I’ve been reading lately

I have recently finished reading Jim Knows: The Book. Unfortunately, it was not written by me, it was written by a man named John Hodgman. And he chose not to call it Jim Knows: The Book, but instead The Areas of My Expertise. Obviously, since I’m mentioning it on this web site, there is some baseball-related content. It comes from the section titled “Some Prophets Who Were Not Actuaries.”

SARAH WOODHOPE grew up in the suburbs around Boston and was noted in her high school yearbook as the school’s only guitar player and its first practicing Wiccan. In the fall of 1985, at the age of seventeen, she had a strange and vivid dream: a Patriot win over the heavily favored Dolphins in the AFC championship. She only mentioned the dream to one or two friends. But when it came true, she tearfully confessed that she had been dreaming of sporting events every night since she had gotten into Bryn Mawr early. She saw flashes of hockey games, whole innings of baseball that would not be played until the following summer, the tips of Larry Bird’s fingers releasing the ball in what would be the last NBA game he would ever play. “I never asked for this,” she told the Boston Globe when her strange gift became known. “Why would Gaia put these awful images in my head? I only wish it would stop.”

Woodhope’s visions continued, however, and Bostonians will recall that she eventually agreed to share them once a week with local disc jockey Dale Dorman during his drivetime shift on KISS-108. Her glimpses of the sporting future did not always predict a winner, and indeed they were often incomplete and imperfectly understood by Woodhope herself: She never quite grasped the rules of football, for example, and expressed surprise when she was told that William “The Refrigerator” Perry was an actual human and not a fantastic invention of her unconscious. “I thought…,” she said in a laughing declaration that would be played by Dorman again and again over the years, “I thought he was some kind of beautiful ogre!” At the end of each segment, Woodhope would explain a principle of Wicca and encourage the listeners to help heal the earth through enlightened white magick. This was her condition for appearing, and her advocacy is at least partly responsible for the large number of covens in Boston today, as well as the tradition of burning incense before Bruins games.

The following September, Woodhope went to Bryn Mawr, where she became an English major and would go on to write feminist fantasy novels. According to her autobiography, Cauldron Sister, her dreams ceased once she left Massachusetts. But there was one final vision she held back from Dorman: She dreamed of a short grounder along the first-base line, the ball hop-rolling gaily through the legs of an instantly ruined Bill Buckner and continuing on over the queasy green outfield at Shea Stadium. It was, of course, Game 6 of the upcoming 1986 World Series. This was the first time, she wrote, that she actually understood what she had seen, and what it would mean to Dorman and his listeners: that Boston would have to wait another eighteen years before it could break the curse laid on the Red Sox by Babe Ruth, that noted warlock of swat.

“I couldn’t put that kind of sadness out into the world,” she wrote, “especially since I knew it would only come back to me threefold: that is the Law.” Still, an unlikely friendship had developed between the DJ and the composed young witch, and so on her last broadcast that Labor Day, she kept her silence, offering only a hopeful Wiccan farewell: “Hoof and horn, hoof and horn, all that dies shall be reborn. Corn and grain, corn and grain, all that falls shall rise again. So mote it be!”

I actually wish this had been written before the 2004 World Series so it didn’t include the “another eighteen years”; it’s obviously much more melancholy if you think about a vision of the Red Sox never winning the World Series.

Yes, if you like this excerpt, you will like the book. As another endorsement, when interviewed on “The Daily Show” about this book, John Hodgman made Jon Stewart laugh repeatedly to the point that he had trouble getting his questions out, in a way I have not seen before or since. Why, if there had been a wall behind him, he might have hit his head from throwing it backwards as a result of all the uproariousness.

Now, please feel free to comment on all this, so that I can continue to post excerpts from books under the guise of “fair use for the purpose of criticism and commentary,” at least until spring training starts.

Not in Levi’s catalog

This is from the 1988 Baseball Abstract, but it’s not written by Bill James; it’s the work of Mike Kopf (briefly mentioned in this article), and is one of several “book reviews” taking up three pages’ worth of space between the National League East and the National League West.

Darkness at Noon (The Battle Over Night Baseball at Wrigley Field)
Mike Royko
University of Chicago Press, 286 pages, $19.95 ($14.95 when purchased during daylight hours)

More interesting, these days, than the Cubs performance on the field is the ongoing battle over installation of lights in the friendly confines. This is a controversy, as Royko points out in his inimitable manner, that has torn close-knit Chicago families asunder, much as the Dreyfus affair is said to have done in France. Indeed, police reports for the past two years note an otherwise inexplicable increase in intrafamily homicides, as well as a seemingly endless array of bar wars, the patrons dividing into vitriolic camps of “suns” and “lights.” Even teenage gang warfare in the Windy City, it is rumored, has crossed racial and ethnic lines to become a battle between “days” and “nights.”

Not surprisingly, Chicago’s notoriously corrupt politics has played a major role in the controversy. At first, skittish aldermanic and mayoral candidates tried to straddle the ivy, so to speak, but inevitably were forced to take sides. An already volatile situation was made worse when both pro- and anti-abortion activists jumped into the fray. The anti-abortionists began holding protest marches and labeled themselves “right to lightsers,” while the pro-abortionists, predictably, came out in favor of “choice” and called for a Supreme Court ruling. This moved the “right to lightsers” to contemplate a constitutional amendment mandating the installation of lights.

Against this hysteria, even the remnants of the old Democratic machine felt themselves powerless. The late Mayor Washington, after flip-flopping on the issue at least twice, found himself finally vituperated by all factions, and Royko, in his most shocking disclouse, reveals that not everyone in Chicago is convinced that the Mayor died of natural causes: foul play by right to lightsers, who have long threatened a terrorist campaign, is suspected by many. Into this whirlwind stepped a newly appointed Mayor, and as the book went to press, his promise to appoint Jesse Jackson as head of a mediation committee seems at least temporarily to have calmed the storm. But lights or no lights for Wrigley remains one of the most volatile issues of our time, and readers are Royko’s book are sure to come away enlightened and yet disheartened, because, as with Catholic versus Protestant in Ireland, or Arab versus Jew in the Middle East, no solution seems on the horizon.

Also reviewed: Water Under the Bridge: The Mysterious Death of Ed Delahanty; What, Me Worry?: An Insiders’ Account of the ’87 Twins (by Al Newman); The Secret Diaries of Shoeless Joe Jackson; and Ate Men Out: A Culinary History of Fat Men in Baseball.

Bill James on…football?!

Now that we’re deep into the NFL playoffs, here’s Bill James in the 1988 Baseball Abstract, complaining about the integrated major league/minor league system in baseball:

Another of the ugly features of the current system is the abuse by club owners of their monopolistic position in negotiations with cities. Although major-league baseball has a relatively good record on this point in the last fifteen years, a good example of what can happen is what has happened to the football St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals, who may be the Phoenix Assholes or something by the time you read this, are owned by an oversized wart named Bidwell. The Cardinals have a perfectly good stadium, Busch Stadium, a major-league facility in every way; nonetheless, Mr. Bidwell is not satisfied. He wants a new stadium, all his own, and he wants the city of St. Louis to tax its $18,000-a-year citizens to build it for him, and if he can’t have that at the very least he feels he is entitled to have several hundred luxury boxes constructed for him at taxpayer expense so he can sell them to rich people for $150 a game. In effect, Bidwell is telling the people of St. Louis that if they don’t give him millions of dollars he will deprive them of their status as a major-league football city — while Phoenix stands by, anxious to give him millions of dollars to acquire that status. It’s an appalling situation, the most blatant abuse of monopolistic power.

The good news is that St. Louis got rid of the Cardinals, who are the worst team in the history of professional football (even though they’ve been around forever, you can’t call them a “storied franchise,” because they have no stories). However, St. Louis ended up deciding they couldn’t live without an NFL team, so a $280-million domed stadium was built for the Los Angeles Rams, who wanted out of Anaheim. Following their move to the Phoenix area, the Cardinals have been in temporary residence at Arizona State University’s Sun Devil Stadium for over a decade and a half. I’ve been to both, and can report that Sun Devil Stadium is not as nice a facility as Busch Stadium. But now, finally, the Cardinals are getting a $371 million stadium of their own for the 2006 season (and $267 million of that is coming from public funding). The luxury boxes, I’m sure, will sell for many times more than $150 a game.

At any rate, in the process of all this, both Busch Stadium and Anaheim Stadium became baseball-only facilities, and got renovations befitting that status.

More baseball Christmas

As with last year, I spoke too soon. Arriving today in the mail was a gift from Levi and Stacey: The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2006, and you can tell they’re serious about the “annual” thing this time because they remembered to include a year in the title. I’m sure Levi likes it because of the profile of Cardinals general manager Walt Jocketty; everyone else can enjoy the two articles by Bill James, which include statements such as “The Royals walk less than Stephen Hawking.”

Baseball-related Christmas

Unlike last year, now that the 2004 trip is further in the past, this year I only got one baseball-related book for Christmas. It’s Grand Old Game: 365 Days of Baseball, a collection of 365 photographs from the Baseball Hall of Fame’s collection, each taking up the entire right-hand page with the photo caption on the left-hand page, which explains why it’s 744 pages long. When I opened the book, the first photo I turned to was of the stands at Ebbets Field in August 1944, packed with the boys who sold the most war bonds

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in Brooklyn, all waving to the camera. Also visible in the near foreground are a policeman leaning on a railing, a vendor standing nearby, and next to the vendor, a sign reading “In Case of Air Raid, Follow Arrow,” the arrow on the sign pointing under the stands. It is a great photo.

Back to Bill James

From the 1988 Baseball Abstract, preceded by six pages of imaginary dialogue, here’s Bill James’s list of the 20 best players in baseball:

  1. Wade Boggs
  2. Tim Raines
  3. Ozzie Smith
  4. Don Mattingly
  5. Tony Gwynn
  6. Darryl Strawberry
  7. Dale Murphy
  8. Roger Clemens
  9. Rickey Henderson
  10. Kirby Puckett
  11. Mike Schmidt
  12. George Bell
  13. Jack Morris
  14. Pedro Guerrero
  15. Alan Trammell
  16. Eric Davis
  17. Ryne Sandberg
  18. Phil Bradley
  19. Dwight Gooden
  20. Dwight Evans

With the benefit of hindsight, this still looks like a pretty good list, except maybe for Phil Bradley.

By the way, if Levi is even more scarce around here than usual, it’s because he’s got his very own blog now, solely devoted to books he’s been reading lately. He reads a lot.

The views of Bill James do not necessarily reflect…

This is probably going to be the last Bill James excerpt for a while, because it’s playoff time. I have balsamic vinegar and cocoa powder in my kitchen right now, two things I have never had in my kitchen before, because I am preparing for Operation Duplicate Chili, in which Levi and I both eat chili made from the same recipe while watching the baseball playoffs, even though we’re several thousand miles apart. This can only help the Cardinals. Why, I might even take my stuffed animals into the living room and set them up facing the TV!

The following is from the 1986 Baseball Abstract, and the headline is “Is Steve Sax Available?”

The Houston Astros, I have decided, must be an acquired taste. You know what an acquired taste is, something like French cooking, modern sculpture, jazz, fat women, ballet, Scotch, Russian films…it’s hard to define. An acquired taste is a fondness for something the advantages of which are not immediately apparent. An acquired taste in my part of the country is painted saw blades. Do they have those where you are? You go to somebody’s house and you discover that above their fireplace they’ve got a bunch of old, rusty saw blades with farm scenes painted on them, look like a hybrid of Currier and Ives and Norman Rockwell. I don’t really understand what the advantages are of having them around, but I figure that they must be an acquired taste. Or like Charlie Chaplin. I mean, W.C. Fields is funny. The Marx Brothers are funny. Charlie Chaplin is an acquired taste.

We all acquire a certain number of inexplicable attachments; mine include Bob Newhart, Jethro Tull albums, sabermetrics, and Pringles potato chips. I am assured by other people in my life that all of these can be hard to get into if you have no history with them. If taken literally, everything in life is an acquired taste with the exception of a few basic staples like salt, sugar, sex, and slapstick comedy, which we all share an enjoyment of; however, the term is not usually applied to things which make an obvious display of their attractions — in the case of a baseball team, by doing things like winning lots of games, playing interesting baseball, or developing exciting young players. One would never describe the New York Mets, for example, as an acquired taste. Acquired tastes have very subtle advantages. The expression “this must be an acquired taste” is quite useful, inasmuch as it can be adapted to hundreds of situations, meaning something a little different each time.

If you hear the expression “Must be an acquired taste,” on leaving a French restaurant or any other restaurant in which the food costs more than $20 a pound and tastes as if the oregano was left out, what it means is “I suppose you’d rather have stopped at Kentucky Fried Chicken, wouldn’t you?”

On a date, if you hear the expression “Must be an acquired taste,” what it means is “This is the last time I’m going out with this bozo.”

In an art gallery, if you hear the expression “I guess it’s an acquired taste,” what it probably means is “What the hell are we doing here?”

If you’re discussing a fondness for some particular poet, painter, playwright, or breed of dog with someone you are close to, and he or she says “I guess it’s just an acquired taste,” what that means is “I don’t want to talk about it right now.”

“It’s an acquired taste” means either that I’m in the know and you’re not, or that this is a particular type of sophistication to which the speaker does not aspire. I do not aspire to be an Astros fan. The Astros are to baseball what jazz is to music. Think about it:

1) Jazz is improvisational. Jazz musicians, uniquely among musicians I hope, sometimes string the elements of their music together as they go, with no particular plan or outline. Do you think the Astros know where they’re going? Do you think there’s a score for this?

2) Jazz ambles along without crescendos or refrains, going neither andante or allegro and without reaching either fortissimo or pianissimo. A good piece of jazz only uses about half an octave. The ultimate jazz tune is a saxophone player undulating slowly between D flat and middle C.

Similarly, the Houston Astros amble along at 80, 82 wins a year; the last four years they’ve been 77-85, 85-77, 80-82, and 83-79. Since 1969 the Oakland A’s have finished a total of 216 games over .500 in their good seasons, and 169 games under .500 in their bad seasons. The Houston Astros have finished 70 games over .500 in their good seasons, and 67 under in their bad seasons. The ultimate Houston Astros season is one in which they lose on opening day, then win, lose, win, lose, win, etc. until they reach 81-81.

3) Jazz is usually played indoors.

4) Jazz uses comparatively few instruments. Jazz ensembles are rarely enlivened with sousaphones, steel guitars, oboes, bassoons, or any other instrument which might tend to break up the monotony. Similarly, the Houston Astros use comparatively few weapons, relying heavily on the stolen base and the starting pitcher, but with no power hitters, no batting champions, no Ozzie Smiths or Jack Clarks. Both jazz and the Houston Astros, in short, are boring.

5) All jazz music sounds pretty much alike to the uninitiated, that 99.97% of us who haven’t acquired the taste; it’s repetitious, depressing, ugly, and inclined to bestow a headache upon the recipient. Much the same can be said of the Houston Astros, well known for wearing baseball’s ugliest home and road uniforms. Similarly, one Houston Astros season, one Astros game, and one Astros player looks pretty much like the next one.

No, I’m kidding of course; the Astros have been a little boring in recent years, but they’ll get over it, and I’m sure jazz is as beautiful, varied, and enjoyable as real music if you happen to have a taste for it. It’s just that…well, I’m a night person. During the Abstract crunch (a fifth season, unique to Winchester, Kansas) I start to work around 4:00 P.M. and I work until daybreak. About ten years ago we went through a period where the only thing on the radio between one and four A.M. was country music. I’ve never understood this…I mean, if you don’t like C&W in the middle of the afternoon, why do radio executives think you’re suddenly going to be struck with a yen to hear some Merle Haggard at 12:59 A.M.? Now it’s jazz; I listen to a mixture of classical music, rock music, and talk shows as I work, and at seven o’clock every evening, they all decide that I’d like to hear Count Basie. Public radio stations, usually a reliable port in a storm, have for some unfathomable reason decided that jazz is socially and morally uplifting, and that they have a responsibility to impose it on us. But if I want to listen to Mozart in the afternoon, why does anybody think I’d want to listen to Miles Davis all night?

Ah well, I’ve got my Jethro Tull and a stereo, and baseball season’s coming…what I should do is get a VCR and record a couple hundred baseball games, and play them back while I’m working. I might even acquire a taste for the Astros.

This time around, Bill James lost me in calling Bob Newhart an acquired taste. This was written in late 1985, when he was starring in a very popular sitcom on the CBS Monday night lineup. The modern-day equivalent: would anyone call Ray Romano an acquired taste? No, everybody loves him.

Also, “…undulating slowly between D flat and middle C…” — I think Bill James may have confused jazz with new age here. I haven’t gotten around to reading the 1987 Abstract yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s mention of a myriad of fans of both baseball and jazz having written him angry letters in response to this piece. “Jazz is usually played indoors” is very, very funny, however.

Also, the women there are crazy and little

More from Bill James in the 1986 Baseball Abstract

For the benefit of anybody who is not familiar with the cities, St. Louis is a much nicer city than Kansas City, and I’ll tell you why in a moment. Yet at every insurgence of the national media, Kansas City press packets are handed out repeating a number of overworked boasts about the place. “Kansas City has more fountains than Rome.” Well, I suppose so; the only problem is that about two-thirds of Kansas City’s fountains are just jets of water shooting up in front of a branch bank in the middle of a bunch of Burger Kings and stuff, and have the esthetic impact of large lawn sprinklers. “Kansas City has more miles of boulevards than any city except Paris.” This one always conjures up images of the International Board of Boulevard Certification, walking along saying “No, I’m afraid this one is just an ‘avenue’ unless you widen the curb space by four more inches and plant six more trees per half-mile.” Another favorite is “Kansas City is the Christmas card capital of the Midwest.” Can you imagine going into New York City for a World Series and having a press person come out to Shea and tell you how many Christmas cards are printed in New York City?

There are about seven reasons why St. Louis is a much nicer city than Kansas City. Number one, it is older, and has a much richer architectural heritage. Number two, its neighborhoods are much stronger. As Kansas City has grown, it has absorbed and neutralized the small cities around it, none of which retains a distinct flavor to contribute to the city. This hasn’t happened in St. Louis. Number three, the downtown area is much more pleasant — you can walk around it, there’s shopping there, the ballpark is there. Kansas City’s downtown area is basically a business area. Number four, St. Louis has integrated the river into the city, adding a great deal to the city esthetically; Kansas City has buried its river underneath a heap of train tracks, access roads, and dirty bridges. Number five, St. Louis probably has more good restaurants. If it doesn’t have more of them, they’re easier to find. Number six, St. Louis has many more areas that one can walk around and enjoy. Kansas City is all built to accommodate the automobile. And number seven, you can drive around St. Louis without getting lost. Unless you stay on the Interstate system, Kansas City has got to be the most confusing, frustrating city to drive around in the United States, with the possible exception of Atlanta, and Atlanta only because all of the streets are named Peachtree. The Kansas City street department renames their streets about every three blocks, so that it is all but impossible to keep track of where you are and how to get where you want to go. Drive you nuts.

That being said, there are things to like about Kansas City. It’s reasonably clean. The best restaurants in Kansas City generally don’t have any kind of expectations about dress; requiring a jacket or tie is considered rather pretentious. I like that. I’m mor ecomfortable eating out in KC than I am in New York — but anybody who suggested that the third-best restaurant in KC would crack the top 50 in New York would be out of his skull. The city’s image would improve a lot if they would just accept themselves for what they are, and stop handing out malarkey about how many miles of boulevard they have.

From my perspective, I know there’s one advantage to Kansas City: passenger trains are once again using the old train station downtown, even though most of it was turned into a science

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museum years ago. That’s apparently not an option in St. Louis, where the old train station was permanently transformed into a mall years ago. Also, right near the train station in Kansas City is an old building with an old advertising sign on the top…

On the other hand, my one experience at the Kansas City airport found me having to leave the security area in order to use the men’s room (in 2000 — hopefully they’ve done some rearranging in the years since); by contrast, the St. Louis airport has a more conventional design, and I remember that the exposed ductwork and digital clocks on the signs hanging above the concourse (helpfully labeled “Central Time”) fascinated me as a young boy when my family was changing planes there on the way to Iowa.

And I’ve been to a baseball game in St. Louis but not Kansas City. So, in conclusion, Bill James is absolutely right.

These people walk among you

When we left Bill James, he was at Royals Stadium for Game 1 of the 1985 World Series, complaining about having paid $30 for a ticket. But then he realizes, “No one has a divine right to attend the event, and if you’re not willing to pay a good price for the tickets, you shouldn’t be there.” However…

All season, whenever Susie and I had gone into games we had been extremely fortunate as to the people seated around us; we made it through almost the entire season without being in earshot of an obnoxious drunk. On this memorable occasion, the law of averages caught up with us. We were seated three rows behind the last human being in the Western hemisphere that I would ever want to marry into my family; she is to this day known in our house only as That Dreadful Woman. That Dreadful Woman combined the virtues of a coquettish Southern Belle, the kind that during a Tennessee Williams play you always want to reach onstage and strangle to speed up the plot, with those of your ordinary garden-variety obnoxious drunken fan. She had a voice that would remind you of a clarinet with a broken reed, set to the volume of an airhorn, and I suppose that she had been a cheerleader two or three years ago, for she was determined to lead the section in cheers. She was a Cardinals fan, which was not the problem; in fact, the ingrained hospitality with which Midwesterners receive guests is probably all that kept her alive as the game progressed. Whenever anything happened…no, that’s not right…whether anything happened or not she would leap to her feet almost with every pitch and, turning around and gesturing with her arms as if tossing an invisible baby into the air, implore the section to screech along with her and give her some sort of reassurance about how cute she was. After about a half-inning of this, every time she got up she would, naturally, be greeted with a chorus of people yelling encouraging things like “Sit Down,” “Shut Up,” “Watch the Game,” “Lady, Pleeeese” and “Will you get your ass out of the way?” However, being apparently none too swift even when sober, she could not take in that it was not anyone in particular who was yelling these things, but everyone in the entire area taking turns. Having focused on someone who was abusing her, she would fasten onto the luckless soul — several, I am sure, will never go back to a baseball game as long as they live — and begin to whimper accusingly about how she didn’t mean to do any wrong and she was just trying to enjoy the game and didn’t they want to enjoy the game and didn’t Royals fans like to have fun and what had she done except cheer for her team and couldn’t they be friends? Eventually she would shake hands with whoever it was; this was, after all, the only way to get her to stop whining in your face. Then she would grab her camera and put her arm around her new friend and have her husband (or boyfriend, or whoever the poor bastard was) take a picture of the event.

She had other uses for the camera — for example, she would try on a funny hat, hand off the camera to a stranger and have him take a picture of her. She would do this, mind you, with the inning in progress.

The rest of the fans in the right field bleachers were not exactly a prize aggregation, either. There was an ABC crowd camera near us, and scattered around were several dozen children and nitwits whose attention was entirely focused on it. Whenever this camera panned near us they would leap to their feet and hold up banners, requiring the people sitting behind them, which was all of us except the front row, to jump up and down constantly in an attempt to follow the game. There were several beach balls bouncing around, enough that it took the baseball fans in the area two or three innings to capture each one and neutralize it with a pocket knife. It was easily the worst Kansas City baseball crowd that I’ve seen.

Also seated around us were a number of die-hard, life-long Cardinal fans who had driven over from St. Louis (five hour drive) to see the game. By the fifth inning, That Dreadful Woman had most of them discussing whether they should continue to support the Cardinals or perhaps should switch to the

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Royals. Several people offered to buy the Dreadful Woman a beer if she would just go stand in line to buy it. She took one guy up on his offer, apparently not understanding the purpose of it — she wasn’t easy to insult, this girl — and as she was leaving a guy about ten rows behind us shouted, ‘Remember where your seat is — section 342.” Needless to say, Section 342 was in an entirely different part of the ballpark, but it didn’t work. We enjoyed the game for a half-inning until she returned.

The next night, Bill James goes back for Game 2…

As Susie and I were walking down the aisle toward our seats the man in front of us yelled gleefully “I don’t think she’s here!” We broke out laughing; we were looking for the same thing. We had the same seats for all four games in Kansas City, if there were to be four games in Kansas City, and the thought of spending three more games trying to get HER to shut up had considerably dampened our enthusiasm for the event. We never saw her again, but it was easy to spot the people who had been in the

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same seats the day before. They were distinguished by the wary looks that they cast around until the offending seat was occupied.

They are the champions

This handy list of 2005 minor league champions was in the agate type of Sunday’s Los Angeles Times sports section, near the CFL results (Edmonton 37, British Columbia 20).

  • Triple A

    • Pacific Coast League: Nashville Sounds (Milwaukee Brewers)
    • International League: Toledo Mud Hens (Detroit Tigers)

  • Double A

    • Eastern League: Akron Aeros (Cleveland Indians)
    • Southern League: Jacksonville Suns (Dodgers)
    • Texas League: Midland RockHounds (Oakland Athletics)

  • Class A

    • California League: San Jose Giants (San Francisco Giants)
    • Carolina League: Frederick Keys (Baltimore Orioles)
    • Florida State League: Palm Beach Cardinals (St. Louis Cardinals)
    • Midwest League: South Bend Silver Hawks (Arizona Diamondbacks)
    • South Atlantic League: Kannapolis Intimidators (Chicago White Sox)
    • New York-Penn League: Staten Island Yankees (New York Yankees)
    • Northwest League: Spokane Indians (Texas Rangers)

  • Rookie

    • Appalachian League: Elizabethton Twins (Minnesota Twins)
    • Arizona League: Giants (San Francisco Giants)
    • Gulf Coast League: Yankees (New York Yankees)
    • Pioneer League: Orem Owlz (Angels)

  • Independent

    • Can-Am League: Worcester Tornadoes
    • Central League: Fort Worth Cats
    • Frontier League: Kalamazoo Kings
    • Golden Baseball: San Diego Surf Dawgs
    • Northern League: Gary SouthShore RailCats

Note that two teams that play in cities along the route of the South Shore Line won league championships, which may be a good omen for the Chicago White Sox.

Meanwhile, here’s Bill James, attending Game 1 of the 1985 World Series and writing about it in the 1986 Baseball Abstract: “On the way in I grumbled about the $30 price of the ticket, but on arriving at the park was struck by the absurdity of this; you pay $45 for tickets to a Broadway show and don’t think anything of it, and this is the World Series.” I believe Levi saw a Broadway show earlier this year, so perhaps he will enjoy that 1985 price quote as much as I did.

More from Bill James’s extended review of the 1985 World Series coming soon, including a comparison of the cities of St. Louis and Kansas City, and the tale of That Dreadful Woman.