Mike Prawicki

Things I find interesting, amusing and well…..

Posts Tagged baseball

The Cubs Scalping Their Own Tickets

Feb 15

Posted by Mike Prawicki in Fun | No Comments

On Monday morning at 10 AM CT, the Chicago Cubs began giving their loyal fans a chance to start buying tickets to regular season games early, but there is a catch. It’s the Inaugural Mastercard First-Chance Presale of seats for the 2010 season, giving fans a chance to buy tickets before they officially go on sale on Friday.

The catch is that the tickets are marked up 20 percent. So while you can wait until Friday to pay $54 for a bleacher seat to see a game at Wrigley Field against the hated St. Louis Cardinals, they may already be gone if you don’t take advantage of your opportunity to pay $64.80 for that same ticket on Monday morning.

Though if you use a Mastercard to buy that ticket, it’ll only cost you $61.56 thanks to that 5 percent discount after the 20 percent markup!

As you’d imagine, this promotion is getting some reaction from Cubs fans in Chicago that isn’t exactly positive. It’s seen as if the Cubs are scalping their own fans tickets, which, in essence, they are. Still, this isn’t exactly anything new, and though they may be going about it in different ways, the Cubs aren’t even the only team in Chicago to do this.

Tickets for White Sox games went on sale this past Friday, though Sox fans who were members of the Sox Pride Fan Club could begin purchasing tickets as early as last Wednesday. Now, the tickets they bought early were at face value, but that price didn’t include the membership fee to join the club, which can run you anywhere from $24.95 to $134.95 a year.

What exactly is the difference?

The fact of the matter is that baseball tickets, much like everything else in the United States, follow the laws of supply and demand. There is a demand for Cubs tickets that far outweighs the supply, so therefore, the price is going to go up. So while fans may complain about the 20 percent premium on the Cubs presale, it’s probably not stopping them from logging on to the team’s Web site this morning to buy them.

2/15/2010 11:31 AM ET By Tom Fornelli

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10 Things I bet you didn’t know about Baseball

Sep 14

Posted by Mike Prawicki in Fun, Sports | No Comments

10 Craziest Baseball Rules

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The guy in the photo above is Alexander Cartwright, and he’s credited with inventing the modern game of baseball.  Only problem is that those initial rules from the 1840s were pretty messed up, in comparison to how baseball is played today. We’ve lauded a lot of these old timey baseball guys with handlebar mustaches in the past, but we might have to take it all back.  In the 1800s, baseball was a goofy game with a lot of stupid rules.  These guys would probably crap themselves if they had to face guys like Justin Verlander or Alex Rodriguez today.  Here are The 10 Craziest Baseball Rules You Would Never Believe Existed.  Besides the whole “no minorities” thing that we’re glossing over, that is.

10.  Pitchers Could Cover Balls With Just About Anything
Before 1920, pitchers could cover the ball with spit, Vaseline, road kill, Nickelodeon slime or whatever the hell else they wanted.  It apparently worked.  That Babe Ruth guy didn’t start hitting a billion home runs a year until they outlawed it.  We don’t actually know for a fact they used road kill, but that whole ‘Dead Ball Era’ thing would make more sense if they did.

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9.  Balls And Strikes Didn’t Really Exist
When baseball started, hitters just kind of stood at the plate whacking away until they hit the ball somewhere in fair territory.  That created a question of what constituted a walk (see Rule Four) or a strikeout.  In 1887, walks were even considered hits.  And that was also the first year that batters were awarded first base if they got hit by a pitch.  Called strikes didn’t even exist until 1858.  And until 1863, base runners would run advance on foul balls.  And as you’ll see in Rule Three, they didn’t necessarily run to the correct bases.

Have you ever seen a Little League game with 6-year-olds?  It’s pretty terrible.  That’s how we imagine old timey baseball must have looked.  We even picture an old farmer so terrible at hitting, that his coach has to bring out a tee.

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8.  Catchers Had Zero Protection
See that old timey idiot in the picture below?  It’s not his fault.  Chest protectors weren’t introduced into baseball until 1885.  It wasn’t until six years after that when catchers got to wear padded mitts.  These poor bastards just had to stand there in a dumb stance and wait to get their goddamn faces blown off with a foul tip.  But, then again, you’ll see from #1 that these guys weren’t really facing ‘the heat’ from pitchers until 1883.  It’s just amazing it took the rules committee two years to realize that catching was a fairly dangerous job.

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7.  Pitchers Used To ‘Throw’ From 45 Feet
You’ll notice in the picture below that the pitcher (who isn’t even on a mound) looks crazily close to the batter.  That’s because the whole 60-feet-6-inches thing didn’t exist until 1893.  But hey, that’s 15.5 feet shorter to hurl your heavy-as-hell Vaseline/spit/pubes ball towards your poor bastard catcher.

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6.  Hitters Had Flat Bats
For some reason that we can’t figure out, hitters used to have flat bats until 1893.  They really took their cricket influence seriously.  Why did they want to use paddle bats?  Maybe they wanted to spank the ball.  Sounds pretty lame to us.

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5.  Pitchers Couldn’t Step Towards The Plate When They Threw
Seriously.  In 1863 a rule was instated which said pitchers had to have both feet on the ground at the same time they threw.  Was sh*t getting way to crazy until 1863?  Modern day Major League batting practice is probably way more entertaining than old timey baseball.  Either that, or it it mostly resembled weird-rules baseball from a middle school P.E. class.

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4.  Hitters Got Nine Balls Before They Walked
We said in Rule Nine that baseball rule makers had a real hard time with balls and strikes, but in 1879 it was decided that nine balls made a walk.   How bad did a pitcher have to be to walk somebody in 1879?  You would’ve had to be blind.  It wasn’t until 1889 that the number was finally whittled down to four.

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3.  Base Runners Didn’t Have To Touch Every Base
From 1858 – 1864, base runners didn’t have to touch every base in order.  Did they also play the “Benny Hill Show” song while these goofballs ran all over the field?

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2.  Batters Could Call For The Type Of Pitch They Wanted
From 1867-1887, batters had the privilege of calling for a low pitch or a high pitch.  What was the point of pitching?  Did the pitcher also have to wipe the batter after they went to the bathroom?

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1.  Pitchers Threw Underhand
That should blow your mind.  Major League Baseball officially started in 1876, but it wasn’t until 1883 that pitchers were allowed to throw overhand.  The initial rules of baseball stated that pitchers had to throw the ball as if they were pitching a horseshoe.  So these old batters got to call for their pitch and get it thrown to them underhand.  They couldn’t step towards the plate.  No wonder the pitchers covered the balls in battery acid and pig manure.

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25 Things We Miss In Baseball

Aug 13

Posted by Mike Prawicki in Sports | No Comments

1. Stirrups

Let’s pause and give thanks that the franchises in Boston, Cincinnati and on the South Side of Chicago aren’t being named today. We might be stuck with clubs named the Baggies, the Bell Bottoms and the Cuffs. Who knows what color stockings the Red Sox, Reds (née the Redlegs), and White Sox wear these days, or if they wear them at all. With just about every player of the last 15 years wearing his pant legs down to his shoe tops (or beyond; we’re looking at you, Ryan Howard) a treasured uniform quirk has disappeared: the stirrup.

In the early 20th century clothing dyes weren’t colorfast: Anyone who got spiked risked blood poisoning if the ink from his hose seeped into an open wound. So ballplayers wore white sock underlayers — still called sanitaries — with fancier colored, loop-bottomed socks on top. Over the years stirrups became baseball’s version of the flair in Office Space, a way to show some personality. Some players wore them low, to flash the stripes near their knees (take a bow, Carl Yastrzemski). Others pulled their stirrups so taut that the loops became tension wires, thin strips of color beneath skin-tight double-knits (hello, Wade Boggs). In between were the sensible sorts, the Tom Seavers, the guys whose stirrups straddled the middle ground — a few inches of loop down low, a few inches of solid color up top.

If you paid attention in the ’70s and ’80s, you could spot a player by his stirrups. And if you were a Little Leaguer back then, stirrup style was a huge game-day decision. (I liked to think I had an ERA like Seaver and socks like Boggs.) Now? Aside from a few throwbacks (Jamie Moyer and Juan Pierre, we salute you), there’s not a stirrup to be seen. Too bad. The baseball uniform is more boring than ever. And no one wants an expansion team named the Boot Cuts. —Stephen Cannella

2. Home Run Derby

Say “Home Run Derby” to today’s younger generation of fans, and they immediately conjure the annual live, musclebound ESPN extravaganza at the All-Star break. But to those of us of a certain age, the original is still the greatest: the 1960 syndicated TV show that was pure low-rent, low-tech fun. The 26 episodes pitted 19 sluggers of the day — from Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron to Bob Cerv, Jackie Jensen and Jim Lemon — in taped, nine-inning slugfests held at Los Angeles’s Wrigley Field, a minor-league park that would in ’61 become the first home of the expansion Angels. (In the empty ballpark, every shot resounded.) Each week’s winner received the munificent sum of $2,000 and a chance to face another opponent in the next episode; the runner-up took home $1,000. It is a measure of the era’s chump-change salaries that almost all the power hitters of the era participated.

In those days of rationed televised baseball, getting to see our heroes in mano-a-mano combat was not only a thrill but also an argument-settler. Would the Mick out-homer the Say Hey Kid, my hero then and still? The anticipation among my Little League circle was as high as if the Yanks and Giants were playing in the Fall Classic. Accordingly, I was crushed when Mantle overcame a six-homer deficit to prevail 9-8.

But the real treat was provided by the unintentionally hilarious byplay between the sluggers and the host, Mark Scott, the type of Hollywood-handsome, big-voiced announcer in fashion then on game shows, local stations and radio. Between turns at bat, each hitter sat down next to Scott and watched his opponent bang away. Here’s the pitch. Whack! “That one went a long way, didn’t it?” Scott would ask Mick/Willie/Hank.

“Yup,” Mick/Willie/Hank would answer. Or: “That’s right, Mark.” Or: “Sure did.”

Did we hang on every word? Yup. That Derby has stuck with us all these years, hasn’t it? That’s right, Mark. And this show helped some of us decide to be either ballplayers or sportswriters, didn’t it?

Sure did. —Dick Friedman

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50 years since Haddix’s masterpiece

May 27

Posted by Mike Prawicki in Sports | No Comments

Pirates starter pitched 12 perfect innings and lost the game

“And so history in pitching was written, but on a sorry note for the 155-pound, 33-year-old Pirate left-hander.”

So read the final line of a story by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette beat writer Jack Hernon about the game in Milwaukee County Stadium on May 26, 1959, a game that will forever be remembered and took place 50 years ago today.

In fact, all you have to say is the name Harvey Haddix for even casual baseball fans to know that on that night, a man pitched a perfect game — for 12 innings — and still lost.

Haddix, who would go on to make three All-Star teams, win 20 games in a season and get the victory in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, is so well-known for retiring 36 batters in a row and then watching it all disappear that the feat is described on the headstone of his grave. Haddix passed away in 1994.

What would have gone down in history simply as the greatest game ever pitched — and still might be, depending on whom you talk to — ended in bizarre fashion in the bottom of the 13th when, in a scoreless tie because Lew Burdette had shut out the Pirates, also for 12 innings, the Milwaukee Braves rallied.

A fielding error ended the perfect game and put a runner on first base, and after a sacrifice bunt and an intentional walk to Henry Aaron, Joe Adcock hit what appeared to be a home run. But because Adcock passed Aaron on the base path, the league eventually turned that three-run homer into an official one-RBI double, sealing the final score at 1-0.

Haddix, who was said to have roamed the streets of the city until dawn after he left the ballpark, wasn’t shy about meeting with reporters right after the game, which somehow only lasted two hours and 54 minutes. But he didn’t seem to be aware of the historical importance of what he had just done.

“Joe hit a high slider,” Haddix told the Post-Gazette. “I thought I had fine control all night. I made a few bad pitches. The one to Adcock has to go down as a bad pitch. There were a few others, I don’t remember when or what they were.

“Sure, I knew I had the no-hitter. Now and then I would look at the scoreboard to see what the count was on the hitter. I had to see that zero [next to] the Braves. I didn’t know about the perfect game, though. I thought that maybe back there in the early innings I had walked a man.

“How do I feel about it? It’s just another loss and that’s not good for the club or myself.”

Haddix got another loss when the Committee for Statistical Accuracy in Baseball, led by then-Commissioner Fay Vincent, announced in 1991 that Haddix’s game, along with others, would not be officially recognized as a no-hitter by Major League Baseball because not only did he give up a hit, the pitcher did not the win game — both requirements for a game to be listed as a no-hitter.

That brought out one musical protest as late as last year.

That’s when Scott McCaughey of R.E.M. and the Young Fresh Fellows and Dream Syndicate frontman Steve Wynn released an album of baseball songs as The Baseball Project.

Their first single, written by Wynn, is entitled, “Harvey Haddix,” and is an argument for Haddix’s perfecto to be officially recognized as such in the annals of the game.

The lyrics say it all about what transpired 50 years ago today.

“The search for perfection is a funny thing, at least as I’ve been told/It drives you nuts, it makes you curse and eats away at your soul/Sometimes better isn’t better, sometimes justice just ain’t served/Sometimes legend isn’t laid where it’s most deserved.

“But humanity is flawed as the losers will attest/We’re drawn to tragic stories, the ones that suit us best/But for 12 innings on that fateful day, old Harvey was a god/A perfect game if nothing else because perfection’s always flawed.”

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