Entries associated with the tag "Baseball":

Ted Cox e-mails the following about the baseball game between the U.S. and China broadcast today, which the U.S. won 9-1:

"Things getting interesting in the big U.S.-China baseball showdown. China hit four U.S. batters, and one guy who got hit responded by plowing over the Chinese catcher at home plate when he got the chance. The Chinese responded to that by beaning Matt LaPorta -- the guy the Tribe got from the Brewers in exchange for Sabathia -- in the ear. "

The BBC reports three ejections for China--including manager Jim Lefebvre.

UPDATE
More from Ted:

"Get this: the Chinese got their one run in the 9th on a homer by Yang Yang, the catcher who had been plowed over by Schierholtz after he was hit earlier in the inning. Yang ran the bases full speed holding his no. 1 index finger in the air, then stomped on home plate. Pitcher Blaine Neal shoulda dusted the next guy off, but simply retired the side for the win, although on the last out, a comebacker to the mound, he did make a point of running over and tagging the batter as he came up the line."

LaPorta has a mild concussion.

It must be the contrarian in me that reacts so strongly to people being deified upon their deaths. Jerome Holtzman was a very good, very intrepid baseball beat writer for a very long time, but from reading the tributes in the Tribune and the Sun-Times -- both of which rightfully laid claim to his legacy -- you'd have thought we'd lost baseball's patron saint. I enjoyed Paul Sullivan's formal obit in the Trib, and like Steve Rhodes at The Beachwood Reporter, I admired how it stuck it to the Sun-Times for basically chasing Holtzman to the competition in 1981. My colleague Bruce Miles's tip of the cap in the Daily Herald was likewise eloquent about how charitable Holtzman could be with young sportswriters.

True, Holtzman deserves credit for coming up with the "save," an important addition to baseball statistics, but the game was changing, and he was simply the first to recognize those changes in a statistical manner--if he hadn't invented it, someone else would have. While not siding with the Sun-Times in thinking Holtzman had nothing to offer in his later years -- the testimony of Marvin Miller and  Donald Fehr in Dave van Dyck's story, citing how he was ahead of most of his peers in treating the Players Association fairly and not siding blindly with owners in strike negotiations, is convincing -- I have to insist that Holtzman was not "the consummate writer," as George Vass said in the Trib, but a bit of a plodding stylist. I also feel compelled to point out the severe criticism Holtzman comes under in Gene Carney's Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball's Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded. As baseball's official historian, Holtzman refused to acknowledge any ameliorating evidence about "Shoeless" Joe Jackson in the Black Sox scandal. "On the whole," Carney writes, "Holtzman's work is bleak and black journalism, which begs for a fact-checker." It's the same sort of hard-headedness Joe Mooshil talks about in the Trib obit. Look, I'm not arguing for Jackson's induction into the Hall of Fame -- far from it -- but I admit Carney makes some convincing arguments, and it casts significant doubts on Holtzman's role as baseball's official historian that he didn't.

So the world is a diminished place with the death of Jerome Holtzman, but the press box not so much. And if you think I'm being unnecessarily hard on the journalistic dead, just be glad I didn't have access to a blog when Steve Neal died.

The White Sox' Carlos Quentin just got recognized as an All-Star, in addition to receiving a well-done profile from the Tribune's usually puffy Melissa Isaacson, who delivered a piece with some fine quotes and details from Quentin's mother, Queta. Yet through it all what's been overlooked is his pivotal place in the Cubs-Sox interleague series. (Let's call it the City Serious, in honor of Ring Lardner's Jack Keefe, as opposed to the Crosstown Classic or whatever else.) With both teams entering in first place, when the Sox got swept at Wrigley, making it seem as if they didn’t deserve a postseason date with the Cubs, they came back more determined and more focused when the action shifted to Sox Park. The pivotal moment came early in Friday’s opening game when Cubs starter Ryan Dempster came high and tight with some chin music to Quentin with the Sox rallying in the third inning, knocking him to the ground. As the baseball book requires, Dempster followed that with a low, outside breaking ball, and Quentin lashed it down the right-field line to score a run and make it 3-0 Sox. Jermaine Dye drove him in, the next two batters walked against the rattled Dempster, and Nick Swisher followed with a grand slam, so the rout -- and the Sox comeback -- was on. If Quentin doesn't deliver in that instant, the Cubs have delivered their message of dominance and perhaps everything is different.

“He came up and in,” Quentin said afterward in his typically understated, matter-of-fact manner. “I’m not surprised by that when a pitcher does it. He’s trying to make a pitch. Obviously, I don’t want to get hit. (Dempster’s) got enough control that he might have wanted to put it there. It’s neither here nor there. The job had to get done to get the run in. You dust yourself back off, refocus, and I was happy I got a good swing on the ball and got the run in and got the job done.”

He got the job done the next day too, when he hit the game-winning homer, and Sunday as well, when another Quentin homer broke a scoreless tie and sent the Sox toward a 5-1 victory to complete the reverse sweep. That might not have sealed Quentin's spot on the All-Star team, but it sealed his place in the hearts of Sox fans. 

Picks from your latest BAT award contender:

AL East: Red Sox (except for Schilling's "right biceps degeneration"--ew--they're just as good as they were last year, perhaps better if Pedroia and Ellsbury improve and Ramirez and Ortiz don't decline much)

AL Central: Indians (the Cabrera addition is great, but more hitting wasn't really what the Tigers needed)

AL West: Mariners (my money's on Guerrero or Hunter breaking down, and Bedard/King Felix looks good)

AL Wild Card: Tigers (just can't bring myself to pick the Yankees)

NL East: Mets (the Santana addition is huge in a mediocre division)

NL Central: Cubs (if I had more confidence in Gallardo and Parra, I'd say the Brewers, but I think they're a year away)

NL West: D-Backs (they could be scary if Drew and Young improve)

NL Wild Card: Brewers (honestly, this is totally up in the air--insert Rockies, Phillies, or Dodgers if you like; I'm going to go with the Brewers just because I wish them well)

ALDS: Sox over Tigers, Mariners over Indians

AL Pennant: Red Sox

NLDS: Brewers over Cubs, D-Backs over Mets

NL Pennant: D-Backs

WS Champ: Oh, hell--D-Backs, with Webb and Haren as the new Schilling/Johnson. I know it's dependent on a lot of improvement from Drew, Upton, Young, Reynolds, and Owings, but I'll take the chance.

Eric Zorn's call for umpires with laser beams on their heads sent me on a quest to track down the patent he mentions, a 1932 automatic umpire consisting of an "elaborate, vertical light-beam apparatus [that] would illuminate the underside of the ball only if it passed over the correct area."

I think Zorn's a bit off--the patent he mentions might be the first automatic umpire employing light, but I found an earlier automatic umpire from 1909 designed by Harry E. Hire which uses a padded backstop and a bell. It seems fatally flawed, but the bell is a nice, county-fair touch that QuesTec should consider, and perhaps a kazoo noise for a ball.

But I couldn't stop there. Below: we are not baseball players! We are Devo!

A "streamlined bat or the like" that street thugs don't have to go to the trouble of driving a nail through.

A cap that converts into a baseball glove for the home-run-ball-desiring fan.

Mark Harris died last week of complications from Alzheimer's. Don't be too sad: he was 84 and apparently lived a good life. I don't know much more about him, except that he was the second-best writer of baseball fiction ever, so consider him Ted Williams to Ring Lardner's Babe Ruth, a not-too-shabby comparison.

Harris wrote four novels from the persona of Henry Wiggen, a pitcher with the New York Mammoths, a team modeled -- explicitly in the movies -- on the Yankees. To the end, Harris was best known for the 1973 film, Bang the Drum Slowly, for which he also wrote the script, but the reason it made a good and lasting movie (aside from the cast, which included Michael Moriarty, Robert De Niro, and Vincent Gardenia) is also the reason it's not his best book. Bang the Drum Slowly is slightly sentimental as it concerns the dying catcher Bruce Pearson, a simpleton who calls Wiggen "Arthur" when everyone else calls him "Author" in recognition of his having written a book.

His best, in my view, is his first, The Southpaw. Like Lardner's You Know Me Al, it's rooted to an era -- Harris's 1950s to Lardner's teens -- but timeless in the way it captures ballplayers and their unique place in the world. Both understand the cruel humor of baseball, the way players tease and rag one another because baseball is an unforgiving game and a player had best get used to that before setting foot on the field. One of my favorite passages from The Southpaw finds Wiggen as a rookie in spring training, watching players arriving at the train station from his room in a nearby hotel and sneering a bit at the "punks." When a real ballplayer shows he knows right away by his presence, his sense of style. So Wiggen goes down to meet him in the hotel lobby. He greets him, and the player says, "Hello, punk," then walks on by.

Lardner knew players from writing the "In the Wake of the News" sports column in the Tribune. Harris, by contrast, was an academic, with a doctorate in American studies. Still, Harris, like Lardner, got the feel of the clubhouse right. Baseball is an odd game because it's such an individual sport -- it always comes down to pitcher versus hitter -- and yet the players spend day after day in intimate circumstances. In both The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly, Harris nails the intangible sense of chemistry that results as few writers have, perhaps best in the Bang the Drum Slowly line, "Winning makes winning like money makes money." Even today, a reader will see much of Lou Piniella in Harris's Dutch Schnell (perfectly played by Gardenia in the film). When a player insists he is very careful, Schnell replies, "That is what everybody says, yet the hospitals are full of babies."

Harris's books have also turned out to be timeless because they capture the players' attitudes toward their game, independent of money. The Henry Wiggen of The Southpaw is privileged, and he knows it. He's a bit of an ass, and he knows that too. Yet he also knows he does something better than all but a few human beings, and others will pay to see him do it. The salary structure of baseball might have changed, but that essential sense of privilege has not. When I reread it, just last year, The Southpaw seemed more contemporary than any baseball book I could think of, certainly more than Bernard Malamud's myth-mixing The Natural or W.P. Kinsella's bathetic Shoeless Joe.

At one point in the debut novel, Wiggen gets off a good line on the bench and Schultz responds, "Somebody ought to write a book."

"Somebody ought to write a good book about baseball," says pitcher Sam Yale.

"Somebody ought to write a good book," says the well-read catcher Red Traphagen.

That would be The Southpaw, on all three counts. 

Tomorrow at the lyrically named Freedom Museum, at the base of the Tribune Tower, the Sun-Times's Rick Telander and former US Attorney Anton Valukas will talk about the legal storm created by the Barry Bonds-busting book Game of Shadows.

(In short, the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who wrote it, Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, were sentenced to 18 months in prison for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury about how they obtained Barry Bonds's testimony to a grand jury. Journalists find this problematic, arguing that it was an overreach of the federal government--the reporters got more time than anyone yet sentenced so far in the BALCO investigation. Only the confession of the attorney responsible for the leak kept them out.)

Wednesday, April 4, 6 PM
McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum
445 N. Michigan
Non-members: $5
Museum members: free 

If you design the sports section, or sports uniforms, here's some key info regarding the importance of "areas of private anatomy." Perhaps the NBA should consider a return to the short shorts of the 70s to boost popularity.

"Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed."

"Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site."

(h/t kottke.org) 

George Castle's book Baseball and the Media: How Fans Lose in Today's Coverage of the Game has been largely ignored in Chicago, even though--or perhaps because--it offers a sometimes damning indictment of the local sports media. Yet in ignoring the attack on themselves, the media have also missed a poignant passage in which embattled San Francisco slugger Barry Bonds explains himself as much as he has anywhere.

In a chapter titled "Not Baseball's Golden Children," about surly stars, Castle--an author, sportswriter for the Times of Northwest Indiana, and syndicated radio host of the seasonal baseball series Diamond Gems--writes about his methods for getting the notoriously recalcitrant Bonds to open up to an out-of-town journalist. Castle earned Bonds's trust by swapping him memorabilia concerning his father, Bobby Bonds, resulting in a 2002 interview in which Bonds talked of the joy he felt in being accepted by the fans after his 73-homer season, following years of being considered a distant star.

"All I ever wanted to do was enjoy the game like I was in Little League and your parents came out to the game," Bonds said. "Whether you did bad or good, everyone always cheered for you. It's taken me nine years in San Francisco where I was embraced by baseball, embraced by the fans. I finally had my dream come true. I finally got to enjoy the game of playing baseball. Everyone around me enjoyed it, too. It was the best feeling in the world. It took seventy-three homers to be embraced by that, but better late than never."

This casts Bonds in a new light--a tragic one. Bonds was already probably the best all-around player of his generation--but also widely considered an unapproachable star, by fans and the media--in 1998, when he saw Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa soak up the adulation with their home-run race breaking Roger Maris's season record of 61 homers. It was then, according to Game of Shadows, that Bonds followed them into what he perceived as their use of performance-enhacing drugs.Why?

Perhaps not just out of pride, as Game of Shadows suggests, but in order to receive the public acclaim long denied him in his early career in Pittsburgh and even later in his hometown of San Francisco. And the result? Bonds is more a pariah than ever as the poster boy for the abuse of steroids and human growth hormone. Bonds got what he wanted, but the methods he used led to him lose everything--a classic tale of tragedy.

Tribune golf writer Ed Sherman wrote an interesting column last Friday--or at least a column with an interesting quote.

The piece was about how the United States Golf Association might soon outlaw new clubs with U-shape grooves in favor of the old V-shape. As I understand it, based on looking at a cross-section diagram, where the V-shape groove is as a diamond might cut it, a wedge, a U-shape groove is as a chisel might cut it, a trench. As one might imagine, the U-shape allows skillful players to put spin on the ball even when hitting out of the heavy grass of the rough, which has allowed the top pros to bomb away with their new big-head drivers with impunity.

Chicks might dig the long ball, but the USGA evidently does not, and that's where the quote comes in. "The skill of driving the ball accurately has become much less important in achieving success on Tour than it used to be," Sherman quoted USGA senior technical director Dick Rugge as saying. "Our analysis of statistical data measured by the PGA Tour since 1980 shows, historically, that driving accuracy was as comparably correlated to winning as putting. Beginning in the 1990s, however, driving accuracy became much less important. Today, the correlation between driving-accuracy rank and money rank on the PGA Tour is very low."

All right, enough golf. What's remarkable here is a top sports executive using statistical analysis to dictate how trends are going and how the sport needs to be tweaked to maintain its purity. Imagine if baseball had looked at the rising home-run statistics of the 90s and said, "Hey, we need to look into whether the balls--or the players--are juiced." Instead, baseball turned a blind eye to the entire phenomenon. If Bud Selig were running the PGA Tour, he'd say fans love the long ball and let's ignore whether technology is changing the game.

The ironic thing is this is yet another example of How Bill James Changed Our View of Baseball, the subject of a new book of essays edited by Gregory F. Augustine Pierce. James's statistical analysis has had immense influence throughout sports but is still widely considered voodoo in the traditional world of baseball, where only maverick executives like Billy Beane rely on it. Funny how what goes around comes around--and frequently goes out the other ear.

As a public service, I'd like to inform young local baseball fans of a fantastic opportunity: an internship with the forward-thinking Oakland A's (the subject of Moneyball by Mr. Tabitha Soren, Michael Lewis). Do tell your friends, particularly econ majors, math whizzes, and 1337 programmers:

- Candidates must be proficient in all Microsoft Office programs (especially Excel).
- Proficiency in statistical packages, such as Stata, SAS, and SPSS is a plus.
- Knowledge of scripting languages (Perl, Python) for screen-scraping programming is a major plus.

"Screen-scraping programming" refers to the practice of automatically extracting specific data from Web pages and similar files; perhaps the A's are developing the MLB equivalent of Carnivore, which would be the greatest thing ever. J.C. Bradbury, who runs the Baseball Economist Web site where I found this, got the tip from A's economist (!) Farhan Zaidi; there's a good interview with Zaidi at Bradbury's site.

This in particular goes out to my fellow Maroons, inheritors of a long tradition that begins with the late Doug Pappas and continues with Baseball Prospectus folks like Nate Silver and Christina Kahrl. We're terrible at sports, but that doesn't mean we don't want to take them over. (Side note: the last halfway decent baseball player to attend the University of Chicago, SF Giants draftee and former minor leaguer Mark Mosier, is now a clerk for Supreme Court chief justice John Roberts. Stay in school, kids!)

Watch your back, though: Tufts University is offering Sabermetrics 101 this year.