→ March 27, 2009
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March Maidens.

I don’t follow college basketball at all, and even March Madness holds only a faint interest for me, since I’m usually wrapped up in spring training at that point. I do pay attention to one aspect of the tournament though: I pull for the maidens – that is, the teams that have never won the championship before. (In horse racing, a maiden is a horse that has never won a race.) We came close to having a maiden team win last year with Memphis, but they let me down.

Unfortunately, this is looking like a really lousy year for maidens. Memphis has just been knocked off by Missouri, and while Missouri is an even bigger maiden than Memphis (the Mizzou Tigers have never reached the Final Four, and this is just their third Elite Eight appearance), Memphis was Ken Pomeroy’s top-ranked team, so in theory, they had a better shot to topple one or more #1 seeds.

Pitt is the only maiden among the #1 seeds, but of course, they barely got by Xavier, which doesn’t inspire any confidence in me that they’re going to beat this relentless ‘Nova team.

Today was actually the better day of the two Sweet 16 days for maiden teams, as Friday’s four games feature just two maidens: Oklahoma (two title game appearances: a 1988 loss to Kansas and a 1947 loss to WHO THE HELL LOSES TO HOLY CROSS IN ANYTHING? back when the court was 12 feet long and they used peach baskets instead of nets) and Gonzaga (never reached the Final Four). Gonzaga faces UNC, who seem to be the consensus “expert” pick to win the whole shebang.

College basketball might be the most likely endeavor among major team sports where you could very easily see a maiden winner every two or three years. In MLB, we get long droughts, but there are only eight franchises that have never won, two of which are less than twenty years old. (It’s nine if you don’t count the New York Giants’ titles for San Francisco). The NFL and NBA have more maidens, but more than half the franchises in each league have won, and it’s hard to get all worked up about Oklahoma City’s title drought of one year even if we don’t give them Seattle’s win in 1978-79. In college basketball, not only do we have a huge number of schools that have never won – only 34 of 347 schools who play D1 basketball have won it – but it takes neither a long time nor a large number of great players to make a team competitive. Unfortunately, we’re on track for our third straight year without a maiden winner after a great run of five in ten years (Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland, Syracuse, and Florida).

* Speaking of the NCAA, Dayn Perry has a great post on Spolitical about the exploitation of college athletes, specifically those in “revenue sports,” which for most schools means football and basketball. That said, issues like revocable scholarships crop up in baseball as well. You’re a freshman pitcher. Coach works you so hard that by year-end you can’t comb your hair and have to visit Dr. Andrews. You’re out for a year or more and odds are your velocity isn’t coming back. You lose your scholarship. Coach loses … nothing. Yeah, that seems fair. If scholarships were guaranteed for three years, wouldn’t coaches have an incentive to handle players (particularly pitchers) better in at least their first two years at the school?

* So my alma mater has a couple of researchers trotting out the new vegetarian mantra that eating beef boosts global warming. Here’s the part that confuses me: If raising cows means more greenhouse gas emissions, can’t we slow global warming by killing all cows? That seems to be the obvious conclusion here.

* Handshake deals are illegal under MLB rules, folks. The Nats should tell Young’s agent to shove it. An oral agreement is only worth as much as the paper it’s written on.

Filed Under: Food, Sports Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 25, 2009
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Okay…

The Strasburg report is up, with video. So is a report on prep LHP Tyler Matzek, who is one of the top two high school arms in the draft.

One question I’ve heard and seen is what a six-year deal would mean for Strasburg’s free agency. The answer is … nothing. If he signs on Draft Day, passes a physical the next day, and starts for Washington on the following Monday, the six-year deal will run out after the 2014 season, at which point he will have roughly 5 years and 120 days of service and thus be ineligible for free agency. He would, however, be eligible for arbitration, with the salary from the sixth year of the contract serving as his “base” in the hearing.

I also did a Q&A with MLB Trade Rumors.

Dayn Perry’s new sports+politics blog, Spolitical, earned a quick entry into my RSS reader, and one of today’s posts, The Case Against the Case Against Barry Bonds, was an excellent overview of the giant boatload of fail that the government is sailing into McCovey Cove right now – with your money, I might add.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ March 23, 2009
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Strasburg.

My Strasburg piece, with video, has been pushed back to Tuesday. It’ll be on the draft blog at some point tomorrow morning.

EDIT: My piece on ASU lefty Josh Spence is up. He’s not a first- or second-round guy, but he’s fun to watch.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,
→ March 15, 2009
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The Quickie Hall of Fame.

I finally had time to tally all of the ballots from the quickie ten-man Hall of Fame thread. There were five incomplete ballots that listed ineligible players (Bonds, Clemens, Maddux, and Rose) or had a joke player on the list; one ballot only had eight eligible names and the other four had nine. I’ve contacted those folks to ask if they wanted to revise their ballots, and I’ll update this post if any of them responds. (UPDATED: Two of the incomplete ballots are now complete, so the list below has changed, although the top ten were unaffected.)

So, out of 63 total ballots, including the partial ballots, here are the results:

Player Votes Percent
Babe Ruth 63 100%
Ted Williams 58 92%
Willie Mays 58 92%
Walter Johnson 55 87%
Honus Wagner 46 73%
Cy Young 37 59%
Hank Aaron 35 56%
Ty Cobb 35 56%
Lou Gehrig 29 46%
Mickey Mantle 26 41%
Christy Mathewson 25 40%
Stan Musial 23 37%
Jackie Robinson 20 32%
Rickey Henderson 18 29%
Rogers Hornsby 15 24%
Lefty Grove 15 24%
Joe DiMaggio 8 13%
Satchel Paige 8 13%
Josh Gibson 7 11%
Tom Seaver 6 10%
Sandy Koufax 5 8%
Warren Spahn 5 8%
Joe Morgan 5 8%
Mike Schmidt 5 8%
Yogi Berra 4 6%
Johnny Bench 2 3%
Jimmie Foxx 2 3%
Frank Robinson 2 3%
Bob Gibson 1 2%
Tris Speaker 1 2%
Reggie Jackson 1 2%
Hank Greenberg 1 2%
Eddie Collins 1 2%
Nap Lajoie 1 2%
Cal Ripken 1 2%
Oscar Charleston 1 2%
Nolan Ryan 1 2%
Harmon Killebrew 1 2%

The last column, just in case it isn’t obvious, tells you on how many ballots the player was listed.

Nobody had the top ten vote-getters on his ballot; five different voters listed nine of the top ten. Kevin and Tom had the top nine vote-getters on their ballots, and eleven others had eight. Only five of the players on my ballot ended up in the top ten.

Some quick thoughts:

• I think omitting Mays from my ten was a mistake. As I said in the last discussion thread, it wasn’t deliberate; the point of the exercise was to give ten names that were more or less off the top of your head. I’d probably bump Young off of my ballot, because he was largely an accumulator and did so much of his work in the 19th century and early 20th century, when it was really a different game and much easier for pitchers.
• I was surprised by the general lack of support for Warren Spahn. Even ignoring the 4th-highest-all-time win total, that’s 5200+ innings of a 3.09 ERA in the postwar era. Until Maddux, he was the best pitcher of baseball’s integrated period.
• Just about all of us skewed towards old-timers. When we think “Hall of Fame,” we think of those guys, the ones who are just names and stat pages and old black-and-white photographs. Mike Schmidt is probably the greatest third baseman of all time; Johnny Bench might be the greatest catcher of all time; Joe Morgan was probably better than Rogers Hornsby, whom I listed; yet none of those three guys appeared on 10% of the ballots. In fact, 57 of the 63 ballots didn’t contain a single catcher, and 43 didn’t include a second baseman, even though we all understand where those positions lie on the defensive spectrum.
• I have no idea what to make of Negro League players, so I didn’t list any. I’m just not sure how to compare them to players from the racist era. I feel like we all accept Josh Gibson as the best Negro Leaguer because that’s what everyone says, and in other areas of baseball analysis, we would never be satisfied with that line of thinking.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,
→ March 6, 2009
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Two new draft blog entries.

Mike Leake report. Waiting on video.

A quick discussion of Derek Tatsuno, one of the best college pitchers ever.

And, in a complete non sequitur, one of my favorite old Sesame Street sketches:

Looks like Sesame Workshop is throwing vintage sketches up on Hulu, which means much higher video quality than the (legally questionable) clips posted on Youtube by viewers and fans.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ March 6, 2009
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Friday semi-open thread.

In yesterday’s chat, I was asked to name the first ten players I’d put into a restarted Hall of Fame, and came up (off the top of my head) with these names:

Babe Ruth
Ted Williams
Honus Wagner
Walter Johnson
Cy Young
Lefty Grove
Mickey Mantle
Rogers Hornsby
Rickey Henderson
Warren Spahn

The question of today, of course: Who would be your ten, using only actual HoF-eligible players and not giving it too much thought or research? (Since I answered off the cuff, I’m asking all of you to do the same.)

I’ll also throw a link up here when the Mike Leake piece is posted.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,
→ February 28, 2009
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Draft article and video.

They’re hard to find with the new site format, but I have a draft blog entry up on Shelby Miller and Everett Williams, with a video available of Miller (from the side) as well. Both appear to be behind the Insider wall.

EDIT: The Miller video isn’t playing properly. I’m told that the tech guys are working on it. I’ve also uploaded videos of Matt Purke and Cameron Coffey and have filed a draft blog entry on those two kids as well as Randal Grichuk.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ January 27, 2009
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Pre-vacation Youtube links.

A few links and notes before I take off for warmer climes…

First off, there’s a lot of bad information out there about the arbitration process in baseball, and one error I have seen, heard, and been asked about repeatedly is how multiyear contracts factor into the process. The answer is that they don’t. Because of the disagreement over whether to consider AAV (average annual values) or actual year-by-year salaries, and the question of what sort of “security” discount the player might have taken, these contracts are usually ignored or discarded after cursory arguments in any arbitration negotiation or hearing. So the second year of Prince Fielder’s deal does not affect Ryan Howard’s hearing. (How could it? You can’t compare Howard’s “platform year” to Fielder’s, because the comparable season for Fielder – second time through the arb process – hasn’t occurred yet.)

“Subway:” A vintage song from Sesame Street – or so they say, since I don’t remember it at all even though it’s from my era. It’s, um, a bit dark for the target audience: “You could lose your purse/Or you might lose something worse/On the subway.”

SlapChop: I know JoePo has been talking about the Snuggie and the ShamWow!, but this is the best of the new breed of infomercials. The line at 0:37 is just priceless. I would work it into a KlawChat, but there’s no way they’d let it stand.

Easy Reader: It’s groovy. But mostly it’s a segue to talk about the new version of the Electric Company, which I caught by accident last week while trying to get Barney off my television before my daughter noticed. It’s good – very good. Not quite the same as the original, but the original – while brilliant – looks pretty dated now. The new version is a little more frenetic, and the opening song is a little awkward, but the sketches have some of that second layer of humor that good children’s shows have, there’s a lot of music (like this song by Wyclef Jean with Canadian jazz singer Nikki Yanofsky, who is very cute and can’t dance a lick), and the language is never dumbed-down for the young target audience. The breakout star here is Chris Sullivan, who plays the character Shock; he’s an an amazing beat-boxer, enough that I would turn and watch whenever he was on the screen. (I’m trying to figure out who he reminds me of – I’m leaning towards a cross between Jamie Oliver and Daniel Radcliffe right now.) My daughter’s too young for the show, although it did hold her attention for 15-20 minutes, and I’m hopeful that it will stick around long enough for her to grow into it.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ January 20, 2009
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Tuesday links.

I’m not huge on brownies with nuts, but this “luxury brownies” recipe, from a woman who sells them in a London market stall, looks amazing. (Hat tip to Chocolate & Zucchini.)

It Is About the Money, Stupid’s series on “Commissioner for a day” ideas starts with one from yours truly about territorial rights.

I’m mildly hooked on Mental Floss quizzes, and today’s is appropriate: Can you name all of the U.S. Presidents in under eight minutes?

My friends at River Ave Blues join the chorus of proposals to alter free agent compensation.

Filed Under: Cooking, Food, Sports Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ January 9, 2009
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ESPN’s Hall of Fame ballots.

Eleven of them, all summed up in one table.

And to think, in January 2019, I might have a “KL” column of my very own, with an “x” in the row for Tim Raines.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,