BP got its stats up bright and early this morning. Does this mean an update from Jamie is imminent? Probably — he’s been doing a great job, and clearly monitors BP closely for its updates. But… Jon Gray struggled yesterday (5.3 ip, 6 er) and Joe Jimenez pulled off a Royal Chulk (0.3 ip, 4 er, 108 ERA). I have some evidence that a bad day for the post writer is positively correlated to a slow day for the update.
So while we give Jamie some time to collect himself (and the stray pieces of Joe Jimenez still strewn over the Flint Hill infield), here are some pictures from my visit yesterday to the National Baseball Hall of Fame!
I should probably be clear. The National Hall of Fame I visited was the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, currently located in St. Mary’s, Ontario, Canada. This photo is of a newspaper article from 1878 recoun ting the dramatic conclusion to the International Association pennant race. EFL owners will note that the season ended in something of a tie, with Ontario’s Tecumsehs having as many wins as Mark Weinert’s Alleghenys! The writer claims the Tecumsehs won the championship because they had fewer games and thus fewer losses (if I understand the article correctly). Those of us who have repeatedly been bested by the modern Alleghenys will see this 150-year-old feat as pre-payback for all the misery we’ve suffered at Allegheny hands.
I did not expect to see Sparky Anderson and Tommy Lasorda in the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. Their fame is mostly based on managing great teams to World Series championships. Lasorda managed only the Dodgers, about as unCanadian as you can get. Anderson spent many years managing the Tigers, whose stadium is about a mile from Canada… but that seems an unlikely key to the Canadian HOF.
It turns out these gentlemen are in the Canadian HOF primarily for their exploits with the Montreal Royals, the old Dodgers AAA team. Lasorda had the longest tenure in Montreal of any starting pitcher — 9 seasons total in the late 1940’s and 50’s. Anderson was four times named the “smartest player” in the International League. The two were teammates only one year that I can tell 1957.
I picked this photo as a representative sample of the kinds of people who make the Canadian Hall of Fame. Pedro Martinez, one of the few native Canadians born in the Dominican Republic, made both the US and the Canadian HOFs after a clearly HOF fame career, including a stretch as a Garden City Wolverine in the old George Fox league.
Jason Bay was an original Old Detroit Wolverine, the prize franchise cornerstone pick of the first EFL preseason draft season.
Ryan Dempster was the number 2 pitcher in the rotation of the 1994 champion Garden City KingBees in the old league. His 8 APBA starting pitcher rating, based on his 1993 pitching stats (Cy Young winners were likely to be rated 16 or better), made Dempster the number 2 man in the KingBees 1994 rotation. Kenny Rogers was the ace as a 10, but he didn’t make the CanHOF for some reason…
But Rheal Cormier did! He was a part-time starting pitcher with the 1994 KingBees, along with Rogers, Dempster, Donovan Osborn, Rene Arocha and Bob Wickman — four of them decidedly mediocre 8’s. (Pedro Martinez was on that 1994 KingBee team as a reliever.) I can still remember how frustrated Don Powers was when Tim Salmon hit the game-winning homer to clinch the only KingBee World Series championship. He could not understand how his juggernaut team could lose to a team with such crummy pitching! But what he didn’t realize was this: there were three future Hall of Famers on that KingBee squad, plus Tim Salmon playing John the Baptist to Mike Trout’s Jesus.
Once the KingBees had won a championship, they began acquiring really GOOD pitchers. For example, before our 1995 season I traded Pedro Martinez for Pat Hentgen, to obtain Hentgen’s shiny 15 rating as a starting pitcher. That 1995 team was better than my 1994 team, but the KingBees never won another championship and Hentgen’s arm wore out long before Pedro’s did.
This coming weekend I can visit another Pedro Martinez plaque in the Cooperstown version of the Hall of Fame. It’ll be impressive, and I am happy to watch Edgar Martinez — who was one of the very few players to be both a KingBee and a Wolverine — join him there. But if I want to see the Jason Bays, Rheal Cormiers, Ryan Dempsters, and Pat Hentgens of the world in a Hall of Fame, then St. Mary’s, Ontario is the place to be.