Harry Wendelstedt is Dead

[Derwood]

http://post-gazette.com/pg/12070/1215839-122.stm Edited March 10, 2012 by Derwood

[Guest]

Harry, not Hunter.

 

Unless Hunter died of a heart attack immediately after hearing of his father's passing...but that's not in the link.

[NewUserName]

wrong wendelstedt in the thread title

[Derwood]

Sorry guys, fixed now

[dfnowak]

Another onfield personnel from the late 70s / early 80s that has died from a brain tumor. Others:

 

Gary Carter

Dan Quisenberry

Dick Howser

Tug McGraw

 

Coincidence? I don't know, but definitely strange.

[dfnowak]

Another onfield personnel from the late 70s / early 80s that has died from a brain tumor. Others:

 

Gary Carter

Dan Quisenberry

Dick Howser

Tug McGraw

 

Coincidence? I don't know, but definitely strange.

Found 4 more:

 

Ken Brett

Johnny Oates

Bobby Murcer

John Vukovich

[Guest]

Another onfield personnel from the late 70s / early 80s that has died from a brain tumor. Others:

 

Gary Carter

Dan Quisenberry

Dick Howser

Tug McGraw

 

Coincidence? I don't know, but definitely strange.

Found 4 more:

 

Ken Brett

Johnny Oates

Bobby Murcer

John Vukovich

I thought McGraw had Lew Gerhig.

[EightyTwo]

Another onfield personnel from the late 70s / early 80s that has died from a brain tumor. Others:

 

Gary Carter

Dan Quisenberry

Dick Howser

Tug McGraw

 

Coincidence? I don't know, but definitely strange.

Found 4 more:

 

Ken Brett

Johnny Oates

Bobby Murcer

John Vukovich

I thought McGraw had Lew Gerhig.

 

Nope. McGraw had a brain tumor. And it's Lou. ;)

[TruffleShuffle]

I thought McGraw had Lew Gerhig.

 

#-o

[jersey cubs fan]

I thought McGraw had Lew Gerhig.

 

#-o

 

Gehrig

[NewUserName]

I thought McGraw had Lew Gerhig.

 

#-o

 

Gehrig

 

He didn't know how to spell Gehrig so he thought no one would notice if he spelled his first name Lew

[Sammy Sofa]

Coincidence? I don't know

 

Really?

[dfnowak]

Coincidence? I don't know

 

Really?

Yes, really. You don't find it odd of the number of baseball people from that era who have died from brain tumors? I think I heard somewhere about a study currently being done on it with the artificial turf and insecticides used on grass being the focal point(s).

[dfnowak]

Ok, maybe there isn't a study being currently done, or rather there needs to be. I found this through a google search:

 

http://sportsfixchicago.com/2012/02/27/whats-causing-brain-cancer-in-baseball-players/

[dfnowak]

More articles through a google search (if anyone cares):

 

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-14/news/ct-oped-0615-cancer-20110610_1_brain-cancer-cancer-cluster-brain-tumor

 

http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/03/is-brain-cancer-stalking-major-league-baseball/

 

I don't think raising an eyebrow at the situation is all that preposterous.

[Guest]

More articles through a google search (if anyone cares):

 

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-06-14/news/ct-oped-0615-cancer-20110610_1_brain-cancer-cancer-cluster-brain-tumor

 

http://healthland.time.com/2011/06/03/is-brain-cancer-stalking-major-league-baseball/

 

I don't think raising an eyebrow at the situation is all that preposterous.

 

It's not. N&G is just jealous that he didn't post it first.

[Sammy Sofa]

Oh, yeah, I'm really bummed I didn't get on the "baseball stadiums are causing monstrous brain tumors" bandwagon.

 

Both of those articles go out of their way to downplay the idea that it's actually something caused by or based out of their time on the field (though I do like how the Trib article goes out of it's way to replicate this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTxJ2QXyzSc).

 

Each of the 26 Major League teams in 1980 (a year arbitrarily selected to facilitate analysis) was composed of roughly 40 to 50 players and coaches, so a reasonable estimate is there were between 1,000 and 1,300 people employed as on-field players, coaches and managers. Two to three cases of primary brain cancer would be expected in a sample of 1,300 adult males over a 30-year period. In this case, the eight players with cancer would represent a twofold to fourfold increase over the expected number of cases.

 

But this is a small, arbitrarily drawn sample. And eight cases of brain cancer in 1,300 people from the same workplace, at the same time, is certainly not enough to draw any firm conclusions, assuming there are no further cases. Most likely, it's nothing more than a tragic coincidence. Nevertheless, it is enough to encourage further investigation of whether a cancer cluster occurred in this workplace.

 

Even a marginally talented undergraduate student in epidemiology would recognize much more information is necessary. The eight patients may not have the same type of brain cancer. And 1,300 on-field major leaguers may not be the representative sample. If a sample larger than the 1980 roster was used, more cases would be expected and these known eight cases of brain cancer would not stand out.

 

But do we know these are the only players with brain cancer? Perhaps there are less prominent players from that era who also contracted brain cancer.

 

From the first article:

 

All this raises two questions: What in the world could the Tisch Center be doing to produce even a few cases that so defy the normal glioblastoma prognosis? And what in the world is going on in Major League Baseball that is causing so many big names to be claimed by so uncommon a cancer?

 

The baseball part is easiest to address because the answer is: There’s probably nothing going on at all. Steroids, which were endemic in the sport for years, have long been linked with brain cancer in the public mind, at least since the death of NFL defensive lineman Lyle Alzado, who died of the disease in 1992 after a career of anabolic steroid use. He went to his grave blaming his doping for his illness. But while Alzado was a tragic authority on the multiple deadly effects of steroids, he wasn’t a doctor.

 

“There is no data that relates concussions to brain tumors in any way shape or form,” says Friedman, and Green agrees: “No association,” he says flatly. Nor is there a credible link between brain tumors and chewing tobacco, despite the fact that the stuff is ferociously carcinogenic and widely popular in Major League Baseball. “Yes, it leads to cancer of the mouth and jaw,” says Friedman. “But even with some getting into the stomach and then into the bloodstream, it wouldn’t be in sufficient quantities to affect brain tissue.”

 

What’s really at work in the apparent cluster of glioblastoma cases in the Major Leagues is probably just a statistical illusion. Up to 18,000 Americans per year are diagnosed with the disease, and while that number seems huge, it’s just .00006 of the 300 million U.S. population.

 

Baseball, clearly, is a smaller community. Still, about 1,600 men wear a Major League uniform in any one season and over the course of 25 years —with some players leaving the sport after just a few seasons and others sticking around much longer — that adds up to about 5,200. Against that, six players jibes pretty closely with the glioblastoma incidence in the general population. What’s more, says Valadka, “Baseball players are all male, and men have a higher incidence of glioblastoma than women. All of them were older when they were diagnosed, which is when the disease hits.”

 

Basically what you're looking at here is the baseball equivalent of the "suspicious deaths due to the JFK assassination" list. You're going to find variation all the time with these types of statistics with different random population groupings, and to make anything out of this someone has to expand the time-frame pretty dramatically and gloss over what type of cancer each person actually had. Trying to throw in umpires skews it even more since almost all of these projections are based on players/coaches/managers/groundskeepers, etc.. and not guys like umpires who didn't spend at least half the season at the same stadium.

[Guest]

Many of those names on the list played/umpired 10-15+ years. What's the percentage knock down to when possibly exposed to harmful elements for that period of time?

 

Not trying to justify any of the articles one way or another, but I don't know that you can simply toss it aside as a conspiracy theory too quickly. It's probably nothing, but still interesting.

[Guest]

What harmful elements are we talking about?

[Guest]

What harmful elements are we talking about?

 

One of the links above mentioned something about astroturf and insecticides as possible causes.

[Sammy Sofa]

Many of those names on the list played/umpired 10-15+ years. What's the percentage knock down to when possibly exposed to harmful elements for that period of time?

 

Not trying to justify any of the articles one way or another, but I don't know that you can simply toss it aside as a conspiracy theory too quickly. It's probably nothing, but still interesting.

 

I'm not tossing it aside as a "conspiracy theory" because there's nobody is talking about any kind of conspiracy. I tossing it aside as coincidence because there's not enough correlation between the number of umpires and the number of players/coaches/managers/etc.. If an unusual amount of umpires were getting brain tumors from lead in AstroTurf or pesticides used at a certain stadium or several stadiums or whatever than you should expect to see a much more pronounced upswing in similar diagnoses in players/coaches/managers/groundskeepers/etc. who spent much, much more time at those locations than the umpires.

[Sammy Sofa]

I mean, the very first link was the one that came closest to pointing out something up and even that one is deeply flawed. Take this part:

 

Considering baseball is about 140 years old, it seems odd that 91% of the players who were diagnosed with the disease just happen to play in the same twenty year period. I understand that to the average person the total number of players actually diagnosed with the disease might not seem that impressive, given that 1.6 million of people are expected to be diagnosed with cancer in 2012 alone. But when you dig a little deeper into the brain cancer stats, some startling trends start to show for major leaguers who played during 60’s and 70’s.

 

Really? They're using 140 years as a measuring stick? All 140 years of baseball? As if the diagnosis and recognition of these types of diseases were comparable over that time? Hey, you know what often causes medical diagnoses to seemingly skyrocket from one ear to the next? THAT THE DIAGNOSIS BECAME A THING IN THE FIRST PLACE. Comparing the baseball players between 1960 and 1980 with brain tumors to the ones between, say, 1890 and 1910 is ridiculous.

[Guest]

Comparing the baseball players between 1960 and 1980 with brain tumors to the ones between, say, 1890 and 1910 is ridiculous.

 

Agreed. There may be nothing in common at all, or maybe this handful of guys snorted baseline chalk in their off time. Hopefully it's just a coincidence and this isn't the start of an wave of brain tumor deaths.

[jersey cubs fan]

Another onfield personnel from the late 70s / early 80s that has died from a brain tumor. Others:

 

Gary Carter

Dan Quisenberry

Dick Howser

Tug McGraw

Coincidence? I don't know, but definitely strange.

 

Maybe