This is a curiously interesting website devoted, mostly, to baseball bats. It’s young and a bit thin, but if the writers continue to enhance their materials it could become a comprehansive resource about baseball bats. I like the line in this story, the “facts,” saying that after Barry Bonds set the single-season home run record using a maple bat many other ballplayers moved to maple as well. Certainly true, and pleasantly focused on bats.
History
Home of the Braves?
My dad was a high school phenom. He was an amazing schoolboy pitcher, as they called them in those days, one of those guys who struck out 14 in 7 inning games. Regularly. He was scouted and signed, this is back in the 40s, and ended up in the Braves organization. The Boston Braves, that is.
I mention all this because the linked story about the Braves in Boston is an excellent introduction to baseball’s local appeal in Beantown (and its amazingly ragtag and robust local history there). And an expression of how important that locality is, even if a team can up and move. And then move again.
Escaping the data panopticon
Prof says computers must learn to “forget”
This is not the place for this comment, but this is my place.
I believe that forgetting is an important part of moving on, of being able to compromise in very construtive ways. So I’m pretty sure that this prof’s heart is in the right place.
But I think the issue is much less nuanced. If we have a good and verifiable record of everything all of us do, our public behavior will have to conform to that model. Our lack of information in the past offered countless opportunities for operators to game the system, but if we know who we all are and who everyone else is, all sorts of trusted (and fair) endeavors become possible.
I think much of what the past was built on was a duplicity, and that is going to be impossible going forward. How quickly that’s going to reshape the world is exciting possibiltity today.
Very exciting.
Baseball Musings
The real work here is in the original post, but David Pinto’s take on Buck Showalter seems exactly right to me. He’s able to get a team close, but it is his departure that is the catalyst for actual success.
Not that it looks like the Rangers are that close. But in these days of parity it won’t take much to move them atop the AL West.
Baseball Prospectus Goodie
I stopped my BP subscription a year or so ago, not because I didn’t enjoy the writing of many of the BP guys, and didn’t value their observations, but because it was all getting a little familiar. For free, I’d attend every day, but having to pay made it a little easy to stay away.
I’ve been surprised how few times I’ve felt like I was missing something since. I still read the newsletter and the beginnings of the stories, and I’m still awfully impressed by a lot of the work that goes on at BP, but I end up feeling like I’m already on their page, I don’t need to be hectored about this and that.
But the lede to this story is choice. Or as my friend Fleming Meeks has said, cherce. Jim Baker discovers an orphaned pool of BP stats about teams and their rate of being shut out. What I learned is that the 1981 Blue Jays were shut out 20 percent of the time.
These days that seems pretty much impossible, but things in baseball change. 1981 was the dawn of Rotisserie baseball and baseball’s age of statistics. I have no other point than at this moment I wish I could read the rest of Jim’s story.
Time for Heads to Roll?
When I started reading this David Pinto post I started getting irked by his blunt attack on Ricciardi, accompanied by some good but not-climactic quotes.
But the real point here is his extension of Bill James’s idea of Families of Managers, from James’ excellent book “Baseball Managers” (who came up with that title?), and a rather potent idea that Joe Torre (the 2nd act) is the father of a Third Way of managing.
There has been much to criticize Torre for the last few years, but his approach has been direct and consistent, which is what gives Pinto’s idea legs. History will tell us more about Willie Randolph and Joe Girardi as managers than we know now, but their success this year makes Pinto’s thesis well worth discussing.
The Physics of Ball on Bat
Thanks to James in Kansas City, this link is to a story that mostly recapitulates Robert Adair’s research on how far a ball might be hit by a human. So give props to James and to Robert Adair, but don’t snub the Alaskans who remind us of this question. Could it be true that none of the steroid enhanced sluggers of the past 30 years matched the distance of the besotted Mick?
The Baseball Analysts: War Stories
Bob Klapisch on Why Ballplayers Don’t Say Interesting Things Anymore
It seems he wrote a highly critical book about the 1992 Mets, and is then surprised that they were really mad about it. Nonetheless, the is a funny story that asks and answers the rhetorical question: What curseword would get you to climb into Bobby Bonilla’s face and offer to fight him, here, now?
Tampa Bay Devil Rays News: Kazmir No. 1?
Scott Kazmir has been pitching very well this month, which is of increasing frustration to Mets fans, who can only wonder what might have been if the then really young phenom hadn’t been traded for the now career-threatened bum Victor Zambrano.
Looking at the picture that accompanies the story, which is of Kazmir with his long stride nearly off the mound and his arm still back behind his shoulder, reminds me that part of the knock on Kazmir was that his unusual delivery led some to think he would be an injury risk.
In this story, in which his start this year is compared to Vida Blue’s historic rookie campaign, no mention is made of the potential risks for a young pitcher cast into a heavy role. Just ask Vida Blue how that turned out. (Note that Blue threw 312! innings as a 21 year old, and topped 180 10 times.)
On the other hand, Kevin Appier had the most shoulder-twisting delivery I’ve ever seen by a starter, and he got in 11 seasons with better than 180 IP—starting at age 22.
Let Kazmir throw!
Bucs Dugout ::
Tracy With The Dodgers: An Interview With Dodger Math
A Pittsburgh blogger talks to an LA blogger about what to expect from Pirate’s manager Jim Tracy. The elephant in the room is why, as Dodger Math says, Tracy’s managing go bizarre after Paul DePodesta became the LA General Manager. I’d like more discussion about that, but this is interesting stuff nonetheless.