Previously, I discussed some possible neutral-field games in the USA or Canada. Today, it’s time to look beyond the borders and muse about possible neutral-field games internationally going forward.
Go below the jump for more.
Continue readingSo, I’ve been slacking with updates this past week due to “real world concerns”. So to make up for it, here are three neat links:
First off, there’s Clem’s Baseball. It has a giant array of diagrams showing how ballparks have changed over the years, including how they’ve adapted for other sports like football.
Want to stay up to date on Japanese baseball? Jim Allen has been in Japan for decades and once worked the sports desk of Japan’s biggest English-language paper. Now, he writes about Nippon Pro Baseball on his blog.
Going back to ballparks to wrap it up: Stadium Page. This is, not surprisingly, a webpage about baseball stadiums, but the real treat comes in its page of “Unrealized Concepts” such as the Brooklyn Dodger Dome and the thankfully-abandoned plan to demolish most of Fenway Park and replace it with a new stadium.
And there you go- three neat links. Here’s hoping it won’t take me almost a week for my next post.
The Olympics are over, and while I’d like to note that I nailed the order of teams on the podium, the Olympics isn’t what my post today is about.
No, it’s about morning baseball. Well, it’s during the afternoon or night where it is taking place, but due to time zone differences they are in the morning in the USA. Mostly that…
I quite enjoy it! Sure, I might not always be able to get up on time or stay awake for all of it, but whether it was the Olympics or ESPN’s KBO coverage during 2020, I found myself at least trying to watch. And at times, I got super-pulled into it, just as if it was a regularly-timed game in our hemisphere. Besides, it’s nice to wake up and watch baseball instead of doing whatever it was you would normally be doing early in the morning.
Alas, now that is gone. Oh, sure, I can if I want try to find some stuff streaming, but that isn’t quite as easy as it is during the Olympics or when KBO was on ESPN.
Which is why I’m calling on MLB Network to fill in the gap. Have on games from Asia before MLB Central is on every morning. It would be surprisingly cheap to do: the pandemic has shown that calls can be made from continents away, and I’m sure that the rights for the games wouldn’t be too expensive. It wouldn’t even have to be every day: perhaps just once or twice a week they could showcase a game from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or (during winter) Australia.
Make it happen, MLB Network!
After last night’s amazing game at the Field of Dreams, it’s no surprise that people are already clamoring for another one (which they will get). But why stop there? After Iowa and previous games in places like Fort Bragg, Omaha and London, England, as well as the yearly game in Williamsport, why not expand the horizons even more?
Go below the jump for some ideas I have for future games outside of MLB stadiums.
Continue readingPreviously, I took a look at hypothetical dream teams for USA Baseball in the 1992 and 1996 Olympics. Today, it’s time to talk about how a dream team might have looked in 2000, at the Sydney Olympics.
(Go below the jump for more)
Continue readingTaiwan AKA Chinese Taipei AKA Formosa isn’t in this year’s Olympic tournament, but their league remains one of the best in Asia. And while during some research ahead of this Olympics, I came across CPBL Stats.
While not updated daily, it has a good constant stream of news from Taiwan’s top baseball league, as well as (of course) stats and info on how you can watch CPBL baseball online.
Check it out here.
Way back in 2012, I did a post discussing what a baseball dream team for Team USA would have looked like in an alternate world where MLB stars came to the Olympics when NBA stars did: the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona. And while my formatting and grammar wasn’t great (it was the first year of the blog), I still think it was a neat exercise.
So now, with the 2020 (err… 2021) games in full-swing in Tokyo, I got to wondering: What would the dream team have been in 1996? Let’s move forward that clock and assume that Team USA’s Olympic Baseball Team won gold in 1992, although not nearly in such a dominant manner as the basketball team did since international baseball talent in 1992 was better than international basketball talent in 1992. What does the team look like in 1996 in Atlanta?
(Go below the jump for more.)
Continue reading
Back on the 4th of July, I said that that I wanted to start doing some non-baseball stuff on here as well.
This new feature, Glick on Gaming, is one such feature.
As the name suggests, it is about gaming. Video gaming, to be more precise. It’ll be an irregular feature with no real schedule, basically coming along whenever I finish a video game or want to talk about it. The form it will take will also be highly variable: sometimes it could just be a few short lines, other times it may be a long essay, review, or rumination.
Among the games you can expect to see covered in the opening parts of the feature are Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Kingdom Hearts, and Red Dead Redemption II.
So keep an eye out!
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The 2020 Summer Games were looking to be a throwback Olympics with minimal issues. Sure, it would cost too much, the weather would have been a bit too hot, and there undoubtedly would be some political and/or drug-related issues, but at least it wouldn’t be a case of a city biting off far more than it could chew. There wouldn’t be a seemingly endless number of venues left behind empty, gathering dust as a reminder of games long-since past. The city hosting the games wouldn’t go bankrupt from it all, either. Tokyo was going to have the best-run Olympics since London in 2012.
And while to varying degrees all that is still true, it will be barely a shadow of what it should have been. It’s because COVID-19, of course. So instead of what was looking like one of the best Olympics in history, this may well go down as one of the worst. Or at least one of the biggest bummers of a game.
The Olympics are often a complicated thing. On one hand, the idea of having athletes from all around the world come together in some great global city and then have competitions in over two dozen sports over a two week span is inherently dramatic, appealing, and awe-inspiring. On the other hand, it is run by the IOC, an organization that has shown time and again to be varying degrees of elitist, sexist, corporate, autocratic, out-of-touch, corrupt, and various other unflattering things. Perhaps that’s more true than ever this year, where they are quite literally holding an event in the middle of a pandemic without fans and apparently not even giving Tokyo a make-up date sometime in the 2030s or 2040s where they’d actually be able to see it and get the money from all those fans.
And yet, ultimately, once the games begin, most of us will probably forget it all, because we always do.
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Anyway, now that that rumination is done, it’s time for some final predictions on Olympic Baseball. A refresher on the tournament (which is admittedly a bit out of date as far as the COVID precautions in the Olympics) can be found here. As a recap, here are the teams involved, in order of when I did previews of them. Click to go to the previews (please note these do not reflect recent changes due to injuries or COVID tests, I will likely have another update before the start of the tournament):
For gold, I think this is ultimately the homestanding Japanese team’s tournament to lose. Behind them I’m going to say that Team USA will be able to beat out Korea or the Dominican for the silver before falling to Japan. The Dominicans will edge out Korea for bronze. Mexico and Israel, thanks for playing.
However, it should be noted that as always in baseball, and especially during international play where series aren’t things, this is ultimately a crapshoot. If a team’s pitching is clicking and hitting is opportune, any one of these teams, even Israel, could conceivably win gold. On the same coin, some bad days of pitching or dead bats could lead to one of the top teams having an early trip home.
The only way we’ll be sure is when the teams take the field late on July 27.
Since my previews went up, there have been some changes to the rosters:
I’ll have more on Olympic baseball as the start of that tournament nears.
The Baseball Continuum 