Bobble Bobble

In addition to winning 288 games in the big leagues, Tommy John is remembered as the guinea pig for a medical procedure which changed the game of baseball. In 1974, the 31-year old John underwent an elbow reconstruction procedure which was so successful that it allowed him to pitch another 14 years in the bigs--and at a higher level than before. The procedure has become so popular among pitchers that it's routinely referred to as "Tommy John Surgery".

It ought to be enough for TJ to get his ticket punched to the Hall fo Fame, but John, who's now the pitching coach for the AA Harrisburg Senators (Expos affiliate) will have to settle for a new kind of immortality. The AAA Charlotte Knights are giving away Tommy John Bobble Arm dolls to the first 1500 fans at a game tonight in Charlotte. According to the press release:

"'The doll, sponsored by Perry and Barron Orthopedics, whose head and left arm bobble, is a one-of-a-kind unique promotion designed by the Knights. It is the first bobble head doll to have another appendage that moves. The doll was created in the likeness of former Charlotte Radio Color Commentator and major league pitcher TOMMY JOHN. The bobble doll is wearing a New York Yankees uniform and is complete with the red scar that has become synonymous with the now famous "Tommy John surgery."

I think I've found my next eBay purchase. To borrow a quote from Homer Simpson: "I have two questions: how much, and give it to me." This will have to tide me over until the Yanks brass sees fit to honor Luis Sojo with a unique doll of his own: the Bobble Chin.

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And on the subject of completely ridiculous products you didn't know you needed (or didn't even know existed), here's another one: ESPN Fantasy Fishing. I shit you not. There are not one, not two, but three different types, two for bass and one for walleye. From the description for the Fishing Challenge - B.A.S.S. Tour:

"Create your own five-man dream team from among the universe of professional anglers on the world's largest bass fishing circuit — the CITGO BASSMASTER Tournament Trail — then track their collective performance over the course of an actual four-day tournament. Score big and you could win valuable outdoor prizes and ESPN Fantasy Uber points. But if your anglers get skunked, you risk shame and humiliation on the weigh-in stage… not to mention a litany of trash talk from other fantasy players. Play for one tournament, or for the whole season. You're free to alter your roster as the season progresses. That way, if your franchise angler suddenly can't buy a bite, you can unload him like last year's Stinkbait."

First question: WHY? Second question: does it come with a fantasy beer cooler you need to keep stocked? Fantasy beer drinking... now there's a game some folks I know would be into...

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 10:39 AM Link

Something for the Kids

If you're reading this, you've probably noticed the relative infrequency of my posts lately as well as my bitching about how little time I've had to write here. As you would suspect, these two situations are not unrelated. For the past three months or so I've been engrossed in various phases of my two biggest projects of the year, both for the same client, the World Almanac Group. I'm the Creative Director for the World Almanac for Kids 2003 book, just as I was last year, designing and producing the cover and overseeing the production of a 336-page full-color book. I'm also designing the cover of the 2003 World Almanac and Book of Facts 2003.

This year, significant portions of both processes overlapped considerably (especially when accompanied by the various promotional items which go along with each book) somewhat to the detriment of my sanity. We're not here to get into that; there's a baseball angle too. But before I explain it, I'd better back up a bit.

For several years, the graphic design studio where I work (Bill SMITH STUDIO) has produced a children's version of the World Almanac annual reference book. It's gone from being a rather dry, pulpy knockoff of the adult book to a splashy, bouncy, colorful affair, and as it's done so it's increased it sales. In the three years I've been involved, the book's popularity (New York Times Top Ten Bestseller) and increased competition have allowed us to spend more money, particularly on the cover. For a guy like me, that's like handing over the keys to the candy store.

And it's a kid-in-a-candy-store mentality I've taken into those covers, with regards to color, content, and even dimension. We use a special six-color printing process which lets us produce a broader range of bright colors than normal CMYK (four-color) printing--those candy oranges and greens--and we emboss it for texture. In addition to a handful of pictures which sample the book's content, we also put a celebrity on the cover, and under my regime, the celebrities have been athletes, ones that we hope will appeal to kids. For the 2002 version, it was Venus Williams, and this year, Sammy Sosa.

Our discussion about who to put on the cover started the process off last November. Before presenting to the client, I polled my friends with a few suggestions, offering up Derek Jeter as my top choice (wide appeal to both boys and girls in the 9-12 age range, I argued), but willing to mount a case for any one of a number of ballplayers. Other names came up as well, both in our poll and in discussion with the client--A-Rod, Ichiro, and Barry Bonds, most prominently, and while I could come up with pros for each one, I could recite the snippy cons as well.

In both contexts, when the name Sammy Sosa came up the room seemingly lit up. Bonds may have been breaking records left and right last year, but Sosa's four straight monster years and the emergence of his public persona in that time have given him a much broader appeal, particularly among kids. And while I can't speak for my clients, fresh in my mind was the post-September 11 Major League Baseball promo with Sosa carrying the small American Flag around the bases after a home run--a resonant image from a sensitive time (the actual occasion was Sosa's 59th homer on Sept. 28, the first home game the Cubs played after the attack). I didn't want to refer specifically to September 11 (I already got my fill of that last time around), but I felt that a ballplayer who did his share of reaching out in the wake of such traumatic events was the kind of symbol we wanted (in that respect, Jeter, Mike Piazza, or John Franco would have made fine choices as well). It helped that I had a life-long Chicago Cubs fan sitting across the table from me when the deal went down.

So here it is, the cover of the 2003 World Almanac for Kids, starring Sammy Sosa. I'm quite proud of it and I look forward to seeing the printed product (the final pages of the book went to press last week). Sosa isn't the only baseball player prominently featured in the book; the famous Honus Wagner T-206 baseball card will be on the book's inside front cover and within one of the chapters, and pictures of players like Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Roy Campanella, Hank Aaron, Randy Johnson, and Barry Bonds are also featured. And as for Bonds, he'll just have to settle for being on the preliminary version of the adult 2003 cover. Who knows if some other slugger will earn his way on by summer's end?

That the Kids book went off to press means that I can breathe a huge sigh of relief, because suddenly I should get a large part of my life back, including more time to spend on this site. I've actually spent a fair amount of time *trying* to write here over the last three months, but short attention spans, inability to take long lunch breaks, and a fear of Monitor Tan have held me back like a sore hammy. But the one-post-a-week season ends today (and I thank my readers for checking in more often than that even in the face of my infrequency). Starting now, I'm back in the saddle again.

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 1:09 AM Link

It's Not a Significant Sample Size Until Bernie Williams is Hitting Above .300

You can practically set your watch by it: Yankee centerfielder Bernie Williams is a notoriously slow starter, but inevitably, he reels off a sorching month which brings his stats to the level of the guy in the catalog. With 13 hits in his last five games (including Tuesday night's action), Williams has put himself well above the magic mark:

           PA  AVG  HR  RBI  OBP   SLG  OPS
April    108 .236   1   7  .367  .392  659
May      122 .377   9  24  .459  .725 1174
on 4/15   62 .180   0   1  .349  .200  549
on 5/14  163 .275   4  14  .384  .406  790
Total    230 .313  10  31  .416  .513  928

Williams is very consistent in the way he starts slow and heats up. Here are his month by month breakdowns by batting average and OPS:

       1999       2000        2001      3 year     Career
APR  .291/ 644  .292/ 928  .200/ 644  .270/ 694  .268/ 785
MAY  .367/ 995  .283/ 888  .264/ 757  .308/ 890  .308/ 923
JUN  .364/1109  .386/1155  .450/1330  .400/1199  .347/1052

2000 was a slight anomaly in that Williams charged out of the gate pretty quickly, but even then, he turned it up a notch during an unstoppable June, like he always seems to do. What's also interesting is how Williams seems to go from slapping the ball around like a light-hittting shortstop (note the low OPS even with the respectable batting averages) to murdering it like a cleanup hitter. Williams's low points aren't completely awful, because he does tend to draw his walks even when he's not hitting well--when he was hitting .180, his OBP was still a respectable .349.

I honestly have no idea how many players you could find who exhibit such a demonstrable pattern as Bernie, but I suspect few are as pronounced in their trends (though if we looked at all of Williams's month-by-month breakdowns, the trend disappears). His slow starts do have their explanations. Last year, the declining health and eventual death of his father hung over his head early in the season, and this year's turnaround was spurred by cortisone shots into his weak shoulders.

But for all of his streaky months and slow starts, the marvel of Williams is his year-to-year consistency, your classic steady-like-Eddie Murray ballplayer putting up carbon copies of the same great season. Clearly, he seems well on his way to another one. And look, it's almost June.

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Speaking of Williams, if you live in New York you've probably seen print ads of him endorsing LASIK eye surgery, the corneal procedure which enables one to shed corrective lenses. Top-flight athletes like Greg Maddux and Tiger Woods have undergone the surgery, as has Williams, and Jeff Bagwell, to name a few. Woods and Maddux have claimed that the surgery improved their already-great games, but then like Williams, how are you really going to tell?

The procedure isn't without its risk. In yesterday's New York Daily News, an article about professional golfer Scott Hoch sounded the alarm. Hoch, who had the surgery in January 2001 and went on to have a career year, winning two tournaments and earning $2.8 million, told reporters that during a March tournament he looked down at the ball and saw what seemed like "a TV set with bad reception" in one eye. A second operation failed to correct a ghost-like double vision, and Hoch complains that resulting depth perception problems give him trouble chipping and putting. Ugh.

As somebody who suffers from some pretty lousy vision, I've thought about LASIK, and I always figured I'd get around to it in a few years when the procedure became even more reliable. But right now I'm not so sure I'd even consider it, and it will be interesting to see if other professional athletes who share Hoch's plight start to appear.

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Postscript on Bernie: 2-for-5 with a game-tying 2-run single in the 9th inning. Dare I say en fuego?

--posted by Jay Jaffe at 10:58 PM Link