Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

Here is a link to a piece that former SI writer Joe Posnanski put out about Edgar:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/joe_posnanski/01/04/hall.ballot/1.html

I quote from that piece, “I’ll just give you one chart: Here is the complete list of non-Hall of Famers who played in 2,000 games and hit .310 or better and had an on-base percentage better than .400.

1. Edgar Martinez.

Yep. That’s it. Every other player who did it — Ruth, Williams, Gehrig, Hornsby, Cobb, Foxx, Musial, Speaker, Heilmann, Collins, Waner, Gehringer, Boggs — they’re all in the Hall of Fame. They’re all slam dunk Hall of Famers. Martinez wasn’t a good hitter, and he wasn’t a great hitter. He was a legendary hitter.

There is not much to say after that.

Being in the Northwest it is easy to fall into a trap of wanting recognition for your teams, players and simply for the State as the most beautiful part of the country. Most livable etc. But that is a trap and it leads to a frustration and victim like anger when the recognition doesn’t come. Let me use Sunday’s game as an example, the Seahawks and Redskin game.

Almost every story coming from that game, from Washington and National reporters and columnists centered around coach Mike Shanahan’s decision to stay with Robert Griffin III after his apparent re-injury during the first quarter. There were a few about Sherman Sherman being slapped after game. There was nothing about Chris Clemmons injury and very little about win or Russell Wilson if anything.

I spoke electronically with legendary sportswriter Dave Kindred about it yesterday. He said it was the better story.

He is the guy, not me, so I have to listen to that wisdom. But it is curious, the two injuries and Adrian Peterson’s from a year ago happened on same miserable field, largely a sandpit that was spray painted for the game. Noted bad boy sportswriter Michael Bradley remarked on Dave Grosby’s show that he wanted to play with his TV antenna to fix the image of the Redskin on the field only to realize that it was the field that was a mess.

More than anything it points out that the Redskins are cheap. Shanahan’s getting flayed alive, but the team ownership is why the kid and Clemmons and Peterson were hurt. Nobody’s writing about that. Lastly they did not write about the terrific game Russell Wilson had. In sum it was very provincial and there is nothing you can do about it, no control, so let it go.

Yesterday in the Seattle Times there was a piece written about Edgar Martinez by a blogger in one of their take2 things. Arne Christensen. Well marshaled in terms of the numbers, typical Northwest restraint, he is not screaming at anyone, no bold caps. As an aside baseball writing in this region has mostly ground to a halt. Geoff Baker wrote a few pieces and is gearing up for the season, Larry Stone is covering the Seahawks and well the Mariners I suspect love being out of the spotlight for a bit. They are doing their caravan thing and were down in the Longview-Kelso-Vancouverish area last night with Dave Sims and crew and some players. Were I to plug into Jack Zduriencik’s head I suspect he is hoping that some of the younger players jump up in spring training and he’s pleased the focus is away so they don’t have to do something when it is not there to do.

In related news, Dave Cameron on Fangraphs.com wrote a piece about how Justin Smoak is an horrific clutch hitter…uses the w/oba tool to measure his ineptitude last year. Bottom twenty in American League included Ichiro, Montero and Ackley.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2013 at 7:45 am by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.