DHL Dan CCXVI - Into Darkness

Shank's most recent column dives into (what else) the bad parts of Ted Williams' life:

Ted Williams was the greatest hitter ever, but there was bad luck and darkness in his family life, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while wondering why MLB doesn’t go back to having players wear their own team jerseys and hats at the All-Star Game . . .

▪ The death of Claudia Williams was announced Wednesday by the Red Sox, with the permission of her husband of 17 years, Eric Abel. Claudia was Ted Williams’s last surviving child.

Boston’s Splendid Splinter was the greatest hitter who ever lived, but there was a lot of bad luck and darkness in his family life.

The slugger’s only sibling, brother Danny, died of leukemia at the age of 39 in 1960. Ted’s eldest daughter, Bobby-Jo, was estranged from her dad in his final years and died of liver disease at the age of 62 in 2010. Ted’s only son, John Henry Williams, died of leukemia at the age of 35 in 2004. And now we learn that Claudia Franc Williams died at the age of 52 in December.

DHL Dan CLXXIV - Something To Cheer About

I remember Ted Williams for, among other things, being more than cantankerous, especially towards members of the press. Thus my surprise at reading this headline:

Ted Williams would be rooting for Luis Arraez to hit .400, and other thoughts

Picked-up pieces while waiting for a Fenway official scorer to give somebody an error …

▪ Ted Williams would be rooting for Miami Marlins star Luis Arraez to hit .400. Ted supported Rod Carew when Carew batted .388 in 1977, boosted George Brett when Brett finished at .390 in 1980, and cheered for Tony Gwynn when San Diego’s hit machine closed at .394 in the strike-shortened season of 1994.

Williams had zero old-guy bitterness toward players of any new generation. He once told me, “That [Paul] Molitor kid in Milwaukee reminds me of Joe DiMaggio. He’ll be in the Hall of Fame someday.”

Teddy Ballgame remains the last big leaguer to hit .400 (.406 in 1941), and he’d be encouraging Arraez in 2023.

Arraez was in Boston this past week and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to speak with a kid with a chance to be baseball’s first .400 hitter in 82 years. The Marlins have played more than half their season and Arraez left Fenway batting .392.

And if you think Shank's still ripping off / 'sampling' from Felger & Mazz, you'd be right:

▪ A reader points out that the Boston Red Sox have become the Minnesota Twins. Middle-market team. Middle-market payroll. Little star power. Forever .500 or worse. Chaim Bloom’s anonymous roster didn’t register a blip in All-Star fan voting.

Going Through The Motions

Shank's fifth column this month revisits some old ground - a column about the Splendid Splinter:

Ted Williams would be turning 100 now, but his legend never gets old

The Kid would be 100 Thursday.

Ted Williams was born on Aug. 30, 1918.

How could The Kid ever turn 100?

We lost Ted Williams in July of 2002, but imagine if he had lived. We’d have headlines screaming, “Kid Turns 100!’’ We’d have quotes from Ted about how sweet it was finally seeing the Red Sox win the World Series in 2004, 2007, and 2013. We’d have him delivering an homage to his dear friend, John McCain. And I’d love to hear what The Kid would have to say about this newfangled “launch angle,’’ which Ted invented sometime back in the 1930s.

You know what else never gets old? Shank writing about Ted Williams!

The Shaughnessy Compilation

I've been away for a week or so (hospital stay) since Shank massively overreacted to the Red Sox' first loss of the season; goes on to laments a 5-1 record as "fool's gold" in the next article five days later; starts to pretend like them a day after that; does a Teddy Ballgame / Red Sox themed Picked Up Pieces column; really, really likes the Red Sox (or so we're led to believe) after a win over the New York Yankees, digs this new offshoot of the game they call basebrawl; then declares the remaining Red Sox-Yankees series as a good omen, presumably for the rest of the season.

In retrospect, it looks better to present Shank's ever shifting opinion of the Red Sox in this manner as it demonstrates the complete overreaction after the first loss. Had the Red Sox went on to tailspin over the past few weeks, he'd pile on and steal more negative themes from Michael Felger & Tony Massarotti. It's the classic path to potentially having it both ways.

Ted or Dead

Straw man: a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not advanced by that opponent.

This fallacy comes into play today with The CHB's positing that Ted Williams was the greatest Red Sox player of all time and that David Ortiz, well, isn't.

"I can’t believe I’m even posing the question. It’s ridiculous. It feels like a sin against the church of Boston baseball."

Well, given that pretty much everything Shank writes is a sin against logic (not to mention an insult to intelligence), that should come as no surprise. But since our job is to debunk the bunk, let's have at it.

We'll start with the basic argument, which is, who cares?

Answer: No one. Because no one is talking about it, save some moronic "television sports debate show" host. (And Shank complains that fanboy bloggers never leave the house. It makes one wonder whose backyard shed said announcer has been living in.)

Addressing the "greatest" question, there's a slew of data that demonstrate that Williams was not only the greatest Red Sox of all time, but he was a top 10 major leaguer of all-time. Ortiz, meanwhile, might barely scratch the Top 10 Red Sox, behind Williams, Cy Young, Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, Yaz, Wade Boggs, Carlton Fisk, Dennis Eckersley, and Joe Cronin, among others, as MLB Hall of Famers who wore the Sox uniform. (That list, of course, does not include Babe Ruth, the greatest of them all.)

Indeed, the Newton Nabob's "logic" has more holes than an encephalopathic brain.

As in, Williams was better than Papi because Beethoven was superior to Prince. (Seriously.)

Even more appalling are the "data" Shank uses to bolster his non-argument. As in, not homers. Not batting average. Not Gold Gloves or any other such measure.

Attendance. (Seriously.)

He cites Richard Johnson (insert your own dick joke here), the Sports Museum in Boston curator (who knew?), who says, "Ted was the reason people went to Fenway from 1939 to 1960."

As if.

The first six years of William's career, the Red Sox averaged between 4,600 and 9,600 fans a game. Granted, that was the run up to the War years. Attendance then peaked in the four-year run after WWII ended, averaging between 18,000 and 20,600 up until 1949. (That run coincided with the Red Sox's best records during the Williams era.) The numbers, while better than the AL average, were still roughly half Fenway's capacity.

As wins became scarcer, so did the crowds. By the time Ted retired, the Fens was down to about 14,000 fans per game, a little over 40% of capacity.

Since Papi joined the Red Sox in 2003, the team has never averaged fewer than 33,000 fans per game or less than 91% of capacity, and Fenway was sold out for entire seasons.

No, fans don't go to see the players. They go to see the team win. And if the team doesn't win, the fans don't go.

Ironically, today The CHB discounts team success when it comes to player rating.

"[I]f championship rings are your only measurement, then Mark Bellhorn (one) is better than Ernie Banks (zero), and Sam Jones (10) is almost twice as good as Michael Jordan (six)."

Again, a sham statement, not to mention hypocritical. After all, who pushes the "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing" argument harder than The CHB? And who pushes the "Bill Russell was the greatest NBA player of all time because he won the most" argument harder than The CHB?

(Oddly enough, Wilt "the Stilt" Chamberlain outscored, outrebounded, and out-assisted Russell in head-to-head matchups, thus underscoring the importance of T.E.A.M.)

Yet that's the sum of this big bowl of stupid soup The CHB musters up. It's almost enough to make poor dead Ted's head spin.

Interview with Yankee Captain Leaves CHB Feeling 'Jeted'

Besides being a future Hall of Famer and best-in-class skirt-chaser, Derek Jeter is apparently smart.

Well, smart enough, anyway, to get the best of The CHB, who tries to goad him into saying he might blow off his career-ending series in Boston. (Although most would agree that it doesn't require much gray matter to outsmart Dan Shaughnessy.)

In a piece that's as much about Ted Williams as the Yankee Captain, Jeter deftly parries Shank's weak attempts to get him to say he might not make the trip: "I don’t know what Ted’s situation was and I didn’t know him well enough to comment on it. Don’t dissect this. It’s not complicated. Don’t complicate things for yourself." As if.

Even better, Jeter gets in a shot of his own, pointing out that The CHB had the chance to ask The Kid whether he planned along to skip his final series (aptly enough, in New York), forcing Shaughnessy to admit that he wussed out. Classic.

Old School Shank

Are you surprised when The CHB takes a thread and pulls it until the entire "I'm Not With Stupid, I AM Stupid" t-shirt unravels?

Not us.

As such, we didn't bat an eye (get it?) when Shank used an otherwise innocuous David Ortiz comment about how David Price should have been suspended for throwing at (and hitting) Red Sox batters after being warned as an opportunity to rehash every insult -- real and imagined -- that Big Papi allegedly has inflicted on the game.

Keep in mind that The CHB, by his own admission, is about the only one bothered by Papi's comments. Shank's anger over Manny Ramirez being feted as part of the 2004 World Series winners must be carrying over.

Ted Williams routinely disrupted his team, played middling defense, defied his managers and ignored baseball etiquette. Carl Yastrzemski attempted to start his own league, publicly ripped his teammates, was fined for not hustling, and used PEDs (greenies).

Here's what Jim Bouton wrote about Yaz in Ball Four:

Yastrzemski was recently fined $500 for loafing and I've been keeping an eye on him. Sure enough, he hit a ball to second base today and loafed all the way to first. I'm afraid Yastrzemski has a bit of dog in him. Always did, and people around baseball knew it all the time. When things are going good Yastrzemski will go all out. When things aren't going so well he'll give a half-ass effort. But he's got so much ability that the only thing you can do is put up with him. 

Sound familiar?

The CHB likes to pretend he's part of the (self-appointed) old school of baseball, guarding the keys to the kingdom and making unilateral determinations as to who is -- and who isn't -- "right" when it comes to playing America's Pastime.

But then again, Papi is Hispanic, and no one in sports today does old school racism like The CHB.

Picking On Shank

Adding to what Roger wrote on yesterday's column:

• "... a Boston bid for the 2024 Olympics [is] the region’s worst plan since Larry Lucchino thought it would be a good idea to hire Bobby Valentine."  

Which The CHB wholeheartedly supported. Not to mention it was The CHB who so happily carried Lucchino's water on multiple occasions with anti-Theo columns.

And it was The CHB who after the end of the 2012 season wrote of the Red Sox owners, "It really bothers them that Theo Epstein isn’t getting enough blame for the train wreck that is the Red Sox of the last 12 months.

• "We can certainly agree that the last group that should be passing judgment on candidates’ 'character' would be baseball writers."   

And that has stopped The CHB when, exactly?

• "Can we slow down the David Ortiz Hall of Fame Train? ... I can’t get it out of my head that he looked like he was all done at the start of 2009 (39 games and 149 at-bats without a homer) and Mike Lowell was pinch hitting for him in 2010."

Ted Williams hit .254 with 10 homeruns in 1959. And he had the immortal Carroll Hardy pinch hit for him. In his followup campaign he hit 29 homeruns and batted .316. It happens. And no one accused him of using greenies -- although he almost certainly did. 

There's lots of reasons to keep Ortiz out, but singling out the worst 39 games of a 2,000 game career is proof that if The CHB wasn't the guy who sold Deadspin his Hall of Fame ballot, he should have been.