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One half of the baseball saying “Spahn and Sain and two days of rain”, Sain was a very good pitcher who lost three years of his career to World War II. When his playing career was over, Johnny worked as a pitching coach for another 20 years. He passed away in Illinois yesterday. RIP.
DOWNERS GROVE, Ill. – Johnny Sain, a three-time All-Star who teamed with Warren Spahn to make up one of baseball’s most fabled pitching tandems, died Tuesday. He was 89.
Sain’s best year was 1948, when he and Hall of Famer Spahn led the Boston Braves to the World Series, where they lost to Cleveland. It was during that season when the famous saying was born: “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain.”
The Boston Post ran a poem by sports editor Gerald Hern that led to the catchy phrase about the Braves’ two dominant pitchers — and the rest of their unheralded rotation.
“First we’ll use Spahn, then we’ll use Sain, Then an off day, followed by rain. Back will come Spahn, followed by Sain, And followed, we hope, by two days of rain,” it read.
Sain was 139-116 with a 3.49 ERA in 11 seasons in the 1940s and 1950s, mostly with the Braves and New York Yankees. He won three straight World Series titles with Casey Stengel’s Yankees from 1951-53.
The right-hander made his major league debut in 1942, then spent from 1943-45 in the military during World War II. He returned to the big leagues in 1946.
Sain had a stroke in 2002 and had been in poor health. The Knollcrest Funeral Home in Lombard, Ill., said it was handling the arrangements.
The Chicago Tribune reported Sain’s death earlier on its Web site.
Sain was a four-time 20-game winner and later became a top reliever, leading the AL with 22 saves in 1954.
Sain topped the majors with 24 victories and 28 complete games in 1948. He beat Hall of Famer Bob Feller and the Indians 1-0 in Game 1 of the World Series that season.
Later, Sain became a popular pitching coach with the Yankees, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota, Detroit and Atlanta.
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| Saturday, October 21, 2006 |
Dan Wetzel argues that, conventional wisdom to the contrary, Major League Baseball, despite wild disparities in team salary, has far more parity than the National Football League and National Basketball Association do with their salary caps and revenue sharing.
MLB will crown its seventh different World Series champion in seven years, either Detroit or St. Louis joining the Chicago White Sox, Boston Red Sox, Florida Marlins, (then) Anaheim Angels, Arizona Diamondbacks and Yankees as winners this decade. Even more telling, the Tigers are the 11th different team (out of a possible 14) to reach the World Series during that time.
In comparison, the NFL, with its hard salary cap and “any given Sunday” motto, has crowned just five different champions the past seven years and also seen 11 different teams reach the Super Bowl. The NBA, which also boasts the kind of salary cap seemingly everyone claims baseball desperately needs, has seen just four teams win the title in the past seven years. Just eight teams have reached the NBA Finals during that stretch.
Making the MLB numbers even more impressive is the fact that baseball invites just eight of its 30 teams (26.6 percent) to the postseason. The NFL lets in 12 of 32 (37.5 percent) and the NBA goes with 16 of 30 (53.3 percent), which increases the likelihood of upset-driven diversity in the late rounds.
There is little question that big-market teams with big payrolls have an advantage in fielding a championship-caliber club; obviously, the Yankees have a better chance than the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. But baseball is a different kind of game, and stockpiling talent isn’t enough – as the Yankees’ six-year World Series drought has proven.
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Baseball is a game where the highest-paid player, the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez ($25 million in 2006), can bat .071 against the Tigers. It is a sport where even the best player only gets up every few innings and the top starting pitcher can only go every fourth day, at best. It is basketball where a player can have an effect at both ends of the court on every single play. It is football where a player can impact at least half of the action.
In baseball, you can’t win without a team – a deep, clutch, close-knit, total team. And you just can’t buy that.
From 1991 through 2005, the Atlanta Braves won their division every year (with an asterisk for the strike-shortened 1994 season, when they were trailing the Montreal Expos but MLB awarded the penants to the team that had won the previous year). They had three Hall of Fame candidates, Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz in their pitching rotation simultaneoulsy for most of that stretch. Yet, they won only a single World Series. By contrast, the 1992 expansion Florida Marlins never won a single division title, had losing seasons almost every year, and won two championships.
That’s not so much parity, though, but the nature of the game. In football and basketball, the better team almost always wins. In baseball, even the most dominant teams lose a third of their games. That’s because, as Wetzel notes, a single player can have a major impact every game.
By contrast, baseball is mostly about dominating starting pitching. Since a starter generally only pitches every fifth day, the dynamics are very different from one game to the next. The left hand/right hand thing matters a whole lot more with pitching and hitting, too. Hitters go through hot streaks and slumps in a way that quarterbacks and power forwards don’t.
This is a major reason why baseball experts agree that winning a World Series is partly about luck. A single football game is generally a pretty good test of which team is better, barring a freak injury to the quarterback. A best of seven series in basketball is virtually never won by the inferior team. That’s because a Joe Montana or a Michael Jordan aren’t sitting on the bench in the final minutes of a close game. Barring injury to Tom Brady, the New England Patriots would never start the quarterbacking equivalent of Oliver Perez in the AFC Championship game.
A great regular season baseball team is built around steady production on hitting and defense and a deep pitching rotation. In a 162 game grind, with maybe five or six days off a month, we get a pretty good idea who the best teams are in each league. In the playoffs, though, a team can ride two hot starting pitchers to a championship (see the Arizona Diamondbacks).
Regardless, however, “parity” isn’t so much a measure of which teams win the championship but which ones have a chance to compete. The only way the Kansas City Royals will ever go to another World Series under the current system is to either start spending a whole lot more money or have extraordinarily good luck in developing talent. By contrast, the New York Yankees can essentially buy themselves a ticket to the playoffs every year. That they’ve invested too much in aging superstars past their prime isn’t a testament to parity but bad management.
OTB
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| Monday, February 27, 2006 |
Angry and disgusted with the latest comments from former slugger Frank Thomas, Chicago White Sox general manager Kenny Williams fired back Sunday, calling the two-time MVP “an idiot.” “He’s an idiot. He’s selfish. That’s why we don’t miss him,” Williams said, responding to a Thomas interview that appeared in The Daily Southtown, a newspaper in the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park, Ill.
Since signing with the Oakland A’s last month, Thomas has made it clear that he didn’t appreciate the way his 16-year run with the White Sox ended, saying that chairman Jerry Reinsdorf didn’t call him to tell him he wasn’t coming back. The greatest hitter in White Sox history reiterated that point in his latest interview, touching on several subjects and adding that he and Williams didn’t see eye-to-eye after Williams became GM following the 2000 season. At the time, Thomas was unhappy that his next-to-last deal with the White Sox contained a “diminished skills” clause. He said the White Sox should have traded him after the playoffs that season.
He also repeated that had he known last fall the team wasn’t going to bring him back — they later gave him a $3.5 million buyout — he wouldn’t have participated in a couple of ceremonial functions during the postseason. Unable to play because of an injury, he threw out a first pitch during the playoffs. Later he was given the opportunity to address the crowd at the end of the White Sox’s victory parade.
Williams said he was most irate over Thomas’ comments about Reinsdorf. “I’ve got a lot of respect for Jerry Reinsdorf, I do. But I really thought, the relationship we had over the last 16 years, he would have picked up the phone to say, `Big guy, we’re moving forward. We’re going somewhere different. We don’t know your situation or what’s going to happen.’ I can live with that, I really can,” Thomas said. “But treating me like some passing-by-player. I’ve got no respect for that.” Thomas said he wasn’t bitter or angry and had joined the A’s with an open mind.
But Williams was fed up that Thomas was still making remarks about his former team and the way he was treated. “Jerry has done everything over the course of 16 years to protect that man, to make accommodations for him, concessions for him. He loaned him money, at times, when he needed money,” Williams said.
“If he was any kind of a man, he would quit talking about things in the paper and return a phone call or come knock on someone’s door. If I had the kind of problems evidently he had with me, I would go knock on his door.”
That’s clear enough, I guess.
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