The sun rises, and Free Leonard leads the LGM Baseball Challenge:
| 1 | Free Leonard, mattricci | 4654 | 98.6 |
| 2 | brokenax16 entry 1, brokenax16 | 4489 | 96.1 |
| 3 | Ambulance Chasers, jsmdlawyer | 4425 | 94.6 |
| 4 | Chacin Amy, thearistokatz | 4402 | 94 |
| 5 | Lexington Bearded Ducks, farls0 | 4365 | 93 |
| 6 | Too Much Coffee, PeterFD59 | 4166 | 86 |
| 7 | WesternDave, dsalmanson | 3983 | 78.9 |
| 8 | TMTZac entry 1, TMTZac | 3971 | 78.5 |
| 9 | Smarter Than Yuo, esfleury | 3871 | 74.2 |
| 10 | Fister? I hardly knew her, sandalteam | 3809 | 71.3 |
Shorter Goose Gossage: “As a man whose Hall of Fame credentials are clear from my WAR that splits the difference between all-time legends Javier Vazquez and Al Leiter, let me take the lead in lobbying against Roger Clemens’ Hall of Fame case after his not guilty verdict.”
Spencer channels Mitch Rubin in worrying that notional future children might not be sufficiently evil:
First, MLB has thought about this a lot. There is no better time to be interested in out-of-market baseball. For about $150, which is basically a couple months of Comcast at most, you can watch any baseball game you want, via the local broadcast, on any device you own. Even with the teams’ recent trend in maximizing revenue not through gate receipts but regional sports networks, this price is only going to drop as baseball, like the NBA, pursues the mobile market. (MLB Extra Innings is one of the few apps that comes standard on an Apple TV right now, so you can just imagine the growth potential for cable-free television.) You want your kid immersed in Yankee heritage? For just pennies a day…
Second, out-of-market-fandom is an easier proposition in Washington. This is a city whose professional class, even those who aren’t transients, have a high degree of identification with East Coast cities like Boston, New York and even Philadelphia. Let’s say your kid is a Yankee fan in D.C. Sure, her friends who are into baseball are going to come to school talking about what Bryce did last night or whether you should break Strasburg’s innings limit if the Nats make it to the postseason. But someone in her class is going to want to talk about the Red Sox, Yankees, Mets or Phillies. Now, if we were talking about any other city, which exhibits a higher degree of civic rootedness, this point is a salient one; even if it’s a less salient one because of technological advances discussed above.
Third, if the first two points don’t convince you, you could move to New York. There, I said it. Washington is a city with a comprable cost of living and fewer educational opportunities for your children compared to New York. It’s also a city with comprable professional opportunities for a journalist. And no one can seriously argue that children will enjoy a more enriching childhood — one that better prepares them for a vicious world — in Washington than in New York. You’re really worried about your kid being an out-of-market Yankee fan? Get a U-Haul and hit 95 North.
These are all excellent points, but sadly they lead to a reality in which more people are Yankees fans. I have the opposite problem; there is reason to be concerned that the girls might already harbor some sort of proto-Yankee sympathies.
Fortunately we’re taking them to the Reds-Twins game this Sunday (Joey Votto Batting Glove Day!) in order to forestall these developments. To be sure, my girls will understand that Daddy will merely be disappointed in them if they become Yankees fans; no one wearing a Cubs cap will ever see a dime of the vast Farley family fortune.
And you thought a wacko interrupting the president was the most embarrassing thing that would happen to The Daily Caller this week.
Not even close.
This is quite literally one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.
Bryce Harper is a conservative hero. The star rookie for the Washington Nationals has woken up Major League Baseball, and watching it unfold has reminded me of nothing so much as the collapse of the old political paradigms and the inevitable and upcoming rebirth of conservatism in November.
This became clear to me on May 26 of this year. The Nationals were playing Atlanta, and in the fifth inning Harper, with his team leading by two, singled to right. The ball was hit to Braves right fielder Jason Heyward. Heyward strolled up to the ball as if he were walking to the corner for a paper.
Harper promptly headed for second base. Heyward suddenly woke up and fired to second base, but too late.
More than one sports writer has noted that this moment was no small thing for baseball. It was like the part in the movie “Awakenings” when the guy who was asleep for 30 years wakes up.
To me, the play carried even greater symbolic importance. Heyward’s bungle showed a complacency, if not indolence, that Harper threatens to destroy, but it also could be a metaphor for the collapse of the old liberal order. Heyward was like one of those public school teachers who, because they are a union member, can’t be fired and so are relegated to the “rubber room” to sit and read the paper and gather a check for the rest of their lives. Or even Obama, who went from Hawaii to Harvard to the White House and never seems to have had to slide head-first into a base his entire life.
Believe it or not, it actually gets much worse from there!!! Including this gem of a paragraph:
If America is to be solvent and healthy, we cannot keep doing what we have been doing since the Miracle Mets won the World Series in 1969. We have to do things differently, just as Bryce Harper is not playing baseball the old way. Harper is not going to sit back and accept what the status quo tells him to accept (where does he get off stealing home?). And conservatives are not going to expect to retire at age 65 or to send their kids to the college of their choice if it costs $50,000 a year. We are going to adapt. (In a strange way, conservatives are not only like Bryce Harper, but have become like the do-it-yourself punk rockers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Don’t have a record label? Start your own. Are the old rock groups bloated and sloppy? Boot them off the stage.) Meanwhile, liberals occupy everything so that they can demand — what was it again? Oh yeah, peace. And taxes.
I have no expectations of good work from any conservative outlet in 2012. But even expecting this to be awful, I was completely blown away. I mean there is no way that the greatest comedy writer in America could create a parody of the conservative worldview better than this.
….In comments, Kathleen notes, “It would have been better if he said, “Heyward strolled up to the ball as if he were a young buck sidling up to the checkout counter to purchase T bone steaks with food stamps”. SEK said more or less the same thing. Showing that because my first impulse is to look for class bias, I can sometimes miss the obvious racism.
Jonah Keri with a very nice piece on the apparent end of Vladimir Guerrero’s career. My own Vlad memory primarily consists of watching him hit not one but two impossibly long home runs off Jamie Moyer. The last great Expo, though Scott might have something to add to that.
The New York Times won the morning on Thursday with an A1 story on a new anti-Obama super-PAC, Character Matters, that’s planning on spending $10 million on an ad campaign linking President Obama—a “metrosexual, black Abraham Lincoln”—to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Character Matters is hoping to get either Jon Voight or an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to narrate the spots, which would be produced by GOP ad guru Fred Davis (of “Demon Sheep” fame).
The money for all of this comes from Joe Ricketts, the TD Ameritrade founder, Bison Burgers baron, and, with his family, owner of the Chicago Cubs. Ricketts solidified his status as a campaign finance heavyweight when spent $600,000 in the last month of the election to try to take down Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in 2010. Since then, he’s launched a campaign to eliminate earmarks, given $500,000 to the anti-incumbent Campaign for Primary Accountability, and, earlier this month, spent $200,000 helping state Sen. Deb Fischer win the GOP Senate primary in his home state of Nebraska. (Ricketts’ son, Peter, is a former US Senate candidate and a member of the Republican National Committee.) Ricketts is sick and tired of wasteful spending—so much so that the briefing book outlining the Wright ad is actually entitled “The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”
But Ricketts’ time with the Chicago Cubs tells a different story. Since the Ricketts Family Trust acquired the team two years ago, they have actively sought to use taxpayer money to expand their own business operations.
Rahm is playing hardball, a sport with which the Chicago National League baseball franchise has only a passing acquaintance:
The most important reaction came from Mr. Emanuel, who, according to the Sun-Times, blasted the proposed ad as “insulting.”
Asked whether the flap will affect the Wrigley rebuild, Mr. Emanuel replied, “I’ll have some conversations on that later — comments, rather.”
A source close to the mayor confirms that that remark was indeed Freudian. Mr. Emanuel is “livid” with the family’s “blatant hypocrisy,” that source says. The Ricketts have tried to contact him, my source adds, but the mayor “does not want to talk with them today, tomorrow or anytime soon.”
For my part, the answer is clear. Burn Wrigley, contract the Cubs, and expunge the franchise from the history of baseball. Nuke ‘em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Principled Tea Partier Curt Schilling:
Former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling asked Rhode Island for additional help to save his video game company Wednesday, prompting state leaders to consider whether the firm is viable enough to justify further investment.
Schilling, an ESPN baseball analyst, briefed Gov. Lincoln Chafee and the state’s Economic Development Corp. board in a closed-door session.
Following the meeting, Chafee would not say what Schilling is seeking from the state. The governor said the question before state economic development officials was, “How do we avoid throwing good money after bad?”
Schilling declined to answer questions, saying only: “My priority right now is to get back to my team.”
Love those conservatives and their unbendable economic principles! When they come from such a pleasant, soft-spoken man as Curt Schilling, it’s all the better!
So today I am attending a game at Fenway for the first time, as I will again watch my Mariners lose on the road. Whenever I see Seattle play on the road, terrible things happen. They get swept in a double header. They get shut out. Felix Hernandez has atypically bad starts. In 2010, when Felix won the Cy Young, I saw him twice. He got absolutely bombed in Texas, the worst start of the season. Then in Cleveland, he pitched great for 6 innings, but in the 7th, a 2 out error was followed by 6 unearned runs. I almost countered this bad luck by remembering that I was at the game in New York when Felix hit the grand slam off Johan Santana, but I also remember that he hurt his ankle covering home 2 innings later and ended up on the DL. Even in the minors, I saw Felix pitch in Albuquerque until the 2nd inning when he caught a liner off his foot and left the game.
Last year, I tried to see the Mariners play on the road twice. DJW and I went to 2 games in Cleveland. In the first, Brandon League gave up a 3-run HR in the bottom of the 9th, which was just awful to witness. Maybe the worst Mariners game I’ve ever sat through. The second game was rained out after we sat through it for 2 hours. The rain out was far less painful.
Today, the legendary Blake Beavan faces Josh Beckett. I am interested to see if Sox fans boo Beckett in his first home start (I think) since he was busted for golfing the day after he missed a start. But I’m sure Seattle will lose in some heartbreaking fashion. Or this game will be rained out too, which is a possibility.
Anyway, since it’s my first trip to Fenway, any advice on where to park, what to eat inside the park (if anything is actually worth it), where to dine or have a drink after the game, or other tips are greatly appreciated.
I spent a bit of time last night looking up statistics on late 19th century baseball players. I was struck by the sheer number of unearned runs allowed. Here’s Old Hoss Radbourn’s career stat-line on runs and earned runs.
Year R ER
1881 162 88
1882 213 109
1883 275 144
1884 216 104
1885 209 109
1886 300 170
1887 305 215
1888 110 66
1889 151 113
1890 183 126
1891 149 103
Now, I’m sure there are a few of you out there who know more about 19th century baseball than I do. But my take from these numbers is that nobody had any idea how to play defense in the 19th century. It certainly seems to help explain some batting milestones that haven’t been reached in more than a half-century. Given the shocking number of errors that must have led to 40% of a pitcher’s runs being unearned over a decade-long career, how many other runs were given up because no one knew where to stand on a baseball diamond? And much more impressive is Ichiro’s 262 hits in 2004?
Eric Wedge is a bad manager. The manager of the Seattle Mariners, he continues to do things that make no sense, like play Chone Figgins and Miguel Olivo. Fans criticize this because, you know, Figgins and Olivo are horrible major league baseball players. Also many of these fans have some understanding of statistics and evidence. Mariners beatwriter Geoff Baker thinks we mere fans should lay off:
There is no time to be delving through stat pages in your brain when this stuff is happening. Jim Riggleman once told me that he would get a thick, book-sized stats package before every game and that he’d throw out about 95 percent of it. He was kidding about actually throwing it in the garbage, but what he meant was, in terms of preparation, there wasn’t time to go over every itty-bitty stat. No time for coaches to do that and even if there was, his players would have it go in one ear and out the other because human beings typically can’t process that much info in such a short time.
….
And those human managers all know about baseball. More importantly, they know about managing in baseball and the human subtleties that come with the job. The human politics that must be played. The pressures that younger players fall under versus the more experienced ones. How those pressures might impact daily play on an individual and overall lineup basis.
That is more important in discussing a manager and his employment future than whether or not he uses words like “RBI” and “home run” in discussing a hitter. Wedge knows what types of hitters he needs and where. But he simply doesn’t have enough of them. So, if Olivo is his best shot at a .450-slugger who doesn’t rely merely on doubles, then that’s what he knows. And Olivo has been that guy before. Just not last season. And Wedge, trust me, knows he needs to get more out of Olivo’s bat. He needs a daily catcher as well and Olivo is his best bet, but that’s a discussion for another day.
I’ll leave you with this one thought, which occured when I read this comment over the internet yesterday:
“Today is Eric Wedge’s 1316th game as a manager of an MLB team. If you take him at his word, he apparently still believes that it is a worthwhile effort to (1) place a fair amount of importance on Olivo’s veteran status, and (2) reference RBI numbers as a measure of how effective a player is.
He’s had 1316 chances for the light bulb to come on and realize why that’s wrong. If I did my job wrong for 1316 days, I would be wondering why I was still employed. I don’t think it’s a stretch to wonder if Wedge is really cut out for this sort of thing.”
My thought after reading that comment is, is this really the level of arrogance our increased knowledge of stats has brought us to? For me, out of simple humility, the thought process should be: “Wedge has had 1,316 chances for the light bulb to come on and realize he’s wrong. Maybe, the fact that Wedge hasn’t realized he’s wrong is an indication that my thought process might not be as bang-on correct as I think it is. Maybe it’s me who has to re-evaluate. Maybe there is more to the job than I realize and that’s why Wedge has been employed at it for 1,316 games.”
But that’s just me. Something to think about.
No, Wedge has been employed for 1316 games because many people in baseball resist something called intelligence. Not all, of course. And those organizations tend to maximize their resources pretty effectively. Take Tampa Bay. But a lot do. Dumbness is prioritized in the clubhouse and throughout baseball culture. If a baseball player sees a movie in a foreign language or reads a serious book, he’s seen as a freak. God knows what the other members of the As think about Brandon McCarthy, who is not only not dumb, but actually takes stands against the homophobia so deeply ingrained in the game and its traditions. Though if there is any organization that would really appreciate a guy like McCarthy, it’s the As, and not only because he’s a pretty good pitcher during his rare periods of health. As Dave Cameron noted in his preview of the Seattle-Tampa game the other day:
Oh, also, Chone Figgins is playing because he’s 7 for 14 lifetime against Niemann. Joe Maddon is shifting his defense on every play because of the work the Rays front office has done to figure out the spray tendencies of every hitter in the Majors, and Eric Wedge is starting Chone Figgins because of the results of 14 at-bats against a particular pitcher. But, yeah, us stat nerds are the ones that are out of touch with today’s reality…
Indeed.
Wow. This might limit him to 25 saves this year…
UPDATE (By Rob): When they came for Joakim Soria, whom I had unwisely spent $23 on the evening of his injury, I said nothing because I had Andrew Bailey. When they came for Andrew Bailey, whom I spent $18 on because I’m stupid, I said nothing because I had just traded Dan Haren for Mariano Rivera. Then they came for Mariano Rivera, and I came to appreciate that I’d spent upwards of 25% of my money on a category that I’ll likely get one point in.
Nevertheless, I’ll acknowledge that the tragedy here goes beyond the failure of my fantasy baseball team. Terrible way to end a great career, if indeed it’s over.
Paul Campos, Above the Law 2011 Lawyer of the Year
Erik Loomis, HNN Cliopatria 2011 Best Series of Posts
