Hello everyone. Welcome the Edward Jones Chatting Cage, where we get to know more about some of the biggest people in MLB baseball. I’m your host, Jeremy Brisiel. Today, we’re talking to the new president of the Houston Astros, Reid Ryan. Reid, thanks for joining us.
Thanks, for having me, JB.
Back at the end of the 2011 season, Mike Fast at Baseball Prospectus posted a study that suggested José Molina might be the best at framing pitches. Last night at Tropicana Field, as Molina caught Alex Cobb, his talents were in full effect.
Witness the following two called-strike-threes. While there’s considerable glove movement on Molina’s part in both cases, as Mike Fast’s article points out, it’s much more important for a catcher to keep the rest of his body — especially his head — stable as he receives the pitch. A catcher is going to have to move his glove to receive most pitches, and some of that movement can be disguised when the catcher closes his glove around the ball. Outside of his glove hand, Molina is pretty steady in receiving both of these pitches.
That pitch, according to Brooks Baseball’s PitchF/X, might have actually been a strike, but Travis Hafner certainly didn’t think so.
From Brooks Baseball.
This pitch to Francisco Cervelli, however, passes neither the eyeball test nor the PitchF/X test:
I wandered the forgotten, half-stocked shelves of the back corner of the low-end department store like a ghost, weaving through a graveyard of display model car seats and pressboard cribs. On the walls hung plastic wrapped in plastic, pink and light blue devices, the last bastion of comic sans font. I waded through reams of onesies with messages like “First Round Draft Pick” and “Daddy’s Little Angel”, with disdain my machete. We were still in book, I thought to myself. The nursery was painted, the ultrasounds studied with burgeoning horror, our diaper philosophy established. All was proceeding.
I had long since lost the reason for being there. My wife unseen called out questions from the southeast, but I was far away, back in my own childhood. Growing up in 1980s suburbia, where crime waves consisted of vandalism, my parents would allow me to explore alone the wide, beige-tiled aisles of the local general store, and I would stare at all that colorful plastic and the potential that was vacuum sealed within. I coveted it all: wind-up pocket toys, board games, sports equipment. With my little senses I drank in the untapped fun.
I’ve failed, in my own little liberal arts degree way, to live up to the economic status of my hardworking parents. I’ve long grown accustomed to my own poverty, and since my wife volunteered herself into our collective cause, she’s accepted her own lead crown. But looking at all this stuff – and there is no better word for it – adorning the shelves, beaming with its own uselessness, I felt regret. I probably won’t be able to waste money on dumb things for my daughter the way my parents did for me, thanks to life choices squandered fifteen years hence.
It was under this cloud that I sulked aimlessly, until I stumbled across this:
Over the off-season, the Milwaukee Brewers asked fans to submit uniform designs. The contest winner would have her/his design made into actual uniforms, which the Brewers would then wear in a couple of spring exhibition games. NotGraphs demigod Dayn Perry covered the winning selection in an article at CBS’s Eye On Baseball; sadly, Dayn’s own “unique” entry was not selected as the winner.
The winning entry, by Ben of Richfield, MN
The Barrel Man head on the cap is awesome, even if the rest of the uniform is pretty bland. I do like the single stripe on the sleeve — a simple but classy touch. And, after slogging through all of the entries, I feel confident in saying that the winning entry was easily one of the best complete designs.
Most of the other entries were slight variations on Brewers uniforms past and present, and aren’t worth parsing here. But as I scrolled through the entries, I noticed some interesting themes emerge.
For instance, a number of erstwhile designers really wanted to incorporate depictions of beer into their uniforms:
Tri-dong: not appealing.
Below are two embiggenable images. One is a picture of Harmon Killebrew. The other is a picture of Harmon Killebrew that I totally messed with. Let’s see who can point out the errors first!
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Last night, I watched one of the worst baseball films I have ever seen.
If you have not yet seen Trouble with the Curve, I hope you will spare yourself the full-on shitsperience of it, instead consuming the following abridged version, complete with screencaps!
TROUBLE WITH THE CURVE
Clint Eastwood plays an old baseball scout in the Braves organization who yells at his pee.
Blu-Ray: The only way to watch a man with an enlarged prostate urinate.
Part II
Yesterday, I took you on a very boring journey through my opening of 1700 baseball cards. It’s true, you can look it up.
Today, I present the remainder of my findings. Enjoy, or whatever.
Part I
At the risk of losing a considerable amount of ‘Net cred, I feel as if I need to make a confession; I haven’t bought a baseball card in about 20 years. There are lots of reasons for this, the main reason being that my friends stopped doing it first. As an adolescent who strove to be accepted, I had no interest in doing anything which my group of friends had no interest. I considered this to be, at the time, a form of self-betterment. I wanted nothing more than to hang on to the small group of friends I had, and therefor the “childish” activity of opening, sorting, and saving baseball cards was done away with.
I am now older and wiser. I understand that having hobbies and interests that are my own within my group of peers is acceptable and healthy. I embrace it. I also am on a different kick of self-improvement, related directly to baseball. As a young baseball fan, I was really only interested in the best players. I did not pay heed to the men I deemed unworthy of my attention. Superstars were it for me. This has led to a considerable knowledge gap when it comes to players of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Too many players have slipped through the cracks – players that weren’t very good or perhaps were good, but I failed to recognize their contributions since I had yet to fully understand player value.
It was a different time, you understand. 1957, or ’58…
It was 1957. The Braves had just returned home to Milwaukee after besting the New York Yankees in the World Series. A crowd of 750,000 people — a number greater than the entire population of Milwaukee proper even at its peak in the early 1960s — met their hometown nine (and then some) in the streets to celebrate.
The Milwaukee Sentinel of the day, its front page bestamped with a large, red, racist image of a Native American…
…relished the fact that the team defeated was the Yankees, depicting them as, among other things, “bushed.”
It was a different time, you understand.
Sometimes a gentleman prefers a leisurely lunch — one rich in aperitif and Algonquin Round Table-grade conversation. At other times, lunch is an act of war, in which food and surroundings are but blood enemies to be vanquished, raped and slaughtered. So it was with Eric Young Jr. and his recent trip to the finest in Oriental-themed Occidental steakhouses …
As you are no doubt aware, Eric Young Jr. is not a man of idle threats and vacant promises. When Eric Young Jr. declares that a restaurant shall be crushed, a restaurant shall indeed be crushed …
Eric Young Jr. will lunch the shit out of this shit.
