drat fink

sidd vicious curveball

"It was 20 years ago this week that Sports Illustrated ran one of its most celebrated articles, "The Curious Case of Sidd Finch" - in which George Plimpton crafted a 14-page exposé on a bizarre, out-of-nowhere Mets phenom who fired baseballs at a stupefying 168 miles an hour. "Crafted," of course, is what Plimpton truly did - the story was pure fiction. It instantly became its generation's "War of the Worlds," leaving thousands of frenzied fans either delighted at the April Fools' prank or furious at being duped."

via metsblog

roxanne hearts michelle

who said bloggers werent fools?

mile high

"When members of the National League expansion committee approved a franchise for Denver in 1991, they probably didn’t know much about the weird history of minor-league ball in this town — and they certainly didn’t consult Dr. Robert K. Adair about drag coefficients and the Navier-Stokes equation, which governs fluid dynamics. Maybe they should have. Beginning in 1886, assorted bush-league teams have played here — the Denvers, the Rough Riders, the Colts, the Teddy Bears — but it wasn’t until detailed baseball statistics came into favor in the 1950s that two undeniable trends became apparent. Games played in Denver produced unusually high scores, and the place was uniformly brutal on pitchers. Fact: Since 1955, the only twenty-game winner for a Denver minor-league team was Jim Ollom, a 6’4”, 210-pound right-hander who did it for the old Denver Bears in 1966, then promptly flopped as a reliever for the Minnesota Twins. The only Rockie to win as many as seventeen games in a season was fan favorite Pedro Astacio, who managed that in 1999."

categorical imperative

Duran Duran - Save a Prayer
John Prine - Flashback Blues
Charlie Parker - Max Maxing Wax
The Hidden Cameras - Shame
Joe Fingers Carr - Under Paris Skies - La La
James Mason - Ive Got My Eyes On You
Ella Fitzgerald - My Cousin In Milwaukee
Nina Nastasia - Superstar
Sonny Rollins - Silk 'n' Satin
Slint - Darlene

life during wartime

ABBA -Does Your Mother Know
Neutral Milk Hotel - Hypnotic Sounds
Home - Let It Overcome You
Françoise Hardy - Je Ne Suis Pas La Pour Personne
Woody Guthrie - Dust Can't Kill Me
Max Frost & The Troopers - Shape Of Things To Come
Cobra - Shoot To Kill
Lee Perry - Yush Dub
Ornette Coleman - The Alchemy Of Scott Lafaro
Albert Ayler - Love Cry

bag lady

my question would be "how does james carville sleep at night?" talk about compartmentalizing, its as if bill clinton were married to ann coulter instead of hillary.

pixelmixela

Klaatu - California Jam
The Smiths - (Original Demos 83-84) - Reel Around The Fountain
Roy Ayers - Yes
Butterglory - She Got The Akshun
Incredible String Band - The Water Song
Cornel Campbell - Blessed Are They
Jackie McLean - My Old Flame
The Move - Yellow Rainbow
Charlie Parker - Tiny's Tempo
Barrington Levy - Nary Long Tougue

out on the mainline

msm = filtered + balanced

billdingsroman

"Bill James: What has happened in the last fifteen years is that the expansion of the bullpens has all but eliminated platooning. Teams used to carry nine pitchers, not 15 years ago but 35 years ago. You have nine pitchers on a 25-man roster, that’s leaves 16 players for eight positions, and you can platoon at three or four positions. Bobby Cox in Toronto in the early eighties was platooning at five positions. Now, teams carry 12 pitchers. You’ve got 13 position players for nine positions, you’ve got a backup catcher and a utility infielder, your options for platooning are very limited.
But what we’re doing now doesn’t make any sense, because you can gain many more runs by platooning than you can save by having an extra left-hander in the bullpen. Eventually, people will realize that what we’re doing now doesn’t make any sense, and then they’ll start cutting back the pitching staffs and expanding the benches, and then we’ll go the other way for 30 or 40 years until something else happens and history tears off on some other tangent."

this one first

"You see, futility does have its advantages."