Love Love Love the Buck O’Neil find and that you felt like you were having a conversation with Buck. Can’t wait to see him inducted into the HOF in July! We’ll be there to celebrate!
Hey Joe, will you still be in Cooperstown this weekend? We'll be there for the Avett Brothers show and also plan to go to the HOF game on Saturday afternoon. If I can actually meet you, I would plotz. (And we may have an extra ticket to see the Avett Brothers if you want to tag along!)
The cynic in me wants to say that we should take these all with a grain of salt, if not the whole shaker. After all, they're not so much scouting reports as they are O'Neill's reminiscences from 50+ years before, in some cases, just musings about guys he never saw.
The cynic says that the only reason any of those guys is in the Hall is because of Buck O'Neill's lobbying for them. (The non-cynic agrees, but notes that this is a GOOD thing!)
I mean, take Smokey Joe Williams. His record on Baseball Reference is underwhelming to say the least: 16-19 in about 50 games over four seasons. Leon Day's record shows that he pitched 100+ innings in a season just twice, and only once won more than 8 contests in a year. Andy Cooper struck out 4 batters per nine innings in his career. Louis Santop's major league career, such as it was spanned just 4 seasons and was worth 2.5 WAR. None of it sounds like much.
But then the cynic in me is kind of a jerk sometimes. In my day job, I get paid to pick apart other people's plans and designs, and I allow that cynicism to leak over into my attention to baseball.
It's OK to have a healthy skepticism of what the numbers tell us. I'm sure, for example, that Turkey Stearnes or Willard Brown would not have hit .350 for their careers against an integrated major league if one had been available to them, if only because nobody else ever has. But that should not mean completely discounting their accomplishments either, or O'Neill's insistence in lobbying for them to be inducted into Cooperstown.
Louis Santop's "Major league" career was in the Eastern Colored League from 1923-26, when he was already 34 years old. He'd been in organized baseball since at least age 21, but nobody was paying too much attention, not enough to really keep track of his exploits. Ditto for Joe Williams, whose "major league" career did not start til he was already 37, and even then he had the best K/W ratio three years running. In reality he pitched from age 23 to 46, in semi-organized Black baseball if not in what we now consider Major leagues. He struck out over 1200 batters and won 137 games, and those are just the ones we know about. He must have pitched more than 7 times for the NY Lincoln Giants in 1915, when he was 29, but that's all we have records for right now, and maybe ever.
So we have to infer a lot about what he and others like him might have done, and yes we have to take O'Neill's word for a lot of it and throw the salt away, because these guys deserve better than to be forgotten just because nobody wrote down what they did often enough.
Thanks for sharing this, Joe. 8 for Sentimentality and an 8 for Fun, which is what baseball is supposed to be for anyway.
Joe, that must have been a chilling instant of extreme happiness when you realized you had Buck O'Neil's handwritten scouting reports. What a moment! Very glad for you, his friend, and us, your readers.
I recently finished reading Joe's book on Buck O'Neil, "The Soul of Baseball." It's a great book. I recommend it unequivocally.
Love Love Love the Buck O’Neil find and that you felt like you were having a conversation with Buck. Can’t wait to see him inducted into the HOF in July! We’ll be there to celebrate!
Notice how there was no BS with Buck. Louis Santop: “didn’t see him play.”
My dad was never a baseball fan as far as I could remember. I am the baseball fan.
Hey Joe, will you still be in Cooperstown this weekend? We'll be there for the Avett Brothers show and also plan to go to the HOF game on Saturday afternoon. If I can actually meet you, I would plotz. (And we may have an extra ticket to see the Avett Brothers if you want to tag along!)
The cynic in me wants to say that we should take these all with a grain of salt, if not the whole shaker. After all, they're not so much scouting reports as they are O'Neill's reminiscences from 50+ years before, in some cases, just musings about guys he never saw.
The cynic says that the only reason any of those guys is in the Hall is because of Buck O'Neill's lobbying for them. (The non-cynic agrees, but notes that this is a GOOD thing!)
I mean, take Smokey Joe Williams. His record on Baseball Reference is underwhelming to say the least: 16-19 in about 50 games over four seasons. Leon Day's record shows that he pitched 100+ innings in a season just twice, and only once won more than 8 contests in a year. Andy Cooper struck out 4 batters per nine innings in his career. Louis Santop's major league career, such as it was spanned just 4 seasons and was worth 2.5 WAR. None of it sounds like much.
But then the cynic in me is kind of a jerk sometimes. In my day job, I get paid to pick apart other people's plans and designs, and I allow that cynicism to leak over into my attention to baseball.
It's OK to have a healthy skepticism of what the numbers tell us. I'm sure, for example, that Turkey Stearnes or Willard Brown would not have hit .350 for their careers against an integrated major league if one had been available to them, if only because nobody else ever has. But that should not mean completely discounting their accomplishments either, or O'Neill's insistence in lobbying for them to be inducted into Cooperstown.
Louis Santop's "Major league" career was in the Eastern Colored League from 1923-26, when he was already 34 years old. He'd been in organized baseball since at least age 21, but nobody was paying too much attention, not enough to really keep track of his exploits. Ditto for Joe Williams, whose "major league" career did not start til he was already 37, and even then he had the best K/W ratio three years running. In reality he pitched from age 23 to 46, in semi-organized Black baseball if not in what we now consider Major leagues. He struck out over 1200 batters and won 137 games, and those are just the ones we know about. He must have pitched more than 7 times for the NY Lincoln Giants in 1915, when he was 29, but that's all we have records for right now, and maybe ever.
So we have to infer a lot about what he and others like him might have done, and yes we have to take O'Neill's word for a lot of it and throw the salt away, because these guys deserve better than to be forgotten just because nobody wrote down what they did often enough.
Thanks for sharing this, Joe. 8 for Sentimentality and an 8 for Fun, which is what baseball is supposed to be for anyway.
So you didn't ruin the Baseball 100 book by giving us all the essays ahead of time. Give us all you got!!
Cmon Joe has 2 daughters to put through college
Yep, just saying his giving us all the 100 essays ahead of time didn't seem to hurt the sales of that book....
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What an awesome find. If you need a break from your research, take the lake cruise for an interesting perspective on the town and the Otesaga. https://www.cooperstownlakefronthotel.com/boat-tours
Joe, that must have been a chilling instant of extreme happiness when you realized you had Buck O'Neil's handwritten scouting reports. What a moment! Very glad for you, his friend, and us, your readers.
This landed in my inbox while Paul Simon's "Cool Papa Bell" was playing.