Around The Diamond

They stitch those things by hand? No wonder Official MLB balls cost like $12 each. 

Though I bet those dudes make about $.17 an hour...

Dimitri Young made about $53M dollars during 13 year career. And while the Young brothers have quite a history of childlike behavior on the field, there’s nothing childish abouthis massive collection of unblemished rookie cards from some of baseball’sall-time greats. I collect cards, though not as crazily as I once did. I’ll buy a few packs a year, and always pick up the Topps hobby set and the Phillies team set at the end of the year. But a collection of 500+ PSA Gem Mint 10 rated rookie cards is something I can’t even fathom. I own one card that’s rated even an 8. It’s a nice to see a ballplayer as interested in the industry that surrounds his sport as much as the fans are. 

Speaking of the sports memorabilia collections, one of the most valuable collections in history was auctioned off last week as song writer and author Seth Swirsky parted ways with items that ranged from the hat worn by Jose Canseco when a ball bounced off his head for a homerun to the original letter sent by Kennesaw Landis to Shoeless Joe Jackson telling him that he would not be reinstated into baseball following the Blacksox Scandal. The Hall of Very Good interviewed Swirsky prior to the auction. One of the more popular draws to the auction ended up being the infamous Bill Buckner ballthat sold for more than $400,000!  Poor Buckner...

Last week, baseball manager evaluation expert (seriously, he has an award from The Sporting News for writing a book on the topic!), Chris Jaffe from the Hardball Times steered me towards an article he wrote on Evaluating Charlie Manuel. It seems like perfect timing for all the Cholly hate that seems to be creeping up right now. Most telling line of the piece for me:

“In his nine full seasons on the job, he’s never had a losing record. Six times his teams won the division, and three others times they came in second place. Only once in those nine full seasons has one of his teams finished more than a game out of the postseason hunt, and that squad was just three games out of the wild card race.”

Not bad for a guy some want to run out of town. The article begs the question as to whether Manuel is lucky for having so much talent at his disposal or whether the talent is lucky to have been developed by a lifelong baseball guy like Manuel. I would suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Manuel sure milked guys like Jayson Werth and JC Romero for everything they were worth, didn’t he?

Another Hardball Times link and all-around fun topic to follow is their anniversary series. Fortyyears ago (plus 2.5 weeks now that it’s taken me so long to get this post up),Steve Carlton threw the most dominant game of his most dominant season. 300+ wins and not a single no-hitter, but his 14K, 1 hit, 1 BB performance was every bit as impressive as most no-hitters.  Read the article for a nice play by play and check out the series of anniversaries and day-versaries for a cool walk down memory lane.

Not that I have anywhere left in my man cave to hang things, but I picked up the above Phillies print by local artist Stan Ping throughPhilliesNation.com the other day. It should go well with my Dan Duffy canvas wrapped print. Grab one, they look cool.