This is what I sing when I go through my RSS reader in April. I’m a troll. Please feel free to use where appropriate. Hat tip to Brett for taking time away from real work to produce this:
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Category Archives: Baseball
Mostly Mets Podcast presented by Caesar’s A.C.
With Toby, Patrick and guest Mark Simon from ESPNNewYork.com:
On iTunes here.
Well that didn’t take long
Remember when I suggested the Mets’ issue this year was their pitching and defense, and not — as Elena Kagan (or her clerk) debatably suggested — their hitting? Consecutive clunkers from Johan Santana and R.A. Dickey and most of the guys behind them mean the team now has a 109 OPS+ and a 96 ERA+. Tiny sample yet, obviously.
Dear everybody
On July 31, with the St. Louis Cardinals — the team with the best record in the National League — in town, the Dodgers announced a crowd of 44,543 on a day the stands appeared closer to half-empty at the 56,000-seat stadium. They also announced attendance of 47,877 for a game three days earlier against the Cincinnati Reds, but huge chunks of the right-field pavilion and the new luxury seats beyond third base were unoccupied, with blocks of empty seats sprinkled throughout each level of the stadium….
National League teams announced an actual turnstile count through 1992, MLB spokesman Rich Levin said. But the National League and American League have since consolidated business operations, and Major League Baseball defines attendance as “tickets sold,” not “tickets used.”
“It’s because of revenue sharing,” Levin said. “That’s what we use in our official count.”
– Bill Shaikin, L.A. Times, Aug. 23, 2005.
Dear everybody,
Very often a baseball team announces an attendance for a game that seems way higher than the number of people who are actually at the game. I realize this is funny or strange or concerning to you, so you note it in your blog or newspaper column or talk-radio monologue. But for better or worse, Major League teams announce the paid attendance at games — the number of tickets sold, not the number of asses in seats — and have, I believe, for every game since 1992.
So if the paid attendance figure seems to have no bearing on the number of people actually in attendance at a ballgame, you can feel free to either dismiss it entirely, or note it and mention without snark that the figure represents tickets sold, as per standard baseball practice and not any conspiracy peculiar to that baseball team.
I know you’re not actually listening to me, everybody, but I wish you would because you just keep bringing up this same distinction between announced attendance and actual attendance like you’re the first person to ever notice it, when meanwhile Maury Brown wrote a whole thing last year explaining why it happens and how it’s actually worse in other sports.
Good day, and I look forward to seeing photographs of your cats.
Thanks,
Ted
Rock stars name their favorite baseball movies
Nuts remake the classics
In case you missed it in 2007 — and I’m assuming you did — that year’s version of the Modesto Nuts passed some of their downtime in the Rockies’ system by remaking scenes from classic baseball movies. Questionable casting choice on the guy playing Cerrano here, but the dude playing Harris not only seems to be the best actor in the bunch, but also appears to be Alan Johnson — one of 10 2007 Nuts to make the Majors so far.
Via Ted Burke.
Go read stuff
Patrick Flood is smart, and he’s live-blogging today’s Mets-Braves game. Go read it.
And that was already done
The Internet rules. Turns out last week Bill Parker did the research I wanted earlier, contextualizing that Jamie Moyer stat, and it’s awesome. Greg Maddux is the all-time leader in the figure. Moyer is third behind Maddux and Tom Glavine, so turns out the switching leagues thing didn’t mean as much as I thought it would.
Parker didn’t calculate the stat for Randy Johnson, but using his method I counted Johnson as having faced 1,367 of the 15,855 hitters in Major League history, some 40 shy of Moyer and good for 8.6% (Moyer has actually faced 8.9%).
Via @Ceetar.
In case you haven’t heard: Jamie Moyer is incredibly old
Real facts about 49-year-old Jamie Moyer have overtaken fake facts about Chuck Norris as the Internet’s darling, but this one is particularly awesome.
Still, it’d be cool to see it contextualized. Is that the record? What pitcher has faced the highest percentage of all hitters in Major League history? It’d seem to favor guys with long careers in the contemporary baseball era, since there are more teams now and thus more hitters to face, plus more guys switching leagues more frequently and Interleague Play.
Per the baseball-reference play index, only Javier Vazquez and Livan Hernandez have thrown more innings than Moyer since Interleague Play started in 1997, but Moyer got a 10-year jump on both of them so it’s pretty safe to say he faced more hitters. Greg Maddux started in 1986, like Moyer did, and finished with nearly 1000 more innings pitched than Moyer has thrown to date. But Maddux pitched his whole career in the National League, which probably hurts him.
The only candidates who could rival Moyer in percentage of all-time Major League hitters faced are probably Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens, both of whom started in the late 80s, lasted through the late aughts, threw more total innings than Moyer has so far, and spent time in both leagues. Johnson pitched about an even number of innings in the NL and the AL, so he he seems most likely of all. But then obviously his career didn’t span the length that Moyer’s has.
Anyone I’m missing? I’m assuming the sheer difference in innings means longtime relievers like Darren Oliver and Arthur Rhodes can’t come close to Moyer or the other starters. But if anyone knows a better way to figure this out, I’m all ears.
Also, the one Jamie Moyer old-man stat I can’t get past is this one: Moyer made three starts against the 1986 Mets. He went 1-0 with a 3.74 ERA in 21 2/3 innings.
Supreme Court Justice breaks from mind-numbing legalese to take misguided cheap shot at Mets
Truth be told, the answer to the general question “What does ‘not an’ mean?” is “It depends”: The meaning of the phrase turns on its context. . . . “Not an” sometimes means “not any,” in the way Novo claims. If your spouse tells you he is late because he “did not take a cab,” you will infer that he took no cab at all (but took the bus instead). If your child admits that she “did not read a book all summer,” you will surmise that she did not read any book (but went to the movies a lot). And if a sports-fan friend bemoans that “the New York Mets do not have a chance of winning the World Series,” you will gather that the team has no chance whatsoever (because they have no hitting). But now stop a moment. Suppose your spouse tells you that he got lost because he “did not make a turn.” You would understand that he failed to make a particular turn, not that he drove from the outset in a straight line. Suppose your child explains her mediocre grade on a college exam by saying that she “did not read an assigned text.” You would infer that she failed to read a specific book, not that she read nothing at all on the syllabus. And suppose a lawyer friend laments that in her last trial, she “did not prove an element of the offense.” You would grasp that she is speaking not of all the elements, but of a particular one. The examples could go on and on, but the point is simple enough: When it comes to the meaning of “not an,” context matters.
– Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, Caraco Pharm. Labs. Ltd. v. Novo Nordisk.
OK, first of all this is like the dumbest f@#$ing thing I have ever read. And I get that half of you are lawyers and there’s probably some legal reason why the distinctions in possible implied meanings of “not an” needs to be detailed in such thorough fashion, but c’mon. This case really made it to the Supreme Court without anyone hashing that out? There’s no legal precedent she can cite that covers how sometimes “not an” means not any and sometimes it means not one specific thing? This is what Supreme Court Justices do?
Second, after she gives two perfectly apt examples of what she’s talking about, she throws in a totally unnecessary joke about the Mets. And I’m all for lightening the mood at Supreme Court proceedings, but, again: c’mon. Stale, and too easy. Jokes about the Mets for people who can’t make lawyer jokes are like lawyer jokes for everyone else.
Moreover, Kagan’s a Mets fan, so you’d hope she’d have a little better sense of what she was talking about. DOES THE SUPREME COURT NOT CARE ABOUT ACCURACY ANYMORE? Hitting is the one thing the Mets do have!
If she said “the team has no chance whatsoever (because they [sic] have first basemen at four positions, shaky starting pitching and play in a tough division),” then she’d get a pass, a frustrated but reasonable fan airing her grievances wherever she finds a platform. But no. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan thinks the Mets can’t hit even though the Mets can hit. And I’m just going to go ahead and assume she retires to her quarters to call WFAN to demand the Mets trade David Wright.
Let’s hope The People vs. Carlos Beltran never goes to the highest federal court because I suspect Kagan’s going to rule on the wrong side of that one.
Via Bill.
Tedquarters 