Mike Krukow: Seabiscuit likes beer, I didn’t know that.
Duane Kuiper: The guys in the truck say it’s obvious: Cain is a horse.
Mike Krukow: That was… ah.
Duane Kuiper: [laughs]
Mike Krukow: Ahh. I love here.
Duane Kuiper: What are you talking about, that could be one of our kids out there.

This was presented in complete reverence for the broadcasting team, for Matt Cain, and for the San Francisco Giants.

I like writing about baseball because I like thinking about baseball. I like thinking about baseball because it’s such a complicated game. Often, the thoughts I have are critical, but underneath it all I have a great respect for those that play the game. I was a terrible baseball player, and I’m surprised John Flaherty, my coach, could even look me in the eye and keep a straight face when we talked about my development as a fourth outfielder and sixth infielder for the JV squad. These guys can do things with balls I can’t even imagine.

But I can think a little bit. So don’t ask me not to think.

I left New York for California in the summer of 2010, and though New York City is the best city I’ve ever lived in (compared to Negril, Hamburg, Atlanta, Mountain City (population 2500ish), Vero Beach, Boston, Palo Alto, San Francisco, London, Jersey City, and Menlo Park in that order), I don’t rue the move too terribly. Weather is only part of the reason — Beer figures in greatly too.

11 of the top 50 craft breweries (by volume) were in California last year, and if you pushed it out to 100, you might see even more of a share for this great state. San Diego seems to pump out a new craft brew prospect with upside every year. It was named the best beer city in America by Esquire last year. And home brewing is rampant here, where the weather is ideal for ales, and more people have garages with space for all the trappings.

So maybe it’s no surprise that three of the four California ballparks I’ve visited — AT&T and PetCo parks in particular — blow Citi Field’s beer selection out of the water. It may not even be the fault of the planners, it may just be a fact of geography.

Read the rest of this entry »

So now, less than three years later, you can get bleacher seats in your nearest National League stadium and look down on left field, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where Jason Bay’s career finally broke and rolled back.

Felix Cortez Reyes Sarris was born yesterday afternoon. Now all eight-pounds-plus of him is barreling towards a career squaring the barrel or barreling the best.

Or not, of course. Whichever sport he plays or doesn’t play is going to be fine by me. A name like Felix puts him on a list with many notable baseball players, but it’ll also give him something in common with a revered economist.

But you know the trite-and-true saying:

“Give a man three baseball names and and a baseball in his left hand, and he’s probably headed towards being a LOOGY at worst.”

In the box score of our day, this was an “SB.”

In the box score of the future, this will be an “SBOMGLOLZFUBARWTF.”

A pound fit for brosephs to @CurseofBenitez for the GIF, and an arched eyebrow at Kelly Shoppach.

Baseball’s so amazing. The confluence of predictability and unpredictability is so sharp and poignant in certain moments. Consider Jose Constanza, walking to the plate against LOOGY Tim Byrdak in the seventh inning, with his Braves down one run in their road opener. The Mets announcers would have you know the following things:

1) Constanza was the man who ended Daniel Murphy’s 2011 season with a slide.
[Cut to Murphy’s face]
2) Byrdak had knee surgery just three weeks before.
[Cut to grimacing Byrdak]
3) Constanza hit .385 in 39 at bats against lefties last year, so Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez has no qualms about leaving him in there.
[Cut to Fredi squatting and spitting seeds]
4) Michael Bourn, another lefty, is waiting in the on-deck circle.
[Cut to Bourn in the on-deck circle]

So, both visually and aurally, the scene is set for a dramatic moment for Constanza, correct? And yet, if you’d seen this swing before, you might have been predicting something like this all along.

Well, maybe not exactly that. But certainly something like that could have been predicted. And we’d feel worse about mocking the player for it, but from that walk of shame, Constanza knows what he did.

When the Chicago Cubs hired Theo Epstein, they unleashed a trade full of others.

“The Other Chris Carpenter” went to Boston and in return, the Cubs got “The Other Bogaerts” — marginal-at-best prospect Jair Bogaerts, the twin brother of the Red Sox top prospect, Xander Bogaerts.

Most likely, this is a first. But in another universe, there were other transactions involving the others:

Read the rest of this entry »

You think you know where you work. You think you know what FanGraphs is all about. And then you’re trolling google and this pops out of the old interweb machine.

FanGraphs: Purveyor of the Finest Coco Crisp News.

What about the Dark Overlord? Is he hiding something? How about the rest of our staff?

Read the rest of this entry »

Somehow this one slipped between the cracks — C.J. Wilson pranked Mike Napoli… by putting the catcher’s phone number on twitter. He wasn’t particularly contrite about it afterwards either:

Perhaps “Nap Nap Weiner” will take an item off of this list of suggested revenge pranks?

Read the rest of this entry »