Another site I often visit is FanGraphs, especially it’s scoreboards, which show the probability of a team winning the game at any given point. For example, you can see just how much that three-run homer in the fifth helped, or just how much that strikeout with the bases loaded hurt the team.
For example, check out the win probability chart for Game 6 of last year’s World Series, which looks like a roller coaster it has so many ups and downs.
It’s time for another installment of Bizarre Baseball Culture, where we look at some of the weirdest uses of the National Pastime in the history of pop culture (no matter how low or high-brow). This time, continuing the series of unusual old comic book adventures that featured baseball, we have the story of Doll Man and the “Baseball Bandits.”
Read more after the jump.
There is a story that, during one of their several hundred attempts to assassinate or overthrow Fidel Castro during the 1960s, the CIA considered sending him baseballs that would, after a time, explode in his face.
With that in mind, perhaps the story featuring the “Fantom of the Fair” in Amazing Mystery Funnies #22 has more truth to it than it appears.
(more after the jump)
We all probably know about the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It posits that Kevin Bacon is the center of the Hollywood universe, and that basically any actor is within seven movies of him. Technically, this isn’t true: Dennis Hopper is the “center” of the IMDB database, at least when you only count movies. However, you get the idea, and it gives us a good example of how the Degrees of Bacon works:
Dennis Hopper was in Cannes Man with Lloyd Kaufman, who was in Super with Kevin Bacon, thus Dennis Hopper’s Bacon Number is 2.
But what does this have to do with baseball? Well, you see, throughout history, baseball players have had some roles in movies. So let’s see how many degrees of Kevin Bacon baseball players are after the jump. As you’ll see they usually don’t need to travel far, although I’m sure I’ll be able to find something that is relatively far away from Bacon, right? Right?
From the itself-good Seamheads site is the Baseball Gauge. Why is it a cool baseball site? Well, for one thing, it automatically calculates the best at positions based on Wins Above Replacement (WAR). For another, it also lets you customize how that shows up. Want to see what the all-time Canadian team is? Boom. How about the best players last year who weren’t All-Stars? Ta-da!
Potentially hours of endless fun. Okay, maybe not hours. More like some fun here and there.
Still, check it out.
Baseball has an unusual relationship with the rest of popular culture. There are more baseball movies than basically any other kind of sports movie (with the exception of boxing, which is very easy to stage), Charlie Brown’s ineptness on the mound lasted fifty years, and almost every TV series ends up having at least one casual mention of the game at point or another.
But with this, sometimes popular culture about baseball can get, well… weird. Bizarre!
This is part of a series about those times. Sometimes it’ll be short stories (like that old tale about 2044 baseball), other times comic books, occasionally a movie clip or advertisement. No matter what, it’ll be weird, it probably won’t be very good, and I’ll give it far more attention than it really deserves.
So, for the first edition of BIZARRE BASEBALL CULTURE (I’ll consider the 2044 baseball story as something of a prologue), I bring to you this:
Captain Marvel. Playing baseball. On the planet Mars. In a story that is about how Captain Marvel taught the Martians baseball. Fittingly, this has been set to go up on a Saturday morning. More underneath the jump.
You can, and should, be following my Twitter feed at @DanJGlickman (hey, we’re told to advertise ourselves these days), but there are some other great baseball twitter feeds to follow, such as…
The big-name national writers
They seem obvious, but they got to where they are for a reason. Probably more than 70% of baseball news is first heard from one of these guys: Ken Rosenthal, Jon Heyman, Buster Olney, Jeff Passan, Bob Nightengale, Jayson Stark, Rob Neyer, Tim Kurkjian and a bunch of other guys. Really, if you regularly see a person talking baseball news on ESPN or MLB Network, and they are not a retired athlete, there’s a good chance they also have a above-average-to-great twitter feed. Ditto if you see their byline in SI, USA Today or another national publication. Not included more because he is a bit more scattered in his coverage (he’s not simply a baseball writer) is Joe Posnanski, who you should still follow.
The Official MLB Twitter Feeds
Following MLB’s official feed, the feed of the Fan Cave and of MLB Network are good follows not because they are giving you anything new (they usually aren’t), but because they will alert and link to good plays, interesting contests and sweepstakes, let you know what is going to be on TV, etc. On local levels, this is also true for the official feeds of individual teams.
The Funniest Twitter Feeds
Not every feed needs to be serious, or even real. Some of the best feeds are fake or tongue in cheek. Take Charley “Old Hoss” Radbourn’s twitter feed: @OldHossRadbourn. It matters not that Hoss died in 1897, he will continue to comment on 21st century events, while often talking about his (equally historically-inaccurate) recollections of the Civil War, fighting Native Americans, and life in the rough-and-tumble pre-modern world of base ball (with a space). Take this tweet from when Josh Hamilton had his historic night:
If a man hit four home runs in one game in my day he would be sentenced to three months in the stocks for congress with the Devil.
— Old Hoss Radbourn (@OldHossRadbourn) May 9, 2012
Another hilarious baseball feed is that of Not Buster Olney, AKA “TRIPPING OLNEY”. This twitter feed, which is actually followed by the real Buster Olney himself, is essentially a feed of a alternate reality version of Buster Olney. In that alternate universe, Olney is a overexcited journalist who is always tripping on various drugs and who has a unhealthy obsession with Royals pitcher Bruce Chen. He also ALWAYS TYPES IN UPPER CASE.
Another good humor twitter to follow, although it is about all types of sports, is the SportsPickle twitter.
Players to follow
Due to rules by MLB, individual teams and PR worries, not that many ballplayers tweet. And most of them are kind of boring. There are exceptions, though. Take, for example, A’s pitcher Brandon McCarthy, who gave us this immortal gem:
Siri, how do you get Josh Hamilton out?
— Brandon McCarthy (@BMcCarthy32) May 12, 2012
One of the first players to take advantage of Twitter was C.J. Wilson, but these days he has not only been joined by McCarthy but also other player-tweeters such as Logan Morrison, Jeremy Guthrie (who played catch with a fan he met on Twitter), Curtis Granderson and @DatDudeBP AKA Brandon Phillips.
Other baseball-related twitter feeds
Besides the various ESPN and MLB Network TV personalities (think of one, search for them, they probably have one), Joe Buck also has a occasionally-updated twitter feed (it comes in waves). I also recommend following other members and sites of the baseball blogosphere, like Craig “HardballTalk” Calcaterra, ‘Duk from Big League Stew, the writers of team-centered blogs, and the writers at Baseball Prospectus. Some good former players to follow are Dirk Hayhurst (@TheGarfoose) and Jose Canseco. Actually, don’t follow Jose Canseco for baseball, instead follow him because he has some of the most… unique Twitter feeds out there. It’s like some kind of poetry of bizarre.
Do you know any other good Twitter feeds to follow? These are just my opinion, after all…
Baseball is paradoxically both one of the best sports for video games to be made on, yet also one of the worst. It is one of the best due to the general obsessiveness of baseball fans, the vast number of statistics, players and strategic decisions and varied playing fields. It is one of the worst because it is hard to make a good baseball video game these days, and expensive. It takes a lot of time and money to make all of the stadiums, uniforms (not just MLB but also MiLB and throwback unis), players (having basically everyone have the same face isn’t good enough), motion captures, play-by-play recordings and all of the other stuff. And, even then, there is a lot of intangible stuff that they can mess up. When done right, it is awesome, when done wrong, it makes you want to pull your hair out.
We are now entering what appears to be a dark age of baseball video games: The MLB 2K series, the crappy replacement that was forced upon everyone without a PlayStation when Take-Two Entertainment signed a third-party exclusivity deal with MLB in the mid-2000s, is near death. This would, usually, be a good thing. However, it also means that it is now likely that there will be no traditional baseball games outside of the PlayStation produced and exclusive The Show next year, and possibly the year after that. This is because, as I mentioned above, making a good MLB game is a time-consuming and expensive process, and now isn’t the time for a company to start from scratch.
(continued)
Yesterday, I gave some of the great mysteries in baseball. But there are plenty of mysteries beyond the diamond as well. For example:
Know any other good ones?
The greatest bane of the Major League Baseball fan in existence is not high ticket prices, competitive imbalance or rainy days. It is the dreadfully antiquated blackout policies of Major League Baseball on television. Drawn up long before the internet, national cable networks and Extra Innings packages, they, as they are currently drawn up, do little to benefit the teams they are meant to and do everything to annoy, enrage and inconvenience fans. It’s so bad, in fact, that some people are suing MLB over it.
(More after the break)
The Baseball Continuum 