20 posts tagged with GoGiants by chavenet.
Displaying 1 through 20 of 20.
Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with Ruth
To all the fans and everyone involved in the baseball world, I apologize for taking so long to come to a decision. I have decided to choose the Dodgers as my next team. [Instagram] [more inside]
A Cautionary Tale
Yet within the sport, and even for the larger world, the Giants remain a cautionary tale: a high-profile example of what can happen when prejudice derails a talented organization or team, when discord and distrust become everyday elements in a workplace. Instead of dominating the big leagues with their core of talented Latino and African-American players, the Giants were perennial also-rans for most of the 1960s. from Giant Missteps
The Final Vestige of Something Irreplaceable and Delicate
To those who know what Oakland A’s baseball used to be, what Fisher had turned the team into was nothing short of tragic. A’s teams in the past had brought to Oakland pride and repute, as they had seemed to represent, in their character and color, their misfit swagger and underdog grit, something both essential and specific about the East Bay’s sense of self. In this way, certain of those teams had evinced something distinct about the constructive potential of pro sports writ large: how beloved local teams can bring a people together and lift a city up. Fisher’s A’s evince something very different: pro sports’ concurrent capacity for diminishment and plunder, disillusionment and grift. from The Long, Sad Story of the Stealing of the Oakland A’s [The Ringer; ungated]
There is Persistent Consumer Demand to Believe in Magic
We have adjectives to describe the insistence on a superior past, and they tend toward the pejorative: vestigial, atavistic, reactionary. Exaltation of lost glory necessarily discounts the present; reimposing the ancien régime requires tossing aside today's players, often with casual recklessness. Audiences embraced "Field of Dreams" because it's a sumptuously shot, well-crafted movie with compelling actors and an Oscar-nominated score, yes, but also because they worried then—and continue to worry now—that something valuable is vanishing, that the best of baseball and the country of its birth is in the rearview mirror. That the only path to redemption is believing, twice as hard this time, in a fairy tale. One that narcissistically absolves our own active role in the decline. from The Expensive, Seductive Nostalgia of Field of Dreams
1 Batter, 59 Home Runs; Needs 3 With 16 Games to Go
Judge hits 58th AND 59th HRs, just two shy of Maris ... Aaron Judge home run pace tracker ... HR Digest: Aaron Judge [more inside]
GET OUT OF HERE BAT!
We made this for you if this is your thing [from The Onion, at a stretch it's "NSFW"]
One, I Love This Game and Two, I Want to Continue Playing It
"I think I'll be OK if I don't get the album back"
She's at First
They’ve Left Cooperstown Barren, Uninteresting and Illegitimate
This is a museum of baseball history. What purpose does that museum serve when it purges entire pieces of history from its walls? You’ve ripped the guts out of the thing and left it as not only a dry branding exercise, but a culturally irrelevant one. Only the weirdos who file FCC complaints about vulgarities during the Super Bowl halftime show would ever want to visit it. from By Leaving Out SF Giants Legend Barry Bonds, the Baseball Hall of Fame Finally Signs its Own Death Certificate by Drew Magary [more inside]
El Mago
"It's a little heavy. But I want you to know this is important to me"
San Francisco Giants outfielder Drew Robinson's remarkable second act [ESPN] [CW: All links above & below include graphic discussion of a suicide attempt; if you need help, ThereIsHelp] [more inside]
You Probably Expected to Pay Some Attention to the NL West This Season
You probably didn’t expect that watching the NL West would be like putting on Godzilla vs. Kong only to see Mothra kick everyone’s ass. With all due respect to the Dodgers and Padres, this fledgling season has belonged to the less-than-ballyhooed San Francisco Giants—who not only lead the NL West over teams that Baseball Prospectus projected would win 103 and 96 games, respectively, but in fact are tied for the best record in the National League. It is bizarre. It is wonderful. What in the world is going on? from The NL West Has Only One Superteam, and That Team Has Buster Posey [The Ringer, by Claire McNear]
The Harper Lee of Social Media...
is Red's Java House.
WAR Games
In such a complicated numerical landscape as a 60-game season, advanced stats might approach their greatest hurdle—but also, counterintuitively, their greatest opportunity to aid understanding above and beyond traditional stats. from The Ultimate Baseball Stat Confronts Its Ultimate Test [The Ringer] [more inside]
Eephus Ain't Nothing
While we wait for the first pitch of the 2020 season, take a couple of minutes to learn more about the mysterious, rare, junky eephus pitch. [more inside]
Whirling Darvish
An overwhelming number of pitchers in the database -- 92% -- have thrown between 3 and 6 pitch types in their careers. Only 99 pitchers, or about 4%, have been tracked as throwing seven or more pitch types. Just 11 have thrown eight or more. And then there's Yu Darvish. Not a typo: Yu Darvish throws 10 pitches [more inside]
Joy in Mudville
Mud is not a lucrative business. This might seem simultaneously self-evident and strange: It’s mud, but it’s an essential piece of a multibillion-dollar business, a feature without which an official baseball game cannot be played. Mud Maker: The Man Behind MLB’s Essential Secret Sauce
The Most Interesting Man In Baseball
Chris Davis is flailing his way to a dubious piece of baseball history, setting records for futility on a fledgling Baltimore Orioles team that will likely find its way toward the bottom of the standings again in 2019. Davis hit a double off James Shields last Sept. 14, but doesn’t have a hit to his name since. He ended 2018 on an 0-for-21 slump, and entered Thursday at 0-for-29 in 2019. The 0-for-50 for Davis is the longest hitless streak by a non-pitcher in major league history. [more inside]
Want More Home Runs? This One Simple Trick Will Knock You Out
The biggest change brought about by the Statcast data is illustrating the importance of an uppercut swing that results more often in fly balls and line drives rather than groundballs ... It appears that having a risk-free method of improvement available to all players has had an obvious effect: more players are hitting more home runs. The statistical revelation that has MLB hitters bombing more home runs than the steroid era [WaPo] [more inside]
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