Entries Tagged 'Baseball' ↓

The Tag and The Meme

I done got tagged to do a book meme. This is a meme that I can get on board with.

The rules of the meme are:

  1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. No cheating!
  2. Find page 123
  3. Find the first 5 sentences
  4. Post the next 3 sentences
  5. Tag 5 people

As for the nearest book, my bookshelf at work is directly behind me, so all of the books were equidistant from me. Therefore, I chose a non-technical book, Management by Baseball: The Official Rules for Winning Management in Any Field. It’s an entertaining read, with some enjoyable baseball stories used to describe his management philosophy. On with the reading.

This excerpt is talking about Mickey Mantle’s 565-foot home run in April of 1953.

First, there was the stadium-dimension factor, compounded by estimating the distance from the fence to the adjacent street, compounded by (the Yankee publicist) [Red] Patterson’s use of pacing as a measuring technique, compounded be the 10-year-old’s memory of where the ball was (no where it landed, but where it stopped rolling). And while sometimes a lot of little inaccuracies can cancel one another out, remember it was a publicist doing the measuring — a person who had every incentive to maximize the number to inflate the importance of the story. Bad tools, weak quality control, biased agent: a fatal combo in baseball or in your organization.

On with the tagging.

Coincidence?

Coincidence or not, you decide.

September 12, 2004 - Judah born. October 27, 2004 - Red Sox beat St. Louis to win the 2004 World Series.

June 11, 2007 - Abel born. October 28, 2007 - Red Sox beat Colorado to win the 2007 World Series.

Sigh of Relief

I think I just heard Tim Wakefield give the biggest sigh of relief ever.

[tags]Boston Red Sox, Tim Wakefield, Doug Mirabelli[/tags]

‘Tis the Season

The Major League Baseball season has started, and once again I’m sucked into the daily ritual of checking scores and highlights in the newspaper and online. My wife found a new website that is sure to make my search for MLB news easier. Ballbug is like Google News, but specifically for baseball news.

Ballbug spotlights the most buzzed-about baseball news from thousands of web sites. It auto-generates a summary page every 5 minutes, drawing on local news sites, national sports media, and baseball bloggers of various stripes.

It probably will become one of my homepages.

[tags]Ballbug, MLB[/tags]

The Next Eight Months

If you want to know what will be on my mind over the next eight months, this will help you out. Let the games begin!

[tags]baseball, spring training, Red Sox[/tags]

Goodnight Helmet Boy

It’s been a while since I’ve had a quality baseball post, so you get one today. This week a sad announcement came out of Boston that John Olerud is retiring after 16 years in the bigs.

John is retiring with an amazing career batting average of .295, and an even more amazing career fielding percentage of .995! He has two World Series rings, both earned in Toronto when the Blue Jays won back-to-back titles in 1992-93. To go along with that John won the AL Gold Glove three times: in 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Being in the Northwest I had the benefit of watching John play from 2000-2004 with the Mariners. He was one of those players that seemed happy to come to the ballpark every day. He was never boastful. He let his bat and glove do his talking. And that swing! I put his swing in the same category as Ted Williams and Will Clark. For me to put anyone in any category with The Kid (Ted, if you don’t know) is a BIG thing. I was happy that the Red Sox picked him up this last year, but was disappointed with the way that Tito handled the platoon at first. But hey, there’s next year. Only next year will be without Olerud.

Laughing

This had me laughing. Great stuff.

NO!

Holy crap this sucks.

Nomar Get’s All Wet

Cubs infielder, Nomar Garciaparra, recently helped rescue two women from the Boston Harbor. A bystander had this to say:

A bunch of us came running over and sure enough, pulling the two girls from the water was Nomar. It was crazy. Nomar was like jumping over walls to get to the girls and [Nomar's uncle Victor] leaped off the balcony. It was unbelievable.

YES!!!

The only thing that makes me happier than the Red Sox winning is the Yankees losing. Well folks, I’m ecstatic tonight.