Author Archives: Ted Berg

A good question

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Here’s my question: Do we really need right/left field umpires in the postseason?

I’m sure it’s confirmation bias or whatever, but I can’t think of a single instance when I’ve thought, “God, I’m glad we have that guy down the line.” But I can think of about 5 instances in which they’ve made blatantly terrible calls that were obvious to the naked eye (Maier, Phil Cuzzi last year, Berkman’s homer last night, etc).

What is the point?

– Ryan, comments section.

Good question. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to learn that the presence outfield umpires for the playoffs and All-Star Game are some sort of make-good for a crappy travel schedule in the umpire’s union contract with Major League Baseball or something, because they really don’t seem to serve much productive purpose out there.

I believe it was Ron Darling on last night’s broadcast who pointed out that the right-field umpire actually had a worse perspective for Berkman’s non-homer than the umps at first and home, since he had to spin later to follow the ball’s flight and so had a tougher time seeing the ball tail foul.

And truth is, if no umpire at any level ever works the right- and left-field lines until he gets to the Major League postseason or All-Star Games, no one charged with the task is going at it with much practice. Sure, it doesn’t seem like a massively different skill set than some of the ones involved in umping the corner bases, but, you know, new angle, new perspective, different thing.

I kind of like the novelty of it, in the same way I like celebratory bunting on Opening Day, but it does seem a bit pointless. Especially if they’re not going to get calls right with any frequency.

What we think of when we think of Yankee fans

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I think the major reason I no longer harbor any particular distaste toward the Yankees — besides a general preference for underdogs — is that I’m no longer in high school and so no longer need to regularly interact with people like this guy:

The Yankee fans I deal with now tend to be people more like Alex Belth, a guy reasonable enough to recognize that he is lucky to root for a team with the resources to contend every year, who does so without the obnoxious sense of entitlement too frequently demonstrated by people like the fellow seen here.

I know plenty of Yankee fans like that and I suspect they might actually make up more of the actual fanbase than we assume; we merely associate Yankee fandom with people like this guy because of confirmation bias, and because they express their allegiance in a much more vocal and detestable fashion than the Yankee fans smart enough to realize that not everyone gets to root for a perpetual winner.

That GIF (taken from Scratchbomb) is mesmerizing. I could watch this guy for hours.

Join Toby Hyde for a drink, see me with a haircut

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I got a haircut today. And for the first time in recent memory, I might actually go two weekdays without shooting some web video or another, so your first opportunity to see my haircut will very likely be at the Village Pourhouse at 64 3rd Ave. in Manhattan tomorrow evening around 5 p.m. as I join Toby Hyde to drink and watch baseball.

I know that must have you on the edge of your seats, so one spoiler: It looks almost exactly the same, just shorter.

But how much shorter!?

Seriously though, come hang out. There’ll be booze and big TVs showing baseball. See if you can corner Toby because he has a lot of interesting things to say about a lot of interesting topics. I mostly will just stare blankly at one of the screens, nursing my drink, chewing my straw.

How to demonstrate that you’re definitely ready for the Majors in 149 Triple-A at-bats

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I stumbled onto Willie Mays’ Minor League numbers after that McCovey story led me to baseball-reference. Holy hell. Obviously small-sample size caveats apply, and Triple-A then wasn’t the same as Triple-A now, but, well, yeah. There was good stuff about this in Leo Durocher’s book, about Mays’ adjustment to the big leagues.

Excellent Willie McCovey article

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“I don’t think anybody could have felt as bad as I did,” he said. “Not only did I have a whole team on my shoulders in that at-bat, I had a whole city. At the time, I just knew I’d be up in that situation again in the future and that then I was going to come through.”

Actually, McCovey was wrong. That Game 7 at-bat was the closest he came to being on a championship team. The Giants in the 1960s had five Hall of Famers — McCovey, Willie Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal and Gaylord Perry — but as McCovey recalled, “We always seemed to be one player away from winning it all.”

– Karen Crouse, New York Times.

Good read from Crouse on McCovey, who still goes to the ballpark and works with Giants hitters regularly despite being mostly confined to a wheelchair by back and knee problems.

But the excerpted section made me think about the Mets, and not just because most things make me think of the Mets.

Did people write columns like this one about Willie McCovey? I’m not asking that rhetorically, either. Seriously — did Giants fans deem McCovey an unclutch loser and clamor for his trade? I wouldn’t be shocked to hear that they did, since the bizarre tendency to blame a team’s problems on its best player long predates David Wright.

The O.G. Earl of Sandwich

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Starch grains found on 30,000-year-old grinding stones suggest that prehistoric man may have dined on an early form of flat bread, contrary to his popular image as primarily a meat-eater.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal on Monday, indicate that Palaeolithic Europeans ground down plant roots similar to potatoes to make flour, which was later whisked into dough.

– Reuters.

Of course he did. Of course he did. C’mon. And though it’s not stated in the article, I can personally guarantee you that, with enough digging, archaeologists will uncover evidence that prehistoric man wrapped his meat in that prehistoric bread.

You think prehistoric man, our forefather, was smart enough to hunt and gather and reproduce successfully — spawning our whole society here — and didn’t recognize the importance and deliciousness of the prehistoric sandwich? Not a chance.

I’ve made this point before: Survey humanity. Just about every culture wraps some sort of protein in some sort of starch. We call it a sandwich and credit it to John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, but that’s a cultural and semantic distinction, and one that vaguely discredits the fine work done by visionaries like Hillel the Elder.

The desire to package meat in bread is baked — pardon the pun — into our very constitution. When scientists eventually sequence the entire human genome, perhaps they’ll discover the section that makes us enjoy sandwiches so thoroughly.

I surmise that prehistoric man probably bit into some meat one day and said, “Damn, this meat is delicious, but I really wish there were some sort of crusty, flaky, milder-tasting starch-based food product to accompany and surround it, creating a synergistic relationship in terms of both flavor and convenience,” then went out and created bread.

Except he probably didn’t say it exactly like that. Did prehistoric man have language? Who has got time to look up a thing like that at a moment like this? The important thing is bully to that guy for obviously desiring something that didn’t even exist yet, though I imagine bread and bread-like products would have been invented one way or the other, because, like I said, desiring burritos is clearly an invariable aspect of the human condition.

Video shows umpires have been wrong for decades

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Larry Granillo at wezen-ball has been beating the same drum I have about umpiring this season. He writes: “I feel like a broken record whenever I say that today’s umpiring is no
worse than yesterday’s (and is, perhaps, better), but I can’t help
myself. It’s just that, with today’s media and today’s technology, you
can’t get away from your mistakes.”