Reconstructing Hughie - More Fun With Box Scores

I wanted to make this post yesterday, but I spent three hours banging my head against this and didn't have an answer then. I still don't exactly, but I figured, hey, let me unleash my latest thing upon the world and maybe they'll have some input for me.

This is probably too dorky/nerdy/geeky/whatever for almost anyone reading this, but hey, this isn't Seattle MariNERDS for nothing.

Anyway, as some of you know, I like puzzle games a lot. I participate in events like Microsoft Puzzle Hunt and play an inordinate amount of puzzle video games and such. I like to solve puzzles for the heck of it, and I'm usually pretty determined to figure things out.

So, in the midst of attempting to calculate some game-by-game breakdowns for my latest baseball history obsession/project (which I'm almost dubbing "The Truth About Losing Pitcher Mulcahy" in my mind, sort of like my Jack Nabors thing a few weeks ago), I've been reading box scores from the New York Times from the Phillies 1940 season, trying to get Mulcahy's game-by-game log, which means figuring out his earned and unearned runs per game. Sometimes this is really easy, like if (as he often did) he pitched 9 innings and nobody made any errors. Sometimes it's not that simple but the flavor text in the article gives it away by saying when the errors were made.

And sometimes it's nigh impossible to reconstruct the game events at all.

In other words, I've stumbled across a boundless set of baseball logic puzzles. This is both beautiful and frightening.

Currently, I'm puzzling over the box score from a game between the Giants and the Phillies on July 5, 1940 (PDF file, copied from the New York Times archive, I hope I'm not going to hell for this). My goal is to figure out: when did Mulcahy get taken out of the game, and how many earned runs were assigned to him?

Let's see what we know, shall we? I'm going to retype the box score just because I know some of the numbers are hard to read on the original scan, and I'll include the relevant text from the bottom (the fact that there were 4702 paid patrons and 5532 ladies since it was Ladies' Day is irrelevant, I think):

Philadelphia                        New York
                AB  R  H PO  A  E                    AB  R  H PO  A  E 
Schulte, 2b      5  0  1  0  4  0   Whitehead, 3b     6  1  3  2  1  1
Mueller, rf      3  0  0  1  0  0   Rucker, cf        4  1  1  2  0  0
Marty, cf        4  0  0  0  0  0   Moore, lf         5  2  2  3  0  0
Rizzo, lf        4  1  1  3  0  0   Young, 1b         5  2  2  7  1  0
May, 3b          3  1  1  1  3  0   Danning, c        4  0  1  6  1  0
Bragan, ss       1  0  0  0  0  0   O'Dea, c          1  0  0  1  0  0
Monchak, ss      3  0  1  3  0  0   Ott, rf           4  2  1  3  0  0
Mahan, 1b        4  0  2  8  3  0   Cuccinello, 2b    4  2  2  1  0  0
Millies, c       0  0  0  1  0  0   Witek, ss         4  3  2  1  1  0
Warren, c        4  0  1  4  0  0   Melton, p         5  2  3  1  4  0
Mulcahy, p       0  0  0  0  1  0   
L. Brown, p      3  0  0  3  0  1        TOTAL       42 15 17 27  8  1
Atwood ph        0  0  0  0  0  0

       TOTAL    34  2  7 24 11  1

Philadelphia      0  1  0    1  0  0    0  0  0      2
New York          2  8  0    3  0  2    0  0  x      15  

Runs batted in - Young 3, May, Melton 2, Whitehead 5, Moore 2, Danning, 
Ott, Cuccinello, Mahan.  Two-base hits - Danning, Whitehead.  Three-base 
hit - Whitehead.  Home runs - Young, May.  Left on bases - New York 7, 
Philadelphia 8.  Bases on balls - Off Mulcahy 2, Melton 3,  L.Brown 2.  
Struck out - By Melton 7, L.Brown 4.  Hits - Off Mulcahy 6 in 1 1-3 
innings, L.Brown 11 in 6 2-3.  Wild pitches - Melton, L.Brown.  

Relevant notes from the flavor text include:
"Young opened fire with a two-run homer in the first inning"
[in the second inning] "Two passes and four singles routed Mulcahy. Three more hits greeted Brown which, with an error, made the Giant total for the inning eight."
"A cluster of three runs came in the fourth, a triple by Burgess Whitehead banging in these three. Whitey also drove two more tallies across in the sixth with a double, his third blow of the day."
"When Brown, along with his catcher, Benny Warren, entered the game in the second..."

Irrelevant notes from the flavor text include:
"Young was so elated over his homer, his third of the year, that on rounding first he tripped and went sprawling inelegantly right in front of all of the ladies."

So, much like a logic puzzle, let's gather facts and try to piece together this crazy second inning and see if we can figure out the earned runs per pitcher. Welcome to my brain, ladies and gentlemen -- it's going to be a bumpy ride, so hang on to your hats!

Firstly, Burgess Whitehead hit in 5 runs -- three in the fourth inning and two in the sixth inning, which we found out in the text. Babe Young hit in 3 runs total, and 2 of them were in the first inning off his home run. If you're looking at the inning-by-inning count of runs... Every other run batted in by a Giant batter happened in the second inning. Namely, RBIs were collected in that inning as such: Moore and Melton both got 2, and Young, Danning, Ott, and Cuccinello each got one.

Secondly, as far as I can tell, no plate appearance counts for two outs. In order for Whitehead to have gotten 6 at-bats, there must have been at least 46 plate appearances by the Giants -- 5 times around the order is 45, and thus his 6th at-bat was a 46th. Well, in 8 innings the Giants were put out 24 times, plus they got 17 hits, plus there was one error, plus there were 4 walks (2 by Mulcahy, 2 by Brown) given them. If you add up 24 + 17 + 1 + 4, you actually get EXACTLY 46. Meaning that the very last at-bat of the 8th inning was Whitehead and he made an out somehow. (He couldn't get a hit then because the double in the 6th inning was described as "his third blow of the day" and the box score shows he only got 3 hits.) They DO list Hit-by-Pitch and Double Plays AND sacrifices and such generally in these box scores, so there just weren't any HBP, Sacs, etc.

Taking that, you know that the four men who walked were Rucker, Ott, Cuccinello, and Witek, because they don't have 5 at-bats each. (Ken O'Dea came in to replace Harry Danning at the plate during the seventh inning or so and managed to get an at-bat.)

Now, let's piece together the first inning to figure out who led off the second inning. Now, here's something interesting. If you make a grid and start filling in frames like a scorecard, you'll see that Moore had to be the batter driven in on Young's two-run homer in the first inning. Why? Because he scored two runs during the game, and there's no way the No. 1 hitter Whitehead could have driven him in during the 4th or 6th inning; it's simply impossible. Therefore, he scored one in the first inning and one in the second. (He can't have scored two in the second. With eight runs scored and three outs, even with three men left on base, that's a maximum of fourteen possible at-bats, which wouldn't get all the way back around to him.)

Okay, so in the first inning, Whitehead made an out, Johnny Rucker made an out, Jo-Jo Moore singled, Babe Young hit a home run. Harry Danning made an out. We know this because Whitehead and Rucker couldn't have also gotten on base or it would have been more than a two-run homer. Harry Danning also made an out -- we know this because he had exactly one hit all game, and he drove in a run -- meaning that hit HAD to come in the second inning. Therefore Mel Ott led off the second inning.

Mulcahy was taken out after 7 batters in the second inning. We know this because he is listed as pitching 1 and a third innings, so there must have been one out credited to him. The text in the article says "two passes and four singles routed Mulcahy." Therefore he definitely had to come out before Danning's double. If Ott led off the second inning, then Mulcahy faced Ott, Cuccinello, Witek, Melton, Whitehead, Rucker, and Moore.

Now the question is... how many earned runs were charged to him? And what exactly transpired in that second inning?

The easy answer to the first part is that 8 earned runs were charged to him total. 2 for the first inning, and 6 for all of the runners in the second (since 8 runs were scored, it stands to reason that all of his runners scored). But it's possible otherwise, especially in trying to figure out how that first out happened and also when Brown's error occurred.

And this is sort of where I'm stuck right now. I can't quite reconstruct a plausible second inning. I'm close, but I don't think it's quite right.

I mean, what we know is that in the second inning, Young, Melton, Moore, Danning, Ott, and Cuccinello had RBIs (and also importantly, Witek and Whitehead and Rucker did NOT). And we can also deduce who HAD to score in the second inning:
-- Whitehead, because he is credited with a run but could not possibly score in another inning (he batted in all the runs after the 2nd without a homer -- and he could not have scored on a wild pitch because all the runs are accounted for with RBIs)
-- Rucker, for the same reason. Batting AFTER Whitehead, he could not be batted in during a later inning, and is credited with a run, so it had to come here
-- Moore, same reason as Rucker but credited with 2 runs, one of which happened in the first inning
-- Young, same reason as Moore
-- Witek, because he scored 3 runs, meaning he was batted in this inning and twice by Whitehead's later hits
-- Ott, credited with two runs, could not have scored both of them behind Whitehead's triple and double (do the math, with Cucc, Witek, and Melton scoring 7 runs between them total but only 5 runs batted in by Whitehead in those later innings, even if you gave them all runs in the 2nd that still accounts for 4 out of the 5 runs Whitehead batted in, so only that fifth could have been taken by Ott)

Also, curiously, Danning did NOT score in the second inning, according to the box score. I wonder if the box score was just wrong -- because THAT is the trickiest wrench to deduce.

So, here's the sequence I'm working with right now:

Ott - out
Cuccinello - walk
Witek - walk, Cuccinello to second
Melton - single, batted in Cuccinello and Witek (2 runs so far)
Whitehead - single, Melton to second
Rucker - single, Whitehead to second, Melton to third
Moore - single, batted in Whitehead and Melton, Rucker to second (4 runs)
Pitching change : Lloyd Brown replaces Hugh Mulcahy.
Young - single, batted in Rucker, Moore to second (5 runs)
Danning - double, batted in Moore, Young to third (6 runs)

This works out fine so far -- Moore was Mulcahy's last batter and he's scored. Great. Now here's where I run into problems. Danning somehow has to get out before crossing the plate, but Cuccinello has to get an RBI, as does Ott -- but DANNING CANNOT SCORE. So I *think* the following is possible, assuming Ott would get an RBI for a fielder's choice. This also assumes the error didn't actually lead to a run being scored.

Ott - Fielder's choice, Danning out at third, Young scores, Ott to second on the throw home. (7 runs)
Cuccinello - singles, Ott scores. (8 runs)
Witek - reaches base on error, Cuccinello to second.
Melton - makes an out. Inning over.

I think this works for the other innings --

Third inning - Whitehead, out 1. Rucker, walked. Moore, out 2. Young, out 3.
Fourth inning - Danning, out 1. Ott, singles. Cuccinello, singles, Ott to second. Witek, singles, Ott to third, Cuccinello to second. Melton, out 2. Whitehead, triples, bats in Ott, Cuccinello, Witek. Rucker, out 3.
Fifth inning - Moore, out 1. Young, out 2. Danning, out 3.
Sixth inning - Ott, out 1. Cuccinello, out 2. Witek, singles. Melton, singles, Witek to second. Whitehead, doubles, bats in Witek and Melton. Rucker, out 3.
Seventh inning - Moore, out 1. Young, out 2. O'Dea, out 3.
Eighth inning - Ott, walked. Cuccinello, out 1. Witek, out 2. Melton singles, Ott to second. Whitehead, out 3.

To sum up:
Whitehead - 1st: out. 2nd: single, run. 3rd: out. 4th: 3-RBI triple. 6th: 2-RBI double. 8th: out. 6 AB, 1 R, 3 H, 5 RBI
Rucker - 1st: out. 2nd: single, run. 3rd: walk. 4th: out. 6th: out. 4 AB, 1 R, 1 H, 0 RBI
Moore - 1st: single, run. 2nd: 2-RBI single, run. 3rd: out. 5th: out. 7th: out. 5 AB, 2 H, 2 R, 2 RBI.
Young - 1st: 2-RBI home run. 2nd: RBI single, run. 3rd: out. 5th: out. 7th: out. 5 AB, 2 H, 2 R, 3 RBI.
Danning - 1st: out. 2nd: RBI double. 4th: out. 5th: out. 4 AB, 0 R, 1 H, 1 RBI.
O'Dea - 7th: out. 1 AB, 0 anything.
Ott - 2nd: out. 2nd: RBI FC, run. 4th: single, run. 6th: out. 8th: walk. 4 AB, 2 R, 1 H, 1 RBI.
Cuccinello - 2nd: walk, run. 2nd: RBI single. 4th: single, run. 6th: out. 8th: out. 4 AB, 2 R, 2 H, 1 RBI.
Witek - 2nd: walk, run. 2nd: Error. 4th: single, run. 6th: single, run. 8th: out. 4 AB, 3 R, 2 H, 0 RBI.
Melton: 2nd: 2-RBI single, run. 2nd: out. 4th: out. 6th: single, run. 8th: single. 5 AB, 2 R, 3 H, 2 RBI.

Mulcahy 1.1 IP, 6 H, 8 R, 8 ER, 2 BB, 0 K, 1 HR.
Brown 6.2 IP, 11 H, 7 R, 7 ER, 2 BB, 4 K, 0 HR.

So, um, if you happen to have access to play-by-play data from this game and want to back me up on my reconstruction of the game, [Lumbergh]that'd be greeeeeeeeeeat[/Lumbergh]. For now, I'm going to sleep, because I've been thinking about this too much. I may or may not edit this down in the morning; I really just wanted to do a brain dump of it all, because dang, my brain's about to explode.

Friday Foto, a few days early

After a whole lot of stress finding a place to park downtown today while I was at work, I did manage to make it down to IKEA in time for the kickoff Mariners Caravan autograph session.


George Sherrill, J.J. Putz, and Jamie Moyer

The flier had advertised "Mariners players and broadcasters answering questions" and "the Mariner Moose taking pictures", but in reality, there were no broadcasters, and there were just the three players, and no Mariner Moose. Ah well.

They had us wait in line in the cold parking garage for a while -- the actual autograph session was in a little space adjoining the cafeteria. While we were outdoors, a lady came by with raffle tickets for everyone. It was pretty chilly out there, but once we got indoors, there was this IKEA guy with a microphone who was rambling out really dorky things along with some trivia. The trivia wasn't so bad ("One of these three guys at the table went to the University of Michigan. Do you know which one?") but the dorky stuff was. ("Ladies and gentlemen, we have another Mariners celebrity here tonight -- Edgar Martinez! Well, that is, we have a little kid wearing an Edgar jersey. But he looks JUST LIKE HIM!")

After waiting in line for quite a while, I finally got up to the table. They were giving out these cute IKEA Mariners Caravan mini-posters, which are basically 8.5"x11" pictures of Safeco Field printed on poster paper with the 2006 schedule at the bottom and a lot of wide open space that's just perfect for signatures on the field part of the picture. However, I'd say over half the people there had actually brought things to be signed, from baseballs to gloves to bats to photos to baseball cards. Me, I brought baseball cards just in case the posters were lame, and decided to get the cards signed anyway. The lady in front of me in line had brought cards for her son to be signed too -- an '89 Donruss Moyer card, a recent Putz card but I forget which manufacturer, and a 2005 Rainiers Sherrill card. I had brought a 1987 Topps Moyer card, which is his rookie card, and a 2004 Rainiers Putz card, and the same 2005 Rainiers Sherrill card.

I get up to the table, and I first hand my Moyer card to Jamie Moyer. Having just signed the '89 card for the lady in front of me, he looks at my card and his face lights up like "Hey J.J., take a look at this one, now THIS is my first baseball card!" and he signs it and hands it back to me grinning. Then I hand my Putz card to Putz, who just sort of signs it ambivalently, and then I give my Sherrill card to Sherrill, who's been looking awfully bored at the end of the table since a lot of people get stuck at the Moyer bottleneck getting pictures taken with him and whatnot.

Well, since the person behind me is, infact, still taking pictures of his kids with Jamie Moyer, as Sherrill hands my card back to me, I say to him, "By the way, I had a question for you.. umm... do you have a brother who posts to the Mariners blogs and websites sometimes? Goes by El Sid or something?" And he looks at me blankly for a second and then goes "Huh? Oh yeah! Yeah, Sid's my brother. Heh." And I just stammer out "Oh cool. Uh, thanks!" and walk off feeling like a dork.

After that, there was only like 5 minutes left until the IKEA people were doing their raffle thingy, so I hung out a few more minutes. They raffled off a Mariners baseball cap, a Mariners t-shirt, one of the new batting practice jerseys (Dorky IKEA guy was like "If you win this, you can take batting practice with the Mariners at Safeco Field! And I am *totally* making that up! By the Mariners I mean uh the IKEA store employees and by Safeco Field I mean uh our parking garage!"), four tickets to a Mariners game, and a $350 IKEA store gift certificate. Needless to say, I didn't win anything. I left shortly after that.

I did wear my Vote For Felix shirt, but I don't think anyone actually noticed it.

The upshot is, I'm not sure it was worth the effort to go to this, especially the part that involved parking downtown during work and then driving to IKEA at rush hour. But if you're in one of the other cities they're going to and it's convenient for you, hey, free autograph session. Unfortunately, most of the other ones don't look nearly as cool -- the schedule shows Sherrill and Putz (no Moyer) for the rest of this week, Morse and Rivera next week, and Dobbs and Rick Rizzs (!?) the week after that, and then there's Fan Fest. I still don't know if I'm going to go to Fan Fest -- mostly depends on whether I can find other dorks people to go with. If there are any current blogizen gangs planning to rampage through, feel free to let me know.

Oh, and PositivePaul is totally going to make fun of me for this, but the one thing I did notice at the autograph session is that George Sherrill is pretty cute. And now that Chad Bradford moved to the NL, I'm thinking Sherrill may be a reasonable candidate to make the 2006 All-Cute team in the category of cute AL relief pitchers. I'd never really seen him close up before, and he's got this look of... I'm not sure what to call it, but he reminds me of Ben Affleck, almost. Here's another picture I took tonight of Sherrill and Putz that might illustrate it a little bit better. See what I mean?

EDIT> Paul had a much better adventure the following night in Olympia, and even ended up in the newspaper. You can read about his adventure here.

Around the Net in 80 Seconds

Well, beyond the normal mlb.com stuff, such as a headshot of Doyle in the latest Mariners mailbag, or the news that we've picked up two more old guys as NRI's, and the Mariners Caravan starting at IKEA today with Jamie Moyer, George Sherrill, and J.J.Putz appearing (and hopefully I'll make it there in time), there's some other fun stuff going on these days:

Sour Cream and Archives

A couple of days ago, I discovered that if you have a membership to the Seattle Public Library, you can log in to their website and search old newspapers without actually having to go to the library. This is fantastic -- for example, they have the entirety of the New York Times from 1851 onwards, in PDF image form, with searchable text (though it's not entirely reliable). So, for example, I'm trying to find out about a particular player's saga through the 1930's, and all I had to do was a text search on his name -- and it came up with tons of newspaper articles and box scores for me to peruse! It's very addictive.

You can either just look at the articles you were specifically searching for, or you can look at the "page map", which is an imagemap where you can see the actual newspaper page and click on the individual articles to read the PDF versions. It's great fun to see advertisements and pictures from the day (like in 1940, an ad for a truck that was "extremely affordable! Prices start at $453!") and to get cultural contexts for the baseball events.

The articles from the 1880's are really the most entertaining -- very vivid descriptions of the games and the crowds and everything. Eventually I might even finish the actual project I originally set out to do here and tell you all a pretty funny story.

The Chat in the Hat

Jeff Sullivan wrote Mariner Chat Room, Volume Two on Lookout Landing today -- if you don't already read Lookout Landing, you have to go read this post at least. It's brilliant and hilarious.

And only a month before Valentine's Day

Dave Haller over at Baseball Prospectus has been running a Diamond Mind simulation of what he calls the Battle of Champions -- the 2005 Chiba Lotte Marines vs. the 2005 Chicago White Sox. Both of these teams are near and dear to my heart, and the first two games of this simulation looked eerily similar to actual Marines games -- in Game 1, the Marines win 10-1. Sound familiar? It should if you were paying attention to Game 1 of the Japan Series. And then in Game 2 of the simulation, Masahide Kobayashi imploded in the 9th inning to give up a 4-1 lead to make it 5-4. Sound familiar? It should if you were paying attention to Game 3 of the second stage of the Pacific League Playoffs. And now, in Game 3, the White Sox won 7-6 as Yabuta blew a save... okay, wait, this one doesn't sound like a Marines game. I think this sounds more like a White Sox game.

(Edit: Game 4 is now up, the Sox winning again. Grrr.)

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this overall -- I still do honestly believe, as I asserted in a USSM thread, that if this series happened in real life, the Chiba team would have a reasonable shot to take a couple games from the White Sox and maybe even win the series. I'd love to someday see an actual formal matchup between the World Series and Japan Series winners -- sort of like the Konami Cup was for Asia this year. Maybe the WBC will help make this become a reality.

Another acronym for the Hanshin Tri-gers

Speaking of goings-on in Japanese baseball, I was scanning Yahoo Japan baseball news as I do most days and came across the funniest article I've seen in a while -- 'CIA' formation! A 40-win starting pitcher trio!. I can't find an English version of this article anywhere, so let me summarize. Essentially, a couple weeks ago the Hanshin Tigers acquired pitcher Chris Oxspring for the 2006 season. So they've decided that this year's marketing gag, to go along with the famed 2005 Hanshin relief trio of "JFK" (for setup men Jeff Williams and Kyuji Fujikawa and closer Tomoyuki Kubota), they're going to have the starting pitcher trio of "CIA", for Chris Oxspring, Kei Igawa, and Yuuya Andoh. Even funnier, they later explain that "Since the CIA is the information agency that helps the president of the United States, our CIA will of course help support our JFK". Oh man. I *love* Japanese baseball. Even when they're not being total nutballs like this. I almost want to see the Tigers do something crazy like deciding they need to make acronyms for *everyone*. Like, making "KISS" out of Kanemoto-Imaoka-Sheets-Sekimoto in their lineup or something.

I'll HOF and I'll puff and...

In about twelve hours, they'll announce whether anyone was actually elected to the Hall of Fame this year, and I'll edit this post appropriately. If the MLB exit polls of a few of their writers is indicative at all, it looks like it might finally be the Year Of The Goose. Whether or not it'll finally be the year for Bert remains to be seen, though. Also, it might be a function of when I grew up and watched a lot of baseball, but I'll never forget Orel Hershiser's amazing run in 1988. It was the best of times for the Dodgers, and it was the worst of times for the Phillies. If I could choose only one guy on the ballot to vote in, it'd be the Bulldog -- but who knows what'll happen.

(Edit: Apparently Bruce Sutter is the only guy to make it in this year. Goose got 64.6% of the vote, but with next year's eligible guys including Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken Jr. and Mark McGwire, it'll be a really tough field. Still, I just don't see putting in Sutter and not Gossage. It doesn't seem right.)

Book Review: The Juice is Loose

You know how sometimes you pick up a book in a bookstore and start thumbing through it, and despite that your brain tells you that it's an awful book, you find yourself somehow morbidly fascinated with it and keep on reading, until you decide to actually buy the book and bring it home and read the whole thing?

Well, I went through that experience a few days ago, and since then have been sucking my brains out of my head through a very small straw as I read through the following two books:

Juicy : Confessions of a Former Baseball Wife by Jessica Canseco
Juiced : Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big by Jose Canseco

See, I don't really care about steroids. I really don't. I just don't find them interesting to discuss at all. Hence, I hadn't bothered reading Jose's book when it came out. And I honestly can't tell you what made me think Jessica's book was worth buying. Like I said, it was some sort of morbid curiosity, despite thinking with every word in the book, "Geez, what a goddamn bimbo!"

Let me give you some advice, if you do think of reading these books:

1) Don't read them.
2) If you absolutely must read one of them, read Jose's and not Jessica's.
3) And if you do read Jose's book, keep in mind that he's insane.
4) I dare you to find more than two consecutive pages in either book without the word "steroid" on it.
5) If you are going to read either or both, don't buy them, or at least, don't buy them for full price. Libraries exist for a reason, and Juiced has been out long enough that there shouldn't be a long wait for it at most places.

Reading both of these books back to back is almost like... it's almost like if two of your friends split up, and for some reason decide to keep telling *you* about all of their relationship issues, which means you get to hear both of them tell their side of what happened, which of course are completely different stories, and they want you to take their side and not believe their scummy ex, and you don't know who to believe, so in the end you decide they're both totally psychotic and ignore them both.

That said, Jessica's book isn't really a baseball book at all, so technically I shouldn't even be reviewing it here. She admits through most of it that she has no clue about sports or baseball. The entire book is pretty much her talking about how she met Jose, then how she slept with him for several years, during which he was a lying cheating bastard, and she stayed with him anyway, eventually got pregnant, got married, had a kid, split up, got back together, split up, got back together, split up... yeah. Whatever. Read this book if you really want to hear some deranged chick talking about having sex with Jose Canseco; otherwise, skip it.

Now, on to Jose's book. Since I read Jessica's book first, it was really sort of strange how Jose would talk about certain things, since I'd first heard her viewpoint on it, so I'd be like "Wait... he's lying. Wait... maybe she's lying. Oh for crying out loud, who CARES?" At least this was somewhat a baseball book, and I found some parts of it genuinely interesting. He talks about his life and career, which would probably be a lot more fascinating if he didn't punctuate most of it by injecting the word "steroid" into every paragraph to bulk up his word count.

The thing is, some people have compared this book to Ball Four, and that's an even bigger insult to Jim Bouton than the insults most ballplayers actually shouted at him. Ball Four was a genuinely hilarious and revolutionary book which gave readers a different look at the inside workings of baseball. Juiced is a vaguely amusing at times book which gives readers a different look at the inside of the bathroom stalls of various major league clubhouses.

At any rate, it felt like Jose wanted people to like him more after this book -- sort of like how Ty Cobb's biography by Al Stump had been tailored to make him seem like a good guy (until Stump published the "what a bastard" biographer's cut thirty years later, at least). And yet, this book just made me think he was more paranoid than I would have otherwise. Not counting Jessica's assertions of how Jose would spy on her, he spends a good chunk of the book saying how pretty much everyone in the world was against him -- his teammates, the media, the owners of the teams he played on, and Major League Baseball in general; sometimes he seems sure it's because he was Latino, and sometimes just because he was Jose Canseco, and sometimes I'm not sure what he's thinking. And maybe he's right to some extent, but it's hard to read his assertions without thinking "Err, um, really? Say what? Paranoid much?"

So, read his book if you want to hear a lot of stories about baseball players sticking needles into other players' butts, or if you're curious about the whole Madonna incident, or if you want to hear who he's calling out as juicers besides Giambi, Palmeiro, Bonds, McGwire, Sosa, etc. But if you're like me and don't care much about steroids, I would say you're no worse off if you don't bother reading this one, unless you were actually a Jose Canseco fan like pretty much every guy I used to trade baseball cards with as a kid. And in that case, you've probably already read the book anyway, and are about to tell me off for insinuating that Jose sucks.

(Which, to be fair, isn't really true. He doesn't have a co-author or ghostwriter listed for this, and if that's the case, then he actually did a pretty good job putting together a bunch of stories. Honestly, Jessica's book is just plain terrible in that aspect. So, yeah. Remember how I said a few weeks ago that I only talk about good books on here? I knew I'd find a way to break out of that streak...)

Friday Foto

I was going to write more about Ryan Franklin, but I spent the evening playing videogames and doing laundry as I expected, so it'll have to wait.

Instead, let's dwell a second on someone else -- Met Boone. Shea what? I sort of hope that Boone makes the team and Kaz Matsui gets moved somewhere else, but I don't really see it happening.

Anyway, this Friday Foto is dedicated to you, Bret Boone, a small worm in a big apple. Here's to standing next to a first baseman who's only half a foot, rather than a whole foot taller than you:



I took this picture in April, back when we still all thought this team might actually win 80 games, and so it was okay to take great enjoyment at pointing out that Richie Sexson made Bret Boone look even more like a midget.

Ryan "It's All About the Benjamin" Franklin

Just to make sure you all know, since I seem to be the resident Seattle person with Phillies-Mariners dual blogizenship: Yes, I'm aware that the Phillies signed Ryan Franklin, for a whopping $2.6 million.

Later tonight, when I'm not at work and not playing videogames (I just got my shipment of "yay, the holidays are over, I can order myself some stuff" import PS2 games yesterday! Whee!), I'll have something more to say about the matter. Maybe I'll even finish writing up the historical blurb I was originally working on before debunking the Jack Nabors story sidetracked me.

At any rate, this signing doesn't really bother me. Then again, I lived through the Phillies in the late 80's, and the Mariners in the last two years, and I still had fun, so maybe it's just my own ability to enjoy bad baseball. Plus, this not only ups the Ryan quota on the Phillies, but it also guarantees that with Billy Wagner gone, there'll still be some goateed redhaired hick pitcher to mouth off at the press all the time and complain about how lousy the Phillies fans are. Yay!

Book Review: The Numbers Game, by Alan Schwarz

I meant to actually read this around when Bat-Girl picked it for her book club thingy, but I think at the time I was wading through a Cy Young book that took me far too long to get through, and I had to read a non-baseball book that a friend of mine from a writing group in college wrote, and... okay, let's face it, I didn't read it back then because I'm lame.

And quite frankly, I am lame. Because this book was incredibly, incredibly good.

The Numbers Game is not really a book about statistics. It is a book about the people who came up with the statistics. You could enjoy this book if you're a huge stathead, finding yourself nodding along as Schwarz describes the characters in this story, seeing those same qualities in yourself. You could also enjoy this book if you're just a casual baseball fan wondering how and where all of these godforsaken numbers came out of. You could definitely enjoy it if you're a baseball history nut, as the history of baseball statistics is firmly woven together with the history of the game itself.

The Numbers Game is to statistics as Moneyball is to general managing. Moneyball is not a book you read to learn about how to be a GM -- it is the story of Billy Beane and his approaches and innovations in the GM job. The Numbers Game is not a book you'd read to learn how to calculate statistics -- it is the story of many people and their approaches and innovations in baseball statistics.

It's really pretty amazing how much trivia you can learn from this book. Whether it's stories about the terrible inaccuracy of stats-stringing in the 19th century, or about Hal Richman in his basement coming up with the ideas for Strat-O-Matic, or Allan Roth figuring out why the Dodgers should trade Dixie Walker, or the quest to construct the Baseball Encyclopedia and the fallout afterwards, or of course, the rise and fall of Bill James -- there's a person and an inspiration behind each innovation. Often, you even learn that somebody came up with a "new" idea that was actually a hundred years old in concept, but never implemented previously.

From the eruption of Babe Ruth and the Home Run era needing new metrics to measure power, to the age of Rotisserie League ball and Voros McCracken coming up with DIPS to figure out which pitchers to use, you're reminded that the numbers revolution has largely been driven by people who never really played baseball. Some may argue that this takes the heart out of the game; that the new minds behind baseball are just that -- young mathematical minds, rather than old experienced players. Some may say that the past decade or two and the upswing of the internet have catapulted the growth of statistics beyond control. But the fact is, discussing players in terms of their numbers is a practice over a century and a half old, and that's where we stand now.

This book had a very curious property for me -- I found myself utterly engrossed in it, and truly fascinated by pretty much everything within -- however, for some reason, it took me about three weeks to finish reading it. I think it works just fine as a bus book, since most of the specific stories in it are very short, even if the story arcs are long. I had a tendency to read and reread things in it as I went along, though. Sometimes he'd present a story about someone, and then some equations, and I'd feel obligated to sit there and read through the equations and make sure I understood them before continuing, which also slowed me down a little. I don't think you necessarily need to do that while reading this book, unless you're a stathead. (And in that case, you should already understand them all. What's wrong with you?)

Another curious property of this book is that the entire time I was reading it, I kept telling other people they needed to read it, even before I was finished. It was like there was this entire history of the statistics of baseball that I'd been unaware of, that I felt they all needed to know. If somebody asserted that crazy statheads are a recent phenomenon, I wanted them to know that, say, a man named John Lawres had started recording players' stats in 1892 and kept doing it for 20 years, just because he had no other way to get their lifetime stats. I wanted people to know about Sandy Alderson and Eric Walker starting the A's OBP revolution twenty years before Moneyball.

And yes, the final chapter or two, where he's talking about Baseball Prospectus and Retrosheet and baseball-reference.com and other such modern overflowing fountains of statistics online, was sort of wacky to read. To his credit, the book is spaced out very well per timeline, and current events are more of an epilogue than a major focus.

I really enjoyed this book, anyway. I know I tend to only bother writing about books I really liked, but no, really, this one was pretty spectacularly well-done, in content, writing style, how well-researched it was, and just how fascinating and entertaining a subject matter it turned out to be. Have I mentioned that you need to read it?

Public Service Announcement: 2006 Ticket Prices

So, we season ticket holders, even the 16-game-plan peasants, have received a whole bunch of stuff in the mail from the Mariners in the last few weeks, as is typical this time of year. They sent a little mini-schedule for 2006, and I hadn't noticed this before, but it's looking like they've actually raised prices this year. In my honest opinion, the prices are already pretty damn high as is, and it's not like the team's gotten any better...

The official site still has all the prices listed as TBD on their Seating & Pricing page, so I scanned in the little price chart from this year's schedule, and also from one of last year's. Note that season ticket prices haven't changed a bit (and looking as far back as I can, they're still the same as they were in 2003) but all of the single game tickets except the centerfield bleachers have gone up:

 

Box seats are up to $55 for a single game, from $45 in 2003 and $50 last year. Even the single game prices to sit in the upper deck is up to $18.

Looking around some other teams' sites, I guess I should just be glad we don't have complicated pricing schemes involving different prices for different days of the week vs. different teams we're playing vs. advance tickets vs. day of game tickets. And I realize we're not the most expensive team to see, sure, but I guess I'm feeling like I'll be less inclined to just spring for seeing games in box seats for the hell of it than I was last year. Which is a shame, because sitting close enough to the field to see the wrinkles in Jamie Moyer's face is just plain cool.

And even with seven kinds of mustard, is the Terrace Club really worth $60 to sit in?

But anyway, rant off. I'm sure I'll still be at too many games for my own good next year. Just figured I'd do people a favor and let them know what was up with prices.