Livingston: The Indians’ Tyler Naquin and timelessness
From Bill Livingston at the Cleveland Plain Dealer on August 22, 2016:
Some baseball games seem endless, which is why rule changes to speed up the game might be in the works.
The eternal appeal of the game, however, is that it can also seem timeless. A moment in the ninth inning at Progressive Field on Friday night can take us on a time trip, back-back-back to when streetcars and trolleys threaded their way through downtown streets and sufragettes marched for the right to vote, when Woodrow Wilson was in the White House and Kaiser Bill was the enemy in “The War to End War.”
Specifically, rookie Tyler Naquin’s game-winning inside-the-park home run against the Toronto Blue Jays set the Wayback Machine for August 13, 1916, the afternoon of the unlikely charge around the Dunn Field bases of Robert Frank Roth, a.k.a., “Braggo” because of his heightened sense of his own ability, against the St. Louis Browns. Well-traveled in baseball circles because of his irritating arrogance, he was also known as “The Globetrotter.”
Read the full article here: http://www.cleveland.com/livingston/index.ssf/2016/08/cleveland_indians_tyler_naquin.html
- Related link: Read the SABR biography of Braggo Roth, by Dan Holmes
Originally published: August 22, 2016. Last Updated: August 22, 2016.