On Tuesday at Yankee Stadium, George Brett will hold a news conference to talk about the most famous moment in his Hall-of-Fame career: the Pine-Tar Game.
Yet absent from that news conference will be a 47-year-old New York cop named Merritt Riley, who feels personally responsible for the pine-tar debacle.
“I really believe the Pine-Tar Game would never have happened if I hadn’t done what I did,” said Riley.
Speaking publicly for the first time ever about his role in the Pine-Tar Game—which took place 30 years ago this month—Riley said, “I remember it happening like it was yesterday.” … Read More
As of last night, Clay Travis’ Outkick the Coverage has merged with Fox Sports. The exact nature of the relationship is not clear. According to Fox Sports, “Clay Travis has officially joined FOXSports.com as a contributor.” As Clay tells it,
Outkick the Coverage and FoxSports.com have entered into a partnership agreeement. OKTC won’t change at all, we’ll just have a much broader audience. And those times when you try to hop on the site and we’re overloaded with traffic and you can’t get to our article?
Yeah, that won’t happen again.
Which is why FoxSports.com is hosting our latest story.
Did that ever happen to anyone? Anyway, Clay continued (as he always does): “After a lot of conversations FoxSports.com made the most sense and I’m excited about what’s to come.” He promises more details in the future, and for now says: “I have editorial control and Fox doesn’t want us to change at all.”
Together with MSN, Fox Sports already owns Yardbarker, which it bought in 2010, and through which it has a relationship with similar sites, such as Larry Brown Sports. Fox Sports seems to like to keep all of these formerly independent blogs underneath the umbrella of its Yardbarker Network. Major questions at this point include whether OKTC will receive the same treatment, whether OKTC itself will become a mere FoxSports.com reverse-portal, and what it means for Clay to be a FoxSports.com “contributor” (and why Clay did not reference that label on his own site).
As for clues about what Clay thinks– or thought– about Fox Sports, we can turn to the premiere source of information on all things Clay, Clay Travis, who in August 2012 responded to a question about ranking the major sports media outlets’ college football coverage by rating Fox Sports last among the given options, adding
I would rank Fox Sports last in its coverage of every sport. In its humor. In everything that it does online. I truly have no idea what this company is doing. FoxSports.com is a complete and total disaster of a site. So it’s no surprise that it’s also bad at college football. It’s also behind SBNation, Bleacher Report, and even OKTC.
Less than a month ago, he wrote that he had not visited FoxSports.com in over a year: “I barely have a conception of what [the page looks] like on direct entry.” Now that his article is plastered atop the front page of FoxSPorts.com, though, it’s probably his homepage.
Involving myself in this project meant developing a more intentional approach to sports observation, fandom, criticism, and so forth. Part of this was reorienting my daily and weekly routines in order to make myself more aware of important events happening in the sporting world, and to place myself in a position to be paying attention to those spaces in which something important to that world might be about to happen. My immersion has not been total, of course. (See, for example, this site’s golf coverage.) Some aspects have required greater degrees of adjustment. Others have felt much more natural, though, and baseball probably leads that group. Living within the terrestrial boundaries of the Detroit Tigers Radio Network (and Fox Sports Detroit) during the 2012 season meant keeping up with that team on a near-daily basis was as easy as passively listening to the radio at night after work. Baseball is a sport that, for the fans, is designed to seep into the mind over time, a multi-month titration of awareness appreciable only at some distance. Writing a serial feature on that team only made sense. Having an outlet for accumulated observations and possible trends, interesting stories about the team, and personal experiences was a way to process a 162-game season, memorialize those little thoughts, observations, and experiences, and generally gain that periodic distance from the game’s day-to-day that makes caring about the next game and the next series fun.
Listening and watching that much baseball– 2013 finds me tracking two teams in particular– is a great way to learn about the game, and I wanted to carve a space outside of those individual team features to write about some of baseball’s details and strategy. I would like this to be more about aspects of the sport that are hiding in plain sight: readily observable things that, when noticed, would enhance any fan’s enjoyment, rather than complex statistical analyses, although I do have some thoughts on the unavoidable topic of sabermetrics. My thought is that each post in the series would look at one isolated issue or nugget of information that, when I happened across it, felt like something I was really glad to know as a slightly more than casual baseball fan and something other, more casual fans might appreciate knowing too.
Here’s a brief, very simple example to kick things off:
The short answer is yes, the Detroit Tigers are baseball’s unluckiest team this year.
Baseball Prospectus has a semi-interactive feature called “Adjusted Standings,” which looks just like an ordinary baseball standings grid, but it has a few extra columns. I don’t pretend to understand the number crunching that’s going on behind the scenes to determine the precise contents of those extra columns, but I do understand the gist of the concept, which is to assess the relationship between a team’s outcomes and the quality of its play. Teams that play the game well usually win games. Sometimes teams play poorly but still win. Sometimes teams play well but lose. If such an incongruity persisted over the course of many games, we reasonably could say that the reason was due to good luck or bad luck.
In the Tigers’ case, that chart shows that, for three different ways of measuring teams’ luck (look at columns D1, D2, and D3), no team has had worse luck than the Tigers this year. Continue reading →
In James Franklin’s world, it’s never too early to make a recruiting pitch.
On Monday, the Vanderbilt head football coach admitted that he routinely sells the scholarship virtues of Commodore athletics to expecting parents, prior to the birth of their son or daughter.
“If I see a 6-foot-6 man walking in the mall with his wife, and she’s 6-2 and she’s pregnant, I’ll go up and offer their unborn child,” Franklin told The Tennesseean.
“I’m not exaggerating. I do that all the time. If I go to speak at an elementary school, if I’m out at a restaurant, we kind of have fun with it. It’s about developing a relationship with people. It’s about getting them connected with Vanderbilt. It’s about making people laugh and telling a story and having fun. It’s about having a sense of humor and not being some robot coach that I don’t want to be.”
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The eminently personable and sometimes controversial Franklin has enjoyed an interesting two-year run in the college football spotlight.
On the field, Vanderbilt is riding a seven-game winning streak — the longest current run of any SEC program. Plus, for 2011 and ’12, the Commodores reached back-to-back bowl games for the first time in school history. … Read More
The ALDLAND Podcast might have taken two weeks off, but it is back and better than ever. Listen to your favorite cohost get all melodramatic about the NBA Draft before moving on to actual NBA discussion as we recap the exciting NBA Finals. Also featured is discussion of Darren Rovell’s interesting take on the Aaron Hernandez situation. Last, but not least, I unveil my innovative compromise to the Washington Redskins name situation.
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This year’s Detroit Tigers are far from perfect, but they’re off to a good start on the strength of their starting pitching and the bats of Miguel Cabrera, Prince Fielder, Jhonny Peralta, Torii Hunter, Omar Infante, (increasingly) Victor Martinez, and (once again) Austin Jackson.
The weak link– the bullpen– has been both very obvious and very weak. Hoping for some addition by subtraction, the club sent onetime-closer Jose Valverde down to the minors, and a more focused “closer-by-committee” approach has emerged, centering around Joaquin Benoit and Drew Smyly, with an emphasis on not misusing Phil Coke.
One of the criticisms of manager Jim Leyland is that he likes to have go-to players to fill defined roles, and nowhere is this more applicable than in his handling of relief pitching. In short, Leyland wants to have one guy be his guy when it comes to closing out games in the ninth inning. His unwillingness to deviate from that approach has had exceedingly frustrating consequences when The Closer is someone less effective than the likes of a Craig Kimbrel or, say, a 2011-vintage Valverde. (This is especially true because the Tigers have trouble scoring late in games. If the bullpen blows a lead late, this team is unlikely to mount a comeback.) Even though fans would like to see Leyland be a bit more nimble with the way he utilizes his personnel, some of his attitude surely has rubbed off on them. The fans want to have someone who can be The Closer too.
My opinion is that, if the Phillies are willing to part with Papelbon without demanding much beyond the absorption of his contract, the Tigers should get him. If his steady hand can turn these cardiac kitties into some cool cats come playoff time, it’ll be worth it.
That said, it probably is worth taking a look at how Papelbon would stack up with his new teammates if he were to catch a ride to Motor City this season. Continue reading →
On Tuesday at Yankee Stadium, George Brett will hold a news conference to talk about the most famous moment in his Hall-of-Fame career: the Pine-Tar Game.
In James Franklin’s world, it’s never too early to make a recruiting pitch.
ALDLAND 