baseball

My god, this is stupid:

The Showalter Plan realigns as follows, with four divisions of seven teams each, arranged geographically to keep all divisions as much within the same time zone as possible -- another simple, common-sense idea. Gee, how novel. Here it is:

If you're not reading Fire Joe Morgan, you should if you care about the sorry state of baseball media. As a good start, try this fisking of an article that displays several of the standard "mediot" (as we called them on rec.sports.baseball back in the '90s) tendencies. Among these are the strange compulsion of the sports media to blame team failure on individuals.

Brian Gunn gives a good analysis at The Hardball Times:

You will hear the mediots put out any figure between 75-90%. That's ridiculous, of course; it seems obvious that offense and defense are each half of the game. I would guess that pitching is about 30-40% of the game.

That analysis is correct to first order, but it doesn't answer the question that the typical 75-90% figure is addressing. The "half this game is 90% mental" crowd is claiming that good pitching is the rarest commodity. They are saying that how much better your pitcher is than average is most of of your chance to win the game.

Back in the early days of baseball, there were folks that claimed that a curve ball didn't really curve, that it was an optical illusion. In reality, they were partially correct in that what you are seeing is the deviation of the flight of the ball from the pure parabolic path your mind expects. So, for instance, a "rising" fast ball is quite impossible; it's really just that it doesn't fall as quickly as your mind expects.

I usually really enjoy Jon Miller's infectious love of baseball. Joe Morgan's analysis of techniques can be very interesting, too, if his analysis of statistics and strategy are seldom insightful. The PowerLine guys take note of what was taken to be pro-Cuba talk from them during the World Baseball Classic semifinals.

As you bend over and look for the catcher's signal, should you have to wonder what the umpire's opinion of what the strike zone should be? If you watch much major league baseball, you will see that this is in fact what goes on. One guy calls more low strikes, one guy calls more high strikes, another seems to have added an extra six inches to the outside of the plate, it's a truly nauseating display of personal opinion being inserted in place of the rules.