Good morning and welcome to episode 989 of Effectively Wild, Daily Podcasts from Baseball

Respect Us, Brought to you by the Play Index, BaseballReference.com and our supporters on Patreon.

I'm Sam Miller of ESPN, along with Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer, Hello Ben. Hello.

Joe Demaggio used to take naps in the dugout. Somebody told us? Yeah. That's my banter. Anything you got?

No, the tall I've got. All right. This is going to be an odd episode. We'll see if we publish it.

I'm almost actually, I don't even need you. I read an essay in the Bill James Historical Habitract that was so good and such a thing that I wish I had written that I want to read a large chunk of it and then ask you about it at the end of the large chunk.

Okay. So you can get some tea. So I'll just mute myself and sit back and listen with everyone else. That's exactly right. So are you ready? Yeah.

All right. This was an essay that he wrote. One of the essays he wrote introducing his player rankings, his all-time player rankings.

And he's writing essays about how he decides how to rank players and the nature of the statistics available to him and the statistics themselves and so on and so forth.

And this is essay six, a subjective record and it begins like this.

You possess about each successful player of our time and enormous fund of information, information that in 20 years time, it would be almost impossible to reconstruct.

I've heard several people say that they have gotten so involved in the baseball of another era that they know more about the players of that era than the players of our own.

I've found that this is almost never so and indeed I wonder if it is even possible.

Pick a player, say Mickey Rivers. You know so many things about Mickey. You probably remember how fast he was when he came up.

That was all you heard about him for the first two years. You know how he walks with that pained almost crippled gate suddenly exploding into a blaze of speed when it comes time to run.

You know they call him the chancellor and you probably know why.

You know about his throwing arm and can visualize him picking the ball off the wall in right center and whirling, flapping like a goose and propelling the ball feebly in the direction of a cutoff man with a throw most likely coming to earth 15 feet short of target and a little to one side.

You know the way he chops down on the ball. You can probably call up the image of him fouling one off his foot as he often does.

You certainly remember him flipping the bat like a baton as he completed his swing.

You remember Pete Rose staring down his throat 25 feet in front of third base in the 1976 World Series.

You know about the malapropisms for which he became famous late in his career and could probably quote three or four of them from memory.

You know about his fondness for the horses and probably remember the stories about his placing bets between innings from the bullpen phone.

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