Ranking the top ten Kevin Costner baseball films of all time.

1. Bull Durham (1988)

All-time classic captures the humor and magic of baseball like no other. Costner is a veteran minor-league catcher who finds himself in a love triangle with the loose-cannon pitcher he’s been called down to mentor and the team groupie who’s set her sights on conquering them both.

2. Field of Dreams (1989)

Unabashedly sentimental but irresistibly endearing, this adaptation of Kinsella’s novel channels Frank Capra and unleashes the full range of Costner’s charm, while giving Shoeless Joe Jackson the immortality he deserves.

3. For Love of the Game (1999)

Uneven, hokey date movie features Costner as aging pitcher at a crossroads, his mind wandering as he hurls a perfect game.

4. The Upside of Anger (2005)

One of Costner’s finest performances, as a retired baseball player and alcoholic who gets involved with his single-mom neighbor.

5. The Postman (1997)

This movie, which no one ever saw or will admit to seeing, may or may not have starred Costner as slumping slugger and notorious bad-boy Jerry “Postman” Patton, who learns a few life lessons during a reluctant stint in Japan.

6. A League of Their Own (1992)

Family favorite features Costner in the role he was born to play, as washed-up alcoholic seeking unlikely redemption at the helm of an all-female baseball team.

7. Dead Pull (1991)

Aging star pitcher and affable alcoholic Bruce “Cheddar” Myers (Costner) gets one more shot at glory — only to find himself the target of a twisted murder plot. Legendary climax features Myers being run over by a train en route to his first World Series start, only to make an unexpected entrance, lead his team to victory, foil the conspirators in the opposing dugout, and win back the heart of his long-time sweetheart (a lonely and streetwise Annette Bening).

8. Robin Yount: Prince of Brewers (2001)

Underrated biopic follows “The Kid” from teenage phenom to reflective coach. Co-starring Dermot Mulroney as Paul Molitor.

9. Shagging Flies (1979)

Forgettable teen romp features Costner in his acting debut, portraying a randy fraternity brother who parlays his college baseball skills into a string of sexual escapades.

10. Bull Tijuana (1996)

An ill-advised attempt to recapture the Bull Durham magic, this dud finds a washed-up Crash Davis in the Mexican League, where he mentors the unpredictable “El Nuque” La Luz (Luis Guzman) while grappling with an irascible manager (Cheech Marin) and a seductive groupie (Salma Hayek).

Robert “Bob” Gibson is walking toward you.

His fastball has been described as “blazing,” which doesn’t do it justice, but that doesn’t much matter now — Bob Gibson doesn’t seem like he will be using his fastball. His slider would make you buckle into a heap of flesh, make you faint — which makes you wish he would throw it — you don’t want to be conscious when Bob Gibson gets to you — but that isn’t happening either. Bob Gibson is walking toward you.

Where is your spine, you ask yourself. It seems to have fled — and you’d be wise to follow it if you were capable of movement. Or, your spine has changed into something other than bone — a windsock, perhaps. Your spine has become a windsock because Bob Gibson is walking towards you.

Bob Gibson saw such a windsock once when he was in high school. It wiggled lazily in the breeze and then tried to lay down a bunt on him. You know what Bob Gibson did to that windsock then? He ate it. Bob Gibson ate that windsock, and now he is going to eat your windsock spine after he rips it from your rice-paper flesh. Yes, as Bob Gibson walks toward you, it appears he has an appetite for a windsock. Bob Gibson has been craving windsock since he ate that windsock back in high school.

Bob Gibson is walking toward you. Or, you assume he is still walking toward you. All you can see now is stars, so you don’t really know for sure. All you can hear is something like the rhythmic thump of shovelfuls of soil hitting a casket top. Are you in the casket? Are you a blind bystander at your own funeral?

You are a speck of dung nestled in the turf, and Bob Gibson has walked right over you.

To the extent that it’s responsible both for an aphid that nearly destroyed France’s entire wine industry once and also the whole Fast and Furious media franchise, it’s probably fair to say that not every export produced on US soil is full exclusively of virtue.

One entirely unassailable American invention, however, is the baseball cap — consummate examples of which important garment the author has considered in some depth at different points over the past couple months.

What follows is another installment in that series — and, specifically, of five such ballcaps as are currently available for purchase by way of internet auction house eBay.com.

Atlanta Black Crackers Hat (Link)
Style: Snapback
Time Left: 2 days, 3 hours
Cost: US $9.99 (Starting Bid) / US $14.99 (Buy It Now)

Former NBA point guard Jason Williams was known by the sobriquet White Chocolate on account of how, despite his pigmentation, he played a brand of basketball much more commonly found (according to former Sacramento Kings media coordinator Stephanie Shepard) on the playgrounds of Chicago. Black Cracker, one notes, is somehow both the same as and also the opposite of White Chocolate.

Read the rest of this entry »

From Rotoworld:

Number of strikeouts Nolasco has had in previous starts:

3/31: -1

4/6: The number of moons orbiting the Earth, minus 3

4/12: Prince Fielder’s batting average minus Prince Fielder’s listed weight

4/18: Prince Fielder’s batting average minus Prince Fielder’s actual weight

4/24: Derek Jeter’s OPS+ minus 100

5/2: The number of fans the Braves are hoping to attract to their new ballpark who actually live in the city of Atlanta

(more negative numbers are welcome in the comments)

Anyone who has made a priority of acquainting him- or herself with the top jams of American cinema will recognize the following as a brief excerpt from the scene in Woody Allen’s 1975 film Love and Death in which Allen’s character Boris attempts to seduce the very ample Countess Alexandrovna at a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve watched the MLB Network for more than 12 consecutive minutes, you’ve seen the commercial for the revolutionary Speed Hitter. Now, inspired by the ad-driven success of said Speed Hitter, another enterprising go-getter has tapped the entrepreneurial spirit that makes America what it is – i.e., not Antarctica, which ranks first in per capita frostbite but dead last in entrepreneurship – by inventing an inventive invention that will “wipe out” – ha! – the competition.

{Opening scene of commercial: Beset with exasperation, a young man is sitting on an American Standard flush toilet. His pants, not to mention his boxers, are around his ankles. On closer inspection, we see that he is reading a comprehensive treatise, complete with graphs and illustrations, on the scourge of constipation.}

Read the rest of this entry »

I was in the mood to do a fairly big portrait of a baseball player’s face, where I would split the face into nine parts and do each part separately and assemble them at the end, like a very easy jigsaw puzzle.

So I opened a Web site that had all the MLB teams listed on it, closed my eyes and moved my cursor around.

I opened my eyes and, well, it wasn’t resting on top of a team name, but the closest team name was the Houston Astros.

I opened their roster page and did the same. I opened my eyes again and the cursor was resting just to the left of José Altuve’s name.

I umm-ed and aah-ed about whether to do him, just because it’s a bit lame to do a big portrait of a small-ish player. Dumb boring joke stuff.

But, I had to stick with my choice, so here it is. And by “here,” I mean “above these words.”

Click = más grande.

5/6: Has MRI on elbow.
5/7: Scheduled to see Dr. Andrews.
5/8: Scheduled to see Julie Andrews.
5/9: Cast in upcoming Sound of Music Live 2: The All-Stars of Sport Climb Every Mountain
5/10: Rehearsals for Sound of Music Live 2 begin.
5/11: Wieters suffers slight case of laryngitis.
5/12: Wieters scheduled to see throat doctor. Doctor prescribes rest and hot liquids.
5/13: Wieters drinks tea, burns tongue. Sound of Music Live 2 places him on 3-day DL.
5/14: While recovering from tongue burn, Wieters reaches for television remote control, strains shoulder.
5/15: Strained shoulder is resolved.
5/16: Tongue burn is resolved.
5/17: Laryngitis is resolved.
5/18: Wieters resumes rehearsals for Sound of Music Live 2.
5/19: Wieters stumbles over new words to My Favorite Things, reprinted here:

Manny Machado and Nicky Markakis
Signing Ubaldo looks like a mistake. Is
Jonathan Schoop better than he appears
Nelson Cruz trying to earn the fans’ cheers

Zach Britton’s finding a home in the bullpen
With O’Day and Hunter it’s kind of a full pen
Jones, Hardy, Davis have all started slow
Off to see Andrews, Matt Wieters did go

5/20: Wieters trips over a girl who is sixteen, going on seventeen. Hurts his elbow.
5/21: Sent for MRI.
5/22: Repeat visit to Dr. Andrews, who reminds him he never followed up after the first visit.
5/23: Wieters has Tommy John Surgery.
Next April: Wieters rejoins cast of Sound of Music Live 2.

It has come to my attention, dear NotGraphs readers, that some policies have been put in place over at Major League Baseball. Specifically, it seems as if MLB has strong-armed Apple, Inc. into removing certain baseball-team-centric podcasts from the iTunes store. I have provided a link in the previous sentence to prove that this is not a farce. It is a real thing, and it frankly upsets me. It seems silly to list all of the reasons, since the intrepid reader can almost certainly list most of them. Suffice it to say that it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from any angle I’m privy to, but perhaps some further explanation from the Lords of Media will provide insight.

In the meantime, I’m here today not as a middling baseball writer but as an IT Professional. I’m here to help you continue listening to your favorite podcasts that were removed from the iTunes store.

1. Manually Add Them in iTunes

Just because iTunes removed some shows from the store, they are not gone forever. Any podcasts publishes updates via RSS. This is the address that iTunes and others look at to see if a new podcast has been posted. Every podcast has one. The RSS Feed for Stealing Home (which is still in the iTunes store as of this writing) is http://www.hardballtimes.com/stealing-home/feed/. Others may be listed through services like Feed Burner or Libsyn. In any case, you can use that address to manually add the show back into your iTunes library. The directions for doing so are laid out nicely here.

2. Use a Podcatching App

If you are in the enviable position of not needing to use iTunes, now would be a good time to switch to a different application to grab all your podcasts. These applications, called Podcatchers by the most pretentious, basically do the same thing that iTunes does but without the handcuff of the iTunes ecosystem.

If you use iTunes to sync podcasts to your iPhone, I suggest switching to Downcast. They have apps for both iOS and Mac OS, and they come at a very reasonable price. Downcast is very customizable regarding things like episode retention and auto-downloading, and can be synced across devices using iCloud. You can use Downcast to beam episodes to a Google Chromecast as well, if you have bangin’ speakers attached to your AV setup. You can add podcasts via manual feed input or a very robust search function.

Android users can look at Doggcatcher for all of their podcasting needs. Doggcatcher comes with many of the same features of Downcast — easy search, customizable feeds, Chromecast support — and is also very reasonably priced. It was the first app I downloaded when I got a new Android phone.

This MLB/iTunes crackdown is a little scary and a little disheartening, but with a little extra effort, you can still get your favorite podcasts into your ear holes at your convenience. The real problem for podcast creators is getting new listeners through channels besides iTunes, but that is an even more alienating post that I will have to save for later.

To All:

It’s been a while since we’ve all relaxed a little and cut loose, so now that the quarterly reports are done, it’s time for a little office party. So mark your calendars for Friday, May 9, from 11:30 to 12:45, in the conference room. We have to get everything out of there by 1:00, however, because Cameron’s got a meeting in there.

We wanted this party to be a little different, so this year we have a theme: TOPPS!

We’re going to rip open new packs, share all our favorite old cards, and make fun of Oh-Pee-Chee. Sounds like an alcohol-free blast!

But wait! Every party needs three things: Chips, DIPS, and decorations. So let’s see what we’ve got in the NotGraphs supply closet:

Check

Check

Read the rest of this entry »