Our ongoing quest, in the manner of a noble knight-errant, is to assign players to cool nicknames rather than indulge in the tired, shopworn paradigm of assigning nicknames to cool players.
Last (and first) time out, Wily Mo Peña fought off Milton Bradley and others (with his fists!), scored a narrow plurality and earned the nickname “Bad Miracle.”
The nickname up for grabs in this episode? It’s “Captain Black Tobacco”!
Although baseball is certainly nowhere near leaving the public eye in the recent future, it can be interesting to think about what will happen to the sport in the distant future. Can a sport like baseball actually survive in the fast-moving world of tomorrow?
Gene Roddenberry and the writers of Star Trek didn’t seem to think so. Baseball comes up relatively often in the series — more often than any current sport, although less often than the awesome-sounding Parrises Squares. In the Star Trek universe, baseball’s popularity declined rather swiftly in the 21st situation, such that the last World Series was played in 2042. The sport lived on in the minds of humans, but was no longer recognized as a major professional sport.
Dr. Paul Stubbs, portrayed by Ken Jenkins (the actor behind Scrubs’s Dr. Bob Kelso) remained a baseball fan despite the sport’s status as a relic. In explaining to young Ensign Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) how broken, how downtrodden Stubbs would be should he miss his one chance to perform his experiment on a stellar phenomenon which only occurs once every 196 years, he refers to his love of baseball, in a way that I think many of us who put our noses to the spreadsheets can understand:
STUBBS: I could live with failure… Well, maybe not. But nevereven to try. To miss your one chance at bat. Do you know baseball?
WESLEY: My dad taught it to me when I was little.
STUBBS: Once, centuries ago, it was the beloved national pastime of the Americas, Wesley. Abandoned by a society that prized fast food and faster games. Lost to impatience. But I have seen the great players make the great plays.
WESLEY: Do you recreate them on a Holodeck?
STUBBS: No, in here… (his mind)… With the knowledge of statistics… runs, hits and errors… times at bat… box scores. Men like us do not need Holodecks, Wesley. I have played seasons in my mind. It was my reward to myself. For patience. Knowing my turn would come. Call your shot. Point to a star. One great blast and the crowd rises. A brand new era in astro-physics. Postponed one hundred and ninety-six years on account of rain.
It’s a bit simplistic, but I think Stubbs’s speech gives a pretty good account of how people like “us” — those fans who take a great joy in the statistical side of the game — use those statistics to give us a greater understand of the game. Seeing Jose Bautista’s 216 wRC+ at the top of the leaderboards doesn’t end with the number. We can see the dominance play out in our heads as well, just like Future Bob Kelso suggests.
The author wouldn’t mind faire-ing a couple of bises with the French First Lady.
If there’s anything more annoying than a young, childless person spending two-plus weeks in the South of France at the height of summer, it’s to hear that same young, childless person complain about spending two-plus weeks in the South of France at the height of summer.
Because, it’s a fact, reader: the South of France is an exercise in charm. The women are almost uniformly beautiful*; the weather is warm and dry; the vin is equal parts delicious and affordable; and the picturesque, winding rues are absurd in their picturesque-ness and winding-osity. Moreoever, an inability to understand the native language means that one is free from accidentally overhearing inane conversations that might interfere with the traveler’s illusions about this land of milk and fine honeys.
*Led, notably, by First Lady-cum-supermodel-cum-heiress-cum-classically-trained-musician Carla Bruni.
For the baseballing enthusiast, however, there’s a small sable cloud attached to the vast expanse of silver lining that is this wonderland of sophistication and perpetual drunkeness — namely, the difficulty in ever watching even a second of live baseball.
I consider myself a rather feverish defender of Colby Rasmus against the mewling hordes who would trade him away for, say, Rick Honeycutt. However, my devotions to Mr. Rasmus and his flat bill, which makes him look fly, are shamefully lesser than those of this young lady …
No, I’m not going to mock impressionable teens when they undertake something with earnestness. Instead, here’s a decidedly partial listing of things that “Fire Burning in the Outfield” is better than: Creed, the poetry I wrote in college, seafood, the NFL, Broadway musicals, Rick Reilly, “Two-and-a-Half Men,” tribal-armband tattoos, Nickelback, people interested in Casey Anthony’s whereabouts, the body politic. I could go on, but I need to watch that again.
So where’s your hip-hop paean, La Russa?
(Loving ballad to reader Nick for the 411.)
Bon to the jour, bespectacled readership. I am Carson Cistulli, and this is FranceGraphs.
In our most recent — and, not incidentally, only other — edition of FranceGraphs, we looked at the slight, but significant, differences between the French and American versions of FanGraphs. Today, we cast a gaze at the French baseball league, the Championnat de France de baseball Élite — or what we’ll call the Elite division, for short.
French baseball, as with French (and other European kinds of) soccer, utilizes a promotion/relegation system of which the eight-team Elite division is merely the top. Below this is the 18-team National 1 division and 24-team National 2 division, the latter of which is composed of winners from numerous regional leagues.
On Thursday night, July 14, America’s elected officials took a much deserved break from trying to figure out what to do with all that debt, and took part in the most American of activities: baseball.
The 50th annual Roll Call Congressional Baseball Game was played at Nationals Stadium last week, and, thanks to a pair of well-educated NotGraphs readers, what you’ll find below is a brilliant review of the Democrats’ 8-2 victory, their third in a row since 2009, after they, the rest of the country, and, well, the world, took it on the chin from the Republicans for eight straight — and long — years.
Huge political props go out to Dara and Noah for their review. Thank you kindly, and long live the American spirit.
Even the participants in the annual Congressional Baseball Game are aware that it’s a slightly pathetic event. The only Baseball Hall of Famer who’s ever appeared in the game, former senator Jim Bunning, is not a member of the Congressional Baseball Hall of Fame, and the game program prominently features a quote from former Congressman Marty Russo calling it “the one thing that’s left where members (of Congress) get to have fun together.” Nonetheless, the 2011 game, played last Thursday at Nationals Park, managed a crowd of a few thousand Congressional staffers, interns, and hometown fans nostalgic for the lovable bumbling of the past few Nationals seasons. But fans on the left-field (aisle?) side were in for a pleasant surprise. The Democrats turned in an impressingly not-incompetent performance, winning 8-2 on the strength of a legitimate gem from pitcher Cedric Richmond.
Man of a Thousand Employers Billy Martin knows a thing or two about a thing or two about real baseball. As such, it should come as no surprise that Martin is profoundly impressed by the Realistic Home-Video Baseball Game that is in his midst …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D54sGd7lUYQ&feature=related
Once upon a time, there was a distinct line between Actual Baseball and the Realistic Home-Video Baseball Game. But then the sorcerers at Atari Video-Gaming Concern came along and blurred that line to the point of invisibility. Billy Martin told us so. Like sinners at a tent revival, we have no choice but to heed his words.
We have our first upset. Dave Winfield obviously wasn’t taking the whole thing very serious and Warren Brusstar glared his way to victory. Maybe Winfield was ranked too highly, or maybe he was just bored, or maybe it was October in his world, but Brusstar’s constipated fire beat the sated mmplops look. Maybe that says something about our bathroom preferences.
Anyway. It’s time to move on. This week we have two classic Mets figures going head to head. Could we have another fire and ice pairing? Looks like it.
Via the DCist comes your Daguerreotype of the Evening, which is Jayson Werth’s admiring, from a sensible remove, an unfolding situation that can best be described as “The Gentleman’s Dilemma” …
Since we can’t see Mr. Werth’s rapt countenance, we’re forced to speculate on how, exactly, he might be taking all this in. Is his pose one of cool detachment? Mounting revulsion? Fear that, much like Philly, tasers are spoken here? Vague, gnawing hope that tasers are spoken here? Envy that has its foundations in his longstanding desire to be manhandled by a battalion of constables while wearing his most gorgeous bridal whites? Or is he merely admiring the craftsmanship of the “N” on the outfield wall?
Or are his eyes closed as he thinks back to that time, years ago, in an open-air bazaar in Tangiers, when he let Dr. Vega slip from his grasp …
(Thanks to reader Josh and his assassin’s sense of calm for calling this to our attention.)
It is a well-established fact that the kids these days are somewhat entitled, what with their mp3s and their Kinects and their computer graphics. Back in my day, we listened to mp2s and played migraine-inducing Virtual Boys and our video games sometimes didn’t even have graphics. If you wanted to kill a troll, you typed the words “kill troll”, and the game narrated whether or not you were, in fact, successful in killing the troll. Note: you were often not successful in killing the troll.
Among computer games, the interactive fiction genre began before people even owned computers. Thirty-five years after people first typed “xyzzy”, the community is alive and well, or at least alive, dwelling in a strata of internet culture just beneath the basement from which the bloggers write about their sabermetrics.
Which leads us to our subject: three weeks ago saw the release of the first narrative baseball game. Bonehead is written by Sean M. Shore, and tells the story of New York Giants first baseman and teenager Fred Merkle, whose baserunning gaffe in the final week of 1908 helped cost his team the pennant and dogged him the rest of his life. Your goal is to re-enact that day, beginning with standing in line at the train station on the way to the stadium.
What’s interesting about Bonehead is the distinction it makes between you as the player and Merkle as the character, despite the fact that you are effectively acting as Merkle throughout the story. The game makes it clear early on that Merkle is destined for misfortune, and that “winning” the game, i.e. playing it to its proper ending, brings about this misfortune. Between passages of the game Shore weaves vignettes of Merkle’s later years. Meanwhile, the game provides multiple opportunities to end the game another way, many of them averting ignominy.
Bonehead is free to play, and the game can be downloaded here. The game file requires an interpreter to run, and they can be downloaded on the same page.
