100 Random Thoughts, Vol. 2

Hi Everyone —

Well, you apparently liked it last week, so we’re going to try again to give you 100 random thoughts about, you know, random things throughout the world of baseball, sports, and whatever else comes to mind. I say “try” because we just BARELY made it last week. So if this peters out at 57, hey, just know that I tried my best.

1) Cal Raleigh has more home runs and RBI than Aaron Judge.

2) I’ve been thinking about how the American League MVP voting would go if this was, say, 1977. It seems to me that MVP voting in those days came down to (A) How well the team did, (B) Batting average, (C) RBI, and (D) Did that player win the MVP last year because the voters didn’t like repeat winners, and maybe (E) Catchers getting a slight bit of extra credit for being catchers.

3) With that in mind, you look at Judge v. Raleigh — (A) the Yankees and Mariners have roughly the same record and are both currently in the wildcard race, (B) Judge’s .355 batting average would be a huge factor, Raleigh is hitting just .259. (C) Raleigh’s lead in homers and RBI would certainly be taken into account. (D) Judge DID win the MVP last year and also two years before that, and (E) I think Raleigh would get some credit for being a catcher, especially because he won the Gold Glove last year but I don’t know if the voters would have given him the full “Thurman Munson Leader” bonus.

4) And in the end? Whew, it’s SUCH a tough call. On the one hand, Judge’s batting average seems to me the decisive factor. The voters rarely gave the MVP to a batter who hit less than .300 (or thereabouts) and NEVER gave the MVP to someone hitting .259. On the other hand, they did give the MVP to Johnny Bench in 1972 when he hit a mere .270, and I really think the voters would have gone to extremes not to give yet another MVP award to Judge.

5) In the end, I’m going to guess: Assuming that Raleigh is leading the league in homers and RBI at the end of the year AND the Mariners make the postseason, the 1977 voters would have given him the MVP award.

6) By the way, I tried to use lower-case letters like (a) and (b) when doing that parenthetical list device, but whenever I put a lower-case c in parentheses, it kept coming up ©.

7) So if you use a Mac and want to use the copyright symbol, yeah, just put parentheses around a lower-case c, like so: © © © © ©.

8) Great, just now when I tried to do No. 8, it automatically gave me this: 😎. Stop correcting me Mac!

9) Oh, this seems a good time to mention that my latest collection of JoeBlogs stories, The Last At-Bat — which includes twenty baseball remembrances — is available in the JoeBlogs Reader store.

10) The collection includes: Henry Aaron; Dick Allen; Roger Angell; José Fernández; Mark Fidrych; Roy Halladay; Ernie Harwell; Rickey Henderson; Roger Kahn; Don Larsen; Willie Mays; Joe Morgan; Robin Roberts; Brooks Robinson; Herb Score; Tom Seaver; Bob Uecker; and Fernando Valenzuela. There are also two essays about Vin Scully.

11) Quite a few people have talked about how, during the All-Star Game on-field celebration of Henry Aaron’s 715th home run, they cut off Vin Scully’s call before he said his famous and legendary lines: “A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. What a marvelous moment for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world.”

12) Henry Aaron would not have been surprised. He very specifically and pointedly talked to me about people trying to turn his home run achievement into something it was not, something less painful and groundbreaking than he believed it to be. They would not talk about the death threats, the hate-filled letters, the way he had to hire a bodyguard when his kids went to school. When he passed away, I led off my remembrance with this: “There are no words strong enough to describe just how much Henry “Hank” Aaron hated chasing Babe Ruth’s home run record.” I got plenty of incensed emails asking why I would bring up the racism he endured right after he died, why I couldn’t just celebrate the man without dredging up all those old, bad memories. Most of those complaints were, I thought, in bad faith, but a couple felt like genuine questions, and so this is what I wrote back: