Archive for the 'Bloops' Category

Click here to read the New York Times coverage of his life.

Baseball history is full of players like Goossen. Not much in the statistics to catch your eye - but, he's part of some great baseball lore.

Note, also this week, Greg Golson got beaned in the head with a BP pitch from A.J. Burnett.  Clearly, it's not a good week for guys named Greg whose last name starts with "G," ends in "son" or "sen" and has an "o" or two in between.

This year, SABR is offering its members a free PDF version of The Emerald Guide to Baseball:

"You can download your free copy through the Members Only portion of the website. The latest version includes updated Spring Training rosters and will soon be available for purchase in hard copy from Lulu.com. The final version of the 2011 Emerald Guide to Baseball with updated Opening Day Rosters will be released around April 1st."

To become a SABR member, click here.

Congratulations are in order for John Thorn today, after he was named the Official Historian of Major League Baseball by Commissioner Selig:

John Thorn Named Official Baseball Historian | MLB.com: Official Info

John has always been a wonderful friend and supporter of Baseball-Reference.com, and we can't imagine anyone more qualified for this position.

After IBM's "Watson" defeated the two best human players in "Jeopardy!" history last week, The New Yorker's Robert Mankoff pondered the history of "thinking machines" -- including a cartoon from 1952 that worried about computers invading the dugout and managing baseball games (an oft-repeated fear half a century later with the dawn of the sabermetric era).

Check out a fantastic interview with former big-leaguer Rick Lancellotti over at The Greatest 21 Days.

I have linked to this site before but I'll say it again--it's just about the best baseball writing I have ever read. Each post is thoroughly-researched and very nicely written. (So, you know, just about the opposite of my stuff on this blog...)

Click here to see Jordan Bastian's story on this at MLB.com.

Somewhere, Jackie Mitchell must be smiling.

Personally, I've always felt, if MLB would ever allow a woman to play in the big leagues, the first one to break in would be a pitcher - and probably a left-handed one with a trick pitch.  But, that's just my opinion.  What about you?  Think we'll ever see a woman in the major leagues?

Pretty cool stuff from Seamheads.com:

Seamheads.com Ballparks Database

It has park batting splits, dimensions, wall heights, capacities, and a lot of other data on each ballpark.

In an annual tradition for the Replacement-Level Yankees Weblog, they plugged their CAIRO projections into depth charts from the terrific MLBDepthCharts.com, and came up with some early expectations for the upcoming season:

Replacement Level Yankees Weblog - CAIRO v0.6 and Still Too Early 2011 MLB Projected Standings

Years ago, I read a fun book called Cult Baseball Players.  If you've ever read it, this next bit of news may interest you.  Heck, it may interest you even if you never read that book.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is a few months after the fact, but, I just found a photo essay that the New York Daily News did on pitching grips. There's some classic photos in there. Click here to see the feature.

Makes me think of that Jim Bouton quote: “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”