Last night I was at Yankee Stadium to see the home team beat the Giants, 5-1, on a grand slam by Alex Rodriguez in the seventh inning. It was his 24th grand slam, moving him ahead of Lou Gerhig as the all-time career leader in the category.

It’s hard to watch A-Rod at the plate and not think about steroids and PEDs, which got me thinking about how hitting performance in Major League Baseball has trended, particularly in the last few years as the league has taken steps to crack down on cheating.

In 1999, the total MLB batting average (combined for all players in the American & National Leagues), was .271, its highest in 60 years (in 1939 it was .275).

Since 1999, the averages have trended downward, and have declined in particular since 2006, from .269 that year to .255 last year.  That’s a drop of over 5%.

Source: http://www.baseball-almanac.com/hitting/hibavg4.shtml

It’s also interesting to note that the American League (which due to its Designated Hitter historically has a higher batting average) has declined even more, at 7.3% over the same period.   A-Rod’s batting average has declined 6.2% since 2006 and 15.3% since his best average as a Yankee in 2005 of .321.

I was surprised to see that the AL batting average is now almost identical to the NL batting average, indicating that the DHs’ decline has contributed significantly since the PED crackdown.

Recently I’ve been wearing one of those heart rate watches to the gym. 

It’s actually pretty fun to develop a feel for when my heart rate is at 120 beats per minute or at 160, or is spiking at 180 (I try not to go above that).  For most of us, our average heart rate is 70-75 bpm.

My brother forwarded me an interesting chart which shows how human bpms compare to other animals.  As the downward sloping line in the chart on the left shows, there’s typically a pretty good (inverse) link between bpms and life expectancy (if bpms are high, then life expectancy is low). [Note: I’m not sure why they have “whale” listed twice on this chart.]

What’s really interesting to see is where “Man” falls.  Given our bpms, we should be with tigers and giraffes who have a life expectancy of ~20 years.  And in the Neolithic era 5-10 thousand years ago, human life expectancy actually was 20 years.

But today the average American lives 4 times as long as this, on average 78 years (as of 2008).  Diet, medicine, technology, etc have all boosted our life expectancy to extraordinary degrees.

The chart on the right is interesting too, mainly because its display greatly undersells the number of extra beats humans get — because the chart’s scale is exponential.  10 to the 9th power is 1 billion; 10 to the 10th power is 10 billion.  That 9 billion difference is a pretty big one for such a little shift to the right!  For humans, we’re about 10 to the 9.4th power, which is 2.5 billion beats over our lifetimes, or about 80 years.

So next time you’re at the gym, you can be thankful that after exercising, your heart rate will settle back down to a much more sustainable level!

This is the title of a great post on The Washington Post’s “Wonkblog” (see here) that I saw last month (yes, it has taken me, um, a while to put this up on Historicalness.com…good thing I’m not covering breaking news). Their post was made even better since it had a graph:

What we can see is that since the late 1980s, the top 1% wealthiest households have consistently held about 40% of the stock market wealth.

And for those same 25 years, the top 10% have consistently held about 80% of stock market wealth.

As Wonkblog notes, even though “about 52 percent of Americans own at least some stock, mostly in their 401(k)s,” those holdings are tiny compared to the average holdings of the wealthiest households, which are the ones that benefit disproportionately to a stock market increase.

On Friday, the S&P 500 closed at 1,582, just below its all-time high.  The stock market has had a dramatic rebound since its late 2008 / early 2009 depths.  Here’s a chart showing the S&P’s growth since 1950:

The avid readers of Historicalness.com surely know that this blog’s third-ever post was about New York’s Trinity Church, its deep roots in the city, and its extensive property holdings in lower Manhattan (see the post here).

A few days ago, we learned that by one estimate the value of those properties today — stemming from the 215 acres gifted to the Church by Queen Anne in 1705 — is $2 billion.  The Church’s latest figures show that it holds 14 acres with 5.5 million square feet of commercial space, mainly in the Hudson Square Area.

Here’s the map of their properties that I posted last time:

In addition to its estimated property value, the real estate generated $158 million in revenue in 2011.

Talk about a great long-term hold!

I really should do a post on July 4th.  Something with a new spin, like how having it on a Wednesday throws vacation scheduling into a tizzy.  But I won’t.  Maybe I’ll do something next year.

Instead, I was interested to see two articles in the last 10 days highlighting a new trend: cities selling ads on everything from fire hydrants to historic buildings.  From Baltimore to Milan, local governments are devising creative — and controversial — means to make up for lost tax revenue and shrinking budgets.

Here are a few interesting naming rights deals that cities have devised with corporations, starting with America’s favorite colonel:

Finger lickin’ good. In Brazil, Indiana

And the Atlantic Avenue subway stop in Brooklyn now has an additional name (and in return the MTA is pocketing $4 million over the next 20 years).

So are these people at the Atlantic Avenue stop or the Barclays Center stop?

In Europe, efforts have extended to sell ads on historic buildings — here’s a big H&M ad on the side of Milan’s gothic cathedral, Duomo, which had its groundbreaking in 1386.

The heart is a nice touch

The Madonna ad looks out of place, but some of these — at least to my American eye — just look like your run-of-the-mill billboard.  This brand always confused me (why do they have to use a “v” when a “u” will do just fine?), but here it is in Milan’s Piazza Duomo:

In other news: “In France, the caretakers of Versailles have agreed to let two hotels open on the palace grounds and have proposed ­licensing the image of the building for use on luxury watches. In Spain, planners eager for more tax revenue approved the construction of an office tower in the historic city center of Seville near the Gothic cathedral where Christopher Columbus is buried, ignoring threats from the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to disqualify the city as a World Heritage site if the project proceeded.”

Will be interesting to see if this trend reverses when the world economy improves. Meanwhile, if you’ve seen some interesting ads pop up in unlikely places in your community, let me know.

Just in time for Father’s Day, historian Douglas Brinkley lists his picks for the best and worst first fathers, which you can see here (at the WashingtonPost.com).

The top 3:

• Theodore Roosevelt Sr.
• Prescott Bush
• John Adams

The bottom 3:

• Leslie Lynch King Sr. (Gerald Ford’s father)
• Roger M. Clinton Sr.
• Barack Obama Sr.

It’s worth reading Brinkley’s quick summaries of each pick (see here).

I’m a huge fan of TR and his dad (McCullough’s Mornings on Horseback is a wonderful history of their relationship), and we should celebrate the great fathers in this list.

But what’s most interesting for me is actually the bottom three.  No matter what you think of the sons’ politics and administrations, what they overcame early in their lives — including varied levels of paternal violence and absence — to reach the highest office in the world, is nothing short of remarkable.  Not to mention inspiring.

Happy Father’s Day everyone.

There’s apparently been a lot of press — all of which I’ve missed — about the Lowline.  In case you too haven’t heard, the Lowline aspires to be the world’s first underground park, tucked inside an old trolley terminal on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Last night I went to a talk by the Lowline’s two visionaries, James Ramsey and Dan Barasch, who view their project as a cousin of sorts to the High Line and who are taking a similar grass-roots approach to convince the city to transform this unused area into a landmark public space.

Here’s an illustration of the Lowline would look like:

The MTA controls the space due to its historical roots as the Williamsburg Trolley Terminal which shuttled passengers from October 1904 – December 1948 between Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, passing underneath Delancey and Essex streets.

Here’s the Trolley Terminal, looking east above Delancey Street toward the Williamsburg Bridge

The reason why the Terminal’s space is wider than you might expect is that it includes 8 loops which the trolleys used to turn around (and which in the picture below resemble the tops of tennis racquets).

An overhead shot of Delancey Street and the Terminal, with the Williamsburg Bridge disappearing in the lower right corner.

Here’s what the loops looked like at their underground level.

What’s also fascinating is the technology that Ramsey has created to capture sunlight above ground and then transmit it down into the park to feed the trees and grass:

The Lowline could serve as a model for urban areas around the world — and there are even a bunch more abandoned stations throughout New York which might also be candidates which you can see here at a site called…Abandoned Stations.

If you’d like to learn more about the Lowline or make a donation to the cause, you can visit their site at DelanceyUnderground.org.

There are a ton of places in NY and elsewhere to get great cocktails, many whose recipes were invented in an earlier era.   I’ve often wondered what people were eating when these cocktails first arrived on the scene — what were they dining on before/during/after their Sidecars and Old Fashioneds?

And, wouldn’t it be fun if restaurants today offered some of those dishes — or, if there was a spot dedicated solely to recreating the menu of the [insert decade here] in its entirely, soup to nuts (literally and figuratively).

But how do we know exactly what used to be served in restaurants around town? Enter the NY Public Library, which has a vast archive of original printed menus, some 40,000 from the 1840s to present (most from NY dining spots).

In April 2011, it launched a digital program called “What’s on the Menu?” (you can see it here), and over the past year, almost 900K dishes from 13,500 menus have been transcribed from print to digital by public volunteers — visit http://menus.nypl.org and you too can help out.

It’s a mouth-watering look into history.

Curious what Delmonico’s (the old one at 26th and 5th) was serving one October evening in 1898?

I don’t know what Filet de boeuf a la Montebello is, but I already love it

What the NY Athletic Club patrons were offered at the turn of the century?

decisions, decisions…

Or that Governor Teddy Roosevelt had a dinner in his honor on Saturday, March 11, 1900 at the Waldorf Astoria?

Looking good TR

Then this is the place for you.  Enjoy!