Category: Baseball CrankSpace

I’m a baseball fan, and a baseball researcher. Both interests are represented here.

Joel’s Lansing Lugnut Notes: an introduction

Although blogs hadn’t yet been invented, seventeen years ago I kept a Lansing Lugnuts weblog, which I called Joel’s Lansing Lugnut Notes. The 1996 Luggies were a new team. I began keeping the online journal because I’d been watching Midwest League (MWL) play for several summers and figured I had something to contribute to the Lansing discussion. As things worked out I did a writeup after each series, and composed a few other pages as inspiration struck. I plan to repost all of the weblog entries, and most of the other pages, to this journal over the next few months. Most will be posted 17 years to the day after they were originally written.

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Bill James Presents The Great American Baseball Stat Book (1988) edited by Don Zminda and Project Scoresheet

This was the first time I saw Brock Hanke’s name in print. The same is true of several of the book’s other contributors: John Benson, Sherri Nichols, Stuart Shea, and Sean Lahman come quickly to mind. (Tom Tippett was there, too, as the project’s programmer.) Just bringing these folks (and Pankin, in the previous edition) into my life is plenty of justification for the effort.

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JD by Jamey Newberg: a review

While this work necessarily has some biographical content, it’s largely about how GM Jon Daniels runs the Ranger’s organization–the things he emphasizes, the people he hires, the objectives he sets, the ways he communicates, the methods he uses to collect information, and the reasons behind those practices. Newberg, who’s been writing about the Rangers organization since the late 1990s, clearly knows the material.

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Sparky and Me by Daniel Ewald: a short review

Besides the Life Lessons, the book contains a quite a bit of biographical material, and a surprising amount of information and commentary about Sparky’s managerial methods. Sparky was more a motivator and molder than a tactician, as anyone who followed his teams knows. Ewald witnessed that during Anderson’s Tiger years, and heard many tales about how he worked with the Cincinnati team’s egos.

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Baseball Research Journal 1979 edited by Bob Davids: a review

Paul Doherty’s look at Cy Young’s last few games with the Boston NL team after Cleveland released him was very good, as was John Holway’s look at Louis Santop and Pete Palmer’s piece on Rube Waddell’s rookie season. Arthur Ahrens’ portrait of Fred Pfeffer (Cap Anderson’s second baseman) was perhaps the finest piece in this edition of the journal. Al Kermish’s always-interesting Researcher’s Notebook included a piece about how he and Tom Hufford identified 1912 Senator player Lefty Schegg (actually Gilbert Eugene Price), and Harold Dellinger gave his account of tracking down the identity of 1884 Kansas City UA player Matthew Porter (rather than Henry Porter, as he’d previously been mis-identified).

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Howard V. Millard

Howard Millard, the president of the Midwest League’s predecessor Illinois State League in 1947 and 1948, was sports editor for the Decatur (Illinois) Review (later the Herald and Review) from 1920 through 1958. For his entire tenure in Decatur Millard wrote a column called “Bait for Bugs.” He was good at his job, but covering the Three-I League for The Sporting News didn’t bring him national fame. He was unusually active in Illinois, however, founding and presiding over the Illinois Associated Press Sports Editors Association.

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