The National Pastime Museum is an online museum and timeline of baseball until the 1950s, with articles and pictures of unique memorabilia and artifacts thrown in. Check it out.
Cool Website: The National Pastime Museum
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Category Archives: All-Encompassing
The 2013 Opening Day Diary-Blog
Throughout Opening Day, I’ll be blogging. So check back on this thread throughout the day. Go BELOW THE JUMP, since this could get long.
Video of the Day: People Will Come
Ray, people will come Ray. They’ll come to Iowa for reasons they can’t even fathom. They’ll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they’re doing it. They’ll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won’t mind if you look around, you’ll say. It’s only $20 per person. They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they’ll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game and it’ll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they’ll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh… people will come Ray. People will most definitely come.
Happy Opening Day, everyone.
Random Video of the Undetermined Amount of Time: Who’s on First?
An oldie but a goodie:
Link of the Day: Baseball Statues
No picture of the day today, instead, here’s a link to a site that is cataloging baseball statues around the country (and, more broadly, sports statues around the world).
Review: The Living Baseball Card
The baseball card. Is there anything so low-tech and yet interesting as it? And remember how, when you were young, you’d look over those statistics, look at the cool photos, and maybe see a line or two about the player off the field? You know, stuff like:
“Player X enjoys hunting and fishing during the off-season.”
Or…
“Player Y lettered in baseball, football and track in high school.”
Well, the Living Baseball Card project is sort of like that, only with a documentary instead of a line at the end. While it has the picture of the player and lines of stats, what sets the Living Baseball Card (which is larger than the average baseball card) apart is that it comes with a DVD that holds a documentary on the card’s player (the one I watched was about 23 minutes), in which the player talks about his childhood, upbringing, time in the minors, and MLB career.
Take the documentary I watched (I received two cards, but I’m holding one of them back as a possible giveaway in the future), which was on Royals outfielder Willie Wilson. The only person who speaks in the video is Wilson himself, as he discusses his childhood, his baseball days, as well as other topics related to his life. Having known very little about Wilson, it was interesting and seemed a good primer on him: about how he got into baseball, his experiences in the minors, etc. They ranged from the funny- he once left before the second game of a doubleheader in the minors, only to come back and have to grab his uniform out of the wash so that he could pinch-hit late in the game- to the sad- he stopped doing autographs for a time because a man had knocked down Wilson’s wife and young child trying to get it. A well-made and good paced DVD.
It will be interesting to see how the Living Baseball Card moves forward- I can definitely see it as being a possible giveaway at ballparks, for example, as the format could easily be changed around to showcase a current player, or an all-time legend that is getting his number retired.
Time will tell, but it definitely has potential.
A proposal to revamp Hall of Fame voting
One of the major gripes with Hall of Fame voting is that it is the Baseball Writers’ Association of America that does the voting. Even some of the writers themselves gripe about it, and many organizations actually forbid their writers from taking part in it, as it is in, a way, a case of newsman actively taking part in making the news.
And, of course, there is the the fact that, unlike, say, MVP voting or Cy Young voting, not every writer necessarily has seen the players on the ballot play, or even been a contemporary of them. While this can, in some cases, be a good thing- it allows for more neutral analysis statistically, for example, it is problematic. In addition, once a person gets a HoF vote, they have it for life, even if they then move on to cover a different topic or retire.
So the question some have is why the BBWAA has this power in the first place. Well, the fact is, when the HoF first opened, the BBWAA was basically the only organization that was around that could have done the job. Remember, it was the 1930s: television didn’t exist commercially, mass travel was not what it is now, and even radio, perhaps the top mass-media of the day, would rarely have covered national games outside of the playoffs. So, in essence, the only people who would have been able to see all of those players were, in essence, the writers and the players themselves. And so, the job was given to the BBWAA.
Now, however, we live in a different world, which is why I have suggestions on how to modernize the HoF vote… after the jump.
Obituary: The Bullpen Phone
The Bullpen Phone- at least as a landline- died today, to be replaced by a new on-field communication system utilizing cellphones (brought to you by T-Mobile).
Phone, who may well have been as old as 83 (it’s a bit vague), memorial services are due to be held in the coming weeks, with Tony LaRussa, perhaps the man most associated with it’s use and misuse, expected to give the eulogy.
The Bullpen Phone was predeceased by the Bullpen Cart but is survived by the crazy antics the relievers do in the bullpen.
In lieu of flowers, get a lefty ready.
Who’s in/out/in-between of the World Baseball Classic as of 8:13 PM of Jan. 1, 2013
Not much today:
- Taylor Green, of the Milwaukee Brewers, is “in line” to play for Team Canada. I’m putting him in as possibly/likely.
As usual, check under the jump for the full list.
My five best position players, pitchers, and managers- just in time for the “End of the World”
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):
The Baseball Continuum 