Friday, April 22, 2022

60 YEARS AGO/12: LET'S PUT LOSING (AND OTHER THINGS) INTO PERSPECTIVE

One of the few things that 2022 has in common with 1962 (aside from the near-miraculous fact that the Earth is still somehow orbiting the Sun...) is that we're about halfway through baseball's version of April, reminding us that spring training actually used to extend into the spring without the "help" of Rob Manfred. So we'll use today's entry to put various matters into perspective, with the addition of some visual aids that will help you follow along at home more easily.

The first such aid is a monthly summary of the Giants and Dodgers game logs (figure at right). About halfway through each month, we'll post this (Giants in orange, Dodgers in blue) and we'll revisit it when we get to the end of the month. 

We've incorporated off days (as you'll see, the only day when both teams were off occurred on April 20) and we've bolded the games that the two teams play against each other. 

We've also drawn boxes around the days when the two teams both lost games (or, at least up through the April 22nd game: we might preview a version of this with those incidences noted without the actual game scores included, just because we incline toward the perverse).

So the box around 4/22 tips you off right away that this was a "double loss" day for the two teams that would meet in a playoff for the NL pennant--and, in fact, are the last two teams to meet in a regular season playoff in which a trip to the World Series was on the line.

We'll briefly summarize these games, since nobody loves a loser (unless there's an ensemble of them all starring in a latter-day TV series, that is). In Milwaukee, the Dodgers scored three in the first (a two-run HR from Tommy Davis, his fourth) but Don Drysdale had control problems and the Braves capitalized on an error by Maury Wills to score three unearned runs in the third to take the lead. Bob Shaw allowed only three hits over his last eight innings of work, and Pete Richert was even wilder than Drysdale (the Dodgers issued 10 walks in this game...), allowing the Braves to add two insurance runs in the seventh. Final score: Braves 6, Dodgers 3.

In Cincinnati, Jack Sanford gave up two homers in the fourth (Vada Pinson, Johnny Edwards) as the Reds built a 5-0 lead. The Giants rallied (two-run homer from Tom Haller, an RBI double from Orlando Cepeda) but couldn't close the gap. 

The most singular moment in the game occurred in the ninth inning when the Giants, down by two but with two on and the go-ahead run at the plate, sent Willie McCovey up to pinch-hit. Reds manager Fred Hutchinson countered by bringing in left-hander Bill Henry. At which point Al Dark pulled McCovey and sent pitcher Don Larsen to the plate instead. Further research will be needed to confirm it, but one suspects that this is the first and only time McCovey was ever pinch-hit for by a pitcher. Larsen, who'd begun his pinch-hitting career by going 1-for-25 but who'd gone 5-for-12 in that role while with the Kansas City A's in '61, hit a long fly to center, but it was tracked down by Pinson. Final score: Reds 6, Giants 4.

So how many times will two teams whose combined seasonal record was 205-125 lose on the same day? You could calculate the odds, of course, but we're hoping that you'll enjoy finding out gradually.

Now let's take a broader look at 1962 and the information available to the baseball fan in the daily media at that time. To set up the contrast, here's a list (at left) of the top hitters in MLB as of 4/22/1962 (this includes hitters in the AL: the NL hitters are shown in red) using OPS as the measure of quality. 

There's a lot of data packed into such a listing; in '62, you'd be lucky to see OBP or SLG in a daily listing--once in awhile, they would be added to a list of leaders that appeared below the top ten hitters sorted by BA, usually underneath leaders in doubles, triples (HA!), and homers. 

For our updated version of this 1962 list, we've shaded the rows for the Giants and Dodgers who appear here in yellow. So you get a sense of how well Felipe Alou and Tommy Davis are doing compared to the other hot hitters during the early days of the season. (This data, by the way, was culled from the Day-by-Day Database devised by David Pinto at Baseball Musings.)

Now let's look at a re-creation of what you would have seen for the "top hitters" listings as they appeared in daily newspapers smack dab in the middle of the all-too-brief "New Frontier" era. This is exactly the level of detail that used to appear, apparently compiled by some grease monkey at the Associated Press and sent out on the newswire for use in filling up space on the baseball pages of sports sections. 

Whereas we combined our list to cover hitters in both leagues, these "top hitters" listings were divided (like all Gaul) into two--one listing for each league. They were, as you can see, strictly limited to batting average.

1962 proved to be the "boom year" for three of the players on the AL list (above left): Floyd Robinson hit .312, led the AL in doubles (45) and drove in 109 in his second full year for the White Sox; Rich Rollins drove in 96 runs and hit .298 in his first full year with the Twins (before shredding the "age-27 paradigm" a few years later when he seems to have just forgotten how to hit); and Jerry Lumpe, a sentimental fave of our pal Jeff Angus, hit .301 and achieved career highs in doubles, triples (HA!), homers, RBI, runs scored, and swizzle sticks collected from all the bar-and-grills littered and lit-out-to on the AL circuit.

The NL list has some familiar names on it: Curt Flood's hot start finally cemented him in the Cardinals' lineup as their everyday center fielder. But what you also see are some Pirate hitters who'd had a chance to feast on the mediocre pitching they'd faces as the Bucs won their first ten games of the 1962 season. 1960 MVP Dick Groat would cool off, finishing with an OPS+ of 84 for the year; even Roberto Clemente, who'd had his first great season in '61 (.351 BA, 150 OPS+) would backslide despite the advantages of the expansion year in the NL. 

Tommy Davis might not have appeared on the leader list, which often only contained a Top Ten by batting average (he's twelfth here), but he would certainly begin to do so with an insistent frequency as the season progressed. 

In the AL after the games of 4/22, only 3 1/2 games separated the league leader from the cellar dweller; in the NL, however, the Pirates were 9 1/2 games ahead of those soon-to-be-lovable doormats who were impersonating a baseball team in the Polo Grounds, while all the while an old man raved with devilishly smirky intent...