*I just learned of Dick Clark’s passing at the age of 82 of a massive heart attack. Not enough time to put something together. Next BC.
Detroit Tigers Quiz: 1) Name the five to hit 40 homers in a season. 2) Post-1930, name the four Tigers hurlers to win 25 games in a season. Answers below.
A Little History
I arrived in Lexington Monday afternoon and immediately went to visit Stonewall Jackson’s grave, Lexington being his last place of residence before he was called to serve the Confederacy. Some 144 Confederate veterans are buried there as well, along with two Virginia governors and a founder of the Kappa Alpha fraternity (for you KAs out there…this is kind of a big deal…I was a PiKa myself). Then I went to the only house he owned, also in town. Very cool…like he and the missus had nice digs for being middle class back in the day. Jackson was a none-too-popular professor at VMI at the time; as in he kind of sucked at teaching, but he was one of the great military strategists of all time, sports fans!
[Monday night I had dinner with four Washington & Lee coeds. Eat your heart out, guys. And I’m not even going to explain how this occurred…heh heh.]
On Tuesday, I drove from Lexington to Appomattox, at first via Rt. 60. I had no idea how spectacular the mountains were that had you driving up and down for 45 minutes or so. I was last in Appomattox back in 1990 when I did a Civil War tour from Gettysburg to Petersburg and across and then on up to Harper’s Ferry and Manassas.
Appomattox is really a beautiful piece of land and if the weather is good, allow yourself an hour to walk on the trail (the historic Richmond-Lynchburg Stage Road) to recreate the scene of April 9, 1865. Also, make sure you stop at some of the turnoffs before getting to Appomattox Courthouse and McLean House, the latter where the surrender took place. You can see where Grant had his last camp and then you move to where Grant looked down/across at Appomattox early on April 9 and asked his officers, ‘Is Lee there?’ ‘He’s in that house.’ ‘Let’s go see him.’ [The two had exchanged letters April 8 and Lee knew it was over.]
So they met at McLean House for 90 minutes. I have an old print at home (next to my Nathan Bedford Forrest print) of the players at McLean House and George Armstrong Custer, one of Grant’s division commanders, is in it, which makes for a good conversation piece. Custer and his men fought the Confederates in the last real battle the day before.
But I’m staring at the print and explanation they have at the McLean House and there’s no Custer! Hey, said I to the park ranger. ‘Sup wit dat?! [Actually, I used more formal language; just trying to keep my younger readers interested.]
“We’ve learned Custer wasn’t there.”
“Well what do I do with my print…airbrush him out like one of the Soviet-era photos where someone was there one day, and gone the next?!” [Feigning exasperation.]
Anyway, Lee surrendered his last 9,000 troops and there is a great spot about a ½-mile up the road where you can see where 18 of the last 100 Confederates killed during the final 2 days of fighting around Appomattox are laid to rest. There is also the grave of an unidentified Union soldier, discovered long after.
Of the Confederate dead, the identities of seven of the 18 are known and one was Jesse Hutchins of Alabama. Imagine him…enlisted 3 days after the firing on Ft. Sumter, only to die in the final 24 hours of the war, April 8, 1865. He served in virtually every major battle in the East, including Seven Pines, second battle of Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor and Petersburg. I took a photo of his gravesite that’s pretty cool.
One other item. After the surrender, when Robert E. Lee mounted his horse, Traveler, and rode back to give his starving men the terms, the Union officers lined up and saluted him in silence.
Grant famously allowed the Confederate soldiers to keep their side arms, private horses and baggage in a magnanimous gesture to help them get their lives back together when they returned to their devastated homes. “Each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by United States authority,” the surrender terms read in part. The soldiers were grateful they had been paroled, not imprisoned.
By the way, there is no single document with both Grant’s and Lee’s signature because the surrender was an exchange of letters between the two. [In case you were rummaging in the attic and thought you found such a document. “Hey, Mabel…look what I found!” “You idiot, that’s pitchers Bill Lee and Mudcat Grant.”]
At the new Museum of the Confederacy, near Appomattox, they just received Robert E. Lee’s sword that he was carrying when he surrendered. It’s a good museum, but I have to note a bit they had on one Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia “fire-eater” who fired the cannon signaling the beginning of the bombardment of Ft. Sumter.
“And now, with my latest writing & utterance, & with what will be near to my last breath, I here repeat & would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred of Yankee rule…”
He would write one more note, put a rifle barrel to his mouth and pulled the trigger. Geezuz, the North’s not that bad! It’s generally about 5-10 degrees cooler in the summer, after all.
Back to Bobby Lee, it was in April 1861 that he said in taking charge of the Army of Northern Virginia:
“Save in defense of my native state, I never desire again to draw my sword.”
[On Tuesday, I also drove to the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va. Due to time constraints, I’ll save this story for around June 6. The memorial itself is only so-so, but the story about the town and its sacrifice on D-Day is why I went.]
Wednesday, I took in Lee Chapel, final resting place of Robert E. Lee on the campus of Washington & Lee, where he was president in the five years after the Civil War until his death on October 12, 1870. [Lee was stricken by a stroke on Sept. 28 and died of complications of pneumonia.] The funeral procession, Oct. 15, had Lee’s beloved horse, Traveler, riderless, walking behind the caisson. Lee would later be interred beneath the chapel.
Upon his death, the school renamed it Washington and Lee. The chapel is very impressive, as is the memorial, sculpted by Edward Valentine of Richmond, who hated the Yankees as much as yours truly, a Mets fan, does. Due to financial difficulties in building an addition to the chapel to house the giant marble figure, “The Recumbent Lee,” depicting the general sleeping on the battlefield, it wasn’t dedicated until 1883, with 10,000 filling the grounds of Lee’s Chapel and Julia Jackson, daughter of Stonewall, unveiling it, which is way cool.
Imagine Robert E. Lee as a school president. He interviewed each student and placed a premium on civility. The “single rule of conduct” that he initiated, based on truth, honor and courtesy, is the code used to this day at W&L.
As for Traveler, he is buried outside Lee’s Chapel. The great horse, born in 1857, died in 1871 and was first buried behind the University’s main buildings. But then the bones were dug up and sent to Rochester, N.Y., for bleaching and mounting in 1875 or 1876, but while the preservation plans went bad due to a poor bleaching job, the bones were then mounted in 1907 when a fellow from Richmond paid for them. The skeleton was then placed in a museum on the W&L campus, which led to a series of student pranks, some built on superstition, and then in 1929, moved to the new museum established in the basement of Lee Chapel (very neat one, by the way), where Traveler stood for 30 years, only to be stored out of view during a major Chapel restoration, and then finally, in 1971, Traveler was reinterred in a wooden box encased in concrete and buried just outside.
Finally, after Lee’s Chapel it was on to Gen. George C. Marshall’s museum, he being a VMI grad. This is an outstanding museum for its kind, and befitting one of America’s true giants, as in he has to be in any Top Ten list of Greatest Americans (your standard top 5 or 6 presidents, including Ike, Jonas Salk, George Marshall, Ben Franklin, and Tom Seaver…just edging out Edison and Einstein). Heck, all you need to know is that Marshall was the first professional soldier to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953. He was FDR’s indispensable right-hand man during WWII, and came up with the Marshall Plan (European Recovery Plan), first spelled out in a short address at Harvard on June 5, 1947…
“…a doctrine against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose shall be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”
Because Americans were going to be responsible for about $80 per head for the cost, $13 billion, it was a very tough sell in Congress but final passage was helped in no small measure by a February 1948 communist coup in Czechoslovakia.
There’s a display case at the museum containing all of Marshall’s medals…very impressive, to say the least…like the Croix de Guerre, the Legion of Honor, Order of Suvorov (Russia), Order of the Crown of Italy, Order of the Bath (UK), Congressional Gold Medal, and then off to the side, his Nobel Peace Prize gold medal.
So tonight I’ll toast Generals Bobby Lee and George Marshall…might require a premium or two.
Ball Bits
–Congratulations to Jamie Moyer! The Colorado Rockies hurler became the oldest in Major League history to win a game at 49 years 151 days in the Rockies’ 5-3 win over San Diego on Tuesday. Moyer allowed no earned runs in 7 innings, mixing his 78mph fastball with his cutter. He is now 268-206 in a 25-year career that began in 1986! [He sat out 1992, 2011].
The fellow whose record he bested, Jack Quinn, pitched from 1909-1933 for 8 teams, going 247-218. Quinn was actually born in Austria-Hungary and is buried in Pottsville, Pa., so if you’re in the neighborhood, stop and pay your respects. And while you’re in Pottsville, stop by the Yuengling Brewery! Make it a family affair.
“Daddy, where are we going?” “The Yuengling Brewery…then we’re all going to drink a Yuengling at Jack Quinn’s grave.” “Not again!!!”
–Article in the Washington Post on the Washington Nationals’ starting rotation. It’s the fastest in baseball in terms of bringing the heat…actually, the fastest since 2002.
Stephen Strasburg (95.1 avg. velocity); Edwin Jackson (93.8); Jordan Zimmerman (93.5); Gio Gonzalez (93.3); Ross Detwiler (91.4).
[The Nats are really going to have to rely on the starting staff because it appears they may lose slugger Michael Morse for at least another six weeks with a strained lat muscle. Last week, though, there was a fear he’d miss the entire season.]
—Albert Pujols had no home runs through his first 11 games as an Angel. Strong, very strong.
—Tim Lincecum is off to a rather dreadful start for the Giants with a 10.54 ERA in his three outings, giving up 5 or more earned runs in each one. He has already given up nine first-inning runs, or one more than he permitted in 33 starts last season. He’ll be fine, but I’m wondering how much he is thinking about the fact he turned down a five-year, $100 million contract extension from the Giants in the offseason.
[Meanwhile, Doc Halladay, in besting Lincecum, moves to 3-0. Can he go 32-0 with one no decision? Give me one more start and I’ll tell you.]
–Mark R. noted after my reference to Ralph Kiner the other day that when he worked at a large brokerage office in Pittsburgh, which had a ground floor office near Three Rivers Stadium, he heard a rumbling one day and saw some brokers seemed to be waving at someone outside and cheering through the glass. It was Ralph Kiner, walking on his way to the park to do a Mets broadcast, waving back. One said, “There goes the greatest hitter in Pirates history.” You’d get a few arguments from Clemente fans and such, but Ralph’s 10-year career is right up there.
–With the celebration of the 65th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, April 15, 1947, USA TODAY’s Bob Nightengale notes that “The African-American population in baseball this season has plummeted to 8.05%, less than half the 17.25% in 1959 when the Boston Red Sox became the last team to integrate their roster, 12 years after Robinson…”
Ten teams opened the year with no more than one African American on their roster, “and 25% of African Americans in the game are clustered on three teams – the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels and Los Angeles Dodgers.”
Foreign-born players make up 28.4% of opening-day rosters. In 2012, the Cubs’ Marlon Byrd is the only African-American major leaguer in Chicago.
At the same time, just 9% of fans attending an MLB game last season were African American.
Dodgers superstar Matt Kemp said: “We’re definitely aware what’s going on in MLB as far as African Americans. I’m trying to make baseball cool for African Americans and let African-American kids know that baseball can give you the same opportunities as football, basketball or any of the other sports. You get paid just as much, get to drive those nice cars and do all of that fun stuff that all the other NBA guys get to do. We’re just a little bit more low-key.”
Universities only offer 11.7 scholarships in baseball vs. 85 in football. There’s another huge reason.
–Shu, Pirates fan, went to the Diamondbacks-Bucs game in Phoenix on Tuesday and reports that a beer costs $10.50!!! Good gawd. I just bought a six-pack of Coors Light tall boys at the Kroger supermarket near my hotel for $6.00, not that this is really apples to apples.
–As expected, the starting five for the national title Kentucky Wildcats is opting for the NBA draft after announcing this in one of the those incredibly stupid press conferences with the coach there, in this case, John Calipari, as they all express their love for the school (like they even went to class or cracked a book). But for the record, freshmen Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Marquis Teague were joined by sophomores Terrence Jones and Doron Lamb. With the departure of these five, plus sixth-man senior Darius Miller and reserve Eloy Vargas, Kentucky thus loses 94% of its scoring and 93% of the rebounding. But then Calipari has another all-world recruiting class coming in.
–New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton has been told by the NFL that he cannot contact league or team officials at any point during his season-long suspension. Time to hit Bourbon Street instead, I’m guessing.
Houston at Detroit…12:30
Washington at Dallas…4:15
New England at Jets…8:20
When the heck are we going to eat (if you are used to a sit down dinner where the TV isn’t real convenient)?! These are potentially three great games in a row…including RG3 and the ‘Skins, and also assuming my Jets are still in it by then.
Anyway, I think I’m just going to tell the family now that we’ll have the turkey later that weekend.
Pssst…Jets at Buffalo on Sun. Dec. 30. I’m forecasting a major lake-effect snow event that day; potentially 26 inches. You need to plan ahead with this one as well.
Other games of note…the NFL opener, Wed. Sept. 5…Dallas at Giants. Sun., Sept. 9…Pittsburgh at Denver.
–Awesome Knick-Celtic game on Tuesday night. Carmelo Anthony with a triple double (35-12-10 assists); Paul Pierce with 43; Steve Novak 8-10 from downtown, 25 points off the bench; J.R. Smith, 25 points off the bench. Knicks win 118-110.
—Bobby Petrino’s ex-mistress quit Arkansas. The school said Jessica Dorrell would be paid $14,000 to settle “all matters between the parties.” Looks like Jessica could be Cartagena bound!!!
—Wesley Korir won the men’s Boston Marathon in the second-slowest time since 1985, owing to temperatures that hit 89! Korir was the 19th Kenyan to win in the last 22 years. Sharon Cherop from Kenya won the women’s event.
–You know who died? Dwayne Schintzius, former NBA center and Univ. of Florida star from 1987 to 1990. Schintzius, just 43, died of complications from a bone-marrow transplant that was part of his treatment for leukemia. He was the 24th overall selection in the 1990 draft by San Antonio.
–The other day when I noted I was at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, Phil W. wrote to say he was reminded that when the museum got a still (think moonshine) to be displayed as part of the history of the sport, it came in pieces and they didn’t know how to assemble it. So staff called Junior Johnson and he dutifully arrived to lend his expertise. Ya gotta love it.
I forgot to mention, though, that the locals are a bit surprised how little traffic the museum is getting. That’s too bad. If you’re into the sport, you just have to go. And parents, if you have a child interested in cars, take ‘em. Plus you have a Buffalo Wild Wings that is attached to the Hall, so just toss the kid inside the museum and plop yourself down at the bar and let the kid find you later.
–Doh! “The crystal football Alabama won for beating LSU in the BCS title game in January was shattered Monday when it was accidentally knocked off a display by the father of an unidentified current player. Athletic department spokesman Jeff Purinton said the school was in the process of replacing the Waterford Crystal trophy, valued at $30,000. Florida’s 2006 trophy was destroyed when it was accidentally knocked off a pedestal by a recruit in 2008.” [USA TODAY] No word on whether either offender will have their sentences commuted.
–On my very long drive up Interstates 77 and 81 from Charlotte to Lexington, compounded by the fact there was construction that virtually stopped traffic cold at times, I was leapfrogging two big trucks from Head Racing, which I’m not sure exactly who they are (a cursory Google search didn’t help), but on one of the rigs was the following:
God is Great
Beer is Good
People Are Crazy
By the way, we kept passing each other around the North Carolina-Virginia border, where I was warned it’s foggy at Foggy Mountain…and sure enough it was. What a gorgeous spot, though.
–So for the above drive to Lexington (and other long ones coming up), I brought some CDs and listened to Glen Campbell’s Greatest Hits, and then popped in some Aaron Copeland, it being America and all.
I mean to tell ya, Aaron is so overrated. “Fanfare for the Common Man” is alright, and his ‘Hoedown’ is good (and highly recognizable), but “Appalachian Spring” is interminable save for 27 awesome seconds near the end that you’d recognize as being the theme music for the old “CBS Reports.” So like I’m thinking, yoh, Copeland…what the hell did you do all day?
I did catch a local country station which right at noon played Dolly Parton’s rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then someone reads the Pledge of Allegiance. I’m assuming they do that every day. Kind of a neat touch. [If you think otherwise…no domestic for you tonight!]
Top 3 songs for the week 4/20/68: #1 “Honey” (Bobby Goldsboro) #2 “Young Girl” (The Union Gap featuring Gary Puckett) #3 “Cry Like A Baby” (The Box Tops)…and…#4 “Lady Madonna” (The Beatles) #5 “(Sweet Sweet Baby) Since You’ve Been Gone” (Aretha Franklin) #6 “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” (Otis Redding) #7 “The Ballad Of Bonnie and Clyde” (Georgie Fame) #8 “Dance To The Music” (Sly & The Family Stone) #9 “I Got The Feelin’” (James Brown) #10 “Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)” (Manfred Mann…so-so week, it being the 60s and all)
Detroit Tigers Quiz Answers: 1) 40 homers…Hank Greenberg (58 in 1938, 44 in 1946, 41 in 1940, 40 in 1937); Cecil Fielder (51 in 1990, 44 in 1991); Rocky Colavito (45 in 1961); Norm Cash (41 in 1961); Darrell Evans (40 in 1985). 2) 25 wins post-1930: Denny McLain (31 in 1968); Hal Newhouser (29 in 1944, 26 in 1946, 25 in 1945); Dizzy Trout (27 in 1944); Mickey Lolich (25 in 1971).
So you might be thinking, gee, with Newhouser and Trout winning 56 between them, that team must have steamrolled to the pennant, at least. Wrong. Newhouser and Trout combined to go 56-23, but the rest of the staff was 32-43. They finished second.
