Moneyball had a big day yesterday, garnering a surprise six Academy Award nominations, including nods in four of the bigger categories: Best Actor, Best Actor in a Supporting Role, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture.  It’s nice to see a baseball movie get this kind of recognition, but nobody should really expect the movie to actually win anything, because 1) the movie wasn’t really that good, and 2) baseball movies, when they get nominated (which is rare), tend to fare abysmally in the final voting.  To whit:

– The Pride of the Yankees (1942) received 11 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress.  It won only one, Daniel Mandell for Best Film Editing.

–The Natural (1984) received four nominations, including Glenn Close for Best Supporting Actress.  It won none.

–Bull Durham (1988) received only one (!) nomination for Best Original Screenplay.  It lost to Rain Man.

–Field of Dreams (1989) received three nominations, including Best Picture.  It won none, losing best picture to Driving Miss Daisy.

-Vincent Gardenia earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Bang The Drum Slowly (1973).  He lost to John Houseman in The Paper Chase.

The closest baseball has had to a major Oscar victory is when Robin Williams won Best Supporting Actor for Good Will Hunting in 1997.  “I just slid my ticket across the table and I said ‘Sorry guys, I gotta see about a girl.'”

Look at David Nied! Just look at him!

David Nied is playing a boy’s game in a god’s country! Is that a cowhide baseball or a frosty snowball, both totems to a lad’s insouciance! The promises of youth! The crisp air in one’s lungs! The ball taking determined flight from the determined hands of a Young Man of America! Who cares if his paymasters will force him to pitch in Mile High Stadium! David Nied, Young Man of America, can do this!

David Nied failed.

This is Vic Tayback’s grave:

(Thanks, I guess: Old Time Family Baseball)

“Oh how those Nipponese love their baseball!”

– James Sakamoto of the Seattle Japanese-American Courier

Yesterday I, along with Carson Cistulli and The Common Man, attended the second annual Bud Selig Distinguished Lecture in Sport and Society. This year’s presentation was titled “One Base at a Time: Baseball and the Nikkei People,” a lecture presented by Samuel O. Regolado (nephew of Rudy) of California State University-Stanislaus.

The lecture series has been designed and supported with the intent of going beyond the men and teams who comprise sports but to examine the communities behind the sports. In many ways, the games we watch and play are a reflection of us as a people (maybe it is, in fact, just society). Specifically, Regolado’s lecture looks at how baseball was a key component of the communities of the first generations of Japanese immigrants in America used baseball as part of their assimilation into American culture.

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Today’s News in Pictures:

This has been Today’s News in Pictures. This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

(Tiger-striped Zubaz pants: BTF)

Last week, my world’s collided. Let me explain: I work by day as a producer on a nightly current affairs television program up here in God’s city, Toronto, called The Agenda with Steve Paikin, producing one-on-one interviews on a myriad of topics, and moonlight as a very mediocre sports writer by night. The inimitable host of our program, veteran journalist, great Canadian, and the hardest working man in show business, Steve Paikin, is a huge baseball fan. He’s got a framed painting of Ted Williams in his office. I’m quite certain that if Steve weren’t a Boston Red Sox fan, he’d be perfect. And, so, when veteran Toronto Sun baseball scribe Bob Elliott got the call to Cooperstown, winning the 2012 J.G. Taylor Spink Award, Steve invited him into our studio for an interview. Now, Bob Elliott’s usually on the other end of this equation; he’s the one asking the questions. But when Steve Paikin invites you on The Agenda, you don’t turn him down. So Elliott sat down with Paikin, magic happened, and television was made.

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Eddie Gaedel[e] has gotten a decent number of mentions at the FanGraphs subsidiaries and elsewhere. As I noted last week, poet and biographer Tom Clark has a long poem about him.

I am not here to weigh in on whether rostering little people constitutes a demeaning gimmick or is the answer to a market inefficiency in baseball.

Instead, I am here to offer you an opportunity to hold Eddie Gaedel’s real life game-worn jockstrap.^[1] You need only travel to the Baseball Reliquary in Monrovia, California where it is safely housed.

Smell it.

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With few job prospects left in the world of professional baseball, it is no secret that Jose Canseco is desperate to find steady employment. Having somehow caught wind of the fact that NotGraphs writers are compensated handsomely for their efforts, late last night Canseco dropped us a line…well, several lines. They are posted below. 

It’s not as if Canseco is wholly unqualified to blog (indeed, one of the great things about blogging is that anyone can do it), as he has “written” two books. In my opinion, it is an offer worth seriously considering.

Just saw the movie money ball.

Carson is probably as good looking as jonah hill

I am going to blog this year.

Carson cistulli call me would love to blog for you just give me a tryout that’s all I ask

Carson cistulli email me Jc7264@yahoo.com

Bloggers love bill James and the Red Sox hired him .that’s from the movie money ball .bloggers love me maybe they can hire me

Is a little tryout to much to ask for

I guess murderers and child molestors get more chances than I do

On the occasion of his signing with the Mariners, a hand-crafted, artisanal snap regarding the aged Kevin Millwood.

The Author: Kevin Millwood is so old he’s got a negative Player ID number on FanGraphs.

All Gathered: Oh, snap.

Also: Rapturous applause.

The nomination process — the bloody, gristly, indisputably felonious nomination process — is done. And our appointed and empowered and empaneled think tank, The Institute for the Right-Wise and Permissible, has winnowed the list down to 10 names, each of which is right-wise and permissible. So vote correctly, lest a stew be made of your loins and children …

Thank you for exercising the franchise, dead man.

1) He’s serious.

2) He was involved in one of the craziest plays in the history of baseball.

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