Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Being a savvy urban mover, one of my favorite games is to keep an eye out for people on the inbound B line who look like they’re not paying close attention once the train gets to Park Street. When the train finally stops, I rush out onto the platform and I turn around to look at these absent-minded folks, sitting there, minding their own business in a completely empty, unmoving train. The window is like a big TV. Then either the driver will yell over the PA system that the train has been taken out of service, or a conscientious fellow passenger will remind them of such. Either way, these folks all shoot up out of their seats with the same sheepish and confused look. That I’m not that conscientious passenger used to bother me, but now it doesn’t. It’s a fun game.

The always delightful Joe Posnanski has a column up about what he calls the Hall of Not Famous Enough: guys who put up numbers in line with the average Hall of Fame player, but who garnered little to no HOF consideration. Read it, because it’s good, but I’m going to pull out a bit of Timmy bait:

[Jim] Rice is obviously the key here. There are 38 non-active outfielders with a 41.5 WAR who are currently not in the Hall of Fame. And while some of them have drawn some cause celebre consideration (Tony Oliva, Minnie Minoso), most have not (Cesar Cedeno, Ellis Burks, Augie Galan, etc.).

Jim Rice is a former Boston Red Socks outfielder who played from 1974 to 1989, and was inducted in the Baseball Hall of Fame in his final year of eligibility, 2009. WAR, of course, being Wins Above Replacement, an advanced metric that calculates how many wins a player adds to his team compared to a AAA callup–quality player. It’s a popular stat, because it takes into account a player’s offensive and defensive contributions, and relates them to the most important stat of all: wins. When Mr. Posnanski writes that Rice has a 41.5 career WAR, what he’s saying is that over the course of Rice’s career, the Red Socks won 41 and a half more games than they would have if a guy like Joe Shlabotnik were playing his position. That’s a not insignificant number of games! There’s hundreds of guys in the league right now that would love to end their careers with a 41.5 WAR.

None of those guys have any illusions about getting into the Hall of Fame, either.

Here’s a quick sampling of some Hall of Fame outfielders you may know, and their career WAR, according to Baseball-Reference.

Stan Musial: 127.8
Willie Stargell: 57.5
Kirby Puckett: 44.8
Dave Winfield: 59.7
Babe Ruth: 172
Carl Yazstremski: 88.7

I don’t know who among Hall of Famers has the lowest WAR or the highest (although I can’t imagine anyone beating 172). I’m just trying to convey the range that’s out there, and it’s not an accident that I included Kirby Puckett, a fairly controversial HOF pick. Which brings us to Ellis Burks.

I pick out Burks because out of the guys mentioned in that Posnanski quote above, he’s the one I actually remember playing. You might, too. He bounced around the league a bit in his 18-year career, playing for the Socks, the Rockies, the Indians, and the Giants. Aside from a monster 1996 season when he led the league in runs, slugging, and total bases and finished third in MVP voting, Burks was a good but not great player. If he was on your team, you’d never think he was a waste of a lineup spot, but you’d also be pretty worried if he was your best hitter. In his first year of Hall of Fame eligibility, 2010, he received 2 votes, which means he won’t be on future ballots. Seems appropriate.

Except Ellis Burks finished his career with a 47.9 WAR, compared to Rice’s 41.5. Now, there’s all sorts of caveats about how WAR isn’t a perfect stat, and it’s not the be-all end-all of baseball statistics, and it’s also kind of arcane. Which is true! So let’s include some other more traditional stats. Burks had a higher on base percentage (.363 to .352), slugging percentage (.510 to .502), more stolen bases (181 to 58), and more runs scored (1253 to 1249), and he did it all in 882 less plate appearances. Jim Rice is a Hall of Famer, and he will be forever. Ellis Burks was deemed ineligible after one year on the ballot.

I’m not trying to hype up Ellis Burks because I think he’s so great. I don’t think he’s so great, and I think he doesn’t deserve to be in the Hall of Fame. Furthermore, I don’t think players that aren’t as good as Ellis Burks should be in the Hall of Fame, either. Here’s a fun thing. This is a group of older active players with a higher career WAR than Jim Rice.

Mike Cameron: 47.2
J.D. Drew: 47.2
Johnny Damon: 48.6
Bobby Abreu: 58.4
Andruw Jones: 60

Do any of those guys strike you as Hall of Famers? Damon, Abreu, and Jones are going to cause some sleepless nights for the voters when they become eligible. But Cameron and Drew? No way, right? I’m willing to admit that Rice was a better player than either of these guys, although Cameron has more stolen bases and Drew has a higher on base plus slugging. But just remember, five years after J.D. Drew and Mike Cameron retire, if things continue the way they’re going, they’ll have been responsible for more wins to their teams than Jim Rice was for his.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I hate the Red Socks, so I’m not going to kid around about my motivations here. The less Hall of Famers the Red Socks have, the better. However, comma, friends of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I’m more or less a supporter of a more inclusive Hall of Fame, so if guys like Jim Rice are Hall of Famers, great! But that means that guys like Keith Hernandez and Don Mattingly and Edgar Martinez and Larry Walker and Dale Murphy should be in too. Which is great too! But if you think the voters see it that way, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

I don’t know why Jim Rice is in the Hall of Fame. I never really cared about his career or looked into it that closely. I just assumed he deserved to be in and was just being punished by the voters for his reputation as a surly jerk. As the Official Roommate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, who’s lived in Boston just as long as me, put it, “By the time that 15th year rolled around, living in Boston, you’d have assumed it was Babe Ruth that was being snubbed.” But it wasn’t Babe Ruth being snubbed! It wasn’t even Ellis Burks!

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that Patriots’ Day is the best day of the year, by far. The Boston Marathon, partying in the streets, great weather, and a celebration of the start of our revolution against the hated British: it can’t be beat! Patriots’ Day is one of the best things about living in Boston. In celebration of this fact, listen to the Standells sing the anthem.

You can't tell, but those rays are blazing with heat.

So, like clockwork, the beginning of November rolls around, and we get our first day where it’s 34 degrees in the morning so you have no choice but to bundle up because even though you only live something like seven minutes from the T that’s still a LONG way when it’s wicked cold out, so you throw on a hoody underneath your normal fall coat and put a winter hat on and everything is well and good but the problem is by noon the temperature is back up to the mid-50s so you’re ludicrously attired for your commute home but you still put your hoody and wool cap on anyway because you’re not going to carry that stuff around and it’s kind of bearable outside but then you get on the train and the heat is on and you start sweating a little bit and your glasses get all foggy so you take the jacket and hoody and hat off but then in the 45 minutes that you’ve been on the train the temperature has dropped to closer to 40-something so it really might be a good idea to put the hoody and hat back on especially if it’s windy which of course you won’t know until it’s too late so just be careful and put the stuff back on. Don’t you hate that?

Sorry, gang. I got into a serious mood to clean up tonight, and I didn’t want to lose momentum. The bad news: the long post I wanted to write tonight didn’t get written. The good news: my desk is finally clean! Here are some cool/interesting things for you to look at.

# I’m always interested in stories by writers who bond with their families over Giants games, but as I was reading this one I sort of felt it was falling short. And yet by the end, I had managed to get a piece of dust in both my eyes. So I don’t know. Just judge for yourself.

# Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know about my staunch belief that parking is the hub on which the entire urban experience rests. Here’s another Times piece, this time about the perils of free parking. Expect more of this from your favorite blogger.

# Boston has a lot of squares. Would you believe that not all of them are square-shaped?

Listen to Will Dailey sing a song about my beloved former neighborhood.

This weekend, your favorite blogger attended the American Craft Beer Festival at the Seaport World Trade Center here in sunny Boston, Massachusetts. I’m a professional writer, but I’m struggling to come up with the words to describe the childlike joy that fills my heart every time I walk through those convention center doors and see 86 craft brewers pouring more than 400 different beers. It’s enough to make you believe that there just might be a providential force benevolently watching over us, dedicated to helping us achieve happiness in this existence.

Every year, I print out this master list of all the brewers and beers, and try to highlight the ones that I absolutely must try. For whatever reason, I completely forgot to do that this year, so I was flying blind. Every year, I also promise myself that I’ll take notes and blog about the experience, and every year I fail to get it done. Not this time! Using a streamlined, no-frills approach of using simple annotations on my handy Beer Fest guide, I was able to create a bare-bones record of my experience. I won’t lie: the tasting cup is tiny, but you can sip as many different beers as you want in three and a half hours, so my note taking um, suffered as the day progressed. But let’s take a walk through and see if I can’t tell you a little bit about my day and some of the excellent beers I tasted.

Stay pretty? Not a problem, postcard.

# The toast of last year’s fest was the relatively new Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project, a brewer based out of Cambridge (although they don’t have an actual brewery, so they’re not quite based anywhere). In fact, by the time I made it to their booth last year, they were all out of beer. This time around, I made sure I went to them first. I’ve had their Jack D’Or American saison before, so I tried the Fluffy White Rabbits, which is described as a “hoppy Belgian triple” (get it?) I scribbled down “light, hoppy, sweet,” but for the life of me, I can’t recall anything else about it. Chalk that up to it being the first beer I had. The good news is, I wouldn’t have bothered to write anything down if it sucked.

# The craft beer industry is the craft beer industry because none of these breweries can even touch the big guys like Anheuser Busch–InBev and MillerCoors. The Boston Beer Company, maker of Sam Adams, is the largest American-owned brewery, and they famously tout in ads how small (something like 1 percent?) their share of total beer sales in America. All this being said, there are still some big guns in the craft beer community: Brooklyn Brewery, San Diego’s Stone Brewing Company, Boston’s Harpoon Brewery, Delaware’s Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, Vermont’s Magic Hat Brewing Company, and California’s Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, to name a few.

These are breweries that, honestly, have nothing to prove. They’re the prime movers of the industry, and some of the most reliably innovative brewers out there. That said, some stood out and some lagged behind on Saturday. Brooklyn offered a virtuoso lineup of brews: I started off with a taste of the Brooklyn Summer, an English “light dinner ale” which, out of the tap, is my second favorite beer ever. I immediately got back into line to taste the Sorachi ale, a dry-hopped saison. (A saison, also know as farmhouse ale, is described by the good fellows at Beer Advocate as “a very complex style; many are very fruity in the aroma and flavor. Look for earthy yeast tones, mild to moderate tartness. Lots of spice and with a medium bitterness. They tend to be semi-dry with many only having touch of sweetness.”) This one failed to disappoint; if you know Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, you know I appreciated the extra touch of hops. I also had a sip of their Dark Matter, a brown ale aged in whiskey barrels. Just think this, with an actual whiskey aftertaste. Delish!

# Harpoon was a sponsor of the event, so they got a prime location with additional taps. Good, because if the Brooklyn Summer is my second favorite beer, then the Harpoon IPA is Numero Uno. (I rhapsodized about this nectar back when I thought I was leaving Boston forever.) This time around, I sampled their 100 Barrel Series offering, Pott’s Landbier, an easy, not-too-hoppy not-too-malty session lager that was vaguely reminiscent of another of Harpoon’s 100 Barrel beers, the kellerbier, a truly tasty style that for the life of me, I can never find anywhere.

# I was a little disappointed with Stone. These guys make notoriously hoppy (and delicious) beers liek Arrogant Bastard and Ruination. When I said up top that there are brewers that don’t have anything to prove, the corollary is that they can take some risks. And the corollary there is that some risks blow up in your face! Stone’s booth featured their cask-conditioned IPA, each dry-hopped with a different variety of hops—Centennial, Chinook, Amarillo, Nugget, and Columbus. It was an interesting experience, tasting how different types of hops affect the taste of a beer you’re already familiar with. However, not every type was a hit, and being cask-conditioned ales at a beer fest, the brews came out kind of tepid. Other people can disagree, but I find that my beer tastes better cold. It was sad, because looking at the Stone offerings in the guide, I was really looking forward to having my hair blown back. It was not.

# I’m not a great food/taste writer. I just have a hard time describing how things smell and taste. Things taste the way they taste. What do you want from me! I say all of this because I really liked the Shipyard Summer Ale, an American pal. But the best way I could describe it was that it had a feety, socky taste. In a good way! Anyone that’s ever eaten a piece of cheese knows what I’m talking about.

# Every time you go to one of these beer festivals, you run the risk of discovering a completely new style that you never knew you liked, but thereafter can’t live without. I got a taste for the aforementioned saison style at last year’s beer fest. This year, the honor went to a style that I had never even heard of: the black IPA. Apparently, in the beer community, there’s a bit of a controversy as to whether the black IPA represents a new style or simply a fad. (I’m apt to agree with the Idaho Statesman’s take.) The fact remains, though, that the stuff is tasty. I tried two types of black IPA on Saturday: one from Clown Shoes, which is actually contract-brewed out of Mercury Brewing in Ipswich, and one from Blue Hills Brewery in Canton. The virtue of the black IPA (or Cascadian Dark Ale, as a vocal faction of beer enthusiasts want to call it) is that it combines the malty taste of a stout, with the light body and hoppy character of an IPA. The Blue Hills iteration leaned in the IPA direction, while the Clown Shoes leaned toward the stout. Both were excellent. I’m very much looking forward to more examples of this delectable brew trickling eastward.

There’s a bunch more beers that I tried and loved, but this post is getting a little long. If there’s a demand for more insight, let me know in comments.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that this isn’t a “Let me tell you about what I did today” kind of blog. But let me tell you what I did yesterday.

It was an exceptionally pleasant day here in the Hub of the Universe, and since I had the day off for Great Friday, me and sweet, sweet Alice went out for a little ride. I took the bike path through the Southwest Corridor Park all the way down to the Arnold Arboretum. (Which, for all of my readers in Boston, is a treasure, and you should all visit.) Anyway, I hopped off for a bit to check out the scenery. I walked off the road and heard something scurry out of the gutter. I look down, only to see an effing SNAKE! A wild snake! In the middle of Boston! So I’m chasing this serpent through the grass, and I almost stepped on ANOTHER SNAKE! The place was awash with this scaly devils. My little guy eventually stopped near a tree, and I was able to snap this picture:

See? See?

It’s only a tiny little garter snake, but still! A snake, in the foreboding urban hellhole! How cool is that?

On another note, I wound up riding like, 19 miles through Roxbury and Jamaica Plain, and my legs were KILLING me. But it was fine, because I had the day off, and it was gorgeous out.

And it’s even more gorgeous today! I’m about to head out for some drinky-poos with my pals, but I thought I would pass this along. It’s the writers for the Morning News, talking about their favorite outdoor drinks. In that spirit, I suppose I’ll reminisce. The god’s honest truth is that I don’t really have a favorite outdoor drink: I find the idea that beautiful weather can be combined with alcohol to be one of the more miraculous concepts ever conceived, so I’m profoundly grateful for any mojito, pina colada, or Natty Ice. I do have some wonderful memories of liming it up with some cold Coronas, but if I had to choose a go-to outdoor bev, it would have to be a gin and tonic. And not one of those wimpy ones they give you at the club. I’m talking a pint glass, with like four ice cubes, and about six glugs (as in “glug-glug-glug-glug-glug-glug”) of Sapphire. Mm mm good. Feel free to leave your favorites in comments.

I’m not sure if y’all are familiar with hockey, but about a week and a half ago, the Boston Bruins’ Marc Savard was knocked out for the season by a cheap-shot, blindside elbow from the Pittsburgh Penguins’ Matt Cooke. It was a self-evidently dirty play. I’m not here to talk about that. I’m watching fans walking home from the Garden out my window as I write, after the Bruins’ first meeting with the Penguins since that savage hit. I don’t know what happened, and whatever did transpire is immaterial to my argument.

I’m here to talk about the palpable bloodlust among Bruins fans for the chance to get some revenge against Pittsburgh. This judgment is based on my completely unscientific reading of various website comments and Facebook status updates today, but considering Sports Illustrated’s hockey writer was lamenting the NHL’s lack of disciplinary action against Cooke, and I’ve been reading stories about this game on non-sports blogs, I think it’s safe to say that some type of retaliatory vengeance was on the mind of many Bruins fans today.

If you take a step back from your ingrained understanding of the game of hockey, it should be a little strange that we’re even having this discussion. After the hit on Savard, the outcry against Cooke was loud, sustained, sincere, and justified. Hockey is a physical game, but there’s no place for headshots like the one Savard suffered. But look where that’s gotten us: an expectation that somehow, the Bruins would retaliate. Would they go after Cooke? Would they go after Sidney Crosby, the Penguins’ star? Would retaliation take the form of a similar cheap hit, or a gloves-on-the-ice brawl?

Even that Farber column I linked to above, written before tonight’s game even took place, takes retaliation for granted: the NHL could have prevented the violence that will inevitably occur, but failed! Now the Bruins have no choice!

But of course they had a choice. Cycles of violence are called cycles of violence for a reason, whether they occur on the streets or on the ice. It’s the same principle. What would be the consequence of the Bruins collectively saying “We’re going to stop this. It was an unfortunate thing that happened to our star, but two wrongs don’t make a right.” Would other teams find them to be soft? Possibly, but what’s the consequence of THAT? More cheap shots? I doubt it, given that Cooke’s hit has put those types of hits on the NHL’s disciplinary radar. Generally rougher play? Fine. If it’s within the confines of the rules, I’m sure the Bruins are capable of defending themselves. I’m approaching this as a rational person, of course, and not as a hockey player, or a hardcore hockey fan. Assuming retaliation, though, is a very pernicious fact of NHL life.

And think of what that assumption entails. Bruins fans, and a good portion of the hockey world, booed Cooke lustily. And then what did they, certainly in some cases, cheer for, and in other cases tacitly accept? Some sort of similar hit against a Penguins player. It shouldn’t be hard for someone with self-awareness to realize the hypocrisy at work. As one of our great philosophers has reminded us this season, what if it were you hanging up on this wall? Hockey fans should know better.

Actually, this is a great idea NOT in action, but it should be!

Think of any generic bar you’ve ever been in, and think about the thought that went into designing it. If you’re a bar owner, you’re going to focus on the bar. You’re going to focus on the places where people are going to sit down and eat and drink. You’re going to focus on the dance floor, or the Big Buck Hunter Game, or the mechanical bull, or whatever. These are the things that make your bar what it is.

But in any physical space, there are forgotten areas. The corners. The spaces along the wall between tables. The surface underneath the bar. My question is, why aren’t these spaces filled with coat hooks?

This might not apply to my loyal readers in San Diego and Fort Lauderdale who can leave the house any day of the year in culottes and flip flops, but up here in the Cradle of Liberty, it gets COLD. In the winter half of the year, there’s no getting around going out to the club wearing your heaviest coat. There’s a fair number of places you come across that have a coat check, but in my experience, that’s less than half. So you get there, ready to hoist some brews or dance with some fly tinies, but before you can get down to business, you have to figure out a place to stash your coat. Which leads to an entire evening of anxiety, as you wonder whether Tommy from Saugus is going to pull what he thinks is his coat—it’s not his, it’s yours!—out of a huge amorphous blob of wool and nylon in the corner, and even if he does find his coat, he’s either spilled the rest of his gin and tonic on yours, if he hasn’t already knocked it onto the ground into a not-quite-yet-dried-up puddle of Bud Light because let’s be honest, you’re not out dancing at a place that’s particularly diligent about mopping up spills as the course of the evening progresses.

Do it next time you’re out. Go to the bar, look around, and count all the different places where there should be a place for one to hang one’s coat. There’s enough for everybody!