Rocket Science Last night my friend and co-worker Lillie (and her husband) treated me (and my girlfriend) to Field Box seats at Shea Stadium for a Mets-Giants game. Thus I finally got to see Barry Bonds play in person. Bonds had a pretty quiet night, walking unintentionally on four straight pitches in the first, popping …
Archive of entries posted by Jay Jaffe
A Rough Week at the Ballpark You know something’s been a long time a-coming when you have to summon up the glory days of Mike Jerzembeck (lifetime ERA: 12.79) to date it. But this past week was the first since the dog days of the 1998 season–after the Yanks had already clinched the AL East–that …
Switch-Pitching? My father, who has long deferred to me on matters of baseball history, asked a question the other night. Namely, if there are switch-hitters, are there (or have there been) any switch-pitchers? Since my recall of the facts was a bit fuzzy (uh, Greg Harris a few years back and.. um… Double-Duty Radcliffe?), I …
More Clubhouse Lawyer Nick Stone is back with a short piece on Ken Griffey, Jr. and is working on a writeup for his first game of the season, so I’ve built a separate spot for him over here and have added his link to the man navigation system. Check it out!
The Strange Tale of Buzz Arlett A few days ago, in a solid effort to avoid getting any real work done, I came across the statistics of a player I’d never heard of, one whose name seemed ripped from the pages of some long-lost Ring Lardner novel: Buzz Arlett. What caught my eye about him …
The Rally of A Thousand Runs Must Begin With a Single Baserunner Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of Willie Stargell, and it marks an anniversary of sorts for me as well–or for this site, more accurately. The bat-twirling Pirates slugger with the infectious smile and the ridiculous train-conductor cap had been of …
You Can’t Have Too Much Pitching Since I’ve spent the past week or so attempting to burn a hole in my computer screen by staring very intensely, I haven’t had the will or the time to play much with this website. But I did manage to catch some ballgames in the season’s first week, including …
Play Ball! Opening Day at last! Spring has sprung, and I can now congratulate myself on surviving an entire winter on only a thin gruel of bowl games, NFL playoffs, March Madness, a trip to the Olympics, King George’s shopping spree and Bad Rug Bud’s odious delusions. But thanks to the events of the past …
Getting Off Base While Pirates manager Lloyd McClendenon provided a highly entertaining exception last year, the old adage “you can’t steal first base” is as true as it ever was. If not even truer–for if sabermetrics has taught us anything, it’s the importance of getting on base to make an offense go. It doesn’t take …
Exhibition Season Among the Dinosaurs Last weekend, I paid a visit to the Baseball As America exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History here in NYC. The just-opened exhibit is a traveling show featuring over 500 artifacts from the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s collection. It’s organized around seven themes which examine the game’s …