Yanks Lose ALCS, 3 Games to 2

Photos: Jose Altuve's Gem Mint 10 rookie card, from my collection.

Yanks lose 4-0 and go home as the Houston Astros move on to the World Series. So despite Judge's 50+ homers, a high-powered offense, and getting past the heavily-favored Indians, the Yanks go home. What. A Damn. Shame.

1909 T206 HOF George Davis

The Card

Photo: T206 George Davis, front and back.

For those interested, I bought this card for $36.33, including shipping.  T206.org says it's been selling recently at about $43, which is a very common value for a Hall of Fame T206 of a nondescript player in Poor condition.  (Poor condition T206s of the big boys--Cobb, Young, Walter Johnson, etc.--still run a couple hundred bucks.)  Anyway, that's a profit of $6.67.  Not much.  The Beckett Graded Card Price Guide (7th Ed. 2015) says it's been selling at about $50, which is a little high, on Ebay, anyway. That's a value of $13.67, which is a little better.

I'm just happy to have a T206 HOFer.  I have about 15 of those now, most of them in Poor or Good condition, because that's what I can afford, ya know?  This card is in good condition, for a Poor.

The Player / The Person

Photo: George Davis, while with the Chicago White Sox, from The Sporting News

Shockingly, the Veterans' Committee got it right when they inducted this guy into the Hall.  Normally the Committee's inductions are abysmal, especially players inducted from this era.  I've looked at a few of those lately, and when I checked Davis's card in my collection and I looked at his stats (via baseball-reference.com, just click it here to see), I was expecting more of the same.

But I was pleasantly surprised.  You may have to know a bit about the time to appreciate Davis's stats.  At a glance, they're not impressive.  He led the league in an offensive category exactly once: 135 RBIs in 1897 for the New York Giants.  (McGraw and Mathewson wouldn't join the Giants until later.)  This is a lot, but for the 1890s, pretty common for a league leader.  What impressed me a lot more was that between 1904 and 1908, the Chicago White Sox let him play full-time, in most of the team's games, although his offensive stats were way below the league's norms.

There's only one reason possible for this: Defense.  From 1890 through 1902, Davis's offensive stats are good, but not great.  They are, though, impressively consistent.  And consistency in 1890s baseball, for 12 years, is very rare, whether it's offense or defense.  The stats will pile up, as they did. So for peak value, Davis was not one of the best players in the league.  But in career value, he was.

And then came 1904-1908 with the White Sox, and those rather unimpressive numbers.  True, the game changed a little, but those are still bad stats.  Why would he still be allowed to play full-time? Could his defense have been that good?

Yes.  Turns out, it was.

His overall WAR (wins above replacement; click on the stat on the webpage if you're unfamiliar with it) was higher in 1904, 1905 and 1906 than it had been in any of his more impressive offensive years. This can only be due to his defense.  Any dWAR (defensive wins above replacement) in the positive is good.  (This happens a shockingly low amount of times, even for good players today.)  Anything above 1 is really good; anything above 2 is Gold Glove worthy.  Davis was a very good defensive player during his good offensive years (consistently between 1 and 2), but when his offensive skills eroded after 1903, when he sat out, due to problems with injury, salary, and constantly jumping between the Giants and the White Sox, and back (jumping teams was VERY common in the early 1900s, but his case was still odd.  Read about it at his Wikipedia page here), he must've realized that if he was going to still play, his defense had to get even better.

And for a few years, it did.  His defensive WAR, from 1904-1908, when his offense was terrible: 3.4; 2.8; 3.0; 2.9; 1.3.  With his average to below-average offense, but his incredible GG (before there was a Gold Glove Award) defense, his overall WAR from 1904-1908: 7.2; 7.2; 6.3; 4.6 and 2.1.  A 5+ is all-star worthy, and his defense alone made him 2 levels above that.

Over his 16-year career, the league averaged a .919 fielding percentage for the positions he played. Davis's fielding percentage was .936.  At shortstop, the league's was .923 and his was .940.  

If you're defending 17 percentage points higher than everyone else in the league, that's HOF exceptional.  Combine that with 1,545 runs scored (56th all-time), 2,665 hits (69th all-time), 453 doubles (100th all-time), 163 triples (33rd all-time), 619 stolen bases (17th all-time), and 1,440 RBIs (63rd all-time), and you're a Hall-of-Fame player.  JAWS says he's the 4th-best shortstop of all-time, and that's going head-to-head with Honus Wagner (#1), A-rod (#2) Cal Ripken (#3), Robin Yount (#5), Arky Vaughn (#6), Ernie Banks (#7) and Ozzie Smith (#8).  Derek Jeter, if you're curious, is #12, ahead of Barry Larkin, Lou Boudreau, Pee Wee Reese and Bobby Wallace (a contemporary of George Davis's)--but behind Alan Trammel (#11)!  [Take a look at Trammel's stats here and you'll be as amazed as I was.  I assure you, nobody--including the announcers and players who were around him--realized he was that good.  Alan Trammel, shockingly, is wildly deserving of the Hall of Fame. But that's another blog entry for another time.)]  All of these guys, by the way, were way above the average HOF shortstop's stats.  Normally shortstops can field, or they can hit, but they can't do both.

So why a blog entry about George Davis, who nobody in this generation (and in this century) has ever heard of?

Because he wasn't inducted into the HOF until 1998, and he died in 1940.  It came 58 years too late, but finally someone dusted off his stats and saw the HOF.  

Well, it started with Bill James, as these sabermetric things often do.  I'll let the Wikipedia page tell it:

In a 1995 book, baseball author Bill James referred to Davis as baseball's best player who had not been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.^[7]Also in 1995, Davis was featured in David Pietrusza's television film "Local Heroes" in the segment "Knocking on Cooperstown's Door."

In 1997, baseball researcher Frederick Ivor-Campbell said that Davis was "the most neglected player of the 19th century. He's definitely the best eligible player not in the Hall, and he's a lot better than a lot of guys already in."^[8] Around the same time, Davis was rated the 21st best baseball player of all time in the official baseball encyclopedia, Total Baseball.^[8]

Davis was up for a vote before the Hall of Fame's Veterans Committee in 1998. Before the committee voted, sportswriter Dave Anderson wrote an article in The New York Times on Davis's Hall of Fame candidacy. He pointed out the work of Cohoes city historian Walt Lipka, which favorably compared Davis to almost all of the shortstops in the Hall of Fame. Anderson supported Davis's election, saying, "It's as if he were discarded nearly a century ago into a time capsule that was forgotten until now... For too long, George Stacey Davis has been his era's most forgotten best player."^[9] He was selected for induction that year.^[4]

Prior to his Hall of Fame induction, a Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) chapter in New York put out a call to locate a descendant of Davis to be present at the induction ceremony and announced plans for a historical marker in Cohoes.^[10] As a great deal of time had passed since his death, no relatives could be located, but a group of about 50 people from Cohoes traveled to the ceremony in support of Davis.^[1]

Me again.  I don't know if George Davis was the 21st best player of all-time, but he certainly belongs in the Hall.  He was light years better than Phil Rizzuto, Joe Tinker, Rabbit Maranville, and lots of other marginal candidates who probably shouldn't be in the Hall, but who are.  Davis got in so late that nobody was around to even honor his plaque.

And why was that?  Well, that's not so Hall-of-Fame worthy, but hey, don't judge:

Davis returned to the minor leagues for one season as player-manager of the 1910 Des Moines Boosters.^[6] He managed a bowling alley in the early 1910s. He was the Amherst College baseball coach from 1913 to 1918, then he became a car salesman.^[3]

The circumstances of his death remained a mystery until baseball historian Lee Allen discovered its details through a campaign to track down historical baseball players, run in part in The Sporting News. Davis was admitted to a Philadelphia mental institution in 1934 suffering from paresis due to tertiary syphilis. He died in the institution in 1940.^[3] Davis was survived by his wife Jane, who was said to have been angry at him when he died. They had no children. His wife spent $41 to have him buried within a day at nearby Fernwood Cemetery.

Me again.  Yeah, so no kids to have kids to honor his HOF plaque 58 years after he died of syphilis. Of course, you can get syphilis many ways, then and now, but...well, his wife was really pissed at him, and buried him the day after he died, apparently sans wake and funeral.  And it was a quickie burial, costing just $41, which sounds to me like someone dug a hole in the cemetery, threw him in, and filled up the hole.  Maybe even without a coffin, and definitely without a chaplain or onlookers.

And that pretty much says it all. 

Red Sox 27-17 May 19, 2013

Been gone for a long time.  The job, and getting a lot of reading and writing done.  But I've been watching (or listening to) most of the games.  Missed maybe 3 or 4 all year so far, maybe.  Here's what's been going through my head about the Sox, and about baseball in general, lately:

--The new one-game Wild Card playoff format is unbelievably bad, I've realized, and here's why.  Imagine you're the Red Sox, for example, and you win the Wild Card over the next team, the Tigers, by, let's say, five games, which is a lot for a Wild Card lead.  Anyway, since the top-2 Wild Card teams play in the one-game playoff, the Sox, who won by five games, play the Tigers.  The Tigers, of course, pitch Justin Verlander, possibly the one best pitcher in the majors.  He strikes out 12 and wins a complete game shutout, and the Sox are out of the playoffs.  Is that fair?  The format exists this year not to make it more interesting for the top two teams, but to make it more interesting for the middle-level teams, three or four of which will finish between one to three games away from the second spot.  Soon it'll be like hockey or basketball, where almost every team is in, or close to, the playoffs.  This is better for the owners, of course, but not for the game itself.

--Pedro Ciriaco isn't doing it for me this year.  After today's game, he's committed six errors in extremely limited playing time, and is hitting below the Mendoza line.  This is a far cry from last year, when he hit (it seems) about .300 and played great defense.  Right now, he's a glorified pinch-runner.  What happened?

--John Lackey is 2-4 with a 3.30 ERA.  And he's slim.  And he's not complaining.  Finally.  Not bad for $15.25 million per year for the past three years, including this one.

--Speaking of money, David Ortiz has made over $112 million (mostly for the Sox) over his career to, essentially, swing a bat.  And for the Sox, and even for Boston itself, he's been worth every cent--if anyone can be worth that much to swing a bat and to represent sport in a major city.

--Lester and Buchholz are finally pitching like they should--at the same time.

--Hanrahan never did it for me, anyway.  But Bailey can't spend any more time on the DL, especially when you consider last year.  If he does any more, you can't consider him a good signing.

--Uehara is amusing.

--I've probably said it before, but I'll do so again: Minnesota should not have an open-air stadium.  Target Field looks beautiful (and its ground crew is run by the guy who used to do Pawtucket's McCoy Stadium for many years), especially with the tan limestone and cityscape in the distance, but it's a mistake for the Twins to have an open-air stadium.  And without a great team, the novelty of it will wear off, fast.

--Ellsbury has been in a long, very quiet, slump.  (Napoli has, too, but not for as long.)  Currently he's hitting about .250, with an on-base percentage around .300.  That's bad in general, but it's catastrophic for a lead-off hitter.  How about Victorino there, and Ellsbury 2nd, or whatever, to let him get himself on track again?  Bradley may not be the answer next year, but I'm not sure Ellsbury is, either.  I have his autograph, so I want to be wrong, but he's got a lot to prove, since he's a free agent at the end of this year.  If the year ended now, I wouldn't resign him, no matter how much Sox gear he sells for the ladies.  (Yes, the management would take it into consideration when considering his free agency.)

--Pedroia's having a great year.  He's a great hitter almost anywhere in the lineup.  He could hit productively, with a high average and on-base percentage, between the first and the fifth spots in the lineup.  When batting cleanup, which he has the last few years when Ortiz was out, he drove in a lot of runs, too.  An amazing hitter who should have a long and productive decline phase, which shouldn't start for quite awhile yet.

--Saw Cecil Fielder on Tim McCarver's show for a short time, so I looked him up on baseball-reference.com, which I use to look up all players' stats, and the salaries mentioned above.  Anyway, he ate himself out of the major leagues.  His last game was at age 34.  The site mentioned above kindly listed his weight at 230 pounds, which is way off, I assure you.  Even now, he takes up the entire lens of the camera.

--Who're the only two American League batters to lead the league in RBIs for three consecutive years?  Answer: Babe Ruth--and Cecil Fielder.

--Speaking of whom...His son, Prince Fielder, will be making $23 million per year, every year, for the Detroit Tigers, until the year 2020.  By that time, he would've made over $225 million playing baseball.  Prince Fielder is hitting below the Mendoza line in his playoff games.  His playoff batting stats are, to be kind, abysmal.  A-Rod has been much better in the playoffs, despite his reputation otherwise.  Ewwwww......

--Tim McCarver is a terrible broadcaster, by the way.  His enshrinement was a joke.

--Daniel Nava is quietly hitting close to .300, with close to a .400 on-base percentage and close to a .500 slugging percentage.  Unbelievable!  Happy for the guy who hit a grand slam on the first pitch he ever saw in the majors--and hadn't done much since.  He was bought from an independent league team for $1.  Literally.

--To show the opposite, Julio Iglesias, who was hitting about .360 and playing Gold Glove defense for Boston when he was sent down to Pawtucket when Stephen Drew came off the DL, was benched for three games recently by the Pawsox manager due to his bad attitude.  His benching started in about the seventh inning of a game I attended.  He was his typical magician self in the field, but he wasn't running out ground balls, and he must've said the wrong thing at the wrong time to the manager.  This won't get him brought back up anytime soon.  He deserved the chance for his defense alone, but his attitude won't help hide how offensive he can be, if you catch what I'm sayin'.  But he has a major league career, even if he bats ninth for bad teams his whole career, just for his defense alone.  He'll give his teams a few wins a year just with his glove.

--Saw a Twins outfielder make a homerun out of a double for Pedroia when he went after a fly ball, and it bounced off of the heel of his glove and over the outfield wall.  (This should really be a 4-base error, rather than a homerun, but I don't know if the rules allow for such a thing.)  Anyway, I haven't seen that happen since Jose Canseco infamously let a fly ball bounce off his head and over the wall.

--A friend of mine imitates how Jenny Dell seems to point with her chest.  I mentioned that Dell does it better, which didn't help matters.  Jenny Dell seems to be having fun with a thankless job.  And she's definitely grown on me, since I said in the beginning of the year that she's no Heidi Watney.