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Some say the Red Sox had the biggest offseason in baseball. I say: Maybe. If you define “baseball” as “the Major Leagues” and “biggest offseason” as “biggest offseason on-field personnel improvement.” Loose those artificial constraints, however, and what flaps forth? but the majestic snow white ibis that has been the ballpark concessions-related offseason of the AA Akron Aeros.

What happened is that, at some point this December, the Aeros announced a new food option for 2011 home games: the “Three Dog Night.” This is a kielbasa with a bratwurst inside it. And there’s also a hot dog inside the bratwurst. Picture, courtesy of Ben’s Biz Blog:

In-progress and complete.

The Three Dog Night got press attention. In response the Aeros swore to keep debuting crazy foods every month until Opening Day.

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Last week, I played the part of Bill James’ scrivener, rendering into electronic print five haphazardly chosen, but still entirely notable, profiles from the 1993 edition of his Player Ratings Book.

In what follows, I do the same thing for the 1994 edition.

Regard, American literature:

Player: Steve Balboni, Texas
Notable Thing: Things plural, actually. The first is — if I’m reading this correctly — is that Jackie Moore’s real father is Steve Balboni. So that’s one thing. The second is this comment from James: “[I]sn’t an awful first baseman, but strikes out like a Deer and runs like a file cabinet.” That he (i.e. James) resisted appending the words “wocka wocka” to that statement represents an exercise in restraint.

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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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Commemorate the occasion.

Palash Ghosh of the International Business Times has a question for the world: Why does everyone wear baseball caps?

This seems like kind of a low-stakes query. I mean, hats are pretty harmless. Everyone might just stop wearing baseball caps tomorrow! That would solve the problem, whatever the problem is. Right?

“What began as a harmless and humble exercise in showing support for one’s favorite local baseball club has mushroomed into something so gargantuan and irreversible [emphasis added] that I fear baseball caps will never vanish from the sartorial landscape.”

Whoah.

While Mr. Ghosh’s tone is a little grumpier* than I can defend, I do sympathize with his perplexity. I wear baseball caps when I need protection from the sun. But lots of people (ok, dudes) wear caps EVERYWHERE. Like sit-down restaurant, wedding reception, college seminar everywhere.

*Maybe ironically?

In fact, The Main Reason I Like Baseball is that when I go to baseball games, everyone has a good reason to be wearing a baseball cap, so I don’t get all apoplectic over people inappropriately wearing baseball caps. Which happens without exception everywhere else I go.

But back to Mr. Ghosh, who’s the really crochety one — his article speculates a little on why there’s this excess of caps. It seems multinational corporate marketing machines and the inexorable disintegration of modern society are somehow implicated. In conclusion: This baseball cap thing is gargantuan. And irreversible.

A man who demands the spotlight.

Inexplicably, the San Francisco Giants have agreed to be the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality series that will air on Showtime next year. I feel bad for Giants fans. (Haven’t been able to say that for a few months!)

Life as a Major League Baseball team is pretty simple. The goal is to win the World Series. You face many challenges along the way, including keeping your clubhouse focused and productive. This is no small task — baseball players are famously delicate, like souffles or those flowers that start rotting if they’re two degrees warmer than they’re supposed to be.

Turning your season into a reality series seems like a distraction with no baseball benefit. Matt Cain seems to hope it’ll make him more famous:

“I think it will be great publicity for the team and the guys on the team… I think it could be a really good thing for San Francisco. Everybody knows the West Coast doesn’t get as much publicity as East Coast teams.”

West Coast teams obviously get less coverage nationally. For West Coast players, that likely means fewer endorsement offers and less leverage in free agency. So, with this show deal, the players get some fame, and the team and the players presumably get money. Giants fans get not much.

Showtime channel-receiving American households are about to learn a lot more about the Giants. We’ll see if they make San Francisco proud.

I’m sure it comes as little surprise that I am a fan of Star Trek. Although my favorite series of the bunch is “The Next Generation,” one of my favorite moments comes from the “Deep Space Nine” series. Commander Sisko, the first-in-command at the space station Deep Space Nine, was a big baseball fan despite the fact that the sport had largely disappeared between the mid-21st and 24th centuries. In one episode, Sisko leads a band of ragtag Starfleet officers in a baseball game (on the Holodeck, naturally) against a team of hard, logical Vulcans, and they somehow will themselves to a (moral and not entirely by the rules of baseball) victory. In other episodes, legends of the game are mentioned: Tris Speaker, Ted Williams, and Buck Bokai.

Here’s a brief summary of what is commonly known of Buck Bokai’s career.

– Made his pro debut in 2019 with the Crenshaw Monarchs of the Planetary Baseball League.
– Traded to the Gotham City Bats in 2020 in a 12 player deal.
– Plays for Tanis (an Earth city, apparently) in 2022.
– Plays for Seibu in 2023 and 2024.
– In 2025, Bokai joins the team he remains with for the final 17 seasons of his career, the London Kings.
– Breaks Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak record in 2026.
– Loses World Series to the New York Yankees in 2032 .
– Hits game-winning home run in final World Series in 2042.
– Played second and third base and switch-hit, and was a prolific power hitter in his early career, hitting 20 home runs from the right side alone in each of his first three seasons.

Bokai must’ve been a first ballot Hall of Famer, but I think it’s possible that such BBWAE (Baseball Writers Association of Earth) curmudgeons as Dave Cameron and Carson Cistulli may have left him off of their ballots in their jaded old age.

Information from Memory Alpha, a Star Trek wiki

Saul Steinberg’s classic New Yorker cover.

Yesterday ESPN announced 11 games in their 2011 “Sunday Night Baseball” schedule, including all games through May. You can check the schedule out on Fanhouse.

Mariners fans have noticed that the Mariners aren’t on this list. Likewise frustrated are Angels fans and the entire AL Central.

On the other hand, the Phillies (two games in May), Yankees (two games against the Red Sox, plus one against the Rangers), Mets (two games), and Red Sox (two tilts with the Yankees, plus two more games) are pretty well represented.

Hang on… New York, Philadelphia, Boston… two are former US capitals… also, two are kinds of sushi rolls… also, they’re the three MLB cities geographically closest to Bristol, Connecticut, where ESPN is headquartered… also, Boston’s Secretary of State was named Philadelphia, and Philadelphia’s Secretary of State was named Boston… WAIT. This might sound crazy, but: could ESPN have an East Coast bias??!?

Ok, so ESPN favors certain East Coast teams. But I doubt it’s an East Coast bias so much as a money bias. Here’s another way of thinking about it: in my opinion, Sunday Night Baseball’s main value add is allowing people who moved away from where they grew up to see their hometown teams. From this (limited) perspective, should Sunday Night Baseball maybe focus on the cities that generate the most domestic emigrant fans? And who would ever move away from San Diego or Chicago? Those are great cities!

Maybe we could develop some kind of inverse Sunday Night Baseball/quality of life index. Just something to comfort the people who are hurt that ESPN is ignoring them. I worry about those people.

(Get it, pitchman?)

Because when I want to advertise a beauty project, I call Randy Johnson!

This advertisement just adds to the legacy created by a previous Just for Men ad, starring Emmitt Smith, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, and Keith Hernandez (all of whom appear in the video above). These two videos truly stand alone when it comes to beard rhymes.

“Your beard is weird.”

“Your stubble’s in trouble.”

“Your ‘stache is trash.”

Sheer poetry. And hey, make sure you watch the petunias on the way out.

This specific pile of money could be yours.

Remember how last year the company that made the baseball video game “MLB 2K10” gave $1,000,000 to the first guy to pitch a perfecto in the game? And how this generated publicity?

Well I guess it generated >=$1M worth of publicity, because 2K Sports is running basically the same promotion for this year’s “MLB 2K11.”

I might just feel this way because I’m the restless, maverick, pioneer-vagabond-trailblazer type, but wouldn’t it be cooler if the $1M accomplishment were switched up for 2011?

There must be hundreds of tough goals besides “perfect game” that could decide which unhealthily dedicated gamer gets a huge nonsensical windfall. For example, 2K Sports could give $1M to the first person to:

• Hit an inside-the-park home run with Pablo Sandoval
• Win the NL East in season mode using not-the-Phillies
• Pitch a perfect game with virtual Jim Joyce as part of the umpiring crew (snap!)
• Prevent Adrian Gonzalez from doubling off the virtual Green Monster for a whole game (good freahkin’ luck! Go Sox!)

Get your mind out of the gutter: not that kind of peek.

Former Baseball Prospecticator Joe Sheehan struck out on his own in late 2009, and in early 2010, he started a email newsletter. What was newsworthy about that decision was that he asked $20 per year from his subscribers at a time when so much great baseball writing on the internet was free. it all stemmed from a twitter conversation he had in response to NBC killing Law & Order and yet keeping The Marriage Ref, with this as the highlight of his opening statement:

Content aggregators are killing content creators, but individuals will recognize and support quality if given that option.

After discussing how lowered barriers to entry – brought on by the internet and anyone’s ability to start a website – has allowed the field to be muddied persay, he adds another important quote:

There are collectives whose business model is built on generating traffic while not paying, or paying an absurdly small amount, for content. They can do this for two reasons: the sheer number of people who want to write for a living, and the conviction that the public won’t be able to tell the difference between what they’re getting and what they could be getting.

Well, there’s a leap there on the second point. It could just be mostly the first point – that there are many quality writers that want to enter the fray, and that the quality is kept fairly high by the sheer number of willing part-timers. Look around at excellent websites like Baseball Analysts and Beyond the Boxscore, and you see great work done for little or no money.

This is not to say I begrudge him his work. Sheehan is an excellent writer. Today he gives us a free sneak peek of the upcoming year of his newsletter, which allows him to write and react as he likes to the news of the moment. In a discussion of steroids, he drops a nice gem that reminds us that good writing is worth paying for:

These are the players we know used. They pissed in a cup and the bell went off. These players are data, and the data is 6’0″, 185 with an 88-mph fastball trying to get to 90. It’s 5’11”, 190 wishing it was six foot tall. It’s not Popeye, it’s Olive Oyl. That doesn’t fit the narrative, so no one writes about it, but this is the face of the needle.