This kicks off a mini-series of email-interviews with media members with interesting backgrounds. Shannon Drayer, who was gracious enough to answer my pestering emails while on the run, writes a Mariners blog and covers the team for 710 ESPN Seattle. As you’ll see, she has a unique story and take on baseball.

Eno Sarris: If I remember correctly, you’ve moved around some. How did you end up in Seattle?

Shannon Drayer: I moved around quite a bit as a child and in doing so I really failed to put down any roots so when it came time to pick a college and kind of go off on my own, the decision was all mine.

I was living in Normal, Illinois at the time and while it was a great town to grow up in it was getting a little claustrophobic for me. I needed to get out of the cornfield. In picking a college location was the number one factor for me. It had to be in a city. I would not compromise on that. I lived only two hours from Chicago at the time but with no car and strict parents it might as well have been two days away. One of the reasons why I wanted the school to be in a city was because I would have access to sports. The University of Washington fit the bill. Good school with good sports and only a few miles away from a ballpark. I never even took a visit. I sent in my scores and grades was accepted and headed to Seattle.

Eno Sarris: But you haven’t been in Seattle the whole time since, right?

Shannon Drayer: With the exception of a year spent in NY studying acting it has been all Seattle.

Eno Sarris: How did you get from studying acting in New York to talking and writing about the Mariners in Seattle?

Shannon Drayer: I enjoyed acting but wasn’t quite committed enough to become a starving actress so I moved home to Seattle. Qualified to do absolutely nothing, I took a job at Starbucks for the benefits and schedule flexibility. It was actually a great job. I spent my days making coffee and talking sports with everyone who came in. I was kind of known for that in the area.

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During the Winter Meetings Wrap-Up Podcast Spectacular, Messrs. Palwikowski and Cameron brought up the strange ambiance at the Winter Meetings in the age of Twitter. It was truly weird to witness the crowded media room, full of writers tracking stories on various websites, and contemplate why we had all gone through the trouble of arriving in one space to do so. Couldn’t those writers stay home to do the same thing?

There are, of course, a couple of events that require a physical presence. Managers hold interviews that run like mini press conferences, there’s the job fair, and the Rule Five draft is the closeout event. Then again, beat writers are most interested in their own teams’ manager, and the manager interviews are not surprisingly best attended by writers from that team’s city. It seems those interviews could be held in the home city without much of a difference in tone or effectiveness. That leaves the job fair and the Rule Five draft – and I doubt as many media members would arrive for that event alone, as interesting as those events might be.

No, the “reason” for the event is the face-to-face time that the lobby – and the lobby bar – provide. After spending almost a day’s worth of time in that lobby, though, it’s worth wondering if the meetings will survive this digital age. While some front office members came down to the lobby, the top of the organizations were conspicuously absent. If they wanted a player, agent or other GM to meet with them, they could either call them, chat them, or invite them to their room. I did not witness a single GM in the lobby while I was there, and asking around, it seemed to be a rare event. In fact, it seemed that teams even sent one specific member of the front office (not the GM) down at certain times to gather rumors and return to the teams’ suites.

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Hired guns.

Mike Newman at ScoutingtheSally provides an excellent service for the prospecticators among us. He visits parks, takes video, and analyzes players that come through the Sally league – ostensibly for those of us in deep dynasty fantasy leagues looking for an edge on our competitors. His independent work functions well as a fantasy manager’s personal scouting department.

Well, now Newman is offering the chance for some fantasy leaguers to gain the jump on others by paying for a premium service. Subscribers of this service will get voicemails or emails minutes after Newman sees a player live and days before he posts an edited piece on his website. An excellent idea, this offering seems to mark a significant moment for fantasy sports. Jason Grey’s hiring at ESPN.com and subsequent articles for ESPN Insider may have been the harbinger, but now a fantasy manager can ‘hire’ his or her own scout by paying for a week-long advantage on the competition. Fantasy is becoming reality.

But there’s something else at play here. Like Mark Zuckerman and Joe Sheehan before him, Mike Newman is attempting to monetize the hard work he does and has heretofore disseminated for free. The correct price is probably yet to be fixed, but the question of whether or not these writers’ work has inherent value should be settled. Zuckerman’s combination of dedication to his team and unique analysis, or Sheehan’s blend of wit and statistical fortitude, or Newman’s tireless scouting work – these things are worth something.

We have far too few data points to speculate on the sustainability of the model at this point. Zuckerman has recently taken to supplementing his reader-supported website, NatsInsider, with the more old-school method of freelancing for CSNwashington, and this writer knows enough from looking at his own wallet not to ask fellow writers to bare their pocketbooks for the public.

But the intellectual underpinnings, the reasoning behind this model, must make sense to most readers, even if they aren’t willing to pony up. There’s real work being done here, and so it’s most likely worth real money.

…aaand a Blackberry in front of a fake treeee.

At the Orlando Winter Meetings, the lobby is a phenomenon. There’s a slightly uncomfortable air to the space which houses virtually no planned or formal events, and is yet a hubub of activity all week long. Major league ball players looking for jobs bump into recent college graduates looking for jobs while media men scan the room for executives to harangue. It’s excellent and squirm-inducing all at the same time.

To pass the time while waiting for a story to break so that we could all run to the media room and post our opinions, some of us started a little word association game to break down the different categories of lobby rats. One thing: this bit of snark is all in good fun. We made friends in every group listed and enjoyed talking to everybody that gave us time. And many of these looks were extremely classic.

But still, there was a bit of a dress code.

Ill-fitting suit: Job-seeker.
Mustard-stained dockers: Journalist.
Golf shirt with team logo: Scout.
Cowboy boots: Manager.
Untied laces: Dave Cameron.
Sweatshirt and sweatpants: Tito Francona.
Sweater vest: Front office, but not GM – unless you are Jack Zduriencik.
Expensive suit: GM.
Expensive suit with wires hanging out the back of the jacket: TV.
Expensive suit with white sneakers: Peter Gammons.
Entourage: Gary Sheffield.

Photo H/T: SNY / Metsblog

Our fearless, not feckless, leader here at NotG recently debuted a series in which he will annotate readings that are germane to the sport of baseball. Judging from the first post, this will be fun introduction to many different intriguing texts.

But on AmazinAvenue, James Kannengeiser has taken an approach to a text that is more comprehensive. While Cistulli will introduce us lightly to many texts – and allow us to decide if we will continue the study on our own – Kannengeiser is discussing one text. He has approached his text, the inimitable Moneyball by Michael Lewis, in an in-depth manner, going chapter by chapter with discussion questions. Since the site is dedicated to a sabremetric approach to the same team that just hired Sandy Alderson, a major character in the book, it’s a convergence of interest and timing that makes a whole lot of sense.

If you will, a few choice moments from his series so far:

From Chapter Four’s discussion questions:

5. Bill James’s wife says in Chapter Four that if she knew the extent of Bill’s baseball obsession when they started dating, their relationship might not have gotten very far. Without getting too specific, has baseball (or sports in general) obsession interfered with a close relationship? Has it aided a relationship?

My wife wants a word with you, James. From Chapter Three’s questions:

2. Is Jeff Francoeur the present day version of 1980s Billy Beane? Michael Lewis writes in Chapter Three:

“He [Billy] didn’t have a baseball mentality,” said Jeff Bittiger. “He was more like a basketball or a football player. Emotions were always such a big part of whatever he did.”

Frenchy isn’t an unhinged buffet table flipper like Billy seemed to be (although Frenchy did bash a water cooler after a game in 2009). Still, I think there is a legitimate comparison — physically gifted player; beloved by scouts; has The Good Face; can’t hit a lick.

That’s a strange parallel for a player so derided by the sabr-crowd. Then a hard-hitting question from Chapter Two:

4. The men in the A’s draft room are depicted packing lips full of chewing tobacco. Have you ever “packed a lip”? What did you think? Awesome or gross?

Good stuff, and it’s led to some great repartee in the comments sections.

It’s worth wondering if this approach would work here. In order to take advantage of the same confluence of interest and timing, it would have to be a book that was relevant to all of us. Could Tom Tango’s The Book be worth a dust-off and a chapter-by-chapter discussion? Alan Schwartz and The Numbers Game? Baseball Between the Numbers? These aren’t novel to the marketplace, and we wouldn’t be breaking new ground, but perhaps we’d learn something together as we reaffirm what we’ve learned?

Fantasy baseball players are comfortable with the idea. We often root for a player above all else – we need those statistics, even if it means that Nick Swisher hits a home run against our beloved Sawx. But this, this group of “McCann’s Cans,” this is a horse of a different tune. This looks a little bit… crazy. Maybe something’s in the water in Atlanta, because Gary Sheffield also got the fanatic treatment.

It’s not all Atlanta’s ‘fault,’ though. Check out this lovely section dedicated to Kevin Maas, called the “Maas-tops,” highlighted in this descriptive quote from Wikipedia.

“Like Mattingly, Maas was a left-handed batter. As a result many of his home runs went into the right field stands. About halfway through the season a group of a dozen or so young ladies began wearing “Maas-tops” to Yankees home games and sitting in the right field stands. Whenever Maas hit a home run to right, the girls would get up, remove their tops and jump up and down until Maas finished circling the bases. However after a few home runs the women were banned from entering Yankee Stadium.”

Ah, stupid Yankee Stadium security guards. If only there were photographic evidence of this group. Then again, this sort of player-based fandom could actually be coming from Atlanta. Here is probably the high-water mark, the moment when wave broke and returned home to wash the makeup off.

Did Kenshin Kawakami know this group even existed? Not quite “Frenchy’s Franks,” was it? I suppose this next one counts, although they never adopted a clever moniker.

All this next group needed was a little shoe polish. Instant fun!

Who could forget the ConeHeads? All sorts of fun. Let’s humbly suggest some more fangroups, in case someone out there enjoys getting dressed up, shall we? Apologies up front, but I’ll try to get this started: Adrian Beltre‘s Bell-Trees? Eh, what is a Bell Tree anyway. Robinson Cano’s Canoes? Might be a tough costume. Shin-Soo Choo’s Choo-Choos? That’s a winner.

Photo H/Ts: McCann’s Cans Facebook Page, Atlanta Journal and Constitution (Sheffield), Talking Chop (Kawakami), Polar Bear News (Pandas), The700Level (Fasano).

The always-excellent Joe Posnanski submitted his vote for Sportsman of the Year this Monday, and his selection couldn’t be more different than the man the voters chose last year. Derek Jeter was the sportsman of 2009, and he was a veteran that had reversed some statistical signs of aging and poor defense to turn in the second-best season of his career (by WAR) at 35. His team won the championship. He was the starting shortstop. He was a matinee idol in the cultural capital of America, he was getting married, and babies were being named after him.

So it’s kind of a long way from there to Armando Galarraga, Posnanski’s vote for 2010. Galarraga didn’t make his substantial major league debut until he was 25, and in his best season hasn’t approached Jeter’s worst season (by WAR). He’s not a great pitcher – a 4.87 FIP is about right for a flyball pitcher with a below-average strikeout rate – and this season he wasn’t even an average pitcher. Obviously, this isn’t about excellence at his sport. Take it away, Joe:

Joyce would handle his mistake with great dignity. But the real hero was Galarraga. He did not argue with Joyce on the field. He just sort of smiled. He retired the next batter, Trevor Crowe, and finished off the game as a one-hitter (making this, in the minds of many, the first 28-out perfect game in baseball history). And then he went into the clubhouse and told reporters that he was very proud of the way he pitched. When asked about Joyce immediately afterward, he said that Joyce should not worry about it, that everybody makes mistakes. He actually planned to go to Joyce to make HIM feel better. Later, when Joyce came to see Galarraga to apologize for missing the call, the pitcher reiterated his stance. It meant a lot to him that Joyce came over to apologize.

“Nobody’s perfect,” Galarraga said.

Of course, Posnanski covers the different definitions of “Sportsman” in the preamble for his vote. And it’s no brain-buster to point out that we admire athletes for their excellence as well as their grace or good conduct – when we can. Former winners of the award seem to have won because of excellence and timing – such as Dwyane Wade the year he won the championship and the Boston Red Sox in 2004. But there are those that have won for other reasons, such as Arthur Ashe in 1992. Look at the whole list of winners and you realize that the definition is malleable and usually depends on the crossover appeal of the story. The “size of the story” was probably behind Posnanski’s 2008 vote for Stephen Curry and the fun he brought back to college basketball, and was probably also be behind his vote for Gallaraga.

But is there some sort of link – intentional or not – between last year’s winner and this year’s vote? Jeter’s big moment this year was very un-“sportsman”-like, in terms of fair conduct, and then there’s the relative excellence and careers of these two baseball men. Perhaps I’m being guilty of cynicism, or maybe I’m just making a connection where there is none. I’m certainly not accusing Posnanski of any untoward behavior. It’s just funny thing that occurred to me while considering a below-average ‘sportsman’ for the Sportsman of the Year. The most likely explanation is the fact that Galarraga and his near-perfect game were the baseball story of the year in the way that it warmed our collective heart.

But it’s also at least worth considering what candidate baseball might have been put forward if the focus were instead on excellence as it has been in years past. Would we be considering Buster Posey more heavily? He made his major league debut at a difficult position and then was instrumental to taking the Giants to their first San Franciscan title. If only he had put forth a more spectacular postseason line, this might be our story. .288/.354/.390 is pretty good, especially for a rookie, but it doesn’t win you postseason hardware or the imagination of the Sportsman of the Year voters – especially on a team full of so many characters and heros. At least this is the right track, judging from Tom Verducci’s vote – the Giants as a whole.

In the end, though, the Sportsman of the Year seems to be the main character in the story that most captured the sporting worlds’ imagination. Is that Armando Galarraga’s “im”perfect game for baseball and for you?

We all knew that Wade Boggs ate chicken before each game and that he was a superstitious character, but thanks to Dan Lewis’ aptly-named e-newsletter, Now I Know, now we know a little more about that colorful dude:

For night games, Boggs stepped into the batting cage at 5:17 and ran wind sprints at 7:17. (Trying to hex him, a scoreboard operator in Toronto once flipped the stadium clock directly from 7:16 to 7:18.) Before each at-bat Boggs would draw the Hebrew word “Chai” in the batter’s box, and his route to and from the playing field was so precise that by late summer his footprints were often clearly visible in the grass in front of his home dugouts. — Wade Boggs’ entry in the Baseball Library.

If such a thing were possible, I would order more of it. Could even the commissioner himself somehow decree that the players show more of their personality? Perhaps the website or the media could achieve the same by celebrating some of the crazier members of the baseball community. Here are some possible moves baseball could pull to put some of the zany back in the game.

1) Turk Wendell Day At the Park
The team – perhaps the Cubs – could hand out free licorice strings and a toothbrush to remind us all of the wonders of the Turk. Players could take flying leaps over the foul line (or draw crosses in the mound dirt) to add a little exuberance to the game, if they like.

2) Recommend Moises Alou as a Hitting Instructor
332 home runs and a career 133 wRC+ later, he could help some young men figure it out. But a whole team full of batters that eschew the batting glove and urinate on their hands would definitely add something.

3) Recommend Kevin “Touch Me, Touch Me” Rhomberg as a First Base Coach
Rhomberg played left field for the Indians once, but was better known for his superstitions. The two main superstitions that apply here were his need to touch anyone that touched him, and his inability to turn right (he’d keep turning left until he was headed right). Imagine a team full of Rhombergs. Just imagine.

4) Mark “The Bird” Fydrich Talking Ball Giveaway
Technology has come a long way. I’m sure a ball that could say a few key phrases could be made cheap enough to give away at a game. Then, at least, the ball would talk back.

5) Nomar Garciaparra Batting Gloves Giveaway
This might fly in the face of the new effort to speed games up, but a Nomar batting gloves giveaway, replete with a “Nomar at the Plate” video montage might just spawn a whole generation of crazy pre-at-bat rituals.

Hat Tip: Dan Lewis

Down in Arizona at the Fall League, there were some freaky things going on — and I’m not speaking about the loud lady with the flags and the one-woman chants up front. Take a look at a couple of these strange athletes.

It’s not polite to laugh at his pitching motion, or call him a “Large Lincecum,” because that’s just mean. Also, Josh Collmenter pitched five innings with eight strikeouts and no walks on November fifth – pushing his record to 3-0 – so he cares little for my tawdry jokes. But, it is a little funny. Joel Henard of Baseball Daily Digest interviewed Austin Romine at the AFL Rising Stars game (last clip of the bunch) and asked Romine about Collmenter’s delivery. According the Yankees’ catching prospect, it seems that Collmenter’s funky release point is part of the reason for his success. If I’m hearing Romine correctly in this clip, it sounds like the high release point makes his curveball harder to pick up right away, and that just reminded me of garik16’s excellent piece debunking the idea that the release point was important to a curveball’s success. Then again, as Mike Fast showed us in his recent treatise on release points, we are still learning a lot about them since they aren’t specifically tracked by the pitch f/x cameras.

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Taken from a blog called “A Conversation on Cool,” this picture of Willie Mays playing stickball in Harlem in 1954 is practically a coolgasm. The soft polo shirt, the believable smile, the flexed muscles and the grinning crowd combine to create a picture worth much more than a thousand words. There’s a lot going on here, and all of it is awesome.

But one cannot avoid a pang of something less grin-ful. Is it nostalgia? Not quite it – a person that wasn’t alive then cannot really miss the time. Perhaps it’s jealousy? But we see great athletes all the time. A combination of the two emotions might describe the feeling. We might be jealous of the grinning children in the back, and that jealousy may be tinged with nostalgia for own youth.

Another picture, then, of a moment from our own time.

To be clear, this is not to suggest the photographs could even be close to equal. One is almost sartorial in nature and its composition and art are there for a completely different aim than the other. One picture is a moment in time, the other more of a documentation that David Wright did, indeed, give some awards to the After School All Stars after hanging out with the children and giving them pointers. And this is not – at all – to denigrate the efforts of Wright and his foundation. His work is important, and good.

But put the two pictures near each other, and some of that nostalgia or jealousy crystallizes into something a little bit too grumpy for this correspondent. Is a moment featuring unbridled (and unplanned) access to a player like Willie Mays possible today? Is there a player today that is such a Man of the People that he could find some kids, join in their local game, and create a moment this cool? As much as we can pride ourselves in the progress we’ve made, has our culture edged out real moments such as this?

Imagine you’re a player (of any sport) driving down a busy street in autumn, 2010. You spot a pickup game, and you want to join in. Then you may think of the demands of your contract, your agent, your publicist, your team, and perhaps even your personal wealth. Would you join in?

H/T: Tommy Bennett