Word from the Upper Middle West this morning reveals that the Minnesota Twins have announced a preliminary schedule for their 2011 Winter Caravan.

Don’t know what that thing is? Let a press release tell you!

Boom, blockquote:

The Twins Winter Caravan is one of the longest running and most extensive offseason team caravans in professional sports. It features teams of current and former players visiting schools, hospitals, corporations and service clubs during the day with a traditional “hot stove” program each evening.

Here’s the thing: I think we can all pretty much agree that the idea of players visiting schools and hospitals — it warms the cockles of the heart. Even if we look at such events cynically — i.e. that they represent little more than a PR opportunity for the organization — the kids still benefit insofar as hanging out with millionaires is always fun.

However, as is often the case, the morally virtuous path differs from the aesthetically excellent one. While everyone can feel good about smiling children, it seems as though what we really have here is a wasted opportunity. For I think the bespectacled readership would rather — much more than all the storybook-reading and high-fiving that assuredly occurs at such events — would rather test the limits of the Caravan genre.

Some suggestions, entirely off of my cuffs, as to how the Twins might more entertainingly utilize this opportunity:

• Facilitate a Question Time-style event, where fans are allowed to ask Ron Gardenhire about some of his more puzzling strategic maneuvers.

• Have Joe Mauer present a workshop on sideburn care and grooming.

• Perform a full-length stage version of Ivan Reitman’s 1988 comedy Twins. Cast Nick Punto as the Danny DeVito character and any other player as the Schwarzenegger one.

Today’s edition of the Los Angeles Times features an interview by T.J. Simers with Tommy Lasorda, the latter of whom — we’re led to believe — spends the bulk (get it?) of the interview talking between mouthfuls of delicious breakfast foods.

Because you’re a free person, you’re welcome to read the article in its entirety. Otherwise, regard these two passages, which one might safely describe as being “full of joie de vivre.”

Passage One: Mike Scioscia also likes eating.

I told [Mike] Scioscia when he played for me that I’d give him $100,000 if he lost 20 pounds,” Lasorda says by way of retort. “But I told him he had to put the check in his son’s bank account. Well, he lost the weight, I paid him and then he put on all the weight he had lost.”

There is no pause between bites.

“Ever hear the story about Scioscia down in the Dominican? We were always worried about his weight. [Former GM] Al Campanis tells someone to get him a bicycle and count how many miles are on it at the end of each week.

“One day Mickey Hatcher hears this bike pedaling like crazy. He’s impressed. He opens the door and Scioscia is lying on the couch with a pizza on his stomach and some Dominican kid pedaling the bike.”

Passage Two: Tommy Lasorda also likes gambling.

Last week, he delivered one of his inspirational speeches to Wisconsin upon its arrival for the Rose Bowl. He says it would have been better had it come directly before the game.

Wisconsin lost.

“They beat the spread, so that helps a little bit,” he says with a laugh.

Three years into a remarkable burn, it looks like Walkoff Walk will shut its doors for good at the end of January. The blogosphere will sorely miss the stylings of the writers at the irreverent WoW. Rob Iracane and Kris Liakos were the primary writers and editors of the site that was seemingly dedicated to immortalizing the importance of the game-winning walk, and, perhaps, shrimp running on treadmills. 310toJoba, Dan McQuade and Drew Fairservice also wrote for WoW, with Fairservice recently starting GhostrunnerOnFirst, a Blue Jays blog on ESPN’s Sweet Spot Network. Something tells me we haven’t seen the last of this crew.

But, before we lose them in this particular iteration, let’s celebrate the genius that was Walkoff Walk. Here are some of the best posts in WoW history, in no particular order:

Kris Liakos’ “Annual Teams That Were Dead By Memorial Day” post (5/7/08)

Kris discovers Rinku and Dinesh (5/2/08)

Kris interviews Rinku and Dinesh (12/11/08)

Drew Fairservice makes a link between gut size and strikeout ability (6/30/2010)

Drew comments on DRaysBay taking out a goodbye ad for Carl Crawford (12/2/10)

Rob Iracane rips off Nate Silver, argues for expansion (5/13/08)

Rob writes about economics in a semi-intelligent manner for once (12/2/08)

Rob wonders why it’s so often minorities that ‘lack hustle’ (5/6/10)

Rob skewers Jon Heyman for circular logic on Bert Byleven – a year ago (1/5/10)

Dan McQuade’s excellent movie recurring review feature, Cinema Varitek (4/30/09)

Dan laments the lack of ‘cat-ty’ analysis (6/15/10)

310toJoba takes a look at WAR and MVP votes, parts 1 and 2 (1/16/10)

It’s hazardous work we do. I mean, go spelunking through the Google news feed using “baseball” as your search term and you can turn up some unfortunate stuff. Mostly, I attribute this to the fact that the baseball bat — otherwise a totem of childhood innocence — can double as a murder weapon or sex toy. So every now and then you run across a tale of felonious assault, or, on those occasions when I find myself deep into an image search for “baseball bat,” (disclosure: this has happened exactly once) you can stumble upon photos that afterward make you want to boil your computer. Such is life.

Anyhow, this is the sort of thing that led me to this wondrous find, which has nothing to do with baseball save for this:

She was fearful for him and followed. She reported that she saw him “levitate” for about 10 feet across the room. She feared he was going to go over the balcony, so she shoved a table across the door.

He picked up a knife and she defended herself with a curtain rod, she said. Then she grabbed a baseball bat. He began chanting “Red, green, go” over and over and “flying” around the room, she said.

He was flailing his arms and hit her, the report states. She struck him with the bat, she said. He began speaking in a language she didn’t understand.

By the way, the headline, which, in the full light of the story, is as understated as an English butler, is: “Man’s Behavior Turns Strange.” Yes, it seems it did.

I’m fond of using the “Apropos of Nothing” category. Sometimes I damn well earn it.

New Year’s Resolution: To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
— James Agate

The best part about writing for NotGraphs, a relatively new project still in its infancy, is — let’s not kid ourselves — the money. Capitalism’s a beautiful thing, and my piggy bank will soon be overflowing.

In all seriousness, what excites me most about NotGraphs is the potential of this here blog as we settle in and prepare to wow you in 2011. I’m anticipating one of those teary-eyed, Hillary Clinton-like moments when I announce that I have indeed “found my own voice.” Can’t wait!

What I’m interested to learn from you is: What makes an alternative baseball blog? What’s in an alternative baseball blog? We’re not going to repeatedly hit you over the head with our sabermetric hammer here at NotGraphs; that’s what FanGraphs is for. So what, if there is anything in particular, would you like to see from us in this corner? From me? I’d love to know. As Victor Borge once famously put it: “Usually I don’t do request numbers, unless of course I have been asked to do.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The wife and I have accidentally — as part of an East Coast tour — we’ve accidentally found our way to the borough of Brooklyn, New York, United States.

Today, as part of same tour, we walked to the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan — a store which, in the event that you’re unaware, features “18 Miles of Books.”

Below are some of the notable baseball titles I found. (Note: The following images are, I’m led to believe, merely thumbnails. I’m led to believe, additionally, that you can click any thumbnail to view a larger image. Furthermore, for each title, I’ve provided a link to the relevant Google Books page.)

The Suitors of Spring by Pat Jordan*:

*This is mentioned in Kevin Kerrane’s Dollar Sign on the Muscle.

Read the rest of this entry »

So Ty Cobb’s great-grandson, who’s named Ty Cobb, plays hoops for Occidental College in Los Angeles. That’s cool. Young Cobb was also a heavily recruited left-handed pitcher in high school, but, well, let’s say he doesn’t share Great-Gramps’s enthusiasm for the most sacred of human endeavors:

“My heart wasn’t in it,” said Cobb, who is averaging 3.1 points and 2.9 rebounds in 13.6 minutes off the bench for Occidental. “In fact, I almost quit baseball several times. Basketball has been my favorite since I was really young. It’s always been what I wanted to play. It’s my true love.”

Given what we know about the original Ty Cobb’s competitive zeal and dedication to craft, don’t be surprised if he rises from the grave, kicks down the gates of the Rose Hill Cemetery and zombie-shuffles his way to So Cal, all to hand-deliver a vigorous spanking to the spawn of the spawn of his spawn. Or maybe the original Ty Cobb is merely smiling on approvingly, proud of his great-grandkid’s sense of individuality and quiet defiance. Probably the latter.

Then there’s this from Ty Cobb v2.0:

“It’s kind of a double-edged sword,” Occidental’s Cobb said of his name (he doesn’t share a middle name with his great grandfather). “Sometimes it’s cool. But sometimes I get a lot of unfair comments. Some people will say that Ty Cobb was a bad guy and he was a racist. I always have to explain to them that’s not true.”

Yeah, that’s got to get old. I don’t know whether Cobb was racist relative to the low standards of the times (after all, if, like me, you’re a board-certified white person of a certain age, then your great-grandpappy was probably on the racially insensitive side), but that has nothing to do with Occidental’s Cobb.

On this point, the lessons of Avenue Q are as penetrating as ever …

Some days, after you wake up, you get dressed, eat breakfast, and then go take your place as a productive member of society. Other days — instead of all that stuff — you spend the first two or so hours of your life wandering without direction through YouTube’s maze of videos.

This post is a product of the latter.

What you have here, bespectacled readership, is an interview that Mike and Mike (of the eponymous radio program) did with Rickey Henderson, in which they ask Henderson to either confirm or deny legends about the Hall of Famer.

So far as videos go, it’s probably not what you’d call a Perfect 10. Mike and Mike, whatever their other virtues, are what a person smarter than me might call “garrulous.” Henderson, though, is hard not to enjoy — as per usual.

Notable moments:

0:42 Rickey Henderson pronounces the names James Brown and Luther Vandross, an angel gets its wings.

1:06 Henderson confirms that he was once given a million-dollar bonus check that, instead of cashing, he just framed and hung up on his wall.

2:28 Henderson gives a borderline logical — and nearly touching — explanation for the check incident.

In the New Year’s edition of the New York Times, Michael Schmidt wrote an interesting article on Rafael Palmeiro and the hall of fame. Naturally, PEDs are a major theme. The topic of how the writers will treat those players from the steroid era – not just those like Palmeiro who were caught, but players like Jeff Bagwell with whom speculation is all the evidence we have – also came up. On that subject, Ross Newhan a former columnist from the LA Times, said the following:

“Somebody said we are not the morality police, but yet I think we are. If we aren’t, who is? Part of our job is that we are custodians of the game’s history. I do look at the larger picture, and Palmeiro had a lot of good years, but that brings back to my feeling that otherwise he would be worthy of the Hall of Fame.”

The merits of Newhan’s viewpoint can be debated – I, for one, stand in the “innocent until proven guilty” court – but that’s not why we’re here. We’re here because the image of Ross Newhan as a Custodian of Baseball is funny. See?

Read the rest of this entry »

Road uniform concept sketch.

It sounds like the Korea Professional Baseball League may be getting a ninth team, this one in the city of Changwon.

As in Japan, baseball teams in South Korea are typically owned by corporations. Intriguingly, one corporation bidding for the rights to the proposed Changwon franchise is NCSoft, a leading publisher of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, including the popular Lineage and Guild Wars series of games.

NCSoft’s corporate motto is “make people’s life more fun.” But when does more fun become too much fun? That question was raised in a US District Court last summer, when a former customer sued NCSoft for negligence, arguing that their game Lineage II was “too addictive.” The plaintiff claimed that he was “unable to function independently in usual daily activities such as getting up, getting dressed, bathing or communicating with family and friends.”

Video gaming is a plausible competitive sport in Korea, and perhaps NCSoft sees some nefarious synergies between publishing video games and running a baseball team. More likely, they’re just looking to do some good old-fashioned advertising.

Fear not, innocent denizens of Changwon: there is no way baseball will ever be as life-wreckingly fun as massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. Baseball has a far more wholesome and more moderate fun-ness.