Over at the Custom Card Blog, a whole raft of photo shop experts and baseball fanatics spend at least some of their time creating cards of current stars — and phenoms — using old time Topps cards as models for new sets. The 1968 Topps “tribute” design shown above (and presented last October) is accompanied by this description: “If the Nationals get the first overall pick in 2010 and can draft and sign Bryce Harper, they would have two of the most coveted prospects in all of baseball with Stephen Strasburg and Harper.” Well, the Nats have got them — with Stephen Strasburg making his major league debut tonight, and Bryce Harper now taking a few weeks of rest while Scott Boras determines how much money the kid will bank. It’s possible, in fact it’s likely, that both players are over-hyped: Strasburg is mentioned in the same sentence as Walter Johnson (and Larry Benard “Ben” McDonald), while a YouTube video shows Harper hitting a 502-foot homer off the back of the dome in Tampa. These guys are “the real deal” — they “can’t miss.”

Unless, of course, they do.

The best pitcher I ever saw was a straight-up 6-0 fastball farmboy from central Wisconsin who threw about 94-95 — and no one wanted to face him. The White Sox signed him, sent him to college and then farmed him out to the Midwest League and the American Association. He didn’t dominate, but he had electric stuff. He appeared in the majors and was traded to the Cubs (with a couple of other prospects, for — get this — Ron Santo), where he reportedly threw out his arm. He was “untouchable” — until he faced big league hitters. The best hitter I ever saw (up close) was a high school kid who was once intentionally walked, with the bases loaded, because allowing him to hit was just too dangerous. He was drafted by the Marlins and ended up in Beloit (again, in the Midwest League). The rumor that circulated ever after is that, following his first stint in the batting cage (during which he lofted several flies into the farm fields beyond the center field wall, wherein grazed the requisite number of Holsteins) a Marlins batting instructor told him: “We have to teach you how to hit.” He blew out his knee.

This is the way your career ends, this is the way your career ends: not with a bang, but with a pop — of a shoulder, knee, elbow, ankle, hamstring or heel, with an arm slot that just isn’t right, with a tweeky wrist or tender oblique, with a pulled groin, or broken tibia, fibula or rib. With a cracked, snapped, torn or shredded muscle that doctors replace with other muscles from other places. But even if your career doesn’t end that way there’s this: the stuff between your ears may betray you — or, in odd but legendary cases, make you better than you really are. Scott Sanderson had nothing compared to Stephen Strasburg, but there are pitchers who would have killed for his career. “I couldn’t throw a curve in a hurricane,” Sanderson once told Tim McCarver. You could have fooled the Phillies: whom he owned. And there have been much, much better players than Mark McLemore — who hit just .259 in his career. He’d be lucky if he hit five homers in a season, let alone a single dinger that could even wink at what Harper has done. But McLemore made $20 million hitting the ball between short and third and he played for 19 years. Who wouldn’t take that?

The Nats have drafted Bryce Harper, perhaps the best pure hitter in the first year player draft since the Yankees drafted Derek Jeter (with the fifth pick for God’s sake), and they will sign him. His journey will undoubtedly start somewhere in Florida, after which he’ll head to Arizona and then on to (I would guess) Double-A Harrisburg. Stephen Strasburg’s journey as a major league pitcher will start tonight. We can expect that he’ll overthrow the first time out, before settling down. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll show tonight that he’s the phenom that everyone says he is — or perhaps the Pirates will hit him around. But it won’t matter either way: baseball is a marathon (not a sprint) and is filled with so many oddities and potholes (with so many unpredicted cracks and snaps and tears and pulls) that it will matter less what Strasburg does tonight than what he does three months from now, and three years from now. And my guess is that, given his enormous talent, his ultimate success will depend less on the “stuff” that he pumps towards the plate than the “stuff” between his ears. Tell me I’m wrong.

The 1950 Phillies were one of baseball’s memorable teams: a great pitching staff and heavy long-bomb hitters. And they arrived at the Fall Classic in a similar fashion to their 2009 version: having humbled the Brooklyn version of the Dodgers in the season’s final game. Then, as now, their nemesis was the Yankees, as memorable a team as the Phillies — packed with prodigious power and strong arms.  Del Ennis, Dick Sisler and Richie Ashburn were the keys to the Phillies’ line up: Ennis because of his towering bombs (31 in all in 1950) and Sisler and Ashburn because of their nose-in-the-dirt style of play. We’ve forgotten just how good Ennis was — playing for sixteen years, eleven of them with Philadelphia. In 1950 he had 126 RBIs to lead the team. Ashburn didn’t have Ennis’s power, but his career ended in the Hall of Fame: with a lifetime batting average of .308, three different years with over 200 hits – and a skyscraping OBP. There’s a statue of him now, outside of Citizens Bank Park, in Philadelphia. But 1950 was far from Ashburn’s best year and the team needed the likes of Ennis to get into the series.

“The Whiz Kids” took the N.L. by surprise. No one even knew who they were. The left side of their infield was under 25 and their two best players were kids — Ashburn was 23 and Ennis was 24. Even so, if you knew only a little bit about baseball, you’d have easily picked the Phillies to best the Yankees in the ’50 Series. Their pitching was the class of the National League. The starting rotation was led by Robin Roberts, then in his third year in Philadelphia. He’d gone 20-11 with a 3.02 ERA and he’d thrown 21 complete games. Roberts threw the last game of the season against the Trolleys, and it was a gem: he pitched ten innings of one run ball before Philly won it all in the 10th. Curt Simmon followed Roberts in the rotation — and he looked (at 20) like he was eleven. Like Ennis, he is remembered best by baseball afficiandos. He had very good, but not great years. 1950 was one of his best: he was 17-8 with a 3.40 ERA. The third arm in the rotation belonged to Bob Miller, whose 11-6 record was a surprise to everyone (including Miller). It was the best year he ever had, but Philly needed him desperately — as the war in Korea was culling the N.L. of some of their best pitchers. By the time the series rolled around, the Phillies had lost stalwart Simmons and fireballer Bubba Church to the service.

The Yankees had won the series in ’49, but they knew the Phillies would be tough. To win, they had to get past their pitching. Their line-up was good, even very good, but these were not the Bronx Bombers of the 1920s. Yogi Berra and Joe DiMaggio were their power hitters, with Phil Rizutto the sparkplug in the middle of the order. Still, Phillies’ fans would be right to wonder why Phil is in the Hall of Fame and not Ennis. “I never thought I deserved to be in the Hall of Fame,” Rizutto once said. “The Hall of Fame is for the big guys.” That’s right, Scooter. The Yankees’ strength was their pitching staff. Vic Raschi (The Springfield Rifle) was the Yanks best starter (he was 21-8 that year), followed by Allie Reynolds and Eddie Lopat. Formidable, sure, but against the Roberts and Ashburn-led Phillies the Yankees knew they were in for a tussle.

Sadly for Phillies’ fans, that’s not how it turned out. In what has to be considered one of the best-pitched and closest World Series ever, the Phillies lost in four — by a combined 11–5 run total. The first game was the surprise, with Phillie closer Jim Konstanty pitching eight innings of one run ball. That how it ended: 1-0. Game 2 was a Robin Roberts’ gem, but he lost the game in the 10th on a DiMaggio home run. The pattern for the series was now well-established, with the Yankees matching the Phillies pitch-for-pitch. The third game ended 3-2, with the Yankees scoring their third run in a walk-off single in the bottom of the ninth. The only game that wasn’t close was the fourth — with the Phillie’s nose-diving, 5-2. The Phillies should have won that fourth game: they were up against a young Yankee hurler by the name of Whitey Ford who’d had only a so-so year.

It seems unlikely that 2009 will see a repeat of the head-to-head pitchers’ duels of 1950. Philadelphia doesn’t have a Robin Roberts or Richie Ashburn or Curt Simmons. In fact, they’re better: with a loaded line-up that makes Ennis and Sisler and Ashburn look like spray hitters (which is, in fact, what they were). Then too, while the current Bronx crew lacks the power and presence of “The Yankee Clipper,” Jeter, Rodriguez and Teixeira hit more like Murderers’ Row than their 1950 ancestors. It will be a real surprise if this is a four-and-out series: and it seems very unlikely to be won by 1-0, 2-1 or 3-2 scores. That said, the 2009 Fall Classic has this one thing in common with the Whiz Kids vs. Empire match-up of 1950: in order for Philly to win, they have to hit Yankee pitching.

The Washington Nationals authored a decisive 7-2 spearing of the Florida Marlins on Sunday, through a combination of stellar starthing pitching and timely hitting. After a long rain delay, Nats’s starter John Lannan dominated the Marlins’ bats through five complete innings, holding the Miami Nine to six hits while striking out three. Reliever Tyler Clippard was, if anything, even more effective (holding the Marlins to one hit over two innings), before Jason Bergman closed out the game. Nats hitters accounted for five hits over unsteady Marlins’ starter Chris Volstad, with the big blows from the bats of Pete Orr and Elijah Dukes. The win boosted Lannan’s record to 9-11, while giving a needed infusion of confidence to Nationals’ hitters, whose bats wer unable to master Florida pitching on Saturday. The 7-2 win gave the Nats the series victory in Florida, three games to two.

Down On Half Street: Derek Jeter recorded his 2,722nd hit on Friday, passing Lou Gehrig for the most hits in Yankees franchise history. Jeter’s landmark hit was properly extolled in the New York and baseball media and we have to give credit where credit is due – there’s no doubt that the Yankees shortstop will end his career by being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and have a plaque dedicated to his accomplishments out in Yankee Stadium’s monument park. Even so, in the wake of Jeter’s accomplishment, ”Baseball Tonight” commentator Steven Berthiaume felt compelled to ask his guests (Orestes Destrade, Eric Young and Buster Olney) whether BBTN was paying too much attention to the Jeter record ”just because he’s a Yankee.” Absolutely not, the trio intoned: Jeter’s mark symbolizes his undisputed place in baseball history and puts him on “the Mt. Rushmore of Yankee greats . . .”  

Well, maybe. But, if you have to ask the question in the first place . . .

 

The Berthiaume question keeps coming up: is “Baseball Tonight” too much of a Boston and New York and east coast-oriented show, with too little focus on west coast teams and west coast match-ups? The producers at BBTN probably have something to say about this — and some of it might even make sense. New York probably provides the largest audience of ESPN viewers and “Baseball Tonight” often (but not always) ends too soon to do a report on west coast scores, particularly if those games run into extra innings. Then too, I’ll just bet that somewhere there’s an internal BBTN memo that says that when Berthiaume and crew lead the broadcast with news about the Padres or A’s, people change channels. Whether we like it or not, the Yankees are of abiding interest (even to fans outside of New York) and the Jeter record is probably more important to the average viewer than, say, the fact that Ryan Howard eclipsed the Phillies’ grand slam home run mark set by Mike Schmidt.  

But if the producers of “Baseball Tonight” are hammered for being “homers” for the Yanks and Red Sox (and the Mets, too, when they don’t stink), it’s only because they often deserve it. Last week the CFG brain trust was convinced that Ichiro would finally get the attention he deserves when he broke one of baseball’s nearly untouchable records: the number of consecutive seasons with 200 or more hits. But that’s not what happened. When Ichiro broke Wee Willie Keeler’s record on Sunday night, ESPN was busy covering the games of another sport while ESPN’s flagship sports reporting program, “SportsCenter,” barely mentioned the accomplishment. But while Baseball Tonight can thereby be excused for their seeming lack of interest, baseball’s pundit class took an “oh and by the way” attitude to Ichiro’s accomplishment in the days leading up to his record breaking infield single on Sunday night. Yankees fans might take umbrage at all of this: that Ichiro is not Jeter, that Ichiro’s record is hardly of the same class as Jeter’s and . . . and that you can’t really compare “Wee Willie” to the “The Iron Horse.” Some of this might be true, but not all of it. While Gehrig was a better ball player than Keeler, the two records are vastly different: Jeter’s record is a team record, while Ichiro’s will reside at Cooperstown.