Name Shame

Cecil Fielder doing what he does best: Hitting a home run.

A designated-hitter dynasty: Were the Fielders good fielders?

As a kid, I remember that the best baseball player I knew of was great at hitting home runs … and not much else.

His name is Cecil Fielder, and he was basically the first player in more than a decade to hit 50 home runs in a single season, a mark that eventually opened the floodgates for years of home-run races (and yes, doping scandals). Fielder’s performance for the Detroit Tigers during the early 1990s was frequently in conversation for the AL MVP, getting close but never quite clinching it. Problem was, the Detroit Tigers weren’t a particularly good team back then, even if Fielder himself was an electric player.

But Cecil Fielder, who was notably a fairly big guy for a baseball star, had a problem, and it’s one that is laid out cleanly on his Wikipedia page:

Fielder also had a reputation as a below-average fielder, mostly caused by his poor speed and range.

This, my friends, is a great example of nominative antideterminism. Often, we draw attention to people whose name more of less lived up to their lives.

See that smile on his face? That’s the look of a man who never thought he would steal a base.

But Fielder, who was always a better slugger than a runner (he infamously only stole two bases in his entire 13-year career), did not excel at the very thing his name suggested he would. This most assuredly explains why he was regularly used as a designated hitter.

A surprising number of “Prince Fielder error” videos on YouTube, but to be fair, most of us would probably not love our errors getting shared with the world. Just ask a journalist whoo doezn’t kno how 2 spel.

His also-successful son, Prince Fielder, had a somewhat better reputation as a fielder than Cecil did. But he also led the league in errors at his position more than once, hinting that he might have also only partly lived up to his name.

His Wikipedia page says this:

Defensively, he recorded a .992 fielding percentage playing every inning at first base.

That’s not quite as succinct as the “below-average fielder” phrasing on his dad’s page. Was Prince also a below-average fielder?

I kind of felt bad sharing that video of Prince Fielder making an error, so here’s a video of him winning the Home Run Derby at the 2012 MLB All-Star Game.

Comparing Cecil’s stats with Prince’s tells an interesting story. While Prince’s career ended prematurely due to a career-ending injury, he played more games than his father, in part because he was playing at an all-star level more or less immediately. (Cecil, on the other hand, spent years paying his dues, including a season in Japan, before his breakout 1990 season with the Tigers.)

Even so, their career fielding percentages ended up fairly similar. Overall, Prince’s fielding percentage was a mere .001 better than his father’s, but setting aside Cecil’s moonlighting at other positions, each had a .992 fielding percentage at first base.

While on the surface Cecil might be a worse fielder, neither were particularly great fielders. In fact, Prince’s range numbers were actually lower than Cecil’s—but as Cecil was more frequently a DH, especially later in his career, you could probably have a good debate over who’s the worse fielder.

(It’s worth noting, though, that Cecil and Prince probably had other things to debate: During Prince’s playing career, the father and son were often estranged, in part because of the elder Fielder’s widely reported financial problems.)

Hey Cecil, Prince: Nobody would be mad if you changed your family’s last name to “Slugger.”

The Bittersweet tale of Neversink, New York, the town whose original location ironically became a reservoir

The town of Neversink, New York, up in the Catskills of New York state, is more than 100 miles away from New York City by driving distance, and about 75 as the crow flies. But the ongoing demands of NYC were enough to change its fortunes and ensure that the city would always come up in textbooks about irony.

Throughout the state of New York, ongoing demands to help support the ever-massive needs of New York City led to common cases of eminent domain or condemnation of small towns to make room for reservoirs to support the needs of a massive city. For example, the town of Gilboa, which started as a settlement in 1760 and became an official town in 1848, was flooded in 1926 by the Schoharie Reservoir, a dam built on the Schoharie Creek. The portions of the town that are now literally underwater are called Old Gilboa.

In 1931, a case that went to the Supreme Court essentially gave New York flexibility to divert water from the Delaware River and its tributaries to ensure the city had a strong, continuous water supply. From the summary of New Jersey v. New York:

The diversion from the tributaries of the amount proposed by New York will not materially affect the sanitary condition of the river, its industrial and agricultural uses, its use as a source of municipal water supply, or its shad fisheries. But it is necessary that the diversion should be curtailed and regulated, and be accompanied by sanitary treatment of sewage entering the stream in New York, in order to prevent injury to the use and reputation of the river for recreational purposes in New Jersey, and in order to avoid an increase of salinity in the lower river and in Delaware Bay which would injure the oyster industry there.

The result put small riverside communities like Neversink on blast, allowing the state to more or less move or remove towns that would potentially get in the way of giant dams. In 1941, thanks to a judicially empowered Board of Water Supply, it was decided: The original location of Neversink was condemned, in favor of allowing the state to divert water from the Neversink River for a reservoir that would supply drinking water to one of the largest cities in the world.

And yes, that meant Neversink’s original location, which also dated to the 18th century, was destined to sink. The situation was bittersweet in more ways than one: Quite literally, a neighboring town to Neversink was called Bittersweet, and it was overtaken by the reservoir, too. Unfortunately, it, along with three other communities flooded for another nearby reservoir, did not survive the condemnation.

(One of those communities was named Eureka, which is a completely different kind of nominative antideterminism.)

It took many years for the relocation to actually happen, because reservoirs take a long time to build. (A whole World War began and ended in the time between initial proposals and completion.) Moves like these created major challenges for communities similar to Neversink, as noted by a 2016 Atlas Obscura story on the similarly to-be-sunk towns of Pepacton, Union Grove, Shavertown, and Arena:

Reservoir construction had been underway for two years when a crowd of townspeople gathered at Shavertown’s general store in 1949. Every day the work inched closer to completion, and so did the time they would have to leave the idyllic village where their families had lived for generations. The city of New York would dole out compensation for their homes and relocation, but this was a small comfort to some, who didn’t even know when moving day would arrive.

“We are pushing construction as fast as the weather and the good Lord will permit us,” Irving Hite, president of the Board of Water Supply told the New York Times. They hoped to finish the project by 1955 and promised not to “take a single acre of land until it is absolutely necessary.”

Meanwhile, the villages lived on borrowed time; farmers hesitated to plant or expand their herds.

Like those towns, Neversink sank, but it ultimately survived the condemnation by moving its residents to another location nearby. Bittersweet, sadly but fittingly, did not. (Bittersweet was a good example of nominative determinism.)

In its place sits a reservoir that, on a good day, can hold up to 34.9 billion gallons of water, and (via a network of other reservoirs and the Delaware Aqueduct), eventually makes the long trip to New York City, where it ends up in fancy glass water bottles that people may or may not drink when they go to brunch.

That’s the tale of Neversink’s nominatively antideterministic life. On the other hand, Neversink was once nominatively deterministic in a completely different way: It was a dry town for 80 years, including during the period when it was getting flooded and they probably could have used the alcohol. (A hotel that straddled the towns of Montela and Eureka had some, but after the floodings, it suddenly became hard to find.)

That only partially changed in 2015. Can’t sink if you’re always dry.