300

Sunday night, Tom Glavine became the 23rd pitcher in Major League History to win 300 games, and just the fifth left-handed pitcher to ever reach that milestone.

Glavine’s first 242 career victories came with the Atlanta Braves, and of the three dominant Braves pitchers of the 90s—Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz—Glavine was always my favorite.

Never blessed with overpowering speed or a devastating breaking ball, he seemed to win games solely on willpower, guile and stubbornness.

I was somewhat heartbroken when Glavine left the Braves a few years ago to play for the New York Mets, Atlanta’s arch-rival, and even if his reasons were somewhat justified, I still shifted some of my allegiance from him to Smoltz, and took some delight when Glavine would pitch against the Braves and get roughed up.

I’m sure Glavine has lost a little bit over the last few years, but his career numbers certainly haven’t been helped by playing for the Mets, who were mediocre at best the first three years he pitched for them, and even since they’ve been good have ruined several of his strong performances by a lack of run support and meltdowns from the bullpen.

It does make you wonder how many wins Glavine would’ve had by now had he remained a Brave, or at least, it made me wonder, so I took a look at his stats. After a superficial investigation, assuming that he continued to win the same percentage of his starts, he would’ve had about 315 victories by now—basically a season’s worth.

Either way, Glavine will end up in the Hall of Fame, and will go down as one of the best pitchers of all time, but had he stayed in Atlanta, I think he might have had a chance of winning more games than any other left-handed pitcher in history (Warren Spahn holds the current record with 363), which would have put him in some very impressive company.

But then again, for a kid from the Northeast who wanted to be a hockey player and then went 7-17 in his first full season in the bigs, maybe getting to 300 is impressive enough.

The Worst Team Ever

Because I am a fairly opinionated person, and because I generally consider my opinions to be pretty much on-target, I’ve decided to start a semi-regular series of blog posts entitled Best and Worst.

Every week/month/undetermined random period of time, I’ll crank out one of these little jewels which will describe the best or worst of all time in a given category.

The first post in the series centers on one of my favorite topics of baseball history: the Worst Team Ever, the 1962 New York Mets.

A brand new team in 1962, the New York roster was a perfect storm of inexperienced and untalented youth, incompetent utility players and over-the-hill stars who united to amass an appalling record of 40-120, the worst in Major League history.

Just how bad was this team?

Sit back and enjoy.

Starting catcher Harry Chiti was acquired from Cleveland in a trade for a player to be named later. Chiti proved so inept at handling pitchers and a baseball bat (he hit only .195) that he was sent back to Cleveland after 30 days—the first player in Major League history to be traded for himself.

Clarence “Choo Choo” Coleman served as Chiti’s replacement at catcher, and while he proved to be a marginal offensive improvement (Choo Choo hit .250 in 1962), he also struggled behind the plate, and according to baseball writer Roger Angell handled outside curves “like a man fighting bees.”

The manager was Hall of Famer Casey Stengel, but by 1962, Stengel was in his 70s and routinely fell asleep on the bench during games.

Outfielder Richie Ashburn was a bright spot; he led the team with a .306 average. Unfortunately, he was also 35 and retired at season’s end.

The Mets’ top three starters combined for a 26-63 record.

But of all the Mets’ players, perhaps no story better illustrates their hapless plight than that of shortstop Elio Chacón. An eager 25-year old from Venezuela, Chacón kept running into the outfield and knocking down center fielder Richie Ashburn as he was about to catch a fly ball.

Chacón didn’t speak any English, so fellow outfielder Joe Christopher explained to Ashburn that if he was going to catch a fly ball and saw Chacón coming out to get it, all he had to say was “¡Yo la tengo!” (“I’ve got it!”), and Chacón would pull up.

So Ashburn practiced the phrase and memorized it, and a game came along where a shallow fly ball was hit towards him. As Chacón came sprinting out, Ashburn shouted “¡Yo la tengo, yo la tengo!” and put his hands up to catch the ball—and was bowled over by Frank Thomas, his left fielder.

Stengel summed it all up this way, “Come and see my amazin’ Mets. I been in this game a hundred years, but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before.”


Honorable Mention: The 1994-95 Happy Hollow Tomahawk 6th grade basketball team went 0-9 with two losses of at least 40 points. We had a chance at victory in the last game of the season, but I missed a layup as time expired. Oops.


Sources for this post include Baseball-Reference and Ken Burns’ Baseball.

The Apple of ESPN’s Eye, or The Yankees/Red Sox Rivalry

Although it probably shouldn’t be this way, I’ve pretty much decided that all forms of media are biased in some way.

The Fox News Channel is conservative, while virtually every other news channel is slanted to the left. Around here in Northwest Arkansas, some media outlets rabidly support Arkansas football coach Houston Nutt, while others are decidedly against him.

Bias is a part of media; I guess I shouldn’t expect ESPN to be any different.

Yesterday, the Atlanta Braves and the New York Mets battled each other in a classic game. Future Hall of Famers and former teammates John Smoltz and Tom Glavine pitched gems through five innings.

Atlanta got to Glavine in the 6th to take a 3-1 lead, but the Mets responded in the bottom half of the inning. New York touched Smoltz for five runs, highlighted by a José Reyes bases clearing triple and Braves manager Bobby Cox being thrown out of the game for arguing balls and strikes.

Down 6-3 and facing the Mets’ formidable bullpen, Atlanta tied it up in the 7th with an Edgar Renteria three-run home run, and then surged ahead in the 8th with another three-run shot, this one by Kelly Johnson.

The Mets threatened in the 8th and 9th but failed to score, and Atlanta held on for the victory, which gave them a half-game lead over the Mets for the NL East lead and put the rest of the league on notice that the Braves are back.

It was quite a game, but apparently, only warranted about 60 seconds of the 90 minute ESPN Sportscenter broadcast that night. Certainly, there were a lot of sports to cover yesterday with the opening of the NBA playoffs, but ESPN may have had more time to recap the Braves/Mets game if they hadn’t spent 10 minutes going over the highlights the Yankees/Red Sox game.

The New York/Boston game was significant; the Red Sox win gave Boston its first sweep of the Yankees at Fenway since the early 1990s, the BoSox hit four consecutive home runs in the game for the first time in team history (the last time any AL team did that was in 1964) and Dice-K was pitching.

It was a good game, but it didn’t merit 10 times the coverage of the Braves/Mets game.

But if you watch much ESPN, this shouldn’t be surprising. The network that is infamous for portraying the Duke Blue Devils as a contender for the NCAA basketball championship in a season when they are barely treading water in ACC play always blows the New York/Boston rivalry way out of proportion.

The Yankees and Red Sox have been playing each other for a long time, since 1903 actually, which is part of the rivalry, and New York and Boston are geographically close to each other (only 214 miles separate the two cities, almost exactly the distance between Fayetteville and Searcy), which adds to it as well.

But actually, throughout most of baseball history, the New York/Boston rivalry really hasn’t been much of a rivalry at all, especially to the Yankees, who have basically been dominating their chowder-eating counterparts for 85+ years now—since 1920, New York has won 39 pennants and 26 World Series Championships while Boston has won 5 pennants and 1 World Series Crown during that same span.

Sure, there have been a few moments of intrigue and points of contention over the years—the Babe Ruth trade and resulting “Curse,” the personal rivalry of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams in the 1940s, the Bucky Dent home run to send the Yankees to the playoffs in 1978 and Boston’s dramatic come-from-behind ALCS victory over New York in 2004—but any two teams who had played in the same division for 100+ years would have similar episodes.

Is there a rivalry between these two teams? Absolutely, and it is one that has intensified over the last decade with the re-emergence of both teams as perennial contenders.

But it still remains the most overplayed and trumped-up rivalry in all of professional sports, more the product of myopic, overzealous northeastern sportswriters than of history.

And seriously, the rest of us are getting tired of it.