Trader Frank vs. Trader Jack

A small part of the fun in delving through baseball's long, glorious history is the useless playing of the 'what if' game.  It's almost as useless as making preseason predictions, but we can't help doing it all the same.  What if Ted Williams and Joe Dimaggio had swapped places?  Certainly many more homeruns for both, and a very different individual public perception for each.  What if ballplayers were excused from military service during WWII?  Williams may own all the major hitting records.  What if the Red Sox and Yankees weren't so slow in shaking their racist sensibilities in the aftermath of Branch Rickey signing Jackie Robinson?  Willie Mays should've been in Boston, either hitting in front of, or behind Williams.  What fun would've been had in Boston.  The Yankee dynasty would have likely extended beyond the end of the Mantle Era.  Would Georgie Porgie have gotten his hands on the team if they hadn't fallen from prominence?  There are countless of these scenarios, and they are fun to postulate about in barrooms.  But here's a silly one that surely would've created some exciting roster instability.  What if Frank Lane and Jack McKeon had been GMs at the same time?  Ooh  Boy!  No player's job would've been safe.

Examining Pitch Type Linear Weights

This is apropos of nothing really, but it's the middle of January and we've got to talk about something...  So, let's take a look at which pitchers threw the most successful pitch types in 2011 according to FanGraphs' pitch value leaderboards.  This metric, "uses linear weights by count and by event and breaks it down by each pitch type so you can see, in runs, the actual effectiveness of each pitch."  The number shown for each pitch type is the cumulative runs saved above average for each pitch type a pitcher throws, the higher the number the better (for a thorough breakdown of how this is calculated, click here).

Baseball and the Movies : Game 6

The camera moves along a rooftop patio overlooking the East River.  The sun is just rising, casting an optimistic glow on a gray New York City morning.  A man, dressed neatly in ironed slacks and shirt sits in a chair, fighting the wind to read the newspaper, drinking a cup of coffee.  He stands and walks to the railing.  He scans the river, the bridge extending across, the rotting cityscape of the luxury elite.  He looks down on the city and says to himself, "This Could Be It".  The movie cuts to a tracking shot.  The centerfield gate to Shea Stadium opens, and we move across the green outfield grass toward homeplate.  Thirteen hours until game time, we are told.

This is a Picture of Luis Tiant

A gentleman of leisure.

Best Pitcher of the 1980s: Beating the Poor Dead Horse

Two fine pitchers...two Hall of Fame mustaches.

I have only recently entered into the annual Hall of Fame debate conducted by thousands of people, most of which have no significant influence on the vote (including myself).  And already I have grown weary of the vitriolic arguments for or against certain players.  In researching for this post, I quickly tired of the argument I was going to make against Jack Morris for the Hall of Fame.  The guy was a very good pitcher who is now being dragged through the ringer that results from straddling the fence between an older generation that evaluates the game and its players with archaic measures and a narrow range of focus, and the new generation that takes advantage of all available tools to better understand baseball and all its intricacies.  The old generation remains stubborn in the face of progress because there is a lot more work involved now, and I imagine a creeping feeling that what they've always known about the game amounts to not nearly as much as prided upon.  And they don't like it.  Gut vs. Brain.  The game pulls at both but should lean more heavily on the brain.  And the new generation, the stat-heads, as we are so derisively regarded, fuel this ongoing fire in part because it is so damn frustrating to have all these resources that provide clearer, more interesting representations of the game that are all but ignored by the baseball mainstream, from ESPN to broadcasts to the BBWAA.  The new generation is winning the war, which will make baseball better in the long run, but the old curmudgeons don't like it one bit.  And Jack Morris is the man chosen to represent that older generation's outlook on the game.*

Zombie Baseball Cards

A late night Google image search of Fernando Valenzuela led me to find this delightful piece of baseball ephemera.  Chicago-area artist Jeremy Scheuch has an entire series of zombie baseball cards, based on the 1986 Topps set.  Do yourself a favor and check out the entire gallery here.  

Kerry Wood, Post-Modern Mr. Cub

Looks a lot like an 'M', or if you prefer, an inverted 'W'

Kerry Wood is still a Chicago Cub, signing a one-year deal for $3 million to set-up cardiac closer extraordinaire Carlos Marmol.  As a lifelong Cubs fan, I was thrilled when Wood signed with the Cubs prior to the 2011 season, coming off his brilliant flash of dominance with the Yankees, and even more so upon learning the sentimental details of his contract negotiations with then GM Jim Hendry following Ron Santo's funeral.  Wood took a discount to come back home to Chicago.  Such a mutual display of loyalty between player and management has always been rare and is almost unheard of in modern baseball business.  But coming into this offseason,  I've had a difficult time shifting my weight on either side of apathy.