The Brewers sent a pitcher named Luis Martinez to Beloit in 2000; in 2003 he pitched a few games for the big club. He's still an active player, pitching in the Mexican League this year.

According to Howe SportsData's 2000 season summary, Martinez was a 183 pound, 6'1" righty. According to Baseball Reference's player page for Martinez (and a couple other handy sources), he was (is) a 200 pound, 6'6" southpaw. Except for those little issues, we're clearly talking about the same guy.

No lesson, here, and Howe's usually a very reliable source. In 2002 they got things right in their Southern League summary. Meantime, I'm just a little confused, and frustrated....

Paducah (Mississippi-Ohio Valley) fans hurled stones and beer cans at the Centralia Cubs following the second game of the August 3 double-header in which Catcher Tommy Gatts was ejected for allegedly striking Manager Eddie Kearse of Paducah as he scored the winning run in the sixth inning. . . . Everett Joyner, West Frankfort outfielder, highlighted the Mississippi-Ohio Valley League All-Stars' 9 to 2 victory over Centralia, August 6, with a single, double, and home run in five trips. . . . Belleville will withdraw from the Mississippi-Ohio Valley League at the close of the season. Cathedral High School of Belleville has purchased the Stags' park for $20,000, while Jackson, Tenn., is reported in line for the vacated franchise. . . .

That's the second mention of Paducah fans getting rowdy I tripped across this evening. Probably worth a followup.

And an All-Star game long before the first ASG the league acknowledges. One of these days I need to track those down; I think I've got dates for all of them, but no results.

But what really caught my eye, here, was the Belleville ballpark information. Cathedral High is long-gone, now, but a little investigation shows that it was located roughly where St. Elizabeth's Hospital is--Fifth and Lincoln. And this certainly looks like the remnant of a minor league ballpark.

Jackson, Tennessee? Hmmmm.

Punctuation as in the original, though I've fixed the spelling of Paducah. Got this from Paper of Record, of course.

From TSN, 9/9/1978; page 56:

Organized Baseball's first wild-card playoffs could become a reality early in September, provided one of the Midwest League's two first-half divisional champions--Appleton or Quad Cities--finishes on top again in the final second-half standings.

The wild-card arrangements, which will be used only if there is a repeat champion in one division and the other division title is divided between two clubs, were announced August 24 by league President Bill Walters.

If first and second-half divisional championships are split in both the North and South, best-of-three semifinal series will begin in Appleton and Quad Cities on September 1, to be followed by a best-of-three series between the winners for the overall championship.

Should the Foxes and Angels repeat as second-half titlists, there would be no semifinals; the two clubs would begin a best-of-five series September 1 in Appleton.

The wild-card entry--should things work out so that one is required--most likely would be Waterloo. The berth would go to the club not qualifying for the playoffs with the best overall season record, and the Indians are certainly that. They were 41-25 in the first half, but still finished nine games behind North Division winner Appleton (51-17). The two clubs have been involved in a see-saw battle for first place during most of the second-half schedule, both playing nearly .700 baseball.

It's been a different story in the South, where Clinton, Burlington and Quad Cities are involved in a three-way scrap for the second-half championship--despite being unable to play much better than .500 ball.

The Angels took the first-half crown, although they finished only one game above .500.

As things worked out, Waterloo qualified by beating out the Foxes. I'm going to need to revise my Playoffs page, though.

On the same page, though unrelated:

In the process of issuing an intentional pass to Burlington's Ivan Rodriguez August 20, Appleton (Midwest) pitcher Mark Esser made an eighth-inning pitch a little too good. Opportunist Rodriguez jumped on the offering, which was in the strike zone, and doubled home the final two runs in an 8-2 Bees' victory. Rodriguez rubbed salt in the wound by stealing third base while Esser was going into his stretch position.

Not Pudge....

Courtesy of Paper of Record. I was looking for something about Esser, whose short career was a little odd. Learned he threw hard, got lots of strikeouts, was pretty erratic, and little else.

The last (still ongoing) step consists mostly of comparing the Baseball-Databank list of major league players to the lists I've collected and assembled; that comparison could be simplified somewhat if I'd automate it, but the error rate would be unacceptable. For each fourteen-team season my programs generate a list of about 140 "likely matches," of whom roughly fifty turn out to be false positives. Most non-matches are obvious when I eyeball them, but the edge cases can be maddening. That's necessarily manual work, folks.

Today I've begun posting that effort to the MWLguide.com website. I've begun with Appleton, and will work alphabetically through to Wisconsin Rapids over the next few weeks. Unfortunately, at this time my presentable data only goes back to 1989, so I'll need to repeat the effort as I complete the earlier years (coming; it's just slow work, as I've suggested). But this is clearly the most-wanted missing feature for MWLguide.com, so it seems worth posting the incomplete lists and promising further cleanup. I expect I'll have "complete" lists (see Less Thans, below) posted early in the upcoming season.

Miscellaneous Notes

Errors. This is the sort of project where every possible error is more or less guaranteed to occur. Please tell me if you find something wrong. Thanks.

The Sporting News. A project like this tends to generate a love/hate relationship with your best source--in this case, the Sporting News Guides. The quality of the Guides is more variable than you'd imagine (for instance: Don't Trust the 2005 Edition), and there are some systematic issues which everyone finds annoying. Nonetheless: TSN has discontinued publishing most of their baseball annuals, and I miss them.

Name changes are problems, as are some common nicknames. David Ortiz called himself David Arias when he played in the MWL. Albert Belle went by Joey. Ervin Santana was Johan. (There are others like this; I recognize a few.) And many minor league sources list players by their proper names, which means my programs may miss major leaguers who went by Dick, or Bill, or Tom at the major league level (though I'd likely notice the match if they went by Rich, Willie, or Thom). The main advantage of getting this right is the demographics; I can get the birthdate right, and show a pointer to his big league career. I'd be grateful to be notified if you spot someone I missed. Thanks.

On the roster, but didn't play. David Eckstein sat on the Michigan Battle Cats' bench for a few days in 1997. Rick Ankiel, officially disabled at the time, spent the entire 2002 season on the Peoria roster. Neither appeared in any games. Neither pattern is particularly unusual, but they're not documented very well. I'm including those I notice.

Less Thans. Prior to about 1964, the TSN Guides don't reliably list players who played only a few MWL games. Baseball researchers call these players "Less Thans," and they're a bane of our existence. I list the Less Thans that I, or my sources, know about, but it's really quite clear that hundreds of folks who played two or four games in the Midwest League are not listed in the historical record.

Birthdates. It's absolutely amazing to me how many players' birthdates changed between their MWL summer and their major league career. It's clearly always been common for players to shave a couple years off their age when they sign their initial contract. This isn't exactly news, but I didn't realize the practice had continued into the modern era. (Note: It appears that the stringent transportation ID requirements imposed by the Feds in 2002 have largely put an end to this practice.)

I've got more information. I have all years' rosters in electronic form, and will post those as I get to them. I have all managers, most coaches, and most trainers. I have some front office staff. I have most umpires, though there are some reliability issues because the available lists are typically produced in March. I intend to mark the MWL All-Stars in the same way I've marked the major leaguers. And the Hall of Famers. I've numbers, positions, birthdates, hometowns, and other information for many players; transcribing those from paper may be next winter's big project. Also: The database contains information I'm not posting to the website. It does not contain any statistics; other folks are working on that.

Seasons, and Organizations. I plan to create lists showing everyone who played in a specific season. I likewise intend to post roster pages for the MWL's major league affiliates.

SABR. SABR's Minor Leagues Committee is working on a similar, but much larger, project. Just wanted to mention it; it promises to be my favorite SABR resource. I'll be sharing my database with that project team in the near future.

Copies? If you want a copy of the database, or a subset, drop me a line. We can negotiate about formats

You want to help? Data donations are welcome. Please put the information in a spreadsheet. Please include first and last names, preferably in separate columns; columns for year and team are also essential. I'm pretty sure I can wrestle any spreadsheet into MySQL, and then to the site. Thanks.

The Midwest League's 1982 format may be serving as a sort of pilot program the major leagues could consider in future years, should the big leagues opt for three divisions. The Midwest is the only Class A league not playing a split season, its three four-team divisions each crowning a champion at the end of the 144-game schedule, then adding a wild-card club--the team with the best record that did not win a divisional title--for a four-game championship playoff. This is the exact format suggested if the National League and American League go to three-division setups. The Midwest League set an attendance record in 1981 before adding four new franchises (Beloit, Danville, Madison, and Springfield) this spring, and the big leagues will be watching closely to see what effect the elimination of the split season has on attendance at the Class A level.

The Sporting News, July 5, 1982, page 47/
Courtesy of Paper of Record.

Attendance

Some evidence, for your consideration:

From 81 to 82

year   attend   tm  games
1981   602,793   8   136
1982 1,005,530  12   144

Cities

 City                 1981     1982
Appleton             66,780   81,970  +
Beloit                        81,512
Burlington           62,127   59,292  -
Cedar Rapids         89,824  101,096  +
Clinton              67,940   89,352  +
Danville                      41,105
Quad Cities         134,142  157,960  +
Madison                      127,639
Springfield                  108,182
Waterloo             80,355   73,597  -
Wausau               58,116   40,077  -
Wisconsin Rapids     43,509   37,748  -

Too much noise to make much sense of this, but: The league's attendance increase from 1981 to 1982 was mostly (not entirely) in the new cities. The returning cities, predictably, reported mixed results.

Once heard one of the Ohio Valley Redcoats owners--Mike Hayes, I think--tell tales about Swisher. Very entertaining.

The Charleston [WVA] Charlies were jolted a mite when they walked into Watt Powell Park in Charleston upon returning from spring training to find a huge pine tree growing directly behind second base. The prank had been the work of grounds superintendent Jim Teague, a professional landscaper. The tree, of course, was removed before the Charlies played their home opener April 12 against Toledo.

From The Sporting News, May 3, 1975; page 32. There's a photograph....

Bruce Catton's Michigan says this:

Men who ought to have known better feared that those who planned the new [Sault Ste Marie] canal were much too optimistic. E.B. Ward of Detroit was the lakes' chief steamboat magnate, just then, and he wrote anxiously to a Michigan Congressman protesting that the locks, planned to measure 350 feet in length by 70 in width, were much too large; 260 feet by 60 feet would be ample, because steamboats too large for such locks would be too big to get up the St. Mary's River, which had shallow places with hard-rock bottoms.... [page 120]

...Captain Ward, as competent a businessman as the lakes country afforded, had turned out to be a terrible prophet, not because he lacked intelligence, but simply because neither he nor the other men who were industrializing this wilderness had any notion how fast the process was going to go, once it got started. [122]

The CCC's Michigan Guide tells us:

Early in 1853, Captain Eber B. Ward, a Detroit shipping magnate, purchased the [John] Biddle estate [in Wyandotte] and established the Eureka Iron and Steel Company on the waterfront, the first plant of its kind in the Detroit area. A blast furnace and rolling mill were built, and a settlement was platted. In the next 20 years, Wyandotte pioneered in the steel industry with two important firsts: the first steel analysis laboratory in the United States (1862), and the manufacture of the first Bessemer steel [properly, this was Kelly-patent steel] in America (1864).... Because of the mill's position between the ore beds of upper Michigan and the coal fields of Ohio and Indiana, it seemed probably that it would become one of the most successful plants in the Nation; but Ward had overreached himself. When he fell dead in Detroit in 1875, his partners, hit by the panic of 1873, permitted the mill to fall into ruin.... [T]wo years before his death, Captain Ward had drilled an oil and gas well on his property, which, although it proved unproductive, revealed the existence of an immense salt bed of good quality and not too deep to be exploited commercially. [470]

Ward gets quite a bit of attention from Jean McHugh in her biography of Alexander Holley; here's one paragraph:

Ward's sole aim was to build the experimental plant and to rush it into operation. He was a strange person. To his credit, he rarely interfered with Durfee's operation [Wyandotte's Kelly-patent mill]. He has been described as a man of extremes: self-controlled and passionate, shrewd and credulous, persistent yet changeable. He was not an ironmaster in the true sense of the word and had little real understanding of the details of Durfee's experiments. In his anxiety to make a financial success of the venture, Ward seemed always ready to listen to any suggestion, no matter how ridiculous. He probably had no intention of creating difficulties for Durfee, but seemed unable to resist trying out a persuasive scheme, especially if it were put forward by those unfriendly to Durfee. [175]

He's mentioned four times in James C. Mills' Our Inland Seas; this one is typical:

The large steamer Planet, built by Captain Ward at Newport, in 1855, and which was a leviathan of the time, was added to the [Goodrich] line about 1863. She was of twelve hundred tons, and splendidly furnished, but ran only until 1866, when she was taken off the line and dismantled. [240]

Finally, and most surprisingly, Ward and his sons show up in Peter Morris's wonderful Baseball Fever:

For five years, Ward tried desperately to make businessmen of his sons, but failed miserably. He put Charley in charge of a business in Toledo, and Charley proceeded to run up thirty-seven thousand dollars in debts. Captain Ward bailed him out, and Charley ran up another two hundred thousand dollars in debts that his father again had to make good. E. B. Ward made similar attempts with Milton, with no more success. Milton ran up large bills in Ludington, Milwaukee, and Ripon, Wisconsin, without making much pretense of following his father's instructions. Both sons of the state's "first real captain of industry" became notorious for their "questionable industry," though it's unclear whether this should be attributed to insanity, rebellion against their father, or mere laziness. In 1874, the Detroit Evening News announced that "Milt Ward has at last found his strong point. He says that he can sit in a chair, and balance longer on the two hind legs than any man in the West." [235-36]

I've no plan to write Ward's missing biography, but I'm intrigued enough that I'll be posting some things about him in this Journal from time to time.

That recovery could have been automated, but I chose to review the individual postings. While there's some pain in this recovery method, it gave me the opportunity to reread everything, rework a few entries, and check the links on the recovered postings. While I don't regret the effort, I'm pleased to have the little sub-project complete. Now I can make time for more obviously-interesting activities.

It's an interesting document, with lots of articles directly on-topic, an excerpt from Tim O'Brien's novel The Things They Carried, and some articles less directly about the memorial.

One of the articles is by Lynda Van Devanter, who was a nurse at the 71st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku; these photographs, both of which were taken at the 71st, are among the illustrations. (This article, too, is a book excerpt, from Home Before Morning.)

My office phone rang. Since it was an external call, and I didn't recognize the number, odds were it was either a vendor or a wrong number. Nope; Lauren Morgan introduced herself as an editor with Boston Publishing, and she was working with Vietnam Veterans of America on a magazine issue. They'd found a couple of my pictures on Flickr, and wanted to use them to illustrate an article. I asked which photos they were planning to use, which she described, and I said sure. We talked about some details for a few minutes, and the conversation ended.

She called again last week, asking where to mail the complimentary copies. Those showed up yesterday. They're really quite beautiful; much higher quality than I anticipated. I do find it odd that she contacted me at work; while I've always known it was possible (I've had the same work phone number for 20 years, and it's available on the web), I'm reasonably certain it's easier to find my home number, which is where I usually field out-of-the-blue calls.

I bought my copy of The Things They Carried shortly after the book was first published, and heard Tim talk about the book this summer at Macalester's reunion. Delighted to share a magazine with him; certainly never expected it to happen. Haven't read Home Before Morning, but I've just added it to my Amazon wishlist.