Blackmon looked like he was just jogging after that ball. Perhaps with the thought that there was no way to stop Cronenworth from getting the triple at that point. But there are worse things than a triple, as he found out.
Blackmon is just back from a groin injury and is clearly not 100% when it comes to running. He's never been a guy to dog it in any way. That said, as bad as the team has been this year he may have decided it's time to start.
So my Nats had quite a day beyond Max and Soto ... two positive COVID tests, a Robles rolled ankle that went from “Oh God he’s done for the year” to “he’s staying in” in the space of three minutes - and yet another ridiculous base runner interference call on Trea Turner that threw mild-mannered Davey Martinez into a foot stomping first base throwing (and very entertaining) rage that got him ejected. Never a dull moment.
I’m sorry, Craig, but in one week you amplify a tweet that puts down Joe Posnanski’s writing for being positive and then you say one “endured” 1983 Dan Aykoryd, in a scene with Albert Brooks and CCR’s “Midnight Special” and some pretty slick stop-motion monster effects. More of this, and I’ll have to… comment again? I dunno, I enjoy the newsletter in general.
(Landis and the helicopter though… that’s bad stuff. He probably should have been criminally liable.)
He's obviously talented, but he just annoys me in a lot of ways. Always has. Even if there are a couple of things he's done that I have liked. Like, obviously "Ghostbusters" is good, but I find him to be the weakest link.
Hell, I think even liked the "Wanna see something REALLY scary" thing when I was younger, but as my distaste for him grew over the years, it's now colored that somehow as well.
My Twitter bio simply reads “to name names, a really big fan of Dan Aykroyd.” A quote from the late great MF Doom. Is that why you only SOMETIMES like my Tweets, Craig?!
It wasn’t Craig, but it was in the intro earlier in the week, tweeted out by the guy who wrote that genuinely wonderful tribute to his sister in the guest post a few weeks ago.
Ah. I just read the thread and I must say, I wholeheartedly concur. Posnanski is a ninja master of whitewashing things, with Joe Paterno as exhibit 1A. He is the Steven Spielberg of sports writers, and I am surprised that more people don't find his shtick off-putting.
I don't read Patterson, but my assumption is the co-authors do almost all of the writing (in Patterson's style) and then they put Patterson's name on it so it will automatically sell in large numbers. I'm sure Patterson add some personal tweaks to it, but suspect he could hardly be considered the author.
I actually represented a woman in the mid-2000s, who had been Patterson's girlfriend for a time, who was suing him for taking her work and passing it off as his own. The thing was: that's his business model. Like, when an author has a story he likes, he, them and the publisher enters into an agreement about it and it's all kosher, legally speaking. And, at least financially, it's a pretty good deal for the author.
That he has THAT kind of setup, and people knocking down his door to give him new stories on that basis, and he STILL (allegedly) ripped off his girlfriend's story was a hell of a thing, but that was her claim.
It went away in settlement before we got too deep into the case, but it was quite the thing to learn about Patterson's "process"
I didn't read the Paterno book as the subject matter even pre-Sandusky didn't interest me and post-Sandusky disgusted me.
Beyond that, though, I absolutely love Posnanski's work. Whitewashing? No. He just has the ability to continually look for the good in his subjects and write optimistically about life. I love his oft-told story of seeing a balgame with Buck O'Neill and how the latter responded when an adult grabbed a foul ball: maybe he has a sick child at home.
Snark and biting commentary has its place, but I much prefer joy, particularly from my entertainment. Poz provides that in spades.
And beyond that, I would think that anyone in any slice of the entertainment industry - sports writers included - would be thrilled to be compared to Steven Spielberg, creator of some of the most popular and successful movies and movie franchises of all time.
By that logic, McDonald's makes the best hamburger in America.
There is nothing wrong with being positive. But Posnanski's willingness to address ONLY the positive, as well as his taking "stances" that are framed as controversial but aren't, not to mention his phony "Aw, shucks" persona, crosses well into the realm of being dishonest and patronizing.
I don’t begrudge anyone’s opinions, and the following is not meant as anything other than mu person opinion. All I can say about the Paterno book is I don’t think that it doesn’t let him off the hook. Considering the timing of when he wrote it, while the news was breaking about Sandusky, he had a choice to make and clearlu he decide it’s not a book specifically about Sandusky but about Paterno’s whole life. I understand why it can feel like he elided over a lot of what certainly is the most dominant part of Paterno’s legacy (for the record, it should be and if he’s remembered for anything, it’s enabling, actively or passively, Sandusky. I also can’t stand the hagiography around coaches or managers in general.) but he wasn’t writing an account of a child abuse scandal and he was being paid to write a Paterno biography.
All that being said, I enjoy Posnanski’s writing and Spielberg’s movies, too. But I’m on board for Craig’s writing too and, I don’t know, Joe Dante movies? I’m not sure if that analogy tracked.
I like how in your note about Turnbull you wrote "four of five" no-hitters, clearly written before the sixth one last night. Of course, Kluber's was the second one this year against Texas, so six no-hitters have been against three teams. Given that the third team is Texas, the point still stands.
I don't think is as simple as just saying pitching is greatly outclassing hitting. Yes, hits per game are at historically low levels. Only once in baseball history, in 1908, were the number of hits per game lower than this year. But runs per game, while down, isn't crazy low. For example, it was lower than now for a 5 year stretch for 2011 to 2015, and no one though that was then end of the world.
As one would guess, the hits per game being extremely low while the runs per game is only somewhat reduced seems to be due to more of those hits leaving the ballpark. While the home run rate is down from the previous 5 years, which were historic highs, this year's home rate is still higher than any other season in MLB history except the year 2000.
Advanced analytics has has found batters selling out for homers is the best way to score runs. And the fact that allowing balls in play results in those home runs happening has made pitchers sell out for the strikeout. You can do something to penalize pitching, such as moving back the mound. Which will result in more homers, and thus runs, and fewer strikeouts. But hitters will still sell out for homers and pitchers for strikeouts, and I don't see any path back to more action by having more balls in play.
It's a tough problem for sure. I'm okay with experimenting with deadening the ball so that the increase in launch angle is less of a viable strategy for those with marginal power (it seems like *everyone* can hit 20+ homers right now). I do think the strike zone should be raised at the bottom, but I think that would trade strikeouts for walks. I don't see how you incentivize more balls in play without moving fences back or deadening the ball a bit (or both).
So they did deaden the ball, I believe, and yeah, raising the bottom of the zone is the trade-off. I don't think it trades strikeouts for walks, however, because pitchers get punished less for pitching in the zone.
I’m for moving the mound back a bit personally to decrease velo. That said guys already are maxing our effort at the expense of command so it’d likely lead to some increase in walks and HBP (just hopefully more balls in play).
Fair, that could work too. I'm definitely for doing something to help promote more contact (and lower velo a bit). That said most hitters are still gonna sell out for power and you can't just go back to the dead-ball era, that'd be super weird for everyone. But if you can balance things a bit more to promote contact (and stolen bases), well I'd find that version of baseball more enjoyable than the current one, for sure.
Yes on the maxing effort at the expense of command. And not just on velocity either. Guys are trying to put the nastiest spin they can on every breaking pitch to maximize break. I have no stats to prove it, but I suspect wild pitches are up in recent years.
I’m 48, so while I never saw “Twilight Zone: The Movie”, I vaguely remembered the tragedy that befell it during filming and all the media coverage in the immediate aftermath. Then, a few years ago, while watching the original “Bad News Bears”, I got to thinking...whatever happened to the guy playing the win-at-all-costs Yankees dad? I went to Wikipedia and...oof.
It's really a testament to his portrayal of Yankee manager Coach Turner that when I heard he died, my snap reaction was, "Good, he was an asshole" for an instant before I remembered, "That was a role he played as an actor, you moron."
The original Bad News Bears is a delight - I'm going to have to give that a re-watch soon.
I think its a good reminder of how shitty the world was in the 70s and shows we have come a long way.
You shouldn't be comfortable thinking of it as a kids movie, which it totally was. I cannot speak to its artistic value as a movie, my last viewing was years ago, and fortunately my kids got bored and left the room. I continued to watch to see all the cringe things that were normal.
Oh, it's definitely not a kid-appropriate movie despite the fact that it was intended to be for kids.
The Bears didn't win the league, but they won at "kids playing baseball" a hell of a lot more than those Yankees did - because at least the Bears had fun. And Buttermaker (who should never have been allowed to be the coach in the first place) somehow accidentally managed to teach the team a thing or 2.
Yeah, it's not wonderful to see 7th graders using hard-r racial slurs, but as you pointed out - the 70s were rough, man. Tanner Boyle in 1976 probably WOULD have spoken like that.
As a black dude who was a black kid in the late 1970s, I can assure y'all that the kid dialogue in BNB was spot on. I grew up in Southern California and lots of my white peers felt quite comfortable using those slurs as playground taunts. Somehow, tho, the movie is concurrently "of its time" and timeless.
I think that's the part that i found jarring - I was born at the tail end of the 70s, and I never heard my teammates or opponents using slurs. And this was in VERY rural Indiana with a lot of racist assholes in the area.
So I was shocked by the movie - even though the kids in the movie were only born 15-ish years before me, it seemed like a movie from 50 years in the past when I saw it as a kid.
I'm the opposite. I was born in the 70s in Philly and was surrounded by racists. Tanner's language is mild compared to what I was used to. I tend to think that a lot of what people now consider "cringe" is just a bit overstated. The idea that Buttermaker never should have been around kids is laughable to me.
Watching the Yankee pregame show, Jack Curry mentioned the Yanks were looking to get a Solid Six(TM) out of Kluber last night. Obviously they got more than that, but as a lapsed lawyer you know better than most if you don't protect your IP it becomes public domain. Can't let those YES Network goons walk all over you like that, Craig. :-)
Speaking of YES and the horrible, awful, very bad Michael Kay, while the Bruins fans got one of the best play-by-play bits ever on their OT winner, YES viewers got Kay saying of Kluber, "Now Kluber is part of forever."
Was he channeling Edwin Stanton on Lincoln: "Now he belongs to the ages" ? (The quote that was likely never uttered.)
No, he was just being his usual overreaching self.
I get inordinately mad when announcers say "History!" or the like on broadcasts or in summaries after things like no hitters or three homer games or those ridiculous multiple modifier fun facts.
Sure it's "history," as is the fact that I woke my kids up this morning. or that someone struck out.
I am inordinately bummed out that Kay is gonna outlast Ken Singleton in that booth. The best version of that broadcast is Kenny on the PBP, Cone as the primary color guy, and maybe a third guy who knows how to pick his spots.
I Think You Should Leave is a brilliant, bizarre sketch show. If you're not the kind of person who gets uncomfortable with cringe humor, you should watch it.
And if you are someone like that, I don't know, the first sketch is kind of that, but it's not nearly on the level of other things. I'm just repeating something I heard others say.
Such a great show. The “Bones are their money” song cracks me up every single time. While waiting for a season 2, if anyone else has Paramount + (I have it to watch big-time soccer), Detroiters is on there and it’s also great. Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson doing their thing, good stuff.
I don’t know if I’d call it “great” but it was pretty enjoyable. My two favorite things about it:
1) The sketches were all pretty short. For the few that weren’t really that funny, it was over and done with real quick. (Didn’t do that SNL thing where the worst sketches drag on forever.)
2) Some bizarre nonsensical thing happening within the first 2 sketches of an episode, that has a wonderful payoff in a callback about 3-4 sketches later. This happened in multiple episodes.
Oh man I just love it. Not every sketch hits (not every episode as a whole hits), but that’s the nature of sketch shows. Nothing made me laugh harder (and the hot dog suit and car focus group have been very meme-able in a good way).
While I generally agree on the “difficult people” rule of thumb….I have run into a job situation where I’m in state government so I have a lot of job security, but so too do all my co workers, from the barely trying to the overzealous jerks. It’s kind of like purgatory. Once I get my public service loan forgiveness later this year, I’m really weighing my options for what I want to do next.
Letterman revealed his true self on the night Harvey Pekar came on the show wearing a tee shirt supporting GE workers, who were on strike at the time. Letterman's flop sweat was painful to see.
From an Atlanta National League Base Ball Club fan: the Chop was originally an organic thing started by the fans at old Fulton County Stadium around the time of the worst to first club. Quirky and fun, even if derivative from the origins at FSU. It didn't take long until it became something driven by the club with the silly organ music and the free foam tomahawks. Even setting aside the racial connotations, it was forced cheering akin to duh, duh, duh, duh ... CHARGE! Or LETS MAKE SOME NOISE!!!!!
Old man shouting at clouds time: I love fan excitement, I hate manufactured fan excitement. Turn down the volume on the canned stuff and let the 30-40K people create the atmosphere. A huge part of the beauty of baseball is the pastoral nature of it and that includes interludes of near silence. And get off my lawn you hooligans!
Same here; I've been amused at the scoreboard at Nats Park exhorting the 8,000 or so in attendance to MAKE NOISE ... if the situation calls for it I'm gonna be noisier but it's tough to do that when I'm being a) told to do so and b) I'm one of the only two people in my row.
I should note that while I used to go to a lot of games at Fulton County and during the first decade at Turner Field, I have yet to go to a game at White Flight Field in Cobb County. I live close to the AAA park in Gwinnett. It is easier to get to the park, much cheaper (including the all important beer!), and a more relaxing atmosphere. I'm not exactly boycotting WFF, but fighting through rush hour traffic to get to I-75/285 then to sit shoulder to shoulder with 30,000 of my closest friends isn't high on my list. So the observations about the Chop and the noise are now a couple years out of date.
Can I assume they do the chop at Gwinnett? Or did that stop when they became the Stripers a couple years ago?
I worked with the Richmond Braves 20 years ago, and the chop was tired and overplayed even back then. The whole lazy attitude was “Crowd looks dead...let’s play the chop!” And of course the crowd livened up...but for those of us who had to experience it at least 2-3 times a game for 70 nights it was pretty exhausting.
Pre-pandemic, I'd go to a couple dozen games a year in Gwinnett and I don't recall a single Chop since they became the Stripers and, frankly, pretty few when they were the GBraves. We do get the overplayed broken glass sound anytime a foul ball goes over the stands, but that is a quirk of a different class.
I haven't been to a game yet this year - their second homestand starts next week and, assuming decent weather, I'll be there.
"but for those of us who had to experience it at least 2-3 times a game for 70 nights it was pretty exhausting."
A couple of decades back, I was a bartender at a beachbar in a touristy area along the coast. The various singers who would perform played Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville" at least once an hour every single night. I'm a parrothead, but can't stand that song anymore.
Thanks, but I stole WFF from a Braves fan who posts at Think Factory.
And FWIW, Turner Field also did not have direct access from MARTA but, just like WFF also required a bus transfer albeit a shorter transfer than the new park.
Lol. This is...this why Atlanta is not super-high on my list of cities to visit. Seems like it could be pretty livable if you pick the right neighborhood but a city that's mostly built for driving and yet is trafficky and inconvenient and confusing for that...no thanks!
Yeah at least here in Denver the Rockies park is right downtown, Nuggets/Avs stadium right off downtown. The only real miss was building the Rapids MLS stadium in Commerce City.
Yeah, the Stars and Mavs play right outside of downtown Dallas and you can take DART, our public transit. The Rangers and Cowboys are out in Arlington, which for the longest time was the largest city in America without any public transportation. I believe there is now one bus loop that the college uses. There are various theories as to why. Some people believe that Jerry will kill any attempt to get a train line because he makes too much money on parking. Others believe all the car dealerships around Arlington and Grand Prairie don't want anyone using the train. The only real fact is that voters in Arlington have turned down joining DART at least twice, I believe 3 times. It's alleged they don't want "those" people coming to their fair city on the train.
When the Rangers were gearing up a couple years ago to fleece the taxpayers on the new ballpark, you started seeing stories in the local media about the Rangers were considering land in downtown Dallas. I 100% believe those stories were planted by the Rangers to scare Arlington voters into paying for the new ballpark.
I like your point re the pastoral nature and the interludes of comparative silence. Case in point...I'm listening/watching to the MLB-on-youtube broadcast of the Giants-Reds game. There are *four* announcers (why??) and they never shut up. C'mon, guys.
Four? Ugh. That is at least two too many. A single announcer can certainly do it, but it would take someone almost as good as Vin Scully. Silence isn't a bad thing in a TV broadcast.
Ugh is spot-on. Even radio doesn't need as much talking as they were doing, let alone a TV/youtube broadcast. Too many announcers - and the game was a blow-out so they mostly moved on to constant conversation about other things, rather than the game. Great American is such a pretty ballpark - they could have done a lot more showing it off...
Question for Craig: there are occasional notes about the number of people opening the daily emails. As often as not, I try to read CoC via substack on my computer rather than look at the email on my phone. Does that mess with the data and, since there is no advertising anyway, does it matter if it does?
It doesn't matter at all. Whether someone opens the email or just navigates to the site is the same for me. I think Substack just gives email opening data for people who really want to dig down and track it, but really, I can't be bothered.
I see the overall open rate when I navigate to my dashboard -- it's almost always 72-75% of emails opened on subscriber only days, almost always 50-52% on Free Thursdays. Of course there are likely a lot of people who do what you do and just go to a bookmark. That it varies so little is interesting, but as long as I'm not losing subscribers, I don't care too much.
I can, if I specifically look up someone's email address, see which ones they opened and didn't, but the only time I do that is if someone specifically asks me to or tells me that they didn't get the newsletter on a given day.
Is it? I really have zero idea how that rates. Of course, all of those people are paying me, so it's not like they aren't already at least a little invested.
CRM and Sales/Marketing Consultant here - those rates are excellent for email. It means not only is your content great, but that percent of your total subscribers are highly likely to renew next year. The ones that are subscribed and never/rarely open are (obviously?) the ones likely to churn/not renew.
In the survey you sent out a while back one of the questions was whether you read the newsletter via the email or website. Out of curiosity did the survey sample happen to correlate to the email open percentage you normally see? (For my part I always go straight to the website.)
As someone who sends out emails for a living (or, at least part of his living), I can tell you that there’s not really an exact science to email tracking. There’s plenty of ways to receive/open/read an email, without the tracker knowing that any of this happened.
So in reality, Craig can say for sure that “Reader X opened the email twice on this date” or “Reader Y clicked on the email on this date”....but if Reader Z doesn’t show up as an open or a click, it doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t open or click the email. Probably best to just look at patterns: making sure you’re not getting too many bounces, seeing which stories are getting more opens and clicks than others, etc.
Except for Craig’s brother of course. Pretty safe bet he’s not reading any of this stuff.
Thunderbird has a great preview function, so I often don't click through on emails. I haave several times gotten email from a group that I contributed to noting that I haven't "read" any of their emails in a while and asking if I still want to get them. Note that it's never the ones I *want* to unsubscribe from.
I'm not sure everyone understands the terms 'engagement', 'delivery', and 'deliverability' in ways that I do and that I'd guess from your writing above that you do, too.
"He has a locker, I have an office"- uhhh...APPEAL TO AUTHORITY much there, Tony? I'm honestly kind of...as a non White Sox fan just kind of fascinated to watch someone have their team in 1st yet lose the clubhouse before May is over. What retrograde thing will he do next? Can he really last the season, especially if/when the team goes through a rough patch? Fascinating, all around.
Any chance he knows he's not going to relate so he's leaning into being a "jerk boss" and unifying the locker room against him? Likely giving him WAY too much credit ... but they're winning so ::shruggie::
It really is "Major League, but the players uniting against their own manager" (I'm watching Ted Lasso right now which is probably putting that in my brain a bit). But yeah I don't think he's doing some kind of 5-D chess I think he's just an old crank. But I could be wrong, maybe he's a WILY old crank.
See? This is why we need a DH in the NL. It's a no-hitter equity issue.
[I'll show myself out, thanks.]
As mucked up as the Mets are, they are still good enough to get at least one hit, even when deGrom is pitching.
Even if he has to do it himself.
Cincinnati needs to give up another 7 inning one
I loved 12:30 am Letterman. But I was in college. I bet it had not aged well.
Letterman, FWIW, "gave us" Brother Theodore. You weren't gonna get that from Leno people. (Yeah, you can go to Youtube for hours of that ...")
Blackmon looked like he was just jogging after that ball. Perhaps with the thought that there was no way to stop Cronenworth from getting the triple at that point. But there are worse things than a triple, as he found out.
My guess is that they thought it was going to be a home run, so they lollygagged it out there.
And it's a miracle they've won 15.
Imagine how much worse they'd have been had they not gotten rid of that dead wood Arenado!
But insert it slowly.
Blackmon is just back from a groin injury and is clearly not 100% when it comes to running. He's never been a guy to dog it in any way. That said, as bad as the team has been this year he may have decided it's time to start.
That was my impression as well, that he's nursing an injury and probably shouldn't be on the grass.
CF should have been there backing up the play. It took 2 OF to help Cronenworth get his inside the parker.
So my Nats had quite a day beyond Max and Soto ... two positive COVID tests, a Robles rolled ankle that went from “Oh God he’s done for the year” to “he’s staying in” in the space of three minutes - and yet another ridiculous base runner interference call on Trea Turner that threw mild-mannered Davey Martinez into a foot stomping first base throwing (and very entertaining) rage that got him ejected. Never a dull moment.
Also a bit disappointed there was no youtube clip of Martinez weakly imitating the master of such tantrums, one Clell Lavern Hobson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ytSNt8YlU&t=1s&ab_channel=News11Sports
I’m sorry, Craig, but in one week you amplify a tweet that puts down Joe Posnanski’s writing for being positive and then you say one “endured” 1983 Dan Aykoryd, in a scene with Albert Brooks and CCR’s “Midnight Special” and some pretty slick stop-motion monster effects. More of this, and I’ll have to… comment again? I dunno, I enjoy the newsletter in general.
(Landis and the helicopter though… that’s bad stuff. He probably should have been criminally liable.)
Yeah, very surprised by the Aykroyd comment. That was one of my favorite parts of the movie. Fantastic scene.
He's obviously talented, but he just annoys me in a lot of ways. Always has. Even if there are a couple of things he's done that I have liked. Like, obviously "Ghostbusters" is good, but I find him to be the weakest link.
Hell, I think even liked the "Wanna see something REALLY scary" thing when I was younger, but as my distaste for him grew over the years, it's now colored that somehow as well.
My Twitter bio simply reads “to name names, a really big fan of Dan Aykroyd.” A quote from the late great MF Doom. Is that why you only SOMETIMES like my Tweets, Craig?!
Will Ferrell, the Dan Aykroyd of his "era."
Without him, it’s just The Blues Brother.
When was the Posnanski tweet?
It wasn’t Craig, but it was in the intro earlier in the week, tweeted out by the guy who wrote that genuinely wonderful tribute to his sister in the guest post a few weeks ago.
Ah. I just read the thread and I must say, I wholeheartedly concur. Posnanski is a ninja master of whitewashing things, with Joe Paterno as exhibit 1A. He is the Steven Spielberg of sports writers, and I am surprised that more people don't find his shtick off-putting.
I don't read Patterson, but my assumption is the co-authors do almost all of the writing (in Patterson's style) and then they put Patterson's name on it so it will automatically sell in large numbers. I'm sure Patterson add some personal tweaks to it, but suspect he could hardly be considered the author.
I actually represented a woman in the mid-2000s, who had been Patterson's girlfriend for a time, who was suing him for taking her work and passing it off as his own. The thing was: that's his business model. Like, when an author has a story he likes, he, them and the publisher enters into an agreement about it and it's all kosher, legally speaking. And, at least financially, it's a pretty good deal for the author.
That he has THAT kind of setup, and people knocking down his door to give him new stories on that basis, and he STILL (allegedly) ripped off his girlfriend's story was a hell of a thing, but that was her claim.
It went away in settlement before we got too deep into the case, but it was quite the thing to learn about Patterson's "process"
I didn't read the Paterno book as the subject matter even pre-Sandusky didn't interest me and post-Sandusky disgusted me.
Beyond that, though, I absolutely love Posnanski's work. Whitewashing? No. He just has the ability to continually look for the good in his subjects and write optimistically about life. I love his oft-told story of seeing a balgame with Buck O'Neill and how the latter responded when an adult grabbed a foul ball: maybe he has a sick child at home.
Snark and biting commentary has its place, but I much prefer joy, particularly from my entertainment. Poz provides that in spades.
And beyond that, I would think that anyone in any slice of the entertainment industry - sports writers included - would be thrilled to be compared to Steven Spielberg, creator of some of the most popular and successful movies and movie franchises of all time.
By that logic, McDonald's makes the best hamburger in America.
There is nothing wrong with being positive. But Posnanski's willingness to address ONLY the positive, as well as his taking "stances" that are framed as controversial but aren't, not to mention his phony "Aw, shucks" persona, crosses well into the realm of being dishonest and patronizing.
Oh, and if you didn't read the Paterno book, then you probably ought not be declaring that Posnanski is never guilty of whitewashing.
I don’t begrudge anyone’s opinions, and the following is not meant as anything other than mu person opinion. All I can say about the Paterno book is I don’t think that it doesn’t let him off the hook. Considering the timing of when he wrote it, while the news was breaking about Sandusky, he had a choice to make and clearlu he decide it’s not a book specifically about Sandusky but about Paterno’s whole life. I understand why it can feel like he elided over a lot of what certainly is the most dominant part of Paterno’s legacy (for the record, it should be and if he’s remembered for anything, it’s enabling, actively or passively, Sandusky. I also can’t stand the hagiography around coaches or managers in general.) but he wasn’t writing an account of a child abuse scandal and he was being paid to write a Paterno biography.
All that being said, I enjoy Posnanski’s writing and Spielberg’s movies, too. But I’m on board for Craig’s writing too and, I don’t know, Joe Dante movies? I’m not sure if that analogy tracked.
I like how in your note about Turnbull you wrote "four of five" no-hitters, clearly written before the sixth one last night. Of course, Kluber's was the second one this year against Texas, so six no-hitters have been against three teams. Given that the third team is Texas, the point still stands.
Big takeaway from Kluber’s no hitter is once more Kluber is proving to be a great signing.
I wonder how CBS feels about Colbert, who is about as political as you can be on network TV now.
I don't think is as simple as just saying pitching is greatly outclassing hitting. Yes, hits per game are at historically low levels. Only once in baseball history, in 1908, were the number of hits per game lower than this year. But runs per game, while down, isn't crazy low. For example, it was lower than now for a 5 year stretch for 2011 to 2015, and no one though that was then end of the world.
As one would guess, the hits per game being extremely low while the runs per game is only somewhat reduced seems to be due to more of those hits leaving the ballpark. While the home run rate is down from the previous 5 years, which were historic highs, this year's home rate is still higher than any other season in MLB history except the year 2000.
Advanced analytics has has found batters selling out for homers is the best way to score runs. And the fact that allowing balls in play results in those home runs happening has made pitchers sell out for the strikeout. You can do something to penalize pitching, such as moving back the mound. Which will result in more homers, and thus runs, and fewer strikeouts. But hitters will still sell out for homers and pitchers for strikeouts, and I don't see any path back to more action by having more balls in play.
It's a tough problem for sure. I'm okay with experimenting with deadening the ball so that the increase in launch angle is less of a viable strategy for those with marginal power (it seems like *everyone* can hit 20+ homers right now). I do think the strike zone should be raised at the bottom, but I think that would trade strikeouts for walks. I don't see how you incentivize more balls in play without moving fences back or deadening the ball a bit (or both).
So they did deaden the ball, I believe, and yeah, raising the bottom of the zone is the trade-off. I don't think it trades strikeouts for walks, however, because pitchers get punished less for pitching in the zone.
I’m for moving the mound back a bit personally to decrease velo. That said guys already are maxing our effort at the expense of command so it’d likely lead to some increase in walks and HBP (just hopefully more balls in play).
I'd rather see experiments with lowering the mound first. From what I've read, a flatter mound may also reduce stress on the arm and shoulder.
Fair, that could work too. I'm definitely for doing something to help promote more contact (and lower velo a bit). That said most hitters are still gonna sell out for power and you can't just go back to the dead-ball era, that'd be super weird for everyone. But if you can balance things a bit more to promote contact (and stolen bases), well I'd find that version of baseball more enjoyable than the current one, for sure.
Yes on the maxing effort at the expense of command. And not just on velocity either. Guys are trying to put the nastiest spin they can on every breaking pitch to maximize break. I have no stats to prove it, but I suspect wild pitches are up in recent years.
Definitely. It's kind of a bummer. Bring back the craft of pitching, imo! Changing speeds, working inside and outside, all that!
They *say* they deadened the ball, but I've yet to see any data.
Point taken. That said, I think this is the combo you try before you go elsewhere.
Agreed.
Touché. I like to imagine that “they say” was sung like Lisa Loeb and “yooou sayyy” right there.
I’m 48, so while I never saw “Twilight Zone: The Movie”, I vaguely remembered the tragedy that befell it during filming and all the media coverage in the immediate aftermath. Then, a few years ago, while watching the original “Bad News Bears”, I got to thinking...whatever happened to the guy playing the win-at-all-costs Yankees dad? I went to Wikipedia and...oof.
It's really a testament to his portrayal of Yankee manager Coach Turner that when I heard he died, my snap reaction was, "Good, he was an asshole" for an instant before I remembered, "That was a role he played as an actor, you moron."
The original Bad News Bears is a delight - I'm going to have to give that a re-watch soon.
Vic Morrow was Coach Turner? (checks IMDB) I didn't know that! Check him out as Sgt. Saunders in Combat! (the exclamation point is required)
it is...something.
I think its a good reminder of how shitty the world was in the 70s and shows we have come a long way.
You shouldn't be comfortable thinking of it as a kids movie, which it totally was. I cannot speak to its artistic value as a movie, my last viewing was years ago, and fortunately my kids got bored and left the room. I continued to watch to see all the cringe things that were normal.
Oh, it's definitely not a kid-appropriate movie despite the fact that it was intended to be for kids.
The Bears didn't win the league, but they won at "kids playing baseball" a hell of a lot more than those Yankees did - because at least the Bears had fun. And Buttermaker (who should never have been allowed to be the coach in the first place) somehow accidentally managed to teach the team a thing or 2.
Yeah, it's not wonderful to see 7th graders using hard-r racial slurs, but as you pointed out - the 70s were rough, man. Tanner Boyle in 1976 probably WOULD have spoken like that.
As a black dude who was a black kid in the late 1970s, I can assure y'all that the kid dialogue in BNB was spot on. I grew up in Southern California and lots of my white peers felt quite comfortable using those slurs as playground taunts. Somehow, tho, the movie is concurrently "of its time" and timeless.
I think that's the part that i found jarring - I was born at the tail end of the 70s, and I never heard my teammates or opponents using slurs. And this was in VERY rural Indiana with a lot of racist assholes in the area.
So I was shocked by the movie - even though the kids in the movie were only born 15-ish years before me, it seemed like a movie from 50 years in the past when I saw it as a kid.
I'm the opposite. I was born in the 70s in Philly and was surrounded by racists. Tanner's language is mild compared to what I was used to. I tend to think that a lot of what people now consider "cringe" is just a bit overstated. The idea that Buttermaker never should have been around kids is laughable to me.
Watching the Yankee pregame show, Jack Curry mentioned the Yanks were looking to get a Solid Six(TM) out of Kluber last night. Obviously they got more than that, but as a lapsed lawyer you know better than most if you don't protect your IP it becomes public domain. Can't let those YES Network goons walk all over you like that, Craig. :-)
Speaking of YES and the horrible, awful, very bad Michael Kay, while the Bruins fans got one of the best play-by-play bits ever on their OT winner, YES viewers got Kay saying of Kluber, "Now Kluber is part of forever."
Was he channeling Edwin Stanton on Lincoln: "Now he belongs to the ages" ? (The quote that was likely never uttered.)
No, he was just being his usual overreaching self.
I get inordinately mad when announcers say "History!" or the like on broadcasts or in summaries after things like no hitters or three homer games or those ridiculous multiple modifier fun facts.
Sure it's "history," as is the fact that I woke my kids up this morning. or that someone struck out.
you woke your kids this morning, so now, according to M. Kay, "[you] are part of forever" too! Congrats!
HISTORY! WITH AN EXCLAMATION POINT!!!
Kay ruined that moment with that call. It really annoys me.
I really want you to start waking your kids up each morning from now on by shouting "HISTORY!!"
I am inordinately bummed out that Kay is gonna outlast Ken Singleton in that booth. The best version of that broadcast is Kenny on the PBP, Cone as the primary color guy, and maybe a third guy who knows how to pick his spots.
Literally never knew where that “hot dog suit” meme came from before clicking that link. Huh.
I Think You Should Leave is a brilliant, bizarre sketch show. If you're not the kind of person who gets uncomfortable with cringe humor, you should watch it.
And if you are someone like that, I don't know, the first sketch is kind of that, but it's not nearly on the level of other things. I'm just repeating something I heard others say.
Such a great show. The “Bones are their money” song cracks me up every single time. While waiting for a season 2, if anyone else has Paramount + (I have it to watch big-time soccer), Detroiters is on there and it’s also great. Tim Robinson and Sam Richardson doing their thing, good stuff.
I don’t know if I’d call it “great” but it was pretty enjoyable. My two favorite things about it:
1) The sketches were all pretty short. For the few that weren’t really that funny, it was over and done with real quick. (Didn’t do that SNL thing where the worst sketches drag on forever.)
2) Some bizarre nonsensical thing happening within the first 2 sketches of an episode, that has a wonderful payoff in a callback about 3-4 sketches later. This happened in multiple episodes.
Oh man I just love it. Not every sketch hits (not every episode as a whole hits), but that’s the nature of sketch shows. Nothing made me laugh harder (and the hot dog suit and car focus group have been very meme-able in a good way).
While I generally agree on the “difficult people” rule of thumb….I have run into a job situation where I’m in state government so I have a lot of job security, but so too do all my co workers, from the barely trying to the overzealous jerks. It’s kind of like purgatory. Once I get my public service loan forgiveness later this year, I’m really weighing my options for what I want to do next.
Letterman revealed his true self on the night Harvey Pekar came on the show wearing a tee shirt supporting GE workers, who were on strike at the time. Letterman's flop sweat was painful to see.
I still miss Craig Ferguson.
Craig Ferguson was good...I miss Conan O'Brien on NBC.
From an Atlanta National League Base Ball Club fan: the Chop was originally an organic thing started by the fans at old Fulton County Stadium around the time of the worst to first club. Quirky and fun, even if derivative from the origins at FSU. It didn't take long until it became something driven by the club with the silly organ music and the free foam tomahawks. Even setting aside the racial connotations, it was forced cheering akin to duh, duh, duh, duh ... CHARGE! Or LETS MAKE SOME NOISE!!!!!
Old man shouting at clouds time: I love fan excitement, I hate manufactured fan excitement. Turn down the volume on the canned stuff and let the 30-40K people create the atmosphere. A huge part of the beauty of baseball is the pastoral nature of it and that includes interludes of near silence. And get off my lawn you hooligans!
Same here; I've been amused at the scoreboard at Nats Park exhorting the 8,000 or so in attendance to MAKE NOISE ... if the situation calls for it I'm gonna be noisier but it's tough to do that when I'm being a) told to do so and b) I'm one of the only two people in my row.
I should note that while I used to go to a lot of games at Fulton County and during the first decade at Turner Field, I have yet to go to a game at White Flight Field in Cobb County. I live close to the AAA park in Gwinnett. It is easier to get to the park, much cheaper (including the all important beer!), and a more relaxing atmosphere. I'm not exactly boycotting WFF, but fighting through rush hour traffic to get to I-75/285 then to sit shoulder to shoulder with 30,000 of my closest friends isn't high on my list. So the observations about the Chop and the noise are now a couple years out of date.
Can I assume they do the chop at Gwinnett? Or did that stop when they became the Stripers a couple years ago?
I worked with the Richmond Braves 20 years ago, and the chop was tired and overplayed even back then. The whole lazy attitude was “Crowd looks dead...let’s play the chop!” And of course the crowd livened up...but for those of us who had to experience it at least 2-3 times a game for 70 nights it was pretty exhausting.
Pre-pandemic, I'd go to a couple dozen games a year in Gwinnett and I don't recall a single Chop since they became the Stripers and, frankly, pretty few when they were the GBraves. We do get the overplayed broken glass sound anytime a foul ball goes over the stands, but that is a quirk of a different class.
I haven't been to a game yet this year - their second homestand starts next week and, assuming decent weather, I'll be there.
"but for those of us who had to experience it at least 2-3 times a game for 70 nights it was pretty exhausting."
A couple of decades back, I was a bartender at a beachbar in a touristy area along the coast. The various singers who would perform played Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville" at least once an hour every single night. I'm a parrothead, but can't stand that song anymore.
"White Flight Field"- chef's kiss emoji. 100% on all your observations. What a dumb idea to build a stadium in the suburbs that you can only drive to.
Thanks, but I stole WFF from a Braves fan who posts at Think Factory.
And FWIW, Turner Field also did not have direct access from MARTA but, just like WFF also required a bus transfer albeit a shorter transfer than the new park.
That's just classic Atlanta planning, amirite?
Nah. Needs more construction and closed lanes plus none of the streets surrounding WFF are named Peachtree. :)
Lol. This is...this why Atlanta is not super-high on my list of cities to visit. Seems like it could be pretty livable if you pick the right neighborhood but a city that's mostly built for driving and yet is trafficky and inconvenient and confusing for that...no thanks!
A stadium in the burbs that you can only drive to? That's the number one thing that keeps me from going to more Rangers games.
Yeah at least here in Denver the Rockies park is right downtown, Nuggets/Avs stadium right off downtown. The only real miss was building the Rapids MLS stadium in Commerce City.
Yeah, the Stars and Mavs play right outside of downtown Dallas and you can take DART, our public transit. The Rangers and Cowboys are out in Arlington, which for the longest time was the largest city in America without any public transportation. I believe there is now one bus loop that the college uses. There are various theories as to why. Some people believe that Jerry will kill any attempt to get a train line because he makes too much money on parking. Others believe all the car dealerships around Arlington and Grand Prairie don't want anyone using the train. The only real fact is that voters in Arlington have turned down joining DART at least twice, I believe 3 times. It's alleged they don't want "those" people coming to their fair city on the train.
When the Rangers were gearing up a couple years ago to fleece the taxpayers on the new ballpark, you started seeing stories in the local media about the Rangers were considering land in downtown Dallas. I 100% believe those stories were planted by the Rangers to scare Arlington voters into paying for the new ballpark.
White Flight Field is such a fantastic name for their ballpark.
I like your point re the pastoral nature and the interludes of comparative silence. Case in point...I'm listening/watching to the MLB-on-youtube broadcast of the Giants-Reds game. There are *four* announcers (why??) and they never shut up. C'mon, guys.
Four? Ugh. That is at least two too many. A single announcer can certainly do it, but it would take someone almost as good as Vin Scully. Silence isn't a bad thing in a TV broadcast.
Ugh is spot-on. Even radio doesn't need as much talking as they were doing, let alone a TV/youtube broadcast. Too many announcers - and the game was a blow-out so they mostly moved on to constant conversation about other things, rather than the game. Great American is such a pretty ballpark - they could have done a lot more showing it off...
Question for Craig: there are occasional notes about the number of people opening the daily emails. As often as not, I try to read CoC via substack on my computer rather than look at the email on my phone. Does that mess with the data and, since there is no advertising anyway, does it matter if it does?
It doesn't matter at all. Whether someone opens the email or just navigates to the site is the same for me. I think Substack just gives email opening data for people who really want to dig down and track it, but really, I can't be bothered.
I see the overall open rate when I navigate to my dashboard -- it's almost always 72-75% of emails opened on subscriber only days, almost always 50-52% on Free Thursdays. Of course there are likely a lot of people who do what you do and just go to a bookmark. That it varies so little is interesting, but as long as I'm not losing subscribers, I don't care too much.
I can, if I specifically look up someone's email address, see which ones they opened and didn't, but the only time I do that is if someone specifically asks me to or tells me that they didn't get the newsletter on a given day.
Thanks!
Wow - that 70% open rate is pretty fantastic, considering all the crap I discussed in my comment just below.
Is it? I really have zero idea how that rates. Of course, all of those people are paying me, so it's not like they aren't already at least a little invested.
Yeah, that’s the beauty of sending emails that people (presumably) actually want to receive
If I am not reading the email it’s either because it’s a Jewish holiday or I went straight to the website. I am getting my money’s worth.
CRM and Sales/Marketing Consultant here - those rates are excellent for email. It means not only is your content great, but that percent of your total subscribers are highly likely to renew next year. The ones that are subscribed and never/rarely open are (obviously?) the ones likely to churn/not renew.
I find it disturbing that you can tell if I opened your newsletter email or not.
Honestly, I'd have to look and I never, ever do.
In the survey you sent out a while back one of the questions was whether you read the newsletter via the email or website. Out of curiosity did the survey sample happen to correlate to the email open percentage you normally see? (For my part I always go straight to the website.)
As someone who sends out emails for a living (or, at least part of his living), I can tell you that there’s not really an exact science to email tracking. There’s plenty of ways to receive/open/read an email, without the tracker knowing that any of this happened.
So in reality, Craig can say for sure that “Reader X opened the email twice on this date” or “Reader Y clicked on the email on this date”....but if Reader Z doesn’t show up as an open or a click, it doesn’t necessarily mean they didn’t open or click the email. Probably best to just look at patterns: making sure you’re not getting too many bounces, seeing which stories are getting more opens and clicks than others, etc.
Except for Craig’s brother of course. Pretty safe bet he’s not reading any of this stuff.
Thunderbird has a great preview function, so I often don't click through on emails. I haave several times gotten email from a group that I contributed to noting that I haven't "read" any of their emails in a while and asking if I still want to get them. Note that it's never the ones I *want* to unsubscribe from.
And here I thought I was the only person in the email industry reading this blog.
Wonder if we know each other?
Isn’t everyone sort of in the email industry now?
I'm not sure everyone understands the terms 'engagement', 'delivery', and 'deliverability' in ways that I do and that I'd guess from your writing above that you do, too.
So true! I once made a comment on a Craig tweet where I mentioned “engagement” and I was rightfully outed as “someone who probably works in media”
"He has a locker, I have an office"- uhhh...APPEAL TO AUTHORITY much there, Tony? I'm honestly kind of...as a non White Sox fan just kind of fascinated to watch someone have their team in 1st yet lose the clubhouse before May is over. What retrograde thing will he do next? Can he really last the season, especially if/when the team goes through a rough patch? Fascinating, all around.
Any chance he knows he's not going to relate so he's leaning into being a "jerk boss" and unifying the locker room against him? Likely giving him WAY too much credit ... but they're winning so ::shruggie::
It really is "Major League, but the players uniting against their own manager" (I'm watching Ted Lasso right now which is probably putting that in my brain a bit). But yeah I don't think he's doing some kind of 5-D chess I think he's just an old crank. But I could be wrong, maybe he's a WILY old crank.