Baseball Bloggers Alliance 2013 Hall Of Fame Ballot

Well, it that time of year again when Baseball Bloggers Alliance writers cast their lot for the Baseball Bloggers Alliance (BBA) Baseball Hall of Fame. (This has nothing to do with the Baseball Writers of America Hall of Fame Voting, this is strictly a vote by the Baseball Bloggers Alliance.)

This year I voted for a record number of players - three.

My vote: Edgar Martinez (4), Barry Bonds (1), Roger Clemens (1)
(number in brackets means number of years on the ballot, maximum is 15 years)

(click on img for fullscreen)

Edgar Martinez was a career .312 hitter, a great right fielder and played the game at it's highest level for 18 years, and for one team - which I emphasize because it indicates selflessness - and that is good for the game.

Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were amoung the best players to ever play the game. I needn't make any arguement for their inclusion based on he numbers they put up. The fact they both used steroids at the end of their careers, to me, is irrelevant - with the following caveat.

They played in an era where the absence of screening by MLB allowed cheating via performance enhancing substances - and coincidentally - they played in an era where MLB juiced the ball to add spectacle to the game. Thus their inflated numbers cannot be quantified as to which part of the inflation was due to cheating, and which part was a function of the profiteering of MLB through the dumbing-down of the game via the spectacle fetish for the home run.

The numbers these two players put up compared to their peers from other eras of baseball will forever be a subject of speculation. I acknowledge that these players were at the pinnacle of talent amoungst their peers (many of whom were also on steroids).

As such - an asterisk should be added beside their names - if inducted by the Baseball Writers of America - indicating they played in the nuclear-ball / steroid era.




mh

GIF: SFG Hunter Pence makes contact with the ball THREE times in one swing

The GIF masters are at it again.

The GIF below was produced minutes after the event occured. San Francisco Giants' right fielder, Hunter Pence breaks his bat on the swing - his bat makes contact with the ball THREE times - in this game changing 2RBI AB in the 3rd inning of NLCS Game 7 - off St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Joe Kelly.

GIF: Hunter Pence makes contact with the ball THREE times in one swing #Giants #Cardinals http://twitpic.com/b6lf8j



Via MetsKevin11 @MetsKevin11 - https://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=MetsKevin11&tw_i=260553722743111680&tw_e=screenname&tw_p=twt&source=twt




mh

Knuckle Under ?

Via MLBFanCave Video, 09/26/12 | KNUCKLE SQUAD! | R.A. Dickey, Tim Wakefield and Phil Niekro follow up their acclaimed documentary KNUCKLEBALL! with a trailer for the sequel KNUCKLE SQUAD!


MLBFanCave Video, KNUCKLE SQUAD!



mh

Randall Munroe's "What if?" series - "Relativistic Baseball"

Randal Munroe publishes a web comic you may be aware of called xkcd (http://xkcd.com/). I've had a link to his comic in the sidebar of my main blog, FilterBlogs - since 2006. Recently Randal Munroe has also begun publishing a series called,

"What if?"  
Answering your hypothetical questions with physics, every Tuesday.

I came to know about Randal Munroe's 'other' project via a Baseball Prospectus article by Larry Granillo - "Wezen-Ball".

Randal Munroe has 11 what-ifs up so far.

This great physics / baseball conundrum is his first 'What if' creation; answering the reader submitted question: "What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?".

As per the meme there, I republish the article in it's entirety.

Relativistic Baseball

What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?

- Ellen McManis

Let’s set aside the question of how we got the baseball moving that fast. We'll suppose it's a normal pitch, except in the instant the pitcher releases the ball, it magically accelerates to 0.9c. From that point onward, everything proceeds according to normal physics.:




The answer turns out to be “a lot of things”, and they all happen very quickly, and it doesn’t end well for the batter (or the pitcher). I sat down with some physics books, a Nolan Ryan action figure, and a bunch of videotapes of nuclear tests and tried to sort it all out. What follows is my best guess at a nanosecond-by-nanosecond portrait:

The ball is going so fast that everything else is practically stationary. Even the molecules in the air are stationary. Air molecules vibrate back and forth at a few hundred miles per hour, but the ball is moving through them at 600 million miles per hour. This means that as far as the ball is concerned, they’re just hanging there, frozen.

The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them so hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.





These gamma rays and debris expand outward in a bubble centered on the pitcher’s mound. They start to tear apart the molecules in the air, ripping the electrons from the nuclei and turning the air in the stadium into an expanding bubble of incandescent plasma. The wall of this bubble approaches the batter at about the speed of light—only slightly ahead of the ball itself.




The constant fusion at the front of the ball pushes back on it, slowing it down, as if the ball were a rocket flying tail-first while firing its engines. Unfortunately, the ball is going so fast that even the tremendous force from this ongoing thermonuclear explosion barely slows it down at all. It does, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny particulate fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments are going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they trigger two or three more rounds of fusion.

After about 70 nanoseconds the ball arrives at home plate. The batter hasn't even seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time the ball does. Collisions with the air have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it is now a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma (mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it goes. The shell of x-rays hits the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud hits.

When it reaches the batter, the center of the cloud is still moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. It hits the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher are all scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrate. The shell of x-rays and superheated plasma expands outward and upward, swallowing the backstop, both teams, the stands, and the surrounding neighborhood—all in the first microsecond.

Suppose you’re watching from a hilltop outside the city. The first thing you see is a blinding light, far outshining the sun. This gradually fades over the course of a few seconds, and a growing fireball rises into a mushroom cloud. Then, with a great roar, the blast wave arrives, tearing up trees and shredding houses.

Everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled, and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city. The baseball diamond is now a sizable crater, centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop.

A careful reading of official Major League Baseball Rule 6.08(b) suggests that in this situation, the batter would be considered "hit by pitch", and would be eligible to advance to first base.

 - by Randal Monroe

* * *



References:

Link to the original at "What if?": http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

Baseball Prospectus, July 10, 2012 | Wezen-Ball - A Really, Really Fast Ball | by Larry Granillo | http://www.baseballprospectus.com/a/17621



mh

Baseball Blogs Radio with "BeeVocal" - show #1 'Test'

Update (1 hour after posting below): W3C school has this, from here - http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_sounds.asp

'BeeVocal' emailed me with a link to their new Radio show production widget. Still finding a way to share the 1:30 test I made - there is no obvious way to do this that is evident on my Home page at 'BeeVocal', but I will persevere.

From the email to recording my first episode took all of 15 minutes! Really great; the interface is intuative - but the link is not an mp3 - instead it's shuttered inside of a player that only is allowed to render on a BeeVocal web page.

You can click on the link and check out the interface as it is so far ... and my incoherent mumblings. :)

http://liveshow.beevocal.com/playback/slides/playback.html?meetingId=d499e2b16a0bf312c274d0378d02b585472d49c0-1345276240753
(playback currently only works in Chrome and Firefox browsers)

Update (30 seconds later): I found the audio file link and I'll go get my favourite player and be right back to lay that in here. Yay!

Well my favourite player wouldn't play the .ogg file so...

..I found a player that adds a tab across the top of this blog you should see it up there, click play to play Episode 1 if you like - SCM Music Player by Adrian C Shum - http://scmplayer.net

Hmmm, that thingy won't play the file either - so that's gone.

So we're left with the link above that takes you to the BeeVocal page with their player, as the only way to share. BeeVocal #Fail.

This is obviously in Beta - I will update when more is known.

You've just read some 'Real Time Blogging'. Now if we can get some real time audio with that...



References:

BeeVocal's 'Ogg Vorbis' File of, Baseball Blogs Radio - Episode 1 - "Test"
(played in my GOM Player, no problem and plays by default in Google Chrome - with the .ogg add-on. Firefox add-on search returned no results for ".ogg" of "Ogg Vorbis".)
http://liveshow.beevocal.com/slides/d499e2b16a0bf312c274d0378d02b585472d49c0-1345276240753/audio/audio.ogg (link opens in new tab/window)

W3C Schools Player - http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_sounds.asp ---> example of the audio tag version I used above ---> http://www.w3schools.com/html/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_audio_5

BeeVocal -  http://beevocal.com/



mh

Rajai Davis' great catch over the LF wall

Scored the Yankees at Blue Jays today from the radio, and heard Rajai Davis make his great catch over the left field wall. Below is the Headline, Game Description and Notes from the scorecard.

I added the MLB video as soon as the game ended.

Aug 12th Scorecard: Yankees at Blue Jays, Game 3

From Rogers Centre, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

New York Yankees
(67-46)
Manager Joe Girardi

@

Toronto Blue Jays
(53-60)
Manager: John Farrell

Game 3 of 3

First pitch: 1:07 pm edt

Starting Pitchers
New York: Hughes (11-9, 4.10 ERA)
Toronto: Happ (0-1, 6.35 ERA)

Umpires
Home - Mike Dimuro
First Base - Jim Reynolds
Second Base - James Hoye
Third Base - Jim Joyce

Weather
Cloudy, warm, chance of rain.


NOTES:

Radio-only day.

The new scroll bar scorecard worked OK, I have the line height set so small it's a little hard to click on the right line when opening a new text box - but that's just a learning curve thing.

On Rajai Davis' catch of the year over the LF wall (which I haven't seen yet) --- I was able to type in a long note in the AB box where the out happened.

In my note I used Jays' broadcaster Mike Wilner's great description of the catch.

Here's my note in 7 hitter Casey McGehee's AB box, in New York's 7th inning: "Davis gets to the track waits and times his jump scaling the wall with his spikes and catches the ball over top of the 10' wall!"


Video:



Via MLB Advanced Media: http://mlb.mlb.com/video/play.jsp?content_id=23840187&c_id=tor&partnerId=aw-5704932443999512486-1046


mh


Rosters via MLB.
Line-up and pitching totals via ESPN.

Also of note - if you've seen Rajai Davis throw from the out field before ... that was a scintillating throw after the catch, trying to double-off Granderson at 1B (of coarse the Blue Jays' television Producer is a hockey player, so he always cuts away from throws).


See the complete game scorecard here - http://internetbaseballscorecard.blogspot.ca/2012/08/aug-12th-scorecard-yankees-at-blue-jays.html



mh

Scoring baseball via good old radio: lazy play by play and neo-liberal macro-engineering

Wrote this yesterday while scoring a Blue Jays' game off the radio, at The FAN 590 Toronto (see link to the scorecard below):


Accurate Reporting & Scoring

Scoring off the radio broadcast today on the FAN 590 Toronto with Jerry Howarth and Alan Ashby, and I'd just like to provide some constructive criticism by saying that I've had to go the MLB Gameday Play by Play 'thinger' on several occasions so far today beacause the broadcasters are not narrating the story concisely.

For example, in the Jays' 2nd on Gose's double to left centre, no one mentioned that it was CF Reddick who fielded the ball and threw to SS Rosales at cut-off (who then threw to Toronto's own, C George Kottaras for the out at home). That happens often, especially with lots going on.

I should note ESPN's automatic Play-by-Play narrative also does not mention who threw the ball to whom on that play. As well, the ESPN widget regularly calls 1B to Pitcher covering a "ground out to first" - which in my universe means 3UA, rather than 3-1 (out by pitcher covering). It makes a big difference in the stats: the way the widget records the play, the first baseman gets a Put Out; the way it actually happened, the pitcher gets the PO and the 1B gets an Assist.

As we advance towards much better defensive stat keeping it would be nice if the old school stats we do keep for defence were at least accurately kept. MLB Advanced Media supplies all the necessary info for a complete and accurate record of each game; it is all available through an API - it's just a matter of building an interface which supports the data stream. (I guess I''ll have to do it.)


The Radio Meme

The between inning advertising on the FAN590 features an ad from the Power Workers Union that starts off with 'did you know that wind power generators are off half the time?' ... and later, 'instead we can use bio-mass technology to fire generators that are carbon neutral'.

What they're talking about is 'strip mining' the northern boreal forest. The northern boreal forest is a band of forest that starts generally, on a latitude marked by the northern edge of Lake Superior (see image).

Northern Boreal Forest - image via Wikimedia commons - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Taiga_ecoregion.png

'Strip mining forestry' (my term) is a new kind of forestry practice. The industry here in Ontario calls it 'whole tree harvesting'. Basically they harvest all the trees in a forest as in clear-cut forestry - but now, towards a leap in efficiency, they harvest the tops, the branches and now - the stump and roots as well.

With almost all funiture now made out of fibreboard, and most housing sheathing materials made out of composites, these new sources of chipped wood and fibre are important; but now the forest industry sees a slow down in consumer demand. Housing starts in the US are down due to the housing collapse, the continuing global economic crisis and the neo-liberal remedy - austerity - is reducing demand for new disposable furniture; like that which Ikea sells. How is the forest industry to maintain profit rates during an forced economic slow down while at the same time maintain their control of global forest sources going forward? The brilliant plan: burn biomass from whole tree harvesting.

Makes you want to vote for more nuclear power stations, doesn't it?

The Northern and Southern boreal forests are one of the biggest 'Carbon Sinks' on the planet. Biomass fired electricity generators are not carbon neutral at all. What we're doing is reducing the planet's ability to sequester carbon; and at the same time releasing thousands of years of natural biomass carbon sequestering through burning. By my reading of several papers on this, it appears, depending on species, that about half the biomass of a tree is in the root system - that biomass in the ground rotting then returns nutrients to the soil that inturn feeds the next generation of growth.

The Power Worker Union claim they are lobbying the Provincial government to go with biomass electricity production - but it's more likely that the Union and the Province are working together - just like they did in the run up to the last Provincial Election. This play by the Province - where the Power Workers Union play the ignorant blue collar moron; and the Province plays the prince all shinny in white to the rescue with the science, the white collar smarts, the nuclear solution - is a play designed to divide the sentiments of the environmentally aware, university educated, white collar urban voter. The thing is, we have to double electricity rates because the nuclear power stations only last half the time we thought they would when we we built them - so now: How to raise electricity rates by 100% and at the same time build 4 Trillion dollars worth of new reactors?

Macro-engineering of the population through deception - that's how.

In my opinion, wind, solar, tidal power and perhaps orbital solar collection delivered by lasers are the answers. We need to invest in these technologies and perfect them; along side a rebuild of existing reactor cores and a modest expansion of this very expensive nuclear power technology to serve the gap in the near term.

Because of the macho-war-culture jingoism in all the ads on Rogers Inc, I can't watch baseball on TV with out muting commercials; now I have to turn off the radio between innings now too because of these evil doings there.

Looks like it's Toronto Maple Leafs semi-pro ball at Christie Pits, or the University League at Stan Waldlow for me... .

Maybe that was always where I had to end up. Outside, in a Park.

This media is no country for old men.



References:

Blogger Baseball Scorecard | 08/04/2012 Blue Jays at Athletics Game 3 Scorecard | http://internetbaseballscorecard.blogspot.ca/2012/08/08042012-blue-jays-at-athletics-game-3_5994.html

Government of Canada | Canadian Forest Service Publications | Effects of forest biomass harvesting on soil productivity in boreal and temperate forests – A review. 2011. Thiffault, E.; Hannam, K.D.; Paré, D.; Titus, B.D.; Hazlett, P.W.; Maynard, D.G.; Brais, S. Environ. Rev. 19:278-309. - http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/publications?id=32736

Government of Ontario | Ministry of Natural Resources | A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE ISSUES SURROUNDING FULL TREE HARVESTING [PDF] | by Alan Wiensczyk | http://www.mnr.gov.on.ca/stdprodconsume/groups/lr/@mnr/@nwsi/documents/document/mnr_e005393.pdf





mh