They’re New York Mets, of course.
More importantly, though, those “educated fans,” we’re them. They’re us. From Pardon The Interruption, to cartoon’s in The New Yorker — I found this one in a piece, a rather good one by Lawrence Wright, I might add, about “The unintended consequences of American funding in Pakistan“) — we’re everywhere, man.
Cartoon by Michael Crawford. If you want to buy it, you can.
It’s come to the editors’ attention that Dayn Perry has, in fact, posted this video despite the fact that it actually appears in Eno Sarris’s work of only one hour earlier. Perry’s implication is clear: “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
It’s Rain Delay Day here at NotGraphs! And what follows is a fine example of whimsy! Rain descends upon a college game of base and ball. How to entertain the flinty souls still in the stands? As with all things, the penetrating wisdom of the renaissance fair is always near at hand …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkuhqsnZF7Y&feature=player_embedded
I promised whimsy, and whimsy you have received.
(Sweeping bow to m’ lady: With Leather)
If every rainy day was like these rainy days, we might not have as much of a problem with them, ’cause these rainy days made for some awesome rain delay action.
Flip Flop Fly Ballin’ spotted this rain delay, where the comedy was all ‘of errors.’ Of special note is the silly hat. Because, hey, if you’re going to do your job very poorly, it’s worth doing it poorly in a silly hat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTSIJzvNIM8
And maybe this is why more rain delays aren’t like this.
Unless you’re freshly murdered, you had a better go of things tonight than Vin Mazzaro did. Here is what Mr. Mazzaro and, one must assume, the vengeful Old-Testament God who has it in for him have wrought:
2.1 IP, 11 H, 14 R, 3 BB, 2 K
The list of people I’d wish that upon consists mostly of bloodthirsty dictators. What’s perhaps most harrowing is that Mazzaro had a better FIP on the night than did Kyle Davies, the Royals’ starter. Success!
How the author feels on the inside.
More than three weeks after being shut down by Sony for security reasons, the PlayStation Network appears to be functional again, allowing those of us who use it (i.e. the Network) for MLB.TV to go back to complaining about unconscionable blackout rules and choppy feeds.
Note that returning to full functionality isn’t quite as easy as snapping your fingers (unless, that is, it takes you 10 or so minutes to snap your fingers just once — in which case, you’ll feel right at home). Each user will likely be prompted to do a system update and to reset his password to something that’s longer than 37 characters with at least one reference to Goethe’s oeuvre.
Today, Mat Kovach presented some fantastic research over at the Hardball Times: using Retrosheet data. he found just how every single game in the Retrosheet database ended. Check out the link for the whole results, but there were a few shockers in the data set.
Kovach highlights perhaps the most ridiculous: a catcher’s interference play which ended the Reds-Dodgers tilt on August 1st, 1971, in which Johnny Bench stepped in front of the plate to attempt to tag a stealing Manny Mota, interfering with the hitter.
Other interesting ones: 22 walk-off stolen bases (and one game ending for the losing team on a stolen base), 13 walk-off balks, 427 walk-off walks, 50 walk-off hit-by-pitches, and 64 game-ending pickoffs (including 16 which ended up winning it for the batting team!).
Pretty wild stuff. Make sure you read through the comments section, as the numbers in the original article include some games that were called due to rain, and the comments section cleans some of that out.
The following two daguerreotypes provide, I should like to think, a sherpa’s load of whimsy while — conveniently enough for the purposes of this series of World Wide Web Site Internet pages — both being at least somewhat about baseball. Please enjoy Ozzie Guillen and his better half quaffing fermented grapes and taking in views of a fetching hillscape!
Now please enjoy Yogi Berra in an Astros uniform!
Now please enjoy having enjoyed these!
In case you missed it, reader, you’ll be pleased to discover that, on this past Friday’s edition of Pardon the Interruption, America’s favorite orange-faced sportswriter Tony Kornheiser made reference to our fair site — and, specifically, to a post by our man Dave Cameron — during a segment on uber-prospect Bryce Harper.
Though modesty prevents us from sharing the entire segment, I can inform you that co-host Michael Wilbon’s reaction would best be described as “totally incredulous.”
As for Tony Reali, his reaction may or may not become the lyrics to The Official Baseball-Nerd Rally Song.
Regard:
Behold! My latest, most impressive findings!
Teams with dumb names (such as the Mets and Orioles) typically cannot hit as well as teams with average names (such as the Dodgers and Astros), while teams with superior names (such as the Pirates and Tigers) hit as poorly as their ill-named counterparts! These findings were not only significant at the 99% level, but they also had an R-squared near 0.224 — meaning a full 22% of a team’s offense come from the pride they take in their name!
It is a well known axiom that players hit precisely how they feel, so when you go out, day after day, wearing the emblem of a cute little bird, it is very difficult to muster the wherewithal to swing a club at a ball. Using Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) and Name Awesomeness Plus (NA+, a completely arbitrary stat I invented for the purpose of this study), we can see how having a name that’s too awesome can be just as detrimental to performance!
We can only assume that if a team has an exceedingly awesome name, such as the Cubs, Pirates, or Braves, the players have less incentive to play hard. They already feel good about themselves, so they do not need to prove themselves any further.
For the full data set, see below.
Note: this now features a poll at the bottom. Rate the Braves’ broadcast team yourself.
Chip Caray is the handsomest of the Carays.
On Friday, I submitted for the readership’s consideration, some basic criteria by which one might assess the quality of an MLB broadcast. In what follows, I attempt — perhaps with less modesty than I ought — to apply that criteria to the Atlanta Braves’ television broadcast.
Over the past week, I watched (most of) a pair of Braves games on Atlanta’s SportSouth — first, Julio Teheran’s debut at Philadelphia on May 7th, and then Friday night’s contest against those same Phillies, but this time at Turner Field.
The broadcast team is composed of play-by-play man Chip Caray and color commentator Joe Simpson. Former Brave Brian Jordan joined the telecast on Friday night, as well.
Analysis
Simpson is the stronger/-est member of this broadcast team (depending on whether you consider Brian Jordan part of said “team.”) He demonstrates little understanding of statistical analysis — he and Caray made unqualified references, for example, to how many RBIs Brian McCann had at Citizens Bank Ballpark and how Joe Mather was “batting .500” against Cole Hamels (in six at-bats) — but he was helpful, I thought, when discussing pitchers.