NMA is an Asian company that makes CGI animations that are… unusual takes on the news. In this case, they’ve made a little CGI animation of Hiroyuki Nakajima, Japanese shortstop, and his signing with the Oakland Athletics.
Clearly, somebody was taking some type of hallucinogens when they made this.
You know the story of who inspired this holiday: His birth was an unusual one, but he grew up to perform amazing feats, and spoke in words that have been repeated again and again throughout history. Later in life, he became known for his ability to resurrect himself.
I speak, of course, of Rickey Henderson, born Dec. 25, 1958 in the back of an 1957 Oldsmobile.
I am not going to do the extremely easy joke that goes with that factoid of information.
Although he had hoped to play football growing up, his concerned mother and a school counselor got him onto baseball, mainly because they were worried he’d get hurt. During his Hall of Fame induction speech, in fact, he mentioned that his counselor gave him a quarter every time he did something well on the baseball field.
This is always ironic, because perhaps nobody was pulled from their baseball career kicking and screaming as Rickey Henderson had to be. After he washed up after 2002, he went to play in Newark to start 2003, for the indy-league Bears. He did well enough that he was signed by the Dodgers, which were the final team he’d play for in his big-league career.
But Rickey refused to go, and in the final years of his playing career, he was something of a joke, again returning to the Indy leagues, first for the Newark Bears again, and then the San Diego Surf Dawgs. Only then did he hang it up.
And when he hung it up, he left with one of the most distinguished careers in history. The Man of Steal was voted to 10 All-Star Games, three Silver Sluggers, a Gold Glove, the 1990 AL MVP, and won a World Series in 1993 during his brief stint with the Blue Jays. His 1406 stolen bases are well-known, but often forgotten is that Rickey also holds the record for runs-scored (2295), and is second only to the often-intentionally-walked Barry Bonds for BBs (2190). In fact, I read once that even if Rickey Henderson had never stolen a single base, he would likely have made it to the Hall of Fame, simply due to his good hitting and excellent eye.
But, of course, no discussion of Rickey Henderson is complete without some of his… unique words. Nobody knows for sure which of them are true, which of them are false, and which of them have been lost somewhere in between. Tom Verducci once noted this, writing that it made Rickey something like Johnny Appleseed or Davy Crockett, a character that could not be merely defined as fiction or nonfiction. Some of my favorite stories and quotes often attributed to Rickey:
How many of those are true? Does it really matter?
Happy Rickeymas!
I’m a big fan of a game called Out Of The Park Baseball. It’s a baseball simulator, which can let you do almost anything. If you want to, you can replay baseball history just as it was, or you could play a whole new history with fictional characters, or even do a bit of both, perhaps using fictional teams but real players. It’s the spiritual descendant of APBA and Strat-O-Matic.
I’m, however, going to use it to do some simulations of World Baseball Classic baseball. Essentially, I downloaded a roster set that has the rosters of Major League Baseball and the minors at the end of the 2012 season. I then deleted all of the leagues, making everybody free agents. I then created a league of National teams: the USA Americans, the Dominican Republic Dominicans, the Italy Italians, etc.
And now I am putting players on the teams, as well as updating the attributes of some of the players (you can enter what their stats in a major league environment was and it’ll give you what their most recent power, contact, etc. abilities would be- otherwise it’d be going off of 2011 numbers, making Mike Trout merely a prospect instead of the most exciting player in baseball).
So far, I’ve created the USA, the Dominican, Australia, Italy (which has a heavy number of Italian-Americans) and I’m working on Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico and Canada. So, for example, I could play a game with a lineup like this:
It isn’t a perfect simulation: the simulation lacks pitch-count rules (thus allowing Justin Verlander to complete-game shutout the Italians and Australians almost any time he faces them) and sometimes the decisions made by the AI are a bit wonky (it made Joe Mauer the starting 1B originally, and had Ben Zobrist the starting 2B instead of the super-utility guy off the bench.. and I’m still trying to figure out why they have Clayton Tanner as the ace of the Australians and not Travis Blackley)… but it’s neat. So I’ll be sharing some of the stuff from it in the next few days.
For example, I think it’s safe to say, based on this simulation of 1000 games between Team USA and Italy, that the Americans should easily win the Pool D game against Italia:
I didn’t get the list of changes to World Baseball Classic participants last night, but here it is now:
Go below the jump for the full list:
Today’s news regarding players and the World Baseball Classic:
Go below the jump for the full list:
Well, here it is. One day until the end of the world, according to the Mayans. Never mind that the Mayans actually didn’t predict that 12-21-2012 was the end of the world, or that the Mayan culture didn’t see history as a straight line but rather as a series of cycles, or that they found another Mayan calendar that extends past 2012, or that the Mayans didn’t see the collapse of their own empire coming… a bunch of crazies on the internet say the world ends tomorrow, so who am I to argue?
Humanity had a good run. We mastered fire, created the wheel, spoken and written language, and invented pre-sliced bread. And remember that time we landed a man on the moon? Or when we drove smallpox into functional extinction? And we created the Internet, allowing us to watch video of a Corgi getting cleaned using a vacuum cleaner! Good times. Good times. Heck, it’s a shame that those stupid Mayans didn’t give us time to fix that whole Global Warming thing sometime before it turned us into a wetter version of Tatooine, because that probably would have ended up there on the list of accomplishments.
Stupid Mayans.
But, hey, the end of the world gives me the perfect excuse to finally say who I think are the greatest ballplayers of all time. After all, if history ends tomorrow, I can say with certainty that this list will never have to change again!
So here we go (after the jump- because the Mayans would have wanted it that way):
Today’s news on World Baseball Classic participation:
Go below the jump for the entire list of statuses for players in the WBC.
I’ve featured Yakyu Baka on the side of the Continuum for awhile, so now is perhaps a good time to link to perhaps it’s Korean equivalent: MyKBO.net.
MyKBO.net, as the name suggests, is about the Korean Baseball Organization and Korean baseball in general. It has links to news and blogs, has the occasional interview with a westerner playing in Korea, and also keeps standings and statistics. In addition, it’s founder, Dan Kurtz, is active on Twitter at @MyKBO and is a pretty good source of news and links on Korean baseball.
So, MyKBO.net has been added to the links part of the Continuum.
In “If I Were Commissioner”, I pretend that I am in charge of all of baseball…
For years, back when ballplayers needed some extra money to hold them over during the off-season and the owners also were looking for ways to leverage some more money, there was barnstorming. Teams of ballplayers would travel the country (sometimes even the world!), playing local teams and each other, spreading the gospel of major league baseball to the cities that didn’t have it- and making a good buck while doing it (usually).
But, alas, as time went on, salaries got higher and baseball expanded west, the barnstorming traditionally slowly disappeared. Nowadays, it is almost non-existent. Beyond the occasional trip to Asia (such as the one in Taiwan in 2011), ballplayers don’t go on tours anymore.
But if I was commissioner, that would change. Because, you see, baseball is a game best seen in person (as opposed to football, which is a sport that is better on television). It would thus make sense to let as many people as possible in as many areas as possible see it in person. Since obviously it wouldn’t make sense to require, say, every MLB team to play one regular-season series in their AAA stadium, the answer is barnstorming.
It could work like this: every November, there could be a team formed from any interested players who’s teams either missed the playoffs or who were eliminated early on. They would then play a series of five to ten games in various cities, the location of which would differ by year. One year it could be in Japan or Korea playing against local teams there, the next it could be in areas of the warmer-weather part of the USA that don’t have MLB teams (New Orleans, San Antonio, Albuquerque, etc.) against a “Washington Generals” team made up of C-list free agents, minor leaguers that need more seasoning, and interested retired players.
So you are probably wondering: what about colder cities? Well, maybe that could be done during the season, using a team of old-timers and free-agents similar to the one mentioned above. They could play a few games against minor league teams, or something. Not a perfect solution, but, hey, what can you do?
Today’s changes:
The Baseball Continuum 