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From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

> I wonder how many players are aware that Reddit even exists

Reddit is the 3rd most popular site in the US and gets more traffic than Facebook or Youtube. This isn't some secret club that only a few people know about

https://thenextweb.com/facebook/2018/05/30/reddit-surpasses-facebook-to-become-the-3rd-most-visited-site-in-the-us/

Coincidentally, when Ichiro visited KC in 06 he made the biggest donation to the Negro Leagues HOF of any active player.

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/17105389/miami-marlins-ichiro-suzuki-approaches-3000th-major-league-hit

Khris Davis: 2.0% of team's stolen bases.
Chris Davis: 5.6% of team's stolen bases.

The answer is clear, ladies & gentlemen.

If anyone wants a good book to read on the subject of the negro leagues (and race in general in baseball) I highly suggest this one by Rob Ruck

You can but have to wear one of these and be scoring the game so random strangers don't take this as an invitation to become your new best friend

To be fair, I think it was just one of them. The rest of the dudes were just as caught off guard and upset about it as most people were; not so much about their political views, but more about hijacking a group performance for personal motivations.

http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/17030389/tenor-causes-stir-working-all-lives-matter-statement-o-canada-asg

Someone has.

Read The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs. It's a book that goes through, in exhaustive detail, every single dinger the babe hit, with distances for the long ones, plus notes a lot of 420+ foot outs in the big ballparks of the day. The summary is that he hit way the fuck more than 714 using modern rules. Over 1000 was the final tally, but if I recall correctly, that included exhibitions. I need to re read it.

Notably, the Babe's detractors don't note that there was no batter's eye, that run scoring and home run totals were lower then, and he hit 400 and slugged over 1.000 against top Negro League pitching, so he wasn't just dominant in the bigs. In 1927, in modern Yankee Stadium dimensions, he would have donged 85 homers. He had a bunch of 420 foot outs and 450 foot doubles.

The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs: Recrowning Baseball's Greatest Slugger https://www.amazon.com/dp/0786719060/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_0HTvCbRF7M71P

This is the first time I'm reading about this and to me this really smells like a mental health thing. To have everyone in the organization be supportive and not mention specific reasons? I understand as a fan being frustrated but it seems like something more was going on.

Sosa didn't cork his bat to cheat. Here's the story.

• After the incident, all 76 of Sosa's bats were tested for cork, and none were corked.

• The corked bat was found in the first inning. Sosa said that it was a batting practice bat. Makes sense that the last bat you put down in batting practice will be the first you pick up for the game.

His excuse is pretty standard for getting caught with a corked bat, but because it was the only corked bat he owned, I believe him.

One of the best sports books I’ve read is based on the life of the winningest pitcher in one season, Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourne. The guy won 59 games in one season lol. It’s worth the read.

https://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Nine-84-Radbourn-Barehanded-Baseball/dp/0061825867/ref=nodl_

Espn:

>For almost the past year, Tebow has been training in Arizona and Los Angeles to hone his play as a professional batter and outfielder in a sport he has not played on a full-time basis since he was in high school in 2005.

>Tebow was an All-State baseball player in Florida and hit .494 as a junior.

>All 30 Major League Baseball teams will be invited to Tebow's workout at the end of the month, an event he has been preparing for over the past year. Those who have seen Tebow hit have been surprised he picked up the sport so quickly after not playing it since he graduated high school in 2005.

So right now you can get a 12-pack of 14-piece Trident Layers on Amazon for $12.10. After paying taxes, agent (because, let's be real, his agent's gonna want in on that gum action), union dues, etc. let's say he gets to keep maybe 55% of what's left.

That means he's gonna get roughly $80,850,000 worth of gum. That comes out to ~6,681,818 cases of gum. With 168 pieces in each case, he'll be getting 1,122,545,424 pieces of gum.

That's a lot of gum.

If anyone is looking to read more about Ty Cobb, read Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty and not the biography by Al Stump. Stump's biography is largely untrustworthy, which people have come to understand in light of better research.

Total number of player in MLB history -16,187x.089=1 440.643 players

Total batters faced 17,102

Very impressive career. Here is to a great year... old man = )

TIL Miguel Batista wrote a novel. You can buy it on Amazon if you're interested. I am not interested in buying it, but I am interested in why one of the 2 reviews is his apparent ex-girlfriend's suspicious declaration that she had nothing to do with the writing of the novel.

> It was revealed in 1998 that McGwire was taking andro, but the journos just shrugged and continued to watch him hit dingers. Pardon me for not taking their moral crusade seriously.

You are underselling the hypocrisy at the time.

They didn't just "shrug", they actually attacked the journalist who reported finding andro in the locker.

From Jay Jaffe's book "The Coopertown Casebook" (page 101, hardcover version):

> The media glorifying the new power kings [McGwire, Sosa] while failing to report the entirety of the story was part of that failure as well. Wilstein, who found the andro in McGwire's locker in 1998, was quickly dubbed a pariah by some of his peers, his professionalism questioned.

> Wrote the Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy, "No wonder ballplayers loathe the media. Mark McGwire is stalkign one of baseball's most cherished records...and suddenly he's engaged in a tabloid-driven controversy that's painting him as a cheater and a bad role model. It's unfair."

I buy it. This happens every once in a while in broadcast booths. His own voice probably got fed directly to his own headset, but there's a slight delay from traversing the audio equipment, so it makes it very hard to speak.

It creates an effect exactly like a drunk slur. There are apps/websites that will do this intentionally and you can record yourself for fun if you wanna try it out yourself (it's kinda funny to do).

Here is one app that does it (I've never tried that one specifically, it's just what I could find).

K, that's neat and all, but let's bring attention to the fact that Lorenzo Cain literally walked all the way from 3B to home plate for run #6

I love that little half step where he thinks about running, but is then all like, "nah."

The corked bat happened once, and it was in all likelihood an honest mistake on his part.

"But [Sosa] says it was an honest mistake, that he grabbed the wrong bat. He admits the bat is his, but that he uses it for batting practice, occasionally, just to excite the fans with long and deep 450-foot blasts.

All of Sosa's bats are confiscated by security personnel and turned over to Major League Baseball. Seventy-six bats are impounded. Each one is checked for cork by baseball officials the following day. All are found to be clean.

All five of Sosa's bats in the Hall of Fame are tested, including the one in which he hit his 500th home run earlier in the 2003 season, on April 4. The bats were checked with X-rays and CT scans. All the bats are found to be untainted."

http://www.espn.com/espn/espn25/story?page=moments/33

Doesn't excuse the incident, but don't paint it as he was using a corked bat for years along with steroid use

How does no one remember that we were thiiiiiiis close to getting past the Even Year Bullshit in 2012?

Scott Rolen, I love you, but I wish your body had given out in November 2012 rather than June.

If there weren't enough onions in this thread, his dad is suffering from lymphoma

>"He's been battling lymphoma all year. He had rigorous chemo and radiation. Right now we're awaiting results to see if he's in remission or not."

You could probably do it with an absolutely ABSURD walk rate, since rookie eligibility only counts "at bats." 48-for-125 with 105 walks, 10 HBP, 15 2B, 1 3B, 10 HR and 30 RBI would be slash line of .384/.679/.760, an OPS of 1.439 and an OPS+ of 297 (using this OPS+ calculator that uses 2010-2016 numbers).

All of that, and still be eligible for RotY the next year even though you had 240 plate appearances.

Edit: I fucked my numbers up, edits in bold.

i highly recommend this book by Devin Gordon, So Many Ways to Lose: The Amazin' True Story of the New York Mets - the Best Worst Team in Sports

i just finished the chapter that talked about the Nolan Ryan trade. in the opinion of the author, and one I agree with, the Mets actually weren't wrong in trading Ryan. they just royally fucked up the return.

Nolan Ryan had no place on the Mets rotation in that day and age - the Mets had Seaver, Koosman, and Matlack, some of the best arms in Mets history. everyone knew Ryan had potential, but he simply would not get the time he needed to develop on the Mets roster. even Seaver knew this to be true. Ryan had been in the Mets rotation for ~4-5 years and was pretty wild. he actually was still wild even after he left the Mets, but it didn't matter because he is Nolan Fucking Ryan.

the Mets needed a slugging third baseman and they had the best trade chip in the MLB at that point. so, in their infinite wisdom, the Mets traded the biggest trade chip in MLB for Jim Fregosi, who was a shortstop... not a 3B. Fregosi was no joke - multiple ASG appearances, a consistent bat for the CA Angels... he just wasn't 3B or a power hitter... and he broke his hand before the season started while doing drills to get used to 3B.

Jim Fregosi would eventually return to CA, and would manage the Angels in 1979 to a league title. just to put a neat bow on all of this...

by 1979, the Mets had alienated all their star talent, and were one of the worst teams in baseball... that's baseball, suzyn

It costs a little extra, but if you use a smart DNS like Unlocator, you can get around the blackout restrictions on (and other sites, like the BBC).

But yeah, the best option would be to let us just pay them to watch the games.

I was having a discussion with a friend who was a little bummed about the Mariners' Spring Training and I put these together to remind him that, seriously, Spring Training doesn't matter. There's really no relationship between how your team has done the past few weeks and how they'll do during the regular season. (Good news for some of us. Bad news for others, probably!)

It includes data from 2003 through the games played on April 1st. I changed the team names when necessary to get more data, so the Expos data is under the Nationals, the Marlins were always called the Miami Marlins, etc.

You can play with the graphs here, including only showing your own team:

• Run differential graph
• Win % graph

For the stat geeks out there, here's the regression information:

For the non-stat-geeks out there: R^2 is a number between 0 and 1 where 0 means there is absolutely zero relationship between the data and 1 means there is perfect relationship.

Radbourn pitched nearly every game in the second half of the season. Providence's other pitcher, Charlie Sweeney, got drunk and quit the team in the middle of a game, and Radbourn offered to pitch every remaining game if he was given Sweeney's salary in addition to his own.

There's a great book about Radbourn called Fifty-nine in '84.

He also has a fake Twitter account.

Tanaka and Maeda actually knew each other as middle school kids but have never started against one another as pitchers.

Ok, the Cubs definitely have some bandwagon fans (who doesn't after two seasons like this?) But to say "most" is wholly disingenuous. In 2012, a year in which the Cubs lost 101 games, the Cubs were 9th in home attendance and 7th in Overall attendance. A lot of us have been here a long time.

Link to Loria's book on Amazon.

Customer review:
> Take a 1950's era fundamentalist "hawk" a la Rush Limbaugh seeing liberals and communists in every shadow, ask him to do a semiotic dissection of a comic strip, and the results are mind-bending.

>Fuck SNL and the whole cast

>Tell them Yeezy said they can kiss my whole ass

>More specifically they can kiss my asshole

>I’m an asshole? You niggas got jokes

Lyrics to Kanye West song "Power"

AN ENVIABLE ATTEMPT AT WHAT I CAN ONLY ASSUME IS YOUR FIRST WORLD SERIES TRASHTALK (YOU GUYS ARE SO CUTE). BUT YOUR REGULAR SEASON SHENANIGANS (AND POSTSEASON AGAINST THE LOL DODGERS) CARRY NO WEIGHT HERE.

THIS IS EVEN-YEAR POSTSEASON GIANTS YOU'RE UP AGAINST.

OH AND I GOOGLED "FUN THINGS TO DO IN KANSAS CITY" AND #6 OUT OF 101 WAS A MEMORIAL GARDEN. A FUCKING GARDEN. I CAN ONLY ASSUME THE OTHER 95 ARE PUTTING VARIOUS SORTS OF WEAPONRY IN YOUR MOUTH AND PULLING THE TRIGGER.

Home team down 1 run in the 9, game 7. No outs. Guys on first and second.

Then this happens

There would be complete pandemonium.

> In fact, Russell put his finger on it. According to ESPN Stats & Information research, the Cubs chased pitches outside the strike zone a whopping 51 percent of the time in Game 4. That's seven points higher than Game 3, which was bad enough, but only some context can give true meaning to that Game 4 percentage. Chasing outside the zone 51 percent of the time Saturday was the second most of any team in any contest this year. That includes every second-place to last-place team in baseball: 4,860 regular-season games -- plus all the playoff contests. Only the Arizona Diamondbacks, back in May, swung more percentage-wise outside the strike zone than the Cubs did on Saturday night -- and only by 1 percent.

holy shit. great article btw

Because of journalism

>A look at how Bonds was driven to use performance-enhancing drugs in part by jealousy over Mark McGwire’s record-breaking 1998 season. It was shortly thereafter that Bonds—who had never used anything more performance enhancing than a protein shake from the health food store—first began using steroids.

https://www.amazon.com/Game-Shadows-Steroids-Scandal-Professional/dp/1592402682

Actually, since your testicle can die if you don't get treatment pretty quickly, I'd recommend men remember that it is a remote possibility.

This is likely an intellectual property thing. Wikipedia is very strict about enforcing IP on images. You can't just grab any photo you find on the web and use it in a Wikipedia article. It needs to either be in the public domain or licensed in a way that would permit its use on Wikipedia. Most freelance photographers do not give away their work for free. However Keith Allison appears to license many (possibly all) of the photos on his Flickr page under the CC BY-SA 2.0 standard, which allows them to be used, subject to conditions which are easily met by uploading with a template to Wikimedia Commons.

LOL. https://www.linkedin.com/in/yann-perrod-6b6235a9 looks like a real thing!?

Yann Perrod Pro at IFNB

Summary: In business, as in life, I live by a simple credo: Grow it Big, Show it Big, Know it's Big.

Edit: http://ifnb.blogspot.com/ Seriously WTF? (NSFW, NSFL)

Ted Williams: one of the greatest...

• Baseball players
• Fighter pilots
• Fly fishermen

... to ever live.

His grandson wrote an excellent book about Walter and there’s a lot of people in the DC area who know who he was. The biggest sports bar near Nats Park is called Walter’s and is full of his pictures etc. There is also a high school named for him, several little league fields, etc. Walter’s grandson has thrown out the first pitch at Nats Park before.

(aside: there is an elderly man called Lorenzo Crowe who is a former Negro League player who is at Nationals Park for every game. The team gave him season tickets for life in the Diamond Club where the waiters always have a table reserved for him and a meal waiting for him, he gets invited to all the season ticket holder events, he is so loved by the team and the club staff. It’s really great to see.)

Now that we have a team again, more people are learning who he was. Having a generation grow up with no baseball in the city makes for a big gap in our history.

Because there isn't any demonstrated evidence that 'clutch' hitting is really a repeatable skill, and it's largely dependent on where you hit in the order and how often the guys in front of you are on base. Lots of people have tried to prove that clutch hitting is a skill without much luck.

I'd recommend Keith Law's Smart Baseball for more discussion about why RBI isn't a great statistic to determine how good you are at hitting.

I know it's not quite on topic, but there's a wonderful book called Seasons in Hell: With Billy Martin, Whitey Herzog and "The Worst Baseball Team in History"―The 1973–1975 Texas Rangers that picks up the year after Ted's tenure with the team. It's delightful and a must-read for any hardcore Rangers fan (plus a drinking Randy Galloway makes an appearance hanging out on a rooftop)

This is my favourite

He played 1 inning in RF...

>There was a time when Jose Bautista could be quite pleasing. While in Kansas City many summers ago, he was young and polite and used to wave in acknowledgement of the Right Field Rowdies, a group of diehards who came to every game despite the fact that the Royals were not very good.

>A member of the Rowdies, Sabrina Gray, liked Bautista so much that in the moments of boredom that come when your team loses two-thirds of its games, she joked about changing her name to Sabrina Bautista.

>"I liked the ring," she says fondly of that time in 2004. "He was always nice when he played for us."

I disagree. Leaving him for Harper was the correct move. Harper was hitting 0.067 career vs Kershaw, with 10 Ks in 15 ABs. It's different from previous years where Kershaw was clearly gassed. The walk was the result of an excellent PA from Harper. Kershaw hit his spots, but didn't get the calls or swings he wanted.

However, bringing in Baez instead of Blanton was strange, though. Blanton's been the fireman all season, so I'm not sure what the reasoning there was.

I do: Let's say the better team has a constant probability p of winning any given game. Obviously, p is between 50% and 100%.

Probability of better team winning 1/1 game: p

Probability of better team winning 2/3 or 3/3 games: p^3 + 3*(1-p)*p^2.

Here is a graph showing these two functions over the interval 0<p<1. With a bit of calculus, one can show that the maximum increase in win probability formed by changing from a "winner take all" to a "best of 3" is when p=78.9%, and it increases the win percentage to 88.5% (only a change of 9.6%). While this is a change, it isn't that much, and as the teams become more similar (p going towards 50%) or more extreme (p going towards 100%), the change becomes even less.

Earlier this year I read <em>A Well-Paid Slave</em> by Brad Snyder which is a great history of Flood's career and his case against MLB. It had been sitting on my book shelf for an embarrassingly long time but I'm glad I read it. Dense, but definitely worth it.

Get yourself a $75 PC/laptop/Chromebook. Install Google Chrome with Ublock Origin. Attach a wireless keyboard w/touchpad to it. Plunk it on a shelf and plug 'er into your TV's HDMI port. Go to r/mlbstreams.

Problem solved.

&#x200B;

According to a book I have written by an umpire roughly twenty years ago, it rhymes with "cough sufferer."

(Very enjoyable read, by the way.)

On this day last year, it was 77 degrees in Chicago.

Hi everyone! I wrote a book on this topic (kind of, it involves players who played in one major league game and involves a few with just one plate appearance.) It comes out March 11, 2020. My personal favorite is Harry O’Neill. Much like Moonlight Graham, he was a defensive replacement and never got to bat. He fought in WWII and was one of just two MLB players to die in the war when he was killed by a sniper in Iwo Jima.

https://www.amazon.com/Cup-Coffee-Club-Players-Baseball/dp/1538130815/ref=mp_s_a_1_3?keywords=cup+of+coffee+club&amp;qid=1574130439&amp;sr=8-3

Well it didn't help in the early 2000's when our owner Vince Naimoli would constantly shit on fans and the fan experience. There's a story, among many others in The Extra 2% by Jonah Keri, about Naimoli not letting a high school marching band on to the field unless they all paid for tickets.

I believe it's because he did <strong><em>this</em></strong> August 25th against the Marlins. And according to ESPN's boxscore, it was the last game of the series and Escobar hit a home run later, so pretty much confirmed.

Coors is the most offense friendly park overall, in large part due to it's massive outfield, but Yankee Stadium is the most homer friendly park of them all according to some park factors. The short porch is a major factor.

EDIT: I mean this is literally true, here's one that has Yankee Stadium tops for HR park factor. Guess I should have offered up proof in the original comment.

Unlocator (the paid service) is safe from this, it's really just the "free" public VPN that causes issues.

Unlocator opens up DNS routing to a specified location based on your own IP, but doesn't funnel traffic through your own IP.

Good morning Baltimore!!

Also...QUADRUPLE BASEBALL HEADER TODAY!!! Christmas has come early for beisbol fans :D

"Mr. Cueto, here's our offer"

Cueto texts an image to Diamondbacks

"Why are you next to a helicopter?"

Cueto texts an image to Diamondbacks

"That's a no, isn't it?"

Honestly, firing those in charge would be a good start. Read Keith Law's takedown of the D-Backs front office - http://www.espn.com/blog/keith-law/insider/post?id=5515. It's absolutely scathing. Teams make bad deals all the time, and I have a very smart baseball writer friend who swears that being a GM mostly boils down to luck, since even the baseball ops guys with the worst track records will often make good trades, and even the ones with the best reps make plenty of stinkers. But TLR and Stewart just continue to demonstrate a lack of awareness on everything from the market value of players to the elemental task of how to build a winner.

After that, I'd aggressively pursue young pitching in the draft, international market, and via veteran-for-prospect trades, so the team isn't tempted to blow $206.5M on an over-30 starter, or much worse, trade the #1 pick in the draft (and two other good young guys!) for a pitcher who later gets demoted to the minors.

ESPN airs the DVD 2005 Houston Astros: The Championship Season

Jenkinson has done conclusive research, over the course of decades. Take a look at the book The Year Babe Ruth Hit 104 Home Runs.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0786719060/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_0HTvCbRF7M71P

Objectively, the Babe hit dozens and dozens more homers due to that rule and cavernous outfields. He has a few more conclusions, but they're slightly subjective. For example, he thinks The Bambino's totals would not have significantly changed if baseball had been integrated, since he batted even better against Negro League teams. Remember, the Sultan of Swat was a barnstormer (even during the regular season), and he would play against anyone, anywhere. Jenkinson looked at 38 games he played against Negro major leagues teams' best pitchers, including, yes, Satchel Paige, and the King of Crash slugged over a thousand.

The implication here is the that the A's were using sabermetrics on the sly and the book exposed that. This is a false narrative. Even ignoring that other teams were using analytics at the same time as the A's, they all knew what the A's were doing anyway. The Red Sox tried to hire Beane, as well as J.P. Ricciardi, before settling on Theo Epstein. They hired Epstein (and Bill James) before Moneyball was published. Despite what Lewis thinks (he claims that the book ruined the A's competitive advantage), I would be surprised if a single front office guy picked up that book as was surprised by anything in it. If it did anything, it slightly sped up the adoption of sabermetrical analysis in MLB, due to pressure from fans.

There's actually a decent book called The Beauty Of Short Hops, in which they theorize that the A's success had almost nothing to do with their Moneyball approach, and everything to do with having three dominant starting pitchers (Zito, Mulder, and Hudson) at the time Lewis wrote the book. The authors argue that the A's were almost always at the bottom of the league in runs scored, and that their success was predicated upon star players that everyone knew about (the aforementioned trio of pitchers, along with guys like Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez), and that the scrubs and nobodies that Beane picked off the scrap heap were a nice story, but ultimately not the primary reason for the team's success.

It faces East, over the bay.

Yeah, no. He was character assassinated after death by vengeful wannabe biographer.

"Over two generations, Cobb has been portrayed as a virtual psychotic in articles, books, and films, including Ron Shelton’s 1994 feature starring Tommy Lee Jones and Ken Burns’s epic, 18-hour documentary, Baseball, in which Cobb plays the villain to Jackie Robinson’s hero. There’s only one problem: this venomous character is predominantly fictional. In Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, published last year, Charles Leerhsen documents how Cobb’s wicked reputation largely dates to the years after his death in 1961, when sportswriter Al Stump created a mythical Cobb—“Ty the Ripper,” Leerhsen calls him—who displaced the real man in the public mind."

https://www.city-journal.org/html/wronged-man-14423.html

In the intro to the book Rube Waddell: The Zany, Brilliant Life of a Strikeout Artist on page 7:

> Rube was unpredictable, all right. Many a time when Rube was pitching, a fire truck whizzed by the stadium and Rube ran off the mound to follow it. "Where's Rube?" was a question many managers asked minutes before a key game when Rube was slated to start. Sometimes he was on a vacant lot, umpiring a game with local boys or playing with them. Sometimes he was under the grandstand playing marbles with kids. Often he was off in the wilds hunting or fishing.

That pic is from the late 90s era jays going by the jersies.

There is a Cecil Topps card from his Jays days where he wasn't yet the fucking manatee he was at the end of his career.

https://www.amazon.com/1988-Topps-618-Cecil-Fielder/dp/B00AFNGFWY

Not as impressive as some of the ones ive seen on this subreddit, but Im excited! Wake up everyday to change chalk records, and adjust the pennants (velcro on back)

Got the pennants from amazon (https://www.amazon.com/MLB-Mini-Pennant-Teams-Rico/dp/B000EHH8KE)

Spray paint chalk board for the records!

Okay. If you want a slightly larger portable one with lots of utility for camping and long battery life, get this one.

Kaito KA390 Portable AM/FM Shortwave NOAA Weather Radio with LED Flashlight, Color Black https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071DXSZ7Z/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_tbtXAbDJB9GTQ

If you want a small one that doubles as an alarm clock, get this one.

TIVDIO V-111 Portable Shortwave Travel Radio AM/FM Stereo with Clock and Alarm (Black) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0186SDYZU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_MgtXAb217SMTR

If you're worried about buying from a company of which you have never heard, you shouldn't be. You want a radio with DSP, allowing good reception of bad stations, and most of these radios are made with similar chips.

If you are worried about that, just buy one of the Sony ones for $20. They're overpriced and lack virtually any features, but they're at least well made.

5'8" and 185-190 here, and I feel fat as fuck. Dude looks like he put on a uniform at a county fair to look like a MLB player. https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/image-editorial/blue-jays-2020-baseball-dunedin-usa-21-feb-2020-10568261bu

1987 specifically was a really weird year. There is a bunch of conspiracy theories about a juiced ball etc. Offense spiked incredibly that single year, then cratered again.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-runs-were-scored-each-year-in-MLB-1970-2013

Honest question: why are we surprised Arrieta performed the way he did tonight? Don't the numbers from this season support similar numbers? Good or bad, he pitched on-par according to his stats from the last two months.

He was carried by a phenomenal April and, maybe, May, but tonight was July to September Jake.

EDIT: The numbers I speak of. Month by month, he's regressed. I love the guy, but he was a shaky #3 starter. I said Hammel would've offered more security and consistency. I'll have to go find his numbers to support that.

Hammel had a shitty September. Still kind of consistent before that.

If you’ve ever seen what high grade tack can do, I suspect you wouldn’t hold the same opinion. Case in point; Spider Tacky’s Amazon page has some pretty comical images:

https://www.amazon.com/Spider-Tack-Competition-Grade-9oz/dp/B004309NLK

Mike Trout net worth: 82.4 million

Avg US citizen net worth: ~100k (varies by age)

Mike Trout % of worth donated (27k): .03

Avg US Citizen % of worth donated ($5): .005

If Mike Trout were an average citizen he would contribute $30 and he's only askin you to kick in 5

source is based on a graph on this page, but the graph is of data from the US Censor Bureau

I mean -- sure, if you want to be sensationalist. I'm not denying global warming as a fact.

But the article's opens up regarding the World Series record for home runs. And all DeJong was doing was testing the age old theory that the hotter it is, the farther a ball flies. And he found that it's somewhat true and that a bell curve exists.

So if you ignore the obvious juiced ball there, was the home run spike this year in the World Series a result of heat? Maybe, but there is a lot of statistical noise here:

• The Juiced Ball Theory which was present all season.
• The assertion from players that the balls in the World Series were actually different and "slicker" than those in the regular and even previous postseason contests.
• Approach changes by many players to produce more fly balls and to hit for power.

But maybe just maybe the fact that this World Series was played in Houston, TX and Los Angeles, CA has much more to do with it. Houston which had an historical offensive season, 4th best ever in WRC+, has a temperature controlled environment being in a domed Stadium. I would imagine just like any other public business, the temperature of the stadium is kept between the 68-75 degree sweet spot that DeJong concluded with his findings.

And in game 2 of the World Series, the Astros and Dodgers hit 5 home runs in the 10th and 11th innings. Late around that time, the temperature had fallen to ~70 degrees.

So if anything, we should be contributing the spike in home runs in the World Series to be partially attributed to the fact that we had two warm weathered cities in the World Series. That's the first time this has happened since the 2002 World Series between the Angels and the Giants. And guess what the previous record was? 21, set by the 2002 World Series between the Angels and Giants.

Using this app: http://infinite-labs.net/afloat/

It's for mac, there's gotta be a windows equivalent but it just creates an overlay of whatever window you want and you can click right through it. The transparency is adjustable as well.

I also dislike 's blackout restrictions, and was actually unaware of the restrictions until after purchasing . This will get downvoted, because it has in the past. But OP, if you want to watch in-market games on , download this extension. It is called Zenmate, and somehow hides your location. The link is for a Chrome browser, but if you have a different browser, just type Zenmate into Google.

Having 20% of teams blacked-out is totally unfair, and I hope this will solve your problems, as it solved mine.

I liked the way The Cubs Way was written.

The whole book tells the story of Game 7 of the 2016 World Series but recaps how a specific player or Cubs' personnel got to that moment.

Amazon Echo has a skill called Background Baseball which is very similar and is absolutely awesome to listen to when doing chores around the house.

it all last year. For $5 a month you can circumvent all blackouts and watch any game on . I would gladly pay extra for in market streaming if it was offered, but they leave me no choice.

The only annoying thing for me was that I had to use my laptop to stream. Unlocator doesn't work on the I couldn't stream with tablet or Xbox.

Isn't the stat something like 60% of Americans have less than $1k in savings?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/most-americans-have-less-than-1000-in-savings-2015-10-06

So what LaRoche is doing isn't remotely typical for the average 39 year old.

Last night's scored run allowed him to finally clean it.

> Miller had refrained from washing his jockstrap because he didn't want to jinx the streak, and Fowler's homer finally freed him to toss it on the pile.

> No one else has to validate themselves with their home and road splits

Not necessarily true. I had someone tell me that Jose Altuve isn't nearly as good as his numbers look because he plays in a hitter's park, despite the fact that Minute Maid Park was <em>thirtieth</em> on the park factor list this year, and despite the fact that Altuve hit much better on the road.

I get being tired of always hearing about Coors Field, but it objectively impacts your hitters' stats. It does. It doesn't mean they're not good hitters, but it's always going to come up in the conversation because it is a legitimate factor that does have to be accounted for.

Context for those who forgot (or otherwise purged it from their memory), Sammy Sosa sneezed and hurt his back removing himself from the line-up for almost a month.

So worth the cost, especially at $50. You're a fool if you pass this up.

Also, to bypass blackouts, I highly recommend Tunnelr OpenVPN. Made by redditors, cheap, and it works flawlessly.

How much of a 'thing' is pretty debatable I'm sure, but for stat nerds he was well known. I started collecting his 'Baseball Abstracts' in 1984. I still have about a dozen of them and they're awesome reads even these days. His 'Win Shares' book probably put him on the map a bit more in the 2000s.

Edit: an Amazon link for fun

I believe this is known as hindsight bias. I've recently been reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, which contains a fascinating discussion on various cognitive biases including this "illusion of understanding".

tl;dr: people assign X chance to event E occurring, if event E occurs, people retroactively assign a greater than X chance to E occurring, if event E doesn't occur, people retroactively adjust their probability downward.

The record rain fall in a year for the Los Angeles area is 38.18 inches, Hurricane Harvey had rainfall totals in Houston as high as 56 inches

Definitely use the search function in this sub. There are a ton of great recommendations from over the years.

That said, I just finished The Only Rule Is It Has to Work and it was fantastic.

Small correction: Bum broke the SF Giants record. A couple of lefties from 100+ years ago have more Ks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SFGiants/comments/2g9lv0/congrats_to_madison_bumgarner_for_setting_the/ckgzfsi?context=3

Essentially this is what I think is happening. Two years ago, Mark Cuban predicted a decline in the NFL because they were going to get "too greedy".

Relevant quote:

>"I think the NFL is 10 years away from an implosion,"

>"Just watch. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. When you try to take it too far, people turn the other way. I'm just telling you, when you've got a good thing and you get greedy, it always, always, always, always, always turns on you. That's rule No. 1 of business."

I always loved the story of Larry Walker:
>Born in 1966 to parents of Scottish descent, Walker grew up playing ice hockey and dreamed of a career in the NHL as a goaltender, only playing baseball for fun during the summer. At the age of 16, he was offered tryouts with Junior A teams in Regina, SK and Kelowna, BC, but after getting cut from both teams, Walker decided to focus his athletic aspirations on baseball. Walker was selected to join the Canadian team at the 1984 World Youth Championships in Saskatchewan. At that tournament, he caught the eye of Montreal Expos scouting director Jim Fanning, who signed Walker for $1500, despite Walker's relative lack of experience playing organized baseball. Wiki

> if you were going to open a business would you take advice from someone who owns a few businesses or would you take advice from the guy who has a degree in entrepreneurship but no experience?

I'd take advice from the person with proven effectiveness. Their background doesn't play into it.

You should read this book and understand why you're wrong. It actually specifically addresses this line of old school thinking.

For those who are interested, the 1989 book, "On a Clear Day They Could See Seventh Place: Baseball's Worst Teams" by George Robinson is an entertaining read. It chronicles the worst team of every decade between 1890 and 1989.

This is what I used - just cut to size. $10 for 17" x 6.5 feet - you can still see the ball, just slightly darker.

Back in '09. Most recent performer wrote a book and moved on to new challenges.

He has a good autobiography out:

https://www.amazon.com/Wherever-Wind-Up-Authenticity-Knuckleball/dp/0452299012

I read it, pretty compelling. Also has some good "made for movie" moments, eg trying to swim across the Missouri River, not making it, nearly drowning, then snapping to it and having a self-realization etc etc etc

You want to argue that it took too long? Sure. You want to say it wasn't related to Posey? Completely wrong. Discussions about the rule change started because of that play. That's a fact.

"Discussion to limit or ban collisions has intensified since May 2011, when San Francisco's Buster Posey was injured by Florida's Scott Cousins. Posey, an All-Star catcher, sustained a broken bone in his lower left leg and three torn ligaments in his ankle, injuries that ended his season."

http://www.espn.com/mlb/hotstove13/story/_/id/10121849/mlb-intends-ban-home-plate-collisions-2015

At Safeco, from the upper deck in above the home dugout, you have an amazing view of the whole Seattle skyline. Pic

There really is no baseball off-season with MLB Rumors.

Just a note about Ken Burns' Baseball, it's on sale at Best Buy for $40, marked down from like $180.

LINK

&quot;Swing and a long drive...&quot;

As always though, honorable mention to &quot;WHAT WAS NOOK LOGAN THINKING? WHAT WAS HE WATCHING? WHERE WAS HE GOING?&quot;

I think he would have had to legitimately have low testosterone levels to get the doctor to grant him the exemption. But the reason why he had low-T was likely, in a sports doping sense, invalid. As we wrote in this Medium piece (https://medium.com/matter/the-untold-and-insanely-weird-story-of-a-rods-doping-habits-e888f08e012a) Bosch testified that A-Rod's cousin told him that his testosterone levels were likely low due to years of PED use. That is exactly why it's virtually impossible to get a testosterone exemption in well-guarded drug programs.

wut

anyways my comment was:

>Im gonna be doing streamable highlights for Jays games this summer the same way I do highlights for hockey games, cant wait!

>A little snippit

If you ever have the opportunity to buy the Calvin & Hobbes collection I would encourage you to do so. Bit pricey but having grown up with it it was worth it.

Link

My second other collection that I love is the Star Wars Concept Art books

Link