Archive for Audio and/or Visual

Though regarded in our time as the Father of Western Thought, it was by embracing his own ignorance and asking almost exclusively questions of his interlocutors that Socrates sought out wisdom.

Nor has the Socratic tradition lost its relevance as a rhetorical device in the modern age. One finds, for example, in the footage embedded here, Oakland right-hander Grant Balfour utilizing an urgent line of inquiry to better understand Detroit designated hitter Victor Martinez’s impressions of the world.

Asks Balfour of Martinez: “Why the fuck you looking at me, man?” And also: “What’s your fucking problem, man?” One notes immediately the deep similarities between this brief exchange and much of Plato’s Phaedrus.

1) Start with a blown strike three call. Add a demonstrative umpire for good measure.

2) Mix in some chin-music-inspired pre-fight-antics involving Torii Hunter.

ToriiChant

3) Have the home-team’s rookie pitcher strike out the best hitter in baseball on his fastest fastball of the year.

SonnyChant

As sort of a complement to Greg Rybarczyk’s work at Hit Tracker Online, writer Chris St. John — whose prospect analysis at Beyond the Box Score, incidentally, is also great and will suffice — created, a couple years ago, a metric called Home Run Damage, a tool by means of which St. John is able to identify objectively the most awe-inspiring home runs of any season.

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The Well-Beered Englishman, a NotGraphs frequenter and tipster, may hail from yonder eastern edges of the pond, but HE KNOWS AN AMERICAN WHEN HE SEES ONE:

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Not merely some — but, in fact, most — feature-length motion pictures fail to produce as much in the way of pathos as this short video of Jim Leyland does in the wake of Detroit’s division-clinching victory on Wednesday, which video includes: Jim Leyland crying a proud father’s beautiful, faltering tears; Jim Leyland being escorted into the Tiger clubhouse via bear hug by devoted son-figure Torii Hunter; and Jim Leyland performing spontaneously a dance which, for whatever it lacks in technical proficiency, compensates for it by managing to remind the spectator that the first act of human dance, whenever it occurred, must also have been an expression of pure and spontaneous joy.

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Wladimir Balentien has obliterated a league-record 57 pitches in Japan. That looks like this:

And ultimately this:

But the task isn’t so hard! Our team of NotGraphs scientists have determined a two-step process in repeating his success!
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Oh, Cleveland. You are fighting for a wild card spot. Even though you have been working your hardest to secure one of the two spots, you continue to provide fan entertainment.

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Tired of German geniuses employing their vast intellect to invent super bombs? Exhausted from the onslaught of innovation that brings only violence, terror, and Kardashians to your front door?

Well, we finally have a tool that will allow us to ingest more baseball while watching live baseball — we finally have a legitimate use for the great Google Glass experiment:

That’s right. It starts here. It starts with basic pitch-by-pitch data. Eventually Google will wise up and make full glasses (with transparency and sunglasses modes) so that I can go to, say, a Mariners and Rockies inter-league matchup and use my Google Glass to watch fullscreen HD feeds of, say, a Rays and Yankees game because who on earth would care about a Mariners-Rockies matchup?

Oh, behold, a bucket of greasy ballpark thanks to Frank Spinillo for passing along the relevant data — all without a Google Glass, too!

In 1997, then-Boston GM Dan Duquette traded reliever Heathcliff Slocumb to Seattle, a club en route to winning its second division title in three years, for pitcher Derek Lowe and catcher Jason Varitek. While there existed perhaps some justification for the deal at the time so far as the Mariners were concerned, it ultimately proved entirely one-sided: Slocumb threw fewer than 100 leauge-average innings for Seattle, while Lowe and Varitek produced approximately 46 wins over the next 20 or so player-seasons for Boston — including a combined seven wins during the Sox’ world championship campaign in 2004.

As Lowe revealed during the third inning of Wednesday night’s NESN telecast, however — of the Red Sox game against the Rays in Tampa Bay — it’s possible that Duquette was not entirely acquainted with Boston’s new acquisitions at the time.

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After hitting his 54th of the season yesterday — a feat celebrated both by the present author and also Jeff Sullivan — former Cincinnati and Seattle outfielder Wladimir Balentien hit his 55th home run today for Japanese club Yakult, tying the Curaçao native with Sadaharu Oh (in 1964), Tuffy Rhodes (in 2001), and Alex Cabrera (2002) for the NPB’s single-season home-run record.

Here are some notable reviews of Balentien’s most recent and record-tying effort:

“Playing by its own rules every step of the way, Wladimir Balentien’s 55th home run is clearly the sort that needs to be hit more often.”

– Matt Brunson, Creative Loafing

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