I got kinda busy today and didn’t get to fully transcribe the stuff from Shaq’s media event at his art exhibition yesterday. (Shaq, for a variety of a reasons, is a difficult man to mic, which makes transcription difficult.)
Anyway, in the meantime, enjoy this brief iPhone video of Shaq talking about art. You’ll have to turn the volume way up:
YouTube is incredible. I found this video today, from the 1990 MTV Rock N’ Jock softball game. It features Bud Bundy, for one thing, plus Keanu Reeves back when he was just “Keanu Reeves, from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”
We don’t see it, but we’re told that Tone Loc picks off Reeves at first base. But earlier in the video, we see Tone Loc playing catcher, so I can only assume that Tone Loc picked off Keanu Reeves by throwing behind the runner at first, a very aggressive move for any backstop, no less one playing in a celebrity softball game.
So good for Tone Loc for further confirming his own awesomeness. I’m sure manager Sammy Hagar was proud.
The highlight of the clip comes when Darryl Strawberry rips an inside-the-park home run past a diving Reeves, who took a downright terrible route to the ball.
In the comments section for a Jeff Francoeur post on Monday, Brian wrote, “If he hits .300 and slugs .500 I won’t give a damn if his OBP is also .300.”
I happen to disagree — the problem with OPS is that it overvalues slugging percentage relative to on-base percentage, and on-base percentage plays a greater role in helping a team score runs. This is why more OBP-driven stats like wOBA have come into vogue, and a nice overview of the principles distinguishing wOBA from OBP and OPS can be found here.
Regardless, Brian’s comment intrigued me, because it struck me that slugging over .500 with a .300 on-base percentage is probably difficult to do. After all, as I’ve written — and plenty of people have written before me — if you expose to the world that you’re willing to swing at so many pitches, you’re unlikely to see a whole lot of pitches to drive.
So I consulted the incredible — and totally worth the price of subscription — baseball-reference play index to see how often it had been done.
Thrice. At least with the plate appearances to qualify for the batting title since 1901. And one of the guys who did it was a Met, and one of the guys who did it is currently a Met:
| Rk | Player | Year ▴ | OBP | SLG | Age | Tm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dave Kingman | 1976 | .286 | .506 | 27 | NYM |
| 2 | Tony Armas | 1984 | .300 | .531 | 30 | BOS |
| 3 | Mike Jacobs | 2008 | .299 | .514 | 27 | FLA |
Plus, as Twitterer OldBiscuitPants (one of my favorite Twitter handles and old baseball nicknames, FWIW) points out, Armas actually posted an OBP ever-so-slightly above .300 in 1984: .30044.
So, to Brian’s comment, if Francoeur manages to slug .500 with an OBP at or below .300, it’s probably worth giving a damn, because we’d be witnessing something exceptionally rare in the annals of baseball history.
Almost certainly not a good rare thing, mind you, but something I’m sure would be entertaining as hell to behold.
The Daily News gets Dr. Lewis Maharam on the horn to talk about PRP therapy. “It’s not a controversial technique,” he says on page 54. But according to Teri Thompson, Michael O’Keeffe and Adam Rubin on page 53: “The treatment, which is a controversial but legal procedure…”
Rob Neyer makes an interesting point about Minor Leaguers, per diems and healthy eating.
This absolutely nails it. I am terrified of the Google.
Here’s video of Ike Davis’ double, in case you missed it.
Tedquarters 