I thought I would do a quick trawl of the British Sunday papers (online) to see if the story of Jackie Robinson was covered anywhere today. The Sunday Times appear to be the only paper to have written anything, although it is a decent little piece commenting on the declining numbers of African-Americans in MLB today.
Sunday is here again and that means it’s time for another edition of “weekly hit ground ballâ€. It’s Jackie Robinson day and the world of MLB will pay their respects to the man who did so much to break down the colour barrier, and was a great baseball player to boot. The number 42 will loom large over the day’s proceedings, but I will resist the temptation to stretch this post to 42 points. Continue reading
There are many reasons to consider the “save†as being a fairly limited statistic. It is entirely dependent on opportunity and, due to the importance placed on them by many in the game, there is an argument that saves condition managers into using their best relief pitcher in a very narrow role. Continue reading
Well this is it, my new site is up and running with all of the posts and comments from the previous blog having been moved across.
Setting up this new site has involved a fair bit of planning and I thought everything was finally in place this morning. A few minor problems had to be ironed out, but apart from that it had all been plain sailing. Then I decided to check whether everything worked okay in different web browsers, as suggested by the Theme owner! I use Mozilla Firefox and this site displays without any problems there and it also works fine in Opera; however I tried it with Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 and was met with a few displaying errors. What I thought was my “perfect” site is actually displaying a few imperfections in these browsers, with the footer not displaying correctly and a few lines appearing on the right hand side of the page. Talk about a kick in the teeth!
I’ve spent the morning seeing if any other themes fit the bill (and work in all browsers!), with depressing results (getting three columns to work in IE is not easy by all accounts). So I’m going to crack on with this theme for now as it was exactly what I was looking for in terms of layout and hope that the slight displaying glitches in Explorer don’t detract too much from the site. Obviously if there are any functionality problems then I will have to think again, but hopefully it will be fine and either the theme owner or myself can fix things in time. If all else fails I will have to find/build another theme, but with a bit of luck it won’t come to that.
Please let me know if you have any major problems.
Waking up this morning, I expected to see reams of stories about Dice-K and Ichiro battling it out last night in the Seattle-Boston clash.
I didn’t realise Felix Hernandez was starting for the Mariners.
He has long been known as King Felix and anyone who wasn’t convinced that this youngster deserved the title will now be bowing at their master’s feet begging for forgiveness.  In a game watched by millions around the world, Hernandez decided that he wasn’t interested in being the support act. The spotlight was shining on Fenway last night. The newly slim-lined Felix waltzed on to the stage and made it his own.
I know what I’ll be watching when I get home from work this evening. The joys of archived games on MLB.com!
As noted in the comments last week, MLB.com are currently offering a free five-day trial of MLB.TV for those of you considering whether or not to sign-up. It’s a great way for newcomers to give the system a proper test-run to see how it will work on your set-up and what the picture quality is like. Continue reading
This is the start of what will hopefully be a weekly feature (hence the name). My week will run from Saturday to Saturday, purely on the basis that I should always have time on a Sunday to write it as opposed to cobbling something together after getting home from work on a Monday evening. These are just my observations from the things I have seen and read over the week, so feel free to add your own in the comments.
Most British baseball fans develop a daily ritual whereby one of their first tasks in the morning is to log on to MLB.com and check the results from the previous day’s play. You scour the scoreboard to see who won (and by how many runs) and then check the basic facts such as who was credited for the win, loss and save and who hit a homerun. You can then dive into the box scores to see how your fantasy players performed (counting the points as you go) before checking out the reports from the results that catch your eye.
Lots of fun stuff on the Daily Rewind today (the episode for April 5), from the Padres’s Kevin Kouzmanoff and Khalil Greene tripping over each other to penguins in New York. But perhaps the funniest bit was the news that the authorities in Canada have ordered two of the Blue Jays’s promotional adverts to be re-filmed.
It cannot have escaped your attention that Daisuke Matsuzaka makes his Major League debut today for the Red Sox. Boston set it up for him yesterday, beating the Royals to tie the series 1-1 and allowing Matsuzaka to try to win the rubber match. First pitch is scheduled for 19.10 (BST) and it promises to be a great way to start the Easter weekend. Hopefully MLB.TV will be up to it, because I’m sure there will be plenty of traffic.
Those looking for a Dice-K primer should head over to the Special K page on Boston’s official site. In particular have a read of the “Variety of pitches up his sleeve” article and watch the main multimedia clip by Will Carrol from Baseball Prospectus, dissecting Dice-K’s pitching mechanics. Seeing how similar his delivery is to Roger Clemens’s is an eye-opener, not least because physically they are quite different in terms of body shape. Whether he can produce the same results is what we are all waiting to see. It should be fascinating to watch.