It’s likely, reader, that you remember something called the Holiday Inn Look Again Player of the Year Award. It’s also likely that you remember it for the same reason I do — namely, because its existence was brought to your attention via Fire Joe Morgan, where Junior (a.k.a. Alan Yang) revealed — rather predictably, perhaps — that a disproportionate number of nominees for the award (including winner David Eckstein) were on the caucasian side of things.

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Down in Arizona at the Fall League, there were some freaky things going on — and I’m not speaking about the loud lady with the flags and the one-woman chants up front. Take a look at a couple of these strange athletes.

It’s not polite to laugh at his pitching motion, or call him a “Large Lincecum,” because that’s just mean. Also, Josh Collmenter pitched five innings with eight strikeouts and no walks on November fifth – pushing his record to 3-0 – so he cares little for my tawdry jokes. But, it is a little funny. Joel Henard of Baseball Daily Digest interviewed Austin Romine at the AFL Rising Stars game (last clip of the bunch) and asked Romine about Collmenter’s delivery. According the Yankees’ catching prospect, it seems that Collmenter’s funky release point is part of the reason for his success. If I’m hearing Romine correctly in this clip, it sounds like the high release point makes his curveball harder to pick up right away, and that just reminded me of garik16’s excellent piece debunking the idea that the release point was important to a curveball’s success. Then again, as Mike Fast showed us in his recent treatise on release points, we are still learning a lot about them since they aren’t specifically tracked by the pitch f/x cameras.

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“If you charge slightly less when Kyle Lohse is pitching, they will come.”

In 2011 the Cardinals will become the newest team to experiment with dynamic ticket pricing software. Teams already price tickets differently based on day of week and opponent, but last season the Astros and Giants started using a software program that raises and lowers unsold ticket prices every day based on factors like weather forecast, number of available seats, and pitching matchups(!).

From my perspective, which is that of someone who likes to read books about scientists, this is awesome. Granted, it wouldn’t make much difference to teams that sell out almost all of their games far in advance. But it’s just cool technology, and for most Major League teams dynamic, daily-adjusted pricing could create value for both fans and the franchise. There’s never a good reason for a seat to be empty when someone outside would like to see the game. Of course, the flipside is that people who can’t pay a lot may be stuck attending lower-quality games, at least if they wait until the last minute to buy tickets.

I know purchase prediction models are used in many industries, but I’m really curious about the baseball manifestation. Is the model in Houston significantly different than the model in San Francisco? The interplay between weather, traffic, ticket price, throwback uni day, competing entertainment options, etc., and ballgame attendance must be different in different cities. I also wonder how something like NERD score would do at projecting demand for baseball tickets.

However, taking the perspective of that famously cynical breed, Cardinals fans, I’d have to say this sounds suspiciously like… well, Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III said it for me:

“It’s something that people are familiar with in other industries, such as the airline industry, where prices are floating based on factors that change over time.”

Modest recommendation for Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III’s press officer: When next your leader is rolling out a new service model to fans, it may not be optimal to volunteer an analogy between that initiative and the airline industry.

You might have caught word of this around the interweb, but it appears to be a real thing now: Peter Miller’s Jews and Baseball: An American Love Affair has opened in New York and Los Angeles — and will be doing the same in Kansas City today (Friday, the 19th). A general opening will occur sometime in the following weeks.

So far as a proper review goes, it’s with all my heart that I regret not being able to offer one. However, allow me to state with totally undeserved authority five things about the film:

• Sandy Koufax agreed to be interviewed for it. (That’s him at around the 1:53 mark.)
• There appears to be no footage of fly balls clanging off Ryan Braun’s glove. This I find terribly misleading.
• Director Peter Miller has worked pretty extensively with Ken Burns, meaning this film is almost definitely well-crafted.
• It also means that viewers should prepare to be bullied emotionally by musical cues (the hopeful “whoosh” around the 1:28 mark, for example).
• Being bullied by Dick Dale and the Del-Tones is considerably less objectionable.

H/T: Ben Platt at MLB.com

Yesterday, in a lighthearted interview with Boston sports radio station WEEI, Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia stated — and understandably so — that he’d have no interest in fighting modern-day boxing great Manny Pacquiao.

Though whimsical in the context of the Pedroia interview, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that a ballplayer, former or otherwise, could excel in another sport. In fact, a number of MLB-ers have done just that. Below are some brief, and very-non-fictional, examples of baseball’s two-sport athletes.

1883: Charley “Old Hoss” Radbourn becomes America’s first real two-sport athlete, not only pitching for the Providence Grays but also excelling in the popular late-century sport of “drunken carousing.”

1961: Boston center fielder Jimmy Piersall (pictured above) unveils for the public’s consideration his self-taught “crane kick,” the move later used by Daniel LaRusso to beat that douche Johnny from Cobra Kai.

1982: In his freshman year at Auburn University, Bo Jackson becomes first college athlete to letter in 17 sports, including Women’s Equestrian. “I just love those damn horses,” says Jackson when asked to comment on his first-place finish at the NCAA national tournament.

2009: “If not wearing pants is a sport, I’m the f*cking champ,” announces a pantless Kenny Powers.

2014: After retiring from baseball, middle infielder and scrapaholic David Eckstein goes on to successful career as jockey in thoroughbred horse racing.

That man up there who knows all the words to 1979’s genre-defining single “Rapper’s Delight” is, in fact, not all the members of The Sugarhill Gang combined M.A.S.K.-style to form an uber-rapper, but rather Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter. The man next to him, on the ones and twos, is DJ Jazzy Jeff, who once combined with the Fresh Prince (a.k.a. Will Smith) to sing the songs of our lives.

“Yes, but how’s this related to baseball?” maybe you’re asking. To which I answer: (a) the event in question was the opening of a Philadelphia-area sporting goods store known as Mitchell & Ness and (b) there’s at least two or five Phillies-related items in the background there.

Jerks.

H/T: RJ White

Taken from a blog called “A Conversation on Cool,” this picture of Willie Mays playing stickball in Harlem in 1954 is practically a coolgasm. The soft polo shirt, the believable smile, the flexed muscles and the grinning crowd combine to create a picture worth much more than a thousand words. There’s a lot going on here, and all of it is awesome.

But one cannot avoid a pang of something less grin-ful. Is it nostalgia? Not quite it – a person that wasn’t alive then cannot really miss the time. Perhaps it’s jealousy? But we see great athletes all the time. A combination of the two emotions might describe the feeling. We might be jealous of the grinning children in the back, and that jealousy may be tinged with nostalgia for own youth.

Another picture, then, of a moment from our own time.

To be clear, this is not to suggest the photographs could even be close to equal. One is almost sartorial in nature and its composition and art are there for a completely different aim than the other. One picture is a moment in time, the other more of a documentation that David Wright did, indeed, give some awards to the After School All Stars after hanging out with the children and giving them pointers. And this is not – at all – to denigrate the efforts of Wright and his foundation. His work is important, and good.

But put the two pictures near each other, and some of that nostalgia or jealousy crystallizes into something a little bit too grumpy for this correspondent. Is a moment featuring unbridled (and unplanned) access to a player like Willie Mays possible today? Is there a player today that is such a Man of the People that he could find some kids, join in their local game, and create a moment this cool? As much as we can pride ourselves in the progress we’ve made, has our culture edged out real moments such as this?

Imagine you’re a player (of any sport) driving down a busy street in autumn, 2010. You spot a pickup game, and you want to join in. Then you may think of the demands of your contract, your agent, your publicist, your team, and perhaps even your personal wealth. Would you join in?

H/T: Tommy Bennett

Sometimes teenage prospects turn into Pedro Martinez, but not usually.

In October, Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times wrote two articles about Major League Baseball’s increased efforts to regulate the signing of prospects in the Dominican Republic (here and here). He also suggested that 2010’s new regulations are why Dominican prospects are signing more slowly and for smaller bonuses than they did in 2009. Yesterday, Schmidt published a piece about one group of people that is still bullish on the Dominican prospect market: private American investors.

These investors, unaffiliated with established sports agencies or Major League teams, are working with Dominican trainers or setting up their own baseball academies in the Dominican Republic. In exchange, they get percentages of the signing bonuses of any financed players who sign with Major League teams. Schmidt’s article on this interesting phenomenon is worth checking out. Sports Illustrated also reported on one of these academies this April, and Time Magazine had a broader piece about the Dominican baseball economy this July.

There are obvious ethical questions around Major League Baseball’s relationship with the Latin American prospect market, where teenagers are trading school for steroids and a small chance at life-changing wealth. By putting more money into that marketplace, private American investors may be encouraging more kids to leave school for a dream that will never come true. You could alternatively argue that more American money means more money going to those same kids, but I wonder how much of it makes it to them.

I don’t think it’d be particularly controversial to suggest that baseball’s news coverage is often absurd. Certainly, at this point in the MLB calendar — not quite into the depths of the Hot Stove League, but too far removed from the end of the season to make any interesting comments about it — the value of reportage from baseball’s front lines can be questionable.

In any case, it appears as though one beat writer understands this. Boston Herald writer Mike Silverman’s twitter account features the following announcements, spaced out by approximately 40 minutes:

And:

Encore, Mike Silverman. Encore.

Word from the internet is that ESPN: The Magazine will soon be publishing a film-themed issue — featuring, among other things, Mariner ace Felix Hernandez and Mariner other player Garrett Olson (pictured above) as Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega, respectively.

It may surprise the reader, however, to learn that ballplayers are no strangers to film. In fact, a number of current or recently retired players have actually found themselves quite involved in the motion picture industry. Below are some notable — and super-not-made-up-at-all — cases of Major Leaguers and their respective contributions to this popular medium.

1968: An infant A.J. Pierzynski appears briefly in title role of Roman Polanski horror film Rosemary’s Baby.

1998-99: Pedro Martinez stars in two-year-long meta-film, exploring what might happen in the event that a mortal were given god-like capabilities.

2002: Apropos of nothing, Ebert & Roeper give Alex Rodriguez two thumbs down “for being kinda douchey-seeming.”

Late-2000s: Mustachioed Brendan Ryan, hoping to develop reputation as serious actor, is instead frequently typecast as bandito.

2014: After retiring from baseball, middle infielder and scrapaholic David Eckstein goes on to successful career as child actor.

H/T: News Tribune