Sabermetric Research: Birnbaum: Clutch hitting: a new study from Pete Palmer and Dick Cramer

Or as first-sacker turned Allison Steele wannabe, Adrienne Barbeauchamp, once said..."There’s something missing in the fog!”

Of the many excellent presentations at last weekend’s SABR convention in Cleveland, one of my favorites was the study by Pete Palmer and Dick Cramer, on clutch hitting. I have to admit that the subject has been done to death (notably by Palmer and Cramer themselves). And there are probably a lot of people like Chris Jaffe, who is “sooooooo very tired of clutch hitting studies.”

So this study could be accused of beating a dead horse – other studies, I think, have already convincingly shown that clutch talent doesn’t exist – but, on the other hand, on a controversial issue like clutch, you can never have too much evidence.

More important, the highly-regarded “The Book” (along with a previous study by author Andy Dolphin) does believe there is some evidence for clutch. So the debate isn’t completely settled.

That’s why I think this study does add valuable evidence to the pile.

THT: Jaffe: Ten things I didn’t know before SABR 38

Chris Jaffe takes in the SABR conven...BREAKING NEWS! Joe Dimino snaps wrist playing punchball: Bernie Williams to be slingbearer!

4. I’m sooooooo very tired of clutch hitting studies

By far the biggest names slated for Cleveland were longtime sabermetric lions Pete Palmer and Dick Cramer, who co-presented a section responding to Bill James’s “Understanding the Fog” article from the Baseball Research Journal from a few years ago.

This confirmed for me something I’ve long since believed. It wasn’t that clutch hitting can’t be shown to exist even if you account for James’ fog (which was their main point). It was about the entire debate. It’s the same damn back-and-forth. You’ll never be able to prove definitively that clutch ability doesn’t exist (that’s difficult with anything) and a rigorously mathematical approach will show at most only limited clutch ability.

It’s one thing if some random study of the issue by Billy Joe Robidiminoux does a study that leaves me flat, but these aren’t just any two random guys from Tacoma.

By and large, the air has become stagnant on this issue and the whole line of questioning is suffering. You know what someone will say about the issue before he opens his mouth. This dead horse keeps getting beaten.

Pax Arcana: Nerding out on baseball at the Museum of Science

Pax Arcana and the luminous and courageous Mrs. Pax Arcana beat a path down to the Boston Museum of Science last night to hear Bill James, the grand poobah of baseball nerds, and his protege Rob Neyer hold forth on a variety of baseball related topics.

...The problem for James is how to measure the impact of a player’s personality on the team’s wins and losses. He has no idea how to go about doing that, but thinks it will have to involve practices from other scientific disciplines, such as organizational psychology. He sharply disputes the idea that off-field behavior doesn’t matter.

“There are some people who seem to think the things that happen off the field have no effect on teams whatsoever. That strikes me as idiotic,” he says.

About Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, James hews to his numbers-based approach and refrains from diving into the murky waters of ethics and morality. “If you choose to feel cheated, I can’t argue with that,” he tells an audience member. “I choose to feel a different way.”

Thanks, Rob...and Happy Birthday! (Doh!...I forgot to use the “You’re with me, flannel” line)

Salon: Kaufman: Popular baseball mechanics

You can go to places like the pitching or hitting mechanics blogs run by a St. Louis computer consultant named Chris O’Leary, or to Saberscouting.com, a site run by a pair of budding scouts named Frankie Piliere and Kiley McDaniel.

You can check the archives at the Hardball Times for articles written by Carlos Gomez, a former side-arming pitcher in independent ball who for a while haunted message boards under the handle Chad Bradford Wannabe and last year parlayed his online musings into a gig as a scout for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Isn’t baseball fandom interesting? We used to just eat peanuts and get sunburned. Then Bill James made us mathematicians and the steroid era made us pharmacologists. Now we’re becoming kinesiologists. Last week I decided not to pick up right-handed pitcher Aaron Crow, the ninth overall pick in the June amateur draft, in a deep fantasy league, because I didn’t like the way he scap-loaded.

On the agenda for next week: Find out what the hell scap-loading is.

Dunno...but I could have sworn The Scaploaders once opened for The Smokejumpers.

Phoenix: Reilly: While old and new media are mending fences, they’re still squaring off in jockland

Kev, sends over this “old school/ new school stuff, which is always popular.”...including some choice Biss Buzzinger.

Buzz Bissinger is contrite. For one thing, he says, his enraged tone in the now-infamous confrontation with Deadspin’s Leitch was out of line. “I was just way over the top,” he tells the Phoenix. “I was too heated up. . . . Will Leitch was just treated with disrespect. You shouldn’t say to someone off the bat that they’re ‘full of ####.’ ”

What’s more, Bissinger admits, he didn’t know as much as he should have before appearing on Costas’s show. “There are some very good blogs dedicated to single subjects,” he acknowledges; his examples include Beerleaguer, dedicated to the Philadelphia Phillies, and profootballtalk.com. They’re very informational. Their goal isn’t to play a snarky game of gotcha, or to be malicious and cruel. They’re great.”

But this contrition has its limits. The good blogs, Bissinger maintains, are the exception. The bad blogs — the ones that privilege glib snideness over reporting and analysis — are the rule. They’re also the most popular. And according to him, they represent the future of the medium.

“The younger generation likes the snarky tone,” says Bissinger. “They like the gossip, they like the juice. I don’t think they really appreciate good writing and reporting, and those, to me, are precious arts. . . . It’s all some interactive gangbang.”

He adds, “You have blogs that proudly parade around saying, ‘We don’t need no stinking credibility or stinking information — it doesn’t matter what you say or do if you know how to write.’ They cover themselves under the mantle of the First Amendment. But if John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had any idea what the First Amendment would have wrought, they would have canceled it.”

AP expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations

In the name of “defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt” the Associated Press is now selling “quotation licenses” that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that “fair use”—the right to copy without permission—means “Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.").

It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.”

SABR: Preliminary Schedule for SABR38

Now the online schedule is up, complete with an overview of all presentations.

Presentations will be given by David Smith, Steve Treder, Steve Steinberg, Jeff Angus, Vince Gennaro, Alan Nathan, Anthony Giacalone, Phil Birnbaum, a pair from Norman Macht, and a joint presentation from Dick Cramer & Pete Palmer, as well as others.

Deadspin: Leitch: A Note From Your Editor

Black tabled? Will Leitch moving on...sorta.

We started this site on September 8, 2005, with a simple headline: “Welcome to Deadspin. We Come With a Pure Heart and Mirthful Disposition.” We think that’s still pretty much true; we try to keep our disposition mirthful at all times. But sometimes that’s more difficult to do than others; this is one of those times.

It is with heavy heart — yet mirthful disposition! — that we announce that our time as Deadspin editor is about to draw to a close. After almost three years of plugging away around here, we are leaving as editor of Deadspin on Friday, June 27. We have accepted a job as a contributing editor for New York magazine. We’re excited about it, but, obviously, this has been our baby and our life every day for three years — which is about four decades in blog time — and we’re too emotional about the whole thing to get into much more detail about how we feel about the whole matter.

We’ll still be writing for the site, even after we’re not the editor anymore, so you’re not gonna get rid of us that easily. (We kind of love it here; we have nothing but manhugs and fistpounds for the Gawker crew, and vice versa.) We’ll go into the details more over the next few weeks, but we’ll just leave you today with a simple quote of “It’s probably time,” and then try not to dribble tears on our keyboard.

Thanks to The Best Neil.

ShysterBall: Calcaterra: Hell in a Handbasket, I Tells Ya!

first of all colin farrell is on great actor look at phone booth and tigerland and the recruit with al pacino.

I normally don’t simply point and laugh around here, but I may have found the worst sports article ever written. A sampling:

A fairly new Internet sensation called “blogs” now dominate the hyperlinks on our search engines and have completely changed journalism as we know it. Now, the Average Joe who probably only watches games from his or her couch and has probably never had a credential to be inside a locker room or press conference is giving strong opinions, badmouthing coaches and dissing players for the entire world to read . . .

. . . Something needs to be done about how today’s athletes are being paid because it can turn really ugly. In Major League Baseball, a sport with no salary cap, bidding wars are causing inflated contracts for players who don’t deserve them. Don’t get me wrong, Alex Rodriguez will probably go down as the greatest player of all time when his career is finished. But does anybody on this planet really deserve to be paid $28 million a year? Yes, one person does: The one who cures cancer . . .

Sure, we’ve all read stuff that looks like this, but here’s the kicker: it’s written by a 22 year-old guy who, appearance-wise, is walking the fine line between hipster and #########. Either way, I’m having a hard time figuring out why he’s writing in the voice of a 79 year-old man. Maybe his publication provides a clue: “Senior Times Magazine,” which bills itself as “your guide to active retirement in northern Florida.” Is he assuming the old man voice because he thinks that’s what his readers want, or is this some elaborate parody?

Former Royal Willie Mays Aikens to be released from prison today

Former Royals standout Willie Mays Aikens is scheduled to be released from federal prison today, and he could be at a Kansas City halfway house as early as this evening.

“I’m thrilled to death,” Aikens told The State of Columbia, S.C., on Tuesday. “I’ve always had hope something would happen with my case.”

Aikens, prisoner 01732-031 at the federal correctional institution in Jesup, Ga., was sentenced to more than 20 years for crack cocaine distribution, bribery and gun charges under mandatory sentencing guidelines in 1994.

At the time, punishment for crack offenders was much stricter than powdered cocaine because it was thought that crack defendants were more violent — an assumption that statistics did not definitively support.

...Aikens is scheduled to undergo counseling and spend 90 to 120 days at the halfway house in Kansas City before his full release. After that, he’s expected to return to his hometown of Seneca, S.C., to be with friends and family.

Riot in Bob T block.

WSJ: Bialik: Baseball Analyst Draws Fans by Crunching Election Numbers

Mr. Silver, who developed the Pecota projection system for research company Baseball Prospectus, began analyzing the 2008 election last October in his spare time, under the pseudonym Poblano at Daily Kos. His postings combined his love of numbers and his support of Sen. Barack Obama, and quickly gained a following among readers of the liberal blog. That inspired him in March to launch his own politics site: fivethirtyeight.com, named after the number of voters in the Electoral College. For months, he retained his Poblano identity. Only on Friday, with a New York Post column under his byline set to appear over the weekend, did the 30-year-old Chicago resident reveal his true identity to his readers.

Even anonymously, he’d gathered a following: by Mr. Silver’s count, 20,000 to 30,000 unique visitors each day, including prominent political bloggers. Despite all the attention, he expects the site to remain a hobby — though it does carry ads — and still works at Baseball Prospectus full-time. (Mr. Silver’s aware the site’s name and focus will make November a bit of a “death sentence.”)

“In 1972...Nixon beat McGovern by 24 points overall”...which started me drinking.

MLB.com: Hoboken Grows ‘Staches For Baseball

Local bar raises whiskers, funds to restore historic plaque

Surrounded by foliage and overlooking an intersection on 11th and Washington, a very weathered stone plaque in Hoboken commemorates one of the city’s most famous claims. The small New Jersey city, located across the Hudson River from Manhattan, asserts that the very first official game of baseball was played there on the Elysian Field on June 19, 1846. It’s a part of the area’s history that a local bar/restaurant is honoring with a fundraiser, a restoration plan and a lot of facial hair.

The Elysian Cafe is a long-running Hoboken establishment on 1001 Washington St., with 1920s-style decor and a soft spot for America’s pastime. Bartenders Ames Crawford, Steve Schneider and Vito Lantz offer customers a novel “baseball-tini” drink, don hats and jerseys representing favorite teams and can be seen crushing the ingredients of various mixed drinks with a baseball bat. Recently, the bar’s male employees have grown mustaches inspired by the Handlebars and Fu Manchus exemplified by Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, Thurman Munson and other Yankees stars portrayed in the ESPN series “The Bronx is Burning.” The latter action has created a new trend among Hoboken citizens, which is just what the restaurant needs to draw attention to their newest cause: raising money to restore the historic baseball plaque.

“It’s caught on like wildfire,” marvels Cafe manager Crawford, who states that male customers have started growing mustaches as well and that women, children and even dogs have been spotted with fake mustaches.

Good effort by the Elysian, which had its best days as a blues bar where bikers mixed with yuppies and locals in harmony.

They lost me at “basball-tini” though.

The Big Lead: An Interview with Joe Posnanski of the KC Star

Krakafinga, East of Javascript, points out this nifty Poz innerview.

Q: Although more papers are slowing catching onto this blogging thing, only a handful of newspapers bloggers seem to ‘get it.’ You clearly fall into this group. Any advice for the newspapers bloggers who find it difficult to trudge on without readers or comments? To those who write more newsy than conversational?

Well, I don’t know that I’m the right guy to be giving anyone advice since at last check I make precisely $0.00 per week writing my blog. But I would advise anyone to be open to what’s new out there. It seems like the first reaction people have to is scoff at what’s new or ignore or it or say that it will go away. There are still people who are hoping that someone will unplug the Internet. I think that’s human. I also think it’s a good way to make yourself obsolete. It seemed to me that at first newspapers thought that blogs were just a good place to dump all those little notes, tidbits and stories that weren’t good enough to put in the paper. Hey, here’s where I ate lunch. Hey, I just saw Billy Crystal in an elevator. Wow, the media parking is too far away from the entrance. Stuff like that. And of course, that just made us look even more out of touch. It seems to me that blogs can be whatever we want to make them, but we have to make them ESSENTIAL. They are a direct line to our readers. It’s a great opportunity, but it’s more important than ever that you offer something unique — a strong voice, an informed outlook, an insider’s view, a funny approach, a breath of honesty, whatever — because there’s just SO much out there.

CStB: Cosloy: Web 2.0, Finally Sorted Out By Skip Caray

Skip Caray and the internet gospel.

During the 5th inning of Atlanta’s 6-1 defeat of the Mets earlier today, Braves broadcaster Pete Van Wieren suggested the visitors’ recent clubhouse turmoil was particularly hard to cope with, given the New York market’s plethora of beat reporters, talk radio screamers and “websites”.

After a lengthy pause, colleague Skip Carey weighed in.

“The bloggers are the ones that are tough. Some of ‘em are pretty good. They write their opinions…others are guys that sit around the house, have a few beers and just make stuff up. Send it out on the internet as if it’s gospel.”

Caray’s been in poor health of late, and with that in mind, there’s not much sport in picking on the radio veteran. But it would be fascinating to know which blogs in particular he considers guilty of “making stuff up.” Keep in mind, neither the Los Angeles Times nor Boston Herald can technically be considered blogs.

SABR: Low Fee for Convention Registration Approaching

As of now, it costs $87 for a SABR memeber to register for this year’s shindig in Cleveland, and $114 for non-member.  On May 29, that becomes $129 and $159, so for those planning on attending, but make the registration in the next 9 days. 

Splice Today: INTERVIEW: Craig Calcaterra

Honey, how can you expect me to do that when there’s still Calcaterra to be interviewed?

ST: What’s your favorite book about baseball? Favorite movie?

Geek answer: Bill James’ Historical Baseball Abstract. There’s more in there than 20 other baseball books, and that’s not even counting the sections explaining his then-new stat Win Shares (which I never really read). Non-geek answer: [Jim Bouton’s] Ball Four. Not because of the salacious tell-all stuff, either. By the time I read it, ballplayers had gone on trial for taking part in cocaine rings and the all time hit king was doing time in federal prison, so hearing about Mickey Mantle foolin’ around wasn’t all that shocking. No, what I liked about it was how open Bouton was about his own insecurities as a ballplayer and how honestly he described his desperation to hang on. Learning that professional athletes were, you know, human beings was very important to me and shaped the way I have consumed sports ever since. It has helped me with my day job too in that, like Bouton with Joe Schultz and the Pilots, I often feel out of place with my peers in the law and struggle to play the role I’m expected to play. Bouton figured out how to make it work, so there may be hope for me too.

Movie: Bull Durham, for some of the same sorts of reasons I like Ball Four. The game in Bull Durham is simply a game, and its participants are flawed human beings. Most baseball movies screw things up by following football story lines and dynamics. Bull Durham feels like the baseball season. It unfolds easily and comfortably. The highs aren’t too high and the lows aren’t too low. There’s no “big game” moment and no heroics, which is fine, because those things rarely exist in real life anyway.

Statistically Speaking: Interviewing David Pinto

Seidman interviews one of the biz’s good dudes, David Pinto.

ES: Musings is slowly becoming what MLB.com used to be for me in terms of showing interesting stories spanning the entire league, but there is so much more your site offers that many still fail to take advantage of.  Could you explain how features like the Day-to-Day Database, Lineup Analysis, and Defensive Charts could enhance someone’s work?

DP: The Day to Day database has batting and pitching lines for each player back to 1957.  Because it’s date based, you can look at a player or group of players over any time period.  There is also batting event data going back to 2000.  Again, since this is date based, you can find out for example what someone is hitting with RISP over the last two weeks or last two years.  More splits out there are season based.  The Lineup Analysis is a fun tool that, given nine on-base percentages and slugging percentages, calculates the optimum lineup.  The defensive charts are from the Probabilistic Model of Range, a new way of measuring range based on the probability of turning a batted ball into an out based on a number of factors.

MSN: 8 Reasons Baseball is Lame and Boring

MSN Quick Vomit Launch...all just one dick away.

In just about every U.S. city, if you’re not a fan of baseball, you might as well not be American. Harboring an aversion to the sport is equivalent to burning Old Glory—especially here in Boston, where I live. What? You don’t know Big Papi’s slugging percentage? That’s an immediate flogging. Tell anyone you’d rather walk along the Charles River than spend an afternoon at Fenway Park? You’re looking at five years in Guantanamo Bay, pal. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some kind of a namby-pamby anti-sports guy. Football is a part of my DNA and most of my shirts growing up were the color of blood. But let’s face it: Baseball is lame and boring. At the risk of being cuffed and detained by Homeland Security (which, by the way, is why I’m writing this article under a pseudonym), here are eight reasons why.

Statistics

If I want a lesson in mathematics, I’ll walk through the halls of MIT, not the turnstiles of Yawkey Way. We’re supposed to be enjoying ourselves, aren’t we? On-base percentages, opponent on-base plus slugging percentages, sabermetrics … Alan Greenspan might enjoy crunching the numbers, but for those of us who’d rather leave our brains at work, the cold-beverage-intake-to-bladder-outflow ratio makes a whole lot more sense.

The Book Blog: You wanted crap/yap from a premium writer….

The Neyer/Lichtman Guide to ########...An Historical Compendium of ########, ########, and #######. (but the book ends well!)

From Rob Neyer, who is lately (maybe for a long while) just as obsessed (and misguided) as almost everyone else about short-term recent performance:

So is Cliff Lee for real? I think all we can say is that he’s really healthy. He’s going to give up a higher batting average on balls in play, and some reasonable percentage of the fly balls he gives up will fly over the fence. So no, he probably doesn’t wind up winning the Cy Young Award. But I’ll bet he’s better than average. And considering how well C.C. Sabathia’s pitched in his last two starts, suddenly the Indians would seem to have the best rotation in the majors.

So Cliff Lee, 31 years old, is better than average, because he has pitched well to 128 batters after having pitched mediocrely, at best, to 3047 batters over the last 4 years?  I think not, and I will take up Neyer on that bet (he offered this time, although obviously not literally).

...That is a fairly sucky pitcher who, based on his 128 batters faced so far this year, is a now an ever-so-slightly less sucky pitcher!  He is NOT better than a league average pitcher, nor he is a league average pitcher.  (Warning: of course, I don’t KNOW what he is for sure, but my estimate, since it is based on science, is a heck of a lot better than Neyer’s, which is based on nothing, but a distorted and misinformed view of what 5 outings of good pitching following 4 years of poor pitching, means.)

...The sad part is that Neyer knows this stuff (I think), but he still writes the same crap that everyone else does.

TV Barn: Bob Costas: “Buzz realizes that he did a disservice to his own points”

‘Bleep you, #########.’” That’s a hit!”...quickly contacts Blogagotchi.com to see if its free.

But the worst thing you’d find in talk radio the snarkiest thing you’d read in print ... even more virulent forms of it are found on the internet because in most cases there are no standards. Now, coming with it are there many important fresh new voices? Absolutely. Are there places where people like you, who were one of the first ones, and Joe Posnanski, not to name all Kansas City guys, but where you can go to get more expansive or quirkier versions of their thought? Yes. Are there nichier places ... baseball-centric sites filled with detailed statistical analysis or, say, everything you want to know about the Seattle Mariners? That’s great. Nothing wrong with that.

But I think the blogosphere, if you’re a critic of the blogosphere you’re somehow against its democratic virtues. Hey, I spent my whole career talking to cabdrivers, everyday people, I did sports talk radio in St. Louis in the 1970s. Some people are more knowledgeable about aspects of sports than I am. I absolutely respect that. ... But it also opens the door for every anonymous bully and lout to spout.

I was talking to King Kaufman about this. He said, “You know, a lot of this stuff, you can get on sports talk radio, except (on the Internet) you don’t have the bleep button.” And I agreed but added this: If you truly didn’t have a bleep button in talk radio ... you wouldn’t just have the occasional person spewing scurrilous things, you’d have it all the time, more and more ... to the point where it crowded out other voices and brought the whole enterprise down.

Truth be told, on any websites, not just confined to sports, that is what happens. It’s not that this kind of lowbrow stuff is tolerated, it is implictly encouraged because the more of those type posts you get the more it is validated. The popularity of sites is measured by it. Who is going to say, “I don’t want the person who says ‘Bleep you, #########.’” That’s a hit! That’s my single criticism of this. And anyone who interprets that as a rejection of all the upsides of the web is either rather dense or wilfully misinterpreting what I say.

Bissinger launches a profane, boneheaded attack on the Internet for being profane and boneheaded

King Bees Buzz...On Your Way Down the Drain.

The segment opened with a packaged piece in which Leitch gave a boilerplate defense of his site’s existence, then more of the same between Costas and Leitch live at the round table. Costas, who has recently taken some get-off-my-lawnish potshots at the blogosphere, joked, “To my surprise, I find you very palatable in person.”

After a few moments, Bissinger could take no more. Perched sideways on his chair as though the very act of sharing a planetary atmosphere with Leitch was painful to him, he said, “I’m just going to interject because I feel very strongly about this: I really think you’re full of ####.”

Thus spake the man who says he has “spent 40 years of my life trying to perfect the craft” of writing—which those punk kids on the Internet would never do—and who is offended by the profane tone of the blogs.

That is, in the comment he printed out and brought to the show and read on “Costas Now,” which to Bissinger apparently represents the entire Internet. This routine was very much like holding up a gummy worm and saying, “Food is terrible. I mean, look at this thing.”

What a yutz.

Sports media will be analyzed on HBO’s “Costas Now”

The sports media will take center stage on a special live, 90-minute edition of “Costas Now” at 10 p.m. Tuesday on HBO. There will be five segments on the show, and it will be conducted in a town-hall setting.

“On [Tuesday], we’re going to take stock of the sports media landscape,”HBO Sports president Ross Greenburg said. “We look forward to a comprehensive and opinionated evening of discussion.”

Segment One: Sports Talk Radio. Video package interviews: Chicago radio host Mike North, Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Hines Ward, Chicago Sun-Times columnist Jay Mariotti and WFAN radio hosts Mike and the Mad Dog. Live Panel: N.Y. Giants defensive end Michael Strahan, best selling author and radio host Mitch Albom and WFAN radio host Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo.

Segment Two: The Internet and Impact of Bloggers. Video package interviews: deadspin.com editor Will Leitch, TV writer and media critic Michael Schur and Washington Post columnist and PTI host Michael Wilbon. Live panel: Pulitzer Prize winning author Buzz Bissinger, Will Leitch and Cleveland Browns wide receiver Braylon Edwards.

Segment Six: Eight town drugdrunks (including Glocko the Swill) will discuss how embarrassing it is for a grown man to be caught carrying a Mickey Mantle baseball card while receiving full depantsiation rights in a hobo alleyway.

Orioles manager lambasts fans who ran on field in Seattle

But I bet his spinnbarkeit is worse than his bite!

Baltimore manager Dave Trembley lambasted two fans who ran on the field during an Orioles game Thursday night at Seattle.

During the game, two spectators jumped onto the field and ran behind Orioles outfielder Jay Payton.

“It’s embarrassing to baseball,’’ Trembley said Friday night before a game against the White Sox. “I wasn’t happy because I’m a big proponent of respect. I think that’s the epitome of disrespect, when two idiots run onto the field like that.

“They came up from behind two of my players. ... I wish I could have taken them in the back room myself. I would have beaten the snot out of both of them.’’

Butch Hobson Lends His Wisdom to Youth Baseball and Earth Day Celebration

Everything will be cleaned out...except for these damn floating (adjust-poke-prod-settle...AAAH) bone chips in my elbow!

In the spirit of two great American traditions - Baseball and Earth Day -the Cromwell Clean Energy Task Force is supporting Youth Baseball and Clean Energy at Cromwell Middle School on Saturday, April 26 between the hours of 9:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. “Good luck to all of the young, up and coming baseball players in Cromwell. May God bless you with hot bats, strong arms and swift legs,” states former Boston Red Sox ballplayer and manager Butch Hobson. “I want families in Cromwell to join our winning team, the Fields of Green, to clean the environment and reverse the tragedy of global warming.”

The Task Force will be giving out free compact fluorescent light bulbs and reusable shopping bags to the first 100 Cromwell residents that bring in their old incandescent light bulbs. For those families that sign-up for clean energy, additional energy saving compact fluorescent light bulbs will be given out. The first 25 families that sign-up for clean energy will receive an autographed baseball from Red Sox great Butch Hobson and be eligible for a raffle to receive an autographed glove, bag of sunflower seeds, or bottle of Ultimate ME2 – a fuel additive that lowers vehicle emissions and a Fields of Green product recommendation.

Viva El Birdos: Iboros: rob neyer Q+A: the art of storytelling

As commenting nomar34 almost said..."I love me some (more) Neyer...”

I have one in particular that’s been driving me a little crazy. I attended a game in the mid-1970s where Ted Simmons and Bill Madlock, who was then with the Cubs, got into a brawl --- and the brawl was precipitated by Al Hrabosky going into his Mad Hungarian routine behind the mound. Every time he’d get back on the rubber, Madlock would step out of the box. And then when Madlock would step back in, the Hungarian would go back behind the mound and do his psyche-up routine again. And eventually words were exchanged, and Simmons and Madlock started going at it. I’ve gone through the archive looking for any game in St. Louis in which Hrabosky pitched an inning in which Madlock came to bat, and I can’t find the game. But I was there.

One of the stories I do remember from my youth --- and I should have remembered this one before --- also involved Hrabosky. I remember very vividly being at my grandparents’ house on summer vacation in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, which is Cardinals country as you know, and I have this incredibly vivid memory of Hrabosky coming into the game with the bases loaded and I believe even falling behind the first batter 3 and 0, and then striking out that batter and the next two batters. I would have bet just about anything that this happened. Well I tried to check it out a few years ago when I was working on my Baseball Lineups book, and I could not find anything. These things lodge in our heads, especially when we’re young, and once they’re there --- I don’t know much about how memory works, but my guess is it’s self-reinforcing. Things pop in there, and then the next time it pops in, we think about it again and that reinforces it, and that happens over and over again --- and eventually we know that happened. Even though it didn’t.

THT: Jaffe: Joe Posnanski Interview

Neat interview with BTF approved* Joe Posnanski...(along with Arnold Hano, John Drebinger, Edward H. Prell and James Arnot Crusinberry)

So your job is to write about sports for a living. You also write books about baseball. In your free time you write lengthy bloggings (that look like they take some notable research) about baseball. Do you ever get burnt out on baseball? Do you ever want to get away from it?

Well, I know this will sound weird ... but I see the blog as getting away. It’s a totally different kind of writing for me, a much more relaxed thing, I tend to view it the way someone might view, I don’t know, doing puzzles or building model trains or working on cars or whatever. I just think of something goofy—usually a baseball thing, but not always—and write about it. So that’s really fun for me.

I can’t lie and say I enjoy every minute of every day of my job—I did not enjoy getting my American flights canceled recently and my bag lost. But for the most part, I really do love it.

Specifically, I can’t imagine ever getting tired of baseball. I really can’t. Maybe it’s because I see it a lot of different ways. I see it as a sportswriter who tries to write about the game in a way that would interest a lot of people. I see it as an author who loves the idea of trying to capture what Pete Rose meant as a player, what drove Joe Morgan, what pulled at Johnny Bench. I see it as a blogger who just loves the minutia, loves going through Sam McDowell’s 1968 season or trying to figure out why young pitchers who win 100 games don’t often win 300. I see it as a fan who sits in my recliner at home and falls asleep to a Royals game. And I see it as a Dad who loves taking Margo and the kids to ball games and being connected enough to get them a hug from the mascot Sluggerrr. So, you never know what will happen, but I cannot imagine baseball as a sport ever being boring to me.

Post-Gazette: Kiner’s launch 58 years ago unforgettable

Don’t worry it’s not another story about Doris Day’s landing pad...it’s about Tom Hennen, SABR, and the longest homer ever.

From the moment Kiner’s clout kissed the sidewalk that day, Hennen figured he was one of the few people who’d seen its entire arc, and eventually resolved to pace it off one day to measure it precisely.

“Then they tore the place down and I thought, ‘Oh, there goes my story.’ But then last August I saw in the paper where someone had written a book about Forbes Field. There on page 123 I found a picture I’d been looking for for 57 years.”

An aerial shot taken from behind the right-field wall shows the sidewalk, the grove, and most of Oakland, providing enough visual relativism for Hennen and Norden to have calculated a flight path of 570 feet.

“That’s conservatively,” Norden said. “I’m an educator who just likes baseball and I just helped Tom with some of the physics. We’ve got some power point slides to show, but I’ll be turning this over to Tom. He’s the star of the show. I’ll just talk briefly about the myth-making associated with some of these homers.”

ESPN: Lapchick: MLB’s diversity would have Jackie Robinson shaking his head

A word from Richard Lapchick who has joined ESPN.com as a “regular commentator on issues of diversity in sport.”

However, there is no doubt Jackie would be dissatisfied that there are only two African-American and one Latino general managers at the major league level, in spite of the fact that that is an all-time high for MLB. The only Latino GM is the New York Mets’ Omar Minaya; Ken Williams of the Chicago White Sox and Tony Reagins of the Los Angeles Angels are the only African-American GMs. This is baseball’s worst area, and MLB is way behind both the NBA and NFL.

Robinson might have a smile on his face if he showed up at Major League Baseball’s offices today and saw that 28 percent of the staff are people of color and 42 percent are women. Likely, he would give commissioner Bud Selig a pat on the back for that. But he would be on Selig’s case about the fact that those percentages are significantly lower at the team level. And in a nod to Rachel and the issue of equity for women, he would surely tell the commissioner that he would never accept a C-plus as a grade from one of his own children, and that he hopes MLB will soon fix the lack of opportunities for women.

We are fortunate that the Robinson legacy is alive today. He changed America. Baseball, like America itself, is not perfect, but it is surely better because he helped inspire it to be. Thank you, Jackie and Rachel.

MLB provides ‘Hands on’ help for parks

I once cleaned up our stickball lot and came across a kit full of bloody hypos and pus-encrusted swabs, your usual urban goody bag of doom, I turned it over to Officer Johnny H (The Singing Cop)...oddly, I never heard another word about it.

Recognizing that ballparks are not the only beautiful parks around, Major League Baseball was represented over the weekend in a staggering overall turnout for the 14th annual New York Cares “Hands On New York” Day.

Volunteers from MLB Properties, MLB Productions and MLB Advanced Media joined forces with more than 6,500 other caring New Yorkers who helped revitalize 110 city parks and gardens, playgrounds, community centers, schools and homeless shelters. Volunteers also planted 20,000 trees throughout the five boroughs in support of MillionTreesNYC. It was the largest turnout to date.

The MLB crew was assigned to St. Nicholas Park at 135th Street in Harlem, and was primarily responsible for painting park benches (including one notoriously long bench rechristened as the Green Monster, despite provincial feelings) and perimeter fencing. All volunteer units were dispatched to specific areas throughout the vast metropolitan area.

“Baseball once again showed its commitment to the community,” said Tom Brasuell, vice president of community affairs for Major League Baseball, and one of those wearing plenty of paint at the end of the day. “Our dedicated crew of volunteers took their Saturday and made Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park a better, brighter, place.”

Biz of Sports: When Sports Becomes a Small Matter: A Child and Autism

From Maury Brown…

There is no category for this topic here. There is baseball, basketball, hockey, football, and auto racing, but there is nothing for topics of far more importance.

This, being my personal blog, has been about commentary on sports. It has never been about my views on matters outside of that.

And, it has never been a place where you would find anything personal. Today, that changes as I find myself placed in a new cause. It is one that touches myself, my family, and as I will outline below, a growing and alarming number of families.

Over the past year, our youngest son has not been developing at the rate that most children do. At first, we chalked this up to him just not accelerating at the rate of our first son, who was ahead of the curve. Now, coming up on the age of three, we saw that he was not communicating, even on rudimentary levels such as pointing when he wanted something. Only when prompted would he respond verbally to a very small list of known words. Things that we initially thought were cute were really signs of something else. There was the jumping up and down when he was excited, spinning in circles, and the one we thought was the funniest… never calling me “Daddy”, but rather, “Mamma. “

Given these signs, we met with his pediatrician and from there, other specialists. The diagnosis was that our son is autistic.

As my wife and family come to grips to this news, we now find ourselves in a life altering experience. The good news is that with early detection, one-on-one and what is called “mainstream” therapy, we can hope that our son will eventually be a productive part of society. What was alarming to me was the incredible trend of more and more being afflicted with this disability. There was a point where the word “autism” would elicit confused stares. Now, nearly everyone in America has a family member or friend touched by this disorder.

Based upon this, I am challenging all that have a platform to do so, to link to this news below, or pass it along. Call it the sports autism challenge, whatever. The hope is that by getting this news to as many as possible in the hope that others can be educated to this disability.