Duane Kuiper to be on next Poscast

Ken Tremendous, Bill James, and now Duane Kuiper. Joe Posnanski is a god among sportswriters.

Along with that announcement, there is also an excellent article that gives a cogent argument with which I agree entirely. It also manages to combine two of my favorite things: baseball and Robert Caro.

about 1 year ago El Person 8 comments 0 recs |

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I believe kuiper was one of his favorite players growing up….I thought I read that somewhere.

by Sabean_Is_Iago on Apr 13, 2011 10:05 PM PDT reply actions

It’s true.

by Natto on Apr 13, 2011 10:35 PM PDT up reply actions

here

from Joe Pos:

I remember the first time I told Bill James that Duane Kuiper was my favorite player growing up. He was amused by this, and he immediate pulled out his new Baseball Abstract and looked in the index to find what he had said about Kuiper. He found my man listed in two places:
Page 555: In the Buddy Bell section (Buddy, another hero, ranked as the 19th-best third baseman ever), Bill pointed out that Buddy was the worst-ever percentage base-stealer (55 for 134, an abysmal 41 percent). And Duane Kuiper was second-worst (52 for 123).
Page 690: Duane had a quote about Rico Carty (59th-ranked left fielder) in Terry Pluto’s Curse of Rocky Colavito. The quote: “Rico always played with his wallet in his back pocket. He didn’t trust the valuables box in the dressing room. … besides, he never slid, so it wasn’t like something would happen.”
Bill seemed just a touch sheepish about my favorite all-time baseball player getting only two rather haphazard mentions in his book, but more than that he had trouble understanding why Duane Kuiper was my favorite player in the first place. Bill’s favorite players — like Amos Otis and Craig Biggio — always seemed so logical for him. Otis was the perfect Bill James player: Underrated, independent, brilliant at all parts of the game, unyielding, misunderstood. And Biggio was the perfect Bill James player: Underrated, brilliant at all parts of the game, beautiful to the discerning eye.
But Duane … I never held any illusions that Duane Kuiper was somehow unappreciated. He was probably appreciated fairly. I never argued that he was better that anyone thought. Even though I wanted to be just like him, I never thought he was as good as Joe Morgan or Willie Randolph or Frank White or Lou Whitaker … He was my favorite player because he was my favorite player. That’s all. It came from someplace deeper than logic. As the short kid with thick glasses growing up in Cleveland, I was not blinded to his weaknesses or my own. We both were doing the best that we could.

Thing A

"Correlation between inability to use the reply button and general crappiness of analysis: pretty high." -Sleepy Freud

by sam23 on Apr 15, 2011 10:05 PM PDT up reply actions