Your Bill James quote du jour
From “Ellis, Richie and the Duke,” a comparison of various HoF and HoF-argued center fielders:
Ashburn had a good year with the bat, but he was playing for the Mets, and he couldn’t see the humor in it.
It reminds me of that line, uttered by I forget whom, about Ashburn’s time with the Mets…that the team lost 120 times, and 120 times Richie Ashburn went down kicking and screaming.With the benefit of hindsight, of course, the futility of that seems kind of funny to us…but Ashburn didn’t know it was the 1962 Mets and that he should probably just work on his tan out there.He got mad.I admire that.
The piece (which also contains a weird simile, followed by an apology by James for listening to the country music that led to it; heh) is from James’s website, which he updates quite frequently; it does have a subscription fee, but I believe it’s a pittance along the lines of $3 a quarter, and if you’d like to read his treatise on the steroid era — which many many other commentators have been discussing in the last couple of weeks — it’s well worth the price of admission.
Tags: Bill James Duke Snider Ellis Burks Richie Ashburn sites
Bill James is awesome. His Historical Abstract is awesome (hopefully it’ll get updated in the next decade?), and I finally got my hands on a copy of the Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers.
Whitey was always a favorite of mine despite playing long before I was born and playing for the Phillies. (Not that I dislike the Phillies, I just don’t follow them and am not exactly a history buff where they are concerned.) Harry Kalas did a lengthy interview on Angelo Cataldi’s show on WIP last February and told several stories, including:
“One of his responsibilities was doing the pregame show. Angelo, if it happened once, it happened twenty times, he would come up to the booth with his tape recorder. He’d say, ‘Boys, that might be the best interview I ever had.’ He’d hand the tape to the technician, the tech’d say, ‘Whitey, there’s nothing on here.’ I mean, it happened all the time.”
I wonder what Whitey would have to say about the 2009 Nationals.