Tag Archives: Web picks

Web pick of the week: Baseball Bugs

Web-PickThis week’s web pick is the classic Looney Tune ‘Baseball Bugs’, which among other things added yet another phrase into the incredible lexicon of baseball. 

Occasionally you will find a pitcher whose change-up is so confounding to the batter, it looks as though the ball has come to a stop somewhere between the pitcher’s mound and home plate. 

The batter swings so early at the offering that you could imagine him getting in position again and taking another hack at it before it actually crosses the plate.

The name for such a devastating pitch: a Bugs Bunny change-up. 

Bugs debuted his pitch back in 1946 in the classic cartoon. “I think I’ll perplex him with my slow ball”, says Bugs, and so he does, along with two other batters! 

Baseball Bugs is just 7 and a half minutes long, but it’s full of classic moments, from Bugs talking up his batting prowess (“Wham, a homer, wham, another homer!”) to chirping away behind the plate like all good catchers (“That’s the old pepper boy, that’s the old pitching, that’s putting it over the old plate boy!”), and is a much-cherished piece of baseball’s popular culture history.

Web Pick of the Week: ESPN’s Daily Leaders

Web-PickThis week’s Web Pick is the Daily Leaders page on ESPN.com.

It can be difficult to keep track of all that happens in MLB on a daily basis, often with 15 games taking place while you are fast asleep in the early hours of the morning. Scoreboards and boxscores are decent sources of info, but the most noteworthy performances don’t always jump out at you if you’ve only got time to skim-read them.

While the free Fastcast video on MLB.com is a nice idea, it covers the games a bit too quickly for my liking so that it’s difficult to take everything in. The free Daily Recap videos on MLB.com are excellent, but I rarely seem to have the time to watch them all.

That’s why I like the Daily Leaders board. It lists the top performers on any given day, ranked by ESPN’s own equation, and provides the relevant stats to show what they did. You can sort it by league and by position player/pitcher, although the one negative about the system is that there isn’t a separate equation and page for relievers and therefore their work isn’t recognised.

It’s a quick and easy way to see all the notable performances, whether you want the info for fantasy baseball purposes or just to keep up with the latest news from on the field.

Web pick of the week: Sports Illustrated and Bryce Harper

Web-PickThe Washington Nationals selected 17 year old Bryce Harper as the number one pick in this year’s amateur draft on Monday. 

Harper’s freakish ability has been discussed with childlike glee by scouts and prospect experts for months and, quite frankly, you could almost complain that Harper took the fun out of the draft.  Just like last year, there was no doubt whatsoever as to which player the Nationals were going to pick.

Judging by the instant impact that their 2009 selection had on his debut on Tuesday night, I doubt Washington are too concerned about that.

It’s easy to dismiss the comments about Harper as mere hype, but  Stephen Strasburg proved in one start that even hype of the greatest magnitude can turn out to be fully deserved.  The hype truly began in June last year, when Sports Illustrated put Harper on their front cover crowning him as ‘Baseball’s Chosen One’ and comparing him to basketball star LeBron James.  Tom Verducci’s article made even casual baseball fans aware of who Harper is and it’s well worth a read.

Web pick of the week: Baseball Musings

Web-PickThis week’s web pick is a long overdue acknowledgement of one of the best baseball blogs around. 

Baseball Musings is run by David Pinto and every day the site’s RSS feed is one of the first things I check because it’s guaranteed to produce links and commentary on stories worth following.  

The full-time blogger updates the site at a tremendous rate.   There were 26 entries posted on Tuesday just gone, for example.  They started with posts about David’s day-by-day database and Evil Player program, before moving on to stories ranging from Stephen Strasburg’s Major League arrival timetable, highlighting all the interesting moments from that day’s games and recommending a new blog to visit.  

I picked out Tuesday’s selection because that was the day I looked at Baseball Musing’s RSS feed and thought: ‘I’ve somehow never chosen that as a web pick’. It was therefore a funny coincidence that David highlighted my post about Stephen Fry’s GB tweet on Wednesday.  So there you go, it’s a great blog and it even occasionally links to BGB.

What more could you ask for?!

Web pick of the week: Baseball and Cricket

Web-PickWhile some like to set baseball and cricket against each other, many of us live by the maxim: why enjoy just one great bat-and-ball sport when you can enjoy two?

There are many links between the two sports and some of them will be uncovered in the new exhibition at the MCC Museum at Lord’s Cricket Ground. ‘Swinging Away: How Cricket and Baseball Connect’.  

Judging by the Lord’s website and a BBC Radio 4 Today Programme feature*, it looks like being a fascinating exhibition and one that all baseball fans in the UK should try and get to over the next six months or so.  We’ll be publishing some features about the exhibition in the near future.

The exhibition couldn’t have opened at a better time, coming as it does so soon after England’s glorious ICC World Twenty-20 triumph.  The short form of the game is the version most closely related to baseball and this is something picked up by Yorkshire and England great Geoffrey Boycott in a recent article for the Daily Telegraph:

“Some people still tend to take Twenty20 lightly, but in the last few weeks we have seen how skillful the game has become. It’s basically cricket’s answer to baseball. If you count up the average number of pitches thrown in a baseball match, it comes to around 100 per innings – which isn’t far short of the 120 balls we use in this format.

There are plenty of batsmen who will whack you out of the park if you bowl in the area where they like it. So a lot of thought has to go into the field placings and individual strategies for each opponent.

Just like a baseball pitcher, you are trying to stop them hit a home run, and you often need a Plan B and C as well as a Plan A”.

Meanwhile, another England great, Michael Atherton, stated in a recent column for the Times that a certain baseball book has also had an impact on the England cricket team:

“The ECB has a habit of sweeping its bad news so far under the carpet that it becomes invisible. Who remembers Peter Moores now? But Moores had a minor influence on England’s World Twenty20 victory because it was he who gave Andy Flower a copy of Michael Lewis’s seminal book, Moneyball, which has been at the heart of the England team director’s obsession with the statistical side of the game”.

These comments are a good example of how what’s often considered to be the public perception of North American sports often doesn’t reflect the reality. Most specifically, while some may try and dismiss baseball as glorified rounders and American Football as ‘a bunch of softies running around in shoulder pads’ and see them as pale imitations of cricket and rugby, the professionals actually involved in the British equivalents often have an enormous amount of respect and appreciation for the games played across the pond.  Indeed, one of England’s star players in the Twenty-20 tournament, opening batsman and wicket-keeper Craig Kieswetter, may well have drawn on his baseball experience to help his Twenty-20 batting approach. 

Let’s hope that England’s Twenty-20 tournament success and this new Lord’s exhibition help to break down barriers and make more Brits realise that you can love both cricket and baseball and that that two sports are complementary rather than opposing forces.

* (hat tip to Matthew Cranshaw for passing on the Radio 4 link)

Web pick of the week: Biz of Baseball’s Rangers sale coverage

Web-PickThis week’s web pick highlights Biz of Baseball’s coverage of the drawn-out sale of the Texas Rangers. 

It’s a topic that will particularly interest some baseball fans in the UK because the villian of the piece is well-known to football followers: one half of Liverpool FC’s American dunce duo, Tom Hicks.

As Maury Brown put it in one recent post:

“Well, this is a fine mess you’ve gotten baseball into, Tom Hicks. The owner of the Texas Rangers (as well as the NHL Dallas Stars and half of Liverpool FC of the English Premier League), overleveraged himself to the tune of $525 million, and now, Major League Baseball is being shoved around for it”.

Sounds familiar, don’t you think?

Hicks had to put the team up for sale after defaulting on a $525m loan.  A group called Rangers Baseball Express agreed a $570m (£390.334m) deal with Hicks Sports Group back in January and was expected to complete the acquisition of the Texas Rangers by opening day, but the creditors are not happy with the deal that’s on the table and are holding up the sale.  

The situation was discussed at an owners’ meeting in New York this week and it’s now looking likely that MLB Commissioner Bud Selig will be left with no other choice but to invoke the ‘best interests of the game’ clause and take control of the franchise to push the deal through.  Any deal also has to be approved by at least 75 per cent of the MLB owners.

A lot of the press coverage concerning Liverpool’s ownership struggles has focused on the nationality of the owners, throwing around the oft-used argument of ‘foreigners’ not understanding football.  This goes to show that the ‘foreigners’ argument is wide of the mark; Hicks is quite adept at getting his sports teams into a complete mess regardless of the sport in question.

Web pick of the week: Unwritten rules

Web-PickIt’s more of a web ‘picks’ of the week today as the ‘Alex Rodriguez running across the pitching mound’ saga has prompted much debate about the infamous ‘unwritten rules’ that govern baseball.

The incident in question occurred in a game between the Yankees and A’s when Alex Rodriguez made an out on the basepads and ran across the pitcher’s mound on his way back to the dugout. Oakland A’s pitcher Dallas Braden went brilliantly barmy about it, claiming that A-Rod had broken one of the unwritten rules of baseball.

Various books have been written about the so-called unwritten rules and I reviewed Paul Dickson’s contribution last November.  The nature of unwritten rules, in baseball and any other community, is that they are governed by the members of that community and different people will not always agree on them. 

In a recent article on MLB.com, Brewers manager Ken Macha and D-Backs manager A. J. Hinch both classed A-Rod’s alleged violation as a ‘new one’ to them, whereas St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa claimed “there are a lot of current players who wouldn’t know that rule … I guarantee that young man [Braden] has studied baseball history”.

Former Major Leaguer Morgan Ensberg found A-Rod ‘not guilty’ in one of a number of typically interesting and funny posts on the subject at his ever-enjoyable blog. His most recent is a response to an article on ‘unwritten rules’ by Jerry Crasnick at ESPN.com.

The unwritten rules are a very subjective, sometimes contradictory, set of laws and that’s partly what makes them such an interesting topic to learn about.

Hat tip to Joe for passing on the recent Morgan Ensberg post, providing the inspiration for this week’s Web pick.

Web pick of the week: Netherlands baseball

Web-PickWe’re taking a slight diversion from baseball in America this week and turning our attention to the sport being played closer to home.

The Dutch Hoofdklasse is arguably the strongest baseball league in Europe, and with it being just a short plane/ferry ride away, a trip to the Netherlands is an excellent way for Brits to take in some quality ballgames.  If you are interested in making the trip, knowing a bit more about the eight teams that currently make up the Hoofdklasse and how the league is progressing would be a good idea.  A new English website for the league has been launched recently, created with the help of the International Baseball Federation, and it allows you to keep up with all of the action.

Web Pick of the Week: Baseball and Charlie Brown

Web-PickNearly three weeks into the MLB season and Kansas City Royals fans haven’t been given much reason to believe 2010 is going to be any different to previous years.  Rational people might suggest that Royals fans should just go and support someone else, but anyone who follows a sports team knows that’s just not an option. You don’t tend to choose your team, your team chooses you and you’re tied together from them on, through good times and bad.

There are many coping mechanisms that can be employed to get through the lean years and gallows humour is one of the most attractive.  With this in mind, appreciate the Royals Review blog’s brilliant depiction of how their team bears an uncanny similarity to the heroically useless Peanuts baseball team.

I’m sure there are people in the UK whose only exposure to baseball is via the Peanuts strips and Snoopy cartoons.  The tales of Charlie Brown’s baseball team have been a long-running theme in the classic Charles Schultz strips since their inception in 1950 and they never fail to fill me with joy whenever I look back at some of them.  One of my favourites is from a week in July 1961 (starting from here) when Schroeder decides to quit the team in favour of devoting more time to practicing at his piano, leading poor old Charlie Brown to bemoan that he had been “beaned by Beethoven”.

The strips are all available via an online archive at Snoopy.com, but the best resource from a baseball fan’s point of view is at wezen-ball where you can bury yourself in the fruits of Lar’s labour.

Web Pick of the Week: Hitting the ball ain’t easy

Web-PickThe Times has been serializing articles from the cricket bible Wisden this week, one of which is an article by Michael Armstrong-James about the process a batsman goes through in trying to hit a cricket ball delivered at rapid pace.  It caught my eye with the second paragraph where Armstrong-James notes that the time between a delivery leaving the quick bowler’s hand and the batsman playing a shot is “about 400 milliseconds”.  That’s the same amount of time that is often given for the similar situation of a batter hitting a fastball.

It’s an interesting article and while some of the passages might not be of direct relevance from a baseball perspective, such as choosing shots and playing strokes, there certainly are bits that carry over.  I was particularly struck with the section about how difficult it is for players that have “reached full maturity” to change their bowling action or batting technique.  We regularly read about ballplayers tinkering with their swing or their pitching mechanics. Having to re-learn what must become an instinctive action is clearly a painstaking, and often unsuccessful, process.

The article also fits nicely with a piece on the Hardball Times website where former Major Leaguer Morgan Ensberg, featured in a previous Web Pick, discusses the “Nuts and Bolts of hitting in the big leagues”