12 Jul 2010, by Ted
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I've been a woefully inept shipmate on the SS Pitchers&Poets of late, so this evening I will celebrate my renewed commitment to yammering on about baseball by LIVEBLOGGING THE HOME RUN DERBY (8 o'clock Eastern, 5 o'clock Pactific).
I've never LIVEBLOGGED before, so this will be as new to me as the All-Star experience is to Nick Swisher.
In anticipation of this major media event, here's an unrelated article by Joel Sherman, NYPost, on the Jack Z negotiations leading up to the Cliff Lee deal, that I found via MLBtraderumors.com. It's all quite dramatic.
08 Jul 2010, by Ted
In this episode of the Pitchers and Poets Podcast, we discuss the upcoming All Star festivities, from Chris Berman's tired Home Run Derby act to All Star fashion (though we didn't get to Alyssa Milano's CHONE projections for the celebrity game). Then it was on to baseball cards, as we cracked a couple of Topps 2010 packs and dug through the Orioles and Pirates commons to find some buried treasure, and learned of the glory of Brad Kilby.
[podcast]http://www.roguesbaseballindex.com/pnp_podcasts/PnP_016.mp3[/podcast]
Right click here for the .mp3 file
07 Jul 2010, by Eric
Not baseball, but this remarkable column by Adrian Wojnarowski on the Lebron James situation caught my eye. Mostly, I was amazed by the first paragraph:
The Championship of Me comes crashing into a primetime cable infomercial that LeBron James and his cronies have been working to make happen for months, a slow, cynical churning of manufactured drama that sports has never witnessed. As historic monuments go, this is the Rushmore of basketball hubris and narcissism. The vacuous star for our vacuous times. All about ‘Bron and all about nothing.
Agree with the premise or not, that is one hell of a way to set the tone. But how does it work? How does Wojnarowski infuse this simple little intro graph with so much seething rage? Let's at least take a look at the first sentence.
He achieves maximum rancor by immediately setting the conversation in his own sarcastic, negative terms. "The Championship of Me" opener sets Lebron up as a narcissist. Without realizing it, by the time we get to the rest of the clause, we are already thinking in the writer's terms. That clause itself is a minefield of dismissive and negative vocabulary. The words "crashing down" imply, well, a crash. Of course nothing is breaking here, nothing is crashing. In fact, you could very easily phrase it differently and say that something is taking off, a new era is beginning. But nope, we're now crashing.
And what are we crashing into? An infomercial, of course. We are crashing into the cheapest and least regarded kind of television programming. This kind of inverse hyperbole is pretty obviously ridiculous when you consider all the other fluff programming to which ESPN devotes one hour specials. Compared to National Signing Day or the 5th round of the NFL Draft, the Lebron James press conference actually feels pretty important.
Of course, unlike these other dramas, the Lebron James presser is "a slow, cynical churning of manufactured drama that sports has never witnessed." This is a beautiful piece of writing. Using the word cynical sets off subconscious alarm bells with sports fans because sports, the holy game of professional basketball included, are supposed to be above cynicism right? Sure. We really think that way. And Wojnarowski's use of the word manufactured is perfect because it strengthens the (completely ridiculous) premise that the rest of the NBA (and sport in general) is some kind of un-manufactured, organic phenomenon. The word manufactured hits even harder when we consider that Lebron might well be departing a city deeply troubled by its inability to manufacture anything.
And who is doing this manufacturing? Why none other than Lebron's cronies. There's a word without negative implications.
I would continue, but I have tickets to go watch an entirely meaningless -- but delightfully organic -- baseball game between the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Mariners. And for the record, I'm no Lebron fan, but I don't think his departure would mean the end of Ohio either.
02 Jul 2010, by Eric
Somehow I ended up in a conversation with Carson Cistulli about home-run trot injuries, biblical misfortune, schlemiels, and schlemazels.
You can find it on Fangraphs.com.
And enjoy a brief excerpt here:
Carson: Eric, I know some things about you that the reader probably doesn’t — namely, that (a) until yesterday, the first baseman on your fantasy baseball team was Luke Scott, that (b) Scott is no longer your first baseman because he injured himself during a home trot last night, and that (c) the only reason you had Luke Scott in the first place was as a replacement for Kendry Morales, who also hurt himself after hitting a home run.
So, my hard-hitting question is: what the H, dude?
Eric: You could say I have the luck of Job, or maybe of Tagg Bozied. If not that, then perhaps I am the one causing these injuries. Perhaps there is something haunted about my team — Chase Utley went down this week, too.
Carson: I want to address the possibility of your superpowers momentarily, but first let’s discuss Tagg Bozied. Bozied, in the event that the reader isn’t familiar, is the outfielder who, in 2004, after hitting a walk-off grand slam to beat the Tacoma Rainiers, ruptured the patella tendon in his left knee while landing on home plate. In other words, it was a pretty similar injury to Morales’s. The difference is that Bozied was only — what? — 23 or 24 at the time, was raking in Triple-A, and has never made it to the majors despite still being around.
Do you think that’s the worst case scenario for a prospect? And also: what is it that’s so — I don’t know — tragic-seeming about Bozied’s case?
Eric: I don’t know if it’s the worst, but it has to be close. Bozied will always have the benefit of wondering what could have been. That has to be slightly better than never getting hurt, but also never being good enough. Or maybe it’s not better — maybe knowing you had the ability to play in the majors but were denied the opportunity by chance, or Fortuna, or whatever causes these things to happen is more painful.
Again, click here for the rest.
25 Jun 2010, by Eric
Chrissy Wilson is a writer who lives in Reno, Nevada. She recently bought her first baseball mitt. We're joining Chrissy as she breaks in, and ultimately becomes one with that glove. Read part one here.
“Well beat the drum and hold the phone, the sun came out today.” It seems this winter has brought insane weather all over the country. Blizzards, flash floods, endless cold fronts. Nevada, my current home, has had no salvation from these terrors. Mostly, we were completely robbed of a spring. It was cold and snowy throughout May with only a couple of days sprinkled here and there of tolerable weather where a light sweater was still required.
My new glove sat in the corner, and I yearned for sunlight and the opportunity to follow through on my purchase and break the glove in. Any time the weather was decent enough I would attempt it.
The first opportunity I got was in the beginning of April. My boyfriend and I headed to his childhood elementary school and played catch as the sun set. We wore sweaters; however, I eventually shed mine as I found myself running all over the place trying to retrieve the ball I was continually unable to catch. My boyfriend stood still fielding each ball I threw. I quickly learned that I luckily don’t throw like a girl, but I catch like one. With each ball he threw at me, I flinched and almost ducked out of the way, working up a sweat running back and forth for the ball. I was also disappointed to realize exactly how stiff my mitt was and how much breaking in this was really going to take. When the ball happened to land in my mitt, it would plop directly out and onto the ground in front of me in a depressing manner. Eventually we had to abandon ship as I was completely out of breath.
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I looked at my glove with disappointment and anger. Had I picked the wrong one? Why on Earth was it so stubbornly bowl shaped? Was it cheap leather? Do I have unnaturally weak hands? Will I ever be able to play catch without embarrassing myself? Maybe I really just wasn’t built for playing any sort of sport. I worried that maybe I should just stick to knitting and reading.
That night we went to sushi with my boyfriend’s good friend who is a die-hard Yankees fan but still a good person. His wife and my boyfriend are both novice baseball fans who just don’t understand spending a ton of money for online-streaming of games with poor video quality from mlb.com or watching the Ken Burns documentary over and over again in the winter. So when the four of us go out, we tend to cross-separate with each other’s significant others to talk about our respective interests.
He informed me that he was a little-league all-star as a child. His pitching was featured in the local newspaper, and he broke records for number of strike-outs. How much of this is true, I am unsure, but I was open to any advice he was willing to give me. He advised me to fold the mitt in on itself, wrap it with rubber bands, and sleep on it. So that night when I got home, I made sure my parents weren’t home as I snuck into the kitchen and found my mother’s prized possession, her rubber band ball. She has been working on it since she moved to Reno 13 years ago. It sit satop a crystal podium and measures about a foot in diameter. As you can imagine, regular old rubber bands no longer cut it. Her rubber band of choice is the thick blue one that come on broccoli or asparagus at the grocery store. This was what I was after. I stole a couple and hoped my mother would not notice. I slipped them around my mitt and went to bed, hoping this would work. An hour into tossing and turning because of the lump under my pillow, I got frustrated and chucked it across my room. My glove and I were really off to a rough start.
Another cold front swept through the desert, and it took a week or so before I had another opportunity to play catch. This time we went to a nearby park where a multitude of families were trying to soak up the intermittent sun and thaw out from the recent freeze. I had confidence that it would all go smoothly this time around. Yet the baseball just would not stick in the glove. I was frustrated to watch the ball we used grow scuffed from grass, asphalt, dirt, etc while the glove stubbornly remained the same as the day I bought it.
The boyfriend offered to trade gloves and quickly agreed with me that the glove was still stiff. We played for a while as he struggled to bend the glove around the ball. I watched the glove molding.
“Okay, we can trade gloves back now,” I told him.
“I’ll just keep using it. It will break in faster.”
“No, that’s okay. Give it back.”
“My hands are probably a lot stronger than yours; it’ll go faster this way.”
But I wanted to break it in. Even if it takes weeks to break in, I want the glove to mold to my hand, and I want the satisfaction of knowing that I broke it in. So I took the stubborn hunk of leather from him and put it back on my hand. That’s the only way it will ever feel like my glove.