Second Week

In this second week of the season, the Giants today managed to win their second game of the year, in extra innings even. Nobody has high expectations for the Giants this year, so we’ll take wins when we get them. On the other side of the continent, Bill Buckner threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Opening Day at Fenway Park to a very emotional standing ovation. The Red Sox then went on to beat the Detroit Tigers 5-0, who now have a surprisingly horrible record of 0 and 7.

We’re going to the opening game of the River Cats this Friday! Should be fun.

Rolling Opener

It’s getting hard to tell when the baseball season starts. The A’s and Red Sox opened the season on this past Tuesday with a pair of games played in Japan. Meanwhile, the rest of the teams were playing their final week of exhibition games. Today, there were two exhibition games, but the Washington Nationals opened their season with a game at home against the Atlanta Braves. President Bush threw out the ceremonial first pitch, and promptly got booed. The rest of the teams start off their season tomorrow and Tuesday.

The Latest Baseball Gizmo

Never mind about wireless weather forecasting devices, what about something that will give all the up-to-date baseball line scores? The company Ambient Devices has decided there’s a market here, and will be releasing their Baseball ScoreCast device at the beginning of the upcoming baseball season. It does look slick, but it’s pretty high-priced ($125) for doing only one thing.

Wild Dude, Wild Dog

Jonathan Papelbon’s dog ate the World Series ball. The Boston Red Sox closer, who became famous during this year’s post-season for dancing jigs to a tune of the Dropkick Murphys, lost the ball given to him by catcher Jason Varitek after the final out of the 2007 World Series when his bulldog Boss jumped up on the counter and started using it as a rawhide chew toy. “He tore that thing to pieces,” Papelbon said. One New England dog trainer is wondering why the ball was on the counter where the dog could reach it. “Bad dog owner. Bad, bad, bad…” she says.

Hot Stove League

Friday evening we ran into Chris at the co-op. Talk naturally turned to baseball, what’s the off-season about to bring (Bonds to the A’s???), the Hot Stove League now turning warm. None of us quite knew where that term came from, and we agreed the topic would make a good blog post. Chris then went on to teasing Pica about her new-found interest in samovars and smoky tea, and I decided to research the term, it making me think of players being traded around like sauté pans on a hot stove…

The term dates back quite a long time. The earliest reference online I could find was from a New York Times article from October 12, 1912 on the fourth game of the World Series between the New York Giants and the Boston Red Sox. The first paragraph reads:

Boston grabbed back its advantage in the world’s series yesterday on terrific smashing of Jeff Tesreau’s speed and moist offerings during the early innings, almost lost it when “Joe” Wood faltered under the strain, then cinched it by pounding Ames for a run in the ninth that made it 3 to 1 and broke New York’s last hope. Two to one in the ninth might not have been so bad, but 3 to 1, Wood settling again after three innings of the rickets and darkness gathering all conspired to make the Giants’ hopeless, and they lost without dishonor and might have won, providing a lot more hard luck alibis for the Hot Stove League this Winter.

The citation implies that the term by this date was in common use. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang explains that the term is originally from baseball and defines it as “sports enthusiasts who continue to discuss their sport during the off-season”.

Paul Dickson’s book The Dickson Baseball Dictionary has a much longer account of the term, defining it as a “term for the gab, gossip, and debate that takes place when baseball is not being played”. The term gained popularity with the publication of a 1955 book by Lee Allen entitled “The Hot Stove League”, he believing that the phrase dated from the turn of the century. However, folk etymologist Peter Tamony found a usage of the term in 1886, describing the off-season in horse racing: “The sleighing has gone, and most of the trotting is done around the hot stove at present.”

Bad Ballpark Ad Placement

If you find the humor here, you’ve spent too much time on the Web.

Pitch By Pitch

Josh Kalk is a sabermetrics god. This past baseball season marked the widespread deployment of a measurement system (called PITCHf/x) to track location and velocity of every pitch. The motivating reason for this was to provide animations of each pitch for MLB.com’s Enhanced Gameday application, but a few baseball stat geeks discovered they could extract the underlying pitch measurement data and started to do analyses with these.

Enter Josh Kalk, who has built up a database of about 300,000 pitches from this season and has presented these graphically on the web. At left is an example of one of his plots. This graph shows the location of all the changeups thrown by Tim Lincecum of the Giants that were captured by the system. The view is from the catcher’s direction; the box in the middle is the strike zone.

Another view of these data is provided by his player cards, such as this one for Tim Lincecum. Kalk has developed an algorithm to separate different types of pitches (i.e. sliders from changeups from fastballs etc.) and these are shown plotted in different symbols on these graphs. In another set of charts he also graphs pitches for each batter, such as this chart for Red Sox slugger David Ortiz.

Hometown Stars

Our neck of the woods is now a breeding ground for baseball stars. Dustin Pedroia of the Boston Red Sox won the AL Rookie of the Year yesterday. This wasn’t unexpected, but it’s fun because he’s a Yolo County lad: he grew up in Woodland about 10 miles north of here, and graduated from Woodland High in 2001, a couple years after we arrived in Davis.

Meanwhile, C.C. Sabathia, who pitches for the Cleveland Indians, just won the AL Cy Young award. We actually live in Solano County, just on the other side of the border with Yolo County; C.C. Sabathia grew up at the western end of Solano County in Vallejo, graduating from Vallejo High.

Baseball Pitches Illustrated

Now that baseball season is over and we’re left with the saga of what team will A-Rod doom to penury with his next record-setting contract, it’s time for a little bit of off-season study. I certainly by looking at a pitch can’t tell a changeup from a splitter, but maybe this guide will help.

Over for the Season

The Sox did it in four, overpowering a team I feared (and hoped) would give them more of a fight than it did. I’m excited about the young players whose salary isn’t in the league of the huge crazy sums we’re used to hearing about, but whose salary will undoubtedly increase after today.

No more baseball, now, till spring…