Oscar Gamble Society

First, I don’t know why on Earth CNBC was showing the Clemens hearings live this morning. That’s a misallocation of resources even more egregious than the hearings themselves - I expect Congress to squander time and money; it’s what they do. I expect more from a subsidiary of GE. Anyhoo…

I just couldn’t get Ayn Rand’s novel out of my head as I watched Roger Clemens - Gallery of Greatness inductee and quite possibly the greatest pitcher ever - grilled by a motley assortment of intellectual pygmies led, appropriately if not admirably, by Henry Waxman. None of these men have ever excelled at anything to the degree Clemens has excelled at his craft, yet they seek their own ancillary glory in attempting to diminish his. In doing so they revealed the incredible smallness of their character. Small men, unworthy of their office.

One thing that baffles me is that the questioning broke so heavily along partisan lines, with Democrats generally focusing their ire on Clemens, and Republicans generally attacking McNamee. Is there some partisan angle on this of which I am unaware? Lord knows the House GOP contingent hasn’t distinguished itself as a bastion of Randian thought, so I don’t think its the Ryan-Neumann thesis. Is it purely random, or is there some weird partisan angle to this?

If major league baseball is looking for a reliable witness, I think they have their man.  A year ago, I could care less about the steroid story, but now I am fascinated.  I guess the Clemens story has peaked my interest. 

No, not the man behind the outstanding 1979 album Look Sharp, but rather Shoeless Joe.

Played only nine full seasons but collected 1,772 hits. He owns the third-highest EVER career batting average of .356, and batted .408 in 1911. Career adjusted OPS of 170, and 202 stolen bases. Top-ten in MVP balloting for four consecutive years (1911-1914). Played in two World Series with the White Sox, winning in 1917 and losing in 1919, cumulatively batting .345 with 8 RBIs and only 2 strikeouts.

In the 1919 World Series, he batted .375 with 6 RBIs, 1 home run and 3 doubles. If he was trying to throw the Series, he did a piss-poor job of it. In my view, the lifetime ban of Jackson is probably the second-greatest injustice perpetuated by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, exceeded only by Landis’ tireless and successful efforts to keep baseball segregated. Even if Jackson took cash from lowlifes, even if he knew of their plans, everything he did on the field was a credit to baseball, and nothing he did off the field harmed baseball nearly as much as Landis.

In defense of the Hall of Fame.

Personally, I think it’s no Gallery of Greatness.

It strikes me as silly that the Baseball Hall of Fame only includes players from American teams, in fact just two leagues, augmented by an effort to retrospectively cull the best of the Negro Leagues. Just as MLB overlooked a great deal of black talent before Jackie Robinson’s debut, so did it overlook most Latin American talent until the 1960s, and Japanese talent until 1995. Yet baseball has been played in Japan since 1872 - nearly as long as in the United States. Obviously, performance in the Japanese or Mexican leagues is more difficult for us to evaluate. But I’d like the Gallery of Greatness to recognize baseball greatness wherever and whenever it flourishes, and to that end I offer a nomination that should be fairly easy to evaluate: Sadaharu Oh.

Playing from 1959 to 1980, he won 9 MVP awards, back-to-back Triple Crowns in 1973 and 1974, and was a 20-time All Star. He set NPB career marks in home runs (868), runs batted in (2,170), runs (1,967), total bases (5,862), slugging percentage (.634) and walks (2,390). His 2,786 hits rank third all-time in NPB, and his career batting average of .301 ranks 14th.

A very good analysis of Oh’s merits appears here.

I’d like to address the following five together - Galvin, Irvin, Keefe, Maranville, Nichols - as Tank requested further evidence based on the understandable lack of familiarity due to the time frames in which each of these guys played:

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