I was thrilled to be there when RA won #20. The Mets trade wasn’t really that much about money… I think they were pretty skeptical that he could get close to it again, and decided to sell high (d’Arnaud & Syndergard, pretty good prospect haul).
The charity R.A. climbed for is called Set Beautiful Free. They do outstanding work getting children off the streets of Mumbai, out of the sex trade, and into a school.
Does anyone have a good explanation for how Dickey gets around in life with no UCL? You need that ligament for all sorts of stuff like grabbing steering wheels, doorknobs, handshakes, etc... Does he have to go up Kilamanjaro to discover the secrets of doorknobs and unscrewing lids from jars? Does his other arm have a UCL, and he just uses that for everything?
The R.A. Dickey story is so crazy on so many levels. When the Neyer/James Guide to pitchers came out in 2004, Dickey's original pitching arsenal was listed as:
So, basically, they had no idea what it was. I have read that it was really a hard knuckler, but there was no indication of that at the time, and anyway he did not throw it like a knuckler, he came straight over the top like Mike Mussina and fell off to the side, releasing it like a splitter, albeit not always with the same action on it. It does not seem that it was a knuckler.
In any case, later on, c. 2005, he was listed as having a Knuckelball, then fastball only, though at the time the distinction was academic at best. He had pitched fewer than 30 innings in MLB in 2005 (giving up 22 Earned Runs!) and would make only one appearance in MLB in the next two seasons, allowing 7 ER in 3.1 IP in 2006. He didn't get back to MLB til 2008, at age 33, and didn't have success as a starter til 2010, his age 35 season.
There really never has ever been a career anything even remotely like Dickey's. His career WAR of 23.7 is in itself nothing special, but the fact that he earned almost all of it (96%!) from his age 35 season on is absolutely unprecedented.
There have, amazingly, only been 34 pitchers who amassed at least 20 WAR from age 35 on. Twenty one of those are in the Hall of Fame, and a couple more (Clemens, Schilling, Tommy John) may be someday.
But all of them have one thing that Dickey does not: They were good, or at least useful, before turning 35. Each and every one of them amassed at least 7 WAR and had pitched at least 200 innings more than Dickey had to that point. The group averaged 42 WAR and over 2200 IP up to age 34. Dickey had 0.9 WAR and 442 innings.
On average, they earned about 47% of their career WAR up through their age 34 seasons, and none were close to Dickey's 96%. Charlie Hough was the only other one above 80%, and just barely so. Only two others, Hoyt Wilhelm and Jack Quinn, were even above 70%.
Hough had the lowest WAR through age 34 at 7.4, and even he had pitched nearly 1200 innings in the majors up to that point, mostly in relief, which is why his WAR total is not higher. Ellis Kinder did not even *reach* the majors until age 31 and he had amassed almost 10 WAR and over 700 innings before turning 35. Hoyt Wilhelm and Mariano Rivera, both almost exclusively relief pitchers had both pitched a couple of hundred innings more in the majors than Dickey had to that point.
Pitchers like Phil Niekro, Randy Johnson, Jamie Moyer and Jack Quinn, all famously late-bloomers, had all pitched at least 1300 innings in the majors and been worth a dozen or more WAR up to that age. Even Satchel Paige's page, which shows official records just a small fraction of all the Negro League and barnstorming games he played, shows him pitching almost 900 innings before age 35 and amassing 26 WAR.
There really, really, has never been a career like this before, and it's hard to imagine it ever happening again. It's all but impossible for someone to stick around for more than a decade the way Dickey did and then somehow successfully remake himself in his mid 30's without, well, cheating, frankly.
But one of the best things about baseball is that this is probably the only sport where something like that could happen. Nobody in any other sport I can think of can somehow develop in their 30s a skill they never had in their 20s and not just hang on but thrive at the highest levels of competition. Just astonishing, and maybe worth a vote for the Hall of Perseverance, if not for Cooperstown.
Mike Napoli is the grandson of one of my dad's high school classmates, Orange (NJ) High School. Mike grew up in California, I believe. Thus, my dad was always a huge Napoli fan, right to the last days of his career. He always talked about him and how he knew how proud his grandparents were of him. This didn't ease all pain he delivered on my Yankees, but my dad didn't seem to mind.
My Porterhouse Memory: When living in Cambridge one year, I took two of my kids to the Patriots Day game and vividly remember standing and screaming from the left field box seats with my 4-year-old in my arms while Napoli tagged a double off the left field wall to score Pedroia in the bottom of the ninth and win the game. It was Jackie Robinson Day and the players were all wearing 42. As everyone knows, the Marathon runs on Patriots Day, but the kids were little and I decided not to take them to see the finish line. The T was slow and crowded, and we walked through a surprisingly quiet Harvard Square on our way home, elated at the walk-off victory we just saw. It wasn't until we walked in the door that we learned that a bomb had been detonated on Boylston Street while we were stopped in the tunnels of the Green Line at Copley Square.
Love watching the Knuckle ball dance and Loved watching R.A. throw his a little faster.
Always liked how there were 1 or 2 of these guys around, hope we haven't seen the last considering how velocity and bullpen focused the league has become.
The page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_knuckleball_pitchers only lists Ryan Feierabend (32 games, last MLB game in 2017), Steven Wright (81 games between 2013-2019, 3.41 ERA), and Mickey Jannis (1 game, 2021, 18.90 ERA) since Dickey retired in 2017. Regretfully, it's not a long list and we're currently in a "knuckleball winter" compared to some prior decades.
With the onslaught of position players taking the mound, I kept waiting for someone to go up there throwing knucklers. Caught a clip of Phillips and he definitely gets points for the unorthodox wind up. Willians might have a future as another discovered the knuckler in his 30s pitcher. At least by the numbers anyway.
Sounds like Dickey's agent did a poor job negotiating his contract with the Rangers after the revelation that he lacked a UCL. The agent could have spun a new narrative, "Behold! The miracle pitching prospect who is GUARANTEED to never lose a year to Tommy John surgery. Peace of mind in a troubled age of once promising prospects going under the knife. The price is now $1.2M."
R.A. actually talked about that in his autobiography, and basically had the same idea, that he'd never have to worry about TJ surgery. The interesting thing is it was a picture on the cover of a magazine with some other young USA stud pitchers (I want to say Billy Koch was one of them) that caught the attention of one of the Rangers trainers which made them say, "Hmmm...we should take a closer look at his arm."
The others were Kris Benson, Billy Koch, Seth Greisinger, and Braden Looper.
All of them reached the majors, though Koch was out of baseball at 29, and Greisinger only ever got a few shots and couldn't stay healthy. But he went to Korea and then Japan and somehow became one of the better pitchers in those leagues for half a decade or so.
I thought that too when I first heard about it, too, but of course it's really about mitigating risk, and they had no idea how he would hold up given that there was no precedent for his condition. Sure, he'd never need TJS, but maybe the lack of a UCL would put undue strain on some other ligament in his elbow, or on his shoulder or whatever.
I imagine if Dickey had had the stomach to hold out and play in the independent leagues for a year - with success, of course - he would have then been a free agent and could have negotiated with anyone, or at least gone back into the draft, but he just wanted to play.
If he'd known it would take him a dozen years to become a consistently successful MLB pitcher, he might have done just that, but then of course if the major leagues had known that, they'd have never signed him for much more than he got anyway!
My father didn't like Mike Napoli because he struck out so often with men on base. I think in general he just struck out a lot (187 times in 2013), but it drove my father mad that he would swing from his heels with two strikes and men in scoring position. He did strike out 30% of the time he was up with men in scoring position, but that was lower than the 32% of the time overall.
The "Rangers notice(d) his arm hanging kind of funny" kind of undersells how weird it was. A team doctor noticed his arm hanging funny IN A PHOTO ON THE COVER OF BASEBALL AMERICA.
And Kris Benson. I almost forgot about him and Anna Benson. Just read up on him and he then married Hank Blalock, former teammate's, ex-wife, Misty. But then it also says he is now engaged and or just dating the daughter of Diamond Dallas Page.
Napoli for Vernon Wells has to be one of the worst trades of the decade. I’d forgotten that Wells was on a terrible contract on top of putting up -0.1 WAR for the Angels. Plus, Napoli got flipped from Toronto to Texas, the team LA finished behind in the division. Just yikes all around.
The Angels knew the Rangers wanted Nap when they made that Toronto trade. I remember them being miffed when Tor turned around and immediately flipped him to TX.
Also, as far as nicknames go, we called him Nap Nap Weiner for some reason down here lol. I think Dirtbag was another nickname, though that may have started in Boston. I’ve never heard the Porterhouse nickname.
One of my favorite Ranger memories is leaving a playoff game against TB that Nap had dominated and the crowd chanting Nap-o-li all the way down the ramp from the upper deck. Definitely a fan favorite here. Party at Napoli’s!
I was thrilled to be there when RA won #20. The Mets trade wasn’t really that much about money… I think they were pretty skeptical that he could get close to it again, and decided to sell high (d’Arnaud & Syndergard, pretty good prospect haul).
Also, huge props for the Wes Parker reference….
The charity R.A. climbed for is called Set Beautiful Free. They do outstanding work getting children off the streets of Mumbai, out of the sex trade, and into a school.
Does anyone have a good explanation for how Dickey gets around in life with no UCL? You need that ligament for all sorts of stuff like grabbing steering wheels, doorknobs, handshakes, etc... Does he have to go up Kilamanjaro to discover the secrets of doorknobs and unscrewing lids from jars? Does his other arm have a UCL, and he just uses that for everything?
The R.A. Dickey story is so crazy on so many levels. When the Neyer/James Guide to pitchers came out in 2004, Dickey's original pitching arsenal was listed as:
𝘙.𝘈. 𝘋𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘺 (2001 2005)
𝘗𝘪𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 2003: 1. “𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨” 2. 𝘍𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘣𝘢𝘭𝘭 (𝘭𝘰𝘸-90𝘴)
𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦: 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘣𝘰𝘰𝘬 2004
𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘦: 𝘈𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘤𝘦, “𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨” 𝘪𝘴 “𝘢 𝘩𝘺𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘥 𝘬𝘯𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘦-𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘷𝘦/𝘴𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘢 𝘴𝘭𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳. 𝘈𝘤𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘉𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘚𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘮, 𝘋𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘺'𝘴 "𝘛𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨" 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘬𝘯𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘦-𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘷𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘉𝘶𝘳𝘵 𝘏𝘰𝘰𝘵𝘰𝘯 𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘸.
So, basically, they had no idea what it was. I have read that it was really a hard knuckler, but there was no indication of that at the time, and anyway he did not throw it like a knuckler, he came straight over the top like Mike Mussina and fell off to the side, releasing it like a splitter, albeit not always with the same action on it. It does not seem that it was a knuckler.
In any case, later on, c. 2005, he was listed as having a Knuckelball, then fastball only, though at the time the distinction was academic at best. He had pitched fewer than 30 innings in MLB in 2005 (giving up 22 Earned Runs!) and would make only one appearance in MLB in the next two seasons, allowing 7 ER in 3.1 IP in 2006. He didn't get back to MLB til 2008, at age 33, and didn't have success as a starter til 2010, his age 35 season.
There really never has ever been a career anything even remotely like Dickey's. His career WAR of 23.7 is in itself nothing special, but the fact that he earned almost all of it (96%!) from his age 35 season on is absolutely unprecedented.
There have, amazingly, only been 34 pitchers who amassed at least 20 WAR from age 35 on. Twenty one of those are in the Hall of Fame, and a couple more (Clemens, Schilling, Tommy John) may be someday.
But all of them have one thing that Dickey does not: They were good, or at least useful, before turning 35. Each and every one of them amassed at least 7 WAR and had pitched at least 200 innings more than Dickey had to that point. The group averaged 42 WAR and over 2200 IP up to age 34. Dickey had 0.9 WAR and 442 innings.
On average, they earned about 47% of their career WAR up through their age 34 seasons, and none were close to Dickey's 96%. Charlie Hough was the only other one above 80%, and just barely so. Only two others, Hoyt Wilhelm and Jack Quinn, were even above 70%.
Hough had the lowest WAR through age 34 at 7.4, and even he had pitched nearly 1200 innings in the majors up to that point, mostly in relief, which is why his WAR total is not higher. Ellis Kinder did not even *reach* the majors until age 31 and he had amassed almost 10 WAR and over 700 innings before turning 35. Hoyt Wilhelm and Mariano Rivera, both almost exclusively relief pitchers had both pitched a couple of hundred innings more in the majors than Dickey had to that point.
Pitchers like Phil Niekro, Randy Johnson, Jamie Moyer and Jack Quinn, all famously late-bloomers, had all pitched at least 1300 innings in the majors and been worth a dozen or more WAR up to that age. Even Satchel Paige's page, which shows official records just a small fraction of all the Negro League and barnstorming games he played, shows him pitching almost 900 innings before age 35 and amassing 26 WAR.
There really, really, has never been a career like this before, and it's hard to imagine it ever happening again. It's all but impossible for someone to stick around for more than a decade the way Dickey did and then somehow successfully remake himself in his mid 30's without, well, cheating, frankly.
But one of the best things about baseball is that this is probably the only sport where something like that could happen. Nobody in any other sport I can think of can somehow develop in their 30s a skill they never had in their 20s and not just hang on but thrive at the highest levels of competition. Just astonishing, and maybe worth a vote for the Hall of Perseverance, if not for Cooperstown.
Nice. What he said. Well.
Mike Napoli is the grandson of one of my dad's high school classmates, Orange (NJ) High School. Mike grew up in California, I believe. Thus, my dad was always a huge Napoli fan, right to the last days of his career. He always talked about him and how he knew how proud his grandparents were of him. This didn't ease all pain he delivered on my Yankees, but my dad didn't seem to mind.
My Porterhouse Memory: When living in Cambridge one year, I took two of my kids to the Patriots Day game and vividly remember standing and screaming from the left field box seats with my 4-year-old in my arms while Napoli tagged a double off the left field wall to score Pedroia in the bottom of the ninth and win the game. It was Jackie Robinson Day and the players were all wearing 42. As everyone knows, the Marathon runs on Patriots Day, but the kids were little and I decided not to take them to see the finish line. The T was slow and crowded, and we walked through a surprisingly quiet Harvard Square on our way home, elated at the walk-off victory we just saw. It wasn't until we walked in the door that we learned that a bomb had been detonated on Boylston Street while we were stopped in the tunnels of the Green Line at Copley Square.
https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2013/B04150BOS2013.htm
Is there still a Knuckle Baller in MLB?
Love watching the Knuckle ball dance and Loved watching R.A. throw his a little faster.
Always liked how there were 1 or 2 of these guys around, hope we haven't seen the last considering how velocity and bullpen focused the league has become.
The page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_knuckleball_pitchers only lists Ryan Feierabend (32 games, last MLB game in 2017), Steven Wright (81 games between 2013-2019, 3.41 ERA), and Mickey Jannis (1 game, 2021, 18.90 ERA) since Dickey retired in 2017. Regretfully, it's not a long list and we're currently in a "knuckleball winter" compared to some prior decades.
Must be Climate Change Ed! The air conditions are not right for the knuckler:)
Do Brett Phillips and Willians Astudillo count?
I don't think Phillips actually throws a knuckleball, just a really, really slow lob pitch. Sure is fun to watch though!
With the onslaught of position players taking the mound, I kept waiting for someone to go up there throwing knucklers. Caught a clip of Phillips and he definitely gets points for the unorthodox wind up. Willians might have a future as another discovered the knuckler in his 30s pitcher. At least by the numbers anyway.
Good to know the “R” in R.A. doesn’t want for Richard
Sounds like Dickey's agent did a poor job negotiating his contract with the Rangers after the revelation that he lacked a UCL. The agent could have spun a new narrative, "Behold! The miracle pitching prospect who is GUARANTEED to never lose a year to Tommy John surgery. Peace of mind in a troubled age of once promising prospects going under the knife. The price is now $1.2M."
R.A. actually talked about that in his autobiography, and basically had the same idea, that he'd never have to worry about TJ surgery. The interesting thing is it was a picture on the cover of a magazine with some other young USA stud pitchers (I want to say Billy Koch was one of them) that caught the attention of one of the Rangers trainers which made them say, "Hmmm...we should take a closer look at his arm."
Someone else already linked to the photo here, so I won't do that agian, but this article explains it well:
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/376916-a-missing-ligament-and-the-knuckleball-the-story-of-ra-dickey
The others were Kris Benson, Billy Koch, Seth Greisinger, and Braden Looper.
All of them reached the majors, though Koch was out of baseball at 29, and Greisinger only ever got a few shots and couldn't stay healthy. But he went to Korea and then Japan and somehow became one of the better pitchers in those leagues for half a decade or so.
I thought that too when I first heard about it, too, but of course it's really about mitigating risk, and they had no idea how he would hold up given that there was no precedent for his condition. Sure, he'd never need TJS, but maybe the lack of a UCL would put undue strain on some other ligament in his elbow, or on his shoulder or whatever.
I imagine if Dickey had had the stomach to hold out and play in the independent leagues for a year - with success, of course - he would have then been a free agent and could have negotiated with anyone, or at least gone back into the draft, but he just wanted to play.
If he'd known it would take him a dozen years to become a consistently successful MLB pitcher, he might have done just that, but then of course if the major leagues had known that, they'd have never signed him for much more than he got anyway!
Anyone have any recs for Negro League history books? My friends and I want to read one for book club this summer. Thanks!
Soul of the Game
Color Blind - about the Bismarck team that Satchel Paige pitched for in the summer of 1935 - great read
Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues - oral history like Glory of their Times
Outside Baseball
Invisible Men
I was Right on Time
Satchel
Negro Leaguers and the Hall of Fame
Fences
Oscar Charleston biography was good.
Soul of Baseball with Pos and Buck O'Neil gives you a good sense of it. Not exclusively Negro Leagues, but great to read Buck recall things to Joe.
I second Only the Ball was White
I was recently recommended Satchel Paige: Maybe I'll Pitch Forever, but haven't read it
Satchel by Larry Tye was very good. My review, FWIW:
https://baseballbook.blogspot.com/2010/03/satchel-life-and-times-of-american.html
Also highly recommend the Soul of Baseball. I listened to the audiobook and it was excellent.
Only the Ball Was White.
We Are the Ship
My father didn't like Mike Napoli because he struck out so often with men on base. I think in general he just struck out a lot (187 times in 2013), but it drove my father mad that he would swing from his heels with two strikes and men in scoring position. He did strike out 30% of the time he was up with men in scoring position, but that was lower than the 32% of the time overall.
"Party at Napoli's!" 2016 CLE Post-Victory War Cry.
The "Rangers notice(d) his arm hanging kind of funny" kind of undersells how weird it was. A team doctor noticed his arm hanging funny IN A PHOTO ON THE COVER OF BASEBALL AMERICA.
That's amazing. Just googled it, and yes, it looks so odd next to the other pitchers he's standing with.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0948/8106/products/960801_-_9616_Armed_For_Battle_1024x1024.PNG?v=1567791862
Yep, I have such strong memories of that.
And Kris Benson. I almost forgot about him and Anna Benson. Just read up on him and he then married Hank Blalock, former teammate's, ex-wife, Misty. But then it also says he is now engaged and or just dating the daughter of Diamond Dallas Page.
Can someone please advise me of any other sports newsletters that namecheck R.A. Salvatore? I'd like to subscribe to them all.
Napoli for Vernon Wells has to be one of the worst trades of the decade. I’d forgotten that Wells was on a terrible contract on top of putting up -0.1 WAR for the Angels. Plus, Napoli got flipped from Toronto to Texas, the team LA finished behind in the division. Just yikes all around.
The Angels knew the Rangers wanted Nap when they made that Toronto trade. I remember them being miffed when Tor turned around and immediately flipped him to TX.
Also, as far as nicknames go, we called him Nap Nap Weiner for some reason down here lol. I think Dirtbag was another nickname, though that may have started in Boston. I’ve never heard the Porterhouse nickname.
One of my favorite Ranger memories is leaving a playoff game against TB that Nap had dominated and the crowd chanting Nap-o-li all the way down the ramp from the upper deck. Definitely a fan favorite here. Party at Napoli’s!
Mike Napoli also had one of the all-time great revenge splits - he absolutely destroyed the Angels after they traded him away.
Wow. I had to look that up: a slash line of .317/.425/.623 over 316 PAs for his career against the Angels!