SB Nation User Blog: Chiburb

Jim's Off-Season Sox Schedule...

Chiburb — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:27:17 -0000

Jim's Off-Season Sox Schedule...

Nov. 9 – General managers meetings, Chicago.

Nov. 1o-11 – General managers meetings are moved to Rio de Janeiro.

Nov. 15 – Joe Cowley reports that the White Sox have interest in trading for Chone Figgins.

Nov. 29 – The White Sox front office ponders whether or not to offer arbitration to Octavio Dotel.

Nov. 30 – Scott Linebrink wakes up from yet another undeservedly good night of sleep.

December – Questionable Latin American alleged crime period.

(More at the link)

Denver Post beat writers told to stop making game predictions

Chiburb — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:23:52 -0000

Denver Post beat writers told to stop making game predictions

For as long as most of us can remember, beat writers at the Denver Post have been allowed to make game predictions about teams they cover -- but no more, because of a decision by the paper's editor, Greg Moore.

What was the real motivations for eliminating predictions? And did readers upset that none of the writers had confidence in the Broncos have any impact? Not according to Moore, corresponding by e-mail, who says, "It is an ethical move. Sports writers are no different than other news-beat reporters. We would not have political reporters picking sides in a political contest.

Satchel Paige vs. Babe Ruth

Chiburb — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:34:40 -0000

Satchel Paige vs. Babe Ruth

Integrating Major League Baseball retroactively with Strat-o-Matic cards.

It's the bottom of the ninth in the Bronx. The Yankees are tied 5-5 with the Dodgers, and Babe Ruth is coming to the plate with two men on and two out. Future Hall of Famer Oscar Charleston is on first base. Tony Lazzeri is on third. And on the mound for Brooklyn is Martin Dihigo, the greatest Cuban pitcher of all time.

This showdown never took place in real life. It couldn't have. Charleston, an African-American, and Dihigo, a black Cuban, were never allowed to play in the major leagues.

Instead, this historic game was happening in Strat-O-Matic on the kitchen table of Scott Simkus, an amateur baseball historian from the suburbs of Chicago. Simkus has been playing the dice-and-cards baseball simulation since he was a boy. Strat-O-Matic has always been a great vehicle for answering what-ifs like How would Ty Cobb have hit against Sandy Koufax? or Would the 1962 New York Mets have lost to the 2003 Detroit Tigers?

Lillibridge In Rare Company...

Chiburb — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:13:38 -0000

Lillibridge In Rare Company...

Going into the last games, our own Little Bridge has a chance to make history. Click through to see how!

No Wonder Rios Can't Hit

Chiburb — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:38:43 -0000

No Wonder Rios Can't Hit

Former MLB pitcher Dave Baldwin (Sox, 1973) explains the brain's functioning during the 4/10 of a second between release and contact.
Snip:
The batter needs to begin collecting pitch information as soon as possible. To prepare for this "quick read," the batter’s conscious mind concentrates on an imaginary "box" where he expects the pitcher’s release point to be. Thus, his cerebral cortex is thoroughly occupied and doesn’t hinder the unconscious mind. If he has guessed correctly and the ball is released from that box, he can begin to evaluate the pitch as it leaves the pitcher’s hand. Otherwise, the batter must spend precious milliseconds searching for the ball.

How Swisher Got His Groove Back

Chiburb — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:01:43 -0000

How Swisher Got His Groove Back

What the heck do the Yankees want with a guy who had just hit .219?

As somebody who asked the very same thing, I thought about the trade on Tuesday night as I watched Swisher wipe the remnants of a pie from his face, planted there in celebration of his walk-off homer to beat the Rays 3-2.

A year ago, Swisher was one of the unluckiest players in baseball.

His line drive rate in 2008 was a career-high 20.9 percent. Based on that figure, his expected batting average for balls in play was .329, which would have been a just reward for hitting the ball hard. But instead, even though he pounded the baseball, Swisher's BABIP was a criminally low .251, a number that can be attributed to lots of terrible luck.

Flash forward to Tuesday night. After swatting a pair of homers against the Rays, Swisher is hitting .254/.378/.506, defying even the most optimistic projections. His 26 homers are the second highest total of his career.

What's changed? Well, scenery, for one. Swisher is having a lot more fun contributing to a winning team in New York than he did languishing for a winning team in Chicago. That's to be expected.

But the real answer lies in Swisher's luck.

(Goes on to explain BABIP, Line Drive %, wOBP, and other unexpected stats by a newspaper reporter. Cowley could learn from this.)

Foreign Talent Loads the Bases in Minor Leagues

Chiburb — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:00:01 -0000

Foreign Talent Loads the Bases in Minor Leagues

Recent changes in U.S. immigration law and growing competition in baseball for raw talent have allowed the minor-league farm system to flourish with imported players. It has been a home run for globalization, but bad news for U.S.-born players, who suddenly have much more competition. Across the minor and major leagues, the total number of foreign-born players is growing fast, to almost 3,500 of the 8,532 players under contract this summer, from 2,964 three years ago.

The surge of young foreign players into the U.S. minor leagues began in 2007, a few months after then-president and former major-league team owner George W. Bush signed the Creating Opportunities for Minor League Professionals, Entertainers and Teams Act, known as the Compete Act. It freed the farm systems of major-league teams from having to compete with all U.S. employers seeking H2B work visas for foreign employees, the supply of which usually was exhausted each year by February. Now, teams can import as many prospects as they want.

"There is no longer a limit on work visas," explains Oneri Fleita, the Florida-born director of minor-league development for the Cubs. "So, yeah, you might see more foreign players getting an opportunity."

An Appreciation Of Don Fehr

Chiburb — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:02:04 -0000

An Appreciation Of Don Fehr

After Don announced his retirement, Marvin Miller, the union leader who preceded him, observed that Don has always had a unique set of challenges. He had to gain consensus with a group of players who now had a lot more to lose economically in the event of a strike, some of whom were industries unto themselves. In Marvin’s time, all the players knew what it was like to play without a union. They understood how it felt being "owned" by a team and having no medical or retirement benefits. When Don took over, few if any players could remember such conditions. Don helped them understand and appreciate how they came to have such advantages, what exactly was at stake, and how this was a movement that would benefit future generations, not only themselves. To accomplish this while keeping everyone on the same page was, according to Miller, "one of Don’s greatest strengths."

It is easy to make Don Fehr a target representing everything that frustrates us. Anyone perceived as the guy who fought for the rights of millionaires — especially millionaires who get to play baseball for a living — will never get a warm welcome. Yet our entire nation across the economic spectrum has been the beneficiary of his work and the work of the organization he headed for many decades, most often for the better.

A quiet subversive on the mound

Chiburb — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:40:50 -0000

A quiet subversive on the mound

Leroy Paige:

But there is more to Satchel’s legacy than eye-popping records. While many dismissed him as a Stepin Fetchit if not an Uncle Tom, he was something else entirely - a quiet subversive, defying Uncle Tom and Jim Crow. He refused to play in a town unless it supplied lodging and food to him and his teammates, a defiance for which young civil rights workers later would get arrested.

Satchel’s loudest claims for equality came on the field. He pitched spectacularly enough, especially when his teams were beating the best of the white major leaguers, that white sportswriters turned out to watch black baseball. He proved that black fans would fill ballparks and that white fans would turn out to see black superstars. He drew the spotlight first to himself, then to his all-black Kansas City Monarchs team, and inevitably to the Monarchs’ rookie second baseman Jackie Robinson. As one veteran Negro Leaguer put it, Jackie may have opened the door to the new racial reality when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, but it was Satchel who had inserted the key a full generation before.

OT: Sad Day For "815" And ALL Illinoisans

Chiburb — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:39:37 -0000

OT: Sad Day For "815" And ALL Illinoisans

As usual here in Illinois the social service agencies are the first on the chopping block because we have no lobby in Springfield, and don't provide enough monetary compensation for our representatives to give a damn about us.

When agencies asked how to deal with the thousands of people who will be displaced by these cuts, the State's Secretary of the Department of Human Services had no response. The new fiscal year as well as the budget cuts started today.

I want to have my state legislature spend an afternoon in any number of agencies today who are closing their doors and explain to an adult or child suffering from mental illness–self-mutilation, pyromania, dimentia, schizophrenia, bi-polar disorders, sudden onset explosive disorder, anger management etc. that the one place which has been helping them is now closing. That where they have friends is closing. That where they have built a life for themselves is closing.

But our clients are the marginalized, the poor, the ghosts who walk our city streets seen but not heard, acknowledged but not understood, and in most cases roundly ignored and thankfully forgotten by our politicians as soon as they are finished with their photo op at our agencies. They have no lobby and no money and are therefore expendable.

These people will be tossed out onto the streets with no treatment, no help and no options. People will die, and no one seems to care.