The 2023 Running Baseball Thread

Yuge!

 

And finally, after 17 straight days of baseball, an off day tomorrow.

 

I feel pretty good that today basically sealed the division. Orioles have six games at home left against eliminated teams.

 

In his career, Ted Williams had 408 more extra-base hits (1,117) than strikeouts (709). Joe D's ratio was 881-369 (+512). Yogi Berra's ratio was 728-414 (+314). Just totally different animals back in those days.

 

Isn't there about a 35% chance today is the last game ever for the Athletics in Oakland?

 

DiMaggio’s 369 career strikeouts … that’s a couple seasons worth for some hitters these days.

 

If they forfeit all of next season

 

One of those seasons I wish I had experienced first-hand. The last true year before the attack on Pearl Harbor decimated the majors for the next four seasons. And yet, very few fans actually witnessed all that history. The Dodgers were the only team with more than 1 million in home attendance. Almost any decent minor league team draws as many fans today as the Braves, Phils and Browns did that year.

Then again, unemployment was still running around 15 percent and after a decade of the Great Depression, the idea of spending what little money you had on frivolous things like a baseball game might have been an issue.

 

And most of the teams still played day games in that era. The Yankees, Braves, Red Sox, Tigers and Cubs didn't have lights yet. Several teams switched the year before and still played majority day games. The Senators, for example, only played 11 out of their 156 games overall under the lights anywhere.

Baseball attendance has a fascinating history. Up until the early 80s, even good teams drew poorly for mid-week games. It just wasn't a thing. The 1979 Pirates had 16 home games under 10,000 attendance, including a low of 3,012. All were April or May games.

Most of us born in the 1970s or after have lived in an attendance golden age that didn't really exist prior to that. Which makes attendance comparisons by era interesting, but requiring context.

 

Also, 11 of the 16 teams were concentrated in five cities in the Northeast U.S. A western swing meant a trip to Chicago and St. Louis.

 

Forgive me if I missed it on a past page, but Netflix's film on Mike Veeck is excellent. It's a bit of hybrid between documentary and film, narrated by Jeff Bridges and Charlie Day playing a younger Mike in flashback scenes.

With a little background on Bill, it covers Mike's reclamation from Disco Demolition Night to the present, with a heavy hit from the trauma he's had to overcome.

 

This is cool