“Moyer wriggled in and out of trouble through three innings”

“It was a familiar story for Moyer. He lived on the edge for the first three innings, barely hung on in the fourth, then went over the cliff in the fifth”

- Our next Chapter Meeting will be May 19th!

The meeting will start at 11am at the Blake Street Tavern, and Jonah Keri will be our guest speaker.

We’ll then attend our May Game of the Month that afternoon, a 2:05pm first pitch for the Rockies against Felix Hernandez and the Seattle Mariners.  You can reserve your tickets by snail mail or e-mail to parkerp@coloradorockies.com. Tickets are $20. Payment can be made by cash or check and sent to

Rocky Mountain SABR
5803 Orchard Creek Ln
Boulder, CO 80301

The board will also meet prior to the chapter meeting.

- Don’t forget our Monthly Lunch on the 3rd Wednesday of each month. That means we’ll have lunch on the May 16th. As usual, we meet at noon in the Landing Room of the Wynkoop in LoDo Denver.

- A reminder that we want to hear from you about this website! Please take a few minutes to fill out the following survey if you have not already done so: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RFKJH9G

A few announcements as we start the 2012 baseball season:

- Our first Game of the Month is April 28th, when the New York Mets visit Coors Field to take on the Colorado Rockies. First pitch is at 6:10pm. Tickets are $20. Payment can be made by cash or check and sent to
Rocky Mountain SABR
5803 Orchard Creek Ln
Boulder, CO 80301

- Don’t forget our Monthly Lunch on the 3rd Wednesday of each month. For April, that means we’ll have lunch on the April 18th. As usual, we meet at noon in the Landing Room of the Wynkoop in LoDo Denver.

- We want to hear from you about our website! Please take a few minutes to fill out the following survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RFKJH9G

Last, but not least…

- Our next Chapter Meeting will be May 19th. The meeting will start at 11am at the Blake Street Tavern, and Jonah Keri as our guest speaker! We’ll then attend our May Game of the Month that afternoon, a 2:05pm first pitch for the Rockies against Felix Hernandez and the Seattle Mariners. Information for ordering game tickets is included above with the announcement for April GOTM. The board will also meet prior to the chapter meeting.

for those of you coming down for Spring Training…I am working the SABR table at Salt River Fields on 3/3, 3/11, 3/25 and 4/1

I will be attending Salt River games ono 3/5, 3/14 (7pm game), 3/19, 3/21, 3/22 (I have different seats….but let me know where you are or when you are coming and I’ll give you contact info at the game

I’m at Hohokam for games on 3/4, 3/12, 3/14, 3/31, 3/20, 3/24 (I’m in section 203, row AA seat 5 for all Hohokam games

I am also volunteering at the Analytic Conference and will be there all weekend

so look me up if you are around…..It’s BASEBALL and WHY I’m in Arizona in the winter

Annie Chaloupka
hawk2hof@gmail.com
480-218-4690

Leon Culberson

Seventh game of the 1946 World Series; bottom of the eighth inning, two outs, scored tied 3-3. Cardinals baserunner Enos Slaughter scores from first with what proved to be the winning run when Harry the Hat Walker drops one between Ted Williams in left and Leon Culberson in center . Slaughter was off with the pitch and scores when shortstop Johnny Pesky momentarily holds the ball after taking the relay throw from Culberson. Pesky becomes the series goat. But was he? Dom Dimaggio says no – and David Halberstam backs him up in his book “Teammates.”

DiMaggio says it was Culberson’s fault. Culberson, who appeared in only 59 games for the Red Sox in 1946, came into the game when DiMaggio pulled a hamstring. With two outs and a runner (Slaughter) on first with left-handed hitting Harry Walker at bat, Culberson was playing him like a dead centerfield hitter. DiMaggio, from the dugout, tries to motion Culberson over toward left-center, because he knows a lot of Walker’s hits go that way.

According to Halberstam, “Culberson moved a few feet, but in Dominic’s opinion, not nearly enough. So he kept waving for him to move farther left.” The field “was in the worst shape that any of the Boston players had ever seen,” says Halberstam. Culberson was playing conservatively, not aggressively as Dom DiMaggio would have done.

Pause for a moment and remember that “Teammates” is a book about the friendship between DiMaggio, Williams, Pesky, and Bobby Doerr. It’s not about Leon Culberson. At the time of Halberstam’s writing (2002), DiMaggio, Pesky, and Doerr were still around. Culberson died in 1989. He wasn’t around to defend himself. For all those years, Pesky had quietly taken the blame, never trying to defend himself on the play – or put the blame on Culberson. DiMaggio took the opportunity of Halberstam’s book to shift the focus from his buddy Pesky to Culberson.

Let’s look at some of  Halberstam’s statements:

“Dom DiMaggio . . . was, along with his brother Joe, one of the two best defensive centerfielders in the American League. Culberson, by contrast, was a journeyman . . . he was no Dominic DiMaggio in the field.”

“DiMaggio . . . had done his own prolonged reconnaissance of the field itself [and] became as comfortable as any visiting outfielder was going to be with that dreadful, torn-up grass.”

“ ‘Leon’s been dead for a few years now [actually thirteen], so maybe it’s time to talk,’ Dom DiMaggio said in discussing it with me.” – (meaning it’s safe because Leon’s not around to defend himself?)

“Culberson was a little slow to retrieve the ball and when he did, he seemed oblivious to what was happening back in the infield. Probably his throw should have gone toward home, with a cutoff man taking it . . .” (Remember that Pesky had run to the edge of the outfield grass, positioning himself to be the cutoff man, and he was the closest man to Culberson)

“The throw to Pesky was soft – a lob, really . . . He was blind to the play, unable to hear Doerr or anyone else trying to alert him.” (Halberstam earlier said that “the crowd noise was fearsome. The Cardinal fans . . . were cheering wildly.” – A valid point made in terms of on-the-field communication.

“Slaughter, years after this happened, told the writer Tom Wicker that he saw Pesky catch the ball and turn momentarily toward second base; that account now seems unlikely to both Wicker and me as we reconstruct the play . . .” (Is this honest observation, or is Halberstam just supporting one of the principals of his book)

“Culberson’s throw to Pesky had been a bad one . . .”

“Because Culberson was playing Walker wrong, the ball got into the gap. Because the outfield was rough and bumpy, and Leon was unaccustomed to it and not very confident, Dominic believed, he had played the ball conservatively.” (Sounds like they’re good a real number on ol’ Leon)

So, who’s the goat, Culberson or Pesky? I posed the question at the recent monthly RMSABR luncheon. The group included one former major leaguer. The consensus seemed to be that if Culberson hit the cutoff man, then he did his job; that the crowd noise should not have been a factor – Pesky should have been able to hear Doerr or anyone else alerting him to Slaughter’s sprint for home; and that it wasn’t Dom DiMaggio’s job to position players on the field, it was the manager’s.

I question Halberstam’s objectivity. If he had been writing a book about Leon Culberson, would he have defended the centerfielder and upheld the traditional view of Pesky as the series goat for holding the ball?

If there were no hesitation on Pesky’s part, if it had been one fluid motion, would it have made any difference? Would Slaughter have beaten the throw if it had been right on the money and not a few feet up the line?

This is the world of speculation, and in real life Slaughter scored the go-ahead run – not a series-ending run – and the score stood Cardinals 4, Red Sox 3 going into the top of the ninth inning. Boston put two men on base and failed to score. They didn’t rise to the occasion.

Judge for yourself. I’ve included below a link to a Youtube clip of the play. It’s not very clear. Does anyone have a better one? I have the same clip on a DVD and I’ve watched it several times at various speeds. It appears to me that Pesky does hesitate on the play.

Do you agree or disagree? Tell me what you think.

 Posted by Jim Powers

David Halberstam’s book “The Teammates” purports to be about the friendship between four Boston Red Sox players — Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr and Johnny Pesky. But is it that, or is it just another Ted Williams book? The first thing you learn in the book is that Dimaggio and Pesky are making a road trip to Florida to see ol’Ted one last time before he dies. Emphasis on ol’Ted.

Throughout the first part of the book, the reader gets a thorough grounding on how the world revolves around Ted, how Dom, Bobby, and Johnny were “his” friends. It seems the world revolves around Ted Williams, the greatest hitter ever. If you don’t believe that, just ask him.

What does Ted Williams have to say for himself. Here are a couple of quotes I found attributed to him on the Baseball Almanac website:

“If ever there was a man born to be a hitter, it was me. (Modest, isn’t he?)

“I’ve found that you don’t need to wear a necktie if you can hit.” (Would that be Ted saying that some people, like Ted Williams, are not required to follow the rules and social conventions of polite society?)

And what did others have to say about Ted — just a few samples:

“If he would just tip his hat once, he could be elected mayor of Boston in five minutes.” — Eddie Collins

“The papers said that the other players, even some of the umpires, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he refused. Gods do not answer mail.” — John Updike from “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” The New Yorker 10/22/1960

Ted Williams always faced the world (and usually glared) on his own terms, always. There was Ted’s way, or the highway. Should the baseball world have put up with this? Should his best friends, Dom, Bobby and Johnny have put up with it, alibiing to the world about what a nice guy he really was? Would we as fans put up with it without the .344 batting average, 1,798 runs scored, 521 home runs, 2,019 walks and the .634 slugging average? Are those numbers enough for us to cut ol’Ted some slack — OK, let’s face it, a lot of slack.

To be honest, Halberstam does make mention of the other Ted — the one who would help out a down-and-out former teammate, who called Dom Dimaggio regularly when brother Joe was dying to ask about him.

Which is the real Ted, the one we should remember. Or do we forget about Ted the man an concentrate only on the .344 batting average, etc.

You tell me.

Posted by Jim Powers

Reacher shrugged. “Couple of guys worked out an overall all-time top ten and only two players had the letter ‘u’ in their names.”

“Babe Ruth,” Poulton said. “Who’s the other one?”

“Honus Wagner,” Reacher said.

Poulton looked blank. “Never heard of him.”

– from “Running Blind” by Lee Child

Posted by Jim Powers