Three Things

Three quick things as we head into the weekend.

First, one of my favorite sites for looking up baseball related stuff is Retrosheet.org. Retrosheet has box scores for every game from 1919 on, and play-by-play descriptions for most games since 1950. It's amazingly well organized, and it's possible to find a box score for a specific game just by knowing a few details.

There is a page on the site that makes me sad. This page has links to the box scores for every postseason game since the 1903 World Series, sorted by year. Two years don't have links. One is 1904, when NY Giants owner John T. Brush refused to play the Boston Americans of the supposedly inferior American League. The other year is 1994, when the season was canceled after a work stoppage in mid-August. Seeing that lonely black number in a sea of blue always brings back to me how disappointed I was that there was no World Series that year.

Next, ESPN.com had an excellent story about Jim Joyce, the umpire who blew the call in Armando Galarraga's Imperfect Game last summer. It really gets across how badly Joyce felt about kicking the call and how much he cares about getting every call right. In a culture were no one seems to want to take responsibility for anything, it was refreshing to see how Joyce manned up and admitted that he blew it that night. It was also amazing that idiots sent death threats to his kids Facebook accounts after the call happened. It's a baseball game, people. If you're getting worked up enough about it to threaten someone's life, it's time to find a new hobby.

Finally, as soon as I post this I will be watching the ESPN 30 for 30 special about the Red Sox comeback over the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS. Because, really, it's not possible to watch that too many times!