Wednesday, February 4, 2009

#16T Vance Law



CARD

This set has a lot of rubber-looking bats, including Law's. Any photographer know why? I'm assuming that it has to do with the speed of the film, and therefore how long the shutter needed to be left open in order to get the right amount of light. Topps' photos of the time didn't look like this--bats in motion were always crisp.

Notice too that the ball is passing right along the bottom edge of the photo. Looks like it's going to be a swing-and-a-miss for Vance.

STAT

What I wrote above got me curious to see how much Vance struck out. Here are all the players since 1901 with 600 to 610 career strikeouts. The list includes two active players. Law's total of 4298 PAs is pretty much in the middle in terms of career PAs to achieve such a a strikeout total. It's tough to say much more than that since this list would really needed to be corrected for average strikeout rates across different eras to make sense. But you can compare Law just to his contemporaries on the list: Boone, Doran, Kemp, Brookens, and Bernazard to see that his strikeout totals weren't particularly noteworthy.

CAREER

Law actually pitched in 7 games, probably among the leaders in the last 40 years for guy who really were not pitchers at all. One guy, Bill Almon, faced him twice, in two different games!

I don't have much else to say about Law's career...

1 comment:

  1. When I was a kid, Vance Law was one of the few players that I thought looked like a nerd. In hindsight of course, I'm sure he was/is a lot cooler than I am, whatever that means.

    ReplyDelete