Today, Mat Kovach presented some fantastic research over at the Hardball Times: using Retrosheet data. he found just how every single game in the Retrosheet database ended. Check out the link for the whole results, but there were a few shockers in the data set.

Kovach highlights perhaps the most ridiculous: a catcher’s interference play which ended the Reds-Dodgers tilt on August 1st, 1971, in which Johnny Bench stepped in front of the plate to attempt to tag a stealing Manny Mota, interfering with the hitter.

Other interesting ones: 22 walk-off stolen bases (and one game ending for the losing team on a stolen base), 13 walk-off balks, 427 walk-off walks, 50 walk-off hit-by-pitches, and 64 game-ending pickoffs (including 16 which ended up winning it for the batting team!).

Pretty wild stuff. Make sure you read through the comments section, as the numbers in the original article include some games that were called due to rain, and the comments section cleans some of that out.

The following two daguerreotypes provide, I should like to think, a sherpa’s load of whimsy while — conveniently enough for the purposes of this series of World Wide Web Site Internet pages — both being at least somewhat about baseball. Please enjoy Ozzie Guillen and his better half quaffing fermented grapes and taking in views of a fetching hillscape!

Now please enjoy Yogi Berra in an Astros uniform!

Now please enjoy having enjoyed these!

In case you missed it, reader, you’ll be pleased to discover that, on this past Friday’s edition of Pardon the Interruption, America’s favorite orange-faced sportswriter Tony Kornheiser made reference to our fair site — and, specifically, to a post by our man Dave Cameron — during a segment on uber-prospect Bryce Harper.

Though modesty prevents us from sharing the entire segment, I can inform you that co-host Michael Wilbon’s reaction would best be described as “totally incredulous.”

As for Tony Reali, his reaction may or may not become the lyrics to The Official Baseball-Nerd Rally Song.

Regard:

Behold! My latest, most impressive findings!

Teams with dumb names (such as the Mets and Orioles) typically cannot hit as well as teams with average names (such as the Dodgers and Astros), while teams with superior names (such as the Pirates and Tigers) hit as poorly as their ill-named counterparts! These findings were not only significant at the 99% level, but they also had an R-squared near 0.224 — meaning a full 22% of a team’s offense come from the pride they take in their name!

It is a well known axiom that players hit precisely how they feel, so when you go out, day after day, wearing the emblem of a cute little bird, it is very difficult to muster the wherewithal to swing a club at a ball. Using Weighted On-Base Average (wOBA) and Name Awesomeness Plus (NA+, a completely arbitrary stat I invented for the purpose of this study), we can see how having a name that’s too awesome can be just as detrimental to performance!

We can only assume that if a team has an exceedingly awesome name, such as the Cubs, Pirates, or Braves, the players have less incentive to play hard. They already feel good about themselves, so they do not need to prove themselves any further.

For the full data set, see below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Note: this now features a poll at the bottom. Rate the Braves’ broadcast team yourself.

Chip Caray is the handsomest of the Carays.

On Friday, I submitted for the readership’s consideration, some basic criteria by which one might assess the quality of an MLB broadcast. In what follows, I attempt — perhaps with less modesty than I ought — to apply that criteria to the Atlanta Braves’ television broadcast.

Over the past week, I watched (most of) a pair of Braves games on Atlanta’s SportSouth — first, Julio Teheran’s debut at Philadelphia on May 7th, and then Friday night’s contest against those same Phillies, but this time at Turner Field.

The broadcast team is composed of play-by-play man Chip Caray and color commentator Joe Simpson. Former Brave Brian Jordan joined the telecast on Friday night, as well.

Analysis
Simpson is the stronger/-est member of this broadcast team (depending on whether you consider Brian Jordan part of said “team.”) He demonstrates little understanding of statistical analysis — he and Caray made unqualified references, for example, to how many RBIs Brian McCann had at Citizens Bank Ballpark and how Joe Mather was “batting .500” against Cole Hamels (in six at-bats) — but he was helpful, I thought, when discussing pitchers.

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By far the greatest anything that will happen at Minute Maid Park in Houston this season:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7B4gic1-qU&

He got away. He definitely got away.

H/T: FanGraphs’ own Mike Axisa. Don’t you ever change, Mike.

Ahem:

And I believe we have a winner. That is, unless you know of someone else in the world of baseball who boasts a tickler the size of an oak limb.

The website for CSN Chicago features a soundboard of 45 different lyric gems, courtesy of White Sox play-by-play man Hawk Harrelson.

Push play to hear all 45 in glorious, consecutive fashion.

A million space bucks to reader/commenter juan pierre’s mustache.

Vin Scully on the ones and twos in 1964.

As I’ve made clear in these pages — mostly by means of words, but also occasionally by means of a sexy dance — a great concern of mine, so far as the art and science of baseball commentary is concerned, is in developing criteria by which the learned fan might anticipate the watchability of a particular game. Already we can do this with something like precision via the NERD Game Scores available in each morning’s edition of One Night Only at FanGraphs’ main page. A catalogue of all 30 of the league’s center-field camera shots further prepares the enthusiast for his nightly viewing. (Watching Roy Halladay pitch at Turner Field is much more satisfying, for example, than watching Halladay at his home park — or, worst, at Pittsburgh’s PNC Park.)

A stone that’s been left almost entirely unturned in this pursuit of happiness, however, is a discussion of what makes for an excellent baseball broadcast. In what follows, I outline some criteria for doing just that.

First, allow me to reveal my biases, such as they exist.

Above all, my preference is for spirited banter. Brewer radio commentator and ubermensch among just regular menschen Bob Uecker is unparalleled in this regard. Uecker’s commentary regularly ascends from the level of mere “word picture” to something considerably more noble, and one can find him, with startling frequency, composing spontaneous paeans to The Good Life. Should it be revealed that Uecker speaks entirely in a fixed meter of his own invention, this would be the pinnacle of unsurprising.

Of course, there are some caveats to this issue of spirited banter. For one, it is not merely enough for a broadcaster just to talk a lot or guffaw a whole bunch. This is annoying and should be censured early and often. Moreoever, there’s the Case of Vin Scully. To the best of my knowledge, Scully has never once recounted one of his drunken episodes on air, and yet probably comes closest to rivaling Uecker in terms of charm — which, charm is probably the best word to describe this quality we’re discussing. Let’s just use that, how about.

With that, we might consider three major criteria for assessing the quality of a broadcast, as follows.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’re damned right I’d follow Billy Martin’s mustache, and his spectacles, into the heat of baseball battle.

Adding to Martin’s lore: Whiskey Slick, his nickname, according to Baseball Almanac. And Whiskey Slick loved an old fashioned fracas, or ten, I learned, after going down the rabbit hole that is Billy Martin’s Wikipedia entry.

Witness:

Martin was well known for drinking to excess and for rowdy behavior when drinking. In 1957, a group of Yankees met at the famous Copacabana nightclub to celebrate Martin’s 29th birthday; the party ultimately erupted into a much publicized brawl when Martin, Hank Bauer, Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra challenged a few drunks who were hurling racial slurs at performer Sammy Davis, Jr. A month later, general manager George Weiss—believing Martin’s nightlife was a bad influence on teammates Whitey Ford and Mickey Mantle—exiled him to Kansas City. Martin felt betrayed by Stengel, with whom he had a strong father-son relationship, for failing to prevent the trade, and the two did not speak for years.

Exile in Kansas City. The more things change …

A few years later:

On August 4, 1960, Martin, then playing for the Reds, charged the mound in the second inning after receiving a brushback pitch from Chicago Cubs pitcher Jim Brewer. Martin threw his bat at Brewer, who picked up the bat and started to hand it to Martin as he approached. Martin punched Brewer in the right eye, breaking his cheekbone. Brewer was hospitalized for two months, and Martin served a five-day suspension. The Cubs sued Martin for $1,000,000 ($7,416,009 as of 2011), for the loss of Brewer’s services. While the Cubs dropped their case, Brewer pursued his, and in 1969, a judge ordered Martin to pay $10,000 ($59,909 as of 2011), in damages. When informed of the judgment by the press, he asked sarcastically, “How do they want it? Cash or check?”

Martin’s fights as a player also included bouts with Jimmy Piersall, Clint Courtney (twice), Matt Batts and Tommy Lasorda.

There’s no way you can convince me that Martin didn’t pay his fine in cash.

There’s more:

In 1969, Martin’s only season as manager of the Twins, he won a division championship. He was fired after the season following an August 1969 fight in Detroit with one of his pitchers, Dave Boswell, in an alley outside the legendary Lindell A.C. bar.

Ten years later, Martin hadn’t mellowed:

After the 1979 season, Martin got into a fight with marshmallow salesman Joseph Cooper at a hotel in Minneapolis.

Marshmallow salesmen are the worst.

Moving on:

On September 22, 1985, while at a hotel bar in Baltimore, Maryland, Martin fought one of his pitchers, Ed Whitson, who broke one of Martin’s arms.

And here I thought the 2006 scuffle between then Toronto Blue Jays manager John Gibbons and Ted Lilly was the stuff of dreams.

Finally:

Martin’s sparring opponents as a manager also included two traveling secretaries (Minnesota’s Howard Fox and Texas’ Burt Hawkins) in a fight outside of Howard Wong’s in Bloomington, Minnesota; Jack Sears, a fan outside Tiger Stadium; a Chicago cab driver who preferred soccer to baseball; sportswriter Ray Hagar, in a Reno indoor arena bar; … two bar patrons, in Anaheim and in Baltimore; and two bouncers in an Arlington topless bar.

I shudder to think what might have become of a marshmallow salesman who moonlighted as a cab driver, and who preferred the beautiful game to baseball, had he crossed Billy Martin’s path.

Interesting cat, Billy Martin, to say the least. And I had no idea.

Image courtesy Baseball Almanac, “Where what happened yesterday is being preserved today.” They ain’t foolin’.