dinosaur jesus

The problem with these ideas isn't that you shouldn't be messing with the game. There's been messing all along, often much more radical than anything that's being proposed here. Changing the number of balls and strikes, letting the pitchers throw overhand, moving the pitching distance back, counting a foul ball as a strike--I probably would have hated all of those at the time, but I guess I'm okay with them now. The problem here is, first, that they're coming all at once. It's too much. And second, that they don't really have anything to do with baseball. Every sport has a basic logic, determined by the rules and by an evolving understanding of how to play the game. And the rules and the understanding tend to move together. Allowing overhand pitching, for instance, came about because pitchers were already throwing overhand, and a decision had to be made whether to enforce the rule or to recognize that the game had changed. The foul strike came about because hitters were abusing the spirit of the rule by repeatedly fouling pitches off without penalty. But these ideas come from outside that logic. They feel like they've been brought in from a completely different sport. They're like drunk poker rules—jacks beat queens on Maundy Thursday, and so on. And they don't address the one serious problem with baseball today, which is that the games take too damn long to play. The pitch clock seems to, but it's mostly just a gimmick brought in from football or basketball to make the game seem more efficient. It's not efficient; it's baseball, which doesn't run on clock logic. If the pitchers are dawdling, then instruct the umpires not to call them on it. If the batters are stepping out of the box and calling time too much, then instruct the umpires not let them. And the one proposal that seems to stand up for baseball tradition, banning extreme shifts, is the dumbest of all. Shifts are completely within the logic of the game; they exploit something that's been there all along but rarely utilized. They're fun as hell to watch. And they work, which turns out to be the real problem with them. What's wrong with these people? Screed over.

I hate all this so goddamn much. How did we get a commissioner of baseball who doesn't like baseball?

He takes a leave of absence in the summer, heads off to Paris to hang out with Mike Fitzgerald and Blake Stein and Matt Joyce, goes down to Pamplona for the bullfights, drinks too much, embarrasses himself, comes back to the States to sober up, gets into a couple of games in September, spends the offseason thinking about the novel he's going to write.

Willets Point wrote: I remember getting the Strat-O-Matic board game and recreating the 2000 World Series. I used the exact same lineups, pitchers, and substitutions as the actual games. The Mets won the series 4 games to 1. In fact they Strat-O Mets won all the games the real Mets lost and they lost the game they won. I never played Strat-O-Matic again. Strat-O-Matic was right. It was reality that was wrong.The team with the better record lost in every single round that year, in both leagues.

I haven't seen it, but I know the guy it's about, the Mauritanian. Sort of. After Guantanamo Diary, he wrote another book, a novel, and I was the copy editor. It's got nothing to do with Guantanamo or himself or current affairs. It's set sometime in the twentieth century, and it's about a camel herder looking for his lost camel. There's some interesting stuff about camels. It's called The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga, if anyone's interested. Zarga is the camel.

Robinson Crusoe and Robinson Jeffers peaked in Double A.

He looks like a truncated centaur.

That's wonderful. The Wikipedia page says he's 79, and that the 1937 birthdate you often see is wrong. If so, he went to high school in San Antonio at the same time as Jerry Grote and Davey Johnson. And my father. And Doug Sahm of the Sir Douglas Quintet. That's quite a collection of talent in one medium-sized city not known for baseball or mathematicians.

=seawolf17 post_id=55791 time=1612889128 user_id=91] Rules That Are Stupid, Ranked: 1) Three-batter minimum 1a) (outlawing defensive shifts would go here if they try it) 2) Extra Inning Secret Bonus Runner 3) Fucking up the minor leagues 4) Not allowing position players to pitch 5) The DH 6) Seven-inning doubleheaders

He fields like Hubie Brooks?

Edgy MD wrote: Kaline, Seaver, Brock, Gibson, Ford, Morgan, Niekro, Larsorda, Sutton, Aaron. You don't lower the flag in Cooperstown; you bury it under the sub-basement. All obvious Hall of Famers, at least three of them inner circle Hall of Famers. It's devastating. If you went to the ballpark in 1967, you could have seen all of them play (Lasorda aside)--Ford's last year, Seaver's first.

Edgy MD wrote: And José Martinez may have already displaced Mallex on the depth chart. Jackie Bradley Jr. to me sounds like the comic opening the late show for Steve and Edie at the Sahara. You may be thinking of Jackie Rogers Jr.

The ducks make me happy.

6. Hand's Across the Water

Respect to Gibson. I must have seen him pitch on TV, but somehow it didn't register. I'm sorry about that, because he was incredible. =batmagadanleadoff post_id=47918 time=1601721933 user_id=68] Trying to guess who might've been at that 300 table. There are 24 total 300 game winners-- many long gone. Five 300 game winners were Seaver's contemporaries: Carlton, Ryan, Niekro, Perry and Sutton. Seaver, Ryan and Koosman - do they hold the record for most lifetime wins by three teammates? I'm guessing no - because otherwise, I'd hear about it all the time.

I haven't been coming here because baseball is one of those things that's been too painful to think about this year. But I have to pay my respects to my first baseball hero. I've had various infatuations since, but he's still the one. When I look at footage of him--there's disappointingly little of him in his prime--just the way he moved, the angle of his knee when he raised it near his chest, the the delivery, even the angle of his wrist as he caught the throw back from Grote, is instantly familiar, completely distinctive, forty-five or more years later. I didn't live in New York, I only saw him pitch once in person, I didn't share my fandom with anyone in the Pirate country where I grew up, but I think I felt as much as any of you what he meant, what he was. What can I even say about him? He was Tom Seaver.

Ken Boswell, 18

Edgy MD wrote: Mets All-Time He Came Back? Team? Kelly Stinnett, c Mike Jacobs, 1b Anderson Hernandez, 2b Alex Treviño, 3b Ruben Tejada, ss Clint Hurdle, lf Carlos Gomez, cf Tsuyoshi Shinjo, rf David Cone, sp Ray Sadecki, sp Al Jackson, sp Greg McMichael, rp Josias Manzanillo, rp Pete Walker, rp Bill Pulsipher, sp

Vic Sage wrote: next year, he was a guest at our little league awards breakfast and i got an autograph. He was very tall (at least to 11-year old me) and looked like Herman Munster, which i thought was very cool. Other people Jon Matlack looked like: David Hartman. There's a Good Morning America episode where David Hartman interviewed Seaver, Koosman, and Matlack. Which I guess proves they're not actually the same person. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. There's a Good Morning America episode where David Hartman interviewed Solzhenitsyn's wife Natalya. They talked about the Mets. Bob Huff, a mathematician friend of my father's who also looked like Solzhenitsyn. He was never on Good Morning America.

https://external-preview.redd.it/-TNsKxiRa50FjcH9W4V6JZkkn-SvprcODPCjGovstE8.jpg?auto=webp&s=72ef762ca9b20db7f878e3f494f898699a3d9c59>

Edgy MD wrote: Rick Ferrell and Ray Schalk had offensive numbers far below Porter and nobody wants to burn down the Hall over them. Maybe they should. Ferrell and Schalk were terrible choices. I'm fine with Simmons, though.

This is awesome. I wish I'd seen more Kurosawa. I have seen the remake of Rashomon with William Shatner, though.

I like old movies. Noir, thirties screwball, early seventies, silent comedy, German expressionist, French thirties noir (Jean Gabin is the man), whatever. I wrote a song once about the look on Burt Lancaster's face in Criss Cross when he comes back to the old nightclub after a stretch in prison, hoping to see Yvonne De Carlo and hoping not to see her, and spots her coming in with Dan Duryea. The chorus goes Yvonne De Carlo Yvonne De Carlo Yvonne De Carlo Yvonne De Carlo I never actually wrote the verses. I basically stopped watching movies, even on TV, about ten years ago. The wife doesn't really understand movies, and I have trouble concentrating for an hour or two. But I used to watch a lot, and they're all still in there somewhere. The Elephant Man is great. "I am not an animal."

Mike Vail?

They never did finish building it, did they?