Monthly Archives: May 2013

I Miss The Mick!

Baseball when I was growing up was the sport of all sports. Little did we know how much it would change. First of all we knew who the players on the team were from year to year. If you were a fan of a contender this was great; if your team was not a winner I guess this was a drawback. Winner or loser you knew the team, it was actually like family. As far as money goes, Mickey Mantle whom I am writing about, his biggest salary was $100,000. The average major league player was not even averaging $20,000. Major league baseball players in those days actually had an off season job to make ends meet. I would go to Yankee Stadium with my Dad and at times bring along a cousin and the general admittance was $3.50 a person. Box seats which were closer to the field were $5.50, bleacher seats out in center field were $1.00. A family lets say of four can at least afford to go to a game. Someone can say people were not making as much money in those days, but at least they could afford to go to a game. Today, if you want to see a game at Yankee Stadium the average price of a ticket is $84 a person. Multiply that by four people and you pay $336 per person. Naturally when you are at the game you will buy food,souvenirs and what have you. Why, because you have to pay for these over paid ballplayers. Its not the ballplayers fault, if the owners are dumb enough to put out that kind of money naturally the ball player is going to take it; the problem is the person who goes to these games has to be more of in the upper middle class range. All sports are into these ridiculous salaries now and I don’t see it changing.

Yes, I miss the Mick. It has been said by many people in the game who have judgment on this that Mickey Mantles first ten years in baseball he probably was the best baseball player that ever lived. The rest of this blog will be all about Mickey and his abilities. We know about his drinking and whatever other weaknesses he had. This is about his speed, accomplishments and his long distance homeruns. All the inserts in this blog is from the book “The Last Boy And The End Of America’s Childhood” by Jane Leavy.

His raw power, the unprecedented alloy of speed and power, spoke directly to our postwar optimism. His father mined Oklahoma’s depths for the lead and zinc that supported the country’s infrastructure and spurred its industrial growth. Mutt’s boy had honest muscles. His ham-hock forearms were wrought by actual work, not weight machines and steroid injections.pg.Preface

He played in twelve World Series in his first fourteen seasons and still holds World Series records for home runs (18), RBIs (40), walks (43), extra-base hits (26), and total bases (123).pg.Preface. He can hit from the right side and left. In other words a switch hitter. He hit 163 homers right handed and 373 homers left handed. He was natural from the right side but naturally he batted more times left handed because he faced more right handed pitchers.

One of my favorite statistics on Mickey was not even homeruns. He could run to first base from the left side in 3.1 seconds. Just look at your watch and watch 3 seconds and imagine someone running to first base in that time line. That is super fast. Some player at one time mentioned the fact that when Mickey ran down the line to first base he sounded like a locomotive. He would have no problem stealing bases and he stole most of the ones he attempted but the Yankee management didn’t want him to steal much because of his bad legs.If you put the number of days together he has lost to injuries he missed a total of two years.

The first game of the 1953 season opened up in Washington with the Yankees vising the Senators. Chuck Stobbs was pitching for the Senators. Mickey is up at the plate. The ball hit his bat traveling at an estimated speed of 110 miles per hour. It headed out of the ballpark toward Fifth Street,NW. The visiting bullpen down the left field line offered an unimpeded view. “Your waiting for it to come down, to go into the crowd,” backup catcher Ralph Houk said. “The next thing it’s over the crowd and out of the stadium. There’s a moment of silence. Everybody is looking that way- even all the infielders on the opposing team and the left fielder. He’s looking for it, and he can’t believe it went out.”The ball had traveled 565 feet.Pg.87 and 89.

“ One of the best athletic bodies I had ever seen, and that was before steroids,” Sundstrom said fifty years later. “He had such beautiful, strong, well- defined muscles.”pg.106. Frank Sundstrom was an assistant at the time of one of Mantles knee surgeries.

By 2001, James, paterfamilias of the stat-geek generation, had conceded that clarity had been all but lost in the numerical dust storm of mutating calculations and shiny new algorithms. But he remained unequivocal in the assessment first published in the 1985 edition of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract: “Mickey Mantle was, at his peak in 1956-57 and again in 1961-62 a greater player than Willie Mays—and it is not a close difficult decision.”pg.134-135.

Nobody could play baseball better than Mickey Mantle played in 1956. He won the Triple Crown, leading the American League in home runs (52), RBIs (130), and batting average (.353). He was the Sporting News Major League Player of the Year and the Associated Press Male Athlete of the Year. He received the Hickok Belt, awarded to the top professional athlete of the year, as well as the first-ever Babe Ruth Sultan of Swat crown as the major leagues’ top slugger.pg.152-153.

There is so much more to cover on the Mick. But I covered his speed, his power, his superb body without the use of steroids. I saw on TV the ball he almost hit out of Yankee Stadium. He missed it by 18 inches. He played in 12 World Series of which 7 were won. Mickey made baseball fun. His baseball cards are worth more than any other player. Many years after he retired he said that he charges money for autographs to make up for the little money he made as a baseball player. He always had that dry sense of humor. Yes Mickey, I miss you and I know the game of baseball misses you.

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It’s Still The Economy Stupid!

The United States economy is not going to improve as long as the small business person is holding on to two trillion dollars from investing it back into the economy, why should they? I can’t understand why these liberals who work for a living like myself understand that their boss who owns the company they are working for cannot invest their money without having the confidence that it will bring them a good return. This owner as a matter of fact now has to worry about his or hers survival just from programs like Obama Care. You liberals who put this President in office just do not realize the danger you have put our economy in by voting for a socialist. Do you really like the idea of the government controlling your life? You have no ambition to profit from your labor’s and the rewards that come with it. You need the government to tell you when to flush the toilet? That’s what you have done by voting for Obama. By voting for Obama you are biting the hand that is feeding you, the owner of your company. The socialistic philosophy is they know what is best for you and I. Obama knows no other way. He grew up with people who implanted this philosophy in his head and hung around people in college who shared this same belief but I will not excuse him for this. He knows the American economy is based on individualism, in other words the capitalistic system. This is how our Forefathers have established our American dream.

Alexander Hamilton was very big among our Forefathers who believed deeply in establishing a sound economy. Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison wrote the famous Federalist papers which were really written to urge the people of New York to ratify the new Constitution. He became our first Secretary of The Treasury. What a great choice this was. He sent reports to Congress on the public credit and the National bank which he started. He also said to Congress that if the nation was to grow and prosper it would have to both encourage foreign and domestic investment.

Hamilton was for the separation of powers, which was in the Constitution. An example is that the states could have its own marriage laws, and the central government would protect us from war.

Hamilton put in checks and balances; he felt strongly about this because with the separation of powers one of the branches might get to powerful, so they had checks and balances, which made sure that all the branches could be checked by the others to make sure they don’t have to much power.

Hamilton is one of my favorite Forefathers but that does not mean I agreed with everything he wanted which was a strong central government. (Obama would have loved that) He did not want to give the people the say in the matters of state. He did not think they knew enough to determine critical issues and decisions; thank goodness the other Forefathers overruled him on this issue and as we know Hamilton went along.

I brought up Alexander Hamilton because his focus was on the economy which he planted the seeds and formula that made us the biggest economic power in the world. We are not going to allow Obama to destroy our economy. I am sorry to say that unless Congress adjusts Obama Care it just might be to overbearing for our economy. Instead of employers trying to put all of their emphasis to make their company grow they will now be putting all their emphasis on how to survive Obama Care. Obama has put the United States into a situation that our Forefathers kept us away from and that is choking the economy. Obama knows economics; he has been schooled. So what is his intent? its to socialize the economy of the United States of America. His whole emphasis ever since his first Presidential election in 2008 has been class warfare, and as we have discussed many times that is the Karl Marx philosophy which has been classified as Marxism.

People have been leaving the workforce. The labor force has dropped to 63.3%. This is the lowest since 1979 and who was President in 1979? Jimmy Carter and a Democratic controlled Congress. We have been down this road before, the difference was that Carter brought us to that road by neglect not because he put the wheels in motion to get us there, but hope is not lost because as we all know the story of how a President Reagan came along because he knew what an economy needed to bring it back and that was because he had the confidence that if he showed the American people confidence in themselves he would have the confidence to set forth the ideas he needed to turn the economy around and we witnessed probably the most prosperous era’s in history. He taught Americans not to believe in welfare and food stamps but to believe in themselves. We need that person again, yes it can be done, but first things first, we need to change this Congress in 2014 to a Congress that will give the control of economics back to the people who control the engine of the economy, the small business person.