kottke.org posts about baseball
As part of a World Series promotion, Taco Bell will give away a free taco to everyone in the United States if someone hits a home run over the left field wall in tonight’s game 3. This is a big offer for a big company so of course their lawyers want to make darn sure that we know precisely what “Taco Bell” means when they say “home run”, “left field”, and “free taco” with an extensive list of terms and conditions. Surely the first legal document containing the phrase “a completely outside the bun idea”, the T&C is a fun read, but my favorite is the first condition that you agree to if you take advantage of the offer:
…to release, Major League Baseball Properties, Inc., Major League Baseball Enterprises, Inc., MLB Advanced Media, L.P., MLB Media Holdings, Inc., MLB Media Holdings, L.P., MLB Online Services, Inc., the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, and the Major League Baseball Clubs, and each of their respective shareholders, employees, parents, directors, officers, affiliates, representatives, agents, successors, and assigns (hereinafter, “MLB Entities”) and Sponsor and their affiliates, subsidiaries, retailers, sales representatives, distributors and franchisees, and each of their officers, directors, employees and agents (“Promotional Parties”), from any and all liability, loss or damage incurred with respect to participation in this contest and/or the awarding, receipt, possession, and/or use or misuse of any Free Taco
Man, I really hope someone hits a left field home run tonight. I’m dying to see some creative misuse of free tacos.
John Cobb and Ray Edwards own a Honus Wagner T-206 card — the most valuable sports card in the world — and they’ve tried to sell it a number of times, but no one bites because the card hasn’t been properly authenticated (even though paper and printing experts have said the card seems real). Related: the obsessive Vintage Baseball Card Forum. (thx, david)
Rethinking Moneyball. Jeff Passan looks at how the Oakland A’s 2002 draft class, immortalized in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, has done since then. “It is not so much scouts vs. stats anymore as it is finding the right balance between information gleaned by scouts and statistical analyses. That the Moneyball draft has produced three successful big-league players, a pair of busts and two on the fence only adds to its polarizing nature.” Richard Van Zandt did a more extensive analysis back in April.
Another article on the decline of the baseball card industry in the US. “Why does a kid want a baseball card of a player when, with a joystick, he can be that player in a video game?” (thx, peter)
Dave Jamieson used to collect baseball cards and recently uncovered his stash when he cleaned out the closet of his childhood home. In attempting to recoup some of the time and money spent in his youth on this cardboard, Jamieson found that baseball cards aren’t as popular or as lucrative as they used to be:
Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They’ve taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn’t get out of the game took a beating. “They all put product in their basement and thought it was gonna turn into gold,” Alan Rosen, the dealer with the self-bestowed moniker “Mr. Mint,” told me. Rosen says one dealer he knows recently struggled to unload a cache of 7,000 Mike Mussina rookie cards. He asked for 25 cents apiece.
Close readers of kottke.org know that I collected sports cards too. I got involved in this prepubescent hobby later than most; I was 14 or 15 when a friend and his older brother — who was around 24 and collecting for investment — introduced me to it. And I loved it:
I still have them all somewhere, in boxes, collecting dust faster than value. The Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie, the 130 different Nolan Ryan cards, the complete 1989 Hoops set (with the David Robinson rookie), and several others I really can’t remember right now.
I used to spend untold hours sifting through them, looking up the values in Beckett’s Price Guide, visiting card shops, flipping through commons to complete sets, looking for patterns in Topps’ rack packs (I scored many a Jim Abbott rookie with this technique), chewing that ancient bubble gum (I bought a pack of 1983 cards once and chewed the gum…it was horrible), and keeping track of the total value of my collection with a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet on my dad’s 286. It was a lot of fun at the time (as the Web is fun for me now); I guess that’s about all one can ask for from a hobby.
Recently I stumbled across The Baseball Card Blog and was hit by a giant wave of nostalgia for my old obsession. One thing led to another — you know how that goes — and before I knew it, a package was speeding its way to me from a card shop in Pennsylvania containing several 1989 Fleer & Donruss wax packs, a 1989 Topps rack pack, and a couple of 1987 Topps wax packs.1
I’ve been opening a pack every few days since they arrived. Smell is the sense most powerfully associated with memory, so getting a whiff of that cardboard is really sending me back. Like a wine connoisseur, I can even smell the difference between each brand of card; the smell of Topps cards holds the strongest memories for me…the 1989 Topps set was my favorite. I opened the ‘87 Topps packs with a fellow ex-collector, but when we tried to chew the gum, it tasted like the cards and turned to a muddy dust in our mouths. But that was mostly what happened even when the gum was new, so we were unsurprised.
Because of the aforementioned slump in the baseball card collecting economy, the card packs I ordered were the same price I paid for them as a kid (factoring for inflation), even though they’re almost 20 years old and way more scarce. Back then, I used most of my $5/week allowance on cards, and it took weeks and months of patience to buy enough packs to complete a set, procure that Griffey rookie card, or amass enough Mark McGwires to trade to a friend for a desired Nolan Ryan.
As an adult, I have the cashflow to buy any card I want whenever I want (within reason). Or several boxes of cards, so as to compile complete sets instantly. Or I can just purchase the complete sets and skip the intermediate step. I could buy an entire box of 1989 Upper Deck packs — at $1.25 per pack and nearly impossible to find in rural Wisconsin, an unimaginable extravagance for me as a kid — right now on eBay. When I think about the financial advantages I now have over my 16-yo self in collecting the same exact cards, I feel like the NY Yankees (and their monster payroll) competing in a Single A league. It’s unfair and even thinking about collecting cards in that manner takes a lot of the fun out of it for me. If I do start collecting cards again, I’m going to approach it like I did back then: by hand, a little at a time, and treating even the essentially worthless commons with care. Unless Nolan Ryan is involved…in that case, the sky’s the limit, although I might have to sell my bicycle to get it. In the meantime, I’m waiting for the next household footwear purchase so I can put my newly purchased cards in the shoe box for safe keeping.
[1] A quick note on terminology. A “wax pack” is a basic pack of around 15 cards (plus gum, when cards still had gum packaged with them), so-called because the packages used to be sealed with wax. (Now they’re all probably packaged in plastic and whatnot…I don’t know, I haven’t kept up.) The bottom card in such a pack is called a “wax back” because the card got a thin layer of wax on it from the sealing process. A “rack pack” is a hanging triple pack made of see-thru plastic. A “common” is an ordinary card not worth very much, as opposed to cards or rookies, hot prospects, all-stars, and the like. A “box” contains several wax packs, typically 20-40 packs/box. A “complete set” is a collection of every card sold by a company in a particular year. The ‘89 Topps set had 792 cards. Sets were sold in factory-sealed boxes or were compiled by hand from cards acquired in packs. ↩
My new favorite weblog: The Baseball Card Blog. I’m having acid flashbacks to my teenaged years, but without the acid. The 1989 Upper Deck set was one of the first I built from scratch, a tall order for someone whose weekly allowance was $5. I remember lusting after the Jerome Walton card in the High Numbers Series…he didn’t do so well after that rookie year of his.
You know that “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” song? They should add another verse, something like:
Take your glove to the ballgame
and if you don’t, you’re an idiot
We went to the Yankees/Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium with David and Adriana last night and in the bottom of the third inning, Yankees second baseman Miguel Cairo hit a line drive just wide of the foul pole in left field. As I watched the ball coming towards us, I thought a million things — it’s foul, it’s gonna drop into the seats way in front of us, never gonna get here, what’s the count now, is it time for cheese fries yet…almost everything except for “holy shit, it’s coming right at me” — and then stuck my bare hand straight up in the air, leaned slightly to my left, and dropped the ball.
Dropped isn’t the right word, really. Deflected the ball off my bare hand is more accurate. It bounced into the seats behind me and then rolled down under Adriana’s seat. After a brief scramble, some meatheads who were ambling by on their way to beer, pretzels, or the can stuck their paws in and made off with the ball. A Yankees fan who observed the whole thing got up in Meg’s face, framed by her faded Red Sox hat, and yelled, “ha ha, Boston fans can’t catch!” His truth stung almost as much as my rapidly swelling hand. David scored the play as an error, Box 324, Seat 3.
But the most entertaining play of the night by a fan who was not me award goes to the fellow in the yellow shirt who, emboldened by too much Miller Lite, dashed out onto the field, arms raised triumphantly, soaking in the cheers of the adoring crowd. Out came security from all corners of the field and the crowd redirected its enthusiasm from the hunted to the hunters, cheering for blood. “Hit em!” the guy behind me was screaming, “HIT EM!!”
Security eventually converged on the would-be outfielder and he adopted the surrendering posture of a man who knows he’s had his fun, palms in the air, head down, not running anymore, almost sinking to his knees. And — BAMMM! — this security guard, a former linebacker by the looks of him, comes flying in from the blind side and wallops the guy, knocking him to the ground in a full-on lay-out tackle. The crowd roared at the guard’s tackle and cheered lustily as the gladiator was removed from the coliseum.
Barry Bonds finally ties Babe Ruth with 714 home runs. And with relatively little fanfare, largely because the homers will be eventually invalidated by his drug use and because Bonds is a dink.
Update: The kid who caught the home run ball doesn’t care for Bonds much: “When asked if he would consider giving [the ball] to Bonds, Snyder declined with a mild expletive.” Bonds was also booed at stadiums around the league when the homer was announced.
MC Hammer has posted a love letter to Barry Bonds on his weblog. “As you close in on the record, and the day of reckoning is at hand, there will be many attemps by the bloodhounds to shake you and force you to quit.” David Jacobs thinks the fans and the media are being hypocritical about Bonds’ situation.
Not a big surprise, but it looks like Barry Bonds took all sorts of performance-enhancing drugs in the last few years of his career, including the season he hit 73 home runs.
Kirby Puckett dies at age 45. Aw, shoot. As a local, I cheered the Twins on to their two World Series victories…I can still hear Bob Casey’s “KIR-beeeeeeeeee PUCK-it” echoing around the Metrodome.
The Baseball Visualization Tool was designed to help managers answer the question: should the pitcher be pulled from the game? Handy charts and pie graphs give managers an at-a-glance view of how much trouble the current pitcher is in. I wonder what TBVT would have told Grady Little about Pedro at the end of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS?
In an era when players are so much bigger, stronger, faster, and richer than the rest of us, it’s getting harder for fans to really connect with pro sports teams.
Wow, Johnny Damon goes from the Red Sox to the Yankees. It’s looking like that Boston championship was a one-shot deal.
In the WSJ, Jason Fry writes about his experiences in starting a weblog about the Mets. If you’re a new blogger, this is a good look at how your first few months might go. “The downside of being a blog writer? Being a blog administrator.”
Watching the World Series last week, Meg wondered, “why White/Red Sox and not Socks?” I knew that if we waited long enough, the Internet would come up with the answer. Bonus: the NY Yankees were once known as the Porchclimbers. Those rascals!
By watching tapes of old baseball games, a New York illustrator has discovered the secret of great pitchers. “Witte’s scientific theory, the specifics of which he refuses to divulge, has something to do with how successful pitchers keep their gloves elevated at the start of their windups, let their back shoulders drop, and lift their front legs high.”
New York City, redemption, and the 2005 New York Yankees. “Jason [Giambi] was redeemed, and his legend is assured now as the star who wanted more, who lost everything to greed and arrogance, and who recovered his glory, which is now vastly more appealing for the fact that it’s tarnished. It’s a real New York kind of story.”
I had more than a few of the cards in this worthless baseball card collection. Ah, commons.
Dressed to the Nines is an interactive look at the design of baseball uniforms. “Whether we are looking at someone in a uniform or we are trying it on ourselves, it is the feeling of the fabric, the design on the cap and jersey, the colors, cut, and history of the outfit, that all lend meaning to our relationship with the game.”
A look at Jefferson Burdick’s baseball card collection which he donated the Met Museum in NYC. One downside to the collection: most of the cards are pasted into albums and so are in poor condition.
One of the pre-conference events was a talk at Fenway Park followed by a tour of the ballpark. Janet Marie Smith, VP of planning and development for the Sox, kicked things off with how the team (especially the new management) works really hard to preserve the essential character of Fenway while at the same time trying to upgrade the park (and keep it from getting torn down). She talked about the advertisements added to the Green Monster, which was actually not a purely commercial move but a throwback to a time when the Monster was actually covered with ads.
Lots of talk and awareness of experience design…the Red Sox folks in particular kept referring to the “experience” of the park. One of the speakers (can’t recall who, might have been Jim Dow) talked about how other ballparks are becoming places where only people who can afford $100 tickets can go to the games and what that does to the team’s fan base. With Fenway, they’re trying to maintain a variety of ticket prices to keep the diversity level high…greater diversity makes for a better crowd and a better fan base and is quite appropriate for Boston (and New England in general), which has always been an area with vibrant blue collar and blue blood classes.
Janet also referred to the “accidental” design of the park. Like many other urban ballparks built in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, the placement of the streets constrained the design of Fenway and made it rather an odd shape….these days larger plots are selected where those types of restraints are removed. And over time, the game has changed, the needs of the fans have changed, and the fire codes have changed and the park has changed with the times. In the dead ball era, the walls of the stadium weren’t for hitting home runs over; their sole function was to keep people on the street for catching the game for free, so the Fenway outfield ran over 500 feet in right field — practically all the way to the street — where there’s now 30 rows of seats. Jim Holt observed that American butts have gotten bigger so bigger seats are called for. Fire codes helped that change along as well…wooden seats, bleachers, and overcrowding are no longer a large part of the Fenway experience (save for the wooden seats under the canopy).
The design talk continued on the tour of the park. Our guide detailed how ballparks are built around specific ballplayers. Yankee Stadium was the house that Ruth built but it was also seemingly (but not literally) built for him with a short trip for his home run balls to the right field wall. Boston added a bullpen to make the right field shorter for Ted Williams. Barry Bonds does very well at PacBell/SBC/WhateverItsCalledTheseDays Park. And more than that, the design of Fenway also dictated for a long time the type of team that they could field, which had some bearing on how they did generally. Players who played well in Fenway (i.e. could hit fly balls off of the Monster in left) often didn’t do so well in other parks and the team’s away record suffered accordingly.
Odd story of one astronomer possibly “stealing” another astronomer’s discovery of a large trans-Neptunian object. The original discoverer alleges that the usurper looked at a couple of Web sites that detailed the discovery and where the discover’s telescopes were pointed…the astronomy equivalent of stealing signs.
Jeff Ma, who was a key member of the infamous MIT blackjack team, notes the turn around of the Oakland A’s and the reversal of criticism directed toward GM Billy Beane. Even Steven Levitt, who thinks not too highly of Moneyball, has conceded that maybe Beane and the A’s are onto something.
Fantasy Fashion League is fashion’s answer to fantasy football and rotisserie baseball. Pick your favorite designers and earn points when their fashions show up in magazines. (via E&N) Related: NY Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent helped invent rotisserie baseball?
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