Hello, my name is Eno Sarris, and I’m addicted to Sega’s new MLB Manager Online game.

As a fantasy addict, I’m familiar with the sort of addiction that Sega’s MLB Manager Online has spawned in me. Constant screen-refreshing, lineup-parsing, and strategy-pondering may not look like the two-feet-from-the-television glazed-over stare of the average gamer, but it fits right into the regular day of a fantasy addict. This isn’t to say that the game doesn’t have flaws, but it is to say that it has considerable upside.

Basic game play follows more of the approach a general manager might have. Compared to fantasy baseball, MMO asks you to think about your team as a whole. Defense, ‘clutch,’ and lineup order matter. Take a look at the roster home page and you’ll see that you’ve got players with certain costs, a budget for your lineup, and the ability to move players around the diamond to take advantage of their defense. You can play Pat Burrell in center field, if you want, but you’ll get some defensive penalties considering that he’s a “D”-rated outfielder with a ’44’ run tool out of 80.

Read the rest of this entry »

At least we have clothes on.

Read the pages of NotGraphs and you’ll know I’m a fan of silliness – specifically, getting dressed in funky gear. Over the years, I’ve used my follicular advantage to be outstanding versions of Bob Ross, Kenny G and Disco Stu. Maybe it’s some vain desire to go a little crazy with the afro that draws me to dressing differently.

My re-adopted hometown San Francisco has a tradition called Bay to Breakers. The website says “no alcohol or floats,” but the city is known for civil disobedience in such matters, and really the point is to look kooky and, maybe, run some. Well, for some, the tradition involves no clothes, but to each his own.

The link here is tenuous for sure, but this sort of thing – dressing strangely while performing a relatively normal task – seems like it could be brought to baseball. I know we are discussing ways to change or destroy baseball recently, and it did occur to me that baseball could have more one-off uniforms. Just look at basketball, which has Spanish-language uniforms for one day a season – we’re not talking patches here. The easiest entry point would be some sort of special uniform for Independence Day, but that’s pretty conventional and we’ve already got hats and patches for the Fourth. Though the military-inspired uniforms in San Diego are interesting, and on the right path, there should be more.

There aren’t too many summer holidays to take advantage of, but looking to other cultures might work. The Welsh harvest holiday called Gathering Day happens in early August and has all sorts of corn- and hay-based costumes. Some of the rites seem like fun. In particular, there’s one known as the caseg fedi or harvest mare, in which three men attempt to bring down the last corn sheaf of the harvest from afar. Then it gets good:

However, his task did not end with the cutting down of the sheaf; he was also expected to carry it into the house without getting it wet, past a team of women who would do all they could to throw water upon it. Often the reaper would hide the ‘mare’ under his clothes in order to get into the house past the women, and this could involve the men being disrobed as they tried to enter. If the man was successful, he would receive all the beer he could drink, or a shilling.

We’ve lost our train of thought. The point is – dressing up differently. And it doesn’t have to be by the players themselves (although that would be interesting). It can be about the fans, as we’ve shown with McCann’s Cans. Soccer fans have obviously figured this out already, but you might be surprised that the picture to the left is from a Caribbean baseball game. What if we were to spur some crazy fan fashion in this country by observing Halloween during the season some time? Award the best costumes with a t-shirt, commemorative picture, or, at the very least, some time on the JumboTron?

Going to baseball games is not hum-drum. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be spiced up with a little sartorial zaniness.

This BSoL’er used “7 Minutes Or Less” to become a different man, like, literally.

We will all be hearing more of the “Best shape of my life” cliches in the coming weeks as players report to spring training and are forced to say something, anything, to us breathless hordes of media types. In most cases, upon hearing the platitude, we’ll just check that check-box on our interview BINGO sheets, take a drink for the BSoL drinking game, make sure Dave Cameron is notified so that he can keep track, and move on.

In a couple cases, though, visual proof of the state can cause a double-take. Consider Pablo Sandoval in before and after shots. Pablito looks pretty good.

So I guess diet was part of the problem here.

Sandoval’s shape has earned him a cuddly nickname or two, but also the derision of fans and front office types alike, so kudos to him for dropping a reported 22 pounds so far this offseason. That should help his defensive numbers at third base, and perhaps even his time to first base and, therefore, his once-vaunted BABIP.

But Cameron’s already cornered the research market on the BSoL phenomenon, so let’s stick to the visuals here. Next up? Prince Fielder.

That first picture reads a little differently in this context.

Fielder’s case doesn’t come with the same stat-based excitement. So far there’s been no declaration of lost tonnage, and his battle with weight has had slightly less exposure to date in general. His recent dip in production wasn’t as precipitous, either, so the pressure and spotlight aren’t on his bathroom scale to the same extent. There’s also room for bigger sluggers and bigger people in our world, of course. But for his heart health, and perhaps for his batting average, this new Petit Prince is probably the better way to go.

FanGraphs: Your Leading Best-Shape-of-Life Media Outlet!

H/T to: Mike Axisa, Photobucket user sussemilch, and trainers everywhere

Follow Ken Davidoff on twitter and you’ll know that he is an even-handed and fair analyst of the game that is friendly to advanced statistics. If you’re lucky enough to be an Optimum Online cable subscriber, you also get his Baseball Insider column for free on Newsday.com. If not, his work (and Alan Hahn’s on the basketball side) are worth the cost of subscription.

Eno Sarris: What’s your background? Where did you grow up and go to school, and what did you study?

Ken Davidoff: I grew up in Edison, NJ, a huge baseball fan and a devout reader of the Newark Star-Ledger. I would read Moss Klein’s coverage of the Yankees, and I wanted to be Moss Klein (their Yankees beat writer, for young ‘uns who don’t know) when I grew up. I knew by age eight that playing Major League Baseball wasn’t going to work out for me.

I attended the University of Michigan, even though that was the one school to which I was accepted (the others were Syracuse, Boston University and George Washington) that didn’t have a strong journalism program. I figured I’d choose the best school and let the chips fall where they may. I joined The Michigan Daily my sophomore year, spent second semester of my junior year at American University and then returned to Michigan for my senior year.

Read the rest of this entry »

The similarities are uncanny.

Username ‘letsgocyclones’ on AmazinAvenue has a decent day job. As a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city, he is surrounded by some of the most precious cultural artifacts our nation has to offer. No matter how grueling all that standing might be, he can at least look left at a Jackson Pollock, or right at a Jan Van Eyck. It gets much much worse than that, we can agree.

But letsgocyclones would trade it all in for a clipboard and a radar gun. Like many of us, he spends much of his day instead ruminating about the Mets’ second base situation or who their left-handed reliever might be in the coming season. There’s no shame in that, the distraction and entertainment sports provide beyond the actual moments themselves are a foundational part of being a sports fan.

As we’ve been showing – at least in some part – by our email interviews of Craig Calcaterra and Shannon Drayer, some of the best thinking is done by people mixing different sections of their resume. As Drayer used some of her history as a barista to focus on interpersonal relationships in baseball and baseball journalism, and Calcaterra has called upon his legal knowledge in parsing important moments in recent baseball history, letsgocyclones has found a genius way to mix his day job and his passion for his favorite team.

A diptych to the strikezone.

In two legendary FanPosts at AmazinAvenue, letsgocylcones has paired Mets’ icons with Met icons, to hilarious results. Some of the pairings are based on a shared line or perspective, some on gesture, some on content. In the case of this Oliver Perez – Jackson Pollock pairing, the two, together, have something post-modern to say about the strike zone. (Try the comments section here for a photoshopped version that hammers the point home.)

The original Dickey Face.

Though it’s all in good fun, there’s a little meat in there too. These pictures are an important part of our current culture. Though they seem ubiquitous, and are produced daily about eight months of the year, they are an art of a modern medium. It’s both meaningful and unmistakable that the same forms and subjects that humans have enjoyed in history are once again resplendent in our present. Just look at this picture pairing. On the left you find the subject of the popular “R.A. Dickey-face” competition, and on the right, a 17th century baroque piece called Magic Scene with Self-portrait by Dutchman Pieter van Laer, who went by “Il Bamboccio.” Magic, indeed.

Of course, I cannot let my art history minor fade silently into the night without a fight. So, I submit my own pairing. On the left, you have Ben Francisco avoiding a high-and-tight from Logan Ondrusek. On the right, Son of Man by Rene Magritte. Not quite as good as the work by letsgocyclones, I will admit. Perhaps I need a little more time in the museum.

Bowler hat, batting helmet.

Get your mind out of the gutter: not that kind of peek.

Former Baseball Prospecticator Joe Sheehan struck out on his own in late 2009, and in early 2010, he started a email newsletter. What was newsworthy about that decision was that he asked $20 per year from his subscribers at a time when so much great baseball writing on the internet was free. it all stemmed from a twitter conversation he had in response to NBC killing Law & Order and yet keeping The Marriage Ref, with this as the highlight of his opening statement:

Content aggregators are killing content creators, but individuals will recognize and support quality if given that option.

After discussing how lowered barriers to entry – brought on by the internet and anyone’s ability to start a website – has allowed the field to be muddied persay, he adds another important quote:

There are collectives whose business model is built on generating traffic while not paying, or paying an absurdly small amount, for content. They can do this for two reasons: the sheer number of people who want to write for a living, and the conviction that the public won’t be able to tell the difference between what they’re getting and what they could be getting.

Well, there’s a leap there on the second point. It could just be mostly the first point – that there are many quality writers that want to enter the fray, and that the quality is kept fairly high by the sheer number of willing part-timers. Look around at excellent websites like Baseball Analysts and Beyond the Boxscore, and you see great work done for little or no money.

This is not to say I begrudge him his work. Sheehan is an excellent writer. Today he gives us a free sneak peek of the upcoming year of his newsletter, which allows him to write and react as he likes to the news of the moment. In a discussion of steroids, he drops a nice gem that reminds us that good writing is worth paying for:

These are the players we know used. They pissed in a cup and the bell went off. These players are data, and the data is 6’0″, 185 with an 88-mph fastball trying to get to 90. It’s 5’11”, 190 wishing it was six foot tall. It’s not Popeye, it’s Olive Oyl. That doesn’t fit the narrative, so no one writes about it, but this is the face of the needle.

Three years into a remarkable burn, it looks like Walkoff Walk will shut its doors for good at the end of January. The blogosphere will sorely miss the stylings of the writers at the irreverent WoW. Rob Iracane and Kris Liakos were the primary writers and editors of the site that was seemingly dedicated to immortalizing the importance of the game-winning walk, and, perhaps, shrimp running on treadmills. 310toJoba, Dan McQuade and Drew Fairservice also wrote for WoW, with Fairservice recently starting GhostrunnerOnFirst, a Blue Jays blog on ESPN’s Sweet Spot Network. Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of this crew.

But, before we lose them in this particular iteration, let’s celebrate the genius that was Walkoff Walk. Here are some of the best posts in WoW history, in no particular order:

Kris Liakos’ “Annual Teams That Were Dead By Memorial Day” post (5/7/08)

Kris discovers Rinku and Dinesh (5/2/08)

Kris interviews Rinku and Dinesh (12/11/08)

Drew Fairservice makes a link between gut size and strikeout ability (6/30/2010)

Drew comments on DRaysBay taking out a goodbye ad for Carl Crawford (12/2/10)

Rob Iracane rips off Nate Silver, argues for expansion (5/13/08)

Rob writes about economics in a semi-intelligent manner for once (12/2/08)

Rob wonders why it’s so often minorities that ‘lack hustle’ (5/6/10)

Rob skewers Jon Heyman for circular logic on Bert Byleven – a year ago (1/5/10)

Dan McQuade’s excellent movie recurring review feature, Cinema Varitek (4/30/09)

Dan laments the lack of ‘cat-ty’ analysis (6/15/10)

310toJoba takes a look at WAR and MVP votes, parts 1 and 2 (1/16/10)

Baseball Team For Sale?

You’ve always wanted to get into baseball. You’ve bothered all your friends for years about your ideas for making a team hum. You read all the cutting-edge websites and have theories of your own. You have some money saved up, and your day job is pretty successful, but you’re not willing to start at the bottom of the baseball hierarchy. You won’t bring your resume and hound the execs.

There’s opportunity for you around the next corner. Try jumping into baseball by owning your own minor league baseball team. The Sports Advisory Group, a sub-sector of the W.B. Grimes and Co., a boutique media, sports and entertainment mergers and acquisitions firm, has a classified section you may never have seen before. They list, for your pleasure, the minor- and independent-league teams that are available for purchase.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra is well-known for his Shysterball blog of yore, but perhaps he hasn’t been prodded about his old profession enough. He was gracious enough to answer my pestering emails in between wondering about Bartolo Colon’s gut and Andy Pettitte’s will to go on.

Eno Sarris: Set the scene, tell us a little about your youth. Where did you live growing up, where did you go to college, what did you study, and where did you go to school after that?

Craig Calcaterra: I was born in Flint, Michigan and lived there until I was 11, when I moved to Parkersburg, West Virginia. We lived there three years, and then we moved 120 miles south to Beckley, West Virginia where I went to high school and eventually graduated. For reasons I’ve explained elsewhere, I consider Beckley my hometown. I went to Ohio State University — far enough away to where I felt like I was going away to college but close enough to home to not feel like I was going too far — where I majored in political science and minored in English and anthropology. That kind of transcript is pretty much tailor made for either unemployment or law school, so I chose law school. After three years at George Washington in DC, my wife and I moved back to Columbus, Ohio were I jumped into the working world.

Childhood was pretty normal. My dad was a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. My mom was a secretary and sometimes waitress. The moves were for when the old man transferred. I have an older brother. We were baseball card fanatics from 1978 until he joined the Navy in 1989. I still have about 100,000 baseball cards in my basement much to my wife’s chagrin. I played baseball and football as a kid, but by the time the tenth grade rolled around my desire to play finally sunk to the same level as my ability so I called it a career. Mostly I was a normal kid just trying to balance his geek-like tendencies against the need to attract females. It mostly worked out.

Eno Sarris: Shysterball readers would remember that you were a lawyer first, but you wrote mainly about baseball on the blog. What was your ‘day’ job like? What did you like and dislike about being a lawyer? Would you ever think about going back?

Craig Calcaterra: I was a litigator. Mostly defending lawsuits for big corporations, but a little white collar criminal defense too.

Read the rest of this entry »

>
Fantasy Baseball 2.0?

Sega has a new baseball game coming out this March – MLB Manager™ Online – which will allow players to select and then trade players in order to accrue points and win championships (there’s even a WBC it looks like). Fantasy baseball veterans may have heard of such a game – but they might also admit that the game could use a facelift. Could a console-style user interface add a little spice to fantasy baseball? It’s possible.

The ‘news’ here, though, is that you, esteemed reader of NotGraphs, might be able to help them shape this game in time for its March 2011 launch. Through this link here, you are invited to apply for a beta test for MLB Manager Online. Applications are open to anybody with a computer that supports Flash 10 (not just PCs), and will remain open until December 27th. The test will begin January 7th. Good luck!