“Aw, say, now,” said the red haired young man with freckles on his voice. “I wouldn’t sign Joyce to play wid de St. Looeys, hones’ I wouldn’t.”
The remark is that of the red haired young man. It is not mine. It was made at the conclusion of the first game for the championship of 1898 in which the New York team figured. The rain wouldn’t be denied, and so in the third inning the umpire gave way as graciously as possible and the thousands of enthusiasts marched out of the Polo Grounds.
There may be a player in one of the minor leagues who could play a worse game at first base than that shown by the captain of the New Yorks.
But I doubt it.
“An’ they was all easy ones,” explained the Crank for Pleasure Only, as the first of the elevated trains pulled out of the 155th street station. “Narv (?) a one was a Spanish torpedo boat. This here ‘Scrappy’ Jones may have some kind of a rep. for certain things, but those things ain’t baseball. They’re bean bags.”
– W.W. Aulick, N.Y. Evening Telegram.
If you’re anything like me and you hoped to do anything productive this afternoon, forget about it. SABR member Jonathan Frankel has uploaded hundreds of old newspaper game recaps from 1897-1912. It turns out I kind of suck at navigating Google Docs, but everything I can pull up and actually read is magnificently entertaining.
Also, for what it’s worth, William Joyce led the 1898 New York Giants in home runs, RBIs and on-base percentage, was ninth in the NL in WAR that year and finished his career with a 143 OPS+. So this might be the earliest yet documented evidence of the Blame-Beltran phenomenon in baseball. It seems especially discordant for it to have befallen a guy nicknamed “Scrappy Bill.”
Murphy does not look like a second baseman and suffered season-ending injuries in 2010 and 2011 while making plays at second*. But the Mets’ other options at second are Justin Turner, who’s not a great fielder himself and can’t hit like Murphy, Ronny Cedeno, who’s likely a much better fielder than both but can’t hit much at all, and Reese Havens, who hasn’t played a game above Double-A and has yet to stay healthy enough to play 100 games in a season.
Tedquarters 