It wasn’t his actual name, of course, or even a proper English translation of his actual family name, which was Pellot. But his mother’s maiden name was Pove, and in Spanish-speaking cultures her name would be included as a second surname for her children. When his mother was young, an insensitive teacher with no Spanish language skills assumed his new student was spelling her own name wrong, and unilaterally changed it from Pove to Power on her school records. That stuck, which meant all of her future children were saddled with the new, incorrect name as well.

In the case of her son, Victor, that unfortunate turn of events left him with an incredible name for a baseball player. If he’d developed into a power hitter it would have been even more spectacular. But, alas, Vic was destined to fall short of his name a bit. Not as badly as Giants and Indians outfielder Horace Speed, who you’d think would be fast but was actually caught stealing more often than he was successful, but Power’s power was a touch below average. Not too badly, as his ISO Power score of .127 was only a touch lower than the league average of .133, matching his home run rate rate (2.0%) also being slightly subpar (2.3%), but one would hope a guy named “Power” would hit more homers.

That’s especially true since Power played a traditional power-hitting position, first base. What aspiring first baseman in Little League wouldn’t want their parents to get them a first baseman’s mitt with “Vic Power” emblazoned across the leather, so they could dream of one day bashing big league homers?

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• Sign your first pro contract at 22 years old (and not because you were in college).

• Never exceed 145 pounds, so light you are literally blown off the mound at one point by a strong gust of wind.

• Have no pitch that could reasonably be called a fastball.

• Spend parts of six seasons in Class D, which would be akin to rookie ball now.

• Spend parts of three years in Class C, basically the current A-ball.

• Spend six more years in the equivalent of Triple-A.

• Go to the Texas League for a year, basically Double-A.

• Finally make you big league debut at the age of 37, pitch two innings and immediately go back to Triple-A for a full year.

In modern-day baseball, this path wouldn’t be available. There simply aren’t enough slots in the minor leagues for a team to allow someone to hang out in rookie ball for six years, and if they were good enough to stick in a Triple-A rotation for six years, they certainly would have been called up and given more than two innings to see if they could cut it in the major leagues.

But things were different back before World War II. Minor league teams were plentiful. Not only did major league teams have their own affiliated farm systems, but many independent leagues existed as well. In 1927, 174 different cities and towns had their own minor league team in one league or another, and it was easier for a player to have a lengthy career even if they never got to the big leagues.

That was the year Joe Berry first signed a pro contract. It was with a team called the Laurel Lumberjacks, and they were part of something called the Cotton States League consisting of eight teams in Mississippi and Louisiana. This was not a league that was devoid of talent, Bill Dickey played for Jackson that season, but it was decidedly off the beaten path and none of the teams were affiliated with big league franchises. It was exactly the sort of place a player like Joe Berry could get his start.

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Furillo himself made no bones about it. “I’m bitter about baseball,” he told Roger Kahn in the basement of one of the still-incomplete World Trade Center towers in the early ‘70s, where they huddled in a shack on a cold day as Furillo took a break from hanging elevator doors. His hard hat and thick work coat were set aside for the moment as he ranted about suing the Dodgers for back pay he was owed, and complained that “the colored” didn’t deserve welfare and “have it easier than anybody.”

He resented having no job options near his hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania, where picking apples or working in a textile mill at horrible Depression-era wages were the only options for someone who dropped out of school in the eighth grade. He was angry at the death of his mother when he was only 18, and at having his pro baseball career interrupted after three minor league seasons when World War II took him, and hundreds of other ballplayers, off to war. When he was wounded in the Pacific Theater he refused to accept the Purple Heart, feeling he’d done nothing to earn it.

Upon returning to his baseball career he was upset to learn that the Dodgers had signed a Black man, and said of Jackie Robinson that he’d “cut his legs off” if Robinson tried to take his job from him. When some of his teammates passed around a petition during Spring Training in 1947, expressing their displeasure at the ball club integrating, Furillo was the only player from a Northern state to sign it. He later apologized, which kept him from being traded away by Branch Rickey, but he never warmed up to Robinson.

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“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

The exact wording varies a lot, but you get the idea. People are wrong a lot, and when they are, it usually has to do with something benign like ignorance, misinformation, or lack of intelligence rather than an evil motivation. In other words, people aren’t trying to kill you when they cut you off in traffic. They’re just bad drivers.

In baseball terms, it’s handy to keep this rule of thumb in mind. For instance, your favorite team’s manager probably isn’t sabotaging games by failing to use the best relievers in high-leverage situations. He probably just isn’t good at handling a pitching staff, or maybe the front office ordered him to use pitchers that way for some misguided reason. It’s unlikely that the manager or GM has bet money on the opposing team and actively wants their club to lose.

Likewise, seeing someone rant about their favorite player being left off a list of the best left-handed hitters ever isn’t an indicator that they have a vested interest in something nefarious. They aren’t trying to replace someone on the list because they don’t like them, and aren’t attempting to damage their reputation. They’re probably just blinded by their bias toward a favorite player and can’t see how wrong they are. For example:

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Monday would have been Hall of Famer Harry Hooper’s 136th birthday. He spent most of his career with the Red Sox, 12 of his 17 years to be exact, and made the Hall of Fame, yet the team hasn’t done anything to memorialize him on the facade at Fenway where they’ve hung the numbers of all the other franchise greats. Granted, Hooper played before uniform numbers, but the Tigers were faced with the same situation for Ty Cobb and elected to put his name on their wall with their retired numbers anyway. They didn’t just skip him because he played before uniforms were numbered, and I think the Red Sox should do the same for Hooper.

I haven’t written about Hooper in detail before, but it’s worth noting that he probably would have won the World Series MVP in 1915 if the award had existed then. All three of Boston’s starters, Ernie Shore, Dutch Leonard, and Rube Foster, were great in the series, holding the Phillies to only ten total runs, and left fielder Duffy Lewis had an OPS of 1.140. But Hooper not only had an OPS of 1.085, but he also hit two homers in the final game, Game 5, one of which was in the ninth inning and proved to be the series-winning run.

Offense wasn’t his strength, but he certainly wasn’t a liability at the plate. Hooper batted .300 five times and was a career .281/.358/.386 hitter. That doesn’t look like much now, but you have to remember most of his career was spent in the Dead Ball Era, so that batting line translated to an OPS+ of 114 for his career. That’s the same as Ryne Sandberg, and only a point away from Luke Appling (113) and Robin Yount (115). For the first five years after the ball turned lively in 1920, Hooper had an OPS+ of 122 from the ages of 32 to 36, which is exactly what Vladimir Guerrero and Orlando Cepeda did. Then there’s the fact that he stole 375 bases in his career, including as many as 40 in one season, so he was a real offensive contributor.

But Hooper’s real calling card was defense. From 1910 to 1916 he led all American League right fielders in putouts every single year, then did the same each year from 1922 to 1924. Seven times he led the league in fielding percentage, and he had an incredible arm. These were his right field assist numbers:

• 1910: 29, led the league

• 1911: 27, led the league

• 1912: 22, led the league

• 1913: 20, fourth in the league

• 1914: 25, led the league

• 1915: 23, led the league

• 1916: 18, second in the league

• 1917: 20, second in the league

• 1918: 17, third in the league

• 1919: 19, led the league

• 1920: 24, led the league

• 1921: 14, fifth in the league

• 1922: 20, led the league

• 1923: 15, third in the league

• 1924: 21, second in the league

• 1925: 19, led the league

His 335 assists from right field are the most in the history of baseball. That’s 79 more than the guy in second place, a fellow you may have heard of; Roberto Clemente. It’s one of the safest records in baseball, as unlikely to be broken as Cy Young’s 511 career wins. Hooper led the league in assists nine times, the most ever. The next-closest total among right fielders is six, a three-way tie between Clemente, Jesse Barfiled, and Ross Youngs. He also led the league in putouts ten times, which is also the most ever. Next in line is Ichiro Suzuki with seven. Hooper led all right fielders in double plays seven times, also the most ever ahead of Henry Aaron and Larry Walker at five each. His seven times leading the league in range is tied with Al Kaline for the most ever, and his seven times leading in fielding percentage is also tied for the most ever, this time with Nick Markakis.

In other words, he’s quite possibly the greatest right field defender in history AND a good offensive player AND likely the MVP of the 1915 World Series AND a four-time World Series winner. Throw in the fact that he did nearly all of this with the Red Sox and is, you know, in the Hall of Fame, and that seems worthy of some recognition with the other Red Sox greats in Fenway Park.

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According to Jay Jaffe’s invaluable JAWS ratings, Deion Sanders is the 342nd-best center fielder in baseball history. For reference, Kyle Isbel, the sixth-year, good-glove, no-hit center fielder of the Royals, is 321st all-time as of this writing. And yeah, that seems about right.

But I gravely doubt the Kyle Isbel will ever get his own action figure:

That’s because Sanders wasn’t getting an action figure because of what he did as a baseball player. By 1998, when this figure was made, Sanders was a five-time first-team All-Pro as a cornerback, return man, and sometime wide receiver in the NFL, plus the Defensive Player of the Year and a two-time Super Bowl champion. He’d be named to his sixth first-team All-Pro squad that fall.

Sanders was barely even playing baseball at that point. He skipped the 1996 season entirely, and would skip the ‘98, ‘99, and 2000 seasons, too. His return for 32 games in 2001 did nothing for his baseball legacy, and he quit after that season with a career OPS+ of just 89 and 5.5 career WAR in over 2,300 plate appearances. Those aren’t numbers that inspire action figures, but the Starting Lineup folks made an exception for a guy who had earned the nickname Prime Time and was on his way to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

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But the reality is that people usually don’t remember teams that lose, and everyone in the NL East that season, even the champs, eventually did. The 1974 season was dominated by three storylines. The first, of course, was Henry Aaron catching Babe Ruth for the all-time home run record early in the year, and then seeing how far past it he could go.

Then came the Oakland A’s, who were trying to win their third consecutive World Series and looked like they’d have to go through either the Orioles, their long-time nemesis in the American League, or a resurgent Yankees team that was playing in Shea Stadium that year. It would turn out to be the Orioles, again, and the A’s would beat them in the ALCS, again.

The third story involved the Dodgers and Reds battling it out to see who would be the best team in the National League. The Reds were already known as The Big Red Machine, were the defending division champs, and had won pennants in 1970 and 1972. They’s won 99 games the year before and were on track to match that for most of the year.

Their only problem was that the Dodgers looked even better that season. That great infield that would play together for nearly nine seasons were all young and good, they had a good, deep pitching staff, and they added two key pieces that offseason. Jimmy Wynn was acquired from the Astros and proceeded to hit 32 homers and drive in 108 runs, replacing longtime Dodger center fielder Willie Davis, who was shipped to the Expos for closer Mike Marshall. All Marshall did was set a major league record by appearing in 106 games in relief and become the first reliever to win the Cy Young Award.

The Dodgers took over first place on April 14 and never relinquished it, their lead climbing to 10.5 games at one point in July, but the Reds made it interesting. After uncharacteristically stumbling early in the season, sporting a losing record as late as May 11, they went 85-50 after that and terrified Dodgers fans. On September 14 they beat the Dodgers to cut their lead to only 1.5 games and had all the momentum going in their favor. But then they lost six of the next eight, while Los Angeles won seven of ten, and that, as they say, was that. The two teams finished with 102 and 98 wins, respectively, the two highest win totals in baseball.

The stepchild in all of these great races was the National League East, home of the defending pennant-winning Mets. But New York won the division with only 82 wins the year before, and no one else in the division won more games than they lost. The Phillies were still letting their young talent figure things out, and the Expos were only five years into their existence, while the Cubs were the Cubs, on the back side of their talented but underachieving teams of the late sixties. The Pirates were reeling from the death of their captain, Roberto Clemente, and the Cardinals had blown up much of their rotation while playing an odd blend of aging veterans and talented youngsters.

That left the door open for the Mets to grab the division with a truly mediocre overall team that pitched great but could barely score. No one expected them to repeat, which they didn’t, but no one knew what to think of the other five teams in the division either. The editor of The Sporting News picked the Pirates to win the division, pointing at their pedigree before the stumble of 1973. Sports Illustrated didn’t make a formal pick, but noted that Pittsburgh “must be considered favorites again.” Neither publication thought much of the Mets’ chances to repeat.

In the end, they’d be right on both counts, as the Mets went 71-91 and the Pirates took the division. But for a long time that season it looked like a team that hadn’t been given much chance at all would come out of nowhere, like New York the year before, and take the weakest division in baseball.

Enter the St. Louis Cardinals.

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I’m not talking about pitchers, who usually can’t do anything but pitch. In the case of someone like Mariano Rivera that was even more extreme. He could only throw one pitch effectively, but he threw it well enough for long enough that no one dared leave him off their ballot when he became eligible for Cooperstown.

But with position players it’s different. For instance, you can’t just hit a bunch of regular season homers and do nothing else well and expect to be elected. Jim Thome, for instance, didn’t have an enormous skill set, ending up as a DH who couldn’t run at all and struck out more than anyone in history not named Reggie Jackson, but on top of blasting over 600 homers he batted .300 three times, drew 100 walks nine times, and was a passable third baseman early in his career. Likewise, while Ozzie Smith was renowned as a stellar defender who couldn’t hit much at all, he was also a fabulous base running threat and cruised into the Hall of Fame. Someone like Mark Belanger, nearly Smith’s equal defensively but with virtually no other on-field skills, was ignored by voters as a one-trick pony.

I think it’s fair to say that voters give weight to each of the following skills to some degree:

• Power

• Batting average

• Playing defense

• Stealing bases

• Getting on base*

(*A relatively new addition)

That might be roughly the order each is considered as well, but I wouldn’t care to place actual weights on them. I could add scoring runs or driving them in here but I think those fall more into a bonus category, like postseason play, longevity, or good character. Driving in runs is viewed as an offshoot of hitting or power or average, just like scoring runs is seen as an offshoot of getting on base a lot. Anyway, I can’t think of anyone who is in the Hall of Fame for doing only one of those things well, but I can think of plenty of guys who were passed over.

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First, though, let’s cover the basics. Fisher was born in Iowa in 1899 but raised on a farm in Minnesota. He simultaneously loved Minnesota but hated farming, and decided that baseball was the career he’d prefer instead. He played on any team that would take him around Avon, the town closest to the family farm, but he still listed farming as his occupation when he registered for the draft during World War I. That kept him from being drafted, but it also kept him from being able to pursue baseball full-time until the war ended.

In 1919 he was noticed by scouts for the Minneapolis Millers, a good Double-A team in the American Association, and was brought in for a tryout. Though Fisher preferred pitching, it was as a hitter that the Millers thought he had the most potential, so they signed him and shifted him to the outfield, and let him play the 1920 season with the Miller Jugglers of the South Dakota League. Fischer wrecked the pitching in that league to the tune of a .378 batting average while allowing nearly six runs per game as a pitcher. That confirmed where his future lay, and his shift to the outfield became permanent at that point.

Though he was still the property of Minneapolis, they didn’t have anyplace to play him regularly in 1921, and he was so rough defensively in the outfield that they really wanted him to get as much playing time as possible. As a result, they assigned him to the St. Joseph (MO) Saints of the Western League for the next two seasons. There his bat played as fabulously as the Millers had suspected, with Fisher posting averages of .352 and .359, marks that were good enough to place him in the league’s top-10 both years. That part of his move to the outfield was fine.

But man, his defense was just awful. Though his bat kept him in the lineup every day, Fisher displayed virtually no ability to read fly balls off the bat or get decent jumps. As a result, he had not only the worst range on the team but also nearly the worst among all regular outfielders in the league. And when Fisher did get to the ball he had a hard time catching it. He made 22 errors in 1921 and 14 more in 1922. That wasn’t the style the Millers wanted, good bat or not, so they sold Fisher’s contract to the Washington Senators, who felt his bat would outweigh his horrible glove.

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Whenever someone holds a record that is surpassed, the danger exists that we’re never going to remember them again. It depends on the record, of course, along with the person’s accomplishments outside of holding that record. No one is questioning who Babe Ruth was* even though his single-season home record was passed by Roger Maris in 1961 and his career homer record was passed by Henry Aaron in 1974. The Babe did enough otherwise to be remembered.

(*Well, Pete Crow-Armstrong apparently is, but that’s a topic for another day.)

But that’s not always the case. For every Babe Ruth, or Lou Brock, or Lou Gehrig who held a famous record only to see it fall, yet remained famous anyway, there are players who largely slid from our memories once their signature accomplishment was surpassed by someone else. For instance, Gehrig eventually played in 2,130 consecutive games, but the record he broke to get there was 1,307, and Monday marked the date he passed it in 1933. Does anyone recall who held it?

I do, but that’s my job, and I’m sure many of you do as well because you’re reading this, which means you have more interest in baseball history than most people and are far more likely to know such things. But the average baseball fan probably has no idea that Gehrig broke a record held by Everett Scott.

He was the sort of player who couldn’t set such a record in the current day and age, a glove-first shortstop with almost no offensive ability at all. That kind of player might still be on a roster in 2026, but if so he’s probably a bench player who gets into games late as a defensive replacement and maybe starts once every week or two to rest the team’s real shortstop.

Scott was small, 5-foot-8 and 148 pounds, and as such he had virtually no power despite the fact that more than half his career was spent in the Live Ball Era. In fact, Scott had a front-row seat to the offensive revolution that was Babe Ruth, as he was his teammate for six years with the Red Sox and for another four years with the Yankees. None of that rubbed off on Scott, who never hit more than six homers in a season and had only 20 in his 13-year career.

His overall batting line was .249/.281/.315. He stole only 69 bases and was caught at least 60 times, probably more but they didn’t track times caught stealing consistently when he first played. His OPS+ was 65, which is historically bad for someone who came to bat over 6,000 times in the big leagues. In baseball history, the only player to exceed 6,000 plate appearances and have a lower OPS+ than Scott was Tim Foli. His mark was 64. The lowest mark in the 21st century was the 74 produced by Alcides Escobar.

Scott’s lack of offense was extreme even in his day, when poor-hitting shortstops were more tolerated as long as they had a good glove. And Scott certainly had one of those. He led the American League in assists, putouts, double plays, and range twice each, in defensive WAR three times, and he was remarkably sure-handed, leading the league in fielding percentage every season from 1916 to 1923. His +95 fielding runs remains in the top-30 all-time among shortstops.

That glove kept Scott on the field, day after day. And not just for any run-of-the-mill team that needed a shortstop; Scott was the shortstop on four different World Series winners, three in Boston and one in New York. It would be nice to say he elevated his game in the postseason, but he didn’t. His career batting average in the World Series was .156, even with a 7-for-22 performance in his final appearance in 1923. Before that he hit a beyond-pathetic .103.

But his glove was excellent, and that mattered enough in those days for him to set the consecutive games mark that Gehrig broke less than a decade after Scott set it. Even now, only Gehrig and Cal Ripken, Jr. have managed to play more consecutive games than Everett Scott. And, at least among poor-hitting shortstops, that’s a record he’ll almost certainly hold forever.

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In 15 big league seasons he wins 128 games while losing 149. His ERA of 3.27 looks good now but it was actually below average for the time, representing an ERA+ of 93. He lost 22 games one year, and led the league with 19 losses in another, never leading the league in any major positive category and never receiving any postseason award consideration.

He didn’t add to his accomplishments with his bat (.179 career hitter with one homer), or his glove (below average range and fielding percentage), and there’s no remarkable postseason résumé to prop him up either. His teams made it to the World Series twice, losing both times, and in four games during those series he was 0-3 with a 4.50 ERA. In fact, during the second of those series he was caught trying to sell the free tickets players received and was criminally prosecuted for it. He was found guilty, but got off lightly with a fine and court costs.

All of these efforts combined to make him worth 14.6 WAR for his career, roughly 1.0 WAR per season in the big leagues. Add all of that up and you basically have Patrick Corbin, who also has a losing career record, is worth less than 15.0 career WAR, and has an ERA+ of 93 in over 2,000 innings of work.

Now tell me, if Patrick Corbin pitched three more years, how good would he have to be in order to get elected to the Hall of Fame?

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In Roger Kahn’s classic The Boys of Summer, which is its own book-length ode to the school of “Back In My Day,” he relates an anecdote about his father. As they discussed how well the Dodgers were playing in 1941, having just captured the pennant and about to start the World Series, Kahn’s father couldn’t stop himself from talking about Brooklyn’s first pennant winner in 1916. “Now there’s a team that was a team. You should have seen Zack Wheat.” Of course he said that, because that’s what all baseball fans do. I know I’m guilty of it, and my father was guilty of it, and any baseball fans among my kids will be guilty of it too sometime in the future. It’s the nature of the world and of baseball.

Because that’s true, it’s also the nature of baseball players. It could be Ty Cobb saying that he’d only hit .300 or so against modern pitching before adding, “You’ve got to remember, I’m 73 years old.” Or Bob Feller carrying around his statistics in his pocket so he could show people how dominant he was. It’s the players like Joe Morgan who insisted Moneyball was nonsense while simultaneously admitting he never read it, and players from before the Steroid Era complaining that PEDs ruined baseball while players from the Steroid Era are now complaining that no one hits for average anymore, and so on, and so on.

That will never end. “Pitchers don’t throw enough.” “No one bunts anymore.” “Why are there so many strikeouts?” The complaints just evolve from era to era, and I’m sure the current crop of big leaguers will have their own gripes about the state of the game in 2056. “How dumb is it to have these orange baseballs?” Or maybe, “I remember when the Savannah Bananas were just a joke, now they’re leading the National League South!”

All of this is fine, and we should take all of it with many, many grains of salt. For the most part this is harmless grousing and it’s normal. It only becomes tiresome when the person complaining has an off-putting attitude about it. Arrogant. Aloof. Preachy. You know what I mean. If you don’t, watch a game announced by John Smoltz, then you’ll get it.

A good recent example of this came from Jorge Posada, who decided to go on a podcast and spend part of his time there complaining about the state of the modern game. Here’s the link to the full episode, but I will warn you in advance that it’s three hours long and everyone is speaking Spanish. I am not a Spanish speaker, and there are no subtitles provided, so I didn’t watch it. I did, however, see a post that pulled some of his quotes from that episode, and they are about as “Back In My Day” as they come.

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It’s the oldest park, and the most beautiful park, and the most nostalgic park, and so on. There are signs plastered all over the building calling it “America’s Most Beloved Ballpark,” in part because that’s possibly true and in part because the Red Sox really, really, really want you to believe it is.

I won’t lie; it’s my favorite ballpark, by far. It was the first one I went to, it’s also the most recent I’ve been to, and since I’m both a Red Sox fan and a historian, all of the nooks and crannies and oddities and things other people find cramped or dated or archaic all strike me as pretty charming. I didn’t need the Red Sox to tell me to love it, because I already did. There’s a reason the builders of newer parks have mostly tried to create updated versions of parks just like Fenway. It’s because people like them.

But there’s a sad offshoot to the effectiveness of the Red Sox’s campaign to put Fenway Park at the forefront of baseball fans’ collective consciousness when they think of the team, and it’s that it obscures the fact that it’s not the team’s original home.

That honor goes to the Huntington Avenue Grounds.

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Here are the career statistics of a pair of shortstops whose careers overlapped for about a decade. Take a look and decide which one was better.

That’s just offense, obviously. To give you a sense of their defensive abilities, here are a few other details:

• Left-column shortstop: Finished with +68 career fielding runs and 12.2 defensive WAR. Led the league in dWAR three times, led the league in fielding percentage 13 times, in putouts seven times, and in range, assists, and double plays six times each.

• Right-column shortstop: Finished with +118 career fielding runs and 23.3 defensive WAR. Led the league in dWAR four times, led the league in fielding percentage eight times, in double plays five times, in putouts four times, and in assists and range twice each.

The most obvious differences between them are that the second guy played way more games, while the first guy was obviously the better hitter, but that’s misleading because the first guy played in the Negro Leagues, and had enormous chunks of his career go undocumented. In reality, he played a considerably longer career (21 recorded years) than did the guy in the right-hand column (15 years). It might help to break there numbers down to 162-game averages to give a more apples-to-apples comparison.

• Left-column: 8.2 WAR, 145 runs, 201 hits, 40 doubles, 10 triples, 22 homers, 132 RBI, 27 steals, 76 walks, .328/.409/.538 batting line, +10 fielding runs, 1.8 dWAR

• Right-column: 6.2 WAR, 85 runs, 175 hits, 38 doubles, 6 triples, 7 homers, 78 RBI, 5 steals, 78 walks, .295/.380/.415 batting line, +12 fielding runs, 2.3 dWAR

Okay, we should have enough to make a decision here. The player on the right was a slightly better defensive shortstop, but both of them were very good. Meanwhile, while the right-hand guy was a good offensive player for a shortstop, the guy on the left was an outstanding hitter in every way. He had a better average, hit for more power, and stole more bases, each by a lot, all while playing nearly as well defensively and doing it for six extra big league seasons. There really isn’t any contest; game-for-game, the shortstop on the left was considerably better than the one on the right.

The guy on the right was Lou Boudreau, who died on this date in 2001. He was elected to the BBWAA in 1970 on his 12th appearance on the ballot. Candidly, the writers should be ashamed of themselves for waiting as long as they did to elect him, but Boudreau had a comparatively short career and was also a bit of a divisive personality. He’d been a player/manager since he was 24 years old and a certain amount of arrogance came with that.

But everyone involved should be even more ashamed that it took so long to elect Willie Wells. He’s the guy on the left, and he was born on this date in 1908. Known as “El Diablo” to the crowds he played for in Mexico for many years, Wells has a very good case for being the greatest shortstop in history. Personally, I’d still take Honus Wagner, but by a very slim margin.

Despite that fact, Wells wasn’t elected to Cooperstown until 1997. He never got to enjoy it, having passed away in 1989, while Boudreau, clearly the lesser player of the two, got to enjoy the final 31 years of his life with the status of a Hall of Famer. That’s good, he deserved it.

But Willie Wells deserved it more.

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Here’s what I’m talking about. Say you’ve got a starting pitcher for the first five seasons of his career and he had this progression as he aged:

• Age 23: Threw 127 innings with a 128 ERA+ and 7.4 strikeouts per nine innings.

• Age 24: Increased to 196 innings and his ERA+ dropped to 99 while his K rate fell a bit to 7.0.

• Age 25: Obviously he didn’t handle the increased workload well, so he’s dialed back to 155 innings and rebounds to an ERA+ of 124 and an 8.4 K rate.

• Age 26: Pushed up to 213 innings with no ill effects. He maintained an ERA+ of 122 and bumped his K rate to 9.2.

• Age 27: The traditional peak season for most players, it proves to be for him, too. He jumps to 258 innings, maintains his 9.2 K rate, and leads the league with a 186 ERA+. He also leads the league in WAR, ERA, shutouts, FIP, and lowest hit rate. It’s an absolutely monster season.

At this point you’ve got a star on your hands, and he’s in his prime. He’s made clear progress every season after an understandable wobble when he was 24 and increased his workload a bit too much. A couple more years of building up his arm strength and stamina yielded better and better results until suddenly he was clearly an ace.

So what would you think was going on if this happened the very next season?

• Leads the league in walks

• Leads the league in homers allowed.

• Leads the league in losses.

• ERA jumps by two runs per game

• ERA+ drops from 186 to 101.

• Strikeout rate drops from 9.2 to 5.6.

• Walk rate jumps from 2.5 to 4.7.

• Gives up three more hits per nine innings.

• Does all of this in just about the same number of innings as the year before, 250.

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He arrived in the big leagues in 1961 having spent his entire minor league career - three full seasons - exclusively as an infielder. In fact, he played shortstop almost entirely, though he split the 1960 season between shortstop and third base. The only game he started in the big leagues in 1961 was at shortstop, and that was the only position he played for the Yankees that season.

A year later he was the team’s Opening Day shortstop, and capably held down that role until the middle of August. At that point he had a respectable batting line of .278/.347/.427, had cracked 15 homers and driven in 65 runs, and he’d played well defensively, worth +3 fielding runs with an above average fielding percentage. He was named an All-Star, and even doubled in a run in that game.

But then the Yankees just decided he was going to be a left fielder instead.

They’d gone into the season expecting to be without the services of Tony Kubek, who had been their regular shortstop for most of the prior five seasons. His National Guard unit had been called up for service, though, so Tresh was able to win the job in Kubek’s absence and performed really well. It was a surprise to everyone when Kubek was released from his service in mid-August, creating a dilemma for manager Ralph Houk. He didn’t feel it was right for Kubek to lose his job due to his military commitment, but at the same time Tresh was on his way to winning the Rookie of the Year Award and really couldn’t be taken out of the lineup.

Houk resolved the problem by sticking Tresh out in left field for the rest of the season. It was a bit of an odd choice, because, again, Tresh had been almost exclusively a shortstop his entire pro career, had never played a single professional inning in the outfield, and Kubek had some prior outfield experience, serving as a jack-of-all trades utility player in a couple of prior seasons. But Houk felt that was the move to make, so out to left Tresh went.

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There was no such thing as a “closer” for most of baseball history. There were a few guys who specialized in relief pitching, like Firpo Marberry, Wilcy Moore, Johnny Murphy, Ace Adams, and Joe Page, but most teams didn’t have anyone like that. The Yankees probably used closers more than any other team before the 1950s, but that was largely an extension of having lots of good pitchers but few great ones, and simply finding innings for some of their guys who couldn’t crack the rotation.

But then Walter Alston was hired to manage the Dodgers in 1954, and we started to see them commit to having a preferred guy at the back end of their bullpen. It was Jim Hughes that season, a 31-year old veteran who had barely pitched in the big leagues before that season but suddenly appeared in more games than any other pitcher in the league and racked up 24 saves. That wasn’t an official stat yet, but that was more than any National League pitcher in history to that point.

A year later it was Clem Labine who was tabbed as Brooklyn’s closer of choice. Another guy who was nearing 30 without having had much success in the big leagues, for the next five seasons he was Alston’s go-to closer, leading the league in appearances in 1955, and in saves in both 1956 and 1957. That made him a two-time All-Star, and now Alston was fully committed to the concept of not just having a closer, but having one who had been a nondescript pitcher who had failed as a starter, either in the minors or the big leagues, to that point in his career.

That remained the case for the remainder of Alston’s tenure leading the Dodgers. Starting in 1962, the team had fifteen straight years in which they had a very effective closer who also happened to be somewhat of a late bloomer after a failed attempt to be a starting pitcher.

1962-1967

Ron Perranoski signed with the Cubs in 1958, straight out of Michigan State University, where he’d been a starter who set the school record for strikeouts. He was assigned to Burlington in the Three-I league and started 13 of the 18 games in which he appeared, going 5-9 with an ugly 6.43 ERA. He redeemed himself enough at a stop in Double-A the following season to make the Dodgers acquire him in the deal that sent Don Zimmer to Chicago.

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The first thing to know about him is that the nickname “Rev” must have come from somewhere besides the title “Reverand,” because not only was Cannady not a preacher but he was actually sort of an ornery cuss. He earned the reputation among his teammates of being somewhat moody, leading them to largely leave him alone, and once used a bat to bash in the car window of an umpire who had thrown him out of a game.

That reputation caused him to bounce around the Negro Leagues quite a bit. During a 21-year playing career, Cannady played in six different organized leagues and for ten different franchises. The longest he stayed anywhere was a seven-year stretch with the New York Black Yankees, but he’d already played for six teams in a 12-year span before he landed there. That mean streak, combined with an occasional loss of interest in playing, often led teams to decide he could take his talents elsewhere.

Those travels led Cannady to land on a truly remarkable string of teams, where he brushed shoulders and shared locker rooms with some of the finest players in the game’s history. Here’s a quick rundown of his path:

• 1921: The Cleveland Tate Stars, which were managed by the legendary Candy Jim Taylor.

• 1922-24: He remained with Cleveland for most of 1922, but also appeared with the Homestead Grays, which was still an independent club at that point. The Grays had Hall of Famer Cum Posey as their manager, and already had some outstanding players like Dizzy Dismukes, Lefty Williams, and Jasper Washington.

• 1925-27: Cannady moved on to the Harrisburg Giants of the Eastern Colored League, where he became teammates with Hall of Famers Oscar Charleston (who also managed the team) and Ben Taylor in addition to the great Rap Dixon, John Beckwith, and Fats Jenkins.

• 1926: In the middle of his time with Harrisburg, Cannady briefly played with the New York Lincoln Giants, managed by another Hall of Famer, John Henry “Pop” Lloyd. George “Tubby” Scales was on that team, along with the largely forgotten first baseman Robert Hudspeth, who batted .372 that year and .311 for his career.

• 1928-29: Most of these two years were spent back with the Homestead Grays, where Hall of Famers Martin Dihigo, Judy Johnson, and Joe Williams had joined the team, and great players like Vic Harris, Jelly Gardner, Clint Thomas, Sam Streeter, and Nip Winters played key roles. He also spent a large part of the 1928 season with the Hilldale Daisies, a club that was bursting with talent, from Hall of Famers like Charleston, Judy Johnson, and Biz Mackey, to Negro Leagues stalwarts like Chaney White, Frank Warfield, Phil Cockrell, and Clint Thomas again.

• 1930: His most infamous stop was back with the New York Lincoln Giants for the 1930 season, where he not only played with some prior standout teammates (Lloyd, Beckwith, Jenkins, Thomas) but added Hall of Famer Turkey Stearnes. Most famously, though, was Cannady’s outfield collision with the great Charlie “Chino” Smith during a postseason series against Homestead. The collision forced Smith from the game and series, and signaled the start of the end of his career, as he was soon diagnosed with cancer and died within 18 months.

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Two different pitchers best known for their time as starters for the Brewers made their respective major league debuts on this date, eleven years apart.

The first was Pete Vuckovich, who debuted for the White Sox in 1975 only a year after he’d been drafted in the third round. It’s not terribly clear why he was called up so quickly, because he didn’t exactly light the minor leagues on fire in his brief time there. He appeared in five game at Class-A Appleton, none of them starts, and after just 15 innings of work he was promoted to Double-A Knoxville, where he was 2-5 with a 4.21 ERA and walked nearly six batters per nine innings. No matter, the White Sox promoted him to Triple-A Denver anyway for the 1975 season, and after going 11-4 but with an unimpressive 4.34 ERA, he was called up and given a couple of starts in early August.

Vuckovich wasn’t good, getting hammered for seven earned runs in less than three innings of work against the Twins in his debut, including a double by Lyman Bostock, the first big league hitter he ever faced. That was followed by four more earned runs in three innings his next time out, leading to him being sent back to Denver and not used in the big leagues again until late September. In four total appearances he had a 13.06 ERA and gave up multiple runs in each game.

Even so, the White Sox kept him on the roster for the entire 1976 season, one in which he mostly pitched in long relief and had a 4.65 ERA while walking 60 batters and striking out 62. He wasn’t very good, in other words, and they decided not to waste a protected spot for him after the season, leading to him being taken by the Blue Jays in the expansion draft. Vuckovich was considerably better fulfilling the same role in Toronto in 1977. He appeared in 53 games, pitched 148 innings, and had a solid 7-7 record and 3.47 ERA for a team that lost 107 games.

That made him a valuable enough commodity that the Cardinals traded for him after the season, planning to transition him into their rotation. They did, and he took another step forward. That was largely due to new-found command that drastically cut his walk rate. Over the next three seasons, Vuckovich walked just 2.6 batters per nine innings while striking out more than twice that many, helping him to a 39-31 record and 3.21 ERA. More importantly, those numbers weren’t flukes, as he had a nearly identical 3.27 FIP as well.

When the season ended, new Cardinals manager and GM Whitey Herzog began wheeling and dealing, trying to re-craft the team into the image he wanted. That included acquiring closer Rollie Fingers from the Padres and then flipping him to the Brewers four days later in a package of players that included Vuckovich. Over the next two years, Vuckovich became pretty famous. He helped the Brewers make the postseason both years, including their only World Series in 1982, and won the Cy Young Award that season with a record of 18-6 ad a 3.34 ERA. He got hurt in 1983, missed all of ‘84, and was bad when he returned in ‘85 before getting hurt again in ‘86 to end his career, but his legacy in Milwaukee was already set. He’s on their Wall of Honor for winning that Cy Young Award, and was a broadcaster for the team for a while after he retired.

Meanwhile, Chris Bosio also made his debut on this date, 11 years after Vuckovich, and though he never got any Cy Young votes and didn’t appear in the postseason for Milwaukee, he was actually a considerably better pitcher for them than Vuckovich was.

Unlike Vuckovich, Bosio had a pretty distinguished minor league career before being called up. Between 1984 and 1986 he progressed through three levels with a combined record of 35-15 and a 3.12 ERA. He never had the ugly control problems Vuckovich faced, though he did have the challenge of the team trying to convert him to being a closer in Triple-A despite his success as a starter. It was as a reliever that he was finally called up, and it didn’t go well. In six relief outings he had a 5.82 ERA, and then he went 0-3 with a 8.15 ERA in four starts.

It was a bad debut, but he stuck with the club in 1987 and was moved back to the rotation in the second half of the season. Much more comfortable in that role, he rewarded the Brewers over the next few years by being a staple in their rotation alongside Teddy Higuera and Bill Wegman. He went 15-10 with a 2.95 ERA in 1989, 14-10 with a 3.25 ERA in 1991, and 16-6 with a 3.62 ERA in 1992. Any one of those years was better than the Cy Young season Vuckovich had in 1982, but Bosio didn’t get a single down-ballot vote for the award in any of those years. He also never got any MVP votes and was never chosen to an All-Star team. Still, it’s clear which of the two was the better pitcher for the Brewers.

Bosio is part of the team’s Wall of Honor as well, but sort of on a technicality. The criteria for eligibility are pretty loose, and by pitching over 1,000 innings for the team he managed to make the cut. That’s hardly a distinguishing characteristic, but at least it gets him on the wall where he belongs, finally getting an accolade he deserved more than the ones that came Vuckovich’s way during his career.

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