I’ve no idea how long it’s been available, but ESPN has introduced to the public consciousness a game called Salary Crunch. To play Salary Crunch, one merely selects the visage of a highly paid athelete, enters his (i.e. this “one” we’re talking about) annual salary, and prepares to be amazed at how little he earns relative to said athlete.

The results are predictably absurd. Using $30,000 — or roughly the median American income — we find that Mariano Rivera makes this sum after .09 strikeouts. We find also that our median American would have to work 500 years to equal Mr. Rivera’s 2011 salary.

It’s not all bad news, though. Per a study recently released by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School, income doesn’t have an appreciable effect on happiness after about the $75,000 threshold.

Obviously, the only question one can really ask is: “How much are these big contracts really Werth?”

H/T: The Nats Blog

While I am personally not a fan of Pete Rose and think he has as much business being in the Hall of Fame as does an unassuming cheese curd, there’s no denying his popularity among the Joe Fan types. An outgrowth of that popularity is a truly bizarre menu of photos and artistic renderings.

So come with me, won’t you, as we stroll through the Pete Rose Wing of the Museum of Questionable Aesthetic Decisions …

You’ve heard of “Christ Figures” in cinema? Above we have unassailable proof that Anton Chigurh was a “Pete Figure.”

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Billy Beane, grinchopotamus.

So apparently Hisashi Iwakuma won’t be joining the A’s after all.

From the start, many people were surprised that the A’s had put in such an aggressive bid. FanGraphs’ own Dave Cameron argued that maybe the A’s needed starting pitching. But $19M still seemed like a big posting fee for this player.

And things got really interesting when contract talks began. Read the rest of this entry »

As this year’s edition continues to demonstrate, Major League Baseball’s Winter Meetings serve as a vehicle for all manner of baseballing-related hijinks.

That said, in the 109-year history of the event, some particularly absurd moments stand out. Below are some notable — and totally-actually-happened — examples of such instances.

1918: Dissatisfied with the merely symbolic shackles imparted by Baseball’s reserve clause, notoriously stingy White Sox owner Charles Comiskey places actual shackles on star players Eddie Cicotte and Joe Jackson.

1959: In just one of a long line of attention-grabbing promotions, White Sox owner Bill Veeck attempts to sign Laika, the Russian dog that, in November of 1957, became the first living Earth-born creature in orbit.

1976: Perhaps overstimulated by the advent of free agency, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner accidentally signs every Major League baseball player.

1979: Shortly after Nolan Ryan becomes Baseball’s first official Million-Dollar Man, Montreal Expo Bill Lee, coming off a season in which he was named the Sporting News National League Left Hander of the Year, threatens to hold out to until he becomes the first player to earn one million space bucks. The front office acquiesces to Lee’s demands; however, the lefty refuses to take the money after falling in love with Princess Vespa.

2010: Baltimore Oriole Luke Scott performs a Dadaist-like prank on Yahoo! contributor David Brown, affecting the personality of an irrational and xenophobic yokel for Brown’s Answer Man series. Intellectuals from all circles applaud Scott’s performance.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of their original console system, NeoGeo has just announced that, on Dec. 21, 2010, ten classic NeoGeo titles (see full list below) will make their way exclusively to the PlayStation 3 via PlayStation Network. Relevant to this site is that one of the games in question is, in fact, Baseball Stars Professional.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that, owing to its prohibitive cost (about $650 new), I never (a) owned a NeoGeo or (b) played many (any?) of the titles for it. Baseball Stars for NES, on the other hand, was/is a legitimately great game.

The cost of this particular edition of Baseball Stars is much friendlier to consumers, at just $8.99 (with later PSP versions costing $6.99). If the images below are to be believed, it’ll also offer a Network mode for playing online.

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Whenever rumors abound of legendary 16 year veteran Gregg Zaun, I find it is my civic duty to remind every baseball fan of the single most important web site in existence. No, it isn’t NotGraphs. Instead, it’s Zaun’s personal website, www.greggzaun.com.

Everything about this website is awesome. From the Mask of Zorro animation to the sweet special effects to the Rush backing track to the fantastic header to the invitation to join the “Zaunbie Nation Fan Club,” Zaun’s site brings the pain from a variety of angles. I have yet to meet a single person who has not enjoyed this website, and if you do, you should stone them at once, for they are not human.

Perhaps the most shocking piece of information contained on this website is the fact that Zaun was born in Glendale, California, and not Saskatchewan, Canada. Between the hairstyle, Blue Jays gear, and premium Canadian rock in the background (also his batting walk-up music), everything about Zaun and this website just screams Canada.

This is easily the most important piece of information you will come across the entire offseason. Disseminate wherever and whenever you can. And above all else, remember to Bring Your Z-Game.

There’s not much need for introductory throat-clearing: Baseball has an impossibly rich history when it comes to player nicknames, and what follows are the 10 very, especially, most greatest of all …

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Because I’m not what you’d call an “expert” in matters technological, I don’t know when it was officially released, but I’m able to inform you beyond a shadow of the shadowiest doubt that, as of this afternoon, iBooks is definitely available for the iPad, iPhone, and — relevant to this author — iPod Touch.

There are probably exactly 1000 exciting things about this, but for bespectacled and university-educated baseball fans like you and me and everyone we know, one terrific benefit is being able to access and read certain books — specifically, those in the public domain — in a manner that still announces to the world that you’re a modern-type man (or woman).

For example, after downloading the iBooks app yesterday, I found just seconds later a text with which I was previously unfamiliar: John Montgomery Ward’s Base-Ball: How to Become a Player, published in 1888.

Ward is an interesting case, generally. His Wikipedia page, for example, informs us that he “graduated from Columbia Law School in 1885 and led the players in forming the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, the first sports labor union.”

So, that’s one thing.

The other is that Ward is also the purveyor of white-hot prose. For example, from Base-Ball:

It may or it may not be a serious reflection upon the accuracy of history that the circumstances of the invention of the first ball are enveloped in some doubt. Herodotus attributes it to the Lydians, but several other writers unite in conceding to a certain beautiful lady of Corcyra, Anagalla by name, the credit of first having made a ball for the purpose of pastime. Several passages in Homer rather sustain this latter view, and, therefore, with the weight of evidence, and to the glory of woman, we, too, shall adopt this theory. Anagalla did not apply for letters patent, but, whether from goodness of heart or inability to keep a secret, she lost no time in making known her invention and explaining its uses. Homer, then, relates how:

“O’er the green mead the sporting virgins play, Their shining veils unbound; along the skies, Tost and retost, the ball incessant flies.”

You just got Homer’d, America.

Over the weekend, I made a case for a way of discussing books in a manner conducive to NotGraphs. You can read those exact words, if you want. Alternatively, you can just believe me when I say that the basic idea is to share lightly annotated passages and ideas from interesting baseball-related books.

Text
A Brief History of American Sports by Elliot J. Gorn and Warren Goldstein

Notes
Whether factually accurate or not, it’s nevertheless pleasant to believe that Dr. Hans Asperger — credited with identifying what we now call Asperger Syndrome — that he, in fact, exhibited symptoms of the very same Syndrome that he discovered. Again, ignoring what I’ll call the “actual details” of the matter, Dr. Asperger’s case gives us a nice figure or archetype with which to work — namely, that of a man whose life’s work is more or less the product of attempting to diagnose his own peculiar condition.

Nor, reader, do I believe I’m misbehaving when I suggest that we, all of us, are doctors in this way — not to the extent, probably, of Asperger himself, but at least in the sense that our fumbling attempts to understand our own unique conditions often define and inform the work that we eventually produce.

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Not long ago, Carson whipped up a wonderful little post that made me nostalgic for the florid sports prose of yesteryear.

For whatever reason, the game stories we read these days lack that certain something that you’ll find when you go spelunking through the archives of some venerable major daily. This isn’t to criticize the poor grunts who have to come up something interesting to say 162 times per year. Hell, give, say, Nabokov a steady diet of Diet Rite, Funyuns and airline liquor and seal him off in a foul-smelling press box for half his life, and the output will suffer.

So what to do? Here’s how we can improve your reading experience, refashion baseball journalism and vastly simplify the lives of our heroic and harried beat writers.

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