The Southpaw

John Paciorek's Perfect Career

On Sept. 29, 1963 was a perfect day for John Paciorek of the Houston Colt .45s: playing right field, he went 3-for-3, walked twice,  and scored four runs as the Colts drubbed the Mets, 13-4, before a crowd of 3,833.

Paciorek never played in the majors again. He suffered back problems, and kept trying to make it back to The Show, but never did. In 1968, he hit .275 with 17 homers for Reno, but retired at 24 after the 1969 season.

So he's got a bunch of career 1.000's to make up for the frustration: 1.000 batting average, 1.000 OBP, 1.000 slugging percentage, even a 1.000 fielding percentage (2 chances, 2 putouts).

Pesky's Pole and the Hot Dog

One of my favorite historical Web sites is Ballparks.com. It's a treasure trove of information about ballparks of the past and present, and provides pretty good updates on new parks being built (usually you can find better updates on team Web sites, though).

I've been to about half of the current Major League parks, and three or four that are no longer used -- Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Veterans Stadium, and the old Busch Stadium come immediately to mind. I've found the information there to be solid and rich in detail, and have used it to research such things as the now-officially-named Pesky's Pole, which Ballparks.com provides just enough background on:

The right-field stands are only 302 feet from home plate at the foul pole. That foul pole was once nicknamed "Pesky’s Pole." Red Sox pitcher Mel Parnell coined the term, after Pesky hit a home run just beyond the famous pole. That home run was one of only six homers Pesky ever hit at Fenway Park, and it won the game for Parnell.

Remembering Syd Thrift

MLB.com has a nice package on Syd Thrift, who promoted and directed the Royals' baseball academy:

Claire: Baseball was better with Thrift
Royals remember innovator Syd Thrift
Leyland recalls Thrift: Former GM gave Tigers skipper first big-league chance

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Collier: Thrift went his own way
Cook: Thrift's best days were with Pirates

From the Kansas City Star:
Baseball loses a visionary

Thoughts on Thrift from Baltimore Sun reporter Roch Kubatko

And a brief book review of The Game According to Syd Thrift

The oldest old-timer

Silas Simmons is 110 years old. He played pro baseball before the Negro Leagues were even formed, between 1912 and 1929, according to Alan Schwarz of the New York Times.

Among the teams Simmons played for: Pittsburgh's Homestead Grays. (That's a link to a team photo: he's second from the right in the middle row.) Among those he played against: Pop Lloyd, Judy Johnson and Biz Mackey. Simmons was a pitcher, and tells Schwarz, "I had a good curveball and a good fastball."

Simmons earned $10 a game for his work.

The story behind the story is also worth a read.

Johnny Sain, con man

Last year I was talking to Jim Bouton about the relationship between Johnny Sain and Leo Mazzone, and I mentioned to Jim that Leo has a reputation for rescuing pitchers from the junk heap, and also for helping good pitchers become great or near-great.

Bouton replied: "John was famous for that."

Hmmm. I didn't know that.

But you can look it up. Jim Kaat improved while pitching for Sain in 1965 and 1966.  Mudcat Grant scattered 145 wins over 14 major league seasons, but only won 20 games one time -- in 1965, with Sain as his coach. Wilbur Wood didn't win more than 13 games in a season until Sain came along to coach the White Sox in 1971 -- but won 20 or more the following four years. Even Whitey Ford thrived under Sain. He had never won more than 19 games until Sain became his coach -- and at the age of 32 he won 25, and then two years later won 24.

Syd Thrift, RIP

As I've written earlier, one of the more ambitious pieces I wrote for ESPN.com was a profile of Leo Mazzone. One of the many baseball men I had the pleasure of speak to was Syd Thrift, who, I discovered from my research, had released Mazzone as a pitcher early in 1976 and then offered him a job managing Corpus Christi in the Class A Lone Star League. It was Mazzone's first job as a manager or coach (he did pitch five games for Corpus Christi in 1976, but only because thought it would help the team win the championship, which it did).

My interview with Thrift, in June 2005, was one I wished had gone on for hours. He'd spent more than a half-century in baseball, and if hadn't done it all, he'd come pretty damn close.

Thrift died Monday night. He was 77.

Because much of my interview ended up on the cutting room floor, including some interesting bits, in honor of Syd, I thought I'd post a lengthier excerpt. I hope you'll find it interesting.

A man's life, file by file

Yesterday I was going through some clips that I had downloaded a few months ago ... all of them  with names like "ProQuest_90614334.pdf." All of them old New York Times and L.A. Times articles that related either to Johnny Sain or Jim Bouton. This wasn't an idle exercise -- I have to rename the files so they're useful for future research.

Many of the articles are about key points in Sain's career, and they're often terribly brief and offer little or no information beyond the facts. No analysis. No quotes.

Joltin' Joe DiMaggio

A little bit of nostalgia, circa 1941.

Download "Joltin' Joe".mp3

The Mets Win the Pennant! (a short history)

In 45 seasons (can the Mets really be that old?), New York's best team, the team that belongs to Casey Stengel, Marvelous Marv, Joan Payton, Tom Terrific, Jerry Koosman, Tommie and Cleon, Ed Kranepool, George "The Stork" Theodore, Duffy Dyer, Jerry Grote, John Milner, Jon Matlack, Tug McGraw, Bud Harrelson, Ken Boswell, Ron Darling, Keith Hernandez, Dwight Gooden, David Cone, Mookie Wilson, Gary Carter, Mike Piazza, Howard Johnson, Gil Hodges, Davey Johnson, Bobby Valentine, and Lindsey Nelson, Bob Murphy, and Ralph Kiner, and so many others, have won their division only five times. (The 2000 Mets made it all the way to the Subway Series, but made the playoffs by taking the wild card.)

1969 -- from way behind the Cubs in August. 1973 -- from last place in August to first in October. 1986 -- by a landslide. 1988 -- the end of the dynasty that never was.  And now -- Sept. 18, 2006.

The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

The Mets will clinch. They will. But maybe they can use some help. Is it time for Sidd Finch to come out of retirement? SI.com has been kind enough to post the original George Plimpton story from the April 1, 1985 issue.

An all-time classic that was expanded into a very good book.

The Braves and the Olympic Javelin Champ

On Sept. 24, Jan Zelezny, who won the javelin gold medal in the 1992, 1996, and 2000 Olympics, will hurl his last spear. Last week he announced he was retiring from the sport.

Zelezny set the javelin world record in 1996 with a toss just over 323 feet.  If he had started his throw from home plate at Turner Field, it would have pierced the right field warning track.  That's about 115 feet short of the world record for the longest baseball throw, held by former Phillie Glen Gorbous. But Gorbous had things a little easier than Zelezny: he was throwing a perfect five-ounce sphere that even a child can heave a decent distance.

The All-Rookie Lineup

Rusty Staub at first. Joe Morgan at second. Jim Wynn patrolling center. Jerry Grote behind the plate. Not a bad place to start for a 1960s lineup, huh?

Those four took the field together on Sept. 27, 1963, playing for the Houston Colt .45s in a home game against the Mets. All were rookies. Actually, every player who started for Houston that night was a rookie. Houston's manager, Harry Craft, thought it was a terrific way to get some publicity out of a game between two expansion losers that meant almost nothing. Maybe the Friday night turnout would have been less that 5,802 if not for Craft's idea. But it's hard to imagine.

Visualizing Pennant Races

It's September, so naturally we're thinking pennant races here. The AL Central and the NL West are up for grabs, and of course both Wild Card berths. The NL Wild Card race is the most tangled: San Diego, Florida, Philly, San Francisco, Cincy, and Houston are all within 4.5 games of grabbing that coveted last spot.

This is one of the great pleasures of September, watching these races unfold, and there's a bit of irony in the term "pennant race" -- because it's day-by-day, the "race" is almost always painfully slow.

But when you get a chance to look back ... using BaseballRace.com's very cool visualization tool ... you can watch past pennant races unfold, from Opening Day on, real fast. A couple of my favorites: the 1964 Phillies collapse (you can almost feel the lactic acid building up at the end there) and the 1969 NL East, which provides a terrific view of my Mets overcoming a huge Cubs advantage in August to finish first, 8 games in front.

Too much. Bravo to Christopher J. Falvey, the man who created this nifty toy.

Jim and Johnny

Ball Four is, by far, my favorite baseball book, and even that may be praise too faint: it's one of my favorite books. And I read an awful lot.

I first read Ball Four not long after it came out; probably around 1972 or 1973, when I was 11 or 12 years old. I wasn't an especially advanced or "cool" kid about matters carnal, and I don't recall being surprised or disenchanted when reading about the drunken escapades of famous ballplayers. Mickey Mantle wasn't my hero, but even if he was, he didn't seem diminished by what Jim Bouton wrote about him.

The man who I thought was the true exemplar of so much that seemed stupid and silly about baseball was

The Jackie Robinson Story

One of the best and biggest "hidden" sites in the Web is the Internet Archive. It features the "Wayback Machine," which is an excellent way to find old stories that haven't even been archived by Google. I sometimes use it to find articles we published at SportsJones.com, where I was executive editor. Many of those articles can't be accessed anywhere else. Which is kind of amazing, when you consider that back in the late '90s, we thought that once something was posted on the Net, it would never go away. But stuff does disappear.

Once in a while I just check out the audio and video files hosted by the Archive. There's not a ton of baseball-related material, but there are some gems, including a full, downloadable version of "The Jackie Robinson Story."

Pitchers rule! (at least for a day)

Seven shutouts in 13 major league games yesterday. That's the most since June 4, 1972, when Bob Gibson and Catfish Hunter were among those who tossed eight shutouts in 16 contests. Times have changed: five of the eight shutouts in 1972 were complete games. Only two of last night's goose-eggs were solo acts: Milwaukee's Doug Davis held the Dodgers to four hits in a 9-0  win, and Cincy's Bronson Arroyo three-hit the Giants.

Not Completely Sain

Baseball, more than any other sport, is a game that contains its own history. Current players invite comparisons to those who came before, and series, games, and even single plays often lead to conversations about similar series, games, and plays of the past. Baseball remembers.

This became most evident to about a year ago, when I wrote a piece about pitching coach Leo Mazzone for ESPN.com. (Mazzone was with the Braves then, and has since moved on to Baltimore. ) One of the first things I learned about Mazzone was that he had a mentor: Johnny Sain, the famed Boston Braves and Yankees pitcher who became a tremendously successful pitching coach in the 1960s.