I just wanted to take the quick opportunity here to point out that Sean Smith now has the Rally WAR Data for the 2009 season up over at his site, BaseballProjection.com. He actually announced this in a blog posting last week. You can use the website to view individual players' data, or even compare the Top 500 players of all time.

But, even better, he has also updated the downloadable data to include the 2009 season. For those who already downloaded the original data, you can pay $5 to download the year-2009 update. And, if you haven't yet purchased the data, the $15-for-one-file or $25-for-both are still available, complete with the 2009 data.

I know I already spent yesterday talking about some great resources available, but I had to do it again. The Rally WAR database is just too fantastic of a tool. Go take a look if you're at all interested in the data.

I'm excited to be going to the Lakers game tonight, so I probably won't have anything up tomorrow. Enjoy your day, and be sure to check out the Rally WAR database.

For those of you who might have read my earlier pitch for SABR but decided to think on it a little more, here's a little more information for you to consider. Last month, after a long wait, SABR finally got access to the Paper of Records digital archives, including 117 years worth of Sporting News issues. This is fantastic news for baseball fans because it gives everyone - well, SABR members at least - an easy way to access one of the best and more comprehensive sources of baseball reporting and writing from decades long gone. From SABR's press release:

The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) has made available to its dues paying members access to The Sporting News (1886 to 2003) online, along with dozens of other newspapers, including some years of the Baltimore Afro-American.

This resource will help members with their baseball research and provide more opportunities to fill in player pages at the soon-to-be soft-launched (to members only) SABR Encyclopedia.

This is something I've been hoping for for a while now, and I can't be more pleased to see it. The Paper of Record website has some user-interface issues and could be a little more friendly to researchers, but there's no denying its wealth of information. And all for the price of a SABR membership (remember, 30-and-younger get a discounted membership rate)? Well worth it!

Poking around with the site over the weekend, I thought I'd look for the first time Bill James, the celebrated sabermetrician, not one of the various ballplayers by that name, found himself in the Sporting News. It should probably come as no surprise that his first appearance came years before his work took off, in the "Voice of the Fan" section. After all, if you were as big of a fan of baseball as Bill James was in the 1960s and 1970s, chances are pretty good that you were reading the Sporting News on a regular basis. Bill's first appearance came in the January 12, 1974, issue of the Sporting News, as a letter. It was as informative as you'd expect:

(click "Read More" to continue reading)

I've mentioned this before, but the baseball cards that I grew up on were, above all others, the 1988 through 1991 sets - specifically, the '89 & '91 Topps and the '88 and '90 Donruss sets. Sure, there were plenty of Score and Fleer and Upper Deck in there, but those were the main ones I collected every year.

For those who collected cards around the same time - before the "insert" craze got out of hand - one of the most memorable subsets by any cardmaker was Donruss's annual set of Diamond Kings. Numbered 1 - 26 each year, the Diamond Kings featured one "star" player from each club, no matter how bad the club or how underwhelming the "star". The Baseball Card Blog has a pretty solid write-up on these Diamond Kings:

The Diamond King subset cards in 1982 Donruss were the first cards to feature out-and-out paintings since 1956 Topps. For nine years, 1982 to 1990, the subset featured the previous season’s stars, one from each team, in goofy headshots on colored backgrounds, each year more outrageous than the last (culminating in the bizarre Alexander Calder-esque background explosions of 1990).

Read the rest of that post for some interesting observations on what happened to the set. Eventually, in 1992, it became an official "insert set" (or whatever collector's call those things), and were thus no longer a part of the standard cards put out each year. It was at this point that I stopped caring about the Diamond Kings (and most baseball cards, frankly).

But in those ten years, Donruss made some fun cards and some interesting choices. The art-work was always great to look at (the blatant Latin-ness of Fernando and Jose above notwithstanding), and few cards were as fun to come across that first time. But who all were the Diamond Kings? Using various resources on the internet - mostly card images found on eBay or Google and this list of Donruss complete sets found at the Baseball Almanac - I compiled a list of all 260 Diamond Kings between 1982 and 1991 (26 teams * 10 years).

I expected to find plenty of repeat winners - just how many stars did the 1980s Braves or Mariners have, anyway? - but there were actually very few. That tells me that Donruss must have made a deliberate effort to spread out the winners to as many players as possible. And while that may be nice for a few teams with more than one star that might otherwise have been dominated by their best player, it certainly made for a few interesting choices. Below are a few of the more surprising, odd or noteworthy Diamond Kings.

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)

It's been a pretty fun week. The Winter Meetings proved to be a little more exciting than they looked like they would on Monday, and Wezen-Ball had probably it's best week ever when Baseball Musings, Baseball Think Factory, Circling the Bases, River Ave. Blues, Baseball Reference, MLB Trade Rumors, and Joe Posnanski himself, among others, all linked to my piece on the highest paid baseball players in history. It was pretty fun to see that so many people liked it, and I certainly appreciated all the comments and suggestions that I got. Overall, it was a good week.

So let's end the week on a fun and positive note. Watch as Goofy teaches us the basics of the game and then battles himself in the last of the 9th inning in the final game of the World Series. Goofy is, as Roger and Jessica Rabbit told us, a genius, and the 1942 artwork is fantastic. It's a real treat to watch. Enjoy!

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"Let's see if the Braves are on. ... I'd like to find out how the Braves are doin' after all this time. Probably still finding ways to lose." -- Sonny Clemonds, 20th century country music star cryogenically awoken in the 24th century (Star Trek: The Next Generation, "The Neutral Zone")

In 1988, the conventional wisdom was that the Atlanta Braves were the worst team in baseball, that they had been for quite some time and that they would probably remain so for quite a while longer. It's why the writers of a show like Star Trek: The Next Generation felt so comfortable making a "400-years-of-crappiness" joke at the Braves' expense. And it's why Street and Smith's allowed Maury Allen to pen such nasty previews of the club year-after-year. To wit:

1987: "The Braves are a heavy-footed, dull baseball team seemingly stuck in quicksand. They never get much better or much worse. They move up and down only because some other clubs do or do not falter. The Braves were last in 1986, 23.5 games out. This year they will probably be about the same margin out but may move up a notch if the Padres are as weak they appear to be."

1988: "One of these days Ted Turner will just get sick of the whole thing, go back to his boats and his basketball, his radio and his television properties, his ranches and his real estate, and let the Braves slip into the Georgia wilderness. They yawned through another ho-hum season in Atlanta with a 69-92 mark, finished 20.5 games out, had the league's worst pitching with a 4.63 ERA (a burden even in easy home-run parks like Atlanta), and did nothing significant to improve over the winter. Chuck Tanner and Bobby Cox took over with high hopes three years back, but both are now always rumored to be moving on. The Atlanta situation is not an inviting prospect for any serious baseball man."

1989: "Sometimes you have to wonder why the Atlanta Braves start the season. They hardly ever finish in any place but last. Only 848,089 fans bothered to come out of their homes and hotels last year to sit in sweltering Atlanta Stadium to be bothered and bored. The Braves were up to their old tricks, winning 54 games, losing 106, and finishing 39.5 games behind the Dodgers, showing no signs of recovering, and not even being funny anymore. They fired Chuck Tanner for all those accumulated sins, hired Russ Nixon and almost lost him when he demanded more than a year to rebuild the team. Asking a man to rebuild the Braves in 12 months is like asking the Italians to rebuild Rome after its fall."

I'm not exactly old enough to remember those years clearly, but I do remember the sentiment from the time: the Braves were a terrible team and a terrible franchise. And then they weren't. They drafted and traded for young pitchers Tom Glavine and John Smoltz, they nearly won the World Series in 1991, and then they splurged on free agent Cy Young winner Greg Maddux and never looked back. By 1994, when the Star Trek character above supposedly "died", the Braves were one of the best teams in baseball. The transformation did not take all that long to make.

At the same time that the Braves were gearing up for their decade-and-a-half of dominance, the Cleveland Indians were sinking to their lowest point. There's a reason they were the star of the 1989 film Major League. The opening sequence of the movie sums it up nicely:

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)

Oh, how things can change in a year...

Late on the night of Monday, December 1, 2008, I finished writing something that would drastically change the way I spent the next year (and more!). The copy of the 1981 Sporting News Baseball Yearbook that I had recently bought off of eBay arrived that day and, after browsing through it, I was inspired to write "Baseball in the Year 2000: Predictions from 1981". Allow me to quote myself:

This evening, the 1981 Sporting News Baseball Yearbook that I found on eBay was delivered to my house. I was excited to look through it, to see what they had to say about baseball at that time... could they foresee Fernando-mania? Was the Dodgers-Yankees Series predicted? Did people realize just how phenomenal Rickey's rookie year was, and what it would lead to? Was Mike Schmidt's status as the greatest third-basemen ever recognized this early (Schmidt and George Brett do share a cover on the magazine)?

Looking through the magazine, I came across an article with a great premise: predicting what will happen to baseball in the year 2000, still 20 years away from the time this was written. Introducing the article, author Joseph Surso wrote, with tongue at least a little in cheek:

"One thing you can bet on: the green that will continue to transform the game the most is mint-green, not grass-green. And, considering the stampede for green at all levels of the game in 1981, you almost can envision three leagues, at least six divisions and maybe nine, tiers of playoffs, a World Series with Japan and Latin America, 7-foot pitchers, $3,000,000-a-year stars, 10 or so men to a side, metal bats, rabbit balls, monster promotional give-aways every night, network control of schedules and maybe even of players' contracts, and $25 tickets if all the above don't work."

I was pretty pleased with how the post turned out, and, since I had never actually written anything that I expected people to read, I decided to share it with a few people I knew (how else would they find it in the sea of Blogspot). One of those people I shared it with was the illustrious Craig Calcaterra of Shysterball, who was kind enough to ignore my breach of netiquette and write something nice about it over at his blog. And from there it took off.

Soon I was seeing links to the post from Baseball Think Factory, River Ave. Blues, Bugs and Cranks, Scott Simkus, and a bunch of other smaller blogs. And then Rob Neyer linked to the post from his digs at ESPN, and I was hooked. I had spent an hour or so writing about a fun little article that I came across that evening and, all of sudden, thousands of people were reading my work. It was a pretty exciting 24 hours, and I haven't stopped since.

(Click "Read More" to continue reading)

Today I'm travelling down to St. Louis to visit some family that I haven't seen in years, and won't be back in town until Sunday evening. It should be a fun time, what with the family-visiting, seeing the city, and even going to a Blues-Red Wings game on Saturday night. I'm really looking forward to it.

Early Monday morning, I'm heading to Nashville for the week for a work conference. That might not be as fun, but it'll (hopefully) be interesting. With all this travel over the next ten days, you'll likely see fewer posts. I have one or two posts scheduled to run next week already, but I have no idea if I'll have any time to write any others. I'll do my best.

In the meantime, have a great Thanksgiving, everyone, and travel safely.

There aren't a lot of things that Duane Kuiper is famous for. San Francisco Giants fans, of course, know him as half of their broadcast team, alongside Mike Krukow, and older Cleveland Indians fan might remember him from their 1970s heyday. Besides that, most baseball fans across the country likely have no clue who he is - unless they're fans of the great sportswriter, Joe Posnanski.

Fans of Posnanski, like me, who have been reading his blog for the last couple of years probably know way more about Duane Kuiper than we ever would've thought imaginable. Kuiper, after all, was not the most effective major leaguer, especially with the bat, though he did manage to stick around for 12 seasons (his glove made up for his anemic bat). If you read Poz's blog long enough (like, say, a week), you're bound to come across the fact that Kuiper, despite having over 3,700 plate appearances, only ever managed to hit one home run in his entire career. No other player could boast that many plate appearances with only one home run. It's one of the most remarkable factoids you can find in baseball's annals.

But as funny and endearing as it is, thirty years later, I wonder what it was like when it happened. After all, Kuiper had no way of knowing that it would be his last. Sure, he was already 1,300 at-bats into his career when that first one came, but, even then, you'd have to think that he felt that, given 2,000 more at-bats, he'd have one or two more. But he never did. So what happened that day, August 29, 1977?

The Associated Press said that Kuiper benefited from the "day of the homer":

(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)

(Don't worry, this eventually gets to baseball... I promise.)

As a kid, my mom once made the mistake of incorrectly answering aloud a multiplication problem from her teacher. Apparently, the teacher had once answered the same question wrong, too, and was subsequently embarrassed into learning the answer. When my mother did the same thing, the teacher enacted the same punishment: the entire class got into a circle, with my mom at the center, and pointed their fingers at her as they sang "8 times 7 is 56! 8 times 7 is 56!" That went on long enough for an embarrassed little girl to learn her lesson. Needless to say, my mom never again forgot what 8 times 7 was.

Most of us have a similar experience in our childhood. I don't mean the crowd of kids pointing at you and laughing as they sing the answer - that's just cruel, and I certainly hope no one else has similar memories. What I mean is, most of us have some relatively minor lesson from our childhood educations that we remember better than others because of the way we learned it. Maybe it's a math concept that you struggled with for a week or more until an older brother or someone showed you a nifty little way to understand it and you had that "hallelujah moment". Or maybe it was a history lesson that you read over and over until you just couldn't forget it. Chances are, though, that it was a grammar lesson that some overly strict teacher drilled into your head. "You cannot start a sentence with 'because'!" or "Don't end a sentence with a preposition!" or "It's '20 items or fewer', not '20 items or less'!" and so on.

It's a common story: kids write as they talk, and often miss the nuances of the written word, leaving fragments and the like all over the place. Teachers then point out their mistakes, but, instead of trying to teach the full complexities of the English grammar to an eight-year old, they give the kid a shorthand rule to follow that is meant to help. The kid then internalizes that shorthand rule as "the rule" and spends the rest of his life correcting people who don't adhere to it. After all, that's the rule that he had such a hard time learning and, now that he's learned it so well, he's not going to forget it. And, lord forgive you if he sees you make that mistake on a website - there's no internet alive that will prevent him from trying to teach you that same lesson.

The problem is that this isn't "8 times 7". When it comes to language, there are few hard and fast rules that follow the "100% right or 100% wrong" nature of an arithmetic problem. Chances are, that shorthand rule that the kid originally learned was only true under certain circumstances and with certain qualifications, but he never learned those because the teacher thought it was too complicated for him at that age. But now it's 30 years later and that lesson has been ingrained in him for all those years. It's asking a lot - maybe too much - to expect him to accept that he's been wrong all these years and to change his ways. For a lot of people, there's just too much history there to fight.

Which is where baseball comes in. For many, many baseball fans, especially those who grew up in the 1950s/60s and before, the traditional stats - the RBI, the AVG, the W/L record - are the stats that they internalized at a young age, the stats that they've defined as "the rule" and that they've spent their life abiding by, but that only work in limited circumstances that they were too young to learn years ago. In language, the people that I've described are called "prescriptivists" - there's a certain prescription, or set of rules, that the English language must follow at all times. In the same vein, these traditionalists can also be thought of as "baseball prescriptivists". To them, there's a set of rules that must be followed when analyzing a club's or a player's performance. These are rules that they spent a lot of time learning and understanding when they were younger, and that they've spent a lot of years using and trusting. They've served the prescriptivists well, and any change seems unnecessary and ill-advised.

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