The bat Kirk Gibson used to hit his walk-off home run in game one of the 1988 world series has two days left to go until “extended bidding” and now sits at a pretty $139,015.

In the world of baseball bat memorabilia, it’s fetching a pretty decent sum, but is still off by a factor of 10 when compared to the world’s most expensive bat: the bat Babe Ruth used to hit his first home run at Yankee Stadium. ($1.3 million)

The shirt Kirk Gibson was wearing while he hit the home run is currently at $129,690, while his road uniform for the 1988 world series seems a relative bargain at $6,050.

Personally, I think having a world series trophy sitting on the mantle would be pretty cool.

If your household is anything like mine (read: rambunctious!), you have may disagreements from time to time. In my personal bungalow, one such discussion revolves around the San Francisco Giants closer, and whether his persona is all cynical and whatnot. I find Brian Wilson entertaining, no matter his motivation.

Well, The Beard just got a little weirder. There is now a Fear the Beard video game that features the eccentric closer battling evil monks, tomahawks and the like, all the while feeding on the energy of the crowd – personified by orange rally towels. Though game play is rudimentary, it is perhaps not the point.

“Fear the Beard: The Baseball Odyssey Game” was made on a site called GameSpark that allows amateurs like you and I to make our own 2D and 3D games. As the site proclaims, you can make “holiday games featuring friends, family and pets.” Making a game based on your family pet may sound abhorrent, but it also becomes a quick inside joke that all the family can enjoy. Rudimentary game play means your aunt can enjoy making Sparky eat all the pies in the house!

So this really isn’t about Brian Wilson. It’s about continuing to bask in the glow that is a world championship. It’s about having an inside joke with all the rest of the Giants fans. It’s about smiling just a little longer.

There will always be time to come back to earth and discuss things like Brian Wilson benefiting from wide strike zones more than any other reliever in baseball, as J-Doug at Beyond the Box Score did just this Wednesday. There will always be time for cynicism and analysis. For now, just jump on the trampoline and fire some fastballs at that monk coming from the left.

Kerel Cooper of On the Black has submitted for the reader’s consideration some film footage of the 1962 New York Mets.

In the event that you’re unfamiliar with this iteration of the Metropolitans, here’s the first thing you might care to know about them: they were bad. Like, really bad. The club finished with a 40-120 record, worst of the 20 major league teams playing at the time, and a full 19 games in back of the next-worst Chicago Cubs.

Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Chronicle’s website, SFGate.com, has a gallery of photographs of Giants fans up right now. Click here to see the whole set.

Take an incredibly photogenic city with a beautiful park and a colorful local population, fold in the palpable anticipation of a half-century-overdue championship, and you get some pretty great pictures. Congrats again, Giants fans!

At FanGraphs, we love baseball. And while the focus of FanGraphs is on the quantitative side of baseball, there are a lot of other things both our authors and you, our readers, enjoy besides the numbers.

That’s where NotGraphs comes in. It gives us a place to put things that would otherwise not have a place on FanGraphs, that we find interesting and we think you would also find interesting.

This doesn’t mean that we’ll be cutting back on our quantitative analysis and commentary in any way, shape, or form, but it will let us broaden our horizons a bit by looking at a wide variety of additional baseball subjects.

The blog is spearheaded by Carson Cistulli, with the current contributors consisting of Jack Moore, Eno Sarris, and Leo Martin (welcome!), with Dave Cameron and others popping in from time to time.

Last night, Texas Governor Ricky Perry, making an appearance on TV’s The Daily Show, meditated briefly on the fate of very coveted free agent Cliff Lee.

Via the magic of the internet, you can watch the Perry interview in its entirety by clicking here. If that appeals to you zero percentedly, this is no problem, as the good people of Los That Sports Blog have transcribed the relevant exchange.

Boom, blockquote:

Stewart: “So in your mind… when did Washington go off the rails?”

Gov. Perry: “About a century ago, actually.”

Stewart: “Seriously?”

Gov. Perry: “Wilson, and the Progressive movement started. The Sixteenth Amendment, giving them the opportunity to take your money with the personal income tax. That’s the reason Cliff Lee is gonna stay in Texas…”

Having spent some time in Dallas, I can say two things about it: for one, it’s absolutely awash in public restrooms and, for two, you have to remove your shoes in order to enter it.

That I’ve only ever been to the airport part of it might color my experience of the city, however.

Kerel Cooper of Mets blog On the Black has recently shared with the public some photos from his tour of Citi Field.

The photo tour, it must be said, is an important genre. For those of us who self-identify as “indoorsman,” it allows us to experience the world without having to, you know, experience the world.

Having said that — and with all due respect to Cooper — there are some images that are conspicuous by their absence. Images such as:

• Paul DePodesta installing Linux on all the front office computers.
• Paul DePodesta convincing the stadium operations department to display WAR on the scoreboard.
• Paul DePodesta — uh, I don’t know. Paul DePodesta’s a nerd, is the point I’m trying to make.

Click to embiggen

The two jerseys on the outside should look familiar, but the two on the inside are brand-spanking-new and will see their on-field debuts in the 2011 season.

Second from the left is the new alternate home for the Indians. It comes in an odd creme color with a sans-serif font. To me, it looks like an older style uniform, although it doesn’t appear to be a throwback to any older Indians uniforms. The closest Indians uniform to the new one is this, from 1972, and the only thing similar there is the lettering. The new design also features a new hat, with a navy block “C” on a red background.

Next to that will be the new road grays. This is a pretty classic look, very similar to what the 1954 Indians wore away from home. Perhaps coincidentally and perhaps not, that 1954 team reached the World Series. This design uses this hat, the original version of the color swap used on the home alternates.

Personally, I think the creme alternate immediately becomes one of the worst uniforms in baseball today. The letters are too big, the creme color is awful, and the blue-on-red hat design doesn’t work at all. The away uniforms, though, are nearly perfect. If I had my druthers, the Chief Wahoo logo would just go away, but alas, it does appear on the arm patch of this jersey (as well as the other three). Other than that, though, it’s a great and classic look that hearkens back to a great era for the Cleveland franchise.

Per the team’s official site, the Baltimore Orioles have announced that Camden Yards will undergo some renovations this offseason.

Behold, facts:

At the request of the Orioles, more spacious seats are to be installed on the club level and upper deck at Camden Yards, and sightlines on both levels are to be improved by the installation of less intrusive railings. Seating capacity will be reduced from 48,290 to 45,971, keeping in line with the capacities of many recently opened parks.

There are some other things going on, too, but the relevant information — for this author, at least — is the news that Camden Yards is now 20 years old. By way of reference, here are some things that have happened since the Orioles played their first game in the iconic stadium:

• Every episode of the hit sitcom Friends.
• Chris Tucker’s entire career arc.
• The inter-frigging-net.

There’s no indication — at this juncture, at least — as to whether the renovations will include the installation of more talented players onto the field part of the stadium.

The Athletics recently won the bidding for Japanese pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma. Patrick Newman published some great thoughts on this pitcher who could be headed to the East Bay.

Iwakuma’s team, the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, has been around just since 2005. The team sponsor, Rakuten, owns a huge e-commerce site that is sort of Japan’s Amazon.com and is actually Japan’s second most-visited site (after Yahoo.co.jp, which is sort of Japan’s Google).

The Golden Eagles are located in Sendai, a city about three hours northeast of Tokyo that most Americans probably aren’t too familiar with. Sendai is home to numerous universities, even though its population is only about one million, and in a neat parallel to “Oakland,” its nickname is “City of Trees.” It is regarded as one of Japan’s greenest cities, featuring many bough-shaded boulevards.

Sendai offers local sports fans several options beyond baseball, including soccer (Vegalta Sendai) and basketball (Sendai 89ers). Additionally, the official municipal website boasts of the Golden Eagles stadium experience:

“The team creates new ways to make baseball enjoyable through the events for fans and entertainment found at every home game in its stadium. The stadium is turning into something more than a ballpark—a park that can be enjoyed without ball play.”

Apparently even in Japan, teams worry that baseball alone won’t fill all the seats.