Coming July 25, 2017 from Thomas Dunne Books: THE COOPERSTOWN CASEBOOK Who’s in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Who Should Be In, and Who Should Pack Their Plaques By Jay Jaffe With a Foreword by __(TBA)__ 464 pages Tucked away in a small central New York village called Cooperstown, the National Baseball Hall of Fame …
A belated Happy Opening Day to you all! I was very busy in the days and weeks leading up to the blessed event, pitching in on Sports Illustrated‘s MLB Preview issue (cover date March 30, edited by fiancée Emma Span), for which I interviewed multiple scouts about the strengths and weaknesses of opposing teams for …
The MLB Network folks haven’t been calling my number lately — the afternoon schedule is filled with spring training games — but no matter. I’m now in the virtual Rolodex of the producers of Olbermann. On Monday, I made my third appearance in as many months for a breezy around-the-horn chat with Keith Olbermann about …
Filling in the gaps on a few more brews of note, including a pair for this past week despite my ESPN El Paso radio spot — the raison d’etre of these lists in the first place — being postponed. • February 25: Smuttynose Durty Mud Season Hoppy Brown Ale Though they don’t get a ton …
In theory, I was supposed to do a better job of keeping up with the posts on this blog, at least when it came to beer. Alas travel, wedding planning (!) and a bit of bookpanic (a German word that roughly translates to “panic over the awesome responsibility of writing a book”) have conspired to …
Continue reading ‘Beers of the Week: It’s Not All Beer and Skittles’ »
“Rocky Bridges looked like a ballplayer. In fact, he may have looked more like a ballplayer than any other ballplayer who ever lived. His head looked like a sack full of rusty nails, he kept about six inches of chewing tobacco lodged permanently in the upper recesses of his left cheek, and his uniform always …
One reason I wanted to fire up this old blog again is to expound upon my passion for craft beer at greater length than Twitter or Untappd allow. Which isn’t to say that I’m anywhere close being to the most articulate person when it comes to discussing brews, but given a broad range of tastes …
Continue reading ‘Beers of the Week — and a Splash of Haterade’ »
Amusing results when I put my Twitter account into this Poetweet system described here. I tried all three formats it offers for the four poems below; the first one is in the rondel format (two stanzas of four verses plus one of five), while the second and third are sonnets (14 lines) and the fourth …
The smile says it all. Even in the twilight of his baseball career — as on this 1969 Topps card, just before heading into his final season as a regular — Ernie Banks was overjoyed to be playing baseball. I’m too young to have seen Banks play, but when I came into possession of that card, one …
On Thursday night I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Jacob Pomrenke of the Society for American Baseball Research, informing me that one of my articles — “The Case of the Disappearing Slugger: Where Did MLB’s Power Go?”, published last September 3 — has been selected as a finalist in the Contemporary Analysis category …
Continue reading ‘Nomination Accepted: The SABR Analytics Conference Awards’ »