Wantlist: 1976 Topps

Continuing along with the Red Sox baseball cards I need from every year:

1976 TOPPS
50 Fred Lynn

230 Carl Yastrzemski
326 Dick Pole
347 Ted Williams ATG
350 Lefty Grove ATG
365 Carlton Fisk

1976 Topps Traded
250T Fergie Jenkins

Can I Quote You on That?

[Jimmie Foxx] has muscles in his hair – Lefty Gomez

It looks like big muscular guys aren’t anything new after all. There’s always somebody who is going to be bigger and stronger than everyone else. That guy is going to be able to put up some pretty amazing numbers. Foxx could simply do things with a baseball that other people in his era couldn’t do. Frankly, I don’t think there are many people in any era who could put up his kinds of numbers.

Jimmie Foxx is a guy that always seems to get overshadowed in my mind, and that’s too bad. For the Boston Red Sox in 1938, look at this line. .349 batting average, 50 HR, and 175 RBI. What about the newfangled numbers? His OBP that year was .462. Add that to his .704 slugging, and you end up with an OPS of 1.166. The scary part? That wasn’t Foxx’s career year. I’ll give that honor to his 1932 season with the Philadelphia A’s. That year he went .364-58-169. His OPS of 1.218 comes from an OBP of .469, and a SLG of .749. Absolutely amazing. Why isn’t this guy more revered? Am I just missing the hype? Especially if you consider that he played in Philly and Boston. It’s not like he was hidden in Milwaukee his whole career? Is it simply a case of Ruth, and everyone else? If you weren’t wearing pinstripes in those years, you’re not worth it?

Where’s the love?

Wantlist: 1975 Topps

When people look to make baseball card trades, naturally they wonder what I'd like to trade for. Until recently, my response has been, "Just about anything." So, I thought it would be a good idea to whittle that down a bit. As such, I thought I'd post my wantlist for every year of Sox cards I'd like to collect. That way, the whole list will be in one place. For those of you that don't collect cards, these posts will be a tad dull. Sorry bout that. But, at least you can look at the list of naems and remember good times. Plus, there will usually be a pretty picture. Starting with my favorite set, the 1975 Topps...I still need:

1975 TOPPS - RED SOX

56 Rick Wise
80 Carlton Fisk
103 Rick Miller
172 Darrel Johnson
280 Carl Yastrzemski

O No!

What on Fenway’s green earth was that? Were the Red Sox just swept away by the Orioles?

I have to admit. While it’s an unusual strategy, it has some merit. When the Sox lost to Baltimore at Fenway, it was a large cause for concern. The Orioles, after all, only had a couple wins at the time. By sweeping the Sox this past weekend, the Orioles now have twice as many wins as they did. So, it looks like the Sox lost to a much better team. Sort of like when Notre Dame lost an early season football game to Northwestern not too long ago. At the time, it made ND look terrible. How could they lose to such a bad team? But, as Northwestern started adding more wins, it didn’t make the Irish look so bad. That must be what the Sox are looking for now. Make the Orioles look better, so they don’t look so bad. Increase their “strength of schedule” factor. Very impressive planning.

The Sox record currently sits at 11-14. That’s not good. No, really. It’s not good. But, when you add the two numbers, you only get 25. So, 25 games in, the Sox don’t look good. Thankfully, there are 137 games left. So, all is not lost. Let’s say the Sox want to win 95 games this year. No matter whether or not you make the playoffs, if you win 95 games, there’s no reason you can complain about the season. So, to win 95 games, the Sox need to go 84-53 the rest of the way. That works out to playing .613 baseball the rest of the season. Boy, that’s tough. How can they be expected to do that? That never happens. I mean, to play .613 ball for an entire season, you’d be on a 99-win clip. You can’t depend on that. Wait, what? The Sox did that last year? Really? There was a 25 game stretch in July where the Sox went 10-15? Huh. So, the rest of last season, they had to play at a .620 clip? That happened? Huh. What do you know? Before this weekend, the Sox were 11-11, and things were looking up. After this weekend, they’re three games lower, and the end is near. Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense to me either.

The problem, really, is how people insist on looking at statistics. Baseball announcers love looking at a player like Dustin Pedroia and his .330 batting average, see him 0-3 in the game and say, “he’s due.” He’s not “due.” If a player has a .333 batting average over a season, it doesn’t mean he got one hit every three at bats. It means he got a hit in one third of his at-bats. They came in bunches. There were long stretches with no hits. An average isn’t a constant thing. Just like wins. If you win 95 games, you don’t win 59% of every ten games. You win 59% of the total games. There are 7-game win streaks mixed in, along with 10 game losing streaks. Yup, the Sox started tough. But, let’s not get crazy here.

To be honest, missing two starting outfielders, 11-14 looks almost respectable. The pitching will be good. The top three will win their share of games. They won’t all have the worst years of their careers the same year. The offense will score runs. It’s show that it can. No need to worry.

This is still a good team.

36 Questions: Schedules

How do they make the schedules?

At the beginning of the year, there were some complaints about the schedule. It was felt that the Sox shouldn’t open against the Yankees. I agreed. As a Sox fan, I’d just as soon have the excitement of Opening Day be separate from the excitement of a Yankees series. I also would like the Sox to have a few games under their belt before the big series start. Ideally, I’d like to see them open against the Nationals, and then move on to other teams. Naturally, that’s not going to happen. But, the conversation got me thinking. How in the world do they manage to put a major league baseball schedule?

At first glance, I can see it being nearly impossible to set the games up for a team. The Sox need to play teams from the AL East 18 times each. You’d like to try and space those out a bit. You can’t schedule a team for too many games in a row without an off day. You need 81 games at home, and 81 games on the road. Those parameters on their own don’t make the job impossible. I can see myself with a blank calendar. I can picture placing series in until the numbers add up. Start with Baltimore, then Tampa. Then Kansas City, and so on. I can even imagine it would be easy to change it up from year to year. I’ll make the schedule for AL East Team A, and one for Team B, C, D, and E. I can change up which team is which every year, and that makes each years schedule different. That wouldn’t be awful.

But, of course, the schedule makers don’t do that. Why? Because they can’t. My schedule has left out a few criteria. The Red Sox need a homestand on Patriots day. I don’t know if other teams have similar requirements, but I bet there are a couple. That’s not too difficult to incorporate. But, I’ve left out the biggest requirement. Road trips. You can’t have a team go from LA to Minnesota, to Seattle, to Tampa. It would be too much. So, you set it up so that the Red Sox go from Seattle to Oakland to LA. At the very least, you need an off day in between. The Sox this year, for instance, have a game in San Francisco on a Sunday, and Tampa Bay on Tuesday. At least there’s a break. So, that all needs to be figured in. Not too bad either. Except, that means that Seattle and Oakland and LA need to have homestands on those days. It also means that you can’t mix up teams using the “Team A” process, because one time Team A could be Texas, and Team B Seattle. So, every year, to make things different, you need a whole new schedule.

Even with all those restrictions, I could probably put together the Red Sox schedule. Heck, I have an example to copy taped next to my computer. But, what about the next team? Just for fun, take this year’s Red Sox schedule. Without looking it up, use a blank calendar to try to create a schedule that would work for the Orioles. You’ll need to have them in Boston when the Red Sox are scheduled to be home, and in Baltimore when the Sox are scheduled to play at Camden Yards. From there, fill in the other games keeping road trips reasonable. It’s getting trickier. But, I bet it would be possible. OK. Now try Tampa. They need to be in Boston when the Sox play them at Fenway, Baltimore when the Orioles play them Camden Yards, and at the Trop when either the Red Sox or Orioles are scheduled to be in Tampa. Wowsers. It’s already getting a little crazy. I haven’t even added in Toronto or NY yet. I haven’t made you set aside time for the interleague play. If I kept going, adding teams to create schedules for, how long before you made a mess of things? When you get to Texas, could they be in Toronto when you already wanted them to be, and then in Arlington when you wanted them to be? What a mess. I have no idea how they do it year in and year out. I don’t doubt that there are computers involved, but even that’s a little crazy. Do they set a maximum number of miles between road stops? Maximum number of time zones? Maybe I need to cut the schedule makers a little slack.

How on earth do they put together a new schedule every year?