The Baseball Zealot

For a quick WTF, here’s a photo of John McGraw with a baby leopard in his arms.  Even more amazing, he’s actually smiling.

I collaborated a tiny bit with PitcherHit8th.   Yes, they’re a Cardinals blog and podcast but they do a good job over there and it’s worth a plug.  If you’re a Redbird fan, check them out.

Interesting bit of digging by Illinois Loyalty.  Seems that the firm that was hired by the University of Illinois to consult them on the search for a new Athletic Director (Parker Executive Search) was paid $90-105 grand by University of Tennessee to do the same job.  No word on how much the U of I is paying but I bet we’re not getting a discount.

Finally, some are pushing for the Pirates to be the lucky (?) ones to move to the American League.  What now, when they are having a winning season?  The Pirates haven’t had a winning record this late in the season since 1999. 

Posted in: General MLB by The Baseball Zealot
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Seamheads (which has one of the coolest banner images for a baseball website) is now holding a contest.  The prize?  An Xbox360 version of MLB2K11.  The contest?  Coming up with the best nickname for an active Major League player. 

Says Seamhead Mike Lynch:

“I want the nickname to be creative, clever, colorful and say something about the player.  And it doesn’t matter if he already has a nickname; if you can come up with something better, by all means submit it.  You can submit as many nicknames as you want for as many players as you want.  The contest will run from April 19 to May 20 and the winners will be announced on Memorial Day (May 30).”

Chris Berman need not apply.

Posted in: Baseball Blogs and Web Sites by The Baseball Zealot
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This postseason, the baseball blogosphere (guh, I wince when I use that word but it fits here) has had a fascination with presenting data in a visual fashion.  It seems to be a trend to almost move away from traditional numbers tables and go to more eye-pleasing visual presentations.  The Hardball Times has a whole series of them during the 2010 postseason (a good example is their Paintomatic series).

But THT isn’t the only ones to incorporate this new brand of “visual baseball data”.  You can find examples of this at The Biz of Baseball and even Baseball Reference’s blog.

Posted in: Baseball Blogs and Web Sites by The Baseball Zealot
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Over at Seamheads.com, they’re holding a fun contest.  Guess the old-timey baseball players whose photos make up their website’s banner. 

I can tell you now that one of them is a gimme and few more I know right off the bat.  Others have me befuddled, though.

Go ahead and give it a try.  The winner gets a free Seamheads t-shirt or mousepad. 

Posted in: Baseball Blogs and Web Sites by The Baseball Zealot
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Bus Leagues Baseball compiles a list of the best names in minor league baseball

I just noticed Seth Schwindenhammer was on the list.  Red Sox farmhand Schwindenhammer was drafted by the Illini.  I remember his name because when I wrote about him, it was just plain easier to copy and paste his name than to type it out. 

Posted in: Minor Leagues by The Baseball Zealot
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For those who want to keep up on baseball prospects, you might want to head on over to Baseball Digest Daily. 

They’ve done the tedious work of compiling the top prospect lists from many (yes, many) blogs and media outlets for each MLB division and put into one spreadsheet for to peruse.

Nice work, BDD.

If you want check it out, you can download the Excel spreadsheet from Baseball Digest Daily’s site. 

Check BDD later for updates, too.

Posted in: Prospects by The Baseball Zealot
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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.

Posted in: Media by The Baseball Zealot
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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.

Posted in: College Baseball by The Baseball Zealot
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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.

Posted in: Baseball Blogs and Web Sites by The Baseball Zealot
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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!

Posted in: Statistics by The Baseball Zealot
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