Archive for Event

Although people are used to the front office of the Kansas City Royals being on the cutting edge of, well, pretty much everything, it was still a bit of a surprise to read that they going to take entries from the “social media” to have the chance to interview General Manager Dayton Moore and a few others during the Royals’ Annual FanFest. The winners were announced last week, and it was nice to see that a fair number of respected members of the Royals’ Nerdosphere were invited.

If you ask me, even more exciting than the list people asking the questions is the list of people said to be answering them. Dayton Moore is one of them, of course, as is manager Ned Yost. But there were also a couple of players. One of them is probably the only Royals position player who could be considered close to being something like a “star,” Billy Butler. The other player picked to be part of this interview (conducted, remember, by a group of people generally considered to play close attention to non-superficial stats, who prefer performance over reputation, who don’t just buy the team’s fluff stories) will be…

…and this is not a joke….

Jeff Francouer.

No, I am not kidding.

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That, near and dear, is Ed Wade viewed from behind — or what he’ll look like to his doomed Houston Marathon competitors!

Yes, the Astros’ front-office lever-puller is in training to run that aforementioned Houston Marathon, and earnest props to him. Running that far without stopping is impressive enough, but doing so at Wade’s age of 54? Nifty indeed. I’m substantially younger than Ed Wade, and last night all I did was drink a sherpa’s load of Two-Buck Chuck and then set up an email alert to remind me to clip my toenails.

Really, though, I exercise regularly and have a treadmill that does not presently double as extra closet space, yet if I tried to run 26.2 miles my hips and groin would fly off after about mile 10 or so and annihilate everyone within the blast field. So congrats to Ed Wade for defying age and doing something not many of us have the will to achieve. And congrats to the Astros for having an AARP-eligble GM who’s in better shape than their left fielder.

So this is purty cool: the fledgling Chicago Baseball Museum is hosting a party on February 3 to celebrate the 100th birthday of the great Buck O’Neil, who passed away in 2006. The details can be found in the link above, but, really, they had me at “Doug Glanville, guest speaker” and “cocktails.”

I can say little about O’Neil’s grace, dignity and historical import that hasn’t already been said much better by Joe Posnanski in his wonderful book, but I’d be pretty pleased if my son grew up to be a fraction of the man Buck O’Neil was (hope is long lost for yours truly).

O’Neil was born in Florida and spent his playing career in Kansas City; however, he spent time as a scout with the Cubs, and Chicago was in many ways the nerve center of Negro League baseball. So it’s fitting in some way that Chi-town play host to an event celebrating the man who’s mostly responsible for the revived interest in the Negro Leagues.

Also, since I live in Chicago, all NotGraphs readers who attend the Buck O’Neil gala are welcome to stay in my home and drink my beer.*

(* – Although my love for all of you is both boundless and without bound, this is absolutely not true. Hope to see you there, though.)

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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If I’ve learned one thing in this world, it’s that NYC tabloids are never wrong. So that’s why I believe the Daily News when it tells me Yanks outfielder Nick Swisher and actress Joanna Garcia are to be wed this weekend.

My own wife, who I assume was coconuts from pregnancy hormones at the time, went through a three-month or so phase of watching “Reba” on the CW every day. So I feel like I’ve watched Joanna grow up. Or not.

Anyway, Swish seems like a good egg, and I can guarantee you no professional athlete can claim this:

Reba McEntire, Jamie Lynn Sigler, and Lance Bass will serve as part of the bridal party, Us reports.

Next up for the future Mrs. Swisher? Doing Laura Posada’s laundry as part of her Yankee Wives Club pledge requirements.

On Sunday, Americans celebrate a cherished national holiday: Repeal Day.

That’s right, on December 5 the Republic will once again fondly recall the downfall of Prohibition and its meddlesome enablers. Suffice it to say, the best way to honor this holy day of obligation is with some wholesome, nutritious alcohol!

Baseball, of course, has a long and bountiful relationship with drinking, and it’s only natural that the game takes part in Repeal Day exuberance. So since we can’t hang the bunting and play ball in December, we’re going to get in the Repeal Day spirit by naming the All-Time All-Drinkers Team …

C – Josh Gibson

Gibson may have been the greatest catcher ever to squat behind the dish, but he also had a legendary weakness for self-medication. Most notably, he missed the 1938 Negro League All-Star Game because he drank too much the night before and missed his train.

1B – Ed Delahanty

There are Drinking Men, and then there those, like Delahanty, who get drunk on a train, threaten to disembowel other passengers with a straight razor, get kicked off said train, and walk into Niagara Falls and die. (Yes, Delahanty was predominantly an outfielder, but for the sake of the narrative I’m deploying him at first base.)

2B – Billy Martin

While Martin’s strongest body of drinking work came as a manager, he was quite fond of the sauce in his playing days. The Copa incident, brawls too numerous to chronicle in this space, broken marriages, an affair with a 16-year-old when Martin was, oh, 50 … Hmm, turns out it’s possible to drink too much. “He’s got a good heart,” drinking buddy Whitey Ford once said of Martin, “but I can’t say much for his liver.”

3B – Wade Boggs

Perhaps it’s a tale that skews apocryphal, but … 64 Miller Lites on one cross-country flight? Even if the story’s not precisely true, it’s safe to say that Boggs embodies the Platonic ideal when it comes to choking down domestic swill.

SS – Swede Risberg

While I have a serviceable command of the sprawl of baseball history, I’m not a Bill James or a Rob Neyer or a John Thorn. As such, I had trouble coming up with a hard-drinking shortstop of renown. So the honor falls to Risberg. Why? Well, he spent a goodly portion of his baseball career in indulgent Chicago, he was one of the driving forces behind the Black Sox Scandal, and he owned a bar after his banishment from the game. Sounds like a Drinking Man!

OF – Babe Ruth

Like Ruth, many of us while thwockstoggled (I just made up a synonym for “drunk”!) have eaten too many hot dogs or submitted to some base urge or another. But how many of us have gotten plowed and, perhaps in a syphilitic rage, heaved a piano into a pond?

OF – Mickey Mantle

I’ve heard it said before that Mantle drank a lot.

OF – Hack Wilson

Lore has it that Cubs manager Joe McCarthy, in an attempt to persuade his star slugger to stop marinating himself in drink, dropped a worm into a glass of whiskey. McCarthy and Wilson both looked on as the worm writhed, squirmed, screamed undetectable worm screams and submitted to a fate far worse than the mockingbird’s beak.

“Now what does that prove?” McCarthy supposedly asked him.

“It proves that if you drink whiskey,” Wilson said, “you won’t get worms.”

Snare drum.

SP – Grover Cleveland Alexander

When it comes to tales of Ol’ Pete’s imbibing, truth and myth mix like, um, gin and tonic. What’s known is that Alexander returned from World War I with a severe case of PTSD, and drinking was the only way he could abide it. Whether or not Alexander actually pulled off this or that great moment while crocked is probably lost to history, but when in doubt bet on “crocked.”

RP – Ryne Duren

Duren makes the team for this quote alone: “I never really knew what it was like to pitch a sober inning.”

MGR – Bob Lemon

Managers who drank too much? Talk about wandering into a cornucopia … Lemon loved scotch more than most of us love oxygen or pizza. He was once asked whether he drank after losses. Lemon replied: “I drink after wins, I drink after losses, I drink after rainouts.”

Cheers, readers.

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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This past weekend, I attended Ron Shandler’s First Pitch Arizona event for the first time. While ingesting my weight in hot dogs and adult sodas, the following things occurred to me, and not in consecutive order:

• What a lineup Ron Shandler puts together for this event. This year, the event featured such fantasy baseball luminaries as Lawr Michaels and Todd Zola from Mastersball/ CREATiVESPORTS, Jeff Erickson from RotoWire, Steve Moyer from Baseball Info Solutions, Steve Gardner from USA Today, Jason Grey and Eric Karabell from ESPN, John Sickels from Minor League Ball, Joe Sheehan from JoeSheehan.com, Mike Siano from MLB.com, Lenny Melnick from FantasyPros911, Tim Heaney and Nick Minnix from KFFL, as well as Kimbal Crossley, a professional scout. Fantasy veterans may find it hard not to get a little jelly-legged.

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