The Pastime

With a full lineup of events today, I’ve been having to make some tough decisions. Do I tour Busch Stadium, or see a presentation on five-game series sweeps based on retrosheet data? What’s more interesting, the history of controversial records, or how Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis failed to integrate baseball as its first commissioner? Tough choices.

I did just sit in on the St. Louis Cardinals guest speaker panel, featuring Al Hrabosky (the Mad Hungarian, sans Fu Manchu), Ricky Horton, Ted Savage and George Altman. The room was quite full, and this is the best picture I could get of them. Sorry.

They shared stories of how hard it was to play under the notoriously brusque manager Leo Durocher, their take on pitcher injuries today, and what it was like to be a black man in spring training in 1961. Ted Savage told an amusing yet sad tale of his first spring training, after he was signed by the Phillies. He walked into the team hotel in downtown Clearwater, Fla. only to be called a n—– and be booted out of the lobby. His manager drove him down to the place where the other black ballplayers were staying — which turned out to be a mortuary. No kidding.

They were all really entertaining, and played off of each other like old friends telling stories of the good old days… Although, they each had a different idea of when the “good old days” were. Horton and Altman both wished they would have played a bit later, while Hrabosky seemed to have a great disdain for how the game is played today. He harped on the idea that when he played, it was a sport, and now it’s “slash entertainment”. Horton and Hrabosky both agreed that they’d like to see the inside pitch return to baseball strategy. Horton spoke of wanting to hit Brandon Phillips with a pitch from the broadcast booth after a recent display of gloating after hitting a home run; an idea that Hrabosky got behind with enthusiasm. Speaking of the Mad Hungarian, he’s got quite a personality in person. It could best be described as prickly yet friendly.

George Altman let us in on the secret to an interesting achievement. Altman holds the honor of being the only left-hander to ever hit two home runs off of Sandy Koufax in a single game. He accomplished the feat on August 4th, 1961. Altman claims that Koufax’s control was so good, it was more that Koufax hit Altman’s bat on the swings than Altman managed to connect for the homers. Considering he has a lifetime .190 batting average against Koufax, I’m inclined to believe him. It at least makes for a good story.

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I’m now off to see a bunch of poster presentations. I’ll be back with at least one more post today, and some pictures of the best posters and anything else I find interesting…

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 26th, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under General Baseball, SABR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.