Baseball

And they're off . . .
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Typhoon
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Re: Baseball

Post by Typhoon »

Simple Minded wrote:Chicago Cubs do it. If anyone wants to get laid today, Chicago is the place to be!

I imagine Typhoon is already en route.
Not till after American Thanksgiving . . .

Contrary to some Western media reports, it is possible to "get laid" in Japan.
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:wink:
May the gods preserve and defend me from self-righteous altruists; I can defend myself from my enemies and my friends.
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Re: Baseball

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“Christ has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks among His people to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses His creation.”

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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

I_aHEuTj2XI

Sir Didi Gregorius, starting shortstop for the New York Yankees (& actual knight of the Netherlands) down in New Zealand.
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

neat - i heard new zealand had a decent baseball scene.
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

noddy wrote:neat - i heard new zealand had a decent baseball scene.
That's the word on the street but still not decent enough to qualify for the World Baseball Classic. They were eliminated from the qualifying round last year by the Australian team, which will be going to its fourth WBC tournament.

Australia along with China and Canada are the only teams to have appeared in all WBC tournaments thus far who have yet to advance out of the initial pool round.

Of the four teams from last year's qualifying series, two are returning teams: Australia and Mexico; and two are going to their first tournament: Israel and Columbia.

The sixteen teams this year will be (by Pool)

Pool A (held in Seoul)

South Korea
Chinese Taipei
Israel
Netherlands

Pool B (held in Tokyo)

Japan
Cuba
Australia
China

Pool C (held in Miami)

United States
Canada
Columbia
Dominican Republic

Pool D (held in Guadalajara)

Mexico
Venezuela
Puerto Rico
Italy
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NapLajoieonSteroids
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

Unless something dramatically changes, it looks like I'll be heading down to Miami to see Team USA play in the initial pool C round for that weekend.

Team USA is stuck in its usual position. First, players aren't warmed up because the tournament takes place at beginning of Spring Training for MLB. Second, no matter how much talent the team always boasts about carrying, the very top echelon of US players (especially those in their prime) are not on the roster. Team Japan faces these problems too, so its not a great excuse; but when some of your top positional talent (like Mike Trout and Bryce Harper) and pitching talent (like Clayton Kershaw and the New York Mets starting rotation) decline to play, it makes it harder to expect them to do anything more than the usual- a disappointing finish in the second round or semi-finals. Team USA has not placed higher than 4th place in any of the WBC so far.

Still, there should be enough talent on the roster in terms of position players. The pitching could get ugly; the starting rotation is made up of guys who all had "down" years professionally last year and are looking to bounce back. Since pitching can go at any moment, who is to say any of them bounce back to top tier pitchers, let alone in time for this tournament?

And the competition, outside Columbia, isn't a walk in the park. The Dominican Republic is the reigning champ, has their top talent playing (as they always have) and have an intense esprit de corps about playing in this tournament. It would be silly not to pencil the DR into the number 1 seed from the pool. So, the USA is probably looking at that 2nd spot if they want to advance, and in their way is Team Canada.

Canada, despite their mediocre showings, isn't a pushover in baseball. Their problem has always been (and will always be?) having enough talent to be scary but just not enough quality pitching to push ahead. This year isn't that different on paper- they are relying on a lot of players on the tail end of their careers- but it wouldn't take a lot of luck to have a ball hop this way or that way, to have the breaks go their way in a game, etc etc....to come in second in the pool. I think even these high paid players on Team USA would be greatly embarrassed if they couldn't make it out of the first round. And I'd hate to witness that.
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

makes sense - in cricket its the pitching (bowling) that seperates the top tier from the rest and makes the gap in skills too high to climb.

sub top tier you have guys who can make the ball move in the air/off the ground, guys with excellent control and guys with 90-100mph speeds but its rare to have a guy with 2, let alone 3 of those skills.

the top tier teams everyone has 2 of those skills and atleast one freak with all three :)
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

noddy wrote:makes sense - in cricket its the pitching (bowling) that seperates the top tier from the rest and makes the gap in skills too high to climb.

sub top tier you have guys who can make the ball move in the air/off the ground, guys with excellent control and guys with 90-100mph speeds but its rare to have a guy with 2, let alone 3 of those skills.

the top tier teams everyone has 2 of those skills and atleast one freak with all three :)
This is one of the areas where baseball and cricket diverge.

My understanding of cricket is that there are more variables at play for the bowler than a baseball pitcher. As such, you can make it to higher professional levels as a master of one aspect while being suboptimal in other areas. It is much more common for a major league level pitcher to hit all the marks you mention, at least at a base level. The worst guy on your pitching staff will likely throw above 90 mph, with sufficient movement on the ball and enough control to throw at least 2 of his 3 main pitches for strikes when he needs to. So it starts to become about degree instead of kind [especially if you separate the starting pitchers and those capable of starting stashed in bullpens from pure relief pitchers.]
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

yes, bowling on the run, on the bounce with a straight arm is unnatural and difficult so only physical freaks who have been doing it their entire lives can get it close to bent arm throwing in terms of speed and control.

those that do hit 95-100mph tend to break down all the time aswell - the body cant handle all the high engergy contortions.

the subtle differences between the 2 sports with similar origins is very interesting to me as i believe the modern cricket delivery evolved from the stiff underarm jab of softball type pitching.

i played 1 or 2 games of softball as a child so only have the most crude memory of the rules and subtlties of the game
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

AkSZGXmuvIo
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

cool - straight, underarm - you motivated me to have another dig :)

http://static.espncricinfo.com/db/NATIO ... EBALL.html
There is a hidden irony in the way things happened, in both baseball and cricket.
Early baseball (i.e. US rounders) was supposed to give batters more opportunities than in cricket, by reducing the role of the pitcher/bowler to that of "feeder". Yet todays' baseball is a pitcher's game....while modern cricket is the sport that really gives batters the major role !
Baseball and cricket, then, came from very similar backgrounds.
They looked a lot like each other, in baseball's early days.
But, after 1850, the two games drifted apart... and each assumed its own character and identity
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

I started a post on the divergence of the Anglo bat-ball sports and their history of the US last night but it seems I didn't save the draft.

Anyway:

There is definitely an ur-sport that all of these games are descended from with cricket branching off much earlier. Rounders, roundball, base, poisonball, townball, a variety of games with cat in the title are all cousins with a lot of pollination going on between them. The old (British) idea was that rounders predated them all and influenced the American games but there is evidence that it there was a sort of synthesis of these games going from Britain to colonies back to the Britain.

That the Puritans came over with regional variations of some inchoate form of these games let it mutate over a wide area in the north. Our earliest records are scant but "baseball" starts forming as its own thing pretty early on in colonial history in Purtain areas as well as being a catch-all term for all sorts of ball games (like those mentioned above).

By the 19th century, baseball (the New York game) and townball (the Massachusetts and Philadelphia rules being most popular) start becoming defined as two different things and start, however slowly, to organize. The curious fact is that 19th century sources say that baseball was prejudiced against and held with such great enmity that players of athletic clubs would quit if their club tried playing baseball instead of townball. There was even a fan revolt in Philadelphia over the switch from townball to baseball.

At no point do any of these sources say what it is about baseball which people found so revolting. I supposed it could just be local chauvinism. If I had to guess, I imagine it to be a class/respectability issue. The history of baseball is intimately tied to the labor movement in the United States. And at its start, it was popular with the popular urban working class. The express purpose of knickerbocker rules were codify a way to make the game "safe" for 18-40 year old grown men to play it. As a lot of these games were meant as leisurely activities for everyone (and especially children to college age crowd) perhaps it was viewed as uncouth. But this is sort of where cricket comes in...

Cricket was a popular game in the United State pre-civil war. In the New York area, it provided an impetus to organize New York style baseball. The Knickerbocker/New York rules standardized baseball to sort of mirror the standardization of cricket in the area. In New York, you find a lot of overlap between the two sports and its players with none of the animosity found in other areas of the north. Cricket players in 1840 and 50s New York knew how to, and often did, play baseball as well.

Now, the conventional story is that the civil war popularized baseball. This is true up to a point.

What became really popular nation wide was Massachusetts style townball. Civil War veterans liked the game very much and it influenced a lot of local varieties of ball games post-war. Knickerbocker-rules baseball fits into the story this way: during the war, regiments from different areas often used it as a sort of compromise. The rules were standard, the games were shorter and putatively safer as you weren't tossing the ball at the runner. I imagine it provided less opportunities for contentiousness, overall. It sort of became a universal language, where soldiers would play a variety of townball against people in their regiment but play baseball with people outside their regiment. This trend continued post-war, to the point that it was a given that if two teams from say Vermont and Connecticut meet, they'd play baseball.

It's one of the reason why baseball naturally transitioned into being professionally organized. Once you had professional teams moving across the country, the standardized rules and customary habit of defaulting to baseball allowed easy accommodations. And what you found by the 1870s is that townball, while remaining popular, would be the quirky local game you played as a kid or young adult in rural and frontier areas and baseball would be for men, amateurs and professionals alike. It was a death knell for any sort of organized townball- in any of its styles- but the nationalization and familiarity of the Massachusetts style of the game didn't just disappear. As the first generation of civil war era kids were coming to age in 1880, baseball rules began to change under the influence of these kids who grew up with townball. The two biggest changes being:

1) Having to catch the ball in the air for it to be ruled an 'out'.

2) Allowing overhand pitching in the modern way.

From 1880 to 1910, professional baseball started incorporating a variety of new regulations that came from this substratum of the other game just as the rural and frontier areas of the country started producing professional baseball players. I think townball mostly died out by the 1930s but today, in the upper midwest, minor league baseball leagues are still referred to as townball leagues.

Also as a historical curiosity, the current major league baseball team in Oakland, the Oakland Athletics could technically be counted as originating as a townball (Philadelphia rule) club.

The original name was something like the Philadelphia Men's Athletic Townball Club. Sometime in the 1860s, they switched over to baseball and got invited into an associated league. Called "The Philadelphia Athletic" as a nickname soon started getting pluralized as the "Philadelphia Athletics". This got shortened to the Philadelphia A's. Now, this version of the A's lost membership in the association and was contracted in the 1870s. But the team was resurrected in name and spirit when the American League started business in 1901.

The American League still survives under the MLB umbrella now and the A's, who first moved to Kansas City in the 50s and Oakland in the 70s, are currently trying to move themselves out of Oakland and into San Jose, California.

So its one of the artifacts from baseball history of this absorption of the one game by the other.
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

thanks - reminds me of the never ending splits in rugby, which are still going to this day. NFL and AFL are also quite diverged.

in australia we just made cricket faster and more aggressive, instead of it being a leisurely gentleman's game it was a rougher working mans game.

verbal abuse and targetting the head and body of the batsman with fastballs changed the flavour of it quite a bit from its polite variant even if the basic ruleset and equipment was the same.

---

it occurs to me that baseball avoids the need for specialized grounds like cricket - playing on the bounce demands a maintained flat section.

the history you provided above lends to that aspect being important.
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

noddy wrote:thanks - reminds me of the never ending splits in rugby, which are still going to this day. NFL and AFL are also quite diverged.

in australia we just made cricket faster and more aggressive, instead of it being a leisurely gentleman's game it was a rougher working mans game.

verbal abuse and targetting the head and body of the batsman with fastballs changed the flavour of it quite a bit from its polite variant even if the basic ruleset and equipment was the same.

---

it occurs to me that baseball avoids the need for specialized grounds like cricket - playing on the bounce demands a maintained flat section.

the history you provided above lends to that aspect being important.
That's a good point. Reading 19th century accounts, there are games of cricket and townball which couldn't be finished because teams ran out of funding for renting particular spaces in parks. Whereas almost any surface was sufficient for a baseball game. Well into the modern era, teams still played on any sort of grounds. It may also be a reason why baseball was field-agnostic and incidental in a way cricket cannot be.

Fenway Park in Boston has been the home of the Boston Red Sox since 1912. Baseball has been played there much earlier than that; it was a little bit of dumpy land in the middle of Boston which was cheap to rent. It wasn't even on even ground- it now has a famous 40 foot wall in left field called the Green Monster that wasn't built until the late 30s or early 40s. Originally, the whole of left field was on a hill that peaked at 40 feet that'd they play on. Up until a few years ago when they finally spent money to modernize it while keeping the shell/appearance of the original, the infield dirt was pretty much just that. It was the same rocky surface full of stones and pebbles that were always there. Balls would take random hops and sliding on it was essentially sliding over rocks....and that is just not acceptable for star players being payed 20 million dollars a year.

The Yankees, when they moved to New York from Baltimore, were originally nicknamed the Highlanders at Hilltop Park. They were called that because home plate was the highest part of the playing field, the rest of it was on a downward slope. Right field even had an undrained swamp in the middle of it. The original Yankee Stadium, before its renovations, had its monuments to former players in fair territory.
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

The biggest park factors in modern baseball are due to the elevation and thin air like in Denver, Colorado (and to a lesser extent in Phoenix, Arizona.)

The Colorado Rockies were an expansion team in 1993 and while they do alright in attendance, have made a World Series, and have a handful of playoff appearances; their location has probably cost them a lot of games and it is very hard to field a competitive team full of players who can grind out a season in Denver, especially one in their midrange budget constraints.

When they have won, it has been by running the table at home and getting very lucky on the road- not really a recipe for perennial success.

Player after player talks about how taxing a season is playing in Denver; breaking pitches don't work; the aches and pains are greater; just as the body starts adjusting to being in Denver, they fly out to another city near sea level and the whole process starts again; they don't feel the ball as well; some players never adjust to the thinner atmosphere.

Home/Road splits for Rockies players can be unbelievable. And players are punished by writers in terms of publicity and awards as well as executives in terms of money. Signing a long-term contract with the Rockies likely costs players any shot at the hall of fame and millions of dollars down the road. So the best players on the free agent market avoid the Rockies like the plague.
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

my home team has simmilar issues of large travel times and unique conditions so i can sympathise with them.

with cricket its like tennis - pitches vary from soft clay to hard clay and all the way to grassy, each of these reward completely different styles of play.
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

noddy wrote:my home team has simmilar issues of large travel times and unique conditions so i can sympathise with them.

with cricket its like tennis - pitches vary from soft clay to hard clay and all the way to grassy, each of these reward completely different styles of play.
heh- you actually got me to go to youtube to watch cricket hightlights; got me to thinking it's difficult to follow the ball through a camera- that's true in baseball and golf too- but it must be difficult to telecast the action.
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

to a large extent you can only really appreciate the best pitches in baseball or cricket in slow mo replays with ball tracking drawing pretty pictures.

also, youtube seems to be a terrible place for videos, im not sure if its copyright issues or just a billion indians with old vcr's and cheap cameras but its hard to find non potato clips.

im more of a connoisseur of bowling than batting, nothing is better than watching a highly skilled bowler.
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

First game of the tournament is on now-

Israel vs Korea

It's the top of the 2nd and Korea's pitcher has lost a sense of the plate. Israel just had the baseball loaded, and Korea walked in the first run of the game (and tournament). 1 out, bases remain loaded. :D
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

noddy wrote:to a large extent you can only really appreciate the best pitches in baseball or cricket in slow mo replays with ball tracking drawing pretty pictures.

also, youtube seems to be a terrible place for videos, im not sure if its copyright issues or just a billion indians with old vcr's and cheap cameras but its hard to find non potato clips.

im more of a connoisseur of bowling than batting, nothing is better than watching a highly skilled bowler.
Well, I am with you on that.

Offense can make fun spectacles but ultimately, the best, more memorable games and moments revolve around the pitcher (and I suppose bowler too.)
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Re: Baseball

Post by NapLajoieonSteroids »

...and quite a game!

Israel beats the hosting team in extra innings 2 to 1.

In what looked like an easy pool for Korea and the Netherlands suddenly seems a bit more competitive. Team Israel can capture one of the spots for the next round with one more win.

In fact, they are playing in the second game of the tourney- around 10:00 PM EST start here, sometime around noon in Seoul.

And their competitor will be Taiwan who, will all due respect, is the weakest team in pool.

Now, Korea, will likely being fighting the Netherlands, which may be a more talented team, for that second spot. At the very least, their game against the Netherlands will be a must win.
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

this just showed up on my feed, hideous quality but shows how a run up with straight arm and standing still with a bent arm can be awfully similar on a fastball.

Image

this particular cricket player hit 100mph quite often but had rubbery elbows that always flirted with the edges of the straight arm rule.


NapLajoieonSteroids wrote: Offense can make fun spectacles but ultimately, the best, more memorable games and moments revolve around the pitcher (and I suppose bowler too.)
very much so as it raises the skill bar the highest and only the very best of batters can still compete.

lower scores make each run more valuable and exciting.
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Re: Baseball

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noddy wrote:this just showed up on my feed, hideous quality but shows how a run up with straight arm and standing still with a bent arm can be awfully similar on a fastball.

Image

this particular cricket player hit 100mph quite often but had rubbery elbows that always flirted with the edges of the straight arm rule.
That particular pitcher was affectionately nicknamed "The Freak" because his motion was not only unusual but he could hit 97-98 MPH with his fastball in his prime, and at his size. I think they officially listed his as 5'11" and a 170 lbs. but he was more like 5'8"-5'9" and probably weighed between 150 and 170.

He was a wonderful pitcher and quite a phenomenon for a few years. His father was a mechanical engineer or architect or something, and actually designed his son's pitching motion to get max efficiency (torque/extention etc.) out of his frame. In fact, one of the stipulations of drafting him was that the team had to agree to allow his father to have a say in his mechanics.

There have been a few instances of "stage-dad" interference in baseball- usually involving players who are unusual in a very specific ways; undersized, excelling at one very particular skill, doing something a bit revolutionary for hitting/fielding/pitching. One team always acquiesces because of this payoff. I bring this up because Lincecum perè was convinced that he engineered a way for his son to not only compete at a high level, but to avoid major injuries to his arm&shoulder.

A lot of teams and scouts passed because they figured at his size and unusual motion, he'd burn out very quickly.

And for the first 5 years (22-27) it looked like he'd beat the assessments. He won 2 Cy Young Awards for being best pitcher in the National League during that period. When he pitched, you went to go see him; and he could innings upon innings without a problem.

Then 28 (when pitchers really start slowingly down) hit and hit him hard. He lost a good 5 mph off his fastball, his curveball was no longer as devasting, with a slower fastball, his change-up wasn't fooling hitters and considering how long he keeps the ball in view before he releases it, it was giving hitters long looks from his hand to the plate....he went from one of the top pitchers in baseball to mediocre very quickly. And he's never recovered or been able to adapt. Around 30, his shoulder went and he's been having usual shoulder injuries/problems since.

He's now a bad pitcher with a number of shoulder problems, trading on his name recognition to stay on the fringes of the major leagues. Last year, he statistically was worse than a replacement level player.

He has revolutionized the game though- after he was a hit, teams reassessed how they evaluated pitchers and started pouring money into mapping and optimizing pitching motions using available technology. Teams have become a lot more willing to give "strange" pitchers a chance to try to wring out a couple of years of effectiveness out of them instead of only going for guys with the potential for 15-20 year careers. And younger players who obviously were influenced by him when they were teens during his prime, are starting to show up in the league.
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Re: Baseball

Post by noddy »

Cricket is full of non classic pitchers - their was a period they trained it out of them but they also discovered that this usually removed their capability of doing something interesting with the ball and turned them into stock bowlers.

Knuckleballs are enjoyable to watch, 3 directions of movement also makes for the most memorable deliveries in cricket - with us thats 2 in the air and then one off the ground.

Image
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Re: Baseball

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On Deck:

Japan (1-0) vs Australia (0-0) in Tokyo. Japan will be the visiting team this game.

Japan is looking like its usual formidable self but Australia is supposed to have a decent pitching staff this time around, and may have enough to give them a puncher's chance.

The Netherlands and Taiwan are in the 2nd inning 0-0 score. No broadcast of that game here in the States (AFAIK). A win by the Netherlands means they are advancing to the next round with Israel. If that's the case, tomorrow's Korea vs Taiwan will be to decide who qualifies for an automatic invitation to the next WBC.

Round up from yesterday:

Korea lost to the Netherlands and are effectively eliminated. The Netherlands looks real good and athletic so far.

Japan beat Cuba, though Cuba gave them a bit of a scare by fighting back into the game after Japan jumped out to an early lead.

Israel is now 2-0 and likely advancing, they wiped the floor with Taiwan.

Cuba bounced back and beat China by shutting them out 6-0.
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