Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
scott@scottlongonline.com
So Tim Raines gets 24 percent. One of the greatest leadoff hitters in the history of the game gets less than a quarter of the votes. Guys like Jim Rice and Andre Dawson, who Raines was a superior player to get more than double his percentage. I know I will probably go back on this statement, but I'm going to stop putting any energy to caring what this crew does. If more than 3 out of 4 cannot absorb the immense value that Tim Raines brought to the field, well I have no reason torturing myself trying to understand their lazy ballot stuffing. It appears like Raines will join the list of players like Ron Santo, Bert Blyleven, and, Alan Trammell who should be in Cooperstown, but instead are sitting on the outside. I'm glad the deserving Goose Gossage was chosen, but why it took the writers 9 years to finally pull the trigger doesn't make them look too good on that front, either.
For a long time, the front office executives and managers of the game didn't really understand how much sabermetrics impacted the bottom line. Now there is a lot better understanding by the people who run the game, but far too many Hall of Fame voters fail this test. Today's vote was just another example of this. Once again the majority of eligible voters that determine who will be inducted into Cooperstown let the ball roll between their legs. My term for baseball Hall of Fame voters from now on will be Buckners.
(1) Could we go with Merkles instead of Buckners? I mean, Bill's really taken a lot of heat since '86 and most of it is really undeserved. Merkle was the originator of messing up a big game. I guess that ruins the metaphor, though.
(2 and this is just nitpicking) Prepositions don't belong at the end of the sentence.
This is why I used Buckner. Ask Dr. Mudd about how helping John Wilkes Booth ended up being a big net negative to his last name. It is unfair, I will agree.
In regards to grammar, I really try, but let's keep in mind this is a blog and I do not have an editor or a proofreader. I'm always open to public editing, though I would really prefer if you could send these comments to my email at
scott@scottlongonline.com
I have certain strengths as a writer, but unfortunately grammar ain't one of them.
tinyurl.com/yuluqn
to see what linguists have to say about Dryden's peculiar critique of Ben Jonson.
And (ii), 'outside' in your sentence wasn't a preposition. It was a noun. (If it were a preposition, it would very, very strange and obviously ungrammatical to slap that 'the' on the front of it.)
In 3 I was playing along with Eric's joke in 2 , by the way.
Ask Dr. Mudd about how helping John Wilkes Booth ended up being a big net negative to his last name. It is unfair, I will agree.
Dr. Mudd probably would feel okay about it, considering the fact that the phrase "his name is mud" was around for at least 45 years before Booth shot Lincoln.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_293.html
Buckner gets far too much of the blame that should go to McNamara and Schiraldi - but he did make a brutal error.
Merkle just did what everyone else did in the same situation. It was common practice to head for the clubhouses in center field when the winning run crossed the plate - epsecially when the crowd swarmed onto the field, as they did that day.
But Johnny Evers had spoken to Hank O'Day about that situation some weeks earlier, and when Evers appealed to him, O'Day called Merkle out.
There was a lot more pandemonium involved, but that was the basic story. Merkle took a lot worse than Buckner did.
How about calling them Snodgrasses?
There's also an old joke: A freshman at a stuffy Ivy League school asked an upper classman, "Can you tell me where the library is at?" The uppper classman said snootily, "Here we do not end out sentences with prepositions." "Fine," said the freshman, "can you tell me where the library is at, asshole?"
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