I still can't bring myself to use his stupid nickname.
77 thoughts on “October 14, 2013: Ortiz”
I took the opportunity to see Comet ISON this morning and dragged out my 8" Celestron for the first time in eons. Comet ISON, Mars, and Regulus were in a tight line with each other, but despite this configuration I was unable to see it from the convenient (yet unfortunately twilight & suburb lit) deck. Jupiter and Mars both looked nice, all things considered. Guess I'll have to wait along with everyone else for Comet ISON to be a naked eye object later in November.
Just think if Terry Ryan had handed Ortiz one of those "huge" contracts way back when.
Mo Vaughn with the Mets?
There's "huge" and then there's huge.
Way back when, nobody had any idea what Ortiz was going to become. Few Twins fans were particularly sad to see Ortiz go, and there was not exactly a big line of clubs trying to sign him.
Every team passed on him before he latched on with the Sawks.
I believe my thoughts were "I still have hope he can put everything together, but the Twins are making the right decision here. Good Luck to him on his new team, whoever that is."
and go Lecroy!
almost added that.
He also wouldn't have the benefit of the Green Monster. His last year in Minnesota in 2002, he had a road OPS of .864. His first year in Boston, his road OPS was .876. His 2002 OPS at the Metrodome was .808. His 2003 OPS at Fenway was 1.033. Also, Ortiz had a hard time staying healthy with the Twins and never played in more than 130 games for them. He was a good hitter, not great, and he couldn't stay healthy, so the Twins went a different direction with a guy that was viewed as a DH only.
Still, Twins were trying to coach him differently; his strength isn't exactly as a "hit it the other way" batter as it turns out
Actually, he became a superstar when he started to bang doubles off the wall at Fenway. That's a big myth that fans like to blame the Twins on.
While he actually has had more home run power in his career on the road, his doubles rate is significantly higher at home. On one hand, I like quirky baseball stadiums, and the idea of building a team around factors in your park can be fun. On the other, it makes many fans blind to how those stadiums can affect the stats.
Tris Speaker is the all-time doubles king, and he played the first half of his career in Boston, though the first four years was before Fenway was built. The first year of Fenway, Speaker led the league in doubles and hit over 150 there in four years before being traded to Cleveland. Splits aren't available for his years in Boston, but for his years in Dunn Field, his splits enormously favor Dunn Field, with a 150 point advantage in OPS and 130 more doubles over the rest of his career.
Ortiz' OPS+ (which considers ballpark factors) with the Twins: 108, with the Red Sox: 148.
In Ortiz' last three seasons as a Twin (his first three were, at best, parttime), he averaged 41 doubles per 162 games. As a member of the Red Sox, he's averaged 45 doubles per 162 games.
In those last three seasons as a Twin, Ortiz averaged 23 HRs per 162 games. As a member of the Red Sox, he's averaged 40 HRs per 162 games.
The big deal is not that he hits another double every forty games, it's that he hits the ball out of the park twice as often.
With the Twins, excluding his first year when he was first called up, he averaged 88 games per season. With the Red Sox, he has averaged 138 games. I think his inability to be in the lineup for the Twins had as much to do with his being released as anything else.
I won't disagree with that. Plus, the Twins wanted have a right handed DH. But, he was at 120 OPS+ his last year with the Twins. He had value. Fangraphs says he was worth $2.3 million that year, roughly double what the Red Sox paid him for the next season. He then exploded in value. Was it a different approach? Maybe, and he's said as much. It wasn't health at least at first, he only played three more games his first year than he did his last year with the Twins (that number did subsequently go up). Was it Vitamin S? Perhaps.
It was hard to expect that he'd be what he became, but the decision not to retain him was not a terrific one even if he'd stayed as he was.
Vitamin S probably plays a role at the margin.
Fangraphs only shows his data back to his last season with the Twins for some series. Things that stand out to me:
1) in 2002, he saw 54.5 pct of pitches inside the strike zone. Over 2002-2013, he's seen, on average, only 46.4 pct inside the zone.
2) in 2002, he made contact on only 35.8 pct of pitches swung at outside the zone; over 2002-2013, he's made contact with 56.7 percent of such pitches.
3) in 2002, he made contact on 81.7 pct of pitches swung at on pitches inside the zone; over 2002-2013, he's made contact on 86.4 pct of such pitches.
These data tell me (assuming 2002 was not anomalous for his time in Minnesota) that he got much, much better at making contact with the ball when he swung the bat. Which is pretty much opposite the narrative of Minnesota's coaches trying to get him to cut down on his swing and take the ball the other way.
I don't think Vitamin S has much proven ability to see the ball and hit the ball with higher probability. Maybe he did change his approach; maybe he just got a lot better at putting the ball in play (or out of play, as the case may be).
2002 is when BIS started tracking the data.
Maybe Vitamin S (and the complete switch to 100% DH) helped him stay on the field more to put up those numbers?
If anything the Twins wanted him to cut down on his swing because he had a 1.82 K/BB ratio and was striking out 20% of the time. With the Red Sox, Ortiz has a 1.26 K/BB rate and has struck out 17.3% of the time despite strikeout rates going up sharply in the league the last five or so years.
when Ortiz last suited up for the Twins, Bobby Keilty was the wave of the future.
If time is cyclical, does that mean Keilty will be the wave of the future again?
I don't expect him to show up when someone sounds the Horn of MichaelLewis.
Tarmon Gai’don is coming
Small sample size, but hired thug Matt Cooke for the Wild has ZERO penalty minutes and leads the team in points with five in five games.
I'd heard this somewhere and found myself wondering if he may have actually turned over a new leaf. I'll enjoy it while it lasts, but I'm not holding my breath.
Turning over a new leaf? I'm not a hockey expert, but I'm of the understanding that enforcers are guys who are instructed to fight by the team, that these guys dread the fights, and that they, you know, actually can play hockey, but not well enough to play on lines on a regular basis. They fight not because they are hotheads, but because that's what they have to do to draw a paycheck.
I'll be happy to be corrected, if I'm wrong about this.
Generally speaking, this is true. But there are some enforcers who make hard checks, fight, but generally stay within the rules. Boogard comes to mind. Some enforcers take cheap shots and play dirty. I can't speak to their motivations though.
Also, the thing with Cooke is he's not an enforcer, he's more of a winger who checks (only 5'11", 200#). His history is more of as an instigator/aggravator/pest - he gets you off your game by worrying about an unexpected hit, elbow here or there, and has a reputation (deserved) as a cheap shot artist.
They changed the checking rules as a result of one of his hits, and that's when he said he'd changed his ways to accommodate the new rules: check legally.
Also, he's a pretty decent winger - averaged 30 points per season over the past 5 years (including the shorted season last year).
oops, took too long to write my comment.
I don't think Corn is referring to fighting, but rather to the extracurricular cheap shots that Cooke has been known for (see his career-ending hit on Marc Savard from a few years ago).
I'm not sure that Cooke was ever an enforcer, in that his role isn't to drop the gloves and fight (21 fights in 14 seasons prior to this one). He's more of an agitator, the guy the other team's enforcers are supposed to keep in line.
Either way, he's played really well so far. The biggest worry is that he's already labelled a "repeat offender" by the NHL discipline office, so it only takes one incident for him to be sitting for a long time.
So, "hired thug" is something different than "enforcer".
Another year of commenting on hockey is completed.
Yeah, sorry, "hired thug" is not my term, just what I heard. Don't listen to me about hockey stuff.
The biggest worry is that he's already labelled a "repeat offender" by the NHL discipline office
Actually, he graduated. Shanaban would likely take Cooke's past into account re: potential suspension, but he hasn't been suspended for a long time now.
I don't know where to find this, but I think Cooke hasn't even had a regular season major penalty in a few years. I think he got five for checking from behind this summer against the Bruins, but that's the only one.
Speaking of - Wild v. Sabres tonight on NBC Sports. I think my Sabres fandom will be the longest lasting effect of my year in Buffalo.
That didn't turn out nearly as badly as I expected. I expected the loss, just a worse one.
It looks like the highlight of this season is going to be using McBain quotes
This was fun:
Pominville has now scored against all 30 NHL teams.
I'll be leaving town tomorrow morning and won't be back until sometime Friday afternoon. Given all the stuff going on Saturday and Sunday, I probably won't be around here much then, either. So, possibly there will be fall/winter baseball reports tomorrow, possibly not, but after that it'll probably be Monday before we get them back going again.
Posted for no reason other than I thought it was funny:
John Hayward @Doc_0
Breaking: Satan retires 666 as Number of the Beast, says 404 is better because "it captures where Hell is really at right now."
lols.
And i thought this was going to be a hockey comment at first.
say what you will, that man has some big, brass ones.
love the `tussin comment.
dare I mention that he overran the ball, and that it was very catchable?
Brass balls are heavier than regular balls and he simply forgot to compensate for the added momentum.
I noticed that, too.
EDIT: I'm not sure it was very catchable, but he overran it and mistimed his jump.
His glove was basically right next to the ball. Right altitude, wrong latitude.
I think Ortiz mentioned it somewhere that when he watched the replay he thought the ball moved away from Torii on the play, but it could have been him just being nice to his former teammate.
Words also can become unusable, paradoxically, through excessive usefulness—overuse. “Awesome” strikes me as an all but unusable word, except in irony, now that we live in a world in which you might plausibly hear an oatmeal cookie or a shoelace described as awesome. (“Awful,” né awe-full, went in an analogous direction but died in a different way.) Likewise, “amazing” and “totally.”
One of my old bosses referred to everything, and I mean everything, as awesome. He had about ten different ways that he said the word and he always (I really believe, subconsciously) conveyed his true feelings in how he said it. He never, ever used that word sarcastically, but man, hearing him say "That's awesome" in one of those very unconvincing tones was... awesome.
I loved the article and that passage in general as well. I remember having a teacher (not an English teacher, but a lover of language) going on about losing the power of the word "awesome" and I shrugged. Now I feel the same way - recently about the word "epic," once a favorite of mine that now has nearly no meaning. It was not epic when Nathan ate that six pack and a pound. It was just mildly amusing, and largely stupid.
I'm getting off the rails, but I also find myself amused when a person constantly uses a word either incorrectly or with the incorrect spelling. A girl I know added me on social media some years back and she was using "broohaha" as her nickname everywhere she went. She told me it was her favorite word, and I finally did tell her that she was spelling it incorrectly. DG was telling me about a professor of his who used the word "penultimate" over and over to mean "super-mega-ultimate." Days after he mentioned that to me, I was watching special features on Mad Men, and one of the writers did the same thing. I thought about writing her and letting her know, but I have to imagine one of her writer friends did so long before I saw the footage.
I'm glad I wasn't drinking coffee while reading your comments about "penultimate". That's totally amazing and awesome and epic.
I don't begrudge people for not grasping "penultimate" (since "ultimate" itself took on such a different meaning over time) but it still gets me every time.
The phrase that my supervisor, a word-snob, tweaks me about is "comprise/compose" as in "the whole comprises the parts." I've abandoned any attempt to come close to getting that one correct.
Your wife and father should be able to help you with comprise.
My father for sure, but my wife has a position where it's best not to write anything.
I love it.
If the biggest rally killer in the world is a home run, where does a bases-loaded double play rank? Second?
With a couple of exceptions, that's a lot of mediocre play at second base.
Yes, plus the Twins never seemed to appreciate solidly average second basemen. O-Dog was not re-signed after one season. Teufel was traded after two. Castillo also was traded after a couple seasons, but he was aging pretty quickly by then. Still not as bad as shortstop, however.
Wasn't the issue with Hudson his personality more than anything?
he didn't fit into the twins "mold", so naturally he had to go.
if "didn't fit into the Twins' mold" means "never shut up" then yes
which explains why ii spent so long in Minnesota....
Maybe ii is the reason behind the "Twin's mold"...
I think you may have undervalued John Castino. His tenure at second was brief, but he had a 4.4 rWAR season in 1983 starting 132 games at second. He was one of the best defensive 2Bs in club history, albeit in only 232 games at the position. Injuries robbed him and the Twins of what could have been a much longer, productive career.
Spam has proven to be a significant problem for NSA — clogging databases with data that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”
In fall 2011, according to an NSA presentation, the Yahoo account of an Iranian target was “hacked by an unknown actor,” who used it to send spam. The Iranian had “a number of Yahoo groups in his/her contact list, some with many hundreds or thousands of members.”
The cascading effects of repeated spam messages, compounded by the automatic addition of the Iranian’s contacts to other people’s address books, led to a massive spike in the volume of traffic collected by the Australian intelligence service on the NSA’s behalf.
After nine days of data-bombing, the Iranian’s contact book and contact books for several people within it were “emergency detasked.”
Sad news: major league umpire Wally Bell has died of a heart attack at age 48.
as has been mentioned by others are around the web: you never really heard much about him before, which meant he was quite good at his job.
CJ Nitkowski @CJNitkowski
I said pre game Ryu was going to struggle and get hit around early. #NailedIt #EmmyAwardWinningAnalysis
I took the opportunity to see Comet ISON this morning and dragged out my 8" Celestron for the first time in eons. Comet ISON, Mars, and Regulus were in a tight line with each other, but despite this configuration I was unable to see it from the convenient (yet unfortunately twilight & suburb lit) deck. Jupiter and Mars both looked nice, all things considered. Guess I'll have to wait along with everyone else for Comet ISON to be a naked eye object later in November.
Just think if Terry Ryan had handed Ortiz one of those "huge" contracts way back when.
Mo Vaughn with the Mets?
There's "huge" and then there's huge.
Way back when, nobody had any idea what Ortiz was going to become. Few Twins fans were particularly sad to see Ortiz go, and there was not exactly a big line of clubs trying to sign him.
Every team passed on him before he latched on with the Sawks.
I believe my thoughts were "I still have hope he can put everything together, but the Twins are making the right decision here. Good Luck to him on his new team, whoever that is."
and go Lecroy!
almost added that.
He also wouldn't have the benefit of the Green Monster. His last year in Minnesota in 2002, he had a road OPS of .864. His first year in Boston, his road OPS was .876. His 2002 OPS at the Metrodome was .808. His 2003 OPS at Fenway was 1.033. Also, Ortiz had a hard time staying healthy with the Twins and never played in more than 130 games for them. He was a good hitter, not great, and he couldn't stay healthy, so the Twins went a different direction with a guy that was viewed as a DH only.
Still, Twins were trying to coach him differently; his strength isn't exactly as a "hit it the other way" batter as it turns out
Actually, he became a superstar when he started to bang doubles off the wall at Fenway. That's a big myth that fans like to blame the Twins on.
While he actually has had more home run power in his career on the road, his doubles rate is significantly higher at home. On one hand, I like quirky baseball stadiums, and the idea of building a team around factors in your park can be fun. On the other, it makes many fans blind to how those stadiums can affect the stats.
Tris Speaker is the all-time doubles king, and he played the first half of his career in Boston, though the first four years was before Fenway was built. The first year of Fenway, Speaker led the league in doubles and hit over 150 there in four years before being traded to Cleveland. Splits aren't available for his years in Boston, but for his years in Dunn Field, his splits enormously favor Dunn Field, with a 150 point advantage in OPS and 130 more doubles over the rest of his career.
Ortiz' OPS+ (which considers ballpark factors) with the Twins: 108, with the Red Sox: 148.
In Ortiz' last three seasons as a Twin (his first three were, at best, parttime), he averaged 41 doubles per 162 games. As a member of the Red Sox, he's averaged 45 doubles per 162 games.
In those last three seasons as a Twin, Ortiz averaged 23 HRs per 162 games. As a member of the Red Sox, he's averaged 40 HRs per 162 games.
The big deal is not that he hits another double every forty games, it's that he hits the ball out of the park twice as often.
With the Twins, excluding his first year when he was first called up, he averaged 88 games per season. With the Red Sox, he has averaged 138 games. I think his inability to be in the lineup for the Twins had as much to do with his being released as anything else.
I won't disagree with that. Plus, the Twins wanted have a right handed DH. But, he was at 120 OPS+ his last year with the Twins. He had value. Fangraphs says he was worth $2.3 million that year, roughly double what the Red Sox paid him for the next season. He then exploded in value. Was it a different approach? Maybe, and he's said as much. It wasn't health at least at first, he only played three more games his first year than he did his last year with the Twins (that number did subsequently go up). Was it Vitamin S? Perhaps.
It was hard to expect that he'd be what he became, but the decision not to retain him was not a terrific one even if he'd stayed as he was.
Vitamin S probably plays a role at the margin.
Fangraphs only shows his data back to his last season with the Twins for some series. Things that stand out to me:
1) in 2002, he saw 54.5 pct of pitches inside the strike zone. Over 2002-2013, he's seen, on average, only 46.4 pct inside the zone.
2) in 2002, he made contact on only 35.8 pct of pitches swung at outside the zone; over 2002-2013, he's made contact with 56.7 percent of such pitches.
3) in 2002, he made contact on 81.7 pct of pitches swung at on pitches inside the zone; over 2002-2013, he's made contact on 86.4 pct of such pitches.
These data tell me (assuming 2002 was not anomalous for his time in Minnesota) that he got much, much better at making contact with the ball when he swung the bat. Which is pretty much opposite the narrative of Minnesota's coaches trying to get him to cut down on his swing and take the ball the other way.
I don't think Vitamin S has much proven ability to see the ball and hit the ball with higher probability. Maybe he did change his approach; maybe he just got a lot better at putting the ball in play (or out of play, as the case may be).
2002 is when BIS started tracking the data.
Maybe Vitamin S (and the complete switch to 100% DH) helped him stay on the field more to put up those numbers?
If anything the Twins wanted him to cut down on his swing because he had a 1.82 K/BB ratio and was striking out 20% of the time. With the Red Sox, Ortiz has a 1.26 K/BB rate and has struck out 17.3% of the time despite strikeout rates going up sharply in the league the last five or so years.
when Ortiz last suited up for the Twins, Bobby Keilty was the wave of the future.
If time is cyclical, does that mean Keilty will be the wave of the future again?
I don't expect him to show up when someone sounds the Horn of MichaelLewis.
Tarmon Gai’don is coming
Small sample size, but hired thug Matt Cooke for the Wild has ZERO penalty minutes and leads the team in points with five in five games.
I'd heard this somewhere and found myself wondering if he may have actually turned over a new leaf. I'll enjoy it while it lasts, but I'm not holding my breath.
Turning over a new leaf? I'm not a hockey expert, but I'm of the understanding that enforcers are guys who are instructed to fight by the team, that these guys dread the fights, and that they, you know, actually can play hockey, but not well enough to play on lines on a regular basis. They fight not because they are hotheads, but because that's what they have to do to draw a paycheck.
I'll be happy to be corrected, if I'm wrong about this.
Generally speaking, this is true. But there are some enforcers who make hard checks, fight, but generally stay within the rules. Boogard comes to mind. Some enforcers take cheap shots and play dirty. I can't speak to their motivations though.
Also, the thing with Cooke is he's not an enforcer, he's more of a winger who checks (only 5'11", 200#). His history is more of as an instigator/aggravator/pest - he gets you off your game by worrying about an unexpected hit, elbow here or there, and has a reputation (deserved) as a cheap shot artist.
They changed the checking rules as a result of one of his hits, and that's when he said he'd changed his ways to accommodate the new rules: check legally.
Also, he's a pretty decent winger - averaged 30 points per season over the past 5 years (including the shorted season last year).
oops, took too long to write my comment.
I don't think Corn is referring to fighting, but rather to the extracurricular cheap shots that Cooke has been known for (see his career-ending hit on Marc Savard from a few years ago).
I'm not sure that Cooke was ever an enforcer, in that his role isn't to drop the gloves and fight (21 fights in 14 seasons prior to this one). He's more of an agitator, the guy the other team's enforcers are supposed to keep in line.
Either way, he's played really well so far. The biggest worry is that he's already labelled a "repeat offender" by the NHL discipline office, so it only takes one incident for him to be sitting for a long time.
So, "hired thug" is something different than "enforcer".
Another year of commenting on hockey is completed.
Yeah, sorry, "hired thug" is not my term, just what I heard. Don't listen to me about hockey stuff.
The biggest worry is that he's already labelled a "repeat offender" by the NHL discipline office
Actually, he graduated. Shanaban would likely take Cooke's past into account re: potential suspension, but he hasn't been suspended for a long time now.
http://espn.go.com/blog/nhl/post/_/id/22099/penguins-matt-cooke-has-a-clean-slate
I don't know where to find this, but I think Cooke hasn't even had a regular season major penalty in a few years. I think he got five for checking from behind this summer against the Bruins, but that's the only one.
Speaking of - Wild v. Sabres tonight on NBC Sports. I think my Sabres fandom will be the longest lasting effect of my year in Buffalo.
That didn't turn out nearly as badly as I expected. I expected the loss, just a worse one.
It looks like the highlight of this season is going to be using McBain quotes
This was fun:
I'll be leaving town tomorrow morning and won't be back until sometime Friday afternoon. Given all the stuff going on Saturday and Sunday, I probably won't be around here much then, either. So, possibly there will be fall/winter baseball reports tomorrow, possibly not, but after that it'll probably be Monday before we get them back going again.
Posted for no reason other than I thought it was funny:
lols.
And i thought this was going to be a hockey comment at first.
404's - That's what I'm talking about!
my worldview is shattered.
Added to the Help/FAQ menu in the header - Embedding YouTube Videos
it's noted in the features section, but probably couldn't hurt to make it more prominent.
Yeah, but yours isn't detailed enough. Its completely missing Mag's last step.
And a completely necessary step it is.
I'd die on the field.
say what you will, that man has some big, brass ones.
love the `tussin comment.
dare I mention that he overran the ball, and that it was very catchable?
Brass balls are heavier than regular balls and he simply forgot to compensate for the added momentum.
I noticed that, too.
EDIT: I'm not sure it was very catchable, but he overran it and mistimed his jump.
His glove was basically right next to the ball. Right altitude, wrong latitude.
I think Ortiz mentioned it somewhere that when he watched the replay he thought the ball moved away from Torii on the play, but it could have been him just being nice to his former teammate.
Unusable words. Jejune does not make the cut.
One of my old bosses referred to everything, and I mean everything, as awesome. He had about ten different ways that he said the word and he always (I really believe, subconsciously) conveyed his true feelings in how he said it. He never, ever used that word sarcastically, but man, hearing him say "That's awesome" in one of those very unconvincing tones was... awesome.
I loved the article and that passage in general as well. I remember having a teacher (not an English teacher, but a lover of language) going on about losing the power of the word "awesome" and I shrugged. Now I feel the same way - recently about the word "epic," once a favorite of mine that now has nearly no meaning. It was not epic when Nathan ate that six pack and a pound. It was just mildly amusing, and largely stupid.
I'm getting off the rails, but I also find myself amused when a person constantly uses a word either incorrectly or with the incorrect spelling. A girl I know added me on social media some years back and she was using "broohaha" as her nickname everywhere she went. She told me it was her favorite word, and I finally did tell her that she was spelling it incorrectly. DG was telling me about a professor of his who used the word "penultimate" over and over to mean "super-mega-ultimate." Days after he mentioned that to me, I was watching special features on Mad Men, and one of the writers did the same thing. I thought about writing her and letting her know, but I have to imagine one of her writer friends did so long before I saw the footage.
I'm glad I wasn't drinking coffee while reading your comments about "penultimate". That's totally amazing and awesome and epic.
I don't begrudge people for not grasping "penultimate" (since "ultimate" itself took on such a different meaning over time) but it still gets me every time.
The phrase that my supervisor, a word-snob, tweaks me about is "comprise/compose" as in "the whole comprises the parts." I've abandoned any attempt to come close to getting that one correct.
Your wife and father should be able to help you with comprise.
My father for sure, but my wife has a position where it's best not to write anything.
I love it.
Minnesota Twins' Best Second Basemen in Team History
The surprising thing when researching this was how close Dozier is to being No. 3. Of course, he has a long ways to being No. 2.
With a couple of exceptions, that's a lot of mediocre play at second base.
Yes, plus the Twins never seemed to appreciate solidly average second basemen. O-Dog was not re-signed after one season. Teufel was traded after two. Castillo also was traded after a couple seasons, but he was aging pretty quickly by then. Still not as bad as shortstop, however.
Wasn't the issue with Hudson his personality more than anything?
he didn't fit into the twins "mold", so naturally he had to go.
if "didn't fit into the Twins' mold" means "never shut up" then yes
which explains why ii spent so long in Minnesota....
Maybe ii is the reason behind the "Twin's mold"...
I think you may have undervalued John Castino. His tenure at second was brief, but he had a 4.4 rWAR season in 1983 starting 132 games at second. He was one of the best defensive 2Bs in club history, albeit in only 232 games at the position. Injuries robbed him and the Twins of what could have been a much longer, productive career.
mmm, spies love SPAM.
Sad news: major league umpire Wally Bell has died of a heart attack at age 48.
as has been mentioned by others are around the web: you never really heard much about him before, which meant he was quite good at his job.