Chris Coghlan needs your help. He has to pick his at-bat music, and he’s asking fans for suggestions.

I’ve spent countless hours considering what my closer music would be, but at-bat music is a different beast. As Coghlan points out, you’ve only got 7-10 seconds, so you want something instantly identifiable as your own. That’s part of what makes Daniel Murphy’s selection of the Dropkick Murphy’s “I’m Shipping Up To Boston” so awesome. You know from the first notes that Murph is approaching the plate.

With closer music, I’d go for something non-traditional, but there’s no time for mind game with at-bat songs, methinks. I don’t know. I’ll have to consider that more.

Also, I’ve got to figure club PA operators are flexible enough that they could play any 10-second snippet of a song, but for the sake of this post, I’m assuming it’s got to be the intro. To be honest, I haven’t thought this entirely through as it is, and the realm of possibilities opened up by that type of flexibility just makes the choice too difficult.

Oh, and obviously it’s got to be an instrumental segment. I don’t think that’s necessarily a rule per se, but you don’t want lyrics in there, muddling up your walk to the plate.

Anyway, this isn’t a conclusive list or anything, but from a quick turn though my iPod, here are a few I might pick.

Rage Against the Machine — Know Your Enemy

This is nowhere close to my favorite Rage song, but that guitar intro is as cool as any they’ve got. Excellent use of the toggle switch.

This seems like such an obvious choice that it’s a near certainty some Major Leaguer is already using it. I just figured I’d throw it in here as a nod to Tom Morello, a Cubs fan with a pretty awesome Twitter account.

Cake — Love You Madly

The hi-hat riff at the top here is a little long, but using this song would go a long way toward accomplishing my secondary agenda of ensuring that vibraslap echoed throughout a Major League stadium. (That’s the beyoyoyoyoing noise, like the sound Bevis always imitated.)

I feel like the guitar hits here are heavy enough to let the pitcher know you’ve got some power, the song is funky enough to show the world you’re a down guy, and the tone of it is relaxed enough to let the fans know you’re not going to beat yourself up if the at-bat doesn’t go your way. And it makes that all clear in the first few seconds, making this a pretty excellent choice for a walk-up song.

Morphine — Yes

Unfortunately, this song does not seem to exist on the Internet in any sort of form that makes it easy for me to play for you. It’s here on last.fm, but you’ll only here a 30 second snippet from the middle, and not the slinky, awesome, bari-sax driven intro.

It’d be a sweet choice for an achingly cool, slick hitter like Carlos Beltran when he struts up to the plate. I couldn’t pull this song off.

Apparently Matt Stairs is going to make the Padres, which is awesome for a number of reasons. Mostly because Matt Stairs is awesome and now he’s on a team that’s not the Phillies. Also, word is he dropped 40 pounds.

Here’s the new and old Matt Stairs. I can see it. Part of it is just how the photos are cropped, but there’s definitely a bit more of a gut in Matt Stairs from August ’09 then there is in Matt Stairs from March ’10. And they say pinstripes are slimming.

It’s frustrating, it really is.

And I don’t say that because of his well-documented affair or harassment case way back when or his sex addiction or whatever. Those things do not impact his ability to talk about baseball.

I say that because Steve Phillips thinks Carlos Beltran isn’t awesome at baseball. Steve Phillips thinks Carlos Beltran doesn’t get the job done in pressure situations.

I say that because Steve Phillips would rather get bogged down in weird post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies than what’s happening in actual baseball games.

And maybe, just maybe, I say that because I’m still a little bitter about the whole Mo Vaughn thing.

A huge hat tip to the Scoreboard Gourmet for tipping me off to this:

Nolan Ryan Beef.

I guess I knew Ryan had a ranch, but I never stopped to think his beef might be available to me.

It is, and he guarantees it’s good:

After years of trying to find a consistent, high quality steak, I finally decided that the only way I could guarantee beef that was tender and good every time was to start my own brand. I gathered up several of my ranching friends and enlisted some of the top meat scientists and beef marketing people in the world. Together, we developed a program to provide you with guaranteed tender, all natural beef that would always be tender and tasty and a great value for families.

Meat science!

Nolan Ryan also has a blog through the site. It is not frequently updated, but it is incredibly well copy-edited, so that’s a plus. Also, almost all Ryan’s entries are about steak.

You might say, “oh, well that’s because it’s a blog on his beef company’s website trying to sell more steak, and he’s probably not writing these blog entries,” but I’m holding out hope that Nolan Ryan is a very careful typist who really likes talking about steak.

Over at The Book Blog, Tom Tango passes along a reader email:

A starting pitcher provides a significant portion of their value just because they pitch a lot. …

Maximizing this portion a starting pitcher’s value (pitching a lot) is complicated by the fact that pitchers effectiveness drops with each plate appearance against the same hitter within a game. Per the Book, a batters wOBA increases with each appearance against a pitcher by a few percent.

I am suggesting that a starting pitchers value could be increased by controlling the point at which they enter the game.

The reader, Scott, details a situation where “starting” pitchers enter games in the second or third inning, allowing teams to take advantage of platoon splits by using a one-inning specialist against the top of the opponent’s lineup — the best hitters — in the first, among other things.

It’s an interesting idea, but one that’s not likely to be employed by any big-league club anytime soon.

I’ve been writing for a while that the way bullpens and pitching staffs are structured is ripe for a change, since everything about the one-inning closer and increased specialization seems so inefficient.

The problem is, for all my finger-wagging, I’ve got no reasonable solution. I know the current system is flawed, but I haven’t a better one.

Excuse a personal, gloating post, but I just booked the flights for a vacation for early May and I’m quite psyched about it.

As frequently as possible, my college friends and I plan road trips to visit different baseball stadiums. The goal, obviously, is to eventually visit every Major League park, but we generally schedule a bunch of Minor League stops along the way, plus stops at whatever other points of interest we’d like to check out.

The biggest and most ridiculous road trip came back in the summer of 2005. It put about 6,000 miles on my car. Here’s what it looks like on Google Maps:

View Larger Map

This one won’t be quite so impressive, Google Mapically, nor will it involve nearly as much backtracking.

It will begin in Savannah, where I’ll spend a couple of days checking out the Sand Gnats and shooting some video with Toby Hyde for SNY.

Vacation time technically starts when I leave Savannah, so I figure I’ll stop by Milledgeville on the way to Atlanta for a quick photo, then on to ATL to meet up with my friends.

We’re going to snake our way through the South, hitting a couple of Minor League parks (and definitely New Orleans). Baton Rouge is a test market for Taco Bell breakfast, so we’ll stop there for sure.

From there, we’ll hit Houston for an Astros game, not to mention the acquisition of pants and the doing of the hot-dog dance. Then it’s up to the Dallas area for a Rangers game, then back to New York.

I’ll figure out some way of maintaining regular content on this blog while I’m gone, plus I’ll have a laptop and I’ll be checking in throughout, so this probably isn’t the last you’ll hear of the trip. But if you know of anything particularly awesome to do or, better yet, eat somewhere in Alabama or Mississippi that I absolutely should not miss, please let me know.

I don’t speak Japanese and so I’m not entirely clear on what’s happening here, but I know a few things:

1) It appears that basically everyone’s just sitting around talking about Shinjo, and so maybe this is the televised equivalent of TedQuarters.

2) If I had my druthers, we’d be using exactly the same set and graphics package this season on New York Baseball Today.

3) It’s mesmerizing when accompanied by a soundtrack. Try playing it simultaneously with the Flaming Lips’ The Gash, Sound Tribe Section 9’s Be Nice, or the second movement to Dvorak’s New World Symphony.