Just one more story about draft picks, scouts and players who don’t necessarily pan out.
The 2005 MLB Draft. Second Round. No. 70 overall choice.
The St. Louis Cardinals take Josh Wilson. The right-handed pitcher out of Whitehouse High School in Whitehouse, Texas, just south of Tyler and between Dallas and Shreveport, had this write up on MLB.com:
On the Wikipedia.com post about what happened in that draft, it notes eight of the first 12 picks became MLB All Stars — No. 1 Justin Upton, and including Alex Gordon, Ryan Zimmerman, Ryan Braun, Ricky Romero, Troy Tulowitzki, Andrew McCutchen and Jay Bruce. There’s even two NL MVPs in that list. The first round also included Jacoby Ellsbury, Clay Buchholz and Jed Lowrie.
Among the “other notable players,” there was Tim Lincecum, a 42nd round pick by Cleveland (No. 1,261 overall) and Buster Posey, a 50th round pick by the Angels (No. 1,496 overall). Neither signed, obviously, as they became All-Star teammates with the San Francisco Giants not long after. Those who signed and advanced: Chase Headley, Micah Owings, Brett Gardner, Jeremy Hellickson, Lance Lynn, Will Venable, Peter Bourjos, Matt Joyce, Sergio Romo and Jaime Garcia.
Josh Wilson isn’t mentioned in any more of the “notable players” from that draft.
The majority of Wilson’s career as a pro lasted from 2005 to 2009 in Rookie, high-A or low-A ball, with the Johnson City Cardinals, the Batavia Muckdogs and the Quad Cities Bandits, between the ages of 18 to 22.
He had shoulder issues, maturity issues, and cash-flow issues.
Heavy sigh. The news shouldn’t have been a surprise at this point in baseball’s wobbly course of history.
More than 17 plaintiffs seek about $100 million. More scouts will likely join this class action suit. Especially those who believe they were wrongfully released from various MLB teams because of their age – not to mention perceived usefulness.
Analytics and technology have been gaining momentum as important amateur player assessment tools. The eyes don’t always have it any more from the physical scouts who do all the legwork, travel, take notes, cross check and then make their case. Budgets are tightened (even if more data shows teams are back to basically printing money) and the size of the draft has also reduced – it used to go as long as teams kept wanting to pick players.
As columnist Jim Alexander of the Southern California News Group recently asked about this situation: So what happens when you give your life to something and then find out it has no more use for you?
Coming from a newspaperman, that carries plenty of weight. And baggage. In a sense, scouts seem to be seen as essential to MLB teams as box scores are to newspapers. They take up too much space. There are other ways to get information. They have a use, but just not here.
The timing of these two books can help us better understand the history scouts have created for a game that seems to be trying to push the pendulum too far the wrong way … to correct an error? Or exacerbate flawed logic?
Stanford’s senior starting pitcher had been pushing the limits of baseball’s accepted norms — and perhaps some common sense – as his team advanced in the recent College World Series. It all had to do with those who were counting his pitches while his teammates were counting on him to carry them on his back.
During the regular season, the 6-foot-5 lefthander threw at least 100 pitches in 15 of his 16 starts. As the Cardinal faced an elimination game against Texas in the CWS super regional, Mathews was allowed to throw 156 pitches in an 8-3, complete-game victory, which included 16 strikeouts.
That added up him throwing more than 300 pitches during three appearances over a 10-day span.
“Before people pass judgment, they don’t know what we know,” answered Stanford coach David Esquer. “We took into account that he wasn’t cranking off a majority of sliders and fastballs. He was probably throwing a majority of changeups, and we thought that lowered the stress of the pitch count.”
It led to similar handwringing when Johns Hopkins University fifth-year senior pitcher Gabriel Romano threw 164 pitches during a complete-game win during an NCAA Division III tournament game last month. Author Keith Law was compelled to post this on Twitter, followed by Romano’s response:
Last game of my baseball career. As a 5th year grad student looking to send my team to a winner take all game I don’t think there is anything wrong with this. At the end of the day it was my call and can confirm my arm is doing just fine. https://t.co/vbPBlhOJna
An NCAA rule in place today states that if a pitcher goes more than 110 pitches in a game, he can’t return to the mound for three days afterward. The rules were all upheld here.
To complete the story on Mathews: The former Aliso Viejo High standout waited eight days after his regional win over Texas to go up against Tennessee in the College World Series. He lasted just 4 2/3 innings as No. 8 Stanford was eliminated by the Vols on June 19. Matthews threw 89 pitches and held Tennessee scoreless until they batted around on him in the fifth inning.
“Quinn’s bailed us out all year,” said Stanford reliever Drew Dowd of the Pac-12 pitcher of the year.
Mathews, a 2022 19th round draft pick by Tampa Bay before he decided to play one more year at Stanford, was scooped up by St. Louis in the fourth round of this 2023 draft, No. 122 overall.
The Washington Post’s Jesse Dougherty wrote a followup about the “layered debate” caused by pitch counts with college hurlers and it quoted Jimmy Buffi, who the Dodgers hired in 2015 because of his expertise in bio mechanical engineering and effects of arm injuries.
“When you sit behind a computer to write a paper about injury risk, injury risk is your number one priority,” said Buffi, who left the Dodgers in 2019 to start Reboot Motion, a sports science company that consults for teams around Major League Baseball. “But when I joined the Dodgers, it was like, ‘Oh, crap; winning is the number one priority.’ And I think about that often: There’s always a risk-reward trade-off when the ultimate goal is winning.”
Joe Posnanski also wrote last April about pitch counts: “I’ve started to fall in line more with people who think we focus too much on the number of pitches thrown and not enough on the velocity and effort of pitches thrown. You hear old-timers talk about it all the time, but how many times in a game did Tom Seaver or Bert Blyleven or Fergie Jenkins or Jim Palmer or Jack Morris or Steve Carlton or Greg Maddux or dozens of other big-inning pitchers really air it out?* How many times did they throw a baseball absolutely as hard as they could? Ten times a game? Once or twice a game? Never?”
The blurb read: “When ‘Only the Ball Was White’ was first published in 1970, Satchel Paige had not yet been inducted into the Hall of Fame and there was a general ignorance even among sports enthusiasts of the rich tradition of the Negro Leagues. Few knew that during the 1930s and ’40s outstanding black teams were playing regularly in Yankee Stadium and Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field. And names like Cool Papa Bell, Rube Foster, Judy Johnson, Biz Mackey, and Buck Leonard would bring no flash of smiling recognition to the fan’s face, even though many of these men could easily have played alongside Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Hack Wilson, Lou Gehrig — and shattered their records in the process.
“Many baseball pundits now believe, for example, that had Josh Gibson played in the major leagues, he would have surpassed Babe Ruth’s 714 home runs before Hank Aaron had even hit his first. And the great Dizzy Dean acknowledged that the best pitcher he had ever seen was not Lefty Grove or Carl Hubbell, but rather ‘old Satchel Paige, that big lanky colored boy’.”
Between the time of the Civil War’s ending and the signing of Jackie Robinson by the Dodgers in 1947, there was stops and starts in baseball’s struggle, which mirrored the country’s struggle, in how to level the playing field, discard the Jim Crow blanket of laws stubbornly covering much of the country, acknowledge our imperfections, and be better people.
More than 50 years after that book’s release – which occurred less than 25 years after Robinson’s debut – we are still, in many disturbing and distressing ways, trying to teach those in our community to learn from history rather than repeat it.
In the brief but powerful 11th chapter of George F. Wrighster’s new self-published book — the chapter is titled “Nigga” — he explains what he saw while watching his grandson one game playing shortstop, a runner on the other team pulled up at second base, and “everything went sideways.”
We offer a brief (as brief as we can muster) apology. We acknowledge most of our reviews in this series – not only this year, but in years past – have unraveled.
They can go long. Turbulently long, perhaps.
In our defense, we simply enjoy the reviewing and writing process. As well as the research, memory retrieval, and dot-connecting. But when you see the reviews linked in a social media post, and it says something like “estimated read time: 18 minutes,” who are we fooling?
Back when the Dodgers traveled with their own plane, if the season hit some turbulent spots, could a bumpy plane ride make it worse?
Perhaps. But here’s our argument: If we feel it’s compelling, interesting and entertaining, the reader, as a partner in this journey, can decide whether to quit or go forward. We have read plenty of long pieces in newspapers, magazines and — yes — baseball books that we stick with because we didn’t expect it to be something we couldn’t put down, or we find it runs out of steam and we’d wish an editor could have worked with the writer to shape it better.
We can’t Bill Simmons ourselves into self-importance. We used him as a reference of someone in the sports journalism world who seemed to make it OK to go beyond the traditional 800-word essay and insert himself far too much into the pounding-out-paragraphs process.
That said, consider this:
For what may end up as the largest book we review this year – in excess of 600 total pages, with about 600 reference books listed in nearly 30 pages of bibliography, along with 40-plus pages of notes – save whatever time you’d spend on our otherwise excessive glowing review and invest it into this epic undertaking.
It ain’t heavy lifting. It’s high heat. It’s history come alive and brilliant. You’ll end up far more educated than you anticipated.
Steve Gietschier, an Ohio State grad with a Masters and Ph.D. in history and once an archival consultant for The Sporting News, comes from a place where he taught American history, sport history and the history and culture of baseball at the liberal arts Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. He retired, as many did, in 2020. He edited the 2017 book “Replays, Rivalries and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports,” which, if you ever saw the cover, you’d not forget it.
Here is your chance to audit Gietschier’s master class in what happened to baseball between the Great Depression and its expansion West.
Imagine sitting there among the students, with Gietschier at the lectern, reading aloud the very first line in the introduction: “This book is a scholarly work exploring the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century.”
Go on …
He credits the past work of Harold and Dorothy Seymour with “Baseball: The Early Years” in 1960 followed by “Baseball: The Golden Age” in 1971 and “Baseball: The People’s Game” in 1990. He acknowledges the massive work also done by his cohorts at the Society of American Baseball Research. He admits he is inspired that “the time has come for a new summing up,” examining the game from the depths of the Great Depression in the 1930s to the migration West at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s.
There are 14 chapters built around a particular figure in baseball that segues into the game’s history at that point. They go as follows:
The first of three expansive biographies on Connie Mack by Norman Macht
Chapter 1: Connie Mack / Baseball deals with the Great Depression.
Chapter 2: Branch Rickey / The farm system
Chapter 3: Kenesaw Mountain Landis / Survival of the minor leagues
Chapter 4: Ed Barrow / Building the New York Yankees
Chapter 5: Larry MacPhail / Night baseball arrives
Chapter 6: Hank Greenberg / Ethnicity in baseball, and its thriving on the radio
Chapter 7: Don Barnes / World War II launches
Chapter 8: Yogi Berra / Players in the armed forces return
Chapter 9: Tom Yawkey / Disruptions in the game
Chapter 10: Bill Veeck / The Pacific Coast League rises
Chapter 12: Ford Frick / Lawsuits and the rise of TV
Chapter 13: Henry Aaron / West Coast relocation
Chapter 14: Bill Shea / The Continental League idea
The 10th and 13th chapters may be most interesting to West Coast folk who’ve read various accounts on why baseball moved this direction, and what impact the PCL had on its decision. The title quote for Chapter 13 — “I have long desired to see California” — comes from Abraham Lincoln five weeks before his assassination. The nuggets of info from Chapter 14, meanwhile, include how Jack Kent Cooke, who’d eventually bring professional hockey to Los Angeles (and buy up the Los Angeles Lakers, the Forum, and the L.A. Daily News), was involved with trying to get Toronto a franchise in the upstart Continental Baseball League that never happened, but forced MLB expansion instead after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California.
Here’s the plan: Take each of the 14 chapters as a week’s worth of a semester-long course. There’ll be no quiz at the end. No thesis paper due. The only guarantee is you’ll be smarter.
There is also this disclaimer by Gietschier himself: “To be a baseball fan is, in a certain case, to be a student of baseball history. … But a historian striving to write with some degree of objectivity must attempt to keep the passion of the fan in check or even dismiss it. My first history professor, Carroll Quigley, told his Georgetown University freshmen that the historian’s job is twofold: To see things as they really were and to see that they could have been different. If this work approaches these two targets, it will have accomplished much.”
It does, and it did.
Just the gratification that you’ve completed one of the most industrious, entertaining and informative pieces of baseball history you’d ever want to ease back into an easy chair and enjoy.
Author Q&A
We were fortunate to connect via email with Steve Gietschier to see if we could extract more context on his project:
Q You write in the introduction that “the time has come for a new summing up” of the Midcentury years of baseball in the 1900s. What inspired you to take on this task?
A I first began thinking about a book like this when I met Dorothy Seymour Mills many years ago. She was the widow of Dr. Harold Seymour, and together they had written a trilogy of works that were general histories of baseball from its origins up until about 1930. I asked Dorothy what she would think if someone picked up the ball where she and her late husband had put it down, and she said that would be a wonderful idea. At the time, I was not thinking that I would write this book, but when I asked many friends in the baseball history community if they wanted to take on this task, they all said no and that I should do it. After talking to the late Dan Ross, then the director of the University of Nebraska Press, I decided to say yes. It was daunting, to say the least.
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 