(Get) A Sporting Life

One thing I am enjoying about the baseball landscape these day is the ability to get to know something about the prospects going into the draft. Ten years ago the draft just happened and you got a blurb or two in the paper the following days. Now it is possible to get some feel for the players likely to go in the first couple of rounds. Granted, that "feel" is a little cursory, but at least it gives baseball fans more of a rooting interest. That being said, here are a few players I'm rooting for the Cardinals to select with one of their four selections in the first 72 picks. (The Cards select 27, 34, 69 and 72.) Note this is not an attempt at a "mock draft" ordering. Trying to do that past the Top 10 selections seems a bit of a fool's errand. There is just too much volatility for mock drafts to be all that worthwhile (though they are fun.) The only thing I am doing is removing some of the big names from consideration as it seems unlikely, for example, that...

I wouldn't have thought the Ryan Braun debacle could have gotten any worse for baseball and for Braun himself. It just got a lot worse : National League MVP Ryan Braun's 50-game suspension was overturned Thursday by baseball arbitrator Shyam Das, the first time a baseball player successfully challenged a drug-related penalty in a grievance... During the hearing, Braun's side challenged the chain of custody from the time the urine sample was collected by Comprehensive Drug Testing Inc. to when it was sent, nearly 48 hours later, to a World Anti-Doping Agency-certified laboratory in Montreal, two people familiar with the case said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because what took place in the hearing is supposed to be confidential. The sample was collected on Oct. 1, a Saturday and the day the Brewers opened the NL playoffs. The collector did not send the sample to the laboratory until Monday, thinking it would be more secure at home than at a Federal Express office dur...

If you didn't watch baseball last night you missed it. There will never be another night like it while you or I are still breathing. Granted, what made it even more special for me is that every team I wanted to win (Cards, Phillies, Orioles, and Rays) did so... but still, even if one of your teams lost you had to think last night was special. The most thrilling night in baseball history Generally I'm very much against instant proclamations of "best ever" — but Wednesday night was unquestionably the most thrilling night of baseball in my lifetime. It doesn't matter who you root for. I've just seen the pinnacle, and I'm going to savor it. I don't think I'm going to be able to sleep for a while. I'm not going to try to sum up the night at length, you surely had an eye and an ear on the action. You saw Evan Longoria(notes) and Dan Johnson(notes) playing hero in Tampa Bay. You saw the scrappy Orioles breaking Jonathan Papelbon's(notes) heart. ...

The only thing I can call this is nonsense on stilts: Posey's injury stirs debate on baseball collisions Ray Fosse watched the crushing blow to Giants star Buster Posey and wondered why after all these years there are still few rules to protect catchers at the plate. If there's anybody who knows about collisions, it's Fosse. He was at the center of one of the most iconic hits in baseball history, when Pete Rose barreled over him to score the winning run in the 1970 All-Star game. Fosse's right shoulder was permanently rearranged, and while he briefly rebounded from the injury, it started a downward slide to a career that was ultimately cut short. "After Rose hit me in '70, I had two guys that blind-sided me, guys who hit me standing up," said Fosse, who stopped short of asking baseball to rewrite the rule book. "There's never anybody ejected for that." The clean but cringe-inducing crash between Posey and Florida's Scott Cousins this week...

...that turns MLB umpires into complete morons? I don't get it. During the regular season MLB umpires are, by far, the best officials in American professional sports. Sure, you can complain about wandering strike zones, and howlers like the excrementally bad call which cost Armando Galarraga a perfect game, but, in general, you don't see officials changing the entire complexion of a game like they routinely do in the NBA, MLS, NHL and NFL. Until they get into the post-season that is. Umpires the last few years have turned into complete choke artists. Last night's debacle in Minnesota is merely the latest example. (Plus the Rays were screwed out of a run as well by a phantom foul ball call.) It used to be bad calls in the post-season was defined by one play only, Denkinger in 1985. Today its take your pick. I really think MLB is gonna have to increase instant replay if only to save the asses of umpires. Its quickly becoming obvious that they cannot save themselves by doing a...

I have to say the first round of the baseball playoffs is quickly becoming my favorite sports time of the year. For one week there seems to always be a game on. I love being able to plop in front of the tube and know some high stakes action will be taking place somewhere. Yes, the first two rounds of March Madness has the same vibe, but it is only four days. Plus there is the stop/start quality to the tournament which breaks up the continuity. The only thing that could make it better would be MLB making the first round series best of seven. I can dream.

This is simply awesome: In Bing Crosby’s Wine Cellar, Vintage Baseball How a near pristine black-and-white reel of the entire television broadcast of the deciding game of the 1960 World Series — long believed to be lost forever — came to rest in the dry and cool wine cellar of Bing Crosby’s home near San Francisco is not a mystery to those who knew him. Crosby loved baseball, but as a part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates he was too nervous to watch the Series against the Yankees, so he and his wife went to Paris, where they listened by radio. “He said, ‘I can’t stay in the country,’ ” his widow, Kathryn Crosby, said. “ ‘I’ll jinx everybody.’ ” He knew he would want to watch the game later — if his Pirates won — so he hired a company to record Game 7 by kinescope, an early relative of the DVR, filming off a television monitor. The five-reel set, found in December in Crosby’s home, is the only known complete copy of the game, in which Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit a game-endi...

Well, well...look at what we have here: Pujols NL MVP The National League's best player has also been named its most valuable. Albert Pujols' magnificent season earned him his second NL Most Valuable Player Award. Pujols finished ahead of Philadelphia's Ryan Howard, who beat him out by a narrow margin to win the 2006 MVP. Pujols has finished in the top 10 in the voting in every one of his eight Major League seasons, and has been fourth or better seven times. He is the 11th player to win two NL MVP awards. ... Pujols had already been recognized with virtually every other major individual award for which he was eligible. He was named National League or Major League player of the year by the Sporting News, the MLB Players Association and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, as well as NL MVP in Baseball Prospectus' Internet Baseball Awards. In the end, the Baseball Writers' Association of America joined the chorus, choosing not to penalize Pujols for his team's fourt...

The explosion of vitriol I vented last night brought up a painful reminder. No matter how much I love the game of hockey I have to admit they have the worst standard of officiating of any major professional sport in America. MLS used to be the worst, but you can attribute that to being a new league with understandably inexperienced officiating crews who have raised their standard over the years. NFL officiating is notoriously uneven, but good work is often done. The NBA has its problems (like officials getting caught throwing games), but overall the reputation of the average gameday crew isn't abysmal. The gold standard in officiating has to be the MLB umpires. Yes, there are annoying aspects to their work, like umpires who seem unable to call a consistent strike zone or who deliberately try to antagonize players, but in general they do good work and they do it in a conscientious manner. Even as notorious a blunder as Don Denkinger's blown call in the '85 World Series shows...

Usually I take time in this blog to bitch about things I don't like, but the time has come to offer praise. Although I was completely skeptical going into the postseason, I have found TBS's coverage of the baseball playoffs excellent. The in-studio segments are interesting and the PBP guys have been more interested in calling the game then in acting like buffoons, as we seen on some other network telecasts. (I'm looking at you Buck and McCarver.) TBS will even forgo the occasional between inning commercial break to go back to the studio for some analysis on what we are seeing in the game. For those who love the intricacies of baseball, and I do, that makes for a highly enjoyable baseball watching experience. It is especially refreshing after spending years watching Fox's baseball coverage, where the executives decided early on that what baseball telecasts really need is plenty of dancing robots.

Finally, academic research asking the really big questions, such as, "How does party ID relate to support for the designated hitter rule?" The Etiology of Public Support for the Designated Hitter Rule (Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2007, 2: 189–203) Several aspects of our findings deserve mention. Most important, and consistent with our expectations, we find that self-identified Democratic Party members are more likely to support the DH rule than are either independents or Republicans; the odds ratio of 1.90 suggests that, on average, Democrats are 90 percent more likely to support the rule than are independents. This implies (we think) that the values that draw the respondents to the Democrats are linked to those associated with supporting the rule. At the same time, the reverse is not true: Republicans are no more or less likely to support the DH rule than are political independents. Nor are self-identified political conservatives, once the effects of party are ac...

Are you ready for some clown baseball? Yes, it is time for interleague play, where baseball becomes a carnival sideshow, but without the saving grace of irony. Interleague play, where your quest for winning your National League division will be decided not in a season long contest against divisional rivals but by how you play against the Royals or the Orioles. Interleague play, when everyone seems to forget that this novelty act ran out of steam about three years ago. And, sadly, interleague play, where pseudo-fans fill the parks because everyone loves a freak show.

Urbina sentenced to 14 years in prison Former Major League baseball pitcher Ugueth Urbina was sentenced to 14 years in prison for the attempted murder of five workers on his family's ranch, the Attorney General's Office announced Wednesday. ... The 32-year-old free agent was accused of joining a group of men in attacking and injuring workers with machetes and pouring gasoline on them at his family's ranch, located about 25 miles south of Caracas. "The ruling was too severe," said Jose Antonio Baez, a former attorney who represented Urbina. Urbina repeatedly has denied involvement with the violence, saying he was sleeping at the time of the attack. The pitcher's lawyer, Jose Luis Tamayo, has said that Urbina surprised the workers by showing up at his ranch that night while they were bathing in the pool without permission. Urbina spoke sharply to them, but later left and went to sleep, according to Tamayo. Urbina, a two-time All-Star, last pitched in the major ...

...than pitchers and catchers report today.

It is good to see Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn make the Hall of Fame in style. (Although I'm not sure how anyone could vote against either of them.) I was surprised to see Mark McGuire's name get on around 25% of the ballots. I had though he might pop up on 10% or so. I wonder if this presages him actually making it in a few years from now. There did seem to be a group of voters who think McGuire is a Hall of Famer...just not a FIRST BALLOT Hall of Famer. I think it is a silly distinction, but there it is.