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Beau Vine

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Posts posted by Beau Vine

  1. If they give awards for professional sports team promo videos, this one should win a truckload of them.

    Hockey is soooooooooooooooooo awesome for lots of reasons, but one of the biggest is that hockey remembers and respects where the players came from better than any other sport.

    That's TJ Oshie at 1:23 at the Minnesota high school state championships.

    That's John Carlson at 1:33 scoring the goal that really made me fall in love with the World Junior tournament.

    There are at least two shots of someone lifting the Calder Cup.

    And yeah, I'm going to Game 4 of the Calder Cup finals tonight (wearing my John Carlson Team USA jersey) and will watch the Caps game on DVR when I get home.

    • Like 1
  2. Gammons on 50 years from theathletic:

    Quote

    I remember awakening at 5:30 the morning of June 6, 1968, turning the radio to WBZ Boston, and hearing of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. At first, the news was numbing, as it had been on Nov. 22, 1963, when while waiting for Geography 41 in Chapel Hill, Professor Mondale walked in and said, “President Kennedy has been shot and this class is canceled.” Or on April 4 of ’68, when a friend walked into a record store in which I worked and told me, “They killed Martin Luther King”; I dropped the “Mr. Fantasy” Traffic album I had been trying to sell and asked to go back to St. Anthony Hall.

    That June morning I was thinking about growing up, and the fact that in a few days I was going to begin an internship that a mentor named Dean Smith insisted was “important, because you can be good, and you can be a voice.” So, beyond shock, and the low spark of the vacuum of my own life at the age 23, it took me hours to realize that R.F.K. seemingly was the one man who could take the thousands of pieces of the Sixties jigsaw puzzle scattered around the playroom floor, complete the puzzle, and bond the past and the hope that had frayed.

    We look back today and wonder where we might be had he not been carried away on that train of murdered dreams — dreams of hope and inclusion and purpose so brilliantly captured in Thurston Clarke’s clever The Last Campaign. As much as Bobby Kennedy seemingly understood the inherent good of an America arm in arm, that understanding may well have died with him, beyond the resurrective powers of humans like his grandson Joe.

    Four days later, I drove from Hingham to Dorchester to begin that summer internship at The Boston Globe. On that first morning, I met a fellow intern named Bob Ryan, and we were assigned a task. Because of one of the greatest figures in newspaper history, Tom Winship, Globe sports interns were thrown into the fire. In those days, the Globe had a morning paper and an evening paper, and the editors wanted a piece for the 3:30 late edition—which was an important paper for the thousands who rode the trains and buses home after work—that detailed what teams did and what columnists wrote about baseball’s response to the latest Kennedy murder. Bob was given the National League, I the American. We sat down at phones, were told to dial 8 for outgoing service, and went to work.

    They gave us an assignment. We attacked it. And at 3:30 that day, there on the page was the dual byline, in alphabetic order. We left the building and went to the Eire Pub in Dorchester—later made famous by Ronald Reagan—for what I seem to remember was a 20-cent draft and a 25-cent dog, over the same kind of feeling that Eddie Pellagrini and Jason Heyward must have had when they homered in their first major league at-bats.

    “It never again occurred to me that I would do anything else,” Bob says. I knew.

    The next day, Bob was off to Longwood to the US Pro doubles, and to meet the great Bud Collins. Twenty-nine days later I covered Pelé, the Boston Beacons against Santos of Brazil, at Fenway Park, before 18,431, the largest soccer crowd in Boston history. Later in that building, I covered Yaz and El Tiante; Pedro Martínez and Roger Clemens and the Gold Dust Twins, Jim Rice and Fred Lynn; Wade Boggs, David Ortiz, Dustin Pedroia, Dennis Eckersley, Mookie Betts… and on and on and on… but I was a college intern 29 days into my professional journalism career and covered Pelé. Final score: 7-1, Santos over Boston Beacons. They let me do Patriots training camp and learn from Leigh Montville, the best columnist I ever read.

    Bob was right. I wasn’t going to do anything else. No one after Dean Smith had to tell me that this was who I am. When I was still in high school and Peter Magowan was at Stanford, we had our own rotisserie game, by mail; he had the 1960s Giants, my best power hitter was Gary Geiger. Peter was off to Oxford. I was off to Somerset, Mass., to watch Jerry Remy, who was a great high school player and became a lifetime friend.

    We were two kids from Lawrenceville and Groton who, as a few of my Groton classmates at our 50th reunion in 2013 said, “did what they wanted to do.” In the process, were able to stick to our core beliefs—never slow down, never grow old, and, in the words of friend Randy Galloway, “know you can only be young once, but you can always be immature.”

    Which is why, in this 50th ink-stained wretch reunion, MLB Network allowed me to cover the baseball draft, which has fascinated me from the first time I covered one, in 1969. That year the Red Sox drafted Noel Jenke, an outfielder from the University of Minnesota who was also drafted by the NHL and NFL. Jenke eventually retired from baseball and went on to play in four Super Bowls, but didn’t kill the buzz.

    Days before this year’s draft opened, I called Reggie Harris, whom the Red Sox took in the first round in 1997 and bought out of a scholarship to play point guard with his cousin and best friend Dell Curry at Virginia Tech. Harris is currently looking for a pitching coach job, which he will find. He stays in constant touch with Dell, who was off watching his son Steph in the NBA finals. Reggie, who pitched for the A’s, Red Sox and four other teams over six seasons, watches every Golden State game. Dell was drafted by the Orioles but opted for an NBA career. I will admit that Harris, who threw 98 mph, was the reason I first watched Steph Curry, long before he became one of my favorite athletes in any sport. “Dell and I were very close,” said Harris. “We played baseball and basketball together growing up, and now to watch his great boys is a joy to our entire family.”

    This week of the draft is Billy Beane Week. I was staying in a small hotel in Farmington, Conn., the week of the 2002 draft. My phone rang at 6:30 a.m. It was Billy. And it was 3:30 Pacific time.

    That was, of course, the famous “Moneyball Draft,” which Michael Lewis turned into a financial success. Nick Swisher was the A’s first pick at 17. He had a good career, on and off the field. Joe Blanton had a solid run. “The idea we had was right—it was an information-based draft, which was ahead of its time,” said Beane. “The problem was we didn’t have the information yet. We tried to merge scouting with information. It was just hard to get the information.”

    Beane had scout Matt Keough following players like Swisher and Blanton and Mark Teahen. “We had concepts for the information,” said Beane.  We understood spin rate. We knew there was a distinct difference between contact and hard contact. Rafael Bournigal is one of my favorite people of all time, and he had contact, he just made contact that didn’t result in balls going very far. Now we have an incredible amount of information available. We all have PITCHf/x data and video available.”

    Swisher represented the Yankees on the first night of the draft on Monday. “I was just excited when Billy called me and told me that if I were there at 17 they were going to take me,” he said. Did he get some extra cash out of the movie? “Of course not,” said Swisher. “Once I heard Brad Pitt was playing Billy, I knew no one but Scott Hatteberg would get paid.”

    Representing the Royals at this year’s draft was Bo Jackson. “I’m here as a pinch hitter for Art Stewart,” Bo said. “He was the heart and soul of this part of baseball. I’m honored to take his place.”

    Arthur Lee Stewart spent his life in baseball. He loved the game, he loved the draft; he still does, but his knee doesn’t allow him to travel. When Jackson visited Kansas City a couple of years ago, he went to the Royals offices, looking for Stewart. Dayton Moore told him Stewart had knee problems and was living in Milwaukee. “I’ll go visit him,” Bo told Moore. The following weekend Jackson was in Milwaukee, visiting Stewart.

    One year Zack Greinke, who was with the Royals at the time, went to a college doubleheader in Surprise, Ariz., and scouted Arkansas pitcher Ryne Stanek. “I love doing that,” Greinke said. “But it also was an excuse to spend the game with Art Stewart.”

    The game evolves, and it remains the same. A lot has happened for Bob Ryan and me in these 50 years. When he speaks at colleges, he doesn’t ask for a fee; the requirement is the school must have a home basketball game. I still love going to Cape League games, as 49 years ago I loved going to Somerset, Mass., to watch a really good high school player named Jerry Remy.

    Following that first day, a dual byline, a beer and a dog at the Eire Pub, I’ve worked at the Globe, Sports Illustrated, ESPN and The MLB Network, and everywhere I’ve worked, I have been treated well.

    Fifty years on, MLB let me work the draft again and, essentially, do the same things I wanted to do the day I first walked into The Boston Globe, before I had any idea what I would do.

     

    • Like 1
  3. This is great by JoePos:
     

    Quote

    "Greatest drawing card in history of baseball. Holder of many home run and other batting records. Gathered 714 home runs in addition to fifteen in World Series." -- Babe Ruth's plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame


    For a week in late April and early May 1969, Babe Ruth actually had 715 home runs. It was a sports scandal. This is the remarkable thing about Ruth's magic number of 714. Even the most minor adjustment will cause a scandal.

    In the mid-1960s, as the possibilities of computing power became more vibrant, a man named David Neft came up with the idea of creating the first database of baseball statistics. It was a glorious idea, one that Major League Baseball immediately celebrated and looked to connect to the upcoming baseball centennial.

    It also was a ridiculous, daunting, virtually impossible task. There is no way now to fully appreciate just what a mess baseball statistics -- particularly old-time baseball statistics -- were. We love now to glance at the records on Retrosheet or Baseball Reference or FanGraphs and think of baseball stats as this timeless and continuous thing. Look, King Kelly hit .388 in 1886, just like Rod Carew did in 1977! The game is eternal!

    Yeah, except nobody knew what King Kelly hit because the game was entirely different. Six balls constituted a walk (and in 1887, for one season, walks were counted as hits). Bats could have a flat side on them. If a hitter was hit by a pitch, he stayed at the plate. Batters were actually allowed by the rules to request pitches to be thrown high or low.

    So Neft and his merry band not only had to chase down precise day-by-day accounts for every player out of the statistical morass that had been passed down, they also had to determine how to count various statistics when the rules were different. For instance, during the dead-ball period, there were at least 11 methods for calculating the pitcher win. Eleven. What do you do with that?

    It should be added that Neft and his company, Information Concepts Inc., were working with early computers that used punch cards; this wasn't like typing all of the numbers into Google Sheets. This was a Herculean effort, and in late 1969 they released a Herculean book, a 2,338-page, 6 1/2-pound marvel that they called, simply, "The Baseball Encyclopedia."

    "Large for a book," one reviewer wrote. "Small for an amusement park."

    The Baseball Encyclopedia changed baseball forever in many ways. For one thing, simply listing of the names and numbers of every player ever opened up the nostalgia floodgates across America.

    "Go to the pages with the Rs on them," Jimmy Breslin wrote in his glowing review. "Pete Reiser. Now I am on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, running down the hill to Ebbets Field. Right on the corner, there is a gate in the right-field fence. There is a space between the bottom of the gate and the sidewalk. I stop running and I flop onto the sidewalk and look under the gate and here, only a few feet away, is the grass of deep center field. One of the pairs of legs moving around the grass in the pregame practice belongs to Pete Reiser, Pistol Pete!"

    For another, The Baseball Encyclopedia had the ultimate answer to every baseball question imaginable. According to Alan Schwarz's superb "The Numbers Game," The MacMillan Company, which published the book, originally intended to market a lock and chain to latch the book to bar tops across America -- so the Encyclopedia would be the last stop for every baseball bar argument.

    More than that, it was a little bit of heaven for those baseball people who had much deeper questions, baseball people who wanted to dive deep into the numbers to understand the game's greatest mysteries. A young Kansan named Bill James, right out of college and the army, spent hours and hours going through the pages and looking up every pitcher in baseball history who had won 20 games and also hit .300.

    "Player by player, yeah," he said.

    "That takes a while," I suggested.

    "It takes a while," he agreed.

    But that was later. First, Neft and his researchers had to figure out how to create such a book, and that meant they had to figure out what to do with all of the mistakes and inconsistencies in the statistical record. Consider, for instance, the saga of Cap Anson. He's most often brought up now for his role in segregating the game, but he was a singular star of 19th-century baseball. More to the point, Anson was the first player to reach 3,000 hits in a career. He didn't just barely get to 3,000 either. He was generally credited with almost 3,500 hits in his career.

    But the Baseball Encyclopedia people actually counted. First, they found that 423 of Anson's hits were before 1876, before the National League had been founded. Those couldn't count for a Major League Baseball record book. That dropped him to 3,055 hits, which was a lot fewer but still good enough to keep him in the 3,000-hit club.

    Except for this … remember above how I mentioned that in 1887, walks were recorded as hits? Well, Anson walked 60 times that year. Those were 60 "hits" that weren't hits at all, not by The Baseball Encyclopedia standards.

    That reduction dropped Anson to 2,995 hits, knocking him out of the club everyone thought he had founded.

    There were a lot of statistical renovations like that. Christy Mathewson, who was considered the NL's all-time leader in wins with 373 (tied with Grover Cleveland Alexander), suddenly lost six of those wins. Walter Johnson got dinged a couple of wins. Ty Cobb was given a 4,192nd hit. Honus Wagner lost 15 hits.

    None of these things sparked much more than curiosity, though. There were those who thought the record books should be left alone and others who were thrilled that the mistakes of the past were being fixed. But it was hardly a national outrage.

    Then they tried to give Babe Ruth one more home run.


    In 1969, there was no number in American sports more cherished than Ruth's 714. Every red-blooded American baseball fan knew it by heart. In that year, the number seemed as unreachable as Mars. Willie Mays hit his 600th home run in '69, but he was 38 and clearly fading -- he only managed 13 homers the entire season. It seemed pretty clear that he wasn't going to get to Ruth.

    And Henry Aaron? Well, Hammerin' Hank was only 35 and by season's end he had 554 homers, but he made it absolutely clear he had no interest whatsoever in going after any homer record.

    "It gets a little bit harder every year," he told reporters. "I'd like to get to 3,000 hits, and then I might retire."

     

     
    Aaron ties Ruth with HR No. 714
    Aaron ties Ruth with HR No. 714 03:23 Apr. 4th, 1974

     

    No, Ruth was alone at the top, exactly where baseball fans wanted him. This is where baseball fans still want him. He has become more folk hero than ballplayer, and while the greatest ever in other sports tends to be a moving target, Ruth has maintained his place at the top of baseball for more than 75 years.

    Seven hundred and fourteen was the number that symbolized the legend.

    But Ruth actually hit 715 home runs. Of this there is no dispute (well, there's a small dispute, which we will get into).

    On July 8, 1918, when Ruth was still with the Red Sox, he came to the plate in the 10th inning of a scoreless tie against Cleveland. He faced future Hall of Fame pitcher Stan Coveleski. Ruth's teammate, Amos Strunk, was on first base. Ruth crushed the ball over the right-field wall to win the game. This is now called a walk-off home run.

    Ah, but in 1918 … it was ruled a triple, and the final score of the game was 1-0. The thinking then was the game ended the instant Strunk touched home plate. As umpire Hank O'Day said, "There is no way you can score a run after a game is over." This was before anyone knew that counting home runs hit in a season and in a career would become a thing. In 1918, being credited with a triple was just as good as being credited with a home run, maybe even better.

    (Side note: If Strunk had been at third when Ruth homered, it would have been ruled a single. The rule was changed in 1920.)

    In any case, The Baseball Encyclopedia folks found 37 of these home runs that were not counted as home runs. They thought it would make sense to fix those. Major League Baseball had put together a special records committee to go over such things, and the committee agreed unanimously that, yes, this was an error worth fixing.

    Babe Ruth had 715 home runs!

    Baseball fans went absolutely bananas.

    See, it was one thing to knock Anson out of the 3,000-hit club; nobody much liked him anyway. But you didn't go messing with Ruth. The newspaper columnists screamed murder -- literally in some cases. Dick Young compared giving Ruth a home run to digging up executed murderer Ruth Snyder because capital punishment had been abolished in New York State. Robert Lipsyte called the number-changers "Revisionist Police," and argued that revising the statistics is only "a phase in the historical revisionism of baseball. One day, all the plaques, busts and memorabilia of, say, Cobb, will disappear. Cooperstown, replying to queries, will say, 'Georgia Peach, you say? You have a wrong number, this is the Baseball Hall of Fame.'"

    If these arguments seem a bit over the top, well, nobody was more outraged than a man named Joe Reichler, who worked in the Commissioner's Office. Reichler was part of that five-man special records committee, but he had missed the Ruth vote because he was in Japan on business. When he got back, he was a hornets' nest of fury.

    "The mission of the computer people, as authorized by baseball's special records committee, was to research all data, correct obvious errors, uncover missing material and clear up gray areas," he griped. "It should not be the function of the committee to tamper with rules which cover baseball records at the time."

    Reichler demanded a revote … and he undoubtedly twisted at least a couple of arms because suddenly the NL's Dave Grote and Baseball Writers' Association of America secretary Jack Lang changed their tunes and their votes. That made it 3-2 against adding the home run.

    And, like that, after just one week of glory, Ruth was back to 714 home runs.

    "Records that were made under the rules of the time should stand," Lang said without explaining why, if he believed that, he voted to change Ruth's homer total in the first place. Grote was more expressive in his explanation.

    "A woman has the prerogative of changing her mind, and so do I," he said.

    There were and are two compelling arguments against changing Ruth's home-run total. One is that once you start trying to clean up outdated rules, where do you stop?

    I mentioned that 714 homers is somewhat in dispute, and this is because before 1930, balls that bounced over the fence were ruled to be home runs. Nobody seems to know how many of these ground-rule homers Ruth hit; best I can tell, nobody has actually found any. But that's out there. It's also true that there used to be a rule that a home run had to land in fair ground. It's also true that balls that hit the foul pole were for a long time recorded as doubles (in "The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs," author Bill Jenkinson wrote that Ruth hit 12 apparent foul home runs in 1921 alone).

    There is a difference, though, between those home runs and No. 715. You certainly can't go back in time and turn those foul balls into homers because they were not home runs during the game. The games went on, Ruth stayed at the plate, no runs were put on the scoreboard. But in the case of the game-ending home run, it's a simple counting decision on a scorekeeping rule that was changed shortly after Ruth hit it. I don't think that's the same thing at all.

    The second argument is that sports records are more than just numbers. They are living pieces of history. This is the argument that has won the day. As the years have gone on, Mathewson was given back his wins -- he's back up to an NL-record 373. Anson is back in the 3,000-hit club. Cobb lost his 4,192nd hit (and two more that were double counted).

    And Ruth has 714 home runs. Maybe he hit one more than that. But everybody just seemed happier with 714.

    Joe Posnanski is a columnist for MLB.com.

     
     

     

  4. 41 minutes ago, Zepol87 said:

    Fuck all that shit. I would be moving for sure

    Yep.

    6 minutes ago, Homesickhorn said:

    Fuck cottonmouths.
     

    Yep.

     

    Shooter, do you live in a swamp?

  5. I think I could have guessed everyone on that list except Lefty Grove.  He used to lead the league in strikeouts every year in his prime, but it was at about a 6K/9IP rate. 

  6. 28 minutes ago, TrashMaster G said:

    They can sign up until they set foot in a college classroom.

    No, that got changed several years ago.  I believe the signing deadline is around July 15.

  7. Fuck this.

    Quote

    A Corpus Christi man is still recovering after he was bitten by a rattlesnake, even after the snake had already been beheaded.

    It happened the weekend of May 27 at a residence near Lake Corpus Christi.

    Jennifer Sutcliffe and her husband were doing weekend yard work when she spotted a four-foot rattlesnake. She said her husband quickly took his shovel and severed the snake's head, but moments later when he bent down to dispose of the snake, the snake's head bit him.

    "Which in that case since there is no body, it released all its venom into him at that point, so he had a lot of venoms," Sutcliffe said.

    Sutcliffe called 911 and began driving her husband to the hospital. He immediately began having seizures, lost his vision and experienced internal bleeding.

    Sutcliffe couldn't get her husband to the hospital fast enough, so she met up with an ambulance.

    "They HALO-Flighted him into the hospital," Sutcliffe said.

    Sutcliffe said the first 24 hours were the worst. Doctors told her husband might not make it, even after giving him vast amounts of antivenom.

    "A normal person who is going to get bit is going to get two to four doses of antivenom," Sutcliffe said. "He had to have 26 doses."

    Sutcliffe's husband is now in stable condition, but his kidney function is still weak.

     

  8. 51 minutes ago, Homesickhorn said:


    Bingo^^^^.

    I’m still pissed about what they did to us last night, but I watched them throughout the Oxford regional, and trust me, they’re playing pissed. I’ve got a ton of respect for these guys, they’re scrappy, disciplined, and will fight tooth and nail. Texas needs to jump on them quick, and keep on them, because they can find a chink in the armor very quickly and exploit it.


    Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

    Remember that year that Penn State lucked into a Regional win and they got sent here for the Supers and they were beaten as soon they walked into the stadium and saw the crowd and got wide-eyed?

    Well, this is not going to be like that.  Surviving that Oxford crowd says a lot about this team.

  9. 2 hours ago, TreatyOak said:

    What is strange is that he seems like his dad was involved. Shame that he didn't get better guidance to keep him on a better path. His friends looks like he was the main culprit but who knows. 

    Kind of reminds me of the Dallas Carter stuff.  Most of those kids were from good 2-parent families, but they somehow decided that because they were good at football, they were untouchable.

    Watching those dads on the 30 for 30 talk about it was just heartbreaking.  

    • Like 2
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