If you’ve ever played baseball, you know how using a brand new, slick baseball can be an adventure unless you “rub it down” and take the shine off. A time honored pre-game ritual in the majors is to rub new baseballs down with mud. Here’s a great article from CNN about where baseball’s ‘magic mud’ comes from and the story behind the tradition:

On August 16, 1920, Ray Chapman, a shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, was crowding the plate in the top of the fifth inning when he was struck in the head by an underhand curve ball from New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays. Days later, Chapman became the first and only player killed by a pitch in Major League history.
“From that point forward the umpires were looking for a way to get a better grip for the pitcher on a new baseball,” Bintliff says. “They tried tobacco juice, shoe polish, dirt from the infield and all of those things scarred or damaged the leather.”
Lena Blackburne, a manager for the Philadelphia Athletics, had an idea. He cured and aged mud from a fishing hole near his home and took it back to the Athletics clubhouse.

Some new footage was of Babe Ruth was recently discovered in a home movie collection from a family in New Hampshire.

The latest Babe Ruth film, unseen publicly until now, is part of a 90-second clip shot from the first-base stands at Yankee Stadium. There is no sound. But there are sweeping views of the park. And there is Ruth, obvious by his shape and waddle.

Here’s hoping this discovery will place a curse on the Yankees this post seeason. :)

As I wake up from last weekend’s drubbing at the hands of the Yankees, and stare at the train wreck that the 2009 Red Sox season has become, I continue to be amazed at the comedy of errors that the Red Sox’ front office has made at the critical position of shortstop. Call it the “Curse of Orlando” or maybe the “Curse of Nomaaaah”. It is true that since that fateful trade deadline deal in 2004 that sent Nomar Garciaparra packing, the Red Sox have won two World Series (two more than I anticipated in my lifetime), and they have consistently been in the playoff hunt. You can’t argue with that success. However, when you “peel back the Onion” a bit, you see a concerning trend of decisions and moves, none more head scratching than the revolving door of underwhelming shortstops.

Most recently, they traded away their latest mistake, Julio Lugo, and have brought back 2006 re-tread Alex Gonzalez, a great fielder who can’t hit is way out of a paper bag. Since their magical run to the 2004 World Series, this is the list of shortstops they have run in and out of (and back in to) town:

2004 – Orlando Cabrera, Pokey Reese
2005 – Edgar Renteria, Alex Cora, Hanley Ramirez
2006 – Alex Gonzalez
2007 – Royce Clayton, Julio Lugo
2008 – Julio Lugo, Jed Lowrie
2009 – Julio Lugo, Nick Green, Jed Lowrie, Alex Gonzalez

What’s most baffling to me is that all of this could have been avoided if they just signed Cabrera after the 2004 World Series for, if I recall, $25-30Mil over 3 or 4 years. I could not believe they did not do it then, and I still curse the decision. This inept judgment was made exponentially worse when they turned around and signed Edgar Renteria for 4 years/$40Mil, and he turned out to be a bust of epic proportions. A few years later, they did essentially the same thing (!!) by signing Julio Lugo to a 4 year/$36Mil contract, and he too was an epic bust. Renteria and Lugo combined have cost the Sox more than double what Cabrera would have cost. Through all of this, “OC” had, and continues to have, solid performance on the field and at the plate for Anaheim and Oakland. Instead of traipsing out 10+ different shortstops during that 3-4 year period, they could have had the steady “OC” there. Now we all know that Hanley Ramirez could have been that stud shortstop for the Sox, but he was traded away while Theo was walking out of Fenway in a gorilla costume, a deal that has been beneficial for both organizations but still always prompts the “what if” questions.

So as we slog through the dog days of August, and the Sox try to claw back into the Wild Card race, lets hope that the three headed shortstop monster of Alex Gonzalez, Jed Lowrie, and Nick Green can pull something out of their collective hat and help turn this thing around. I’m not holding my breath.

I came across a great site today called Flip Flop Fly Ball. The site’s author Craig Robinson essentially takes run of the mill baseball statistics and information and turns them into graphic works of art. For example, the chart below displays the direction that the batters face within each of the MLB stadiums (click to see the full sized image).

There is a great visual of the price variance of MLB tickets (with the Yankees leading the way), the types of MLB stadiums, and my personal favorite, the monetary value of MLB’s stolen bases if they were actually stolen.

On this day, June 29, 1905, Moonlight Graham played in the only game of his major league career.   Archibald “Moonlight” Graham’s short career is significant because its a central storyline in W.P. Kinsella’s book Shoeless Joe, which was the basis for ( in my opinion) the greatest baseball movie ever made, Field of Dreams. Here is his MLB career line:

The story of Moonlight Graham was depicted semi-accurately in the movie:

On June 29, the Giants were the visiting team against the Brooklyn Superbas. For the bottom of the eighth inning, Graham was sent in to play right field, replacing George Browne. In the top of the ninth inning, Graham was on deck (scheduled to be the next batter) when his teammate Claude Elliott flied out resulting in the third and final out. Graham played the bottom of the ninth in right field but never came to bat, and that game turned out to be his only appearance in the major leagues.

After his short visit to the majors, Moonlight completed his medical degree and moved to Chisholm, MN where he served that town as “Doc” Graham for close to 50 years. In the movie Field of Dreams, Burt Lancaster brilliantly plays “Doc” Graham in one of the great sequences in movie history. One of my favorite lines from “Doc” Graham:

Well, you know I… I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn’t. That’s what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases – stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That’s my wish, Ray Kinsella. That’s my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?

The way Lancaster delivers this line is amazing. You can see the twinkle in his eye and you get the feeling that he is just dying to jump into the batters box. So on this June 29th, pay an ode to “Moonlight” Graham, and to the idea that you can achieve what you want, even if it is for only half an inning in the field.

Alex Rodriguez completely comes clean and admints he took ‘roids from 2001-03 and that he’s not exactly sure what he was taking. At least he has the balls to stand up and admit he did it, even though he denied it on 60 Minutes about a year ago.

Great article about how the Tampa Bay Rays had to scramble to find hotel rooms because the World Series has been put on hold due to the terrible weather in the Philadelphia area

The puddles did it. As soon as Jeff Ziegler, the director of team travel for the Tampa Bay Rays, saw water covering the infield at Citizens Bank Park on Monday night, he realized Game 5 of the World Series might be suspended. Instantaneously, Ziegler also realized he needed to locate hotel rooms for 170 waterlogged people.

Ziegler called hotels near downtown Philadelphia, but he had as much success as someone selling $600 doorknobs. Not only did he discover that finding the 87 rooms the Rays needed was impossible, but hotel manager after hotel manager also said there was barely a spare cot. The puddles were growing bigger.

I originally wrote this post last Thursday at around the bottom of the 6th inning of Game 5 between the Sox and the Rays. As we all know, the Sox staged a comeback for the ages in that game but, alas, just prolonged the inevitable as they lost in Game 7 to the Rays. So the post below was delayed, but the story remains the same (to quote Led Zepplin):

In the end, the Red Sox missed Manny more than they thought. But it was more than that. The Rays “dropkicked murphyed” the Red Sox all over Fenway Park, then once they were done kicking, they shipped them off to the off-season.

In the three games at Fenway Park (stats below through 6th inning of Game 5 [editor's note]), the Rays outscored the Redsox 29-5 and outhit the Sox 34-20. Collectively, David Ortiz, Jason Varitek and Jacoby Ellsbury went a combined 3 for 43, or an .070 batting average for those of you keeping score at home. And I won’t even go near the pitching stats. That is not a formula for winning games. But more than anything, the Rays made the Red Sox look like a very slow, plodding and old team.

The stats above were through the 6th inning of Game 5. Since the series went 7 games, the numbers changed a bit by the end of the series, but the story is still the same. Papi, the Captain, and Jacoby did not show. The off season should be interesting. And with that, I will keep my Red Sox posts to a minimum until next summer.

Oh my lord. TBS is having major technical difficulties and they can’t broadcast Game 6 of the ALCS as of this post. They have been showing Dick Clark Bloopers and Practical Jokes and Cedric the Entertainer. Could this go down as the Cedric the Entertainer Game? Similar to the Heidi game from the 1970’s.

TBS’s tagline is “TBS: Very Funny” Dripping with irony.

Someone is getting fired tonight.

Red Sox – 8
Tampa Bay – 7

Wow, what a comeback win. Seven runs down in the 7th inning. No expectations here. We still have to win two games down in the Trop. Not going to be easy, even with Beckett and Lester.

Update: Great article by Bill Simmons on last night’s game and the emotional roller coaster that it was. The following exchange was exactly how I was feeling:

We [Simmons and his Dad] were having the funeral for the 2008 Red Sox. Heck, I even gave one of the eulogies. Called my dad during the seventh inning for the requisite, “Yup, we just didn’t have it this year,” conversation and everything. I remember uttering the words, “I wanted us to win tonight if only because it would have been another two days where I didn’t have to think about Matt Cassel.” I remember Dad admitting, “I turned it off 20 minutes ago; I’m watching ‘ER.’” I couldn’t even blame him. We hung up.And yet …I didn’t turn off Game 5. I did the old “half-watching it, going through e-mails and not getting totally invested even though I totally was” thing.

I had a blog post ready to go, extolling the season and the fact that the “Ghost of Manny Ramirez” was haunting them. But somehow, they lived to see another day. Yes, the upcoming sports weekend did get a hell of a lot better last night.

From Jason Stark at ESPN, here are his highlights, lowlights, and year end awards from the past year in baseball. Some of the funnier items:

With the bases loaded in the ninth, a four-run lead and Mr. Home Run Derby himself, Josh Hamilton, heading for home plate, Maddon knew exactly what had to be done — even if no American League manager had done it in over a century.

He intentionally walked Hamilton — with the bases loaded. And lived to tell about it. The next hitter, Marlon Byrd, whiffed for the final out. And we’d just witnessed another great moment in managerial genius.

“No, not really,” Maddon told Year in Review. “Just managerial imagination.”

The Tigers whiffed Angels rookie Sean Rodriguez on Sept. 4 — on a 4-and-2 pitch — when everybody lost track of the count, including the umpires and Rodriguez. “That’s a new trick of ours,” manager Jim Leyland said.

One of the Craziest Games of the Year: Don’t Walk This Way — Sept. 5: A’s 11, Orioles 2. Last year, on the day the Orioles announced they were bringing back interim manager Dave Trembley, they lost a 30-3 game. This year, the day they announced they were extending Trembley’s contract, they allowed an eight-run inning — on one hit. How’d that happen? How ’bout six walks, including four with the bases loaded, plus a hit batter and a grand slam — by a guy (Rajai Davis) who had entered the game as a pinch runner. So the Orioles became the first team since the 1959 A’s to give up eight runs in an inning on one lousy hit, and the first since the 2004 Dodgers to issue four bases-loaded walks in an inning. And loyal reader Eric Orns reports that Davis was the first guy to hit a slam in an inning he started as a pinch runner since Gene Stephens did it for the Red Sox on July 13, 1959 (after running for Ted Williams). “I’ve never seen an inning like that,” Trembley told the Baltimore Sun’s Dan Connolly. “Ever.”

Here’s to a great October and November playoff season!!

As I’m watching the last game at Yankee Stadium on ESPN (Disclosure: I’m a life long Red Sox fan), you can’t help but get a little tingle watching Mo Rivera leave the bullpen to Enter Sandman. Its just an awesome and, if I was a player, pretty intimidating spectacle.

I’ve never been too fond of the Yankees, but I’ve been to the old Stadium in the Bronx enough to appreciate the history and importance of the building. From a baseball history perspective, I’m sorry to see it go. From a competitive perspective, I can’t wait for them to tear the place down. Too many bad memories (but one spectacular one – Game 7, 2004 ALCS) I just don’t look forward to the extra cash that the Yanks will rake in with the new stadium and how they will use it for their team.

The NYTimes posted a pretty cool panoramic of Yankee Stadium from last night. If you have a wide computer screen, be sure to enlarge the photo to full screen.

So tonight is the Yankees night. Enjoy the off season, watching the Red Sox in the playoffs.

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Seen Sunday August 2, two days after Manny Ramirez was traded from the Red Sox to the Dodgers, on a construction site on Lansdowne Street across the street from Fenway Park. Photo was actually taken from within the grounds of Fenway Park.

This is a great local NY spot by Avis, tapping into the Yankees – Red Sox rivalry. It would be great if Avis did one from the Red Sox perspective to counter this one.

As the Red Sox’ Manny Ramirez approaches the 500 HR plateau, the Boston Globe has a really interesting graphic demonstration of where Manny has hit all of his homeruns over the course of his career. When I look at this, the thing that impresses me the most and illustrates just what an amazing hitter he is, is the stunningly even distribution of his homeruns to the different parts of the field. It appears that there is a slight skew of his homers to left field, (which is logical being that he’s a right handed hitter) but it is only slight. Its just Manny being Manny.