As noted minutes ago in these very same electronic pages, the author is watching the Nats-Cards game via Postseason.TV. One benefit of that sort of thing: four Pete Kozmas hitting a home run. Or, at least, four concurrent shots of the home run Pete Kozma hit, like, 10 minutes ago.
Today’s NLDS game between St. Louis and Washington (live boxscore) is available only on the MLB Network and online, using MLB’s playoff streaming-video product, Postseason.TV. Which, that means — for those of us who (a) don’t have the former but also (b) want to watch the game — that a purchase of the latter is necessary.
Below, for those interested, are two screenshots from Postseason.TV — the first an example of the “quad feed” option, which features four camera angles simultaneously; the second, of the “tight center” option by itself.
Note that, while Bob Costas’s commentary accompanies the feed, that there is no “presentation”-style editing — meaning the viewer himself controls what he sees. Also, there are no instant replays.
Here’s the aforementioned “quad feed” (click to embiggen):
Sitting here at primanti bros. about to crush a Pitts-burgher cheese steak for you. Thank you fans, for all your support. #thisonesforyou
— Travis Snider (@Lunchboxhero45) October 3, 2012
For Sale: Tiny, Dancing Ichiro
– Great for parties
– Housetrained (tiny toilet not included)
– May need to put towel over cage to get him to sleep
– A tiny, national treasure
– Eats Powerbars and cigarettes
Will accept all reasonable offers.
The nomination process, which involved furious denunciations and copious amounts of the dirty-dirty, is complete. Now you may select from the 10 names that follow. The desperate question before us: Who, because he is a rank maroon, should be nicknamed “I Denounce This Man”?
Thank you for exercising the franchise.
The following tweet is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):
Billy! — I say it with my Rosie Perez voice
like you are Woody Harrelson, but
you are not Woody Harrelson, let’s face it —
you are too much a lover
of soccer —
Billy, who should laud you
when your shit doesn’t work — for real
it’s like your shit is a time release fertilizer
that ends in October —
when you’re shit.
You’re not shit. I love you.
I hate you.
I love you.
I love that it is boring to you,
this game of bases and balls, this
menagerie of melancholy and silly
torture, this spectacle from which you hide
cinematically
on your exercise bicycle or
secretly behind your PB smoothie
(that’s right, I know you love them) —
I love your growing preference for piebald
balls.
When Endy Chávez was signed by the Texas Rangers in 2011, the Rangers had just become the parent team of Austin’s suburban Round Rock Express (taking over what had been a Houston Astros franchise). Although I was, as an Astros fan, disappointed that the closest ball club to be was now Rangers territory, I tried to make the best of it by getting extremely drunk with my friends at a game during the first week of their season. Endy Chávez was the token journeyman / former major leaguer toiling in the minors, and we briefly entertained the idea of becoming Endy super-fans, making handmade shirts and signs to support what had to have been a tough journey from Mets defensive superstar to bleak Texas suburbia.
“The strength to be there,” indeed.
I bought a t-shirt today …
“Mr. Roberto Clemente!” I said upon purchase. “One must certainly respect the great Mr. Roberto Clemente!”
“One must certainly not,” sniffed Cistulli, who, unbeknownst to me, had been lurking behind a potted palm the entire time. “And his name is not ‘Mr. Clemente.’ His name is ‘Bobo Clementines.’ The honorific is reserved for men of honor. Bobo Clementines is a mewling baby coward.”
“How can you say such things?” I gasped.
“Charity is vice,” sniffed Cistulli. “Death is weakness. I do not respect Bobo Clementines.”
Then he ravished me.
Last week, I shared a new statistic, called FAME, that measured the amount of acclaim that a player received during his career. The purpose of this endeavor was to compare the established greatness of players with the recognition of their accomplishments, and it produced a few minor revelations, namely that Yogi Berra was incredibly overrated in his time, and that Tony Phillips may not have actually existed at all, and was created as a psychological experiment by professors at Stanford who posted flyers on Oakland telephone poles reading “Tony Phillips Has a Posse”.
Yogi won three MVP awards, tied for the second most of all-time, yet never actually led the league in WAR. His FAME score, more than any other player, dwarfs his actual numbers. This led me to ask: what if the BBWAA were, retroactively, to cast off their intangibles and surrender to the droning hive-mind of the baseball accountancy? What if the MVP were awarded to the player who provided the most value to their team, regardless of context, over the hypothetical replacement player? What if John Larroquette were to be considered the greatest television actor of his generation?
As it turns out, the MVP in its current form is a perfect example of the inherent conflict between precision and suspense. Here, for the purposes of comparison, is a list of all players who won three or more MVP awards in their career:
