On Monday, I unveiled Part One of an advanced study. Workingly titled “Cool or Lame? Estimating the Relative Appreciation of Baseball Players,” or something like that, the study sprung from a simple impulse: the craving to know just to whom, in the history of this sport I love, I ought to pledge my fanhood. Although it was a selfish impulse, I have thought, too, of the children. Just as our teenaged selves realized, in the course of our primitive sociopolitical maneuverings, that it might behoove us to spurn (say) Coldplay* in favor of some more exclusive taste, today’s youth surely seek that privileged knowledge that will empower them to transcend their Jeter-jerseyed milieux. Herein, then, I attempt not only to secure that knowledge, but to quantify the sh*t out of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

As any of my fellow NotGraphs contributors will proudly attest, our primary purpose here is to advance the state of baseball knowledge through cutting-edge research. To that end, I now submit to you the results of a study designed to resolve a question of vital interest. Namely: which players, in the history of this sport, have been the most overappreciated and underappreciated? Or, stated in the vernacular: of which players is it coolest, and lamest, to be a fan? You might think that such a subjective question would thwart all empirical investigation. But you would be severely underestimating the resources (and the wits) at our disposal here at the NotLabs. Among those resources is a series of measurements that provide a precise and infallible index of what we may casually term “fame”: the number of backlinks to every ballplayer’s Wikipedia page.* Players who are more famous, we postulate, will have more Wikipedia pages linking to their own page. By plotting a player’s backlink count against his career WAR, we may generate a regression line that predicts fame based on value, and then measure deviations from that line. In our first application of this methodology (to hitters only), we obtain the following. Discuss.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s good to be king, as Max and Felix Hernandez both know. FiFi says he’s a Mariner for life, but what about after? Why, after, he’ll join the All-Time Royalty All-Stars. And probably win a few more games. (Peak single-season WAR listed for batters, lowest single-season FIP- for pitchers.)

UPDATE: Thanks to alert readers for reminding me of “Rajah” Hornsby and “Burger” King.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been way too long since we did this. For today’s installment (difficulty level = 7), we mangle the title of a well-known poem.

Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you have surely wondered: why don’t women play more baseball? Here the legendary Babe Ruth, staunch fitness advocate and tireless sports educator, tackles that question with all the diplomacy and sophistication you’d expect. The answer, as it turns out, is that women are hopelessly ignorant, uncoordinated, vain, distractible, and handicapped at every turn by their fat sisters. But however futile his efforts to mold the fairer sex, Ruth’s wisdom shines through for the rest of us, in such pearls of hard-won baseball insight as:

On pitching: “So you wind up, and when you throw it, just follow your arm right through.”

On hitting: “I’ve often been asked the difference between a baseball swing and a golf swing…Notice that the stance at the start of both swings is alike…The follow-through in both is exactly alike.”

On fielding: “On a slow ground ball like this, an infielder runs in at full speed, and throws the ball. He must be very accurate with his throw.”

And to think how close this came, this priceless window into a master’s craft, to being consigned to the dustbin of history! Watch, gentle readers, and learn! And if, by some misfortune, you happen to be female — fear not! We, like the Babe, will be there to snatch you from the jaws of failure.

If there’s one principle at the very core of my personal philosophy, it’s that no cockle should be left unwarmed. I was, therefore, thrilled recently to be entrusted with a reader’s chilled cockles and given explicit instruction on how to warm them. Although they were too demure to share the state of their own cockles, several of said reader’s colleagues were clearly in need of similar attention. And so, being the service-oriented writer that I am, I put together the following.

Read the rest of this entry »

From time to time here in these pages, this being the first time, we like to pause to celebrate the lesser baseball players and their small moments of heroism that might otherwise be forgotten. Today we honor Chad Griffin Durbin, at this moment forgettably engaged in the bullpen of the Atlanta Braves. Mr. Durbin’s career has been forgettable by virtually any measure. Among active pitchers with 700+ IP, he ranks last with 1.7 WAR, or, less than half as valuable as Guillermo Mota. Mr. Durbin has spent 13 seasons in the major leagues. His Wikipedia article states that he “is not related to Dick Durbin, the senator from Illinois, former MLB pitcher J.D. Durbin or 1930’s Seattle Time’s syndicated columnist Derby Durbin.” I detect a mournful tone here. We cannot even depend upon linkage to a marginally less forgettable relative, it seems, to salvage Chad Durbin from the dungheap of memory.

But for one sweltering Kansas City afternoon in the summer of 2001, Chad Durbin was the Durbin; Chad Durbin was a hero. Facing the mighty Seattle Mariners — who had just hosted an All-Star game with four of their own players in the starting lineup, and would go on to compile the most wins in the history of the sport — Durbin hurled eight shutout innings, giving up a scant three doubles and a single, and striking out six. As it turned out, Jamie Moyer also hurled eight shutout innings, and the Royals went on to lose in 10. But for those two glorious hours, the downtrodden souls of Royals Nation held their collective breath as their unlikely champion brought a murderers’ row to its knees.

Since that day, Chad Durbin has traveled from one coast to the other, toiling in replacement-level obscurity. But nothing can erase July 18, 2001 from the annals of history. Chad Durbin, you will not be forgotten.

Dan and cousin Claes.

Who among us has not admired the blood coursing in Dan Uggla’s redoubtable forearms? And who among us has not conjectured, perhaps aloud to our significant other, that such blood can only be noble blood? Conjecture no more, friends. The late Mr. W. A. Reitwiesner has bravely scoured Dan’s roots and linked him to a veritable Valhalla of proud Scandinavians, whose very names drip with elegance and valor: Emerentia Stake! Polykarpus Crumbugel! Hebbla Standorph! Let us not forget that great fellow bearer of the family crest (and, it must be said, the family forearms), that unforgettable martyr of the Battle of Oland, Admiral Claes Uggla; and, too, let us pay proper homage to that incomparable sixth-great-grandfather, the illustrious Axel Roos, whose heroic band of dragoons* saved their king’s life no less than thrice at the Skirmish of Bender.

So just remember this, you griping Braves fans and grumbling fantasy owners, when next you find yourselves doubting your second baseman: remember all the hope, the trust, the crushing legacy, that rides on those chiseled shoulders.

* Who dubbed themselves, as historical documents attest, “Gunns und Rooses.”

I’m sure we all had the same thought when the starting lineups for this year’s All-Star Game were announced. Namely: Who, WHO will portray these gentlemen in the inevitable Hollywood dramatization? That dramatization became somewhat more evitable once the National League opened a can of whup-ass on Justin “For the Fans” Verlander, but the question still burns. Luckily, we now have MyHeritage.com’s powerful and sophisticated Celebrity Face Recognition service to replace the notoriously fallible decisions of human casting directors. Here, then, is the cast, and for the full revelation of startling and often haunting doppelgangerhood, please do embiggen by clicking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Joe DiMaggio disapproves of Nick Swisher.

Read the rest of this entry »