Monday, February 8, 2010

Monday Morning Shortstop

Comment of the week, from Nick:

Jon,
(Disclaimer: I made a comment along these lines Friday, but it's never appeared on your blog. Don't know what happened.) Anyway:
Bo Jackson would be a good Maranvillian. Some of the stuff he did was breathtaking. A homer I saw him hit off Oswaldo Peraza in 1988 is probably somewhere around Saturn by now.


Inspired choice. Bo knew strikeouts, he knew home runs, and he knew stolen bases. In 1989, he led the league with the highest Power/Speed number. A look at the yearly leaders shows some other guys mentioned here: Reggie Jackson, Mark Reynolds, Jackie Robinson, and Larry Walker to name a few. Versatility isn't just for Meryl Streep. It may also be a good quality for Maranvillains, now that I think about it. How was he as a fielder? I seem to recall him as aggressive, but most of his career coincided with my Army days and I didn't follow baseball much those years. It was hard to without a TV back then.

There was some sporting event last nite, and Brian Burke commented on the ballsiness of one coach.

A call for scoresheets.

Dave Allen has an idea for a new boxscore. To tie these last two together, Bill James had an idea in one of his Baseball Abstracts that involved a scoresheet style boxscore. I liked that and thought it was the most concise way to tell the story of a game.

One of my friends calls Joe Mauer a baseball robot, but this is a nice story about him; if you get ESPN Insider. If not, it's in the latest "The Mag."

5 comments:

  1. You refer to the account-form box score from the 1983 Abstract. Coincidentally, I'm going to be writing a post about it sometime soon. I made a scoresheet that doesn't keep the sequence of events, just the details for the account-form box, and it can fit three games on one side of paper.

    I'm surprised that someone hasn't implemented it on the web. Sure, you can get full PBP from Baseball-Reference, but not in shorthand form. The first site to implement something like the account-form box will get all of my daily box score reading hits.

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  2. Hopefully that's Yahoo, so you can continue to point out there typos. Account-form! I was blanking on what he called it.

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  3. Re more Maranvillains - Pudge Rodriguez, the way he used to intimidate basestealers. That was awesome. Baseball fans just a little older than me, though, the guy they rave about is Johnny Bench. I have probably heard more raving about the incredible, eye-popping all-round play of Johnny Bench than anyone else I can think of.

    Nolan Ryan, another Maranvillain by the way. While I am thinking of it.

    The guy in Pudge's mold who impresses me the most now with his play behind the plate is Yadier Molina. I love watching that guy play baseball.

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  4. Bo had a hell of an arm. Just ask Harold Reynolds.

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  5. Thanks guys, when I have time over the next seven days or so, hope to concentrate on this instead of my little diversions into six digrees of baseball history crystallize some of these thoughts.

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