I’ve never personally hit a home run in a major-league baseball game. However, were I to hit a home run in that type of baseball game, I’d probably make sure to do a weird, flamboyant helicopter motion thing with my left arm — like the one Dan Uggla performed, I mean, just after hitting a home run against Diamondback rookie Wade Miley on Saturday night.
In the tradition of Dodger rookie Rubby de la Rosa, Philadelphia shortstop Jimmy Rollins left Sunday’s game with an unexpected — and slightly embarrassing — injury.
As a Dodger, Ausmus would often accidentally freeze mid-swing.
Fans of the Astros might’ve have been very ready for catcher Brad Ausmus’s departure from that team. The available numbers from Ausmus’s last six seasons in Houston all point to the aging catcher as something like replacement-level.
That said, he was excellent for a number of seasons, was always highly regarded for his ability to work with pitchers, and — as you might expect from a grad of even a lesser Ivy like Dartmouth — is rather articulate.
All the reasons in that second paragraph are reasons the curious baseballing enthusiat might care to listen to Ausmus’s recent appearance on NPR’s Fresh Air. The full audio is available at the NPR website, but you can find some excerpts from the interview transcript below.
Francoeur is as Francoeur does.
The informed reader will no doubt have learned by now that the Royals have extended Perpetual Sabermetric Talking-Point Jeff Francoeur for two more years. The news has sent ripples of self-righteous pleasure through the baseballing nerdosphere, nor is such a reaction wholly unjustified: despite his decent 2011, Francoeur probably isn’t even an average major leaguer. To their credit, the Royals aren’t really paying him like one, either: the reported contract of two years and $13.5 million suggests something like a 1.5-win player — something that Francoeur is probably capable of being.
For the present, though, we’ll put aside contractual matters and turn our attention to another thing for which Francoeur is known. For it was in a May 2009 piece by ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick regarding plate discipline that Francoeur famously asked the question “If on-base percentage is so important, then why don’t they put it up on the scoreboard?”
Some pointed out at the time (and rightfully so) that it’s not really the responsibility of a club’s scoreboard department to paint a precise portrait of a player’s value. Others — like Craig Calcaterra, for example — noted that OBP actually is on the scoreboard.
What if we took Francoeur’s comment literally, though? If we were to use importance as the only criteria of what should appear on a stadium’s scoreboard, what information would most likely appear there?
The reader might have found himself under the impression of late that, owing to how Charlie Blackmon recently injured himself, that the present author would be looking to use his white-hot prose skills to eulogize some other sort of baseballing PYT.
Allow me to inform the reader immediately that such an impression is decidedly false. How the reader ever found himself under it is a great mystery — and he (i.e. the reader) would do well to begin finding himself astride, athwart, or any other preposition as regards said impression.
In fact, Mr. Blackmon has found some other outlets for his conspicuous Talent — namely, in the different-but-kinda-the-same arts of beard-growing and tweeting.
Age is also a number — a number that informs statutory rape laws in almost every state.
As the reader has probably gathered, it’s the custom of Team NotGraphs to spend the better part of each day at our lushly decorated headquarters lounging about in different angles of repose whilst drinking delicious, peaty scotches and then comparing them to other delicious, peaty scotches, which we then proceed to drink.
It was, in fact, this very thing we were all doing this afternoon when — I don’t know how it happened, really — but when colleague Jackie Moore and I found ourselves discussing what constituted a “playoff race.”
Jackie submitted that, so far as he could tell, only two races remained in the major leagues as of today — those in the AL Central (between Detroit and Cleveland and Chicago) and NL West (Arizona and San Francisco). When I asked Jackie Moore how he defined race, he proceeded, first, to laugh out loud and then to roll on the floor while laughing and then to laugh his ass off. When he’d composed himself, he proceeded, at that point, to suggest that, in any case where a team had a 90% or better chance of making the postseason, that a race ceased to exist involving the team.
No true child of the 80s is able to hear the words “sweep the leg” without feeling inside his heart and his mind and his other, more sordid, parts a sense of loathing for so-called “sensei” John Kreese and his unethical karate tactics.
The five months that Madison Bumgarner spent in the 80s were, very clearly, not enough to produce within him this same aversion to leg-sweeping, as last night, in the first inning of the Giants-Braves affair at Turner Field, he felled not Daniel Russo, but Daniel Uggla, via what appears to be a cut fastball — the footage of which has been GIF’d and embedded below for your pleasure.
It’s only a matter of time, of course, before Uggla himself utilizes a metaphorical crane kick to knock out this metaphorical Johnny Lawrence and win the metaphorical All Valley Karate Tournament.
In the midst of discussing a graphic produced by Baseball Info Solutions that details Peter Bourjos’s range, Mark Simon of ESPN’s Secret Nerd Squad invokes a catch made by Bourjos last Wednesday — one also mentioned to me of late by FanGraphs Audio’s most recent guest, Sam Miller.
The catch in question is the one embedded abovely that you’ve already watched four times before reading these words. Do consider forwarding it — or, at the very least, describing it as explicitly as possible — to every lover you’ve ever had and/or plan on having someday.
Thank you, Grant Brisbee, for the link. And the memories.
With an excellent performance in his second rehab start Friday night — one that gives him nine strikeouts and zero walks in 4.2 innings in his return from Tommy John surgery — Stephen Strasburg has re-entered the public baseballing consciousness.
Because his brilliant debut occurred before NotGraphs was even a thing — and because MLB video has become embeddable in the meantime — it’s fully within all of our rights to re-live his 14 strikeout, no walk performance together in these electronic pages.
Below, I’ve made note of some extraordinary moments from the first two minutes or so of the above video. The bespectacled reader is invited, however, to add his own commentary where relevant.
0:11 — Records first major-league strikeout against Lastings Milledge on a pitch that was spotted later that night at an area club drinking vodka tonics with no fewer than seven Naomi Campbells.
0:34 — Delwyn Young strikes out on a curveball that removes whatever was left of his (i.e. Young’s) virginity.
0:41 — A 91 mph changeup. The phrase “God is dead” is subsequently removed from all English versions of Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.
1:24 — Jeff Karstens strikes out looking on 101 mph fastball, calls therapist on way back to dugout.
1:40 — Announcer Bob Carpenter incorrectly, but also sorta correctly, identifies Strasburg’s changeup as a fastball.
1:49 — The entire television audience goes through a second puberty. Prepubescent children experience consecutive puberties.
Woody Allen says in 1977’s Annie Hall that we’re “always trying to get things to come out perfect in art because it’s real difficult in life.”
In the relevant scene of that film, we’ve just witnessed Allen’s character Alvy Singer directing a play in which Singer has rewritten a breakup between himself and the titular Hall (played by Diane Keaton), such that she rushes after, and professes her love for, him.
For Allen’s Singer, the potential outcomes are binary in nature: either Annie does or doesn’t leave him. The former is what happens; the latter is what happens — what is perfected — in art.
The sort of perfect we find in the three drawings above, courtesy of (male man) Erin Wong, is different. Joe DiMaggio and Willie Mays and Sandy Koufax are, by most accounts, the closest thing that baseball has seen to perfect. There are details that could be edited — maybe DiMaggio’s personal life could’ve been less turbulent, maybe Mays wouldn’t’ve had an age-42 season, maybe Koufax’s brilliance could’ve lasted a couple-few more years — but one could also make the argument that these imperfections actually make each player’s respective resume even more striking.
But achieving — or, at least, gesturing towards — perfection isn’t always a case of choosing one of two outcomes in a binary relationship. Rather, Wong’s pictures are a product of a desire to re-see players whose respective mythologies are well known to the point of being tired.
Wong’s drawings — like a batter totally at ease with his own weaknesses — don’t try to do too much. Rather, they seem to ask simple questions. “What would Joe DiMaggio look like were he crossed with an older Ed Sullivan?” “What would Sandy Koufax look like were he thinking the words ‘I know something you don’t know’?” “What if gravity had only a minimal effect on Willie Mays’ hat?”
It’s not unusual to hear people say art is dead because everything has been done. What sort of conceit does it require to imagine that one’s age would be the one to kill an immortal thing? In its own, small way, Wong’s drawings make it clear that art isn’t dead, won’t die. All it requires is the desire to ask small questions and the technical skill to answer those questions in the relevant medium.
