"Nobody Fucks with De-Jesus!"

"8 year-olds, Dude.  8 year-olds."

Here is a post that exists solely for the pleasure of its title. 


Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer (it seems impossible to name one without the other) made their first acquisition in the mission to end the Championship drought that predates the birth of any Cubs fan.  Although in reality there is no drought as everything resets at zero for the two executitve wunderkinds.  The first free agent splash of the new regime:  the one, the only, the inimitable...David DeJesus.  Some Cubs fans demand a lot.  More than a lot.  They pretend the previous 103 years are all on their shoulders, though all any fan can lay claim to are those losing years starting at fanship.  I feel no pride or accomplishment, no self-satisfaction or congratulation regarding the dominant 1906-1908 teams.  Nor do I bemoan the failings of the 1946-1984 teams.  They don't belong to me, nor most of the fans demanding success now.  Epstein/Hoyer and comrades may yet extend themselves to the glittering prizes Pujols or Fielder, but right now this looks to be a fine move.  A very fine one indeed.

Anatomy of a slide

[via FFFFOUND!]

Manager of the Moment

Cornelius McGillicuddy, Sr.

Manager of the Year is the most tenuous of baseball awards, relying almost solely on the gut instincts and distanced observation of a select group of baseball writers.  The end-of-year awards provide great opportunity for argument, even when there are irrefutable statistics that should eliminate such jabbering.  As the MVP and Cy Young award voting continues to illustrate, these statistics are still taken with a grain of salt.  This year's Cy Young winners both dominated in voting, Justin Verlander winning unanimously and Clayton Kershaw taking 27 of 32 first place votes, though a quick perusal of the most telling pitching stats point to Roy Halladay being the best NL pitcher and CC Sabathia at least being good enough to garner a substantial number of first place votes (instead he finished 4th in voting).  While baseball writers still struggle to evolve toward more accurate measures of baseball greatness, the Manager of the Year vote will always allow them to indulge in those tried and not-so-true indicators: the gut and wins.  Advanced statistics don't exist in the evaluation of managers.  Yet.  However, in the short history of the award, wins don't seem to play too great a roll in deciding a winner either.

Fielding Metrics, a Brief and Incomplete Study

Defensive statistics are considered to be the final frontier of the sabermetric movement.  While the statistics available these days paint a picture that is much clearer than the fuzziness of fielding percentage, there is still a lot of room for improvement.  Two of the best defensive metrics that are readily available right now are Tom Tango's Fans' Scouting Report and Ultimate Zone Rating.  Let's now look at this year's best defenders according to these two statistics, see if they pass the smell test, and compare them to the results of the Gold Glove winners.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Come one, come all to the 9th Wonder of the World!  Not since the purely philanthropic efforts of the benevolent Judge Roy Hofheinz has Major League Baseball been blessed with such an architectural gift.  While the Astrodome elevated the arena of baseball to new glorious heights, with its lush green carpet, which in addition to improving the trajectory of a batted ball, provided a soothing sensation to jet-lagged ballplayers, who would often take warmups barefoot to relieve the east-coast bias.  Not to mention the starry nights ripped from storybook romances that glittered upon euphoric spectators.  But times have changed, and with them the pleasures of man have evolved.  So without further ado, join us for a tour of baseball's latest marvel, a ballpark that illuminates the imagination, titillates the senses, and ushers the phantasmagoric possibilities of human conciousness...

Marlins Ballpark in Little Havana!!!

Somewhere, Buck O'Neil is Smiling

   In our beautiful memory

   We were all handsome

   We all could sing

   We all had the heart 

   Of the prettiest girl in town

   And we all hit .300  -Buck O'Neil

One Crack of the Bat

Baseball dreamers speak of naturals in the game.  Johnny Mitchum was a natural.  Rescued from the obscure sandlots and pastures of rural Missouri and supplanted to the city lights of St. Louis, young Johnny Mitchum, affectionately nicknamed 'Rube', ascended to stardom in  his first season, carrying the Cardinals through the playoffs en route to the Championship.  He only got better in succeeding seasons, posting numbers that placed him among the upper echelon of baseball royalty.  Yet the brightest star often casts the darkest shadow.  As Johnny Mitchum is pulled toward greatness, other forces work against him in a battle with horrific and agonizing consequences.

Memory Demands and Image (vol. II)

the Christian Gentleman

In this installment of Memory Demands an Image, we travel even further back into baseball's gauzy past, this time courtesy of the Library of Congress' Flickr page.  There are some really incredible photographs in this collection, highlighting the end of the dead-ball era, mostly between 1910-1915. These were the days when uniforms consisted of short brimmed caps, collared jerseys, and knickers with high socks; men wore suits and hats to ballgames; the Yankees were the Higlanders, the Indians were the Naps, and the Brooklyn club was alternating names from the Dodgers to the Superbas to the Robins; and even with the advent of the cork-centered ball, pitching still reigned supreme. Enjoy these photos in all of their gritty, grainy, black and white glory.

"You Can't Kill an Oriole"

The Baltimore Orioles have been a mess for a while now.  They have not had a winning record since 1997, a year in which they should have won the AL pennant.  They are on their seventh manager since '97, and nobody has been able to tell the difference.  Towards the end of 2010, Buck Showalter was given the reigns and seems firmly entrenched calling the shots.  Now that the MacPhail magic has proven exhausted, Orioles owner Peter Angelos has done a smart thing: he has hired Dan Duquette.

Ballplayers

In addition to being obsessive about baseball, I also collect records. It is not all that often that these two disparate wolds collide, but when they do, it sets off all kinds of bells and whistles in the pleasure center of my brain.  This is something I'd like to dig into on this blog as an ongoing series of sorts, exploring both music recorded by baseball players and music about baseball.  This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive study, as there are a fair amount of baseball players that have recorded some terrible music (Bronson Arroyo, I'm looking at you), but rather to bring to light some lesser known artists or songs that have at least some sort of redeeming value. The first installment in this series will explore the works of the group Ballplayers.

A Race to the Marshalsea

The stove is already getting warm with Atlanta's trading of Derek Lowe to Cleveland.  The steady but aged sinkerballer will now be 'sweating it out' by the Cuyahoga River.  They have some good breweries up there, so I expect Lowe to have a bounce back year.  The real heat so far this off season is coming from the managerial hot stove, with the Cubs, Red Sox, and Cardinals battling over their next skipper.  The General Manager search is in full swing in Anaheim (where the brass hope to find someone who can offset the Vernon Wells debacle) and in Baltimore (where we all hope that once great baseball town can lift up its bootstraps).  It seems the MacPhail magic has worn off. 

Breaking News

In what was initially thought to be a No-Shave November move, it appears Derek Holland's mustache will be taking it's talents to South Beach.   This comes as a blow to Rangers fans who are still reeling from their team losing consecutive World Series.  Marlins fans, however, have yet another reason to be excited about 2012.  In addition to their cutting edge neon colored horror-scape of a ballpark and a brash new manager, the newly minted Miami Marlins now have a mustache with considerable upside under team control for the next five seasons.


While not a finished product by any means, scouts say the Dutch 'Stache is highly projectable.  A rival AL scout was quoted as saying that, "While not being much more than a pedo-stache right now, if you look at it with the right eyes, you can see a Selleck.  It's a mustache you can really dream on."  


**Derek Holland could not be reached for comment, but he clearly seemed distressed by this recent turn of events.**

"He doesn't run, he skates."

They don't sneer like they used to.

Paul Rapier Richards.  I have been an avid baseball fan for nineteen years, excluding those early years spent weening and teething and those late adolescent years spent seeing just how far I could insert my head up my ass, and I had never heard that name.  At least not in a context that would commit it to memory.  And yet Paul Richards has probably had more impact on post-WWII baseball than most any other man.  A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that he never guided his club to the pennant.  In fact, he seemed to make a habit of getting out just before the getting got good.