What to Do During a Global Health Crisis

by Danny Boyce

 

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m an insomniac.  As a result I have spent a lot of hours doing a lot of crap.  For example, right now it is 4:43 am on April 17, 2020, and I’m typing up this column while listening/watching the Simpsons episode where Rodney Dangerfield is the voice of Mr. Burns’ lost son.  I’ve probably seen this episode 150 times, but what else is there to do?  I mean, over the last three and a half weeks I have put together

 

  • A new computer desk
  • A new coffee table
  • Two new book cases
  • A new night stand
  • A new air hockey table game.

 

But I am still waiting on my new be.  And during that time I have binged

 

  • The Office (rewatch)
  • Parks and Recreation (rewatch)
  • Evil Genius
  • McMillions
  • Ozark
  • Real Rob (thank science this was only two seasons)
  • Most of The Rewatchables from The Ringer (I cannot recommend this podcast enough)
  • The first three seasons of Community
  • The first two seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm
  • West World
  • Barry (rewatch)
  • The Righteous Gemstones (rewatch)
  • The League (I’m convinced that this series was based on real life events)
  • Documentaries about Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer, and Marjorie Diehl Armstrong
  • About 60 different Simpsons episodes
  • Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Blink (rereads)
  • About a half dozen of WWE Network’s Legends of Wrestling (rewatch)
  • The games I linked to the other night along with at least a dozen more
  • The first two seasons of Arli$$

 

Yes, it has gotten to that point where I said to myself, “You know, I should give ‘Arli$$’ another shot.”  (I mean, it had its moments, but not a whole helluva lot of them.)  And along with all of that I have made my weekly grocery store trips, taken my trash out three times per day, taken at least one walk around my block every day, organized a room here into my office (seriously, when you have been on the road for two thirds of the last three years you fall behind rapidly), this is complete with kettle for tea and fridge, started playing a table top curling game, practiced my office putting (three holes through the condo), updated all awards for all 19,500+ players in Major League Baseball history for my Baseball Project That May or May Not Amount to Anything, updated my Super Bowl spreadsheet, started working on my NCAA basketball tournament spreadsheet (involves all results since the field went to 64 teams), wrote a 14,500-word post about memorable athletes, and looked up a bunch of YouTube clips for another post.  If I have accumulated 20 hours of sleep over this time frame “amazed” would be an understatement.  Other than the occasional afternoon nap, I have been doing something time consuming but probably not exactly worthwhile to anyone other than a nerd like me.

 

So today I figured I would write a little bit about some of the other things going on in my screwed up world . . .

 

Howard Finkel

Growing up in the 1980’s there were two distinct types of professional wrestling.  Down south the in ring product was to make it as real as possible.  The matches took place in front of smaller crowds (the TBS shows featured matches where the seats further back were dimmed out if they weren’t in the studio with about 25-30 people around) and the emphasis was on “wrestling”.  Up north it was about the characters and the over the top performances.  Their weekly programming showed matches in packed arenas.  Everything was big time.  And a big part of that was the booming voice of Howard Finkel.  When the World Wide Wrestling Federation was “shut down” and reformed as the World Wrestling Federation (later WWE), Finkel was the first employee.  He turned out to be the longest serving employee as well.  The best part was when a championship changed hands.  Finkel made the changing of the guard official with his trademark, “and NEEEEEEEWWWW . . .”

 

He was never afraid to be the butt of the joke, he had a mind like a steel trap, and was well respected throughout the industry.  He will be sorely missed.

 

Brian Dennehy

While I’m sure people will remember him for other movies, at Talk Back Fans he will be most remembered as Big Tom Callahan, the man who kept Sandusky, Ohio employed.  He wasn’t in the movie long, but I think partly because of the way Chris Farley played the role of Tommy Callahan (by the way, Dennehy loved Farley and even years after Farley’s death was still shaken), you felt that Big Tom was a huge influence on Tommy Boy.

 

But more than that, Dennehy won six Prime Time Emmys, two Tony Awards, and two SAG Awards.  He even unknowingly made a brief appearance in “South Park:  Bigger, Louder, and Uncut”.  But mostly, we’ll remember him for Rambo, for his performance as Willy Lowman, and yes, Big Tom Callahan.

 

Willie Davis

One thing that drives me nuts about the NFL is their constant ignorance to what happened before 1970.  Willie Davis was Vince Lombardi’s defensive captain in Green Bay.  He was nicknamed “Dr. Feelgood” because of his happy disposition.  Undersized even for his time, he made up for his lack of size with ferocity and tenacity, never giving up on the play and being the aggressor.  In his time in Green Bay, the Packers lost just one playoff game.  Overall they won five NFL championships and the first two Super Bowls.  Teammate Forrest Gregg said the he never thought there was a game where Davis didn’t play the absolute best he could play that day.  To me, that’s the best compliment you can ever give a player.  We all have bad days, but that is no excuse for giving the best effort.  In 1981 he received his rightful enshrinement into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

 

The Baseball Project That May or May Not Amount to Anything

A lot of things have kept me from getting further into this project, starting with a crashed hard drive that wiped out my primary files.  On the bright side while rebuilding the files I got to re-thinking my formula and tinkered with it.  Quick summary:

 

I’ve explained the basics enough in other posts, but the changes is I eliminated the Baseball Prospectus WARP (not calculated for pitchers before 1950, so what good does that do), and decided to add some of the subjective stuff, but had to figure out how to do it systematically.  Simply, I use 60.00 as my dividing line, which is basically 1,000 points.  I don’t like using negative numbers in my rankings, and even though this method still yields negatives sometimes, they are only for players who have played about a handful of games or pitched poorly in about an inning or two.  But anyway, how to deal with these subjective things.  Well, there are All-Star appearances, MVP’s, Cy Youngs, Gold Gloves, Silver Sluggers, postseason MVP’s, Rookie of the Year, and other various awards.  I didn’t want the awards to overshadow the value comparisons, but if a player showed up regularly in the MVP voting, that sure as hell should count for something.  So, what I did was this:  For every MVP or Cy Young Award won, I awarded .25 (or 25 points each, if you want).  For every time they finished in the top ten in the MVP voting or top five in the Cy Young voting I awarded .10.  I did the same for every All-Star appearance.  For every Gold Glove or Silver Slugger won I awarded .15.  And for all other YEAR LONG AWARDS (in other words, no “of the Week” or “of the Month” awards) I awarded .10.  The final part I added was the “share” of the voting for the MVP and Cy Young awards.  For those I added the total share (in other words, if a player finished with 120 points in the MVP voting out of a maximum of 420, that is a share of .29 – I’ll spare you the running decimal) and divided that total by 10.  Of the over 19,000 players in MLB history the highest total for any player is 11.08, which is Barry Bonds.  Basically, this doesn’t take someone who otherwise shouldn’t be worthy; this basically takes legitimate borderline guys and push them over or leave them short.  Glad I could get back to this project.

 

New Books

I love the electronic format, for two reason.  One, I like the audio books, especially for naps.  Malcolm Gladwell has the perfect voice for naps.  I picked up the audio version of three of his books, and currently I’m a quarter of the way through “Outliers”.  I also got the electronic version of Chuck Klosterman’s “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs”, or as I call it, “Clean Living”, one of my favorite collection of essays about popular culture.  I also picked up five baseball books.  The first two are Bill James’ “Solid Fool’s Gold:  Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom” and “Fools Rush Inn:  More Detours on the Way to Conventional Wisdom”.  These are two books in which Bill does what he does best:  sift through the bullshit, buck the old ways of thinking, and develop better ways of studying the greatest game ever invented.

 

The other three are about the 1919-20 timeframe.  The first one is “The Pitch That Killed:  Carl Mays, Ray Chapman, and the Pennant Race of 1920” by Mike Sowell.  One thing forgotten about that season is that seven of the eight Black Sox were still playing up until the last week of the season. Haven’t gotten into it yet, but I am looking forward to it.

 

The next one is called “Baseball Gods in Scandal:  Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and the Dutch Leonard Affair” by Ian S. Kahanowitz.  What a lot of you may not know is that Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were accused of attempting to fix the Indians’ final game of the 1919 season, and an incriminating telegram has a bit to do with it.  What is truly baffling to me is that somehow people don’t realize just how much gambling was affecting the outcome of games during that time.  Both were eventually acquitted, but neither managed another game after the accusation, mostly because it was found that they were both better managers when they had themselves to manage.

 

The third one is “The Betrayal:  The 1919 World Series and the Birth of Modern Baseball” by Charles FountainI enjoyed the movie and the book “Eight Men Out”, but the book is referenced in the introduction with “. . . which remains the best known if also the least-reliable book on the subject.”  So I hope that this book can add a different (and better) perspective to all of it.

 

This will help with the aforementioned project.  I hope.

 

Posnanski 100

I love when Joe Posnanski comes up with a project.  He reminds me of myself because he’ll tell you about the distractions and various bumps in the road that come with completing these things.  It was a fun read because the project was not as much a ranking system as it was a vessel used to tell stories about the players.  I love the stats and I use them a lot to tell the story about a player, but there is so much more to a player.  The mannerisms, the attitude, the work ethic (or lack thereof), etc.  he tried to capture all of that in the series that took about 400 more words than it took to write “Moby Dick”.  For fun I decided to take Joe’s list and compare it with my HOF Rating list (I already have the players that he would have listed from the stats end of it; he included Negro League players, so my list would no way match his completely) as well as Bill James’ ratings from 20 years ago.  There was nothing really scientific about it, nor was I looking for anything enlightening, except to see how many younger players jumped into the list since Bill last did his rankings.  Besides, this was a nice distraction.

 

Anyway, There were 146 total players between the three lists.  Out of 100, 54 players made all three lists, 43 made two of the three, and 49 made only one of the lists.  Joe only had seven that neither Bill or I had and Bill and I each had 21.  What does this tell us?  Absolutely nothing, but it doesn’t have to.  Baseball stuff can just be fun.

 

The Rewatchables

If you love movies and enjoy watching them over and over, this podcast is for you.  Each episode they take a different movie and break it down with categories like “Most Rewatchable Scene”, “Casting What Ifs”, “Picking Nits” and others.  They’ve discussed classics like “The Godfather” and “The Shawshank Redemption”, comedies like “Tommy Boy” and “Step Brothers”, also action movies, chick flicks, name them.  For an hour and a half of your time you’ll enjoy them.  Simmons is a little too NBA centric on his analogies for my liking (every sport in moderation), but the crew does a great job of keeping you entertained for an hour or so each episode.

 

Well, it’s now 2:09 PM, April 17, 2020.  I’ve taken two laps around the neighborhood and my shopping is complete, too.  Please, everyone stay safe.  Hang in there.  We will get through this.