Another notable number came up after Tuesday’s game, when the sports-information company STATS LLC pointed out that the Rockies had listed Moyer’s age incorrectly, and that he was, in fact, a day older than the team had reported. You can’t talk about old pitchers and age discrepancies, however, without paying tribute to the undisputed king of both categories: Leroy “Satchel” Paige, the Negro Leagues ace and baseball folk hero. Moyer’s win on Tuesday was impressive, but Paige has him beat on one score, at least, by a decade. On September 25, 1965, Paige pitched three credible innings of baseball for the Kansas City Athletics against the Red Sox at the decidedly incredible reported age of fifty-nine—making him the oldest player to ever appear in a major-league game. He faced ten batters, recorded a strikeout, gave up just one hit (a double to Carl Yastrzemski), and was replaced at the start of the fourth inning, leaving the field to an ovation from the nine thousand or so fans in the stands who’d come to watch the A’s finish out a losing season.

– Ian Crouch, The New Yorker.

Everything about Satchel Paige is awesome. Every day that goes by without a biopic getting made is an opportunity lost. Check out Larry Tye’s biography of the man if you haven’t yet.

I’d cast Dave Chappelle in the movie myself, but it’s probably worth noting that I’d cast Dave Chappelle in pretty much everything. Via Alex Belth.

The Worcester Tornadoes of the independent Can-Am League signed Jose Canseco, meaning his amazing tweets will presumably soon take on a New England flavor (actually, it appears they already have).

The Tornadoes open with a weekend road series in Newark starting May 17, then play the Rockland Boulders in Pomona, N.Y. the next week, so New York-area baseball fans with an appreciation for spectacle and things Jose Canseco does (which is redundant) should have an opportunity to check this out in about a month’s time, assuming Canseco’s affiliation with the Tornadoes holds.

Incidentally, the Can Am League home run record belongs to Eddie Lantigua, whose baseball-reference page will break your heart. Lantigua has played 13 games above A-ball, all of them in Double-A, and spent parts of 16 seasons playing in Indy Leagues.

After a year off in 2010, the Puerto Rican-born Lantigua returned to the Can Am League in 2011 as part of the NYSL Federals, a squad formed to give the Can Am League an even number of teams which had no home stadium, went 15-78 in its season of exclusively road games, and which has since folded.

On July 31, with the St. Louis Cardinals — the team with the best record in the National League — in town, the Dodgers announced a crowd of 44,543 on a day the stands appeared closer to half-empty at the 56,000-seat stadium. They also announced attendance of 47,877 for a game three days earlier against the Cincinnati Reds, but huge chunks of the right-field pavilion and the new luxury seats beyond third base were unoccupied, with blocks of empty seats sprinkled throughout each level of the stadium….

National League teams announced an actual turnstile count through 1992, MLB spokesman Rich Levin said. But the National League and American League have since consolidated business operations, and Major League Baseball defines attendance as “tickets sold,” not “tickets used.”

“It’s because of revenue sharing,” Levin said. “That’s what we use in our official count.”

– Bill Shaikin, L.A. Times, Aug. 23, 2005.

Dear everybody,

Very often a baseball team announces an attendance for a game that seems way higher than the number of people who are actually at the game. I realize this is funny or strange or concerning to you, so you note it in your blog or newspaper column or talk-radio monologue. But for better or worse, Major League teams announce the paid attendance at games — the number of tickets sold, not the number of asses in seats — and have, I believe, for every game since 1992.

So if the paid attendance figure seems to have no bearing on the number of people actually in attendance at a ballgame, you can feel free to either dismiss it entirely, or note it and mention without snark that the figure represents tickets sold, as per standard baseball practice and not any conspiracy peculiar to that baseball team.

I know you’re not actually listening to me, everybody, but I wish you would because you just keep bringing up this same distinction between announced attendance and actual attendance like you’re the first person to ever notice it, when meanwhile Maury Brown wrote a whole thing last year explaining why it happens and how it’s actually worse in other sports.

Good day, and I look forward to seeing photographs of your cats.

Thanks,
Ted