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.