prone to enthusiasms….
I’m a baseball fan, and a baseball researcher. Both interests are represented here.
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This second BRJ edition has more substance than the first, right from the first article where David Voigt put the 1972 baseball strike into historical context. John Tattersall’s offering discussed leadoff homeruns, and Fred Lieb presented a fine portrait of Hal of Fame historian Ernie Lanigan.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
November 2nd 2011
A fun, quick read, with just enough substance to get you thinking. I enjoyed.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
October 17th 2011
But it’s a shallow book. There’s not much analysis, despite the title. You can sometimes see that real analysis has been done, but the presentation hides the work. The clear attitude is “Take our word for it, we’ve crunched the numbers.” Lots of us aren’t happy with that sort of presentation; but hey, it’s their book, they can do that if they want. But saying we can’t complain about it is a little unreasonable.
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Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
August 12th 2011
The 11/29/1940 Dallas Evening News (my thanks to GenealogyBank) tells me that R.H. Johnson’s military career mostly occurred during WWI, as an enlisted man in Artillery, which was before his West Point stint. At the USMA he was quite active in sports, including baseball; he captained the basketball team. Johnson subsequently served for a few years as a ROTC instructor in the NYC area before resigning his commission to enter the banking business on Wall Street. In 1929 he founded R.H. Johnson & Company, and in 1947 began Franklin Investments.
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Baseball CrankSpace
History Scrapbook
Posted on
April 18th 2011
We’ve straightened out the pitching situation–Scott McGregor’s magically appeared on the mound. And we’ve released Ingram from his baserunning duties so he can return to QC’s CF. emBut: We’re still lost track of one out. That will haunt us.
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Baseball CrankSpace
Semi-Geekery
Posted on
March 28th 2011
This is a book mainly about the northside ballpark, and about the team executives who’ve been responsible for maintaining it. Although many ballgames are described, and seasons are summarized, the Cubs (and the ChiFeds who first resided here) are not the book’s subject. This is not a shortcoming, but is occasionally disconcerting.
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Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
March 22nd 2011
In May of 2006 Jeff Sackmann announced that he’d begun publishing splits (left/right, day/night, home/away, etc) information for minor league players. His Minor League Splits (MLS) website became one of the most valuable minor league stats sources. He’s no longer providing the information in an easily accessible form, but he’s made the underlying data available. This is potentially an immensely valuable resource, as it may enable folks to study the disparities in performance between players taking the field at different levels of professional competition.
Filed under Baseball CrankSpace Posted on March 12th 2011
On January 24 of 1996 I began work on what would evolve into MWLguide.com, but the site’s original URL was www.wp.com/JOWO/. The first page, built from a template supplied by my Web Pages host, was an early draft of this biographical page–that bio’s structure remains basically theirs–and two days later I’d composed A Fan’s Guide to the Midwest League in Lotus Word Pro and uploaded it to the site.
Filed under Baseball CrankSpace Posted on February 3rd 2011
Emails often made my day. I heard from fans, from past and present players, from team radio voices, from former and would-be player girlfriends, from executives, from prospective team owners, from newspaper reporters. Over the years I received thousands of notes on a vast array of topics. A Danville fan told me about watching Butch McCord. One writer told about his mother boarding black players in Decatur. Another filled me in on a former player’s troubled life after baseball. A batboy told about his continuing friendships with players who’d shared the Dubuque dugout. Pat Neshek wrote me a delightful note after his MWL summer. Bob Sprout thanked me for writing up his remarkable season, as did Bob Lawrence; both were reminded of lost friends. In the best email I ever received, a kind lady from Williamsport, Pennsylvania, told me in detail how her family became unintentional hosts to a gentle giant named Juan Salazar, and fell in love.
Filed under Baseball CrankSpace Posted on September 5th 2010
The web makes a book like this less valuable every year, as virtually all of the information here is available at places like Baseball Reference and the soon-to-be-rolled-out SABR Encyclopedia (which I’m helping build–take that as a disclaimer). But it’s still fun to page through this book, and find interesting and unexpected things. Nicely done, in most ways.
Filed under
Baseball CrankSpace
Bookworm Alley
Posted on
March 26th 2010
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