“If you charge slightly less when Kyle Lohse is pitching, they will come.”

In 2011 the Cardinals will become the newest team to experiment with dynamic ticket pricing software. Teams already price tickets differently based on day of week and opponent, but last season the Astros and Giants started using a software program that raises and lowers unsold ticket prices every day based on factors like weather forecast, number of available seats, and pitching matchups(!).

From my perspective, which is that of someone who likes to read books about scientists, this is awesome. Granted, it wouldn’t make much difference to teams that sell out almost all of their games far in advance. But it’s just cool technology, and for most Major League teams dynamic, daily-adjusted pricing could create value for both fans and the franchise. There’s never a good reason for a seat to be empty when someone outside would like to see the game. Of course, the flipside is that people who can’t pay a lot may be stuck attending lower-quality games, at least if they wait until the last minute to buy tickets.

I know purchase prediction models are used in many industries, but I’m really curious about the baseball manifestation. Is the model in Houston significantly different than the model in San Francisco? The interplay between weather, traffic, ticket price, throwback uni day, competing entertainment options, etc., and ballgame attendance must be different in different cities. I also wonder how something like NERD score would do at projecting demand for baseball tickets.

However, taking the perspective of that famously cynical breed, Cardinals fans, I’d have to say this sounds suspiciously like… well, Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III said it for me:

“It’s something that people are familiar with in other industries, such as the airline industry, where prices are floating based on factors that change over time.”

Modest recommendation for Cardinals president Bill DeWitt III’s press officer: When next your leader is rolling out a new service model to fans, it may not be optimal to volunteer an analogy between that initiative and the airline industry.

Sometimes teenage prospects turn into Pedro Martinez, but not usually.

In October, Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times wrote two articles about Major League Baseball’s increased efforts to regulate the signing of prospects in the Dominican Republic (here and here). He also suggested that 2010’s new regulations are why Dominican prospects are signing more slowly and for smaller bonuses than they did in 2009. Yesterday, Schmidt published a piece about one group of people that is still bullish on the Dominican prospect market: private American investors.

These investors, unaffiliated with established sports agencies or Major League teams, are working with Dominican trainers or setting up their own baseball academies in the Dominican Republic. In exchange, they get percentages of the signing bonuses of any financed players who sign with Major League teams. Schmidt’s article on this interesting phenomenon is worth checking out. Sports Illustrated also reported on one of these academies this April, and Time Magazine had a broader piece about the Dominican baseball economy this July.

There are obvious ethical questions around Major League Baseball’s relationship with the Latin American prospect market, where teenagers are trading school for steroids and a small chance at life-changing wealth. By putting more money into that marketplace, private American investors may be encouraging more kids to leave school for a dream that will never come true. You could alternatively argue that more American money means more money going to those same kids, but I wonder how much of it makes it to them.

Coors Field humidor room: “These aren’t the super-dry baseballs you’re looking for.”

I’m not attending the Orlando Winter Meetings, but personally I would be sorely tempted to skip out and catch a show or two at Disney World. For the benefit of any GMs that might be reading this, perhaps our NotGraphs readers can help prioritize between “Fantasmic” and “Philharmagic?” Pat Gillick and Ed Wade will be watching the comments section and thank you in advance.

In the meantime, our heroes are hard at work discussing issues like the Rockies’ baseball humidification process. Background: this September, the Giants (and apparently at least one other team) complained to Major League Baseball about the level of independent oversight surrounding the Coors Field humidor. The Giants were bothered by the fact that, since a batboy periodically brings balls out to the umpires during games, the Rockies could theoretically be providing humidor balls when visiting teams were batting and then carrying out non-humidified baseballs when the Rockies were up.

The Rockies responded by letting umpires personally collect the entire stock of game balls from the humidor, but it looks like this issue isn’t dead yet. It’s tempting to chalk it all up to gamesmanship on the Giants’ part; they were just starting an important September series against the Rockies when they made the complaints which initiated the change. Of course, lots of people had that reaction when the Patriots Spygate allegations first came out, and that stuff kind of turned out to be semi-true.

Norifumi Nishimura leads his team in pregame calisthenics.

Yesterday it was announced that Norifumi Nishimura, manager of the Japan Series-winning Chiba Lotte Marines, had won the 2010 Shoriki Award. Nishimura may not have been entirely shocked to receive the call¹ though, because apparently since 2001 the Series-winning manager has received the Shoriki Award every year, with the one exception being Trey Hillman in 2006. Presumably Japan foresaw the mustache.

This Shoriki Award is given to the person who made the most outstanding contribution to Japanese baseball in the last year. It is named for Matsutaro Shoriki, a very interesting fellow who founded one of Japan’s largest newspapers and one of its first television stations and last but not least for our purposes its greatest baseball franchise, the Yomiuri Giants. In 1935, a politically charged time in Japan, Shoriki arranged for Babe Ruth and some other Americans to play an exhibition game in Tokyo, and for his trouble somebody tried to assassinate him with a sword.²  As far as I know, this exact thing never happened to Connie Mack.

Returning to the Shoriki Award, I haven’t been able to identify a comparable “outstanding contribution to baseball” prize in the United States. Considering the diverse spectrum of interpretations that American baseball writers and fans manage to project onto comparably well-defined awards such as most valuable player and best fielder, I can’t begin to imagine the ensuing discord if we did have something like the Shoriki Award (assuming people cared about it). How would you approach the question of who made the most outstanding “contribution” to American baseball in 2010? Maybe Roy Halladay — playoff no-hitters get people talking — or Josh Hamilton, with his great story. But probably I’m not thinking about this in broad enough terms.

¹ I always imagine people being informed that they won prizes by means of 5 AM phone calls like American Nobel laureates get because of the time difference with Sweden. Surely that’s not always how it works. I will win a prize and confirm — stay tuned.

² This article was originally printed in a 1935 issue of Time Magazine, so please excuse its regrettable language.

Dubya and the Mick watch Jeter winning the 2006 Gold Glove.

Topps wants your vote to determine their 60 greatest cards of all time. No write-ins, though — they’ve preselected a field of 100 candidates.

There will probably be controversy/grumbling about the cards up for consideration. What makes a baseball card “great” is pretty personal. Market price might be one objective index of greatness, and I imagine many of the highest-priced vintage Topps cards are among the finalists here.

However, knowing basically nothing about baseball cards, I’m just going with my gut. Some notes in preparing my ballot:

1. 1985 Roger Clemens: Imagine Roger Clemens isn’t wearing his cap in this photo, and that instead of his jersey he’s wearing a jacket and tie. Freeze that in your mind. That insincere half-smile, with the hands-on-hips pose, is what I look like in all photos taken of me at weddings.

2. Topps used the same headshots for Roberto Clemente in 1955 and 1956 (also Ted Williams), but Sandy Koufax got a fresh picture in ’56. What gives?

3. 1961 Roger Maris: Roger Maris, the man, has a shirt collar sticking out from underneath his jersey on one side only, and he’s wearing a facial expression that is sinister, but in the same moment, kind of sleepy, and his head is bursting out of a newspaper article, and that article is about Roger Maris, public icon. An evasive portrait of two different men, joining paths at an historical and personal crossroads.

That’s just what I thought when I looked at that one.

4. Baseball card collectors really enjoy collecting Mickey Mantle baseball cards. He’s the protagonist of a whopping 16 of the 100 cards.

5. Extending the above thought: This baseball card pantheon seems to honor players that captured fans’ imaginations, and it probably does so more accurately and honestly (or at least differently) than lists of statistical leaders or Hall of Fame inductees. Who are the players with the highest deltas between fan inspiration and on-field accomplishment? Jose Canseco, Bo Jackson, and Fisk/Munson come to mind.

H/T: ESPN Page 2’s Chris Olds.

Picture = approx. 4 words.

Will Carroll has an intriguing think piece at Wired.com about Microsoft Kinect’s potential to bring biomechanical analysis to the masses.

If you’re not familiar with Kinect, which launched last week, it’s an add-on device for the Xbox 360 that allows you to control Xbox games with your body’s movements. Unlike the Nintendo Wii, Kinect doesn’t require you to hold a wireless controller — cameras in the device track and interpret your movements. Kotaku has some good Kinect coverage if you’re interested.*

Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Chronicle’s website, SFGate.com, has a gallery of photographs of Giants fans up right now. Click here to see the whole set.

Take an incredibly photogenic city with a beautiful park and a colorful local population, fold in the palpable anticipation of a half-century-overdue championship, and you get some pretty great pictures. Congrats again, Giants fans!

The Athletics recently won the bidding for Japanese pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma. Patrick Newman published some great thoughts on this pitcher who could be headed to the East Bay.

Iwakuma’s team, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, has been around just since 2005. The team sponsor, Rakuten, owns a huge e-commerce site that is sort of Japan’s Amazon.com and is actually Japan’s second most-visited site (after Yahoo.co.jp, which is sort of Japan’s Google).

The Golden Eagles are located in Sendai, a city about three hours northeast of Tokyo that most Americans probably aren’t too familiar with. Sendai is home to numerous universities, even though its population is only about one million, and in a neat parallel to “Oakland,” its nickname is “City of Trees.” It is regarded as one of Japan’s greenest cities, featuring many bough-shaded boulevards.

Sendai offers local sports fans several options beyond baseball, including soccer (Vegalta Sendai) and basketball (Sendai 89ers). Additionally, the official municipal website boasts of the Golden Eagles stadium experience:

“The team creates new ways to make baseball enjoyable through the events for fans and entertainment found at every home game in its stadium. The stadium is turning into something more than a ballpark—a park that can be enjoyed without ball play.”

Apparently even in Japan, teams worry that baseball alone won’t fill all the seats.

As reported by the New York Times and others, Joe Morgan and Jon Miller are losing their jobs as the ESPN “Sunday Night Baseball” telecast announcers.

The Times notes that both men are Hall of Famers. To me, Joe Morgan’s Hall of Fame plaque, which he (obviously) earned as a player, seems kind of… irrelevant? in this context. Anyway, much ink has been spilled already on the topic of Mr. Morgan’s broadcasting abilities. Let’s save some with which to extol Mr. Miller.

Jon Miller was inducted the Baseball Hall of Fame — as a broadcaster, no less — just this very year. He will continue doing TV and radio broadcasts for the Giants along with postseason radio for ESPN. According to his Wikipedia page he sometimes sprinkles broadcasts with quotations from Shakespeare, which I’ve never noticed, but it sounds very romantic, and according to this Edible San Francisco interview he’s really into kombucha, which is less romantic, but still cool.

On a personal note, Jon Miller’s radio call of the final out of the World Series was my last experience of the 2010 season, and it was a perfect way to close things out. Here’s hoping that ESPN rustles up a comparable pro for next year’s “Sunday Night Baseball.”