Monthly Archives: October 2009

Yankees win Game Two to level the World Series

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world-series2009The New York Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies 3-1 in the early hours of this morning to level the 2009 World Series at 1-1.  A.J. Burnett was brilliant over seven innings and solo home runs by Mark Teixeira and Hideki Matsui proved to be the difference as Pedro Martinez took the loss against his old enemy.  We now have an ‘off’ day today before the series reconvenes in Philadelphia for three games in three days.  All three will be necessary and everyone who has richly enjoyed the first two games of this series will be keen for the final two potential games to be necessary as well.  This Fall Classic has the hallmarks of a seven-game epic.

When looking back over my scoresheet from Game Two, what strikes me the most are the similarities with the series opener.  Continue reading →

Phillies win World Series opener

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world-series2009The Philadelphia Phillies defeated the Yankees 6-1 in a drizzly New York to win the opening game of the 2009 World Series in the early hours of this morning. 

While MLB’s previous free-to-air TV host Five was showing a third-rate piffling show called Super Casino, the Phillies’ Cliff Lee was dealing.  He pitched a complete game against the potent Yankee batting lineup, striking out ten and conceding just one late unearned run, whilst also making two nonchalant fielding plays that had everyone not connected to the Yankees grinning from ear-to-ear.  Lee’s opposing number, and former team mate in Cleveland, CC Sabathia also pitched a strong game, giving up four hits over seven innings; however he made two mistakes to Chase Utley and the Phillies’ second baseman dispatched both of them into the seats for solo home runs. 

Philadelphia added four more runs in the final two innings off the Yankee bullpen, but ultimately it was a cushion that Lee didn’t need.  Despite a typical display of the Yankees’ never-say-die spirit in the bottom of the ninth, led by a Derek Jeter single as so often has been the case over the years,  the Bronx Bombers could only muster a single run on a throwing error by Jimmy Rollins.  Breaking up the shutout was the only bright spot for the home crowd, one cheered a little more heartily than usual because of the identity of the person who chucked the ball away.  That moment apart, the Yankee fans were left trudging away from their spectacular new stadium with the knowledge that their team had been outplayed.  Philadelphia’s one-nil advantage is fully deserved and sets up the rest of the series perfectly for us neutrals.

The lack of coverage on British terrestrial TV meant that the MLB International feed with Dave O’Brien and Rick Sutcliffe wasn’t available to us (maybe that’s the feed that was shown on ESPN America?), so FOX were our broadcasters via MLB.tv.  Joe Buck and Tim McCarver kept the annoying moments to a minimum and offered a neat little feature at the start of the game by showing us the pitch types and grips used by the two starting pitchers, something that the MLB International production has done in the past, if my memory serves me correctly.  Sabathia was shown gripping a four-seam and two-seam fastball alongside a cutter and a change-up; Lee displayed a four-seamer, change and a ‘spiked’ curveball.  That last pitch was a Yankee-killer on the night.  Lee showed he had a great feel for it right out of the gate by flipping a beauty to Jeter with his second pitch of the game and he used it to strike out Jorge Posada to end the contest in the ninth. 

I’ve always been tickled by the way in which pitches can be seen in different ways by different people.  Some batters will confidently tell you that Sabathia doesn’t throw a cutter and that it’s really a slider, while the commentators regularly referred to Lee’s cutter even though that wasn’t one of his pitches showcased in the above mentioned feature.  I guess the difference between some of these pitches is slight and what you call them doesn’t really matter.  It’s when and where they are thrown that counts.

That was highlighted by the two pitches that Sabathia would love to be able to take back.  The left-handed Chase Utley stands very close to the plate and a left-handed pitcher like Sabathia is always going to try and throw the fastball in under his hands because that’s clearly going to be a very difficult pitch for Utley to get around on and hit if you locate it well.  It’s a classic case of strengths and weaknesses being so close to each other.  Sabathia knows that if he gets those pitches right then Utley will struggle to do much with them, but if he misses then he’s in trouble.  Throw it too far inside and you’re likely to hit him, as happened to Utley more times in the 2009 regular season than any other player in the Majors, putting a runner on in front of Ryan Howard.  If you don’t throw it far enough inside and get too much of the plate, you’re putting the ball right into Utley’s wheelhouse.  The latter happened twice in Game One: Posada set up inside, Sabathia’s fastball drifted into the middle of the plate and Utley smacked it into the right-field seats. 

The margin between success and failure at the highest level of baseball is breathtakingly small.  That’s the intense thrill of the competition that players, managers and us fans feed on and enjoy so much.

Despite Lee’s masterful performance, had a few plays turned out differently then the game might have ended in the Yankees’ favour and that’s how this ultra-talented New York team will look at it.  Sabathia could have jammed Utley twice.  The unusual double-play turned by the Phillies in the fifth after Matsui’s lead-off single, one that has prompted a few scoring queries for me to put to Joe once I’ve finished writing this article, was nearly missed by the umpires.  Raul Ibanez might have grounded out to Robinson Cano with the bases loaded yet again in the eighth, as he did in the first inning, rather than send the ball past him to double the Phillies’ 2-0 lead.  Of course, had Ibanez struck the blow in the opening frame then who knows what would have happened next.

There are potentially six more games left in this World Series and the Yankees undoubtedly have the class to turn it around, but  the Phillies have struck a significant opening blow. They are guaranteed to head back to Citizens Bank Park at least with the series level at 1-1 and with the chance to reel off three wins to win the series at home, as Rollins cheekily predicted.  Lee struck out Alex Rodriguez three times as the third baseman went hitless (how long before people are saying he can’t handle the pressure of the World Series? One more 0-fer performance I bet), the Phillies’ hitters inflicted damage on the Yankee bullpen and beat the Yankee’s one ‘banker’ starting pitcher. 

Joe Girardi is now relying on the ace-type A.J. Burnett showing up tonight, while Charlie Manuel will be hoping that the New York crowd’s taunts will inspire Pedro Martinez to put on a vintage performance.  Hopefully both pitchers will be at their best and we can enjoy another well-played, exciting game.  First pitch is set for 23.57 GMT once again.

World Series 2009 Primer

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world-series2009The 2009 World Series begins tonight at 23.57 GMT and it promises to be a fantastic contest between two excellent teams.  The Philadelphia Phillies are the reigning champions and return to the Fall Classic with many of the same hitters that won it all just twelve months ago.  The New York Yankees have history on their side, being the most successful franchise in U.S. sports with twenty-six World Series titles, and their star-studded roster has been designed purely with World Championship success in mind.  Both would be worthy champs, but only one can end the season celebrating.

The series is too close to call, so I can’t give you any clues on who is going to win it.  However I can set the scene with a World Series 2009 primer.  Continue reading →

Collection of rare British baseball programmes available online

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1939 coverI was contacted a few weeks back by Anthony Taylor, a British-based collector of baseball memorabilia. While his collection is focused mainly on the Major Leagues, he has developed an interest in British baseball too, and he has managed to pick up a number of rare programmes from the 1930s and 1950s, such as the one for the 1939 national final between Halifax and Rochdale that is pictured to the right.

It can get frustrating at times to think of all the British baseball memorabilia that sits in private collections, never to be seen by the wider public. So I was delighted that Anthony was not only offering to digitize his collection for my perusal, but was also explicit about wanting it to be added to the Project Cobb site so that it became publicly available.

I like to think that other collections will surface over time, and that their owners will be as generous as Anthony Taylor has been. However, it may be greedy to wish for collections as extensive and novel as this one.

The collection can be found here.

New York Yankees are back in the World Series

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The World Series lineup was set in the early hours of this morning as the New York Yankees completed their 4-2 ALCS victory over the Los Angeles Angels with a 5-2 win.  Fans of the long ball should be in for a treat as this is just the third time in MLB history that the top two home run-hitting teams from the regular season have matched up in the Fall Classic.  More importantly, the contest will be between the best team from each league (admittedly Dodgers fans might argue with that, but it’s a close-run thing either way), which isn’t always the case owing to the unpredictable nature of best-of-five and best-of-seven series.

The New York Yankees’ triumph is in some ways a public relations problem for MLB.   It’s a simple story to write that the Yanks have bought their way to the World Series.  At $208m, their payroll is $63m higher than the second highest (the Mets) and $97m more than what the defending champs have spent.  The huge contracts that they dished out to Sabathia, Teixeira and Burnett over the offseason can be cited as prime examples of a big-money team simply blowing their competitors out of the water in the pursuit of success.  It was the baseball equivalent of Chelsea Football Club parking their tanks on the lawn and firing £50 notes at their rivals, as ex-Arsenal Vice-Chairman David Dein once memorably put it.   Those competitors are always going to cry foul in response (the Brewers’ owner Mark Attanasio was particularly vocal about the task teams like his face), but that reaction can also spill over to baseball fans and onlookers in general.  We can accept that some teams will always have more than others, but the financial disparity between the Yankees and the rest may begin to look insurmountable and if that’s the case, does anyone else really stand a chance?  Continue reading →

The new-look BaseballGB is here

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We’ve been mentioning for a few weeks now that a new design was on the horizon and, after several months of planning, I’m delighted to finally launch the new-look BaseballGB.

BGB started as a one-man blog and has gradually developed into a site with several writers that combines what you might call traditional blog-posts with news stories, full-length articles and regular columns.  That transition has been great news for me because that is exactly what I hoped would happen when I began blogging on my own back in early 2006; however, the evolution of the site has meant that the previous design was no longer ideal.

Why change?

From an aesthetic point of view, I wanted a more eye-pleasing design with a slightly wider area for the article text and the ability to make greater use of images.  From a functional point of view, I was becoming increasingly aware that, due to the regularity of our posting, good content was very quickly slipping out of obvious view on the main page.  This was particularly the case with our regular columns.  I wanted to have the ability to set a clear ‘headline’ story and to highlight the latest instalments of our regular features, whilst also giving enough space to the other articles we publish and offering lots of different ways in which to search our ever-expanding archive.

The new design allows us to do just that.

What it means for you

‘New’ means ‘different’, so the way in which you will navigate around the site has changed a little.  Obviously the main difference is that a larger selection of content is now available from the main page.  It is no longer just a simple list of the latest posts in date order.  A headline story will be set manually so that the most recent substantial article is listed at the top of the page.  For example: if we write a piece about some interesting British baseball news and then publish a quick update about a new multimedia feature on MLB.com, the British baseball piece can stay at the top of the pile. The MLB.com piece will be published as the main story underneath the category bar. If the headline story is the same as when you last looked, check below the colourful category bar to see if any posts have been added since then. 

Aside from the ‘headline’ area, we can keep items on the main page in two key ways.  The first is in the ‘featured’ carousel that will serve as a ‘best of BGB collection’, with the seven most recent additions to the category being put in the carousel.  The second is via the ‘category spoilers’ that can be found on the right-hand side of every page.  These will highlight our regular features, such as ‘You are the Scorer’ and ‘Weekly Hit Ground Ball’ and we will change them around, as well as the items listed in the category bar, to suit what is most topical at the time. 

New features

You’ll notice that we’ve added in a new Tag Cloud on the right-hand sidebar through which you will be able to search for posts relating to a wide variety of key words.  For example: posts about the upcoming Fall Classic will be put in the MLB category and then have tags attached to them for ‘World Series’, ‘Philadelphia Phillies’ etc.  Click on a tag from the cloud and it will take you to an archive of posts that relate to it.  Individual posts do not currently show which tags have been attached to them (although you can see which category/categories they are filed under) as I’ve always thought that this looks a little untidy, particular if you attach quite a few tags to a post.  However, the idea of the redesign is to make a better experience for our visitors, so if there is a demand for them to be added then I am certainly open-minded about doing it.

A list of the recent posts and comments are available on the right-hand sidebar alongside a list of categories.  The full month-by-month archive can be found via the new menu bar as a sub-heading under the ‘About’ page (the latter was written just before the 2009 MLB season began and could now do with being updated, so I’ll get to that over the coming week).  We’ve also created a separate page for our list of links.  If you know of any other baseball-related sites that fans in the UK would find useful and enjoyable, please let us know.

The footer currently takes you into the the BaseballSoftballUK news feed, the Project Cobb Twitter account and my BaseballGB Twitter account.  I update the latter on a frequent basis, chatting during MLB games, commenting on the latest baseball news and also discussing upcoming articles and features.

The other important new feature that deserves a mention here is the ‘Contact’ page that also can be found under the ‘About’ heading.  We’ve been contacted by people via our direct e-mail addresses in the past, but putting your e-mail address on the Internet can lead to a plague of spam filling your Inbox.  This new form will allow you to get in contact with the writer of your choice directly by filling in the form.

The updating process

The new design requires us writers (or this editor) to slightly alter the way we lay out our articles.  That’s no problem with those that we write from now on; however we have over 1,000 posts in the system dating back to March 2006 and they have been laid out to fit into the previous design(s).  For example, often when we have used images in the past, we have embedded them into the post by linking to another website (most commonly Joe’s GBBSA site).  The consequence of this with the new design is that where posts are listed (under category archives, author archives etc) a box with a cross will appear alongside it to indicate that it cannot display the image as it has to be hosted on our own server.  That’s not ideal, but we can only fix these things by manually checking and editing every post one-by-one, which would make for a significant amount of work.

I’m also mindful that a) these slight flaws shouldn’t detract too much from the content, and b) the time spent doing all that work would be better spent on writing new articles.

So, I’ve taken a pragmatic approach to this problem.  The most important thing for me was to make sure that previous posts could still be found easily; therefore I have gone through all of the posts to alter things like categories and tags, which to a certain extent can be done in bulk thanks to WordPress, the underlying blogging system we use.  I have then taken a targeted approach to update those in the archive that I feel are most likely to be of interest to future visitors.  This includes posts from the regular features such as ‘Weekly’ Hit Ground Ball, This week in MLB, You are the Scorer, Roundshaw Hop, BaseballGB Fantasy League updates, as well as the book reviews (47 and counting) and other featured articles (Q&As with Great Britain players etc).   The work built up over a period of time so that a good proportion of posts have been updated in this way. The rest will be left in the current not-quite-perfectly-formatted state, unless I decide to do a bit of website housekeeping every now and then.

What’s next?

A website never stays static, at least it shouldn’t.  No doubt I will be making some minor tweaks to the new design as it beds in over the next couple of weeks and we are always looking at ways in which we can improve things in terms of design, functionality and new features. 

Although there’s an offseason for the players, that doesn’t extend to us fans and writers.  The lack of baseball games doesn’t greatly reduce the amount of MLB news there is to comment on, particularly when it comes to the Hot Stove of player transactions.  I got into a routine of posting a baseball book review on most Wednesdays over the last offseason and I’m planning to do so again this time.  I’ve already got several books on my list waiting to be reviewed, but please pass on any recommendations for books that haven’t been covered yet.  I’ll also be running a series of ‘review’ articles looking back at the 2009 season in relation to MLB, the British leagues, the International scene, coverage of the sport available to UK-based fans and much more besides.  If you’ve got any ideas for articles/features, or if you want to join in with the writing, please get in contact via the new Contact form.

Of course before all of that we’ve got the World Series to enjoy.  It promises to be a cracker, which makes it all the more depressing that it will not be on free-to-air TV in the UK for the first time in over a decade.  I desperately scoured the TV listings for Wednesday 28 October in the hope that someone somewhere had picked up the rights. All I found was re-runs of films and US dramas.  Five will be showing a “live interactive gameshow” called SuperCasino, which is about as pathetic as it gets. 

So we’ll turn to MLB.com or ESPN America to follow the action and use various social networking sites, forums, blogs and websites to keep the British baseball community together in place of Johnny and Josh’s peerless coverage.  Hopefully BaseballGB will continue to be one of the main places on the web that does this and that the new design makes it all the more enjoyable.

If you’ve got any queries or comments, please feel free to pass them on via the comments box below.

Cheers

Matt

(P.S. it would be completely remiss of me not to publicly thank Joe for his help in designing logos and offering suggestions as part of the redesign, all while doing work on his own sites. Thanks mate!)

Improvements made to Project Cobb website

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Cobb (128x128)Back in September, Matt announced his upcoming plans for BaseballGB in an interview with baseball-braniac.com. This included news of a design overhaul to make the site even more useful and enjoyable for you, the reader. After a lot of work to get the new-look site ready, I believe that the big upload is very close.

I hope, then, that Matt doesn’t see me announcing news of some improvements to the Project Cobb site as trying to steal his hyperspace thunder. Well, here goes anyway (I guess if it’s really an issue Matt can always delete this post and say “sorry Joe, it accidentally got lost during the transitional period”).

The truth is, compared with Matt’s imminent BaseballGB overhaul (for which, incidentally, I’ve had the good fortune to see some very impressive previews), my changes are mere tweaks. Continue reading →

Phillies reach the World Series again

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The Philadelphia Phillies blasted their way past the Los Angeles Dodgers 10-4 in the early hours of this morning (British time) to book a return date to the World Series.  Four home runs, including two by Jayson Werth, were swatted by the home team at Citizens Bank Park as they completed a 4-1 NLCS victory. 

Cole Hamels didn’t give the Phillies an ace-type performance as they had hoped, conceding three runs in 4.1 innings, but he didn’t need to.  Vicente Padilla turned back into a pumpkin (six earned runs in three innings) and Clayton Kershaw’s two-inning effort in relief was spoiled by a two-run shot by Shane Victorino.  It was an abrupt end to the Dodgers’ season, yet they can have few complaints despite hitting three homers themselves in game five.  The Phillies are a strong side and they now have a World Series repeat firmly in their sights. 

Whether it’s the Yankees or the Angels who will meet them in the Fall Classic, they are going to have to play to their full potential if they are to have a chance of stopping the defending champs from successfully defending their world championship.