This past weekend, I made a case for a way of discussing books in a manner conducive to NotGraphs. You can read those exact words, if you want. Alternatively, you can just believe me when I say that the basic idea is to share lightly annotated passages and ideas from interesting baseball-related books.

Text
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Notes
Readers of FanGraphs will very likely be acquainted with the statistical concept of the outlier — that is, the data point that resides unusually far from the cluster of other data points in a given set. In this book, Gladwell attempts to examine the conditions that surround people who become outliers in terms of success within their chosen fields.

In an early example, Gladwell looks at a Canadian junior hockey team. Seventeen of the team’s 25 players are born within the first four months of the year. Nor is this phenomenon isolated merely to the one hockey team; Gladwell provides a number of other cases in which team rosters are skewed bizarrely towards January, February, and March.

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I’ve no idea how long it’s been available, but ESPN has introduced to the public consciousness a game called Salary Crunch. To play Salary Crunch, one merely selects the visage of a highly paid athelete, enters his (i.e. this “one” we’re talking about) annual salary, and prepares to be amazed at how little he earns relative to said athlete.

The results are predictably absurd. Using $30,000 — or roughly the median American income — we find that Mariano Rivera makes this sum after .09 strikeouts. We find also that our median American would have to work 500 years to equal Mr. Rivera’s 2011 salary.

It’s not all bad news, though. Per a study recently released by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, income doesn’t have an appreciable effect on happiness after about the $75,000 threshold.

Obviously, the only question one can really ask is: “How much are these big contracts really Werth?”

H/T: The Nats Blog

As this year’s edition continues to demonstrate, Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings serve as a vehicle for all manner of baseballing-related hijinks.

That said, in the 109-year history of the event, some particularly absurd moments stand out. Below are some notable — and totally-actually-happened — examples of such instances.

1918: Dissatisfied with the merely symbolic shackles imparted by Baseball’s reserve clause, notoriously stingy White Sox owner Charles Comiskey places actual shackles on star players Eddie Cicotte and Joe Jackson.

1959: In just one of a long line of attention-grabbing promotions, White Sox owner Bill Veeck attempts to sign Laika, the Russian dog that, in November of 1957, became the first living Earth-born creature in orbit.

1976: Perhaps overstimulated by the advent of free agency, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner accidentally signs every Major League baseball player.

1979: Shortly after Nolan Ryan becomes Baseball’s first official Million-Dollar Man, Montreal Expo Bill Lee, coming off a season in which he was named the Sporting News National League Left Hander of the Year, threatens to hold out to until he becomes the first player to earn one million space bucks. The front office acquiesces to Lee’s demands; however, the lefty refuses to take the money after falling in love with Princess Vespa.

2010: Baltimore Oriole Luke Scott performs a Dadaist-like prank on Yahoo! contributor David Brown, affecting the personality of an irrational and xenophobic yokel for Brown’s Answer Man series. Intellectuals from all circles applaud Scott’s performance.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of their original console system, NeoGeo has just announced that, on Dec. 21, 2010, ten classic NeoGeo titles (see full list below) will make their way exclusively to the PlayStation 3 via PlayStation Network. Relevant to this site is that one of the games in question is, in fact, Baseball Stars Professional.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that, owing to its prohibitive cost (about $650 new), I never (a) owned a NeoGeo or (b) played many (any?) of the titles for it. Baseball Stars for NES, on the other hand, was/is a legitimately great game.

The cost of this particular edition of Baseball Stars is much friendlier to consumers, at just $8.99 (with later PSP versions costing $6.99). If the images below are to be believed, it’ll also offer a Network mode for playing online.

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Because I’m not what you’d call an “expert” in matters technological, I don’t know when it was officially released, but I’m able to inform you beyond a shadow of the shadowiest doubt that, as of this afternoon, iBooks is definitely available for the iPad, iPhone, and — relevant to this author — iPod Touch.

There are probably exactly 1000 exciting things about this, but for bespectacled and university-educated baseball fans like you and me and everyone we know, one terrific benefit is being able to access and read certain books — specifically, those in the public domain — in a manner that still announces to the world that you’re a modern-type man (or woman).

For example, after downloading the iBooks app yesterday, I found just seconds later a text with which I was previously unfamiliar: John Montgomery Ward’s Base-Ball: How to Become a Player, published in 1888.

Ward is an interesting case, generally. His Wikipedia page, for example, informs us that he “graduated from Columbia Law School in 1885 and led the players in forming the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, the first sports labor union.”

So, that’s one thing.

The other is that Ward is also the purveyor of white-hot prose. For example, from Base-Ball:

It may or it may not be a serious reflection upon the accuracy of history that the circumstances of the invention of the first ball are enveloped in some doubt. Herodotus attributes it to the Lydians, but several other writers unite in conceding to a certain beautiful lady of Corcyra, Anagalla by name, the credit of first having made a ball for the purpose of pastime. Several passages in Homer rather sustain this latter view, and, therefore, with the weight of evidence, and to the glory of woman, we, too, shall adopt this theory. Anagalla did not apply for letters patent, but, whether from goodness of heart or inability to keep a secret, she lost no time in making known her invention and explaining its uses. Homer, then, relates how:

“O’er the green mead the sporting virgins play, Their shining veils unbound; along the skies, Tost and retost, the ball incessant flies.”

You just got Homer’d, America.

Over the weekend, I made a case for a way of discussing books in a manner conducive to NotGraphs. You can read those exact words, if you want. Alternatively, you can just believe me when I say that the basic idea is to share lightly annotated passages and ideas from interesting baseball-related books.

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A Brief History of American Sports by Elliot J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein

Notes
Whether factually accurate or not, it’s nevertheless pleasant to believe that Dr. Hans Asperger — credited with identifying what we now call Asperger Syndrome — that he, in fact, exhibited symptoms of the very same Syndrome that he discovered. Again, ignoring what I’ll call the “actual details” of the matter, Dr. Asperger’s case gives us a nice figure or archetype with which to work — namely, that of a man whose life’s work is more or less the product of attempting to diagnose his own peculiar condition.

Nor, reader, do I believe I’m misbehaving when I suggest that we, all of us, are doctors in this way — not to the extent, probably, of Asperger himself, but at least in the sense that our fumbling attempts to understand our own unique conditions often define and inform the work that we eventually produce.

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There’s no official contest for best coverage of basball’s Winter Meetings, but if there were Erik Hahmann of DRaysBay would currently be winning it.

Regard, Exhibit One:

Exhibit Two:

Exhibit Three:

Let’s not give Hahmann all the credit, though. The YES Network’s Jack Curry deserves to be noted for this tweet, regarding pitcher Cliff Lee’s favorite pastime:

Have you, reader, seen any tweets of note? Please do report them here, stat.

Over the weekend, I made a case for a way of discussing books in a manner conducive to NotGraphs. You can read those exact words, if you want. Alternatively, you can just believe me when I say that the basic idea is to share lightly annotated passages and ideas from interesting baseball-related books.

Text
A Brief History of American Sports by Elliot J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein

Notes
There are obviously a number of reasons why baseball became popular in the United States. To attribute baseball’s rise in our culture merely to one or the other causes would be foolish. Gorn and Goldstein, for their part, are clear on this point. Discussing the “modernization”-type interpretation of mid- and late-19th c. sport, the pair writes:

The characteristics that historians identify as modern — rationalization, quantification, bureaucratization, mass spectatorship, equality of opportunity — were important elements of American athletics by the turn of the century. The rise of sports depended on new technologies, institutions, and patterns of though. Yet we must not remove the complexity from historical experience. Sports often perpetuated older values, even as modern elements crept in (114).

Elsewhere, they state:

This interpretaion of the rise of sports is at once useful and misleading. Bureaucracies, statistics, uniform rules, an ideology of fair play were all important. Yet those who apply modernization theory — to sports, to agriculture, to religious and ethnic identity — tend to see the tranformation as inexorable. Resistance to the modernizing juggernaut is depicted as either reactionary (because modernization allegedly benefits all) or unimportant (because the changes are inevitable). Modernization flattens historical experience by slighting the cultural tensions and the conflicts of power that accompany all major social transformations. Certainly there was nothing smooth, simple, or automatic about the rise of sports after the Civil War. Baseball’s relationship to the idea of equality, for example, was troubled (111-112).

These lines — in particular, those regarding the complexity of historical experience and historians’ tendency to flatten it — will likely be music to the ears of the sabermetrically inclined. Constantly, there’s this question of how fine to parse player performance. On the one hand, there’s the need to tell a story. There has to be some narrative quality to a stat in order for it to capture our imaginations. On the other hand, we must remain humble before the great complexities that lie beyond the narrative.

Consider FIP, for example. The accomplishment of the metric is that it (a) says quite a bit about a pitcher, but (b) requires only three widely available inputs — i.e. strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed. So, its narrative powers are strong, which is good. But Gorn and Goldstein would ask us to remember — as would Tom Tango, I’m sure — that, while FIP is useful it can also be misleading. Or, rather, it will mislead those who ask too much of it. Each player presents to us a unique arrangement of uncontrolled variables. We oughtn’t forget it. Ever.

If I’ve failed to mention it previously, allow me to state vigorously right now that one use of NotGraphs will be to provide for the readership reviews of forthcoming (or recently released) baseball books. In fact, provided the good people of DeCapo Books — publishers of Jim Collins’ excellent Last Best League — provided they’re not lying liar faces from Liarville, I’ll soon have in my possession two books — Tim Wendel’s High Heat and Sean Manning’s Top of the Order — whose contents I’ll be very happy to consume and disclose in the near-ish future.

However, I don’t think it’s book reviews proper that I intend to discuss right now.

If I’m understanding correctly — and it’s quite possible that I’m not — but if I am understanding correctly, book reviews generally come in two forms. In the first kind of review, the writer serves, more or less, as a deputy for the consumer. His (i.e. the reviewer’s) job in this case is to acquaint himself with a text and relate to the people at home whether it’s worth their time and/or money.

In the second kind of book review — what we might, in fact, call “criticism” — the worth of the book in question is more or less taken for granted. In these cases, the author serves not as a deputy for the consumer, but as an Idea Man.

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As the attentive reader will already know, rising NotGraphs star Dayn Perry commemorated — earlier today, in these very same pages — he commemorated America’s most important holiday (i.e. Repeal Day) by naming baseball’s All-Time All-Drinking Team.

That same attentive reader will also likely know that I, Carson Cistulli, rode Mr. Perry’s entirely fashionable coattails en route to my first post of the day, in which I submitted for the readership’s consideration the fruits of at least one or one-and-a-half minute’s worth of arduous research — namely, a video of the 1926 World Series featuring exactly two members of Perry’s All-Drinking Team.

Here, I’d like to consider briefly another of the All-Drinkers, Ryne Duren.

Duren is an interesting case for at least 11 reasons — some of which, owing to space and time restrictions, I’m unable to address.

Notably, Duren is distinct from most of the other names on this list in that he was active during a time when alcoholism began to be regarded not merely as the harmless pastime of rakes and/or roustabouts but rather as a real-live disease. In fact, the internet reveals to us that Duren (who’s still alive) not only outlived the worst of his drinking, but has gone on to serve as an alcohol abuse educator.

The internet also reveals to us that Duren was a showman, as the following passage suggests (and our own Erik Manning noted last year, too):

In those days the Yankee bullpen was a part of the short-porch right field and only a low chain link fence served as the boundary. When called upon by Casey Stengel to relieve, he wouldn’t use the gate, but preferred to hop the fence with one hand and begin a slow walk to the mound with his blue Yankee warm-up jacket covering his pitching arm; he followed this routine even on the hottest days. When he finally took the ball and began his warmups, the first pitch was typically a hard fastball 20 feet over the catcher’s head. The succeeding warmup pitches would be thrown lower and lower (but not slower) until Duren would finally “find” the plate.

Finally, it needs to be mentioned: Duren was really good. In a time when the concept of the “relief ace” was just becoming understood, Duren was one of the best — or, at least one of the brightest.

Consider what happens if you point your browser to FanGraphs historical leaderboards, set the minimum innings-pitched at 70, and sort by K/9:

1958:

1959:

1961:

1962:

“Hooah,” as Al Pacino would say.

The only year that’s omitted there, 1960, actually saw Duren post a career-high strikeout rate of 12.31 K/9, but in just 49.0 IP.