I don’t really think words are needed to describe why I find this item from MLB.com’s holiday store so hilarious, but here are some anyway.

Philadelphia has a certain reputation as a sports town that some would lightly describe as “salty,” or perhaps “abrasive.” To put it lightly, Philly’s fans can be mean. Even the grinchiest of grinches wouldn’t throw snowballs at Santa Claus. But Philly fans did, as verified by the ever-vigilant Snopes.com:

When (Frank) Olivo (the 20-year-old handpicked to portray Santa Claus) finished his run down Santa Claus Lane, he got into range. A fan in the upper deck threw the first snowball. As Santa hit the south end zone, one turned into ten, then into 100.

“When I hit the end zone, and the snowballs started, I was waving my finger at the crowd, saying ‘You’re not getting anything for Christmas,'” Olivo recalled.

“Oh, I got pelted,” Olivo says. He remembers being hit by several dozen snowballs, which suggests that many of the upper-deck denizens were more accurate passers than [the Eagles’ quarterback]. “I didn’t mind,” he says. “I started kibitzing with some of the people throwing the snowballs.”

Still, he had his limits. “When I finished, Mr. Mullen asked if I wanted to do it again the next year,” Olivo says. “I told him, ‘No way. If it doesn’t snow, they’ll probably throw beer bottles.”

This story is really lighter than most people than most people consider it, I think. At the same time, though, it’s friggin’ Santa Claus. He’s jolly and he gives people free stuff. If you can’t appreciate that, who can you appreciate?

On another note, if the Philly Phanatic really were Santa Claus, somehow I think David Wright would get a lump of coal in his stocking.

Javier Vazquez, Good Samaritan.

On Tuesday it was reported that Type B free agents Trevor Hoffman and Javier Vazquez were being offered arbitration by their respective teams, but that pursuant to “gentleman’s agreements” the players would not accept the offers.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find these arrangements a little odd. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Bespectacled Readership,

Your host, Carson Cistulli (i.e. me), has just — literally, within the last half-hour — completed the drive from Madison, Wisconsin, to an undisclosed location in Michigan.

Though I’m not at liberty to discuss the exact reasons for my visit to America’s second-most peninsula-y state, I can assure you that all but one or two of them (i.e. the reasons) are legal.

In any case, I have two announcements for you, the first of which will make you L — if not OL, then at least STY* — and the second of which will make your quality of life better.

*That’s “silently to yourself.”

The first is this: “… and, boy, are my arms tired!”

Ba-da-bing, amirite?

The second is this: thirty or so minutes of the trip were rendered entirely bearable by listening to an April 2008 interview with Bill James on PRI’s The Sounds of Young America (TSOYA).

Read the rest of this entry »

Like any serberista worth his fashion spectactles, I spend about 90% of my day within arm’s reach of Bill James’ collected works. Or, okay, maybe collected works is an exaggeration — but at least a whole bunch of them.

Anyway, when I find a moment of leisure, I’m not averse to reaching out my arm, extracting from the bookcase one of James’s aforementioned works, and reading the frig out of it.

Which, I was doing that just now, when I came across a passage that will be of interest to the NotGraphs readership.

The passage in question comes from James’ Baseball Book 1990. In that Book, there’s a section called the Draft Adviser, in which section James provides brief capsule-type analysis for probably like a thousand players.

One such capsule is for Charles Hudson, and it looks almost entirely like this:

CHARLES HUDSON
Detroit

Ouch. I detest pitchers like this. Hudson is one of those guys who looks great — five times a year. The rest of the time he loses. Basically, I’d rather have a cocklebur in my underwear than Charles Hudson on my pitching staff.

Two notes on this. Or, at least two.

First, let it be known that Hudson’s story is actually a kinda not-inspiring one. After some success in 1983 and 1984, his career went the wrong direction — until 1989, when he had more walks than strikeouts. Adding a very literal injury to the insult that was his career at that point, Hudson was involved in drunk-driving accident at the end of the year and never pitched again in the Majors.

So, I recognize that’s unpleasant. One-hundred apologies.

There is, however, a second, decidedly more LOL-ish, side to this particular story. Notably, it’s this: owing to the layout of the text, the word cocklebur is actually split in half, so that it reads cock-lebur. To the eye of a male, between the ages of 18 and, say, infinity years old, a cock-lebur is a very different thing than a cocklebur.

I’ll leave it to the reader’s imagination exactly what it might be, but it’s almost definitely something that shouldn’t be in Bill James’ underwear, that much is clear.

We all knew that Wade Boggs ate chicken before each game and that he was a superstitious character, but thanks to Dan Lewis’ aptly-named e-newsletter, Now I Know, now we know a little more about that colorful dude:

For night games, Boggs stepped into the batting cage at 5:17 and ran wind sprints at 7:17. (Trying to hex him, a scoreboard operator in Toronto once flipped the stadium clock directly from 7:16 to 7:18.) Before each at-bat Boggs would draw the Hebrew word “Chai” in the batter’s box, and his route to and from the playing field was so precise that by late summer his footprints were often clearly visible in the grass in front of his home dugouts. — Wade Boggs’ entry in the Baseball Library.

If such a thing were possible, I would order more of it. Could even the commissioner himself somehow decree that the players show more of their personality? Perhaps the website or the media could achieve the same by celebrating some of the crazier members of the baseball community. Here are some possible moves baseball could pull to put some of the zany back in the game.

1) Turk Wendell Day At the Park
The team – perhaps the Cubs – could hand out free licorice strings and a toothbrush to remind us all of the wonders of the Turk. Players could take flying leaps over the foul line (or draw crosses in the mound dirt) to add a little exuberance to the game, if they like.

2) Recommend Moises Alou as a Hitting Instructor
332 home runs and a career 133 wRC+ later, he could help some young men figure it out. But a whole team full of batters that eschew the batting glove and urinate on their hands would definitely add something.

3) Recommend Kevin “Touch Me, Touch Me” Rhomberg as a First Base Coach
Rhomberg played left field for the Indians once, but was better known for his superstitions. The two main superstitions that apply here were his need to touch anyone that touched him, and his inability to turn right (he’d keep turning left until he was headed right). Imagine a team full of Rhombergs. Just imagine.

4) Mark “The Bird” Fydrich Talking Ball Giveaway
Technology has come a long way. I’m sure a ball that could say a few key phrases could be made cheap enough to give away at a game. Then, at least, the ball would talk back.

5) Nomar Garciaparra Batting Gloves Giveaway
This might fly in the face of the new effort to speed games up, but a Nomar batting gloves giveaway, replete with a “Nomar at the Plate” video montage might just spawn a whole generation of crazy pre-at-bat rituals.

Hat Tip: Dan Lewis

As previously reported in these electronic pages, Oriole pitcher and writing Dutchman Rick VandenHurk has spent the last couple weeks in Europe with teammates Adam Jones and Jeremy Guthrie — plus some other baseball-types — offering instructional camps to tiny little foreign people.

Or, I should say, he was in Europe. The group has now concluded their duties abroad and flown back to the US of A. Even so, that hasn’t stopped VandenHurk from attempting to charm your pants off one last time.

Of note from VandenHurk’s most recent dispatch:

• More instances of totally unnecessary, but still entirely delightful, capitalization — including the words/phrases Indoor, Big Welcome, and Clinic.
• A brief account of a PSV Eindhoven match.
• Which, that means Adam Jones was at a PSV Eindhoven match.

Finally, and extra specially, the careful reader will note that the perpetually considerate VandenHurk signed his name “Vandy” in observance of Ron Gardenhire Day.

Jehovah’s Witnesses of the Upper Midwest are collectively kicking themselves today after Tim Pawlenty — Governor of the State of Minnesota — declared today to be Ron Gardenhire Day in the Land of 10,000* Lakes.

*Note: an approximation.

“In his declaration,” writes MLB.com’s Kelly Thesier,

Pawlenty pointed to the fact that Gardenhire, like [former manager Tom] Kelly, has made throwing strikes and playing sound defense the foundation of his teams. Over his nine seasons as the Twins manager, the 53-year-old Gardenhire has a career winning percentage of .550 with a record of 803-656.

The recognition comes just a week after Gardenhire won his first American League Manager of the Year Award.

While all the good people of Minnesota will no doubt have their own special ways of commemorating the beloved Gardenhire, the generally accepted custom is to spend the day addressing friends and relations by their “locker-room name” — a form constructed by adding “-y” to the first syllable of an addressee’s surname. By this method, Justin Morneau becomes “Morny“; Michael Cuddyer, “Cuddy“; and Nick Blackburn, perhaps regrettably, “Blacky.”

When asked how to address people whose last names already end with a “-y,” the governor’s office replied that it’s probably best “to ignore such people entirely.”

People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

-Rogers Hornsby

Now you can look out that window in style in the winter months, thanks to this new line of holiday hats from ’47 Brand. The hats feature team logos in Christmas colors (red and green) with a baseball-bat wielding Santa (reminds me of this guy). Some even don the team logo with a Santa-style stocking hat, sure to keep the ears or tops of letters warm.

These hats sell for 18.99, or roughly half of what an Authentic Collection hat sells for. I suppose that makes sense – at least here in Wisconsin, you can count on half of the year bringing wintry weather. That said, this doesn’t seem like anything a serious fan would want to wear, and the main targets for this would probably be unsuspecting gift buyers like Secret Santas. (Note to any Secret Santa of mine: don’t buy me one of these hats.)

What this really suggests to me is that these hats must be incredibly cheap to make, as ’47 Brand can apparently afford to produce this highly specific line of hats which doesn’t have much appeal to any hardcore type of fan – the type of fan that would spend money on hats. Perhaps I’m merely a Grinch, though, and am merely looking at the world with nary a hint of holiday spirit.

Baseball Superstars 2011, released earlier this month for iPhone and iPod Touch, is another in the Baseball Superstars franchise begun by Gamevil in 2007.

I acquired the game this past Friday and will be reviewing various aspects of it over the course of the next week or two.

In this dispatch, I’ll provide my first impressions of the game and some comments on the Exhibition mode.

First Impressions
You might have guessed, owing both to the Asian people and the Asian other things in the video above, that this game is deeply influenced — aesthetically, at least — by Asian cartoons. I’m tempted to say “Japanese” cartoons (as Strong Bad does in the video below), except for Gamevil is actually a Korean-based company, and I think it’s right and good to celebrate all our Asian brothers and sisters.

Whether for these aesthetic considerations, or for other reasons entirely, the game can be overwhelming at first. There are no less than seven options on the main menu — including Exhibition, My League, Season, and something called Mission. The literature for the game suggests that the My League mode “contains unique RPG elements in a sports title,” which sounds intriguing. It also says that Mission Mode “demands finest skills.” That’s unfortunate, of course, for those of us who possess only middling skills.

Like many swords, this is the double-edged kind. On the one hand, the number of options for play are alot for a newcomer to comprehend; on the other, if one measure of a quality game is that it can be played for some time, then the myriad options bode well for this.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lou Merloni’s pregame meal of choice.

This weekend’s Cape Cod Baseball League Hall of Fame induction was a time for sharing memories. And based on this article in the Cape Cod Times, mostly what everyone remembers from those weeks on the Cape is what the players ate.

Lou Merloni shared a fond reminiscence of his house mother:

“I was struggling early in the season. She made me steamers one day, put everything in it, carrots, linguica. I got three hits that night off Billy Wagner. Next day, she made steamers again, and I had two more hits… I went on to win the batting title all because of that host family and those steamers.”

Former Cape Cod League player Mike Loggins, who never made the majors but spent several years in the Royals’ system, offered a cautionary tale about his own house mother and the unredeemable unfairness of life:

“After my first home run, she told me she was going to make me a London Broil. It was so tender I told myself I was going to hit some more. I hit one again soon after, and I got another one. Then in three games I hit something like five homers, and I never got another London Broil.”

Sad. Lastly, and leastly, David Aardsma’s house mother revealed to the world young Aardsma’s “penchant for eating Spaghetti-O’s.”

In case you’re not familiar with the Cape Cod Baseball League, it’s a wood bat summer league for college players. The Cape Cod Times article linked above really captures how memorable the experience is for the young players, who typically stay with a host family and work day jobs on the side. Like any developmental league, some players go on to star in the majors, most don’t. If you’re interested in the league, or you just want to think summer thoughts as the weather cools down, several books have been written about it.