As my colleague — and America’s Kid Brother™ — Jackie Moore noted in the smallest hour of the night, Tuesday’s 19-inning affair between Pittsburgh and Atlanta ended in an unexpected and controversial manner.

For more on the game’s decisive play, I direct your attention either (a) once again to Jackie’s post or (b) the home for entirely reasonable discourse that is the internet.

Equally deserving of our attention is what happened on the other end of the play — batter (pitcher?) Scott Proctor’s end, I mean. For it was Proctor, owner of three career plate appearances and three career strikeouts before last night, who set the wheels of this baseballing soap opera into motion.

What you see down and to the right is a flip book of sorts documenting the initial moments of Proctor’s departure from the batter’s box. Because the image is long, I’ve presented alongside it poet Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” something with which the bespectacled reader will want to become acquainted if his dreams of becoming a Real Aristocrat are ever to be realized.

I leave it to the reader’s discretion to determine the exact identity of Arnold’s “ignorant armies.”

DOVER BEACH

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Part I of an infinity part series dedicated to dissecting the bad ideas of SABR-bashers.

We’ve all reached that point in the discussion. The point when, say, you are debating the merits of a given player and you have just cited xFIP, or wOBA, or WAR.

“What!??” your opponent replies incredulously. “What the hell is xFIP/wOBA/WAR?”

“Well, it’s an advanced metric that measures such and such,” you explain.

Your opponent scoffs. “I don’t have time for these made-up stats. They take all the fun out of the game for me.”

It is at this moment that the discussion has usually reached the point of no return. It’s like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books; you can either escalate things by snarking the living shit out of your opponent or you can extricate yourself from the discussion and risk looking weak. Either way, there can be no “winner”.

Not too long ago, the release of the book The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball by Alan and Sheldon Hirsch touched off a minor controversy in the world of baseball commentary. Among other things, their book takes up the “sabermetrics takes all the fun out of the game” position:

[T]he saber-obsession with numbers occludes a major aspect of baseball’s beauty – its narrative richness and relentless capacity to surprise. Baseball, thank goodness, transcends and often defies quantitative analysis. Games are decided by bad hops and bad calls, broken bats, sun and wind, pigeons in the outfield, and fans who obstruct players, among other unforeseeable contingencies. That may seem obvious (apart from the pigeons), but not to the folks who increasingly run the show. Rather than celebrating baseball’s delightfully spontaneous quality, sabermetricians deny it or rebel against it.

Let us leave aside for a moment that this sentiment is commonly expressed by people who are unable or unwilling to grapple with new statistics with which they are unfamiliar. Of course these people too use statistics to make sense of what happens on the baseball field, just less insightful statistics. In fact, a large portion of the Hirsches’ book is devoted to a feeble attempt at debunking specific advanced stats. Others have already done a fine job of critiquing the Hirsch brothers’ book and I do not wish to retread too much old ground. Rather, here I want to engage on its own terms the all too common argument that advanced statistics obscure the game’s beauty.

Read the rest of this entry »

Despite the fact that he enters play Saturday with a line of just .245/.303/.372 (.277 BABIP), it’s entirely likely that — owing to a combination of defense, park adjustment, etc. — it’s entirely likely that Sam Fuld is an average major leaguer. Add to this some notable biographical details — that he went to Stanford, for example, or that he has diabetes and worked for STATS, Inc. and went to Phillips Exeter and is Jewish — and one finds in Sam Fuld the makings of a Nerd Among Men.

Fuld himself problematized that narrative on Friday night, however. In the top of the fifth inning, with Fuld on first, Fuld’s teammate Sean Rodriguez grounded to Royals second baseman Chris Getz. Attempting to start the double play, Getz flipped to shortstop Alcides Escobar, who’d moved over to second to take the throw. What happened after that is what you see in the expertly embedded GIF at the top of this post.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: as a number of reader-commenters have suggested here, it’s very possible that the basepaths at the pictured stadium are only 60 feet long, therefore negating all of the inspired work you find in this post. This, once again, reveals why “facts” are harmful and ought to be ignored.

A couple days ago, in response to a piece I wrote that waxed poignant on the pleasures of baseball and its capacity to constantly generate data of all sorts, reader/commenter/modern man Danmay noted that, perhaps stranger than one club hitting over half of a league’s homers is a club averaging almost a triple per game.

I can reveal now that the team hitting all those triples are the Lions of Savigny (or, Savigny-sur-Orge to be precise, a suburb of Paris), a club in the French Elite division (treated with awe-inducing prose here). I can also now reveal that, owing to the new technology of “drawing red lines on images from Google Maps,” it’s possible to determine if, in fact, the dimensions of Savigny’s home park, Stade Jean Moulin (whose dimensions are absent from internet), might influence the Lions’ triple totals.

But first, a test. Regard, below, an image of very famous Fenway Park (also courtesy Google Maps). Because we know (a) that home to first at Fenway Park is 90 feet and (b) that home to the left-field wall at Fenway is just over 300 feet, we can test our method to see if it works.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes inspiration comes over the author like the strong but tender hands of a Belarusian massage therapist named Miroslav or Milorad or Mirobad or something else beginning with M. Other times, inspiration strikes violently, not unlike in our friend Garth Algar’s encounter with Dream Woman, Donna Dixon (skillfully GIF’d and embedded above).

In the case of the present post, the author’s experience has been one firmly in the latter camp. The idea? Composing a pantheon of sorts for the joueurs of bat-and-ball.

Below is a brief list of the most notable Greek gods (with a full list available here, courtesy Wikipedia). Which current player is MLB’s Zeus, do you think? Which’n is Dionysos, god of wine and doing it?

They’re important questions, reader. And your answers are important, too.

God/dess: Aphrodite
Associated With: Love and beauty
Defining Acts: Offered Helen of Troy to Paris. Saved Paris from dying at hands of Menelaus. Both lover and surrogate mother to Adonis — which, somehow that’s okay.

Read the rest of this entry »

Clicking and embiggening are both options here.

It’s the conviction of this author that, among its many charms, baseball’s greatest (charm, that is) is its capacity to constantly produce data. While such a claim would likely redden the face of a Real Baseball Man, let it be known that, by data, I’m not merely thinking of columns of stats; in fact, because of the frequency with which games are played and because of the intimacy which necessarily develops between players and coaches and beat writers and fans, baseball also produces narratives about masculinity and heroism and failure, etc.

The act of record-keeping is truly central to the game. Really, nothing besides politics and the weather is so thoroughly documented for the benefit of public consumption — and neither politics (which is horrifying) nor weather (which is boring) are so pleasant to discuss with strangers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The only thing I know about marketing is that if you use each letter of your company’s name to spell out a positive attribute, it’s golden gold. Thankfully, the Chiba Lotte Marines, to cite but one example, know more about marketing than I do. I introduce this into evidence …

As Zig Ziglar teaches us, cast the opposition as giant, spiteful golems who destroy urban infrastructure and endanger children, and you’ll sell tickets. The Chiba Lotte Marines have taken this lesson to heart, and that heart is beautiful and mighty.

By all means, collect the whole set.

Sadaharu Oh’s autobiography is an enjoyable read, remarkable for its eloquence and candor.  He details his struggles with racism, having a Taiwanese father in post-war Japan, as well as his conflict with that very same father over his love of baseball.  In Chapter 4, he also establishes himself as a free-market capitalist who isn’t interested in money, and touches on the age-old dilemma: is parity the same as fairness, or is the amateur draft, as Buzzie Bavasi once called it, “a form of socialism”?  Oh (with David Falkner) writes:

In those days there was no draft system.  Thank God.  If there had been such a system, I never would have fulfilled my dreams.  I can look back on it no and feel this sense of tremendous blessing – one that includes the sense that I am somehow a person from another age – but I feel anger for what was ultimately surrendered.

The draft system, this peculiar lottery of talent that is supposed to give all teams an equal opportunity to stock their rosters, is one of the most unfortunate changes to affect modern professional baseball in Japan.

Imagine a young amateur player, as I once was, looking forward to playing professionally.  In the heart of that young person, if he has passionately followed baseball from his boyhood, is loyalty and longing. … What does it mean when that youngster , if he is good enough to be a professional, has no say whatsoever in what team he plays for?  What does it mean when the fans of a team see their management unable to choose players whose loyalties have led them to the team in the first place?  The answer in both cases is a tremendous loss in the charm of baseball itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Tell me what your interests are, who you be with.

Search diligently the internet, your local library’s microfilm collection, et cetera, and you’ll invariably find a glaring omission in the annals of sportswriting, reader — namely, any conversation whatsoever of the All-Star game and how it might be improved.

I mean, it’s kinda weird, right? Because it seems like sportswriters — with a pressing need to provide copy and a dearth of noteworthy events at the All-Star break — it seems like the idea of how to improve this obviously flawed venture would’ve come up at least once. And yet, as I say, there is literally no trace of any relevant commentary on the subject.

So it is, reader, in a move unprecedented in the genre, I submit here for the readership’s consideration ten (10) ideas that would very likely make the All-Star game better.

Regard:

Vintage Jerseys
Players wear great uniforms from baseball history.

Vintage Mustaches
Players wear great mustaches from baseball history.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re at all like me, reader, you find yourself feeling underrepresented in many of the heated political debates this country is always seeming to have.

Health care? Bah! Immigration? Double-bah! The economy? Excuse me while I fall asleep!

It’s almost like baseball nerds don’t even have a voice anymore!

Well, thanks to a combination of Free Time™ and Paint.NET, now we do — as NotGraphs presents Co-Opted Political Slogans.

For our first (and, very likely, last) Co-Opted Political Slogan, we present “These Colors Don’t Run.” Featuring FanGraphs’ trademark beige and green, “These Colors Don’t Run” is a great way to have your voice heard without even opening your mouth!

Perfect for anything from large, rhetoric-filled rallies to totally chill backyard BBQs, “These Colors Don’t Run” lets everyone know that you’ve studied linear weights pretty effing closely, thank you, and you know the break-even point for stolen bases when you see it.

Made from 100% Great Idea, “These Colors Don’t Run” will never shrink, fade, or moan in a really inappropriate way.

So buy “These Colors Don’t Run” now — and let everyone know all your political beliefs instantly!