UPDATED: The podcast is now available to listen to over at Blog Talk Radio (or embedded below the jump).

It's only about a week away, so I should probably take a minute to mention (again) that I'll be giving a presentation at the national SABR convention in Atlanta next Thursday. The presentation is called "Peanuts Baseball: A Comprehensive Look at the Wins, Losses, and Other Statistics of Charlie Brown and the Gang" and will be held at 4:30pm on Thursday, August 5.

I'm very excited to be giving this presentation (and, quite naturally, a bit nervous). Unlike my Peanuts stats posts from this January, this presentation will discuss all fifty years of the comic strip, from the first mention of baseball in March 1951 to the last mention in December 1999. The limited nature of the presentation (only 25 minutes total, including questions) means I won't be able to go into the crazy detail that I did in my first post, but that should be all right. I think I've structured the presentation to go over a good amount of information without being dry or boring. Plus, I'll certainly be posting something here on the blog to go along with it.

If you're going to be at SABR 40 next week (it goes from Thursday through Sunday), I hope you find the time to come by and see the presentation. It'd be fun to meet everyone in person. If you were on the fence about attending the convention, or just plan to be in the Atlanta-area next Thursday, I really recommend signing up for the convention. This will be my first SABR national convention, but I already know it's going to be a blast.

You'll probably see a reminder to this once or twice more between now and the convention. If you do plan on being there, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

You'll also hear a little bit more about the presentation/convention (and much more) tonight in the podcast that I'll be doing with The Common Man and Bill from The Daily Something. The podcast will go live at 9pm central time tonight - be sure to listen! The technical difficulties from last week should be ironed out, leaving more time for our stimulating talk (or a gross approximation thereof)! You can find the podcast here.

(Click "Read More" to listen to the podcast.)

We close out this week with one final guest post. Whether it's a 500-word post at Walkoff Walk or Philadelphia Will Do, or just a 140-character tweet on Twitter (@dhm), Dan McQuade is always smart and funny and definitely worth reading on a regular basis. He also runs what should be the greatest Twitter feed ever, if only ballparks would cooperate: Kitty on the Field. Thanks for this great guest post, Dan!

Why are the Phillies the strongest team in the National League?

They're always holding up everybody else at the bottom of the standings!

My grandfather used to tell this joke when I was little. He can't really tell it anymore. Recent struggles this season aside, the Philadelphia Phillies have been a pretty good organization recently. Back-to-back pennants, only one losing season since 2000 (80-81, in 2002), 84 straight sellouts at Citizens Bank Park.

Yes, the Phillies have been generally good for a decade now. There has been one other "golden age" of Phillies baseball -- the 70s and early 80s -- but aside from that this is a unique time. The Phillies have been around for about a million years (okay, 128) and most of them have been bad.

As such, many fans have taken a dim view of Phillies management. This persists. Right now, you can't sit in a bar for more than 15 seconds in Philadelphia without hearing someone complain about the Cliff Lee trade. But things could be worse for fans. If the Phillies are having you arrested in 2010, it's because you've vomited on a fellow patron or dashed onto the field in a fit of drunkenness or stupidity.

In 1923, the Phillies had an 11-year-old fan arrested for keeping a foul ball. Back then, fans were generally expected to return fouls. Before the 1920s, the same baseball would be used until it would start to come apart at the seams. An always-fresh baseball in play led to more hits, more runs and more foul balls.

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I was busy experiencing one of the biggest thunderstorms Milwaukee's seen in a long time this evening - a big enough thunderstorm that this Cadillac Escalade disappeared into a giant sinkhole in one part of town - so I didn't realize the big news out of Yankee Stadium right away. But, thankfully, Twitter was there to educate me soon enough: in the third, the Yankees captain Derek Jeter hit his second career inside-the-park home run when Kansas City centerfielder David DeJesus couldn't make the play after colliding with the wall. The official time on Jeter's trot is 15.42 seconds.

Watch Derek Jeter's inside-the-park home run here.

It's the fourteenth inside-the-park home run already this season, putting 2010 on pace for the highest inside-the-park home run total in over twenty years. If the current rate holds up, we'll have 24 inside-the-parkers by the end of the season. Last year, there were only 12 inside-the-parkers all season. There were 20 inside-the-parkers in 1990 and 22 in 1997. There have not been more than 16 hit in a single season since then (three seasons: 2000, 2003, and 2008). Of course, inside-the-park home runs are almost exclusively the result of random goofs in the field, so there is no real reason to expect batters to maintain this rate into October.

Jeter's inside-the-park trot time puts him smack dab in the middle of the pack, at seventh place. At 15.42 seconds, his trot was only a hair's breadth slower than Tony Gwynn, Jr.'s first inside-the-park trot in June. It also puts him about a quarter-of-a-second faster than David DeJesus's own interesting inside-the-parker from April, where the ball cleared the fence but umpires didn't realize it so DeJesus was forced to race around the bases. The quickest home run trot still belongs to the Mets' Angel Pagan, who sped around the bases in 14.48 seconds on May 19. The slowest was just last week, when Jhonny Peralta was the beneficiary of Ryan Raburn's collision with the Progressive Field bullpen fence, clocking in at 16.74 seconds.

After a brief respite yesterday, we're back with another terrific guest post today, this time courtesy of Tommy Bennett. Tommy is one of the best writers we have today when it comes to mixing stats-based analysis and thought-provoking questions about the game. It's a pleasure to have him guesting here today. You can find Tommy's writings over at Baseball Prospectus and you can follow him on Twitter at @tommy_bennett.

When I first started going to ballgames, most stadiums were hulking concrete bunkers. As you gave your ticket and entered the concourse in most of these stadiums—Shea, Veterans, the Kingdome—you didn’t yet have a clear view of the field. Instead, you were presented first with concessions and old guys selling scorecards (back when you could still buy a scorecard separate from the program). The smell and the crowd were what reminded you that you were at a baseball, not a football, game, since most of these stadiums were designed and used for multiple sports. The plan of the stadium called for dozens of tunnels that led from the concourse to the seating sections, and most traveling around the stadium had to occur outside, in the concourse.

That compartmentalized planning has been replaced by the more single-minded, pastoral, revivalist stadiums we go to today. Most new ballparks now have standing room only sections throughout the park, and it is generally much easier to see the field from the concourse. These changes are great for baseball fans: few fans would opt for Shea over Citi or the Vet over the Bank. But those old stadiums with their enormous seating capacities drive home a feature that makes baseball unique among American sports. Baseball has niches that, like cubbyholes or stadium tunnels, cordon off aspects of baseball that can at times appear unrelated to the game on the field.

Let me give you an example. Baseball teaches us about mortality and the passing of time. Baseball literature, in particular, is obsessed with this theme. W.P. Kinsella, in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy , describes a game between a local Iowa squad and the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance 1908 Cubs that lasts for over 2000 innings. The game takes place in sleepy farm town of Big Inning despite the fact that for dozens of innings on end, the big inning does not come. As the floodwaters rise, the maniacal dedication to finishing the game grows absurd. But what, it is surely fair to ask, does this have to do with baseball?

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Great news out of WTMJ, Brew Crew Ball, and everywhere else: beginning this Friday, Bob Uecker will be returning to the radio booth to call Brewers games once again.

Seeing as how he's been doing that duty since 1971, save for his time off since heart surgery in April, that is refreshing news to Brewers fans and baseball fans alike. Having Ueck in the broadcast booth is just the right thing - it makes the world a better place. I'm not alone in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, or in the country in being thrilled by the news.

And with such great news on our minds, it seems like the perfect time to look back at two recent(ish) posts: first, there's this terrific guest post from Carson Cistulli, published this week, reminding us of how great of a human being Bob Uecker is (I wasn't kidding when I said that his return makes the world a better place).

There's also this chart I did at the beginning of the year, when we first heard about Ueck's surgery. Forty years is a long time to be doing a job, and it's made Uecker the voice of millions of people's childhoods. He's not alone in that regard, though, as Scully, Harwell, Caray, Buck, and many others have had the same privilege. This chart - Your Childhood Has Been Brought to You By... - honors them all (though there are many more who deserve at least the same honor).

The real honor will be hearing Uecker's voice coming out of the radio once again on Friday, but, until then, I hope this will do. Now let's hope the weekend gets here soon.

We've got another guest post for you today, this time from Jeff Polman. Jeff runs "Play that Funky Baseball", a Strat-O-Matic replay of the 1977 season, where I manage the 1977 Dodgers. It's home to some of the most inventive writing on the web. He is currently running the 1977 Funky All-Star Challenge, a contest to predict the 1977 Funky All-Star Game winners. Go check it out. And thanks, Jeff!

In one of my former lives, I was the Arts Editor and Sports Feature Writer for the first five years of the Vermont Vanguard Press, a scrappy alternative weekly located in Burlington, Vermont.  Rents and salaries were cheap up there, winters went from October to Memorial Day, but one of the perks was that Montreal, Canada was a mere two hour drive up Interstate 89.  This produced two frequent events: trips over the border to bring back 12-packs of high-octane Molson Brador, and visits to Olympic Stadium to see some of the best Expos teams of all time.

Thus in 1981 I was fortunate to cover the three final NLCS games at the "Big O" against the Dodgers, after the teams had split the first two meetings in L.A. (it was a best-of-5 series then).  What follows is an excerpted account of that thrilling weekend, first published in the Vanguard Press, October 23-30, 1981. Boule de jeu!

*  *  *

Larry Parrish, garbed in rust-colored leather jacket, blue jeans, boots, and western hat, moves through the exit turnstile in the Metro's Pie-IX station, on his way to work. His walk is casual but proud, and his boots click loudly on the tiled floor of the sloping ramp that leads up and into Olympic Stadium. The third playoff game against the Dodgers won't start for another four hours, but even though there are already clusters of fans milling about the entrance to the stadium, few of them recognize the Expos' third baseman as he strolls toward the side door, spitting streams of reddish-brown tobacco juice into every other trash basket he passes.

Parrish, a strong but often clumsy player with one superlative season (1979) to his credit, epitomizes the Expos in this final weekend of the playoffs.  Trying to shake a local reputation as a goat, his bat came alive in Los Angeles, and like his team, he finally has a chance to put years of mediocrity behind him.

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Things are still pretty busy in my world, so I'm staying away from the blog for another week. But that isn't all that terrible of a thing for you since I've been able to finagle another week's worth of guest posts out of some of my favorite bloggers from around the web. Considering just how great the blog posts were last week and who all is lined up so far, it's looking to be a pretty good week.

And this first post should be all the proof you need of that. I would hope that everyone here is aware of just how great Carson Cistulli is. If you aren't, you can find his work over at FanGraphs, as well as here and there around the web (ESPN, Yahoo!, Rouges Baseball Index). He's an incredibly talented writer, and I'm glad he agreed to contribute. Enjoy the post below - it's just fantastic, by the way. Thanks, Carson!

If you've visited these electronic pages before, you're almost surely aware that the proprietor of this site, Mr. Larry Granillo, is a resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Something of which you're maybe less aware is that, in just over a week, the wife and I -- I, Carson Cistulli, that is -- will pick up a Penske-brand truck*, fill it with literally all of our earthly possessions, and point it (i.e. the aforementioned truck) in the direction of the Middle West, with the idea that we'll arrive safe and mostly sound in Madison, Wisconsin, around August 1st.

*Penske: Dedication at every turn.

It'd be hard to overstate my enthusiasm for the move. It's an enthusiasm that exists for a number of reasons -- I mean, Wisconsin is the epicenter both of beer and cheese in the fifty nifty -- but I feel that the most prominent of these reasons is the knowledge that I will soon be taking up residence in the state that has produced ubermensch Mr. Bob Uecker.

As Nerd Ally and Insufferable Math Snob Jack Moore would certainly agree, Bob Uecker is a VIP in all our hearts. Many who've never heard his work as the Voice of the Brewers will at least know him from his role as Indians radio announcer Harry Doyle in Major League. Or as Mr. Belvedere's low-brow adversary in the show of the same name (Mr. Belvedere, that is -- not Low-Brow Adversary).

I'd like to make a case, however -- with my tongue as far away from my cheek as is comfortably possible -- that Bob Uecker is more than just a Good Times Charlie. I'd like to make a case that he is -- at least so far as his public persona is concerned -- that he's as perfect an ethical model as we have in our popular culture.

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Home Run of the Day: Prince Fielder, Milwaukee Brewers (Trot Time: 22.96 seconds) [video]

This is Home Run of the Day mostly because of what happened in Prince's next at-bat. The home run came in the 7th inning, and was the first run in a five-run inning off of Tommy Hanson. Leading off the 8th, Prince faced new pitcher Jonny Venters. The first pitch was an 84-mph slider about a foot over Prince's head. After a warning from umpire Angel Hernandez, the next pitch from Venters drilled Prince square in the back at 94-mph. Obviously, Prince was upset, but nothing happened. Angel Hernandez calmly walked Prince down to first base, Venters was thrown out, and, eventually, so was Bobby Cox.

Watch video of the ejection.

Brewers fans are absolutely confident that Prince was hit on purpose, and a number of Braves fans seem to think so too (though there are plenty who deny it). Cox and Venters deny it, of course, but they pretty much have to. This is the third time this year (and second time this weekend) that a Braves pitcher has hit either Ryan Braun or Prince Fielder after a home run, so it's understandable that Brewers fans might be a little suspicious.

But maybe Prince had it coming. He does tend to watch big flies on occasion. Here's what I wrote in a comment over at Brew Crew Ball:

If the Braves (or their fans) are complaining over Prince’s swing, then they’re just looking for something to worry about. Yes, it was a big, emphatic swing, but his body language on the swing was completely in line with the energy he put into the uppercut. When he decided to swing that big, there was nothing he could do about his body. In short, he swung so hard he lost his balance, and there was only one thing to do.

It’s no different then when a player hangs on the rim after a dunk in order to regain his balance. There’s a penalty for hanging on the rim for no reason, but an unbalanced guy has plenty of reason to do it and will never get called for it.

After the swing, Prince was nothing but respectful when running. He got out of the box fast, and didn’t do any fancy stomp on the plate when he got around. The trot itself was 22.96 seconds, which isn’t slow at all (though it’s not fast either – it’s pretty average for Prince).

As I said, you have to be looking for something to complain about if you’re blaming Prince for that…

I still believe that. Who knows what happens on the field, though. Accidents do happen. All we can do is speculate. But with Bobby Cox at the helm, Prince Fielder at the plate, and a recent history of "accidental" beanings, I have to side with those who are suspicious of this beaning today.

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It's Friday, and I bet you thought that we were done with the Guest Posts for the week. Well, I'm happy to say that you're wrong. This post comes from Vince over at my favorite Brewers blog, Miller Park Drunk. Things are a little different over at MPD, but that's what makes it so great. It also helps that the writing is top-notch, whether it's an inspired piece about Father's Day or a satirical look at the Corey/Prince power "duel" (dating guides aside, of course). Make sure to check it out. Thanks for the post, Vince!

I used to live in Alabama. This was a cold, dark time in my life that I've never truly recovered from (tractor accident), but while living there I got to see the intensity that is college football rivalries. In college football fans will fight, shoot each other and even go so far as to steal each other's crystal meth in the honor of their team. It's completely insane and stupid and I loved every minute of it. They do this because they're stupid people, but also because rivalries impassion us. Rivalries among fans are one of the greatest things about sports and the fact that a few crazy people go so far as to want to hurt and murder makes it all the better.

In baseball, we have a few of these rivalries as well. There is the one that Fox never shuts the hell up about (Mariners-Padres, natch), the one that started in New York and sort of continues on the west coast (Giants-Dodgers), the one where the one team chokes all the time and the other team is the Phillies and the friendly one where everyone really likes each other that Will Leitch wrote a book about (Cardinals-Cubs). Living in Wisconsin and maintaining a blog about the Brewers I am supposed to buy into the notion that the Chicago Cubs are our hated, natural rival. Despite the fact that, you know, we've only been regularly playing each other since 1998 and have only been in like one(-ish) pennant race.

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The guest post for today comes from Patrick Sullivan, who writes for Baseball Analysts. If you've never read Baseball Analysts or Patrick's posts, you're missing out. It's easily one of the best easy-to-read stats sites on the web, and Patrick fits right in. He was also the first person to ask me to write a guest post last summer, so I'm pleased to have him return the favor. You can also find Patrick's musings on Twitter at @PatrickSull.