I'm Moving This

Over to another host. I'll still have to settle on a design. The one I'm using seems a little bland and lacking.

NYT: Roger Federer As A Religious Experience

More of David Foster Wallace on tennis. Here's my favorite part:

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

Fire Wayne Hagin Already!

3) "Oh, I suppose you could do better?" No, I couldn't. I'd be a lousy announcer, for sure. But I don't need to know how to make a movie to know that Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is a stinker. I don't need to know how to play guitar to know Loverboy was a lousy band. I don't need to know how to cook a really good burger in order to know when I'm eating a crummy one. (As it happens, I do know how to make a really good burger, but that's another story.) In short, I know an overmatched broadcaster when I hear one, and Hagin fits the bill.

Loverboy was a lousy band? Get Lucky had an awful, unfortunate, cover but it had classics like "Take Me To The Top", "Working For The Weekend", and "When It's Over." Okay, maybe they weren't AC/DC or Led Zep, but they had their moments. I can come to only one conclusion: Paul Lukas hates Canada.

Thanks to Can't Stop the Bleeding for the link.

DanDotLewis Is My Hero

Dig.

3) Drop the arrogance of specificity. Use ranges when possible.

We’re measuring luck. Luck isn’t exact. So we’ll never be right on the money. You’ll never be able to find a season where a significant number of players have an xBA equal to their actual batting average. That makes us look stupid, when in fact, we’re just being arrogant — by being so exact.

We should use ranges. xBA should be the 50% confidence interval, not the midpoint thereof. More made up numbers: If a guy’s xBA is .285, it’s probably better expressed by saying that it’s between .279 and .291, or whatever. It makes that .290 BA not seem “lucky” (it really isn’t) but tells us that a .274 is really unlucky. In other words, it does the job — without the excruciatingly nerdy exactitude we are (wrongly) associated with.

It’s our job to communicate this stuff. It’s not their job to get smarter (they’re not dumb) or to figure it out themselves (they’re busy) or that they don’t respect us (true, but fixable). The problem is semantic, not logical, and semantic problems can — and indeed, must — be fixed by revising our language. It’s time to stop using BABIP.

Personally, I have thought for years that BABIP should have been called In Play BA. In Play BA flows better and BABIP, frankly, sounds like the name of a robot in some cheesy sci-fi flick. But I'm not the one who names these things.

The Morning News: Paper Tigers

I read this for the Bethlehem Shoals parts. He can be a little esoteric for my tastes, but when I grok him, I dig him.

By the time my friends and I started our sports blog, FreeDarko, I had done a decent amount of music criticism, and was in grad school for American studies. Typing for a few minutes when I had a stray thought about Kobe Bryant didn’t strike me as anything particularly special... Out of college, I wanted to write about music because writing seemed like an act of love or devotion. Criticism was a necessary corollary of art, a way to get at the meaning underneath the visceral experience, or at the meaning of that experience. While I sometimes dismiss my stuff as “music writing about sports,” I wouldn’t balk at the label “sports criticism.”

My all-time favorite piece of sportswriting is Woody Allen’s 1977 essay on New York Knicks guard Earl Monroe, which appeared in Sport. It helps that it’s Woody Allen, but it’s just as important to me that Woody Allen is not a traditional sportswriter, and that his take on Monroe is anything but traditional.

I’m also a huge fan of Tommy Craggs, senior editor at Deadspin. Tommy is a simply phenomenal writer who could also go toe-to-toe with any sports nerd anywhere. His longer stuff is just fantastic; these Slate pieces on the interpretation of Kevin Love, and the myth of Stephen Curry, remind you why “essayist” is a title one has to earn.

I like the phrase "music writing about sports." I tried to do something similar with my series on Maranvillains, but haven't developed that chops that Shoals has yet. Other works mentioned in that roundtable include the "String Theory" essay by David Foster Wallace that I linked earlier and a couple of books by John McPhee. This isn't the first I've heard of McPhee. Shooty recommended his work to me. Unfortunately, when I read A Sense Of Where You Belong, his expanded essay on Bill Bradley's senior year at Princeton, but it didn't grab me. This is probably my fault more than McPhee's.

WSJ: George Steinbrenner, The Yankee Capitalist.

Allen Barra weighs in on Big Stein. I like Barra, even if he seems to have a bias for the Yankees and the Crimson Tide. He is underrated by the blogosphere. For instance, Football Outsiders didn't acknowledge his work with George Ignatin on football stats. At least this was the case last time I checked a couple of years back. I apologize if this has been rectified.

Bill Veeck, the legendary Chicago White Sox owner and showman, who also was no gentleman, saw a kindred spirit in Steinbrenner. "I like George," he once told me for a story I was writing for the Journal. "He breaks all the unwritten rules."

I plan on expanding on this and other thoughts later tonite.

What Mark Read: Harvey Pekar

I'm dimly aware of Harvey Pekar. I probably saw him on Letterman way back when, but I never read him. I probably should rectify this. He seems like he'd be right up my alley. I'm a fan of the graphic novel form. I haven't been into superheros much. I think the peak of my fandom was one some local channel reran the Superman TV series from the 50s. But I have enjoyed such varied works as Maus, The Bogie Man, The Road To Perdition, and A History of Violence. And I occasionally get a kick out of Zippy The Pinhead.

This may be why I'm attracted to the slo-mo trainwreck of Funky Winkerbean. It's basically a graphic novel dripped out day by day like Chinese water torture. I occasionally think of seeking out an artist collaborator. I think some of my work would be a good fit for the graphic novel form. The Tacks Latimer bio sticks out in my mind as an example. There's also the PETCO thread, but I had little to do with that.

It's Called Writing?

Geeze, Louise. I couldn't come up with worse dialogue than this drivel if I tried. Killer shark issues?

CSTB: Too Young To Have Met Dave Kingman, Eh?

Was Will Clark really a well known a-hole? I don't recall that, but he was an NL West guy and I'm an AL East guy.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum

Can't Stop The Bleeding didn't get that memo and I laughed at their headline. Roger Kahn's book October Men makes the case that his Watergate conviction was a screwjob. I wasn't a big fan of the man, but he deserves a Hall of Fame spot. I'll try to expand on that thought later.

Chris Brown's Library

I always like it when Chris over at Smart Football makes posts like this.

Sports Stats Sites: A Quick Compendium

Baseball
1. Baseball Reference
2. Retrosheet
3. Fangraphs
4. Baseball Prospectus

Basketball
1. Basketball Reference
2. College Basketball Reference
3. Basketball Prospectus

Football
1. Pro Football Reference
2. Football Outsiders

Hockey
1. Hockey Reference
2. Puck Prospectus


I think those are the major non-mediaconglomerate stat sites. Am I missing anything?

AP: Conn. land dug up for items from tribe-settler war

I don't link many stories like this here, but this one caught my eye. Battlefield archaeology is a cool topic.

MYSTIC, Conn. – Artifacts of a battle between a Native American tribe and English settlers, a confrontation that helped shape early American history, have sat for years below manicured lawns and children's swing sets in a Connecticut neighborhood. A project to map the battlefields of the Pequot War is bringing those musket balls, gunflints and arrowheads into the sunlight for the first time in centuries.

Freakonomics: If You Don’t Want Your Car Stolen, Make It Pink

However, do not park it at Jiffy Park. Lord knows what will go on in that car.

Dead Presidents #3

He wasn't a president, but today is the feast day of Alexander Hamilton and his death was more interesting than the death of most of the presidents.

Aawon Buh!

Never Saw Them Play

Every Day Should Be Saturday makes Deadspin look like the Dick Cavett show, but I have them in my Reader. Their latest post admonishes poll voters to get a DVR and watch all the games. This might be more important for voters for individual awards like the Outland Trophy. Football stats might not mean much on the individual level, but when it comes to ranking teams, can't you just use Sagarin Ratings or something similar as a guide? It might not be useful the first couple of weeks, but after enough iterations, you should be able to get a pretty clear picture of how to rank the various teams. BTW, what do D-II and D-III voters do? What about the NAIA?

Will Carroll: Equations

A long, detailed analysis of the (Cliff Lee)deal on Monday probably has some value, but it’s so greatly diminished by the volume of things we’re going to see between now and then makes it near zero. I think the time part of the analysis is shrinking. What used to be 48 hours is now maybe 12. Anything beyond that, no matter how good, isn’t going to matter.

I hate the ever-shrinking news cycle. Remember Urban Meyer's resignation? If that makes me a curmudgeon, then so be it. I don't have a solution to this, so I suppose this makes me part of the problem. I used to like reading the news weekly magazines like Time or Newsweek or US News and World Report, but they seem to have gone downhill. By the way, one thing I like about Sports Illustrated that stands the test of time is their photography. But about the only time I see any of these mags is when I am waiting for a haircut or an oil change. One think I DON'T miss about them is their ink smudging my hands.

PS - On this note, I liked the All Star Game as a kid, but it's lost it's luster for me. Is this part of getting older, or are we just oversaturated with sports options on TV?

WSJ: A New Way To Keep Score

Another one going out to p.

This Week In Milford: What Is Anyone Still Doing Here?

Milford must have had a ton of snow days because summer vacation is just starting now. I must say that the Occurrence at Funky Winkerbean Bridge is more interesting than this story about an alt-country pitcher who slightly resembles Tim Lincecum, but Batiuk moves as slow as an appellate judge. The writers at Gil Thorp Enterprise pace their stuff marginally quicker. Hopefully, Clambake or Von Haney show up in the annual summer story.

Trivia time: Do you know who the head coach/protagonist in this strip was named after? Once again, I am offering a ham sandwich to the first correct caller.

Hartford Mag: Play Ball!

More recent vintage base ball. I play in one of their leagues. If you are in the area, I'll be in a doubleheader topmorrow.