I'd have to say Chris Carpenter is a pretty good (and bad for Jays' fans) story, especially if he wins the Cy Young.

The one that springs to mind for me was Dave Stieb's comeback in 1998 after a 5 year absence. If I recall correctly, his first game back was a relief appearance in Baltimore, and he picked up a win against Minnesota at the Dome.

Who says Jacob Brumfield's name was never good for anything?

First game back, at Baltimore. He pitched the ninth inning of a 13-6 game and gave up three hits. No runs, though.

First (and only) win, at home vs. Minny. He actually started this game, and it was probably his best start of '98: 5 IP, 7 H, 4 R.

Good memory.

Sniff sniff. I miss Dave Stieb. That was a fun year but frustrating as I kept hoping the Jays would just put him in the rotation and leave him there. He was very effective in the minors iirc and Texas tried to get him away from the Jays but the Jays decided to leave him in the long relief role/6th starter rather than let Texas use him.

Just checked Retrosheet and Stieb had just 3 starts, 2 on the road, after being called up June 18th (well, that was his first game played at least). The main 5 were Clemens (triple crown), Williams (mediocre but decent), Hentgen (stunk, but just 2 years from Cy), Carpenter (1st full season), Guzman (done by end of July) followed by Escobar (10 starts from August on after failing as closer but didn't allow more than 3 ER as a starter), Hanson (8 starts then let go, it looks like Stieb was called up to replace him), then Stieb (3) and Halladay (2).

Looking at that I can understand the Jays reasons for not putting Stieb in the rotation. Still doesn't change that I wished they did though.

Mick, I know that you-–like Magpie, Jordan, and a few others on Da Box-–care about language; so I hope you won’t be offended if I point out a misuse of the term “begs the question”. (Up here in Ontario, it’s regularly misused in the papers and on the airwaves--and it drives me nuts: willy, the masked crusader for lost causes). Anyway "begs the question" does not mean "prompts the question".

To “beg the question” is a technical term taken from Logic. Begging the question is the “fallacy of founding a conclusion on a basis that as much needs to be proved as the conclusion itself." (An example-- "That foxhunting is not cruel, since the fox enjoys the fun." Arguing in a circle.)

Best bet: just say “prompts the question”.

Sorry, I *have* to do this. My Gene of Tolerance is broken.

willy, as you'll see, I made the change, but really only because I don't want to be responsible for you cracking your skull on your keyboard in further frustration.

I've had this conversation before, and as a double major in English and Philosophy, know both sides by heart. The bottom line, though, is that "begging the question" is a technical term in a philosophy/logic venue only. Outside of that context, it could just as easily mean "begs that the quesetion be posed," which is what it meant above originally.

Essentially, using a phrase outside of one area where it means something specific in another area where it doesn't mean that thing can certainly irritate (that's an intentional word choice that in another context would be wrong!) people familiar with the former. Think about a baseball fan hearing back-to-back songs on the radio by the same band, then cringing -- for no real reason, given context -- when the deejay says "All right, that was a double play from The Outfield!"

Same thing here. But there's no reason to leave up a word or phrase that annoys someone, so I changed it.

Quite true, Willy, though very prescriptionist:). I wanted to find out more about this topic, so I did some research. Several different websites provide good information on this topic, including amongst others that I could find: World Wide Words.

I've paraphrased what I learned below and added my own conclusions.

Some dictionaries now include a definition of "beg the question" along the lines of "avoid the question" coming from the similarity of the logical fallacy to the process of evasion of the logical truth.

A few dictionaries and most common usage (as you pointed out) now defines this phrase as meaning to make one want to know. I think that this meaning actually makes a lot of sense and will therefore likely prevail over the "logical" meaning which besides being antiquated is actually based on a bad translation from the original Latin phrase. If it does prevail, as it already seems to be doing, then it will become acceptable usage despite the efforts of prescriptionist grammaticians.

I don't believe that all revisions to language must be accepted, but ones that enrich our language or simplify a complicated issue or enable people to express themselves more effectively than before should be embraced, not fought against. For this reason, Mick, I don't think you needed to worry about changing your wording, though I respect your reason for doing so.

The bottom line, though, is that "begging the question" is a technical term in a philosophy/logic venue only. Outside of that context, it could just as easily mean "begs that the quesetion be posed," which is what it meant above originally.

Thanks, Mick, for your civil reply. But *why* can the term "just as easily" mean something else? Who says so? And when did this take place? That seems altogether too loose to me. Since one of your majors was Philosophy, maybe you know Wittgenstein's remark, "The world we live in is the words we use." Sobering thought, isn't it? So if one is content to live in a world of imprecision, inaccuracy, or downright confusion, then all this doesn't matter. I'd rather not do so, to the extent that it can be avoided; and I invite you to let me know when I make slips. (I can hear the knives sharpening from here. Jerry is "homing" his, though, rather than "honing" it.)

Let's keep Da Box the most literate baseball site on the web.

Thanks, Tim. First, let me assure you that I'm not a "prescriptionist grammatician". (Phew!) But researching words on the web is a mug's game: you can find some site to justify just about any usage.

I think you're probably right about the specific meaning being displaced by the currently popular one. That's the way language develops. (I've never come across the meaning of "begs the question" as "avoid the question" though.)

Sorry you didn't cite the "bad translation from the original Latin phrase"--I don't follow you.

How do you feel about "speaks to"? Does that enrich the language?

Further to Wittgenstein's remark--Phil Dick, rather more ominously, wrote: 'The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.'

Seems new currencies of use tend to drive out old ones (see Gresham, Thomas)...consider a word like 'fulsome' which has reversed course at least twice.

'The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.' (Phil Dick)

Oooh, that's going on down south right now, isn't it? Well, whether one appreciates Wittgenstein's remark or Phil Dick's (who he?), the upshot seems to be that it's quite important to pay close attention to the meanings of words--so that we can tell when someone is trying to bullshit us, if for no other reason.

I don't know quite what Mr. Dick means by "manipulate reality" or "control the meaning of words" without more context, I'm afraid--arbitrarily change word's meanings to suit one's particular needs or desires? Hope not.

Wittgenstein's slider couldn't touch Dave Steib's anyway.

Sorry for the long digressions: the game will be on soon.

We definitely are going a little far afield here. Those not interested in linguistics will have to ignore our comments or read them bitterly hoping that there is something baseball related in them somewhere.

Willy, the comment about the bad translation from Latin refers to this quote from about half way down the article I cited:
"The fallacy was described by Aristotle in his book on logic in about 350BC. His Greek name for it was turned into Latin as petitio principii and then into English in 1581 as beg the question. Most of our problems arise because the person who translated it made a hash of it. The Latin might better be translated as “laying claim to the principle”."

Your claim that anyone can find support for any particular idea on the internet is quite true. I personally found this author to be quite believable, given that he claims to have written for the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of New Words. However, you are quite right that I am trusting him to be telling the truth rather than checking his credentials.

I would add that his definitions of newer uses of the phrase "begging the question" match the Collins Cobuild Dictionary which does not mention the logical fallacy but says after several other uses of beg:
" 5 If you say that something begs a particular question, you mean that it makes people want to ask that question; some people consider that this use is incorrect.
Hopewell's success begs the question: why aren't more companies doing the same?
PHRASE: V and N inflect

6 If you say that something begs a particular question, you mean that it assumes that the question has already been answered and so does not deal with it. (WRITTEN)
The research begs a number of questions.
PHRASE: V and N inflect"


The Collins Cobuild and the Oxford Dictionary of New Words
are both admittedly descriptionist dictionaries based on corpus analysis which looks at very large bodies of text (millions of words)to analyze actual current usage of words.
Since I am admittedly more of a descriptionist than a prescriptionist, I tend to lean more to accepting these alternative definitions as valid. Thus, I'm also fine with "speaks to".

As to Wittgenstein and Phil Dick (do you mean the SciFi author, Bid), I would agree strongly that our view of reality is coloured by the language we know. As we learn more of our language or languages, we are able to understand the world in ways we previously could not. I would use this fact to justify the acceptance of new ways of speaking that are better able to reveal the world's current reality. I imagine the prescriptionist would use this statement to say that words must be used as they were originally intended in order for people to see the world as it should be seen. I would say that this is a fairly limiting concept.

To bring this discussion back to baseball, one of the things that would be interesting would be a discussion/analysis of the effect language has on our understanding of the game. For the French, a slugger is a frappeur de puissance (not so different)and a knuckle ball is a balle papillon (butterfly ball), which I think is a beautiful and effective phrase. How does speaking French, or Spanish, or Japanese affect the
meaning of the game? Indeed, how have the changes in English in the last hundred years changed the way one sees the reality of baseball?

WHO IS PHIL DICK?

Oh my God, willy, I have to loan you about 30 novels and a couple of hundred short stories. I am a scary-obsessed Philip K. Dick fan. He's a massive influence on my fiction writing (unpublished and mostly unfinished, though something will be coming perhaps by Christmas if I can get my ass in gear).

Dick was ghettoized as a science fiction author. While much of his work is s-f, it's 'soft' s-f, with no science hanging around. He writes of dystopian futures in the most bleakly hilarious way. Often his stories and novels are adapted into bad action films (or good action films that bear little resemblance to the thoughtful originals) -- Blade Runner, Total Recall, Screamers, Paycheck.

Favourite PKD moment: in a world where everything is coin operated, Joe Chip's apartment won't let him leave because he doesn't have a dime to deposit in the door. He tries to reason with it, but it keeps repeating "ten cents, please". He tells it that the dime is a gratuity and not strictly required, but the door counters that all charges are laid out clearly in his homeowners policy. Finally, he takes a screwdriver and begins to remove the door's hinges.

"I'll sue you," said the door.

"I've never been sued by a door," said Joe, "but I think I could live through it."

What looks to be a fantastic (and faithful) adaptation of one of Dick's best novels, A Scanner Darkly, is coming this summer from Richard Linklatter. It's animated, which should help convey the hallucinatory world of the junkies who populate it.

Dick was obsessed with a number of things that crop up in virtually all of his novels: perception of reality (what's real, and how do you know that it's real); what defines a human being (not just the replicants of Blade Runner / Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but also the simulacrum of Abraham Lincoln from We Can Build You that becomes upset that it can be bought and sold as property); cold-hearted, destructive women; empathy and the lack of empathy; schizophrenia; death.

And the single best moment in a PKD short story for me is in the story where a man has accidentally turned his wife into a lizard and destroyed his home and generally wrecked his life by making wishes that have come true -- he tells his sob story to a robot driving a cab, to which the robot replies "Robots have worse troubles than anybody" before driving away.

How does speaking French, or Spanish, or Japanese affect the meaning of the game?

Apparently, the Japanese expression that means "bullpen catcher" literally translates as "he who serves the purpose of a wall", which I find outstandingly funny.

he who serves the purpose of a wall

Excellent example. Sure must make the bullpen catcher feel valuable!

I see you're quite the PKD connaisseur. I've read a couple of collections of his short stories, but wouldn't claim to know his body of work well. He is a very good writer. I enjoy his understated cynicism in describing the "benefits" of the modern world.

Oh, good, hermeneutics!

Let's give a word over to the great Zen master hisownself, H. Dumpty:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." -- Through the Looking-Glass

Phil Dick is, with all apologies to H. Dumpty and L. Carroll, one of the truly fantastic (in every sense of that term) wordsmiths who has ever lived. It's just a shame that mainstream North America thinks the bubblegum Ahnold flick "Total Recall," the monstrosity that was "Minority Report" and the bastardization of a changed-ending "Blade Runner" (let's not even discuss "Paycheck" -- Ben Affleck in a PKD movie? Um, no) represents his best work.

That'd be like forming an opinion on the Beatles by listening to your high school marching band crank out "Nowhere Man."

I was going to venture an opinion on some historically great comebacks, but I think I'll just back out slowly now and hope no one notices me.

(And yes, if you can get *me* to tiptoe away from an intellectual pissing match, it's a safe bet you've gone way over the line of the sublime, into the chocolate-coated land of the ridiculous).

No, Craig, please do! I still think it's an intersting question, we've just, ah, veered a bit off topic.

Dave Dravecky made a comeback from a broken arm. Successful in making it back, but ultimately unsuccessful.

Well, gentlemen, it's been swell. Never know what you might stir up on Da Box.

My sincere apologies to NFH et al for my ignorance of Phil Dick. I am old. I had a miss-spent youth. A more miss-spent adulthood (still misspending it.)

Thanks to Tim, Bid, and Mick for the exercise.

Take it away, Craig.

Likewise, thanks to all who participated in this "intellectual pissing match". Hard to believe you didn't want to join in, Craig! Hope we didn't derail the actual thread topic too much :)

Brett Butler and Andres Galarraga come to mind immediately as cancer survivors who came back to play, albeit neither as well as they did pre-diagnosis.

Rico Carty missed an entire season due to TB then came back and The Beeg Mon won a batting title.

Does Lou Brissie count? I don't know whether or not he made it into pro ball before his WWII injury or not -- he didn't make it to the majors until '47.

Well, willy, the good news is that PKD died in 1982, so you can catch up. Plus, the wrangling between his estate, his kids, his ex-wives, his agents and his former publishers has finally been definitively settled, so unlike my decade-long quest to read many of these books, you can buy 'em all at Chapters, even the complete short story collection that took me two years to track down.

That'd be like forming an opinion on the Beatles by listening to your high school marching band crank out "Nowhere Man."

Exactly! Now, the problem with PKD is that he wrote so much in so little time because he was poor and couldn't keep other jobs, so many of the short stories are terrible, and I'd say that only one in three of the novels is truly excellent, but there are just so many of them that there's a massive amount of good stuff. And as Vintage slowly puts his entire collection of novels back into print, I'm discovering that the ones that were the hardest to track down are also pretty much the worst ones. Example: The Unteleported Man / Lies Inc: Vintage printed the uncut, "final" version for the first time in North America last year, and it's really underwhelming. The expansion material isn't well integrated, and it's also boring. It had a couple of kickass PKD moments, but not enough to recommend a purchase.

Anyone who's interested in reading some PKD after all this, I suggest the last two volumes of the short story collection (called Eye Of The Sybil and The Minority Report in their current printings), and the following novels:

• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich: acknowledged by Wes Craven as his inspiration for A Nightmare On Elm Street -- trippy and scary.
• The Divine Invasion: easily his funniest work. Includes a gigantic Artificial Intelligence device called Big Noodle that runs the Earth, and a man in cryogenic freeze whose frozen dreams are constantly interrupted by a bad strings version of Fiddler On The Roof because an easy listening radio station's transmitter was built beside the facility where he's being kept in suspended animation. Oh, and the Second Coming. Part of a loose trilogy -- the other two books are VALIS (a tough but rewarding read, really heartbreaking) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which is his most human book.
• Game Players of Titan: straightforward s-f, or so it seems. Things get a little crazy, but it's mostly a fast-paced semi-actioner.
• Clans of the Alphane Moon: the main character's next door neighbor is a psychic slime mould named Lord Running Clam. He is unable to knock, so he oozes under the door to borrow a cup of sugar. Loopy.

Is Ryne Sandberg the best player who legitimately retired, then made a "real" comeback after a significant time away from the game? I guess there's no equivelant of a Jordan or a Lemieux (or even a Lafleur).

As for Sandberg, I still remember newly-appointed Cubs GM Ed Lynch doing a radio interview on the FAN in the fall of '94. Then-host Dan Shulman asked him about the possibility of a Sandberg comeback, and the question rendered him speechless for a moment. Seemingly impressed by the question, Lynch said he'd given dozens of interviews, and nobody had brought up that topic... I'm not sure where Shulman got the idea, but he did seem a bit prophetic when the un-retirement was announced a year later...

Total Recall was the great Arnold movie, probably because Paul Verhoeven (sp?) was in top form (think Starship Troopers, but lighter on the satire). Arnold rolled it right into the Governor's Mansion in Sacramento. He's got it all and he's done it all. Arguing with success is a bit like arguing with an umpire, it's futile.

Total Recall was a good action movie, but it can't hold a candle to the (radically different) short story. Much like Blade Runner -- it's cool until you read the book, then you're sad for the missed opportunity. Though PKD himself said that the script for Blade Runner would make a better movie than his book, which would have been a lot of sad people sitting around a table, talking.

David Cronenberg was attached to Total Recall at one point, and submitted a few scripts. Finally, the producers complained "You're giving us the Philip K. Dick version and we want Indiana Jones On Mars." I can't remember if he quit or they fired him.

Well, when I think of a writer discussing how language can be manipulated to limit what can be thought - Mr George Orwell, ladies and gentlemen.

I think Willy's fighting a losing battle, not that it's not worth fighting. Usage will always determine what a phrase means, and its origin will have little to do with it. Its original meaning always gets rubbed away, and new meanings grow over top of it. We make it up as we go, out of ignorance and convenience...

' How about Jose Rijo?

The Village Idiot himself, Ruben Sierra, has been surprisingly effective after his retirement/stiffish middle portion of his career.

Hey Gitz - remember Mike Norris?

I do remember Mike Norris. And, for that matter, the rest of that staff: Steve McCatty, Rick Langford, and Matt Keough. In case we've forgotten just how radically baseball has changed, here are some numbers, from 1980, to go with the names:

Norris: 24
McCatty: 11
Langford: 28
Keough: 24

This is pretty easy, so I won't even award a no-prize to whoever figures out the "mystery" statistic.

Complete games, surely. Among the many things that have changed is Billy Martin is gone.<p>

I brought up Mike Norris because I remember him making a comeback almost 10 years later, and actually pitching rather well for about half a season.