The Green Bag: Call for papers and nominations on “baseball and the law”

The Green Bag, “an entertaining journal of law”, has the following (11 Green Bag 2d 280):

We are seeking submissions of two sorts for our 2010 Almanac & Reader, which will have a baseball-and-the-law theme.

First, we want scholarly essays on topics related to baseball and the law. We hope to select 12 essays, each between 1500 and 5000 words long. Topics in which we are particularly (but not exclusively) interested are: (a) baseball and ... civil rights law; criminal law; defamation law; intellectual property law; international law; labor law; media law; property law; tax law; tort law; transportation law; (b) baseball players who were or became lawyers; and (c) roles played by lawyers in baseball.

Second, we want nominations for a ballot we are preparing to help us identify the best legal writing about baseball. This sort of writing might come from any number of sources, including but not limited to: fiction; journalism; litigation (briefs, judicial and arbitration decisions, etc.); poetry, music, and song; and scholarly works.

In due course—meaning sometime during the 2009 season—you will have an opportunity to vote for your favorites from the ballot we will prepare from your nominations. Balloting will take place online. We will publish the results—perhaps including a few samples from the top vote-getters—in the 2010 Almanac & Reader.

Please send your proposals for papers and your nominations for the ballot to editors@greenbag.org.

Mondesishouse.com: FIELD TRIP: THE PIRATES ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT SECTION

A long, troubling photo-illustrated review of a Sunday at PNC Park with some AYCE tickets in hand.

Actually, I didn’t see much “abuse” from the AYCE customers. It’s not as if there was some enormous guy walking back and forth the entire game with four burgers in his hand at all times. The speed of the line clearly discourages a lot of people. Some employees looked like they were trying to keep up with the crush; others looked like they were moving in suuuuper---slooooow----motion.

The way I saw it, most people loaded up on burgers and dogs in the early innings, then supplemented that with nachos and ice cream down the stretch, with ample drink refills throughout. A decent number of paying customers would use their entire four-item allocation on their own personal tray of drinks.

But as I looked around the stadium, I noticed something that was really sad: the complete and total apathy of the crowd. The Pirate “fans” have to rank among the worst in the league, and it’s not entirely their fault. As I said earlier, the fact that anyone is still showing up for these games is a minor miracle.

They come for the atmosphere, for the day out of the house and under the sun, for the Italian Day, for the hot dog toss, for the all-you-can-eat burgers, and for the Freddy Sanchez banner for their kid. If the Pirates win, it’s a nice bonus, but win or lose, the end result really doesn’t matter to the majority of those in attendance. They’re totally numb to the on-field action. And while the Pirates could only muster an eclectic collection of 10 singles today, it wasn’t as if they were ever out of the game at any point.

The Baseball Analysts: Hulet: Looking to Avoid the Sophomore Jinx: AL

The 2007 season saw a number of exciting players come into both the American and National leagues. The junior league received some intriguing young pitchers, while the senior circuit welcomed some promising offensive players.

We are more than a month into the 2008 so now is a good time to take a look at how the 2007 rookie class, now a collective group of sophomores, are doing. Are you as curious as I am to see how many of the promising 2007 rookies have been bitten by the dreaded sophomore jinx? Let’s have a look at the American League today.

Dustin Pedroia
2007 520 .317 .380 .442 112
2008 163 .307 .343 .311 104

Pedroia is the type of player that doesn’t have too many highs or too many lows; he’s just incredibly consistent and a great complimentary player to the big boppers in Boston. He should be good for quite some time and could be one of those players who gets better as he ages, in the Mark Loretta mold.

Josh Fields
2007 373 .244 .308 .480 101
2008 000 .000 .000 .000 000

Already stuck at Triple-A (and hitting .240), Fields has been sidelined by patella tendonitis, which never a pleasant injury for baseball players (just ask Mark McGwire). Continued low averages and on-base percentages will likely continue to hinder his major league success.

Hulet the dog out…

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.

The Baseball Analysts: Lederer: Q&A: Rob Neyer - The Big Book of Baseball Legends

Hassock tripping fun with Rob and Ritchie (if Buddy and Pickles Sorrell wander into the interview...I’m outta here!).

Rich: The Big Book of Baseball Legends is your sixth book in nine years. You have become almost as prolific in writing books as The Beatles were in producing records during the 1960s. I’ve got all of The Beatles CDs and all of your books. Both are important parts of my music and baseball libraries. The good news is that we don’t have to worry about Rob Neyer breaking up. Or do we?

Rob: I’m absolutely sure that’s the first time my name has ever been mentioned in the same breath with the Beatles, and for that I can only thank you, kind sir. And no, I’m not breaking up. But I am taking a break from book-writing until I have an idea that really excites me. Because at the moment I don’t have one.

Rich: In the Foreword, Bill James tells a story about a scene in a movie he recalls as Shattered Glass wherein a young reporter rises to the top of his profession in short order by “just making #### up.” As it turns out, the scene is actually from Absence of Malice as you so delicately noted upon a bit of research. How perfect was that for the Foreword in a book called Big Book of Baseball Legends?

Rob: Pretty perfect. Somebody else mentioned that in a review, and assumed that I had fact-checked that story and tossed in the correction as a friendly rebuke to Bill, but he actually fact-checked himself and added that coda, which I really enjoyed.

Salon: King Kaufman’s Sports Daily: Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends

“Rob Neyer’s latest “Big Book” debunks some baseball legends and confirms a few, all without spoiling the fun.”

And more important, these stories remind us that we know things like this about guys like that. They tie us to all the other baseball stories, and all the people who tell them and listen to them. Details aside, they’re all about the same thing, about being part of a crowd that cares about the same thing. Because you’re not getting past the table of contents if you’re not part of that crowd, the crowd that cares about baseball.

It’s fun to tag along with Neyer as he plays detective in the pages of his “Big Book of Baseball Legends,” mostly because of his breezy, conversational style and considerable wit. And it occurs to me as the Babe and the Emp lead a rousing chorus of “Oh, Clementine,” arm in arm atop the Hard Knox Cafe bar, that I disagree with Bill James. All this accuracy isn’t sad. The details are fun, and ultimately the details don’t matter.

I’m sure you noticed something improbable in my own story about lunch with Babe Ruth and Emperor Norton. You caught me, didn’t you?

The Hard Knox Cafe’s on Third Street, not Potrero Avenue.

The Must-Have Book Guide

Baseball fans will even argue baseball books. Everyone has their favorite and the reasons why each is the most important baseball book ever printed. Here is a collection of fans and the books they consider a ‘must have.’

Let the debate begin.

MSNBC: Doyle: THE SCIENCE OF BASEBALL STATS

“Quantum fluctuations in space, science, exploration and other cosmic fields”...like the study of physioc on baseball?

Was there ever a team sport better-suited for statistical modeling than baseball? The heart of the game involves one pitcher vs. one batter at a time, allowing for a dizzying array of individual statistics. The regular season, as well as the typical player’s career, will generally last long enough to build up an encyclopedia’s worth of those statistics.

No wonder so many statisticians and physicists love to theorize about the game’s winning factors - and no wonder new statistics are being created on a regular basis.

Batting averages and earned-run averages were just the start: Nowadays, you can track win shares and win probability, defense-independent ERA and range factor. But there’s always a farther frontier for baseball analysis, and a couple of new twists came to light at last month’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As Major League Baseball kicks off the new season this week, here are a few Web links you just might get a kick out of - even if you’re not a fan of the game:

THT: Studeman: Be Jolly

No, no...Studes hasn’t fallen for the lame patchy work of Jolly Garogers. It’s his look at The Bill James Gold Mine 2008 and the new Bill James Online website.

In addition to the nuggets and tables, organized by team, there are the typical James essays. Some of my favorites were:

--"Hall of Famers Among Us,” in which James gives his opinion about the Hall of Fame chances of each current player. The percentages are okay, but I particularly enjoyed his comments about individual players.
--"Measuring Consistency,” which includes a typical Jamesian formula to determine which players had the most consistent (and inconsistent) careers. Most consistent? Hank Aaron.
--"Strength Up the Middle,” an investigation of whether pennant-winning teams really are stronger up the middle.
--"The Targeting Phenomenon,” in which he shows that players really do target certain numbers, such as 20 wins and 100 RBIs.

What’s more, there are several shorter (single page) essays scattered throughout the team comments. These were all enjoyable—a good example is “Howard’s Mark,” about the history of batting strikeout records. When it comes to capturing and writing about the statistical nuances of the game, no one is better than Bill James.

The Book Blog: MGL: Bill James’ New Book, “Gold Mine”

“Come on, Bill, get off your *** a little!”...a true Ike Farrellian book flapper is there ever was one!

I just got the book, skimmed through it, and read a couple of the articles.  So far, “eh.” The title is a little grandiose (of course), although it is catchy (with a gold colored cover to go along with the title). 

As I said, I barely read through it.  It is filled with team essays, a la all the other “annuals” (BP, THT, Shandler, etc.), with interesting sidebars about some of the players on each team.  Each essay gives you team and player stats, each one a little different. He picks out a few players on each team and gives you detailed hitting or pitching data, like where and how balls are hit or pitched.

Throughout the book, he gives us 3 or 4-page articles or studies, like those in BP or THT.  Some are interesting.  Honestly, most of the studies, from what I could tell at first glance (I read a few of them) are done with brute force rather than the finesse and rigor I would like to see in statistical studies.  One I found interesting was the one on “closer fatigue.” He found that Rivera, over the course of his career was more effective when fresh.  Unfortunately, he only looked at ERA (which is fine when using large samples and especially with one pitcher for one team), and really unfortunately, he only looked at ONE pitcher.  It would have been REALLY nice if looked at more than one pitcher.  Come on, Bill, get off your *** a little!  One thing about the results.  He looked at team wp versus Rivera fatigue and Rivera ERA in those same games.  The team wp seemed to fluctuate about twice what you would expect given the difference in ERA (assuming that the LI when he pitched averaged 2 and change).  Probably just noise.

ShysterBall: Calcaterra: A Much Delayed Review of God Save the Fan

THE BOOK REVIEW THAT THE N.Y. POST WAS AFRAID TO RUN! (RR)

Leitch’s criticism of the players and owners is relatively mild, however, compared to the ire he reserves for the sports media. Most pointedly, ESPN, which he equates with “the Imperial Forces from the Star Wars movies; controlling everything with a dark hand . . .” It does so, Leitch argues, by buying the silence of sports reporters who, in exchange for healthy paychecks, have lined up for the opportunity to reduce themselves to the lowest common denominator on inane ESPN shout-fests such as “Around the Horn” and “Pardon the Interruption,” which Leitch says have “made the discussion of sports 57 percent dumber.” If any of these reporters dare criticize ESPN or its interests in print, they can look forward to being blackballed by the network, never invited back to the shout-fests, and “forced to live off a piddly newspaperman’s salary.”

The result of this tacit arrangement, Leitch argues, is a free hand for ESPN to promote its own brand and churn out content on its multiple media platforms free of criticism or dissent, all the while paying less and less attention to the actual sporting events fans tuned in to see in the first place. Indeed, in an effort to conclusively prove that the content of ESPN’s sports coverage has suffered as ESPN’s power has grown, Leitch subjects himself to a 24-hour marathon of the Worldwide Leader in Sports’ family of networks. The results of being subjected to a day’s worth of synergy were not ultimately fatal, but they were not pretty either, as Leitch describes being “pounded into submission” by ESPN’s “bulk, polish, and repetition.”

The Griddle: Book Review: ‘I Live for This!’ by Bill Plaschke with Tommy Lasorda

Crank up the HEPA air purification system...as Bob T. checks out the Lasorda-Plaschke book.

Plaschke depicts the 2000 Olympics as one of Lasorda’s shining moments as he rode a hastily prepared team of minor leaguers to a surprising gold medal win over Cuba. But in the book, Lasorda comes across as a prototypical “Ugly American” who tries to intimidate the opposing teams by encouraging rough play and continually baiting the umpires. In the gold medal game, Lasorda refused to let his pitching coach, Phil Regan, tell him what starter Ben Sheets’s pitch count was. Lasorda was going to leave him out there until the game was over. (I couldn’t find the pitch count, but Sheets threw a four-hit shutout and got a lot of ground ball outs, so it likely wasn’t too high.)

...And yet through it all, Lasorda remains a Dodger. He claims to value loyalty more than any other quality and he claims that’s why he’s been paid by the Dodgers for most of his adult life. Lasorda says he is loyal to the Dodgers above just about everything else. But is Lasorda loyal to the Dodgers or is he just a guy who knows how to survive? Is he “baseball’s last true believer” as the subtitle of the book implies or is he the ultimate politician? Plaschke doesn’t answer this question. He’s too busy admiring the façade that is Tommy Lasorda to find out.

BTW...Sheets pitch count was 103 in the gold medal game.

THT: Jaffe: Ranking the Recent Postseasons

Uptown Top Ranking...by Chris & Jaffe.

Since it all ended I’ve found myself wondering if this was in fact the worst postseason in my memory. I started watching baseball in 1982, and this was the 25th not-strike-cancelled October in that time. If it wasn’t the worst, it certainly was in the picture.

So. . . as long as I’m wondering if it was the worst, I may as well look it up and try to rank the 1982-onward postseasons.

12) 1984. This one’s personal. I was a 9-year-old Cubs fan watching the NLCS. I will never forgive Steve Garvey for what he did. Admittedly, the fact that he’s Steve Garvey makes him that much easier to hold a grudge against. Also, the postseason contained a dominating performance by the Tigers, who showed that their 35-5 start wasn’t a fluke as they trailed for only a handful of innings in the entire postseason.

Walk Like a Sabermetrician: End of Season Statistics, 2007

Patriot and his methodology...read on.

For the past several years I have been posting Excel spreadsheets with sabermetric stats like RC for regular players on my website. I have not been doing this because I think it is a unique thing that nobody else does--Hardball Times, Baseball Prospectus, and other sites have similar data available. However, since I figure my own stats for myself anyway, I figured I might as well post it on the net.

This year, I am not putting out Excel spreadsheets, but I will have Google Spreadsheets that I will link to from both this blog and my site. What I wanted to do here is a quick run down of the methodology used.

...First of all, the term “replacement level” is obnoxious, because everyone brings their preconceptions to the table about what that means, and people end up talking past each other. Unfortunately, that ship has sailed, and the term “replacement level” is not going away. Secondly, I am not really a believer in replacement level. I don’t deny that it is a valid concept, or that comparisons to replacement level can be useful for answering certain questions. I just don’t believe that replacement level is clearly the correct baseline. I also don’t believe that it’s clearly NOT the correct baseline, and since most sabermetricians use it, I go along with the crowd in this case.

My Year of Flops: The Scout

Nathan Rabin at The Onion’s sister site The AV Club has been reviewing 2 commercial movie flops a week for a year as part of a project titled, appropriately, “My Year of Flops.” This week he turned to Albert Brooks films, and up came “The Scout.”

Like far too many contemporary sports movies, The Scout centers on an archetypal “Big Game” rather than mirroring the laconic rhythms of baseball. Baseball is essentially the art movie of the sports world: games regularly last three hours or longer, they’re filled with dead space where nothing appears to be happening, and it’s rapidly losing fans attracted to faster-paced, more exciting, and visceral fare.

Barry Bonds #756

Jumpy and incoherent (but still entertaining) fan-shot video of the home run from section 144, right where the ball landed. If you look closely, you can see the flip-flop move back and to the left…

Catholic media gets boost from New City native

Tom Allen became a lifelong Mets fan when he was growing up in New City, but couldn’t help feeling torn - maybe even a bit gleeful - when the St. Louis Cardinals dispatched his team in the playoffs last fall and then won the World Series.

You have to understand, Cardinals pitcher Jeff Suppan was named most valuable player of the National League Championship Series against the Mets. Then David Eckstein earned the MVP trophy in the Series.

Both are devout Roman Catholics.

Allen had already interviewed them about their faith for a film about Catholic baseball stars. Now he had a dream storyline.

ESPN: Keri: The midseason review … ‘82 Brewers style

From Keri the 10 to Keri the weight...and in this case, that could only mean Pete Ladd.

Last season the Detroit Tigers were the darlings of Major League Baseball, completing their transformation from a 119-loss laughingstock to a 95-game winner and American League champs in just three years. The Tigers’ success inspired me to write a midseason report on all 30 teams. Only instead of assigning each team a letter grade, every club got its own member of the 1984 Tigers—the franchise’s last big winner.

This season the Milwaukee Brewers are the talk of baseball. It’s been 25 years since the Brew Crew last made the playoffs. But led by an army of good, young hitters and a deep pitching staff, the Brewers have led the NL Central for most of the season, and now sit 5.5 games up on the second-place Cubs. To honor that achievement, we’re digging up the old bat-and-ball, “mb” logo and flashing back to 1982. All 30 teams will be graded using a member of that great ‘82 Brewers team.

Let’s crank up “Maneater” (Oh-oh here she comes … watch out boy, she’ll chew you up!) … and we’re off.

Southern Men and Baseball: Professor Timmerman ‘s Study of Batters Hit By Pitches

And...don’t forget what your good book said!

This post prompted a dozen comments of all kinds, including at least one Southern man who agreed that it described his behavior.  And it prompted one yesterday from Professor Thomas Timmerman of Tennessee Technological University. Timmerman just published a study of nearly 30,000 “hit by pitch” events during Major League Baseball Games (drawn from a sample of nearly 5 million at bats) that occurred between 1960 and 1992 and between 2000 and 2004. This research produced some fascinating findings, which are consistent with prior work on the culture of honor.

...Fascinating stuff, huh?  I guess the upshot, as my colleague (and native Southerner) Steve Barley has told me before, “We are the nicest people on earth until you piss us off.” Apparently that is an evidence-based statement.

lection: Morris: Golenbock, 7

7 is actually not the worst novel I have ever read, preferring to stay on safe ground much of the way through: more bore than raunch.

For most of its length, 7 is pretty much a straight up and down as-told-to. Except that the teller is a decade-dead Mickey Mantle and his tellee is an even deader Leonard Shecter, brought together by Golenbock in Heaven to write the as-told-to that no-one would publish while they were alive. But 7, for all its bluster, pulls too many punches to shock anyone.

Errors shake BP’s position as top baseball stats book

Are editing and typographical errors detracting from their written product?

NCAA MVP 07 (college baseball vid game) reviews anyone?

This is a thread for Primate reviews of MVP 07 (the link goes to Metacritics review page for the game), the second year of the EAs college baseball video game franchise.  It came out yesterday and I’m wondering if anyone has played it.

Last years was good, but (for me-a college baseball nerd) not great because it missed some essential details of college baseball that would not have been hard to incorporate into the game.

For example the schedules were totally out of whack.  Sometimes I’d play 6 days a week for a full month and then the next month I’d have 2 games a week instead of the normal college schedule of 3 game series on the weekends with a midweek game or two.

Also, good juniors from big conference teams (the type of players that, in real life, go pro early 75% of the time or more) NEVER went pro.

Also, top HS recruits didn’t go pro and the recruiting in general was weak and overly simple.

Anyone played this years?  Is the dynasty stuff, my main concern, any better?  Also is the new pitching system cool?

What say Primerdom?

BBD: Hamrahi: Baseball Digest Daily’s Top Web Sites of 2006

What?....Still no love for If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats!

4) While we’re talking about baseball references, the best site for statistics and play data is, you guessed it, Baseball-Reference.com. Sean Forman had already put together an incredible site, but he has made it even better this past year if you can believe that.

14) This list wouldn’t be complete without its fill of Strat-O-Matic links. For many of us, Strat helped initiate us into the world of baseball analysis. The Strat-O-Matic community has grown considerably over the years thanks to some special sites such as Stratogists (excellent articles, top rookies list, draft help), SOM World (card projections, rating reviews, detailed player analysis) and the Strat-O-Matic Forum.