2013 WBC Projections: Australia

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Australia is sort of a weird country when it comes to baseball. Plenty of people play it, but it’s an afterthought on the national level. They have lots of professional players and even a professional league of their own, but haven’t really produced any full-fledged stars. Internationally, they play well but rarely great, although sometimes they shock the world and do better than anybody was expecting them to. I think it’d be safe to say that baseball in Australia is vaguely like men’s soccer in America, especially when it isn’t a World Cup year. Maybe a bit lower. It exists, there is a league, and there certainly are some good players and a devoted fan-base, but it’s an after-thought unless somebody does something really good.

Anyway, the Australian roster is filled with professionals or former professionals, mostly from the minors and overseas but with a some MLB players here and there.The Australians have a lot of guys who can play anywhere, and as a result, you’ll see some positions where there are no dedicated players of that position.

Keep in mind that this set of projections was made over a long period of time, and while I have tried to keep it up to date, there still may be a stray out-of-date stat or piece of information here and there.

So, after much research, the Australian national team can be found under the jump. The usual rules apply:

  • Any player coming off a major injury or who has a history of injuries is unlikely to participate. This is especially true for the pitchers.
  • Players that will be on new teams are less likely to participate, but shouldn’t be completely ignored, with the exception of pitchers.
  • Teams are made up of 28 players, of which 13 of them must be pitchers and two of them catchers.
  • The pitch count rules make relievers extremely important.

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Getting a lay of who is still in it, who isn’t, and who could get back into it

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Well, with the Olympics now over, it’s time to return to 100% baseball mode. Okay, 97% baseball mode. You never know when I might decide to go off on a tangent about football or the movies or something.

But right now, all baseball. With the season about to enter it’s last month-and-a-half of madness, it’s time to figure out where all the teams are and who, exactly, still has a shot at reaching the playoffs. With the addition of the second Wild Card, this means more teams than previous years have at least an outside shot at the postseason. Of course, that doesn’t mean every team has an outside shot. So, here are how every team can be classified, in rough order of least to most chance of reaching the playoffs.

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Cool Website of the Undetermined Amount of Time: SABR’s Biography Project

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One of the great places on the baseball-related internet is the Baseball Biography Project run by SABR (the Society of American Baseball Research). It is exactly what it says it is: a project to put up biographies of baseball figures. Most of them are short-but-sweet, but some are longer, more in-depth

They range from the obvious (Babe Ruth and Willie Mays) to the famous-because-they-are-obscure (Eddie Gaedel and Moonlight Graham) to the downright I-haven’t-ever-heard-of-them obscure (picking randomly: Tom Hernon and Pat Purtell).
A good way to waste time while soaking up some sweet baseball knowledge.

Baseball Public Service Announcement: Manny Machado

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We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog for a special Baseball Public Service Announcement to inform you of Manny Machado of the Baltimore Orioles, who hit two home runs in just his second MLB game. That, by the way, made the 20-year-old the youngest person to ever have a two-homer game in either his first or second game.

Go after the jump for more.

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Episode 5 of The Franchise is Wives’ Day

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Episode 5 of The Franchise (Miami Marlins edition) is definitely different from the previous episodes. For one thing, by now everybody knows, in the aftermath of the trade deadline, that this team isn’t going to be the paradigm-shifting one that Jeff Loria had hoped it would be for Miami baseball. The opening title sequence, which once had people talking about how this was going to be the Marlins team that was going to go against the best of the best and change everything, now has more reflective quotes about how it hasn’t gone so well and they are trying to fix things. For another, this episode is focused heavily not on the players, but rather their wives. Go below the jump for more, as well as this week’s Ozzie Guillen counter.

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Great Baseball Lies: Old replica uniforms with names on the back (and other inaccuracies)

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Quick: What’s wrong with the picture below?

Okay, how about this?

The answer is: Neither of them are correct. In fact, they both have anachronisms in them: the Ruth jersey, for example, has the famous “NY” logo on the jersey itself, something that they didn’t do until 1936, by which point Ruth was retired.

But the biggest lie on these replica jerseys: they have names on the back. To the casual fan, perhaps, this is not anything out of the ordinary. After all, teams have been having the names of the players on the back of their uniforms forever, right?

They’d be wrong. In fact, the first time any MLB team had names on the back of the uniform was in 1960, when the White Sox started doing it.

So, in other words, Babe Ruth never wore a Yankees’ jersey with his name on the back (no Yankees, not even those of the present day, have their names on the back, with the exception of some recent batting practice uniforms). Ted Williams never had his name on the back. And, quite frankly, if you don’t know immediately that a “3” on the back of a Yankees uniform means Ruth and/or a “9” on a Red Sox uniform means Ted Williams, perhaps you should be paying more attention the history.

So, for giving people a false image of baseball history and insulting the intelligence of devoted baseball fans, I hereby declare that having names on the back of retro uniforms is one of the Great Baseball Lies.

Baseball’s children

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In a bid to combine their powers and increase the chances of returning to the Olympics, baseball and softball’s international federations (the equivalent to soccer’s FIFA or basketball’s FIBA) recently decided to merge. How well this will or won’t work, as well as what effect this might have on things like women’s baseball or men’s softball, remains to be seen. However, it does give a good excuse to look at some of the “children” born from baseball. See after the jump.

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Olympics Continuum: Why not joint hosting bids?

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I stumbled across an article today that caught my eye: a city councilor in Toronto, worried about the gigantic cost that hosting an Olympics brings to a city, has suggested that there be a joint bid between Toronto and an American city, such as Buffalo or Detroit.

I have written of this before back at the Courier, but seeing this news item has brought it back to my thoughts: why not? Why can’t and why hasn’t there been a joint Olympics bid, featuring cities relatively near a national border?

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What type of Olympians would MLB stars be?

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Getting into the Olympic spirit, the folks across the pond at the BBC have created a neat little website that lets you enter your height and weight and it then tells you which Olympian is similar to you. Well, in theory, anyway. I’m sure their bodies are made up of way more muscle than the average Joe. I mean, I certainly am not built like a weightlifter, but it said I’m most similar to one.

However, let’s do a far better use of this already useless technology: find out what type of Olympic sport baseball players would play. Now, as I said, there is a difference between having the same height and weight as somebody and actually having the same type of body and abilities as them, but in general some things hold true: somebody who is smaller is more likely to be a gymnast or a weightlifter, while somebody tall is more likely to be playing hoops.

So, let’s get down to business:

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RETRACTION- The Orioles are not dead

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On July 17, I declared that the Orioles’ playoff hopes were dead.

However, since then, the Orioles have somewhat stabilized, and are now 6.5 games out of 1st in the AL East and only 1.5 out of a Wild Card spot. Therefore, as I thought they would drop completely off the map by the end of July as they struggled heavily, I must retract my previous statement: the Orioles are alive.
At least for now. They continue to be playing far better than their run differential suggest (they’d be 46-59 if their record reflected their run differential!), and, while they didn’t make any moves at the deadline and have had Jim Thome and Brian Roberts go on the DL, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they will at least somewhat remain in it so long as they can continue defying the gravity of their run differential problem. They are winning close games but losing blowouts.

It will, in the end, all come down to how they play against their AL East rivals. And in MLB’s toughest division, I’m wary of making predictions.