Joe Morgan

Joe Morgan has died.

Arguably the greatest second baseman in baseball history, Morgan was in the early and mid-1970s the best player on the Big Red Machine, which was one of the best teams ever. He was an outstanding player for several seasons both before and after his spectacular five-season 1972-1976 run, but in those years he played at a Mays-Mantle level, despite being only 5’7″ on a good day.

After his playing career he became a classic curmudgeonly announcer, and a hate object for the sabermetrics crowd as a result, which is like rain on your wedding day, given that sabermetic analysis helped highlight what a truly great player he had been (nobody paid any attention to the walk column before Bill James for example).

I heard the old, old men say,
“Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.”
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn trees
By the waters.
I heard the old, old men say,
“All that’s beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.”

Yeats, “The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water”