longevity and risk

between sociology meetings last week, i commiserated with my friend charis about the complications of modern-day baseball fandom. she's younger than me, but was a dodgers fan back in the steve garvey-ron cey-manny mota-davey lopes* era. i loved that team and their series rival oakland athletics, in part because their lineups were so stable from year to year.

those days are gone, of course, and few kids today could name the local nine. here's the opening day lineup of another of my favorite teams from the mid-1970s, listed by position and years of service with that team on opening day. can you guess the team and year? a couple hints are listed below.

second base: 14 years
right field: 21 years
designated hitter: 11 years
first base: 14 years
catcher: 2 years (hint: regular catcher had 12 years with team)
left field: 10 years
center field: 10 years
third base: 3 years
shortstop: 3 years
starting pitcher: 11 years

total: 99 years, for average of 9.9 years of service with the same team per player.

this year's lineup for the same team?

centerfield: 3 years
second base: 2 years
catcher: 3 years
right field: 2 years
designated hitter: 5 years
first base: 3 years
shortstop: 3 years
left field: 5 years
third base: 5 years
pitcher: 1 year

total: 32 years, for average of 3.2 years per player.

ok, i'll dork out and offer a real hint: you can see one player's name from the first box score on most of the small batteries (e.g., AA or AAA cell) you have around the house. it wouldn't be much fun to list opening day lineups of sociology or criminology departments in the 1970s. in contrast to baseball, free agency seems to have had little effect on the professoriate.

the first non-anonymous commenter to correctly guess the team might get a worthless but old baseball card from said team. since that would require dealing with some scary spiders in the basement, i can offer no guarantees.

* as a little league second baseman/pitcher, davey lopes was one of my favorite (non-twin) players. i still cite him as an example of being too conservative or not taking enough chances in one's career. i thought he was the best base-stealer ever, perhaps better than rickey henderson or lou brock. but he didn't run enough. in fact, his career ratio of stolen bases to caught-stealings was five to one, whereas mr. henderson's was approximately four to one and mr. brock's was about three to one. during his prime, mr. lopes almost never got caught and it was over ten to one. this induced me to yell run, davey, run! at the tv whenever he got on base. of course, my own gutsy-but-excruciatingly slow baserunning success/failure ratio was closer to one to four, so i really shouldn't have been offering mr. lopes any advice on this matter.