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MLB’s “Baseball Origins Committee” choose members

In his first official act of MLB’s Official Historian, John Thorn will serve as chairperson of the “Baseball Origins Committee”. The purpose, according to mlb.com simply put is to:

“seek to determine the facts of baseball’s beginnings and its evolution. The Committee will compile and evaluate information that pertains to the game’s founding and its growth. Following the study period, the panel will seek to tell the story of baseball’s beginnings and explore not only the game’s broadest origins”.

Fortunately for me, we have one of the members of the committee here on the University of Illinois campus in Dr Adrian Burgos.

Here is the full list of the committee membership:

DAVID BLOCK, an early baseball historian, author of Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

JAMES EDWARD BRUNSON III, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs at Northern Illinois University and author of The Early Image of Black Baseball: Race and Representation in the Popular Press, 1871-1890.

ADRIAN BURGOS, JR., Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois; author of Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line and Cuban Star: How One Negro League Owner Changed the Face of Baseball; a consultant to Ken Burns’s Baseball: The Tenth Inning; and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

KEN BURNS, award-winning filmmaker of Ken Burns’s Baseball, Ken Burns’s Baseball: The Tenth Inning, The Civil War, Jazz, The War, and many other highly acclaimed documentaries.

LEN COLEMAN, the former President of the National League.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN, Presidential Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir.

STEVE HIRDT, Executive Vice President of the Elias Sports Bureau, the official statistician of Major League Baseball, and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

JANE LEAVY, Former staff writer of the Washington Post; author of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy and The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and The End of America’s Childhood; and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

LARRY McCRAY, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who, since 2005, has coordinated "Project Protoball," a record of print references to baseball and parallel bat and ball games prior to 1860, and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

GEORGE F. WILL, Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator, Washington Post and Newsweek columnist, ABC News analyst and author of Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball.

Part of me is excited of me to find out what this esteemed group will reveal and part of me is wary. I guess I’m concerned because of the inherent nature of an organization discovering its own history.

Will this committee’s findings be public? Or will it be subject to MLB’s spin? Time will tell. In either case, I’ll be interested what comes out of it.

Interview with artist Grant Smith

A few weeks back, I wrote a post about artist Grant Smith and his work. Smith (seen left in front of his work entitled “The White Josh Gibson”) hits on the topic of baseball quite a lot in his art. If you haven’t seen his work, take a look at http://grant9smith.com.

Smith has had his art exhibited at the Chicago Baseball Museum and the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and Museum. He’s even sold some art to Johnny Damon.

Personally, I enjoy his particular style of art (like I said before, I’m no art critic but I know what I like). His view on baseball as seen through his art is unique and each of his paintings seem to tell a story.

Smith and I corresponded a bit over email and I learned a bit more about him and his art. He graciously agreed to answer a few questions in a Q&A interview.

The Baseball Zealot: Give us some background in your artistic endeavors. Do you do mostly oil paintings?

Grant Smith: My family always encouraged my art and made a big deal out of everything I made. I know a lot of children are discouraged to pursue art because their parents are feel it is a dead end career that a person cannot make a living. I use the paintings to delve into subjects that are unjust, ironic, or brutal. The polar opposite for me is baseball. No matter how much stress I have when I turn on a game it melts away. So they are about the battle between good and evil. I work in a few mediums, but oil is my favorite. I use acrylic paint as my first layer of colors called under painting. I use different methods of under painting depending on the mood or color scheme of the work. Oil allows for easier blending because it stays wet longer.

TBZ: What is the history of your baseball interest? What teams have you followed most intensely?

GS: Baseball was a language and theme in my house, and most of my families homes. My great grandparents had a brownstone a few blocks from Wrigley Field, so they were huge Cub fans, as are everyone on my Mom’s side. My Dad’s side was from the South side of Chicago and so I thought I may be the first person to try to be both a Cubs and Sox fan. I wore a Cubs hat to Comiskey park in the late 80’s and had a beer poured on my head from the upper deck, so I quickly realized an allegiance needed to be formed with one or another. I went with the Cubs because there is nothing better than Wrigley Field or the Wrigley neighborhood in general. My grandparents Hugo and Dorothy Stracke loved the Cubs also, and every summer I would vist them and we would go to 3 or 4 Cub games. I also follow the Texas Rangers since the team is 20 minutes away from my home in Dallas, and was thrilled last year to see them get to the World Series.

TBZ: It’s obvious that you use symbolism a great deal in your art. More than that, it’s almost as if you use the symbolism to teach a message rather than leave it to the viewer to come up with their own interpretation. Is that accurate?

GS: I like to have the paintings remain subjective, but their are leanings towards some sort of moral lesson or absurdity I want to stress. I have made paintings filled with Jim Crow signs, that are alarming to a person that did not know that existed. I have been at the same show and had a person see a Jim Crow painting and remark how great it was that I was making people confront racism, or bigotry that we all have stowed away in our subconscious. 20 minutes later another came over to inform me they didn’t approve of me being a racist and supporting Jim Crow laws. I can only speak for myself, people will come up with an interpretation based on their own life experience. I don’t want to spoon feed someone about the story, art should evoke some sort of emotion in the viewer.

TBZ: Symbolism aside, I think it’s safe to say that your art work has an ‘edge’ to it. It doesn’t always show the whitewashed, ‘pretty’ side of baseball. What kind of responses have you gotten to your work?

GS: I know I lose a lot of people by not sticking to the pretty pictures that most sports painters like to portray. I paint about Eddie Gaedel being beaten to death, or Pat Tillman being murdered, Rube Foster hanging himself in a mental institution, Jack Johnson and Jim Crow laws. Often there are interesting back stories on what drove a person to these extremes. The psychology interests me; what drives a person to abuse, or their reaction to abuse. These things go on all the time a lot of people would rather ignore them and pretend they don’t happen, I don’t want to have my head buried in the sand.If we confront them they are less likely to reoccur. I love the Charles Bukowski poem The Broken Shoelace. It is about the millions of miniscule disappointments a person has in life that accumulate and finally send a person to the madhouse. Here is a small portion.

It’s not the large things that send a man to the madhouse
death he’s ready for
or murder, incest, robbery,
fire, flood.
No it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to a madhouse
not the death of his love, but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left"

Most sports paintings show the hero, mine the anti hero, how many times does the average person know what it’s like to be a hero? I feel they could connect better to my narratives. I’m working on a painting now called "The Piss" It is about an empty seat I saw in the Willie Mays photo from "the catch". About a guy who got up to take a piss at just the wrong time, but being at that game was the highlight of his life so he always lied about what a great view he had of Mays making the catch.

TBZ: You sold some of your work to MLB outfielder Johnny Damon. Tell us about that. How did that come about?

GS: One of my great friends is named Jeremy Taggart and he is a drummer in a band called Our Lady Peace. I was visiting Jeremy for a week in Toronto in 2002. We went to the Red Sox- Jays game, and afterward to a bar. I saw Damon and Jason Varitek standing at the bar, and went over and introduced myself. We talked for about 10 minutes, and I asked if they like Our Lady Peace. Damon was a big fan, so he wanted to meet the drummer and guitar player who were with me. We ended up hanging out the rest of the night, exchanged numbers, and he ended up buying quite a few paintings from me. In December of 2004 I went to his wedding in Orlando, they had just won the World Series, and the wedding party was a week long, and amazing time.

TBZ: Your website is http://grant9smith.com . On your website, you tell us that ‘9’ was chosen originally because of Ted Williams. Why?

GS: Ted always fascinated me, with the bigger than life personality, his obsession with hitting, his skill as a Marine fighter pilot. He was a big reason I joined the Marines. I started to read about numerology, and various metaphors and meanings of numbers looked to baseball to make my own meaning of the number. 9 players on a team, 9 innings in a game, 0 is the lowest numeral, 9 is the highest before additional digits are needed.So 9 is the prest before additional digits are needed. Sitting in a studio all day so I tend to think about bizarre stuff like this.

TBZ: Let’s end on a corny one… If you were stranded on a desert island, what baseball art piece (painting, poetry, sculpture, anything) would you bring to remind you of the game you love?

GS: That is great question, and a difficult one. I would cheat a bit and bring 2 from the same artist Raymond Pettibon. The first is titled Babe Ruth, and the second 0 for 40. I can go back to the text of these paintings and create different meanings numerous times. For me that is what makes art fun, turning it back on yourself, using your own experiences and life to make it your own.

Much thanks to Grant Smith for sharing his thoughts with us. If you want to see more of Grant’s art, stop by his website at http://grant9smith.com.

Art Credit: “We Can Dream” by Grant Smith

Beltre has this thing about head rubbing

it’s true… Adrian Beltre reacts badly whenever anyone, even teammates, rubs his head. Someone has even posted a collection of videos of him getting his noggin rubbed up and his rather upset reaction to it.

Now he’s with the Rangers but it doesn’t look like his new teammates are too sensitive to his concerns.

Take Elvis Andrus, for example:

Oh yeah … a bunch of times. He better get used to it. He might kick my tail, but I’m going to do it.

What is it, March? He’ll be in for a long year

Baseball Reference is goin’ mobile

A few weeks ago, I was out and about and had the need to look up some baseball stats. I have Baseball Reference punched in as a bookmark on my Android smartphone. I wouldn’t say perusing the site was painful… I actually was able to find whatever stat I was looking for. But quite honestly, it was laborious and I thought boy, Sean really needs a mobile version of this site or maybe even an app.

Huzzah!! Baseball Reference now has gone mobile!

And it looks sharp, too. I just gave it a quick test run and so far it passes my test.

1) it’s easy to navigate especially considering how complicated this particular site is.

2) the text is clear as a bell as very easy to read

3) and comprehensible. Most everything you see on the regular website can be accessed via the mobile site.

So bookmark http://m.bbref.com on your mobile device (you actually don’t have to. Browsing to Baseball Reference’s normal web site with a mobile device will take you there).

Thanks to Sean at Baseball Reference for going the extra step.

The Case of the Lost George Bush baseball card- revisited

A friend of mine and I were chatting about baseball and baseball cards in particular today and the topic of the Topps George Bush baseball card fiasco came up. It’s a local story from 11 years ago I was woefully ignorant.

The details can be summed as such:

In 1990, Lee Hull and Dan Cook were owners of Who’s on First, a baseball card shop in Champaign, Illinois. They bought what they thought was a typical Topps baseball card set from a woman. Among the other cards though, was a baseball card with George Bush dressed in his 1947 Yale uniform. Very odd.

As told by the owners of the shop, the were sued by a local lawyer who claimed the shop owners offered up for sale for fifteen cents. Rumor has it they were asked how much they thought it was worth and they gave their opinion with no intention of selling it (let’s face it, do baseball card shop owners EVER sell any cards for 15 cents).

Here’s the rub: Topps got wind of the lawsuit and heard about one of their George Bush baseball card floating around. The baseball card company claimed that only 100 of those cards were made and they were presented to the White House (remember this was back in 1990 when Bush was in the White House).

Topps went as far as to accuse Who’s on First baseball card shop of possessing stolen property.

The story had all the twists and turns of a late night B movie. Even People magazine picked up the story back in 1990 As for Hull and Cook, they resolved to stay strong:

Hull calls the suit ridiculous and vows to play hardball with any and all comers. As for Topps, he says, it “asked if we’d give it back if George Bush asked us to. I said only if he came here or we got to go to the White House.”

As for how the story ended, I’m not really sure. Who’s on First folded after a year a so and I’m not finding any news reports that give any conclusion to our little melodrama.

Cubs have spring fever, take frustrations out on each other

I thought we were told there would be no more of this.

USA Today: Fight breaks out in Cubs dugout during spring game

It seems Carlos Silva was the one who couldn’t keep his cool.

The Cubs said that Silva was "not in the right frame of mind to talk" after the game.

To be honest, I pretty much expected to read about Carlos Zambrano, not Silva, when I clicked the headline link. I’m not sure whether it’s a good or bad thing that I was wrong.

Keep it cool, Silva

Quommunication

While White Sox manager is embroiled in a sniping war with former Sox reliever Bobby Jenks, it looks like Mike Quade is cementing himself as the Great Communicator in the Cubs organization.

From USA Today:

Mike Quade already had the attention of his Chicago Cubs players during his first spring training as a big league manager, between his hands-on approach during drills, added attention to fundamentals, and an infectious energy he brings to work.

But not even the most alert player saw this coming Friday: lineups posted for the first three exhibition games, two days in advance of the spring opener, complete with each starter’s backup for the day listed in parentheses.

I’m not sure if it’s an issue of communication or just plain being organized. Compared to the former Cubs czar, the players think he’s quite on top of things.

Yet, communication, efficiency and even being a ‘players manager’ may not translate to wins. We won’t know that come April. It’s a good start, though.

RIP Chuck Tanner

Former MLB manager Chuck Tanner died yesterday after a long illness at the age of 82.

Tanner ranks 27th all-time among managers in wins with 1352. Unfortunately, he has 1381 losses just barely giving him a losing record for his career. Of course, his crowning jewel was his World Series victory in 1979 with the Pirates.

He was described as “upbeat” by the media and that was collaborated by my friend, Todd the Ump, who is a die-hard Pirates fan.

When I got home my son was watching the Pens post game show and they started showing clips of the 1979 Pirates and Chuck Tanner. My son said, "Oh yeah, he died." I didn’t believe it. Chuck Tanner is not supposed to die. He is the eternal optimist who said "You must never ever ever ever quit." Other than the normal happiest days of my life (i.e. kids being born, day I got married – yes I actually do love my wife) the day I met Chuck Tanner and had my picture taken with him at PNC ranks right up there.

You couldn’t help but like Chuck Tanner. He never said a bad word about any player and you never heard a player say a bad word about him. Looking back it’s hard to believe that when he skippered the Buccos to the ’79 Championship that he was only a few years older than I am now. Yet when I met him a few years back he didn’t seem to be any older than he was in 1979.

I hope the Pirates do the right thing and retire his number 7 this coming season. After all, he quite possibly will be the last man to lead them to a World Series title.

I don’t think anyone could have said it better.

Kiwanis Sports Trivia Championship (Team Zealot still has a lot of work to do)

Today, the Champaign-Urbana Kiwanis held their 2nd annual Sports Trivia Championship. Much as I’d like to think that this is an effort to humble me and my Team Zealot teammates, I just have to admit that their are a lot of guys out there who are smarter than me at least when it comes to sports trivia. And I’m fine with that because I had a blast today regardless of the outcome.

I won’t tell you how bad Team Zealot (myself, Shawn Lee, and team newcomer Nick Zahos) did other than to say that we didn’t come in last (whew!). The questions were tougher in my opinion, from last year’s inaugural Sports Trivia Championship. During the halfway break, we were mentally exhausted.

They did give us the answers to the first half’s questions during the break and while they were tough, I think we caught a break and got a lot of lucky answers (including questions like what was the height of the Illinois state high school record high jump… we got that through pure luck). We really weren’t in the running by the halfway point but I thought we did ok.

Overall, we generally scored 7 out of 10 on most categories. Weak points for Team Zealot were (don’t hate us Illini fans) Illinois football (4 out of 10) and Illinois basketball (5 out of 10). Ironically, we managed to score 8 on the NFL (I haven’t followed football religiously since the 80s).

The biggest trivia question surprise to us? It was in the Major League Baseball category. Ok, here’s the question:

Which franchise had the most players in the Hall of Fame? The choices: Yankees, Cardinals, Giants, Red Sox.

I’ll tell you the answer later in the article. I will say that I think all three of us agreed on the same answer and got it wrong anyway.

Much kudos go to the winners named ‘Team Rain Delay’, who scored 83 out of 100 questions correctly. If you think of it, they would have had to score eight or nine out of ten for each of the ten categories. They had four members on their team so they will have to split that $1,000 check four ways. Be nice, guys!

Thanks to Brian Barnhart who was the Master of Ceremonies. Some of you may know Barnhart as the broadcaster for Illini football and basketball games. Others may remember him from his days as broadcaster for the Angels in the late 90s. He did an excellent job and quite honestly, kept the event going at a pretty good pace.

Biggest thanks go to Jim Sheppard, longtime former public address announcer for Illini football and basketball games. His work with Kiwanis to organize the Sports Trivia Championship to raise money for the service projects that they are involved should be recognized.

Oh, the trivia question. Which franchise had the most players in the Hall of Fame? The answer is the Giants. The lesson here is: Don’t go with the obvious. The three of us all thought it was the Yankees.

Jim Sheppard told me that they plan to do a third Sports Trivia Championship next year. Those in the East Central Illinois area should keep that in mind for a fun afternoon for a good cause.

Short sluggers

Steve Lombardi of the Baseball Reference Blog lists the top career homerun hitters of those players 5’6” or shorter.

First of all, I never knew Hack Wilson was so short. He just makes the 5’6” requirement. He tops the list. He’s also pretty much the only legitimate slugger. Wilson outpaces #2 Tommy Leach by a remarkable 244 to 57 margin.