Archive for Uncategorized

The beacon that draws us north.

It’s the beginning of March, and that means the players report to warmer locales while the nerds head north. It all makes sense when you look at the lineup that MIT Sloan Business School puts together for their annual Sports Analytics Conference.

This year, FanGraphs will be in full force at the event, as Daves Cameron and Appelman will be attending, and your intrepid NotG reporter will be covering the event’s nerd-angles and nerd-crevices. If you doubt the credentials of the event, just check this list. The invited speakers and panelists this year include:

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One way or another.

Borrowing from an excellent thinkpiece by Dave Gershman over at Beyond the Boxscore, I thought it might be fun to imagine a more European approach to the Major League Baseball. In the Premiership, and various other soccer leagues around the world, the bottom teams are relegated to the minor leagues, while the best minor leagues teams ascend to the majors. Gives the bottom of the ‘table,’ or standings, a little juice at the end of the season.

Of course, that would create all sorts of problems with baseball, where the minor league teams are all assigned to major league teams. That sort of relationship would be hard to navigate. For example, Gershman starts by wondering if the Pirates deserve Anthony Rendon – and if they deserve to be in the major leagues at all by extension. But if the Pirates were relegated, they would have been replaced by a minor league team associated with the Royals. Then we’d we be stuck with twice the amount of Royals-based teams in the major leagues – however you feel about the Royals, you probably don’t want that.

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It’s back.

Public service announcement: as of yesterday morning, the “MLB.com At Bat 11” app can be had at an app store near you. It costs $14.99, but you “pay” electronically via your computer, so it’s kind of free.

SUPPORTED DEVICES: iPhone/-Pad/-Pod Touch, Android, Blackberry.

FUNCTIONALITY: Pitch-by-pitch game data, stats, standings, schedules, and news. Radio broadcasts of many spring training games. Video of certain spring training games, but only on Apple devices.

WHAT IT DOES IF YOU ALSO BUY A $99 MLB.TV PACKAGE: Lets you watch non-blacked out MLB games on your phone, that’s what. But notable asterisk, courtesy of the Androinica blog: MLB has not yet said which Android devices will support the video streaming, and some may not, so Android users may want to hold off on the whole $115 investment until that info is out. Or just buy an iPhone already. Jk!

MLB.com At Bat 11 is, after one day, the eighth best-selling paid app in the iTunes App Store, although it’s not clear what the timeframe for those rankings is. Recall that last year, MLB At Bat 10 ended up as the highest-grossing iOS app of the year.

I like to imagine each of these e-purchases as a single crocus, poking up through the just-thawed earth and bravely baring its velvety petals to the sun. Spring is nearly here.

I… I don’t even know… which is which? My whole world is turned upside down!

In case you haven’t watched SportsCenter anytime since last March, the guy on the left is Jimmer Fredette, and he is very good at college basketball. Fredette, a 6’2″ shooting guard from New York, has pushed Brigham Young University’s basketball team into national relevance thanks mostly to his pinpoint shooting from anywhere on the court. And, like Friedman, Fredette comes from a Jewish family.

That’s about where the similarities between Fredette and Andrew Friedman, pictured on the right, end. Friedman has, like Fredette, shown himself to be excellent at his craft, building a contender out of spare parts in one of the smallest and least lucrative markets in the league. However, Friedman certainly can’t play basketball, at least if Joe Maddon is telling the truth. Via Jayson Stark (insider subscription needed for full article):

“I watched Andrew deke [Rays assistant minor league director] Chaim Bloom,” Maddon reported. “He got Chaimer in the air. Went around him. Free layup. And missed everything. No rim. No nothing. Air ball. Over everything. That’s what I saw. I don’t think it was too windy, either. Calm winds. Great fake. Clear path. No iron.”

Ouch. Jimmer is likely to get drafted in the first round of next year’s NBA Draft. Friedman might be lucky not to be the last pick in the Rays’ front office basketball games going forward.

Besides all the money and fame and bottles of Cristal and hookers and first-class transport and hookers and celebrity luncheons and hookers — besides those things, the best part about running a blog is devising and then utilizing hilarious and/or whimsical tags.

Below is a list of all the tags here at NotGraphs. And also a picture of the bottle of Cristal from which I’m currently drinking. And also a picture of Mark Fidrych — because, duh, Mark Fidrych.

Actual Thing
Apropos of Nothing
Audio and/or Visual
Big Idea
Call to Action
Dick Allen Research Department
Event
Everything’s Amazing
Extry Extry
Feast Days
Food Metaphors
Gaming
Highly Reputable and Totally Real Think Tank
Investigative Reporting Investigation Team
Item
Jersey Edit
Mad Lib
Memorabilia
Naming Names
News About News
Now Playing
Obvious Conspiracy
Old News
Open Letter
Poem
Readings
Received
Self-Help
Shameless Promotion
Site News
True Facts
Uncategorized
Unreliable Source
Website Review
Wisdom

The Diamondbacks will wear these ancient uniforms for three days next season.

Via MLB.com:

The Arizona Diamondbacks will turn back the clock Sept. 9-11 when they officially celebrate the 10th anniversary of the club’s World Series championship with the “2001 World Championship Reunion Weekend.”

The weekend will begin with the D-backs wearing throwback jerseys for the Sept. 9 game against the Padres. The club will wear the traditional home white top with purple pinstripes and the “A” logo. That was one of the uniform tops the club wore from 1998 through 2006, when its color scheme was purple, turquoise, copper and black. In 2007, the team switched to its current color scheme of sedona red, sonoran sand and black.

Seeing this bit of news made me think of two things.

First off, we never really acknowledge just how insane it is that the Diamondbacks won a World Series in their fourth year of existence. My Brewers took 13 seasons just to reach a World Series and haven’t been back since. The Rangers just made their first World Series in their 51st season of existence (including their time as the second Washington Senators). It took the Arizona Diamondbacks all of three seasons from their very first game to bring home the Commissioner’s Trophy, an accomplishment we may never see again in professional sports.

On a second note, how bad were those first Diamondbacks jerseys? Green pinstripes with purple undershirts? The fact that the Diamondbacks have to use throwbacks for those jerseys – jerseys a youngster like myself can actually remember seeing a team play in on TV – really tells us how bad they were. The Diamondbacks only used them for nine seasons before realizing a redesign was completely and totally necessary. Now, I think the Diamondbacks have one of the better color/uniform combinations in the game. Back then? It was an interesting attempt at reproducing the look of the Diamondback, but in the end, these uniforms deserved their early retirement.

Owing to how she’s so humble and deferential a mademoiselle, it’s likely that NotGraphs’ own Bethany Heck would feel uncomfortable sharing with the wide readership the latest development in her march towards baseballing ephemera superstardom. Luckily, the present author possesses no such compunction.

The thing to know is this: Ms. Heck has made available, via a website called Kickstarter, the very same scorebooks that she featured in these pages earlier in the month.

If you’re not familiar with it, Kickstarter is the most heartwarming iteration of capitalism possible. A Kickstarter project begins when a duly motivated person (in this case, Ms. Heck) submits a creative project. Said person also establishes a funding goal and deadline. Then people out there, in the cyberspace, make backing pledges in exchange for the promise of dollar-appropriate good in return. If the the funding goal is met,

I’ve made it sound impossibly complicated, I’m sure, but it’s actually simple: you give-a-the money, you maybe get-a-the thing.

Famous for writing standing up, but he could do it all. Photo: Cornell.

In 1962, Vladimir Nabokov — author of Lolita — published a book called Pale Fire, which presents a long poem written by a fictional author, with another fictional character chatting to you about the poem along the way, and it’s all riddled with complicated allusions and things. Since my descriptions so often fall short, I will just report that it is considered a masterpiece.

What’s more, there’s a baseball angle! The poem within Pale Fire references a newspaper headline about a Red Sox-Yankees game, presumably a game from before 1962, since that’s when Pale Fire was published. But significant questions remain, namely: Was that Red Sox-Yankees game ever played in real life? And did Tim McCarver ruin it for everyone?

If I’ve piqued your interest,* I can’t take credit for the payoff. Brian Cronin over at the L.A. Times’ “Fabulous Forum” blog did not-inconsiderable legwork and posted a very enjoyable writeup exploring whether the game referenced by Nabokov was a real game. If you just want the answer, one Michael Donohue also discussed this question back in 2004, albeit succinctly.

And just on the off chance that any of our NotGraphs readers are also the kind of people who like to waste their time reading about sports on the Internet, I should point out Brian Cronin’s “Legends Revealed” website, which has lots of sports-myth-debunkery content, and his book, which leaves no comic book legend un-revealed.

* If I haven’t piqued your interest: Come on! This is like literary/baseball-historical Indiana Jones! It’s like if Harrison Ford got cast in Field of Dreams, but Dan Brown did a rewrite on the screenplay, and Umberto Eco was his writing partner. And Christopher Nolan directed it. And Harrison Ford’s wife in the movie was Salma Hayek. Interested yet? Need I point out that in 1989, when Field of Dreams was released, Salma Hayek was 23? Changed your answer?

Click to embiggen

This screencap was taken a full two nights ago.. Now, of course, only mere minutes remain until Albert Pujols’s self-made contract deadline. Will Albert stay in St. Louis? Will he bolt for Chicago? Los Angeles? Maybe… no… not New York?!

The clock is ticking. Mang.

Today, we raise our cups (and/or licorice candies) and commemorate solemnly three lives.

Hear our prayers, oh unnamed and unnameable!

Lenny Dykstra!
You don’t appear to’ve figured out
the finer points of civilian life,
have, in fact, been dispossessed
of your business ventures, all known assets,
and, it would seem, most of your dignity.
But you were also the sort of person
whom people felt compelled to address as “Nails”
and memorably announced that you would “stick it”
to great left-hander Steve Carlton.
You have taught us unknown lessons!

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