Niall Ferguson compares the Venice of 500 years ago with the New York of today. In a wide-ranging article he also touches of globalization, outsourcing and nuke devices going off in London. The article is macro in nature -- thought-provoking and big-picturish.
I've been tired of hearing about Clemens for the past couple months and about the Yankees for the past five years but all the hype has compelled Al Doyle to write-up a short history of "Sunday ptichers".
[In 1944] Denny Galehouse couldn't quit his war-related factory job in Akron, Ohio, since leaving would expose him to the military draft. Desperate for scarce talent, the Browns decided to let Galehouse catch a train on Saturday to wherever the team was playing the next day. The right-hander would appear in the first game of the Sunday doubleheader and immediately return home.
By winning the opener of the Red Sox series last night (after sweeping the Devil Rays) the Orioles have reached .500 with an 18-18 record. For the second straight season Markakis has gotten off to a slow start. The good news is it's not as slow as last year and the patient approach he employs at the plate bodes well for avoiding debilitating slumps. He turned in a 4-5 night with two doubles in the 6-3 victory over Boston.
I never knew the story behind one of the most famous sports photos of all time. Now I do and you do thanks to No Mas.
Here are his top ten major league bullpens. The author uses the Baseball Prospectus statistical measurement named WXRL for his rankings. WXRL takes two measurements and combines them into one number to help assign value to relief pitchers. The higher the number the better.
The first measurement takes the expected wins added over a replacement level pitcher and assigns a value to the pitcher that is being studied. This first measurement is then meshed with a second measurement that determines the quality of the opposing hitters the hurler faces.
Now who knows what a good WXRL is? I certainly don't. It's not like how I can evaluate doubles or batting average. Forty-three doubles? Yeah, that guy had a pretty good darn year in the gapper department. How about a .224 batting average? Well, if you're not Adam Dunn your stinking up the joint.
In 2006 the leader in WXRL was Francisco Rodriguez who checked in at 7.301. Rodriguez was the leader in 2005 also with a 5.619. And in 2004 Brad Lidge hit 8.097 to lead the majors.
Through May 10th, 2007 the major league leader in WXRL is Atlanta's Rafael Soriano with a 1.927. The top WXRL bullpen in the majors this year has been the Padres at 4.664.
Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul has hit the internet mainstream. Andrew Sullivan performs the honors.
Steve Rubel hits the nail on the head regarding a very important career tool each of us hopefully possesses - curiosity.
Climbing the all-time home run list. Entering the season Griffey Jr. had played three games in rightfield. This year all 25 of his starts have been in right.
Running through the National League hitting totals through Tuesday's games show that compared to recent years hitters are doing worse as a whole in 2007.
The league batting average sits at .257, on-base percentage at .331 and slugging percentage at .399. For each of these three rate stats the last year that they were this low follows.
Perhaps unseasonably cold weather the first three weeks of the season have something to do with what is shaping up to be one of the cooler overall offensive efforts the NL has mustered in over a decade. The upcoming summer months will tell us whether the first month and a half of this season have been a fluke or not.
Will Thompson You Tube's his top five in this compilation. Famous stunt car driver and less famous actor Bill Hickman can be seen in two of these movies from circa 1970.
After watching Hickman (in video number five and one) try naming an actor who's cooler under pressure then Hickman's characters are in these two films. In Bullitt the unbelievable combination of Hickman and McQueen's on-screen cool is just as important to the scene as their incredible stunt driving.
A fun story from the AP that gives all of us Rickey fans an update on where his head is at.
"I'm going to look at it (returning to play baseball) at the end of the
year. I might come out with some crazy stuff, a press conference telling
every club, 'Put me on the field with your best player and see if I come out of
it'. If I can't do it, I'll call it quits at the end," he said.
Google unveils it's new analytics for blog traffic tracking. Stuart Brown provides the overview.
LayoffSpace.com offers those who are out of work a place to commiserate and network with other unemployed souls.
This guy throws serious gas. He allowed five walks, five hits (2 homers) and four earned runs in his debut. The homer he allowed to Ryan Howard was a mistake out over the plate that Howard crushed to straight-away center. It's the type of pitch that Lincecum could get away with more often in Triple-A.
Jonh Winkin, the 125-pound 87 year-old skipper of the Husson College baseball team, is still going strong after 50+ years of collegiate coaching.
My favorite place to eat a burrito sees it's stock move higher. Actually, it's my favorite place to eat.
Sickels hits us with a Howard Johnson Prospect Retro. I was a teenager during his prime and don't remember him walking so much. Perhaps that's because walks weren't the rage back then that they are now.
Johnson was a member of the great Tiger championship team of 1984. In his 3rd major league season at the age of 23, Johnson produced a league average OPS+ and saw the bulk of his playing time occur during the three summer months. He mainly hit 8th and 9th in the vaunted Tiger lineup.
Justin Upton and Tim Lincecum top BA's list in grand fashion. Lincecum will be with the Giants in no time flat since Russ Ortiz will be league average for only so long.
Devil Ray Wade Davis currently finds himself in High-A performing very well. With the D-Rays history of promoting its players quickly he may find himself in the majors in the second half of 2007.
Here's the perfect site to get salary inflation going again at late-70's levels. PayScale and some other online sites allow you to accurately price yourself in the labor marketplace. All of the old gatekeepers (this time HR Departments control of salary info) are falling by the wayside in the ever expanding internet age.
Jay Esbe at OpEdNews.com takes a swipe at all but one of the candidates in the Democratic Presidential Primary Debate last night. Mike Gravel is the one who escapes his harsh hand.
Gravel is most famous for being an Alaskan Senator throughout the 1970's and being absolutely opposed to the Vietnam War. After his defeat he disappeared from public life in the early 1980's.
Gravel's fierce anti-Iraq War stance makes him one of the three true anti-war candidates currently in the race. Republican Ron Paul and Democrat Dennis Kucinich are the other two.
What will happen when Quentin Tarantino makes his Spaghetti "Southerns"?
My favorite dictator has been forever immortalized on a citzen's car.
...when I say favorite I mean the one whose maniacal climb up the Soviet government's career ladder was most interesting to me.
When you still have your hard stuff working at age 40 and haven't suffered a serious injury throughout your mid and late-30's you too can sign for $14 mil.
Google Video has the movie 1984 in it's archives now. It's an hour and fifty minutes. I watched the first thirty minutes and stopped. My wife is going to hook her laptop up to the TV downstairs and we're going to watch it from the beginning this evening.
Diary writer jagsbball41 over at John Sickel's Minor League Baseball has an entry on a self-induced change in Barry Zito's pitching motion. His info was gleaned from espn.com. The change has his pitching coach sounding a little nervous,
"He's gone from one extreme to another from a pitching standpoint," (Dave) Righetti said after San Francisco's pitchers and catchers finished their initial workout. "His ball flight is going to be different, no doubt about it."
Initial fears are that his new delivery will cut down on the break of his classic 12 to 6 curveball and also wear down his body quicker. Conversely, the consensus in the thread is that Zito has tweaked his delivery from time to time during his career and that he's never suffered from those changes.
Twenty years back the Soviet Union was nearing the end of their disastrous military involvement in Afghanistan. Today, Soviet veterans of that war shake their heads when talk turns to the American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. In what has become a classic example of history repeating itself these veterans have a simple message to the Americans: Get out now.
An example of Soviet propagandizing, or rather, covering up the true nature of the Soviet invasion to their own people can be read in the following passage from Alexander Golts:
I just came across this series of baseball articles from ESPN. Called Hot Stove Heaters this series of twenty-five articles covers a variety of general subjects in a very specific way.
For instance, under the January 30th article named Innovation, Jayson Stark takes a look at the flourishing of the iPod in Major League clubhouses in just the past twelve months.
I disagree with Phil Rogers' conjecture that the Angels may have the best outfield in 2007. The triumvirate of Garrett Anderson, Gary Matthews Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero may well have a very solid offensive season but two-thirds of this outfield are huge question marks. Anderson is currently on the downward slope of his career as the 34 year-old has posted OPS-plusses of 137, 105, 99 and 98 the past four season. Don't expect him to jump back up to a 130 OPS+ ever again. Oddly, later in the article Rogers notes that Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui are on the downsides of their careers -- and Anderson isn't?
Gary Jr. of course had his breakout year in '06 but it was at the age of 31 and his OPS+ was still just 119. Again, one can't expect that a player with his career profile is going to far exceed that OPS again.Rolling Stone Magazine takes aim at their list of the Ten Worst Congressmen. Before I pulled up the list my guess was that the Pro-Democrat mag would contain eight Republicans. Alas, I was wrong as there were nine!
The cool thing here, though, is the picture tranformations that can be initiated for each congressman. Where else can Ned Flanders, Archie Bunker and Tom Tancredo be seen together in one place?
From Sports Illustrated come twenty spring training pics of March's past. Pic four shows the Cincinnati Reds running sprints in 1972. There is visible laughter on the faces of three of Pete Rose's teammates as Rose (with his own wry grin) is hustling his way through the obligatory spring sprints. One can imagine the possibility that Rose has just said something crudely humorous.
This fight was the one that setup George Foreman's epic showdown with Muhammad Ali the following year in Zaire. His man-handling of the formidable Joe Frazier made Foreman the baddest man on the planet.
In round one George Foreman throws Joe Frazier around like a rag doll all the while pounding on him. In round two he simply goes in for the kill and TKO's him with a flurry of vicious crosses to the head.
Frazier's knocked down multiple times with the knockdowns at 4:35 and 5:15 especially devastating.
It will be greatly exciting to watch the economies of Eastern Europe continue to evolve over the decades as the vestiges of Communist rule fall further and further back from the collective conscience of the Slavic people.
One such place in this part of the world with a good opportunity for economic advancement is the newly formed Montenegron state. Officially independent in the summer of 2006, this largely homogenous and small state is looking to harness its young entrepreneurial class to increase their standard of living and move full-bore into modernity.
The Mercatus Policy Series has written a brief on this very subject in its current publication. At the bottom of the short article you can find the link to the PDF.
Future success by Montenegro can further bolster the argument that smaller states can be just as economically viable, free and industrious as the large mega nation-states of the 20th century.
Polyphasic Sleep, as explained in its Wikipedia entry, is "achieved by spreading out sleep into short naps of around 20-45 minutes throughout the day". While little scientific research has been done on the subject, a subculture of bloggers have taken to testing this odd sleeping pattern.
Steve Pavlina is one such blogger who has written an intensely detailed number of blog entries regarding his foray into polyphasic sleep over the course of a ninety day period.
Scary stuff from Representative Charlie Rangel. The short of it is that all US citizens between the ages of 18 and 42 would be required to serve their country for two years in a military or domestic service role.
The John Birch Society has a nice rejoinder to the totalitarian bill that Rangel wishes to pass.
The Mises Institute has begun a Print-on-Demand section in their on-line store. Alerted to the fact that numerous readers of their free on-line PDF's actually wanted hard copies for easy chair use the fine folks at the Institute created this nifty little device to satisfy their demands. The prices strike me as quite reasonable.
Here are pictures of vehicles that are overstuffed.
The fastest splitting continent in the world is Africa.
