Not a lot of offense on today's Birthday Team, but at the very least, they have a Future Star.

C: Eddie Ainsmith
1B: Tim Pyznarski
2B: Germany Schaefer
3B: Possum Whitted
SS: Rob Picciolo
LF: Lefty Davis
CF: Steve Brye
RF: Doc Miller

SP: Doug Fister
SP: Rollie Naylor
SP: Joe Sparma
SP: Rankin Johnson
SP: Doug Slaten
RP: Dan Plesac

Settle down, Beavis: Rusty Kuntz

Baseball history item at THT notes that 40,000 days ago Rube Waddell allowed four hits from one batter - but no other hits all game. Odd way to lose a no-hitter.

Also, full article at THT: Memories of 2012, from the odd to the end (part 1) about some of the stranger/bizarre moments of last year.

was seriously stabbed in the face

As opposed to an every-day, run-of-the-mill type of face stabbing?

Body found under parking lot is King Richard 3

Predating what allegedly happened to Jimmy Hoffa by a few hundred years.

I was once jokingly stabbed in the face.

Unless the ‘seriously’ was meant more like “Dude, seriously. Baskette got shanked in the face.”

My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Baskette get shanked at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's pretty serious.

Other uncommon adverbs for "stabbed":
Unseriously
Merely
Jauntily
Calmly
Luckily
Automatically

Surprisingly common:
Offhandedly

Since we're on the subject of stabbing and history, one of my favourite reports on the 1626 parliament mentions how the Duke of Buckingham got annoyed with a Lord for not voting his way on a bill and "offered him the Stabb", which is a turn of phrase I wish I had occasion to use in my life at some point.

Brandon Webb has announced his retirement.

Minor league deals:

Orioles sign P Mark Hendrickson and P Jo-El Pineiro
Indians sign OF Jeremy Hermida. He's still only 29. Seems like he's been around forever.

Don't be shy, Greg (U)K, tell us more of your favorite anecdotes from the 1626 parliament.

Someone wanna check up on Jeff Pearlman?

January 31          21  12  .636 ---- 
February 19         17  11  .607  1.5  
February 5          20  13  .606  1.0  
February 6          18  13  .581  2.0

News and Notes:
* Unsurprisingly, January 31 (Nolan Ryan, Ernie Banks, Jackie Robinson, Josh Johnson, Yuniesky Betancourt) is the hottest team in the league after a month. February 19 is a surprise, but unless Dick Siebert is going to hit .446 with power all season, they're likely to fade.
* Siebert is, as you might expect, leading the league with that .446 batting average.
* League leaders in runs scored: Henry Aaron (February 5) 33, Babe Ruth (February 6) 33
* League leaders in home runs: Aaron 12, Ruth 12
* League leaders in home runs vs LHP: Aaron 4, Ruth 4
* League leaders in home runs vs RHP: Aaron 8, Ruth 8
* League leaders in total bases: Aaron 91, Ruth 87, Alan Trammell (February 21) 78.
* Ruth leads the league in OBP (.486) and SLG (.777), but is second to Siebert in RC/27. (Siebert 16.8, Ruth 15.6)
* League leader in intentional walks: Chick Hafey (!) (February 12) 6
* Honus Wagner (February 24) leads the league with 19 stolen bases. Sliding Billy Hamilton (February 15) has 10 SB, tying him with Endy Chavez (February 7) for sixth.
* In addition to his exploits as a batter, Ruth leads the league in wins (7), winning percentage (1.000), and innings pitched (61.2). He's seventh in the lague with a 1.75 ERA.
* Clyde Wright (February 20) leads the league with 1.00 ERA.
* Devern Hansack (!) (February 5) leads the league with a .141 opponent batting average.
* Nolan Ryan is who we thought he is: He leads the league in strikeouts (56), walks (31), K/9 (8.95), and opponent stolen bases (17).
* February 18 has won six in a row.
* February 22 defeated February 19 7-6 in an eighteen inning game on May 4. That's the second-longest game so far in the Birthday Leagues. January 16 defeated January 15 in 19 innings on July 18 of Birthday League I.

Stats, standings, box scores, and leaderboards here.

Someone wanna check up on Jeff Pearlman?

"I don't like Beyonce. Life is boring."

Or, y'know, maybe you just don't like Beyonce.

The Oakland A’s acquired infielder Jed Lowrie and right-handed pitcher Fernando Rodriguez from the Houston Astros for first baseman Chris Carter, right-handed pitcher Brad Peacock and minor league catcher Max Stassi.

Indians sign OF Jeremy Hermida.

This is exactly the sort of thing they should be doing more of. Yeah, he probably (almost certainly) isn't a good baseball player, but their other left field options are Ezequiel Carrera and Drew Stubbs. If you're going to get nothing out of LF anyway, you might as well collect a bunch of free lottery tickets and scratch them off until you find a winner.

I also love the Matt Capps NRI, but I'm less jazzed about the Tribe signing Kazmir. He's toast. That shoulder is done. Might as well sign Charlie Nagy.

The Oakland A’s acquired infielder Jed Lowrie and right-handed pitcher Fernando Rodriguez from the Houston Astros for first baseman Chris Carter, right-handed pitcher Brad Peacock and minor league catcher Max Stassi.

This trade makes a lot of sense for the Astros. Lowrie is going to make a massive $2.4M salary this year while Carter is still pre-arb and making the minimum. Also I guess they get prospects or whatever.

I've spent the past week or so cutting apart and scanning (to PDF) a bunch of my old books that aren't worth anything and are unnecessarily taking up space on my bookshelf. I'm startled at how many baseball books I have.

Baseball books scanned so far: "Yaz" by Yaz, "My Turn At Bat" by Ted Williams, "The Catcher In The Wry" by Bob Uecker.
On deck: "Beyond The Shadow Of The Senators" by Brad Snyder, "The Politics of Glory" by Bill James, "If At First" by Keith Hernandez, "Only The Ball Was White" by Robert Peterson.

I've got multiple copies of the Snyder and James books...I probably wouldn't mangle them otherwise.

This is a fun project. I thought I'd be a bit more weirded out than I am about destroying books, but I dunno...I still have the books. They're just on my tablet and backed up in my email now.

Bruno Sammartino has finally decided to make amends with WWE and has come to terms on his induction into this year's Hall of Fame class.

To the pro wrestling fan, this is Barry Bonds being inducted big.

You scan every page? How long does that take?

I can chop, scan, and convert a book in ~45 minutes. I just throw 'em in the document feeder on my scanner and let it do its thing.

Don't be shy, Greg (U)K, tell us more of your favorite anecdotes from the 1626 parliament.

I know I've been a bit of a one trick pony in my BTF posting career...but no worries, my next research project is on an entirely different topic so starting soon you can expect to see all new anecdotes.

From the parliament of 1641!

Heh, that's pretty badass. I think I'd feel guilty tearing a book apart page by page, even if it was a case of destroying the village in order to save it...

Greg, do you have any thoughts on what discovering Richard III means?

Greg, do you have any thoughts on what discovering Richard III means?

At the very least it's very fun news!

In Leicester too, which is just down the road from where I am. I've never dealt with much (any) archaeology, but it is pretty remarkable the amount of information you can get from finds like this. My supervisor actually appeared on a show last year that does this kind of thing. They'd found a Civil War era group of soldiers outside of a town that had been under siege. By determing their diet immediately before their death they were able to speculate that their unit had come from Bristol, which helped resolve a debate that had been going on for years about how the various units were disposed before the walls. One of them actually had a condition where he had no knee-joint...or rather that it had been fused into bone so that his knee was permenantly bent at about 60 degrees, as well as the same condition fusing some of his fingers at odd angles. And yet he showed signs of a long military career. Not entirely sure what his role was, but his body showed signs of repeated combat. [EDIT: Which led to some fun speculation about what instruments he'd need to get around and still have a hand free to club people with. Actually, how physically disabled people experienced everyday life in the 17th century is a fairly new area of exploration I know at least a couple PhD students are getting into]

For Richard I imagine his remains will help clarify his final moments, and subsequent burial - as well as help piece together his physical characteristics (which among English/British monarchs are probably among the most distinctive).

I'm not sure how (or if at all) it will play into the contested identity of Richard III - Grade A Jerk, or Victim of Tudor Propaganda? My guess would be not at all.

I'd imagine that someone's going to try facial reconstruction from the skull. If the results are friendly enough, maybe the historical Richard III will recover from the drubbing Shakespeare (I mean, Edward de Vere) gave him.

Dan, are you going to do anything with all those PDFs? Set up a virtual library?

I could never do that; I hate destroying books, or throwing them out, or even dog-earing them. I don't think I've ever even written notes in a book.

I can chop, scan, and convert a book in ~45 minutes. I just throw 'em in the document feeder on my scanner and let it do its thing.

I used to scan 8-10 books a week for my various sites. Also proofed them (well.) But if you're going to digitize your library, I absolutely swear by these guys:

It's actually $3 a book, but you can do 50 or so titles (depends on length) for $100. They take paypal, and have never lost a single title I've sent them. Few issues when they were just getting started, but they've been flawless for over a year. (Actually, I get a lot of stuff from Ebay, and sometimes a seller forgets to put in my code, but they know who my stuff is for.)

The .pdfs they give are pretty huge, but they can resize them for you if you want to read on an iPad. I think Cecilia Tan is using them as well, not sure if that's for her SABR stuff or her other business.

Dan, are you going to do anything with all those PDFs? Set up a virtual library?

See 2/5/2013 dugout for more re: digitization.