Our fearless, not feckless, leader here at NotG recently debuted a series in which he will annotate readings that are germane to the sport of baseball. Judging from the first post, this will be fun introduction to many different intriguing texts.

But on AmazinAvenue, James Kannengeiser has taken an approach to a text that is more comprehensive. While Cistulli will introduce us lightly to many texts – and allow us to decide if we will continue the study on our own – Kannengeiser is discussing one text. He has approached his text, the inimitable Moneyball by Michael Lewis, in an in-depth manner, going chapter by chapter with discussion questions. Since the site is dedicated to a sabremetric approach to the same team that just hired Sandy Alderson, a major character in the book, it’s a convergence of interest and timing that makes a whole lot of sense.

If you will, a few choice moments from his series so far:

From Chapter Four’s discussion questions:

5. Bill James’s wife says in Chapter Four that if she knew the extent of Bill’s baseball obsession when they started dating, their relationship might not have gotten very far. Without getting too specific, has baseball (or sports in general) obsession interfered with a close relationship? Has it aided a relationship?

My wife wants a word with you, James. From Chapter Three’s questions:

2. Is Jeff Francoeur the present day version of 1980s Billy Beane? Michael Lewis writes in Chapter Three:

“He [Billy] didn’t have a baseball mentality,” said Jeff Bittiger. “He was more like a basketball or a football player. Emotions were always such a big part of whatever he did.”

Frenchy isn’t an unhinged buffet table flipper like Billy seemed to be (although Frenchy did bash a water cooler after a game in 2009). Still, I think there is a legitimate comparison — physically gifted player; beloved by scouts; has The Good Face; can’t hit a lick.

That’s a strange parallel for a player so derided by the sabr-crowd. Then a hard-hitting question from Chapter Two:

4. The men in the A’s draft room are depicted packing lips full of chewing tobacco. Have you ever “packed a lip”? What did you think? Awesome or gross?

Good stuff, and it’s led to some great repartee in the comments sections.

It’s worth wondering if this approach would work here. In order to take advantage of the same confluence of interest and timing, it would have to be a book that was relevant to all of us. Could Tom Tango’s The Book be worth a dust-off and a chapter-by-chapter discussion? Alan Schwartz and The Numbers Game? Baseball Between the Numbers? These aren’t novel to the marketplace, and we wouldn’t be breaking new ground, but perhaps we’d learn something together as we reaffirm what we’ve learned?

If you’ve yet to read The Cultural Importance of Keith Hernandez, posted yesterday by my esteemed NotGraphs colleague Dayn Perry, and not yet watched the slightly not safe for work short film “I’m Keith Hernandez” he shared, trust me: do so. I’ll wait.

…

Twenty minutes well spent, eh? I told you so. When any short film begins with Keith Hernandez’s Seinfeld cameo, you know it’s not going to disappoint. And on a cold and snowy Monday afternoon up in the Great White North, “I’m Keith Hernandez” scratched me right where I itched.

Procrastination through baseball; I’ve got it almost down to an art. And recently on my travels along the highway of information, I hit the jackpot: R.B.I. Baseball 3. While video games have certainly come a long, long way, there’s nothing like a game of baseball displayed vividly in 8-bit graphics, using baseball’s 1990 rosters.

I was the Toronto Blue Jays, of course. It was an afternoon affair, in Kansas City. Dave Stieb versus Kevin Appier.

It wasn’t pretty, an 11-1 Royals final. Dave Stieb took the loss after giving up six runs in the first inning, and was spelled in relief by Jim Acker, Jimmy Key, Duane Ward and Tom Henke. My only run came courtesy of an inside the park home run by John Olerud. It was wild. Appier went the distance for the Royals, striking out 12, Tony Fernandez and Junior Felix twice, and Kelly Gruber three times. By the 8th inning, Appier was tossing junk 27 MPH. But it didn’t matter; I couldn’t hit him.

Some pointers:

• When you’re ranging right with your shortstop, trying to get to a ball in the hole on the left side of the diamond, your left fielder is running to his right, too. And when inevitably your shortstop doesn’t get there in time, you’re screwed. It’s maddening.
• On fly balls, there’s no assist circle on the field, where you’re supposed to end up to catch the ball. More madness.
• The sound effects are utterly amazing. Appreciate them.

Did I get rocked? Absolutely. Most importantly: I had fun. And that’s what counts. They were twenty-seven minutes I wouldn’t ask to be returned.

I also found, on the same website, Nintendo’s 1983 release, Baseball, and 1987’s R.B.I. Baseball.

Enjoy. And don’t mention it.

Some younger fans might think of Keith Hernandez as nothing more than the guy who sawed logs in the Mets’ broadcast booth. But back in the day, Hernandez was — and affected eloquence has no place here — a genuine bad-ass. Not only does he have a strong HoF case, but he was also something of a cultural touchstone.

On that point, Rob Perri’s short film “I’m Keith Hernandez” must be seen to be fathomed. It’s not particularly new, but it is particularly awesome. And is it hard to believe or decidedly easy to believe that, among other things, nudity makes this video not safe for work unless your place of work is a permissive den of iniquity?

I’m Keith Hernandez from water&power on Vimeo.

There’s no official contest for best coverage of basball’s Winter Meetings, but if there were Erik Hahmann of DRaysBay would currently be winning it.

Regard, Exhibit One:

Exhibit Two:

Exhibit Three:

Let’s not give Hahmann all the credit, though. The YES Network’s Jack Curry deserves to be noted for this tweet, regarding pitcher Cliff Lee’s favorite pastime:

Have you, reader, seen any tweets of note? Please do report them here, stat.

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
There are obviously a number of reasons why baseball became popular in the United States. To attribute baseball’s rise in our culture merely to one or the other causes would be foolish. Gorn and Goldstein, for their part, are clear on this point. Discussing the “modernization”-type interpretation of mid- and late-19th c. sport, the pair writes:

The characteristics that historians identify as modern — rationalization, quantification, bureaucratization, mass spectatorship, equality of opportunity — were important elements of American athletics by the turn of the century. The rise of sports depended on new technologies, institutions, and patterns of though. Yet we must not remove the complexity from historical experience. Sports often perpetuated older values, even as modern elements crept in (114).

Elsewhere, they state:

This interpretaion of the rise of sports is at once useful and misleading. Bureaucracies, statistics, uniform rules, an ideology of fair play were all important. Yet those who apply modernization theory — to sports, to agriculture, to religious and ethnic identity — tend to see the tranformation as inexorable. Resistance to the modernizing juggernaut is depicted as either reactionary (because modernization allegedly benefits all) or unimportant (because the changes are inevitable). Modernization flattens historical experience by slighting the cultural tensions and the conflicts of power that accompany all major social transformations. Certainly there was nothing smooth, simple, or automatic about the rise of sports after the Civil War. Baseball’s relationship to the idea of equality, for example, was troubled (111-112).

These lines — in particular, those regarding the complexity of historical experience and historians’ tendency to flatten it — will likely be music to the ears of the sabermetrically inclined. Constantly, there’s this question of how fine to parse player performance. On the one hand, there’s the need to tell a story. There has to be some narrative quality to a stat in order for it to capture our imaginations. On the other hand, we must remain humble before the great complexities that lie beyond the narrative.

Consider FIP, for example. The accomplishment of the metric is that it (a) says quite a bit about a pitcher, but (b) requires only three widely available inputs — i.e. strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed. So, its narrative powers are strong, which is good. But Gorn and Goldstein would ask us to remember — as would Tom Tango, I’m sure — that, while FIP is useful it can also be misleading. Or, rather, it will mislead those who ask too much of it. Each player presents to us a unique arrangement of uncontrolled variables. We oughtn’t forget it. Ever.

I suppose this isn’t surprising, as everything these days has to have a logo.

However, I’m pretty surprised at how elaborate this logo is. For as much craziness as the Winter Meetings can create on the internet and, particularly, on the twitters, the stuff that actually happens this week in Orlando is about as boring as any event in sports. When it comes down to it, the Winter Meetings are just a bunch of dudes in suits on their blackberries for a week.

Naturally, then, the logo for the event is an alligator with a baseball bat in its mouth, with some flamingos down by the numbering for this year. Perhaps it’s supposed to be symbolic. Now’s the time for baseball’s GM’s to snap up a good deal, like an alligator! Or maybe it means that the Seattle Mariners should be looking to sign an alligator with a bat in its mouth, because they really need a designated hitter. Or maybe…

Regardless, the start of the Winter Meetings today marks one of the most exciting points of the MLB’s offseason. After seeing this logo, though, you don’t need me to tell you that.

Tip: Wait for sales.

‘Tis the season when Major League Baseball generously offers to intervene in your holiday shopping. For example, just last week fans learned “20 reasons to customize a jersey right now at the MLB.com Shop.” Because I am acutely sensitive to the average fan’s extreme busy-ness during this, the busy-est of seasons, I have reformed MLB’s list from an intimidating 20 to a manageable 7, complete with helpful glosses. Without further ado:

Read the rest of this entry »

If I’ve failed to mention it previously, allow me to state vigorously right now that one use of NotGraphs will be to provide for the readership reviews of forthcoming (or recently released) baseball books. In fact, provided the good people of DeCapo Books — publishers of Jim Collins’ excellent Last Best League — provided they’re not lying liar faces from Liarville, I’ll soon have in my possession two books — Tim Wendel’s High Heat and Sean Manning’s Top of the Order — whose contents I’ll be very happy to consume and disclose in the near-ish future.

However, I don’t think it’s book reviews proper that I intend to discuss right now.

If I’m understanding correctly — and it’s quite possible that I’m not — but if I am understanding correctly, book reviews generally come in two forms. In the first kind of review, the writer serves, more or less, as a deputy for the consumer. His (i.e. the reviewer’s) job in this case is to acquaint himself with a text and relate to the people at home whether it’s worth their time and/or money.

In the second kind of book review — what we might, in fact, call “criticism” — the worth of the book in question is more or less taken for granted. In these cases, the author serves not as a deputy for the consumer, but as an Idea Man.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the attentive reader will already know, rising NotGraphs star Dayn Perry commemorated — earlier today, in these very same pages — he commemorated America’s most important holiday (i.e. Repeal Day) by naming baseball’s All-Time All-Drinking Team.

That same attentive reader will also likely know that I, Carson Cistulli, rode Mr. Perry’s entirely fashionable coattails en route to my first post of the day, in which I submitted for the readership’s consideration the fruits of at least one or one-and-a-half minute’s worth of arduous research — namely, a video of the 1926 World Series featuring exactly two members of Perry’s All-Drinking Team.

Here, I’d like to consider briefly another of the All-Drinkers, Ryne Duren.

Duren is an interesting case for at least 11 reasons — some of which, owing to space and time restrictions, I’m unable to address.

Notably, Duren is distinct from most of the other names on this list in that he was active during a time when alcoholism began to be regarded not merely as the harmless pastime of rakes and/or roustabouts but rather as a real-live disease. In fact, the internet reveals to us that Duren (who’s still alive) not only outlived the worst of his drinking, but has gone on to serve as an alcohol abuse educator.

The internet also reveals to us that Duren was a showman, as the following passage suggests (and our own Erik Manning noted last year, too):

In those days the Yankee bullpen was a part of the short-porch right field and only a low chain link fence served as the boundary. When called upon by Casey Stengel to relieve, he wouldn’t use the gate, but preferred to hop the fence with one hand and begin a slow walk to the mound with his blue Yankee warm-up jacket covering his pitching arm; he followed this routine even on the hottest days. When he finally took the ball and began his warmups, the first pitch was typically a hard fastball 20 feet over the catcher’s head. The succeeding warmup pitches would be thrown lower and lower (but not slower) until Duren would finally “find” the plate.

Finally, it needs to be mentioned: Duren was really good. In a time when the concept of the “relief ace” was just becoming understood, Duren was one of the best — or, at least one of the brightest.

Consider what happens if you point your browser to FanGraphs historical leaderboards, set the minimum innings-pitched at 70, and sort by K/9:

1958:

1959:

1961:

1962:

“Hooah,” as Al Pacino would say.

The only year that’s omitted there, 1960, actually saw Duren post a career-high strikeout rate of 12.31 K/9, but in just 49.0 IP.

Earlier today, in these electronic pages, rising NotGraphs star Dayn Perry commemorated America’s most important holiday — Repeal Day — by naming the All-Time All-Drinkers Team.

Curious about some of the names on the list, I took to the internet and, after the most grueling 83 seconds of research you could imagine, have this video footage of the 1926 World Series — featuring the Yankees and Cardinals — to show for it.

This particular series features two all-time drinkers: Grover Cleveland (or “Pete”) Alexander and Babe Ruth, both of whom feature prominently in the video. Below are some notable moments.

0:25. That’s the very famous commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis there — who, if you believe noted historian Jonathan Coulton, “was seventeen feet tall [and] had a hundred and fifty wives.” The attentive viewer will note that Landis has an actual iron fist. Impressive!

0:49. Not baseball related, but interesting. Note that the narrator uses the word natch — as in, short for naturally. EtymOnline suggests that the truncated version was first recorded in 1945.

1:20. Slow-motion video captures Ruth hitting “the longest home run ever hit in St. Louis” on what appears — to this viewer, at least — like an opposite-field check swing.

1:34. Footage of Alexander pitching. Question: if the Inverted W is a way to describe one kind of arm action, how might we describe the one utilized by Alexander? The Askance K? The Truculent Y?

2:26. Well, that’s one definition of “money muscles.”