’ll have to be in Hartford, Connecticut on July 9th.  There will be a talk on Hartford baseball history at their library that day.  The guy who’s running it said that he can give me 5 minutes to talk about a night baseball game that was played in Hartford in 1890.  If you’re in the area stop by.  Stay truned for some 1951 related stuff, probably later this week if I get up early enough one morning.

I picked up Nine Innings close to 25 years ago; around the same time that I picked up my first Baseball Abstract.  What a tremendous book.  It covers a game back in 1982 between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Baltiomore Orioles.  It isn’t really germane to 1951, but I hope to accomplish some of what this book did.  Interspersed between portions of the game account are episodes that give mini-bios of various members of the Brewer organization.  Dan Okrent also touched on other baseball themes like the evolution of the slider and how free agency came about.  He’s best known as an editor, but the man can turn a phrase.  Here are a couple:

… Steve Stone suddenly attained satori with his curveball, winning 25 games and the Cy Young Award.

… (T)he Luplow Catch had become as essential a point of refernce for baseball hands as Easter SUnday 1916 at the Dublin post office had become for Irish patriots.

It so shocked all who knew Williams’ arrogance that one Boston newspaper headlined “Ted Bunts!” as if V-E Day had just been announced.

Other writers have tried the “game as a microcosm of the sport approach”  (Buster Olney’s Last Night Of The Yankee Dynasty comes to mind) but I don’t recall reading an account that equaled this one.

While poring through microfilm, I saw ads for The Day The Earth Stood Still and Jim Thorpe All-American.  Theaters also used to run films of recent title fights.  Whiskeypedia has a page on 1951.  Some cineaste may disagree with me, but it doesn’t look like a banner year at the movies.  Out of the top 10, I believe that I’ve seen Alice In Wonderland and The African Queen.

I was surprised to see “Dust My Broom” at #15.

Bert Jones was born in 1951.  (L.C. Greenwood was not.)  I’m busy with work and  decided to go with this as the post of the day.

AFAICT, four players born in 1951 made it to Canton: Joe DeLamiellure, Dan Fouts, John Hannah, and Dave Casper.  I borrowed Sean Lahman’s Pro Football Historical Abstract from the library recently.  He ranks John Hannah as the #6 offensive lineman of the two platoon era while DeLamiellure is ranked #25.  Dave Casper is ranked as the #11 tight end.  Fouts, I was surpised to see, was ranked #54 at QB; between Jim Hart and Billy Wade.  He threw a lot of interceptions.  Lahman’s system is purely statistical.  It attempts to account for adjusted yards in comparison to a players peers at his postion during the same era.  But if you are interested in how a player was viewed by his contemporaries, I’ll mention 1st team All Pro selections; like K.C. Joyner did in Blindsided.  Hannah had 7, Casper had 4, DeLamiellure 3, and Fouts 2.  That sounds about the right way to rank them and it (in this instance) matches well with Lahman’s stats.  Fouts did seem to get a lot of ink when I was a kid, but he was a QB and that comes with the territory.

As a kid, I once wrote a fan letter to Casper.  I’m not sure if I ever sent it or not.  I had a habit of not sending letters.

FWIW, there was a Heisman winner born in ‘51.  Johnny Rodgers went to Canada for a couple of years to dodge the NFL draft.  When he returned to the States, he didn’t do much.