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| Aug-10-10 | | Jim Bartle: <Mayo> Smith was concerned about a couple of hot dogs? And of course Finley also drafted Reggie, the greatest hot dog of them all. |
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| Aug-10-10 | | Jim Bartle: Anybody else watching this fight between Cards and Reds? I've never seen this before, a fight before the first pitch in the bottom of the first. Looks like Baker and LaRussa were both thrown out. |
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Aug-10-10
 | | Phony Benoni: Hot summer night, close race, tempers flaring. Looks like baseball season is finally beginning. |
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| Aug-10-10 | | Jim Bartle: And the Tigers are facing a pitcher who appears to have been borrowed from high school freshman team. |
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Aug-10-10
| | Phony Benoni: Yeah. Like Bob Feller. Gosh, this is embarrassing. |
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| Aug-11-10 | | crawfb5: I have completed Game Collection: Havana 1913, less any minor tweaking along the way. In looking for background on Kupchik, I started looking at Lake Hopatcong 1926 (not the 1923 Congress you've already collected). It was a small event, with Capablanca, Kupchik, Maroczy, Marshall, and Edward Lasker. We've only missing the two Lasker-Maroczy games, and I submitted those, although it may be some time before they are processed. It's the smaller, older, type of event I should probably stick to, so I think this is next on my list. |
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| Aug-11-10 | | A.G. Argent: A fascinating glimpse at a batter's thought process; Colby Rasmus on his taking a change-up deep for a Slam today when (speaking of Arroyo): " He likes to work that fastball up and then that batting practice fastball, that change-up down. And then he'll flip those sliders in there. He's gotten me to chase some of those up. So going in, having faced him quite a few times, I got kind of an idea of what he might try to do to me. So if I see those cutters up and in, or two-seamer up and in, I try to take it as best I can. I was trying to be as late as possible. If he threw a fastball there and beat me then you've got to tip your cap. I was just trying to be late and my bat sped up to it and caught up to it." BAM, Grand Slam, sweep, and Brandon Phillips is the perfect idiot. (Also Johnny Cueto is the cowardly little b..ch in all this, viciously kicking Jason Larue in the face and Carpenter in the back with his spikes and then saying he did it because he was scared in being backed up against the fence when all he had to do was roll out to his right to escape it all.) He is the one who needs to be suspended. And fined. |
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| Aug-11-10 | | Jim Bartle: I remember Yogi Berra saying similar things about facing Bob Feller. |
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Aug-11-10
 | | OhioChessFan: Carpenter is a world class punk. Period. As for Cueto, what exactly should he have done? It was only, what, 10 against 1? And what video are you watching if you think he could have "rolled out" to the right? Here's what should have been Rasmus' thought process: Wow, I've taken strike 3 twice already and this ump won't call it. Of course, he hasn't called a close strike for Arroyo all day. At least Wainwright has gotten all the calls. Anyway, now that it's 3-2, Arroyo has to throw one down the middle. It's been 7 hours ago, but I remember it as an 87 MPH fastball he hit. I agree Phillips is an idiot. I think there is something to be said about what a bunch of jerks the Cardinals are. Tony Larussa: "I was so upset last night I vomited 4 times." LOL. Maybe he should call Alan Alda to share his emotional turmoil. |
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| Aug-11-10 | | crawfb5: <1) Hastings Christmas Congress. I'm made a decent start on these (with the help of suenteus po 147), but there's still a long way to go.> I have http://www.amazon.com/Battles-Hasti..., but it has few games. <2) U.S. Open. I attended this tournament 25 years in a row, bought tournament bulletins at each one, and have found a few more over the years to extend my possible coverage from 1967-1999. Most of these games have never seen the inside of a computer, so I feel this could be a valuable historical project. Thing is, many of them do not meet the quality requirements of cg (though others don't seem to worry as much about that).> Eeekk!!! I actually <played> in one of those! It was BC (before computers) -- 1977, IIRC, the one in Columbus, Ohio. Those games are probably better left lost. This could break my perfect record of having no games in <any> database... <I want to put them into PGN form, but still need to figure out a way to preserve and make them generally available. It wouldn't help much if whoever inherits my computer just cleans out all the junk on my hard drive!> Put them on another site and link to them? Any way you do it, that's a massive amount of games to process. |
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Aug-11-10
| | Phony Benoni: Now this is why we don't have instant replay for baseball fights. All the angles would be inconclusive. Is it my imagination, or has there been an especially large number of controversial calls by umpires this year? Or are we simply more aware of them with all the videos available? |
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Aug-12-10
| | OhioChessFan: I think it's the availability issue. I recall a friend who was a Braves fan in the 90's and would deny that Glavine and Smoltz and Maddux got a huge strike zone. Then one year the networks put an overhead camera atop the plate and you could see pitches 2 and 3 inches outside/inside being called strikes. That pretty much ended the discussion. This year the local Fox sports has a graphic superimposed strike zone that shows (fairly) accurately where pitches are. I'm not sure why it's so hard for the average person to determine the strike zone, but now they can see a pretty definitive answer as to whether a pitch was a strike or not. Also this year, there have been a large number of high profile bad calls. Most bad calls just happen and are done with. This year, they seem to be affecting important games much more than normal, ergo, there seems to be more of the bad calls. |
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| Aug-12-10 | | Jim Bartle: I admit certain pitchers may tend to get breaks. But it's not that easy for umpires, who cannot always be looking directly forward at the ball and the plate. Umps usually look over the inside shoulder of the catcher, and seeing the outside corner is not that easy. And as well, I really think those computer charts showing the location of the pitch are well off, showing pitches on the corners as outside or inside. |
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Aug-12-10
| | Phony Benoni: I would imagine that an automatic ball/strike caller for baseball would be harder to create than an electronic line judge in tennis because of the three-dimensional aspect of the strike zone. |
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Aug-12-10
| | OhioChessFan: I thought I was the only one who realized the 3D aspect of the strike zone. A pitch on a downward plane at the knees at the very back edge of the plate is a strike. A sweeping curve to the right that crosses the very front right corner of the plate is a strike, as well as if it crosses the left rear corner. The superimposed strike zones show a flat plane and don't seem to consider that. Umpires appear to me to not consider it either I will note the graphics appear to me to call strikes on pitches that are in fact low, and balls that are really high strikes. |
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| Aug-12-10 | | Jim Bartle: "A sweeping curve to the right that crosses the very front right corner of the plate is a strike, as well as if it crosses the left rear corner." I'm surprised if that is correct. I thought the strike zone refers to the front 17 inches of the plate, that a ball which curves in and crosses over the back of the plate is not a strike. At least that's what I was taught. Otherwise sidearm pitchers like Don Drysdale and Randy Johnson would get a big advantage. OCF has me on ignore, so won't consider this in comments. |
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Aug-12-10
| | Phony Benoni: This should settle the question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike...
A conceptual three dimensional right angle pentagonal prism??? |
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Aug-12-10
| | OhioChessFan: Exactly Phony.
<The opposite extreme—favoring pitchers—requires a pitch to be called a strike if even the smallest portion of the ball, seams included, has intersected or passed inside any strike zone boundary as defined in the official rules.> Dead on. I am not sure, but I believe the black edge of the plate is not part of the strike zone. So when an announcer inevitably says "He painted the black with that pitch", he's really saying "The ump just made a bad call." |
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| Aug-12-10 | | Jim Bartle: I still believe the front of the plate is what counts, but I'd be happy to be corrected. Painting the black is technically a ball, of course, but in general it refers to the center of the ball over the black, which would mean part of the ball was over the white. And one stitch over the white and that's a strike. The greatest inconsistency among umpires, and where the rule is most violated, is the upper limit of the strike zone. You'll see some umpires refuse to call anything over the waist a strike. In particular umps won't call a breaking ball above the waist a strike, on the assumption that it wasn't meant to go there anyway, so shouldn't be rewarded. That makes it tough on pitchers. When I umpired a pitch was a strike unless I clearly saw it as a ball, not the other way around. I was pretty strict on low pitches, but called close pitches inside and outside as strikes. I called pitches up to the chest strikes. Of course at Babe Ruth/American Legion level you're going to have an awful lot of walks if you're too strict. |
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Aug-12-10
| | Phony Benoni: Of course, it's not just the pitchers who get breaks. Ted Williams had such a reputation for having an eagle eye and the discipline not to swing at bad pitches that umpires were know to call close pitches balls simply because he hadn't swung at them. The usual cliché you hear is that players can accept close calls if the umpire is consistent; it's when he seems to be favoring one team that the trouble begins. Of course, this judgment is usually made by biased observers, but as long as the umpire is perceived as being fair there is not generally a problem. Then there are other factors. We've all seen obvious ball fours called strikes because the batter started going to first before the call. (I don't like such calls, by the way). And, though I have not checked this scientifically, I'll bet there are an awful lot of called strikes late in games on hot August afternoons with the score 13-2. |
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| Aug-12-10 | | Jim Bartle: Wade Boggs is another guy pitchers complained didn't get strikes called against him, at least until late in his career. Williams was known to be fair to umpires, at least that's the lore. One time he was called out in a key game, or maybe an All-Star game. The third-base coach started arguing, and Williams just said, "The pitch was right there, I should have hit it." |
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Aug-12-10
| | OhioChessFan: For the record, Arroyo said he took something off a fastball on the grandslam. He commented on the strike zone, which is surprising since he tends to not address that. Most of the Reds pitchers will in a heartbeat. |
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| Aug-12-10 | | Travis Bickle: Dr. Benoni you being an afficiando of great literary works, I thought you would appreciate this poem. http://www.csh.rit.edu/~kenny/poetr... |
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Aug-12-10
| | Phony Benoni: Gosh, <Travis>, I figured you'd come up with this version from your distant youth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G2H...
By the way, if anyone's asking I couldn't find the Tug McGraw version. |
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| Aug-12-10 | | A.G. Argent: Excellent. Cueto got a 7 game suspension. |
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