Baseball DIY

The coolest thing to happen in a long long time has just been made public. The Ivory-billed Woodepecker, thought extinct for sixty years, has been seen (and video taped) in Arkansas.

You know what this means? This means we are living in the presence of a miracle. No storeis about distant weeping statues or parting seas, we get to see a bird fly out of the forest that has not been visible for decades. The last person to see it was a child born during the Great Depression.

And now they are letting us see them once again.

What I love about this is that the ornithologists who saw the bird a year ago have been very very careful about who they let know about it. They've been holding their cards tight to their chests and making sure that everything about this was done in the best possible way for the birds. That means that the publicity is so great that the government has to acknowledge that an extinct bird has returned from the dead and they have to make sure that the bird remains protected.

And that means that maybe my grandchildren will see get to see the Ivory-billed Woodpecker flying wild one day too.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is also know as the "Lord God Bird", because it is so beautiful that people would yell "Lord God, look at that bird!" when they first saw it.

And now it's back. I am so so happy about this.

Joesportsfan.com has an excellent article regarding the last season of the current Busch Stadium.

True, it's way too early to judge the situation, but I wanted to see how David Eckstein, Orlando Cabrera, and Edgar Renteria compare so far. Eck's who the Cards ended up with, Edgar's the dude we lost, and Orlando's the guy I wanted us to get when Edgar split. My apologies in advance for the appearance of this chart. I can't figure out how to get it formatted; Blogger seems to undo any spacing magic I work in the Compose screen.

AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB BA OBP SLG OPS
Eckstein 63 7 17 4 0 0 4 1 1 10 .270 .395 .333 .728
Cabrera 77 8 20 5 1 2 7 1 0 8 .260 .329 .429 .758
Renteria 84 12 20 4 1 2 9 1 0 6 .238 .289 .381 .670
GP GS INN TC PO A E DP FPCT RF ZR
Cabrera 20 20 182.0 97 33 63 1 11 .990 4.75 .843
Eckstein 17 17 149.0 87 28 58 1 12 .989 5.19 .800
Renteria 21 20 177.1 91 29 59 3 13 .967 4.47 .864

So Eck's living up to his reputation as an 0n-base machine and has a surprising lead in range factor (basically, outs per game). Edgar's .289 OBP is obscene. I think Orlando Cabrera is still the pick of the litter.

To be fair, though, Eckstein should get some bonus points for having to put up with the continuous barrage of "he's a good little player"/"he doesn't have the best skills, but he's scrappy" comments.

I'd just like to point out that my beloved Cardinals have the best winning percentage of any team in the majors right now. This could change by tomorrow, so I thought I'd mention it now.

On a related note, I'm reading Three Nights in August by Buzz Bissinger/Tony La Russa right now. A variation on the idea behind Nine Innings, the book uses a 2003 Cardinals/Cubs series as a springboard to discuss the myriad mental, emotional, and physical exercises necessary to manage a major league team. So far, there's already been one direct burn on J.D. Drew, and I'm only on page 30. With a few more of those, and maybe some Kenny Lofton-bashing, this book could sneak its way into my Top 5.

Following a link and great review from Bob Gray at Fresh Eyes, I took a look at Emmis Books and their very interesting books on baseball. Emmis has two books out right now as part of their series Baseball: Behind the Seams, one on catchers and one on pitchers. I love the tagline: "no pouting superstars, no steroids, no player's strikes."

Can you imagine?

In his journal Bob wrote about Our Red Sox which looks to be of the classic "coming of age of a baseball fan" or as described on the web site, "a look from deep inside Red Sox nation." I would dismiss this book as the standard I "heart" baseball fare if Bob didn't love it so much. By his own admission he is not an avid baseball fan, so his recommendation carries some additional weight for me.

I'll quote liberally from Bob here so you can see what I mean. (We seem to be heavily into quoting around here lately....)

Emmis Books sent me a signed copy with a pleasant greeting from the author, Robert Sullivan, a Deputy Managing Editor of LIFE magazine whose work has often appeared in Sports Illustrated and Time. And even though it was clearly a book about the family side of Red Sox Nation with the potential to be of diabetically-high sugar content (The jacket copy actually says, "Our Red Sox is a home run..."), I cracked it open in a moment of weakness.

And I loved it. Our Red Sox is full of sentiment without ever being sentimental. Native New Englander Sullivan traces his lifelong obsession with the Sox (even though he has lived for many years among the enemy in Westchester) and weaves it into the 2004 season's impact on his family and friends, as well as the rest of the Nation.

It's a book that ultimately accomplished one of things I like best about this business, and something that happens all too rarely. It surprised me with its excellence.

Well done, Mr. Sullivan. Our Red Sox is a keeper.

What more could you want from a recommendation than that?

Go read Fresh Eyes for great writing on books and check out Our Red Sox for great writing on baseball. It's a banner day for readers everywhere.

My favorite author (I think), Michael Chabon, has redesigned his more-than-worthwhile Web site. One of the recent additions is the baseball-addled author's essay on Ozzie Canseco's brother. Here, I present a possibly overlong extract:

THE question that concerns me in all this is not one of the obvious ones, like what to tell my children, or what to do about the problem of steroids, or how to think about the records that may have been broken by cheaters, or how to protect against perfidy, avarice, taint and scandal the dear old national game. Like all obvious questions, none of them can really be answered.

All human endeavor is subject to cracking. It's the hard, Tex Avery truth of the universe: put your finger over one leak and another one pops up, just beyond your reach. Violence, gambling and game fixing, pestilential racism, overexpansion, competitive imbalance, labor strife, mind-boggling cupidity, and cheating of every variety and school: for most of its history the game of baseball has, like everything we build, been riddled with holes, some cavernous, some of them irreparable.

I don't know what is to be done about this latest debacle, and neither do you. No, what I want to know about Jose Canseco is, how come I still like the guy so much?

It was really just a matter of time...Nats fans have taken their love for their team to the Internet. This is the first Washington Nationals blog that I've come across. I recommend the Joey Eischen quote.

Michael Lewis (of Moneyball infamy) has an article in the New York Times Magazine. I haven't read it yet, but I've heard good things from trusted sources.

The putatively rigorous drug testing in the minor leagues, in Stanley's view, didn't reduce the use of steroids so much as it increased the energy players put into not getting caught. In 2003, players were going off into a separate room to fill a cup with urine; that was a joke. Last year, the testers followed the players into the bathroom; steroid users were said to fill false penises -- whizzinators, they called them -- with clean urine and stick them down their pants. The testing wasn't designed to catch cheaters but to create the illusion of trying to catch them. And never mind the biggest loophole of all: the off-season, when the testing of players was haphazard at best.

While wandering around The Diamond Angle I found a review of SABR's convention reports (that's the Society of American Baseball Research) that includes some really fascinating stuff. The publication, Road Trips, is a sampler of 53 presentations and short papers from past SABR conventions. It includes subjects as varied as Bud Fowler (who I'm already fascinated by), the history of the Dodgers Spring Training Complex in Vero Beach, the politics that went into forming the AL and the saga of the 1878 Buffalo Bisons. As the review mentions, SABR is home for a lot folks who are passionate about all aspects of the game and they can lead convention attendees into areas of baseball history that most fans have never heard of, or even considered studying. But that is what always make a convention cool; someone else has done all the research for you and you just get to sit back and listen and learn.

Or you could read about it while enjoying some sunshine. I'm going outside, you go read.

Over at The Rake, Brad Zeller has written a very interesting article in his Warning Track column on the music played during Twins games. (Link provided via Batgirl.) Like the other fans he mentions, I've never given much thought to the background noise at any sporting event but he's right, a lot of thought does go into it. And if the music is bad then everyone notices, so making appropriate, good and ecelectic choices is a bit of a challenge.

In his latest column Zeller also exposes a bit of his own bad behavior at a recent game, proving that he is a bit more of a rabid fan sometimes then necessary (although I'm sure he would argue that point with me quite successfully), and he is not a sausage and cheese man.

I think that is the most important part of the article.

My son is eating sausage right now as a I write this. It's not all bad, Brad.

This past Christmas, my wife took my ever-so-subtle hints that I wanted a Montreal Expos hat. I didn't really have a good reason for wanting one; I just figured, "if not now, when?" The idea of wearing a deceased team's hat certainly appealed to me, and the Expos' logo is or was undeniably cool. Other than that, I wasn't aware of any other reason for wanting one.

Fast forward (or, for you bookworkms, flip ahead) a month, and my department at work learns that our existence will soon come to an end, as our jobs will be packed in styrofoam peanuts and shipped to the company's Philadelphia office. Nothing makes you grow up (at least a little) like getting laid off. All of our hard and good work, apparently, wasn't needed or, worse, wasn't efficient enough. So by the end of the year, St. Louis Issue Management will go the way of the Expos.

Yesterday, in the produce section, I realized that my Expos hat, which I had sworn not to wear during baseball season but wear just the same, had taken on new meaning for me. The Expos, like all of the good (and bad) people of my department, deserve to be remembered. I'm sure the Expos brought joy to many fans, Quebecois and otherwise, over the years, and now they've morphed into an American team that reincarnates another deceased team (if you haven't heard by now, the Senators were called the Nationals for much of their existence). My job is basically to make authors and editors (and, if necessary, advertisers) happy, which I do on a regular basis. But, for whatever cosmic reason, our respective runs have come to an end (technically, I'm cool to December, but who wants to wait around for his own funeral?).

The mature part of me, though, takes a wider view. Yes, the Montreal fans lost a team. Washington fans, however, gained one, much like Philadelphia will gain jobs. There is no net loss, just a shifting of resources. I'm only mad because I'm in St. Louis; were I a Phillies fan, I'd jump up and down. It's hard to look at it objectively, but it's also something of a lukewarm comfort.

I've concluded that I wear my Expos hat for the broken-hearted fans of Montreal, for myself, and to point the finger at Seligistic mistakes wherever they occur (it didn't have to be this way, Bud).

Most of all, though, I wear it for that kick-ass logo.

Over at the literary blog The Millions there is a very poetic mention of Robert Angell's book, Game Time. (Scroll down to April 20th.) Angell is one of baseball's better writers, for all the best reasons: he can write well anyway, he loves the game and he knows the game. (The last one being a critical component.) Game Time has been out for a couple of years but remains a bit overlooked, which is a shame. As for The Millions, it's great coverage of all kinds of books, both new and old.

If you can't watch a game, then go read a book.

The New York Times has a great article today about what happened to the 1955 World Series Pennant which disappeared from a ballroom in LA in 1959. I love this kind of story and I'm enough of a sentimental old fool to be very very happy that the pennant is back home and on display.

And hey, they have some Gil Hodges memorabilia.

Why isn't that guy in the Hall of Fame?

One of the thing that has always annoyed me about girls vs boys sports programs is the attitude that comes with them. The women's soccer team did a lot to change that attitude and so has the WBA, but on the little league level girls still don't draw the same crowds or excitement. What's annoying is that a lot of those little girls are waaaay better than their male competition but they never get the recognition or support. If you've got a pig-tailed little leaguer in your life you should buy her My Thirteenth Season. It's everything she's going through as a girl who loves to play the game, and plays it well.

There's a lot worse things you can do than throw like a girl, you know.

This is the first time Bud Selig has talked about doing something that I actually agree with.

I'm now waiting for hell to freeze over.

I think it's great that Boston is taking a hard line with the fans involved in the Gary Sheffield incident over the weekend. And as a Boston fan myself, I don't think Sheffield deserves to be suspended; I don't even think he should be fined. It's baseball for God's sake, you shouldn't have to be worried about someone reaching over the side and grabbing you or taking a swing at you and as for the idiot who threw his beer on Sheffield...Get a life.

It's a family game, remember?

Iris Chang did not play or write about baseball. Her life, in fact, seems to have been completely devoid of all sports. Of course I don't know that for sure, she could have been a huge fan of anything, but as for her professional life, it wasn't about ball. What she did was write one of the most important history books to be published in recent years, The Rape of Nanking. It recounts the events surrounding the Japanese invasion of China prior to WW2 and particularly the destruction of the city of Nanking. It's an event that has been an open wound for the Chinese and largely ignored and denied by the Japanese; one of the ugly moments in history that everyone seems to want to go away. Iris Chang did not believe in letting history disappear. She was an amazing writer and more than that, she wrote about things that mattered.

Iris died in November last year, from suicide. The San Francisico Chronicle has a very sad but thorough story about the last few months of life and what might have led to her death. Read the article, but more importantly, read the book.

The best way to remember her is to pass on the story she told. And trust me, she was someone who should be remembered.

While wondering around the 'net today looking up books for my other writing job, I found Da Capo Books. I've never heard of this small press before, which is no surprise. It's not easy to hear about anybody that isn't Random House or Penguin these days. But after a quick look I must say I'm very impressed. They've got a nice little selection of sports books including some excellent baseball choices. First up is Last Best League by Jim Collins, a look at the Cape Cod League from someone who grew up there and knows all the ins and outs. And it's not just a namedropper apparently but about baseball and the people who play and watch in Cape Cod. Nice. There's Arnold Hano's book, A Day in the Bleachers which covers the opening day of the 1954 Series between the Indians and Giants. The cover shots are of the famous Willie Mays catch, another classic moment. Mark Ribowsky is up next with a biography of Satchel Paige, Don't Look Back. What I think is interesting about this title is that Ribowsky looked at Paige's whole life, not just baseball. He's such a legend that I think the rest of his world gets lost in his contribution to the game, which isn't good. The man was a lot of things, and pitching balls was just one of them.

Red Barber was the broadcaster for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 when Jackie Robinson joined the line-up. He chronicles the year that followed in 1947:The Year All Hell Broke Loose in Baseball. Barber was also a friend of Branch Rickey's and knew a lot of what was going on that missed the public eye. This is history as it happened by someone who was in the middle of it, the best kind of historical book to me.

DaCapo are also the folks who published the recent high school football bestseller Friday Night Lights and the great Frank Deford classic, Everybody's All American. They've got Jake LaMotta's Raging Bull and books on horse racing, boxing, poker, golf..you name it. There's also W.C. Heinz's collection of magazine articles: What A Time it Was. Heinz was in the middle of it all during the 1940s and 50s and wrote about: Jackie, Sugar Ray Robinson, Red Grange...the list goes on. This is the sportswriting book I'll be buying next.

Why waste your time on another Yankees/Red Sox rivalry book when there's real writing to be found?

I thought you'd understand.

Every once in a while, I'll flip open a Bill James book and just start reading. Rarely do I quit reading due to lack of interest. It seems unfair that one man can have so many astute insights on just about anything directly and indirectly related to baseball (ie, everything). His book Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? examines, diagnoses, and prescribes a remedy for the ills of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in about 450 pages.

Reading from it today and then keeping my mind busy with the mental residue while mowing the lawn, I realized that one thing I admire in James's work is the implied assertion that everything is knowable. "What makes a baseball player a Hall of Famer?" sits at the right hand of "What is the meaning of life?" at the Table of Questions Designed to Make You Chase Your Own Tail. The easy answer to the question to the question is, "A Hall of Famer is whoever the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA) says is a Hall of Famer." This answer, though, leaves an empty spot in the soul, especially when the facial and cranial follicular decisions of certain members of the BBWAA are considered. So you or Bill James ask(s), "What should make a baseball player a Hall of Famer?", which is like asking, "What should the meaning of life be?" All of a sudden, a debate on the merits of Gil Hodges has turned into an investigation into what values, attributes, and abilities are vital to a Hall of Fame career/well-lived life. Good luck getting out of that forest without burning down some trees (which Bill James usually manages to do, though he doesn't always entirely resolve the question at hand).

What I value in James is the attempt to comprehensively understand something that most people would rather ignore or explain away with an easy answer, which is pretty much the same thing.

I just thought I'd share that.

The lawn looks great, by the way.

The literary journal Hobart is up with its April issue, all things baseball. My favorite story right now is "Course Catalog from the Jose Canseco Academy." What can I say, I'm feeling very sarcastic and snarky at the moment.

And if anyone deserves snarkiness, it's Canseco.

Last night at baseball practice, I hit the first over-the-fence home run (I've hit a couple inside-the-parkers in softball games) of my life. Left-field at the Unions home park is kind of short and is adjacent to a creek, so we were using this spongier ball that is a little cheaper (not to mention less likely to jump off the bat like a hyperactive three-year-old). I smacked the fifth or sixth pitch I saw into the left-center field trees on a low arc. I watched it the whole way, not thinking that it would make it, but then I heard it land in the branches. It sounded soooo good. Naturally, I tried to maim the next pitch and ended up popping it up to the second baseman. Stupid, stupid rat creature. The home run ball was retrieved and, other than its sogginess, showed no signs of the thrashing I had given it.

It's like Bob Gibson said (paraphrasing): anyone can hit in batting practice.

Thanks to a brief mention in the current issue of Vanity Fair (the one with the picture of the Desperate Housewives on the cover...oh joy), I spent a little time today researching the life of sportswriter Shirley Povich. Povich, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, was a sportswriter for The Washington Post back when baseball was first played in DC. He was in many ways the voice of the Nationals and clearly someone who loved the sport for what it could be and should be. I love the quote they pulled for the piece in VF that Povich wrote in 1939: "There's a couple of million dollars worth of baseball talent on the loose," he wrote. "Only one thing is keeping them out of the big leagues - the pigmentation of their skin."

Clearly, he cared little for the game's bullshit and more for its true glory.

Last month a collection of Povich's columns was published by PublicAffairs. Read and remember.

One of my favorite all-time Cardinals is/was Steve Kline. He is a scruffy Canadian left-handed reliever (SCLR) whose dirty hats usually got more attention than his pitching ability did (the Cardinals tried to fill the SCLR role with Bill Pulsipher; alas, he's from Georgia and currently resides on the DL). The local media took to portraying him as something of a mo-ron and called him "the Governor" for the usual ironic reasons. Though he occasionally crossed the line (flipping Tony La Russa the bird one time comes to mind), I always liked having him on the team and never got the Dave Veres Chills whenever he came into a ballgame. This offseason, he took the Orioles up on an offer he couldn't refuse (partly because the Cardinals refused to match the offer), and it seems that things haven't gone as Kline thought they would.

Kline later apologized for the comments in the above-linked article. Sometimes, honesty is not the best policy (at least when you're teammates and bosses have access to the Web).

This probably won't make much sense, but I've been reading a lot of Herman Melville for class.

It occurred to me that a lot of what I like about baseball, a lot of what makes me think about it so much, is that, sometimes, it just seems so damned arbitrary. I haven't done the math to prove the point, but I remember hearing in Bull Durham that the difference between a .250 hitter and a .300 hitter over the course of a season is an extra hit per week. "One seeing-eye single, one dying quail" is enough to forever change how people view your performance that season. Over a career, a certain amount of skill is required to gain a Hall of Fame reputation. But just within the context of one game, how many small, seemingly insignificant events occur that result in our terming one team the winner and the other a loser? It just seems to me that baseball more closely reflects life than hockey, football, or basketball.

Imagine that it's the bottom of the ninth, and your team is down by one with two outs and a runner on first. The batter hits a drive deep to center field; it looks like it's going to be the proverbial walk-off home run. It lands five feet short of the fence, though, and bounces over for a ground-rule double. Had the fence been a foot taller, or the warning track a little damper, the ball stays in the park and, at the very least, the runner on first scores. Instead, the way it works out in this particular reality, the pitcher who gave up a monster shot ends up looking like a hero, because he strikes the next guy out on a questionable slider on or off the inside corner, depending on whom you ask. You lose a game more because of landscaping than because of the skill of your team. The other team is invariably credited with possessing the "intangibles" necessary to win the close games, but in your heart you know that that's absolute nonsense (and somewhere deep inside, so do they).

In Moby Dick, Melville says that the events of your life are determined by a combination of necessity, free will, and chance. He's careful to point out that chance gets the last word. Watch enough baseball and you see what he means.

In the highly competitive world of baseball eats (yeah, all things relative), Baltimore seems to be kicking DC's ass. I have never strayed beyond the hotdog and coke stereotypes for my game day fare but I must admit I'm a bit intrigued by idea of crab cakes in the ballpark. It does seem very Baltimore, doesn't it?

For those of you who really want to talk ball food, Baseball Fever has a whole forum on the subject. The one entry that stood out for me had the word panini in it. (I have no clue if I'm spelling that right.) I never thought I'd be jealous of baseball food, but I'm thinking maybe I've been wrong staying with the tried and true. Maybe I should plan a baseball tour of all the best food parks. At least that way, no matter which way the game goes, I won't be disappointed.

It's one way not to want your money back.

Robert Redford as Branch Rickey in the still untitled Jackie Robinson biopic that is picking up steam....here's hoping it leans away from Bagger Vance territory and more towards The Natural (which I will shamelessly admit that I love.) The oral history collection by Robinson that was originally published in 1964 is back in print this week. Baseball Has Done It, with a new intro by Spike Lee, includes dozens of interviews that Robinson conducted with other black ballplayers.

And I can't help but wonder, which one of today's players will they be making a movie about fifty years from now?

Anybody?

The baseball toaster is all about poetry these days, including predictions across the league. Here's the kicker...the stuff is actually very good! Makes it easier for a tough guy to appreciate verse I suppose. Todd Jones over at The Sporting News is wondering why northern towns always have home games in the Spring when it's freezing outside. He has a solution to the problem that I think makes a lot of sense, especially for all the shivering fans. And Patrick Rasmussen pines for the Oakland A's of his childhood in a new essay up at Slow Trains.

Sometimes, you need your memories to keep you warm.

Now this is a surprise. Stefan Fatsis who wrote Wordfreak, a book about Scrabble, of all things, is a Wallstreet Journal sportswriter who also happened to write one of the more intriguing sounding books on minor league baseball that I have come across in a long time: Wild and Outside. In this interview with Spike, Fatsis manages to sound perfectly normal, inspite of a borderline obsession with word games. I'm more interested though in how he found out about an obscure minor league in the Northern Midwest and Canada. The book doesn't look so easy to come by from amazon, but Daedalus Books has it for a very reasonable $4.98. That's cheap enough to pick up the Scrabble book as well...hey it is competitive isn't it? Does that make it a hobby or a sport?

Anybody?

MLB players make a lot of money! And a lot of the highest-paid players play for the Yankees!

I'm Back.

Harry Abrams has a new book coming out, Negro Baseball, which is significant as it features the photographs of Ernie Withers. Withers was one of the primary photographers of the Civil Rights era and was equally famous for his photos of the Negro leagues. One shot featured in the current issue of Smithsonian shows Jackie Robinson, Ernie Banks and Larry Doby together in the late 1940s. (Doby was the first AL league Hall of Fame member.)

The pictures are gorgeous in their own right, but fantastic as history in the making.

Would you believe that I had to miss the last 8-1/2 innings of the Cardinals opener last night because of my American Literature Before 1900 class? Some genius, who may or may not have been me, signed me up for a ten-minute presentation on an article titled "'Bartleby the Scrivener' and the Transformation of the Economy" on Opening Day. Before I left for class, I saw Mike Shannon's first mistake of the new season (talking to Walt Jocketty on the Fox Sports Midwest pre-game show: "How do you like this team you have in '04 compared to the team you had in '04?") and Jim Edmonds three-run homer to the left-field seats, so it wasn't a total loss.

Not to belittle the accomplishment, but I think I could hit one into the left-field seats at Minute Maid Park.

Apparently, everyone but me can write a book:

The Kimberly Bell book tour, even without a publishing deal, has begun.
The San Jose woman who has said she dated Barry Bonds from 1994 to 2003, talked to The New York Times this week and said she plans a book about the relationship.