Worried about your fantasy football draft? Well this podcast probably won’t help that much. But it might help a little bit. So plug in those headphones and get some advice from ALDLAND on what to do during your fantasy football draft. You can thank us later.
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Adrian Peterson’s headline-making 2012 season– he ran for 2,097 yards and averaged 6.0 yards per carry– was even more remarkable in context: he had torn his ACL and MCL in December 2011, yet he was starting for the Vikings on week one of the 2012 season, a mere nine months after the injury. When he did return, he had the best season of his career. Ordinarily, players require a full twelve months of recovery following surgery to repair torn knee ligament. When they do return, their production usually decreases. Peterson was a startling exception on both fronts. Peterson’s recovery was so remarkable, many fans described him as superhuman, while others, along with one Detroit linebacker, were asking whether there might be some other reason for his surprising return. Peterson told that linebacker last season and the rest of us this week: “I’m juicing on the blood of Jesus. Faith is what got me to this point.” It isn’t easy to talk about religion in the sports world, and I’ve touched on it only briefly here, but from a purely conversational/presentational perspective, Peterson needs a response to the question, “Are you juicing?” that does not recall President George W. Bush’s groaner of a response to a question about whether he was turning to a “Plan B” in Iraq: “Actually, I would call that a plan recommended by Baker-Hamilton, so it would be a Plan B-H.” When it comes to answering to opposing linebackers this season, Peterson probably should just let his knees, however reformed, do the talking.
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Previously
Ziggy Ansah
As reported yesterday afternoon by SLAM Magazine, Allen Iverson is planning to announce his retirement from the NBA “in the coming days.” Iverson, who played for Philadelphia, Denver, Detroit, and Memphis, has not played in the NBA since 2010, and he has not played anywhere professionally since 2011, when he was playing in Turkey.
Chronicling Iverson’s on-court greatness is best left to the many others who are far more qualified to do that. Instead, I’ll recall the most memorable off-court moment from The Answer’s career: his May 7, 2002 press conference. If you’re not tracking, direct your attention to this video. (Here’s the full transcript for the textually inclined.)
In a post-Chuck-Sheen-meltdown world in which web memes are very much a valuable currency, it’s easy to underestimate how severely that segment would break the internet today. In a society that is, by orders of magnitude, more plugged in today than it was in 2002, it’s difficult to appreciate the viralty of that moment. You basically had to have played in the NBA and been tasked with guarding Iverson to be the sort of person who, when asked in 2013, “when I say ‘Allen Iverson,’ what do you think of?”, would not blurt out, “practice!” By being that person, Gary Payton nevertheless revealed more about the origins of Iverson’s press conference moment than heretofore was known:
After making the playoffs two seasons ago, the Detroit Lions are trying to rebound from a frustrating 4-12 mark in 2012. While the numbers provide a reason to believe the Lions won’t be as bad– or unlucky– as they were last year and the spotlight rightly belongs on stars like Calvin Johnson, Matthew Stafford, Reggie Bush, and Ndamukong Suh, plenty will be asked of the team’s first-round draft pick (fifth overall), DE Ziggy Ansah. The question is not whether Ansah presents himself like a young, professional athlete– he answered that in the affirmative on draft day— but whether he will be able to avoid serving as the second coming of Darko Milicic. (After all, Darko thought he knew a thing or two about style too.) Ansah has played twenty-three games of football ever, all of them at BYU, and many of them on special teams. Ansah’s ability to develop his body, which he describes as “a delicate flower,” into one that can help solidify a talented but perpetually raw NFL defense will go a long way in determining whether the Lions will improve on their 2012 season. Coach Jim Schwartz said “the best is yet to come with . . . Ziggy.” When your team spends the fifth overall pick on a player as inexperienced as Ansah, that had better be true.
If there is one constant in the world of baseball, from its invention in the 19th century to the present, it must be its inextricable link with beer. The connection is almost Pavlovian: When I watch a baseball game, my mouth tells me it wants a beer. (For someone who watches baseball professionally, this can raise quite the occupational hazard.) I’m not sure what about the game inspires such a yearning. Maybe it’s the spring air, the smell of cut grass, all that Ken Burns business. Maybe it’s the dirt and dust. Maybe it’s the fact that half the stadiums are named after brands of beer. Now that I think about it, it’s probably that.
The connection is no accident, as historian Edward Achorn makes clear in “The Summer of Beer and Whiskey: How Brewers, Barkeeps, Rowdies, Immigrants and a Wild Pennant Fight Made Baseball America’s Game.” The book documents the creation of the American Association, a league of ballplayers ostensibly founded to rival the National League but in fact brought into existence almost entirely as a way to evade Puritan liquor laws in order to sell beer. That guy in the bleacher with the T-shirt that says baseball is his favorite beer delivery system? He’s more right than he knows.
The essential founder of the American Association was a man named Chris Von der Ahe, a German grocer and beer-hall owner who lived in St. Louis. He didn’t really understand baseball—though he did love the game—but desperately wanted a way to move product on Sunday afternoons. The National League, led by a persnickety Chicago moralist named William Hulbert, was renowned for banning Sunday baseball, limiting alcohol consumption, keeping ruffian players from its ranks and booting owners who didn’t get on board, even if they owned teams in major cities like New York and Philadelphia. Von der Ahe and his fellow American Association owners (many of whom were beer barons themselves) took advantage of this. Their league would be the ribald troublemaking alternative. … Read More
(via WSJ)
(HT: Mitch)
August is the only month in the American calendar without a holiday, which leaves us free to craft ad hoc celebrations of events taking place in the moment.
For baseball fans, this is the time of year when the action really starts to heat up. There are a deceptively large number of games remaining in the season, but it’s the beginning of crunch time for teams looking to secure their positioning for the postseason.
The Detroit Tigers and Atlanta Braves are two of the best teams in baseball this year, and they happen to be two of the teams followed closely on this site. Each also has a star hitter who has ramped up his performance this month.
I’ve already noted that Miguel Cabrera is following up his 2012 season– in which he won both the MVP and Triple Crown– with an even better 2013. This month, it is widely becoming clear we are witnessing a special season from the Detroit third baseman, who is becoming something of a living Babe Ruth-Kirk Gibson combination. Due to injuries, Cabrera basically is playing on one leg, making it difficult to do things like run the bases. His response has been to hit a lot of home runs so he doesn’t have to run the bases. He has sixteen hits in eleven games in August, and six of them were homers. Here are his numbers through last night, broken out by month:
As more and more turn their eyes to the Motor City to gaze upon this remarkable production, the number of articles testifying to Cabrera’s greatness to which I could link here are many. Consider this one from yesterday, though, which nicely combines text and visuals describing Cabrera’s recent exploits.
While Cabrera’s August is allowing us to marvel at his ability to persistently perform in historic fashion, Justin Upton is offering up a late-summer burst that shows him rising to the great levels expected of him when he joined the Braves in the offseason.
After a ridiculous start to the season, which included five home runs in his first five games, the younger Upton cooled off. He hit a total of twelve HRs in April, but he only hit four in all of May, June, and July. He’s already hit six through thirteen games this month, though, and his .380 batting average is the highest monthly mark he’s posted all year by almost one hundred percentage points. Here are his numbers through last night, broken out by month:
Finally, we come to the (mostly) ex-presidents. The United States Senate often is referred to as an “august body.” The president of the Senate is the vice president of the United States, and the president of the vice president is the president of the United States, and so here we have scouting reports on the pitching prospects of all of the United States presidents since William Howard Taft. Enjoy.
Yesterday, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Dan Uggla, Braves second baseman, would be placed on the disabled list in order for him to undergo Lasik eye surgery:
In the midst of the worst season of his career, Braves second baseman Dan Uggla will have Lasik eye surgery that will keep him out of the lineup for at least the next two weeks.
Uggla was placed on the 15-day disabled list and Tyler Pastornicky was recalled from Triple-A Gwinnett and will start Tuesday night’s game against the Phillies at Turner Field.
Uggla will have surgery in two or three days, and the Braves think he’ll be able to recover quickly, play in a few minor league games and return to the active roster in 15 days or shortly thereafter.
“It was a mutual decision,” said Uggla, who ranks second among Braves with 21 home runs and leads the team with 62 walks, but has the lowest average (.186) among major league qualifiers and most strikeouts (146) in the National League. “Obviously I don’t want to go on the DL whatsoever, but at the same time you’ve got to do what’s best for the team right now.
“I’ve been struggling pretty bad and battling with the contacts and grinding with those things day in and day out. I think the best thing to do is just go ahead and do it now.”
The full story is available here. Uggla can be a lightning rod for criticism, and the fact that his home runs and walks are up at the same time he has baseball’s worst batting average (supplanting teammate B.J. Upton) and is leading the National League in strikeouts sounds to me like a very Uggla season. With the team continuing to be beset by seemingly critical injuries (and succeeding in spite of that), the question is whether Lasik– which sounds a bit dog-ate-my-homework-esque– can help Uggla.
The idea here is that Uggla’s having trouble hitting the ball because he’s having trouble seeing the ball, and that having corrective eye surgery would improve his ability to see, and therefore hit, the ball. That AJC story includes an apparent testimonial from Uggla’s teammate, catcher Brian McCann, who battled vision problems and is having a great season at the plate this year.
But a 2005 study found “no statistically significant or practically significant difference . . . between the presurgery and postsurgery means on either on-base percentage, batting average, slugging percentage, or on-base plus slugging of any major league baseball players.”
Fangraphs’ Chad Young thinks there’s good reason to believe that study is flawed, however. His article raises three primary issues with the study: 1) it fails to account for player age; 2) it does not place player output in historical context; and 3) it utilizes rigid, narrow sample windows.
Young attempted to crunch the numbers himself in a way that addressed the flaws he saw in the study’s methodology, leading to a number of conclusions, including: a) offensive contribution increased significantly in the year following surgery, and b) players in Uggla’s age range saw an increase in offensive contribution, while older players saw a decrease, something Young attributes to age independent of eye surgery. In other words, “when we account for age and league context, the picture gets quite a bit rosier. Maybe the way I am looking at the data suggests I need the surgery more than Uggla does, but I am not ruling out the possibility that we will see noticeable gains once Uggla can see.”
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Uggla may be having trouble seeing the game right now, but we certainly did not, as our last trip to Turner Field found us in what may be the best seats I’ve ever had for a baseball game.
I have yet to see the Braves lose in Atlanta this season (a streak that will be put to the test again tonight), and this particular game was the most emphatic victory yet. Continue reading
Welcome to a very special ALDLAND Podcast this week as old favorite and one time co-host Chris Cunico returns to discuss a variety of topics with yours truly and Marcus. On tap this week is the boring slog that is the NFL preseason, discussion of Clint Dempsey’s move to the MLS and one final steroid suspension talk (we promise we’re done after this). Bonus: technical problems!
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Download the ALDLAND podcast at our Podcasts Page or stream it right here:
[audio https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/73353635/Podcast%2040.mp3]
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