Archive for August, 2014

New Stat: Clutch Snarl Index Ratio

Tom Powers writes an astute article about the Twins losing a lot of games over the past few years because they have too many players who are psychologically healthy. In his piece, “Twins need fewer smiles, more snarls,” he argues that the Twins have too many nice guys, and not enough angry jerks. A compelling argument, supported by an impressive pile of evidence as large as the world’s largest unicorn, but I think Powers misses one key insight:

It’s not that the Twins don’t have enough snarls, it’s that the snarls aren’t coming in clutch situations. They’re wasting their snarls on two-out, nobody-on situations, or late in the game when it’s already a blowout, or they’re spreading them out instead of stacking them for maximum effect. I know they say that there’s no such thing as a clutch snarler, but, having done at least as much research as Powers, I can stand behind three — no, four — airtight conclusions about the game of baseball and about snarling:

1. A lone snarl is as useless as a walk. You can’t win with one snarl at a time, just like baserunners don’t mean anything unless they arrived at first via a headfirst slide.

2. Your best snarler needs to bat 6th in the lineup. Whoever says lineup order doesn’t matter has his head buried in a pile of meticulously-analyzed records. Batting order counts, and snarls need to come 6th. That’s all there is to it.

3. If a lefty snarls, and then a righty snarls, the two snarls cancel each other out. That’s why you need to have all your snarls come from the same side.

4. If your Clutch Snarl Index Ratio falls below 64, you will not make the playoffs.

That’s right– taking every team in history and running them through my proprietary Clutch Snarl Index Ratio formula (which I cannot reveal due to my upcoming book, Clutch Snarl Index Ratio For Real Dummies, You Dummy), I’ve found that no team has ever reached the playoffs with a Clutch Snarl Index Ratio below 64. It was a shocking insight, especially since the Clutch Snarl Index Ratio operates on a scale that runs between 65 and 147.

Of course, so much more research must be done before I could even think about publishing an article about this in an actual newspaper. They have standards, y’know?


The Puig Wag Through History

As is amply documented, Brian McCann’s job as Chief of Fun Police has made him a busy man for the past several thousand years. Somewhat less attention has been given by historians to the role of Yasiel Puig. That is now changing, as ongoing scholarship reveals the Cuban sensation to have been present for a surprisingly large number of momentous events. Take heart, Albert Pujols: you are merely the latest to have faced, and ultimately overcome, the Wag of Puig.

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Will Matt Williams Tip Over?

mattwilliams(Keep Scrolling)

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eBay’s 5 Most Marvelous and Currently Unavailable Ballcaps

It is important to note, for the sake of both historical accuracy and literary theme, that when Mark Twain wrote, “There is no such thing as a new idea,” he was stealing from the biblical Solomon, who, despite enjoying the ministrations of 700 wives and 300 concubines, had conceived a similar and ultimately Ecclesiastical maxim, namely, that there is nothing new under the sun.

Of course, the proof of Twain’s assertion is less in his choice of words than in his decision to use them. That he thought it was nothing new; that he said it was something old. Among writers, the search for new ideas is a truth as old as time, if not somehow older. When facing writer’s block or “thinker’s void,” we must often turn to other sources for inspiration or “plagiarism.”

It is in the spirit of all these things – literature, theft, things being under the sun – that I present this post, inspired by C. Cistulli’s award-craving series, eBay’s Five Most Marvelous and Currently Available Ballcaps.

To repeat: eBay’s 5 Most Marvelous and Currently Unavailable Ballcaps:

NotAvailable

Anderson Felons New Era Hat (Missing Link)

Style: Fitted (7 3/8), probably
Time Left: Pretty much all you want, as the cap remains unavailable
Cost: The time it takes to read this post, or this part of this post

The Felons, according to Baseball Indirect Reference, were an Anderson-based Dependent League team that belonged, first, to the Anderson-Area Correctional Institute and then, after that, the Anderson-Area Correctional Institute And Good-Times FunDrinkery. I have it on good, if not great, authority that anyone who wears this hat is automatically confused by the goals of the institution – fun? good times? retribution via killer hangover? – and ultimately confined to the institution, just in time for happy hour.

***
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Terrible Photos of Ballparks from the Interstate: Volume I

Today, the author and his wife completed the first leg of a two-day journey in a U-Haul truck from the north of Michigan to an undisclosed location in New Hampshire that will serve as our new home.

Generating weblog content whilst driving a 17-foot truck presents some challenges. For all their virtues, wives are decidedly intolerant of husbands who attempt to perform internet work from within the confines of a driver’s seat. Fortunately, certain ballclubs have done everyone the total solid of constructing ballparks close enough to Interstate 90 so that absurd men with limited ambitions — like the present author, for example — can parlay that into writing of no consequence.

With that in mind, I present the following — which is to say, probably all the ballparks you can see from the stretch of I-90 between Toledo and Buffalo.

All Pro Freight Stadium
All Pro Freight Stadium is located in Avon, Ohio, and serves as home to the Lake Erie Crushers of the independent Frontier League. Here’s a terrible photo of it from the interstate:

Lake Erie

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More People Are Watching The Tigers Than Are Currently Alive in Detroit

Maury Brown has a super-interesting post on Forbes that lists the local television ratings for each of the major league teams (except the Dodgers and Astros, which have cable-system-carrying issues). Unsurprisingly, if you look at raw viewer numbers, the Yankees are #1 with an average of 251,000 people watching each game. But given the size of the New York market, that places them merely in the middle of the pack when it comes to the average household rating. #2 in viewers and #1 in rating — to my surprise — is the Tigers, with 156,000 average viewers.

Some quick research tells me that there are only 7 people currently living in Detroit.

So that’s a lot.

Marlins, Angels, and White Sox fans may not want to bother checking out the link, although I’m guessing none of you are reading this either.


How Gambling Could Improve Baseball

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Baseball is pretty great. It’s a particularly great, from the spectator’s standpoint, because its ridiculous amount of luck allows even the most putrid of teams to win around a third of the time. And, because of those fixed outs every team must accrue, a loss never becomes a mathematical certainty, as those obnoxious people who keep retweeting the Indians’ 2001 comeback against the Mariners like to keep reminding me.

Still, there are certainly times, particularly when you’re cursed with an affiliation with the Padres, when a particular two-run deficit may seem insurmountable. And there are those late inning game states where the losing team would love nothing more than to run out the clock, but are bound by individual fiscal incentive to keep hurling themselves off the proverbial cliff. It’s grisly, like an ant that’s been stepped on but keeps crawling around.

How do we kindle the competitive flame in these expanses of tundra? I was struck with an idea when Friend of the Site and champion dramaturge Michael Clair threw this cry out into the void:

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Ticket Information for the Italian Baseball Series

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The purpose of this weblog post is to inform that considerable portion of the readership who’d previously requested information regarding same, that tickets for the Italian Baseball Series of 2014 between Unipol Bologna and ASD Rimini, starting August 15th, are now available. The cost is €15 per game or €25 for the first and second games combined. Fans who are either 65-plus or a member of the military — which is to say, the Italian military — may purchase a reduced-price ticket for €12 (€20 combined for the first and second games).


Matt Harvey is Here to Pull You out of Your Funk

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Wipe your eyes, America. Pivot that chin up. Matt Harvey is pitching again.

You may hate your spouse, your kids may hate you, your career might be in the toilet. So what?

You think Matt Harvey lets that shit get to him? He used to be on top of the world. He was on top of the world, looking down on we filthy with his piercing eyes of judgement and compassion. Then Fate, Killer of Fun struck him down at the knees. Well, his elbow actually. But the elbow is basically the knee of the arm. Matt Harvey used to be the elbow of a nation. Then he was the teardrop of the Internet.

But look at this handsome fuck. He didn’t let it stop him. He’s riding fast — two middle fingers cocked and ready — all the way back. He’s taking his life back from Life. He has fate in a sleeper hold. He is moments away from sweeping the leg.

Leave your spouse. Quit your job. Start that novel or rehash that hobby or ask out that barista with the great legs and the pretty good face. Matt Harvey’s elbow has died for your sins. Is this how you wish to repay it? Winners never sulk, and sulkers can go walk into traffic.

Matt Harvey is pitching again. Let us all rejoice by creating better versions of ourselves.

(source)


Big TV Reaches Agreement with Yankees, Red Sox, God

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TELEVISIONLAND — In a move that some industry experts have called “shocking, but then again, not really shocking at all, because when you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world, given that the world apparently contains just two cities in which major league baseball teams exist,” Big TV announced today that it has reached a multilateral agreement to broadcast Yankees-Red Sox games for “all eternity … and then some!”

“With this unprecedented agreement,” said one Big TV executive, “we have ensured that Yankees-Red Sox games – in their past, present and future incarnations – will be transmitted in perpetuity, without the spatiotemporal parameters that afflict otherwise similar broadcasts in the earthly realm.

“Indeed, thanks to this partnership,” she added, “Yankees-Red Sox games will never know the worldly transience of an Astros-Royals contest on cable channel 738, or the mundane boundaries of a Cubs-Dbacks game at Chase Field. To paraphrase a poet, we will slip the surly airwaves of Earth!”

Key to the blockbuster deal, insiders say, was the cooperation of God.
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