Never cared for Bryant Gumbel… now I have one more reason why.  He implicitly accused Jeff Bagwell, Nomar Garciaparra and Ivan Rodriguez in an open letter to Mark McGwire that he read on his show, “Real Sports”:

“In closing, guys, please feel free to share this letter with Bagwell, Nomar, Pudge and all those others who went from hitting homers to power outages overnight. Tell ‘em fans are ready to accept what happened. Tell ‘em we’re ready to move on. Tell ‘em that most of us get it…even if they, like you, still don’t."

I’m not prepared to say one way or another if these players did or didn’t.  But a person in Gumbel’s position should know better than to throw names around without proof. 

Sanctimonious dolt.

***

Gary Bedingfield maintains a baseball blog with a special bent.  His site, Baseball in Wartime focuses on the history of baseball during wartime and baseball players who served in the military.  It’s a unique idea for a blog and Gary seems to have a lot of info on the topic. 

***

Finally, those who follow Illinois Baseball Report know this already but we are less than one month away from regular season.  If you’re talking about college baseball, that is.  Usually, that’s not big news as normally teams from the north travel south to play colleges in the warmer climates. 

The catch this year is that University of Illinois will be starting their season at home in chilly Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.  They will be playing host to the Bradley Braves on February 20-21.  It’s the first time I know about that Illinois has had a home season opener in February. 

Now, if Mother Nature lets this series happen will be another thing.

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Bus Leagues Baseball has a nice piece on the Alaska Baseball League.  They interview Jesse Jack who covers the ABL on his site, 49th State Hardball.

Maybe it’s me but I’m getting the sense that the ABL is gaining in popularity among colleges to send their ballplayers in the summer.  Even our University of Illinois firstbaseman Matt Dittman, who was playing for the Lake Erie Monarchs last year, faced the Alaska Goldpanners as part of the 104th Midnight Sun Game in Fairbanks.  The Libertyville Review had a feature on his trip.

And no, it doesn’t get THAT cold in the summer there.  We’re talking about Fairbanks here:

From the interview:

A “hot” day up here is in the neighborhood of 70-80 degrees, which is comfortable for almost everyone. The colder days can be a little chilly; down into the 50-degree range. In fact, at least one team has installed heaters in their grandstand! But it’s very rarely too cold or too hot to take in a ball game…

We could use that kind of weather here at UI games.

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Here’s quick plug for a contest at one of my favorite minor league blogs, Bus Leagues Baseball.  They’re giving away a copy of Joe Posanski’s “The Machine”. 

The rules of the contest are stated simple enough in the post so saunter on over there and take a stab at winning a copy.

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Kudos to Baseball Reference again, this time for their “Share” feature that they just implemented in their stat pages. 

The Share feature does what it implies… it allows people to share any stats on almost any Baseball Reference stat page in a variety of formats. 

The formats available are html table, bbcode, a javascript widget, an html iframe, pre-formatted text, comma delimited file or just simply a hyperlink.  Those baseball bloggers, forum posters and stat hounds who frequently cite baseball statistics will find this very useful. 

Just browse to the stat page you want to quote and click the “Share” link. Since Clyde Vollmer was born today, I’ll use his batting stats as an example.  The “Sharing Toolbox” will then come up. 

This is where the best feature comes up.  Don’t want to display the CS stats?  Not interested in the age of the player?  Not to worry, BR has allowed for us to customize the display of the table by deleting columns or rows that you want.

Just click on the red X of any unwanted column or row and it won’t appear in the final result.  There’s also a red X within an arrow on each row and column that will delete trailing ones. 

In Vollmer’s case, I’m going to make his table a simple one with just homeruns and rbis.  I’ll click on the red arrow on the rbi column deleting everything to the right of it.  I then deleted every other column except Tm, Lg, HR, and RBI.  Not being interested in per team stats I deleted every row below his career stats, too.

Don’t forget, stat tables in Baseball Reference allow you to click on stat column headers to sort by stat categories.  In my example with Vollmer though, I’ll keep it in chronological order.

Once you get the stat table the way you want it, click on the format type you want.  A window will then pop up giving you the code or link you need. 

In the Vollmer case, I clicked html table and was given html code for a table. 

Here is the result for Clyde Vollmer’s homerun and rbi totals for his career:

There you go.  A reasonably good looking table that was easy to generate (probably easier than I made it sound).  It’s easy enough to go into the code and remove the link to B-R but why be a tool?  It’s the least I could do.

It should be emphasized that this feature works from almost any stat page in Baseball Reference.  Splits, Game logs, team stats, you name it. 

Oh managers pages too.  I just used it in a recent post about Bobby Cox.

In this day and age when MLB is trying their best to lay claim to baseball statistics as a commodity, it nice to see Baseball Reference making it easy to share them.  Keep up the good work, B-R!

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The most excellent baseball blog Hardball Cooperative just posted their Top List of Baseball Flicks.  I had a hand in contributing in the article so definitely check it out. 

In their poll of contributors, Bull Durham eked out Field of Dreams for best baseball movie.  For my part, I chose Baseball: A Film by Ken Burns as my fave and did a short review of it.

And what’s a best baseball movie list without a list of “bad” baseball movies?  HC didn’t drop the ball and presents us with their panels’ list of “worst” baseball movies.  Clichés, stereotypes and over-used plots are the norm here.  My choice?  Major League: Back to the Minors (aka Major League 3).  I have to admit the “bad” movie list is an entertaining read.  Check out the article (including my review of ML:BTTM).

Thanks to James Bailey of Hardball Cooperative for affording me the opportunity to participate in the project.  It was fun.

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Baseball Reference is now on Twitter. 

From what I can tell they’ll be including updates to the B-R blog and their always interesting Stat of the Day blog.

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In case you hadn’t noticed, The Baseball Zealot went through a small makeover last week.  It got a new banner and a new color scheme.  I hope you like it. 

As much as I liked the old orange and blue styled banner (above), it wasn’t as reflective of our current emphasis now that I’ve spun off almost all of our University of Illinois baseball coverage to Illinois Baseball Report which I brought up earlier this year (Illini baseball fans check it out!).  Much thanks, by the way, to former Illini shortstop (and current Tiger minor leaguer) Shawn Roof who graciously allowed me to put his photo on the banner.

In case you’re wondering, the photo in the new banner is the of the infield of Huntington Park in Columbus, Ohio.  Huntington Park is the brand new home (it was weeks old when I took the photo) of the Columbus Clippers and was named 2009 Ballpark of the Year by Ballparks.com.  I had the chance to enjoy the park when I was there for the 2009 Big Ten Tournament. 

Also, I’ve added Feedburner to better facilitate RSS feeds.  There are links on the upper right to help you subscribe to your favorite feed reader or just click on “Subscribe”. 

Comments are welcome on the new theme. 

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Sometimes info is easier digested in graphs, at least for me.  Check out the website Flip Flop Fly Ball and you’ll see what I mean. 

It’s full of neat baseball-related graphs, maps and images that are kinda neat.  For my buddy DonS, they even have a video montage of Ichiro Suzuki. 

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It won’t be long before the 2009 First-Year Player Draft will be upon us.  The Washington Nationals will be on the clock for their first pick in the first round on the evening of June 9th, broadcasted on The MLB Network.  Draft time is 5pm Central time.  The draft is scheduled to last till June 11th.

If anyone wants to brush up on the exact rules of the First-Year Player Draft, here are the official public rules from MLB.  The gist of it is.. the eligible players are:

• High school players, if they have graduated from high school and have not yet attended college or junior college;
• College players, from four-year colleges who have either completed their junior or senior years or are at least 21 years old; and
• Junior college players, regardless of how many years of school they have completed

While I’m on the topic of MLB.com, they are providing their usually good coverage of the draft.  Which is good since it is their baby.  Their Draft Central is a go-to site for anyone interested in the rookie draft.  Read their Draft FAQ which probably answers any question you might have regarding the Draft.  Draft Central has plenty of reports from different team’s perspectives Also, check out their Draft Tracker for a partial list of potential draftees and of course, the team order of the draft.

MLB.com has historical look at the draft which is worth a look but if it’s pure stats and data you want, you should go to Baseball Reference’s Draft section.  Interactive, clickable and very complete, BR has all the info you want on past drafts going all the way back to Rick Monday in 1965.  I’ll admit it, I got most of my info for my article about the history of the draft’s top picks from Baseball Reference. 

While MLB.com does provide pretty great and complete coverage, sometimes it’s nice to get some independent analysis (y’know, something that doesn’t read like a company communiqué).  The Baseball Analysts really fits the bill.  Like they have for years, Rich Lederer from TBA is providing some good anticipatory coverage of the upcoming Draft.  Just go there and you’ll find plenty of articles on the subject but his Q&A with Baseball America’s Jim Callis is a good place to start. 

And I’ll be chiming in with my opinions here on The Baseball Zealot too so stay tuned for my witty insight.  If anyone has a favorite comprehensive resource for Draft Day coverage, feel free to leave a comment. 

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For those of you who enjoy reading what Teddy Ballgame puts up on The Baseball Zealot, you might be interested to know that he’s got his own blog now. 

Whatteddsedd.com will contain the daily spewings of Teddy.  Near as I can tell, it will be an eclectic sort of blog which is a nice way of saying he talks about just about everything. 

Seriously, check it out. 

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