Let them play! Let them play!

This decision debases the most beautiful aspect of baseball...

No Ties!

No ties in baseball. It doesn't work that way. It's the beauty of baseball. No clock; the teams play until someone wins.

OK, so they didn't have any other players left and didn't want to hurt the pitchers. There are nine players on the field, each of whom has pitched in the past. And very successfully. So put Freddy Garcia in left field and let Garret Anderson jump on the mound and throw some strikes. Position players throw batting practice all the time. Let someone win.

What about this? Bend the rules a little bit. How about letting the managers bring a couple of players back into the game? Let someone win.

What about this? End the game with a home run derby. Let someone win. Make someone win!

Rob Neyer weighs in...

9:27: Boy, these guys are a bunch of geniuses. The umpires and the managers are all clustered around Bud Selig, trying to figure out what to do if the National Leaguers don't score in the bottom of the 11th.

Gee, didn't anybody think about this before the game? Didn't anybody remember that baseball is the one game without a clock? Apparently not, because the delay just goes on and on while Selig "thinks" about what happens next.

There's now a great chance that the 2002 All-Star Game will end up in a tie. Which, come to think of it, is the perfect conclusion for an exhibition game.

9:36: Even more perfect than we could have imagined. It's Bud's Big Night, and the festivities conclude with many thousands of fans booing Selig's decision (justifiable though it was). I don't have a problem with him stopping the game, but he really screwed up when he (presumably) instructed the P.A. announcer to tell everybody that the game would end after the 11th if the Seniors didn't score against Garcia. If nothing else, Commissioner Bud certainly is a master of public relations.

9:54:18 PM  comment []    

Economist: Self-doomed to failure

From their schooldays onwards, Arabs are instructed that they should not defy tradition, that they should respect authority, that truth should be sought in the text and not in experience. Fear of fawda (chaos) and fitna (schism) are deeply engrained in much Arab-Islamic teaching. “The role of thought”, wrote a Syrian intellectual “is to explain and transmit...and not to search and question.”

Such tenets never held back the great Arab astronomers and mathematicians of the Middle Ages. But now, it seems, they hold sway, discouraging critical thought and innovation and helping to produce a great army of young Arabs, jobless, unskilled and embittered, cut off from changing their own societies by democratic means. Islam at least offers them a little self-respect. With so many paths closed to them, some are now turning their dangerous anger on the western world.

thanks Christopher

12:03:44 PM  comment []    

David Halberstam: The Perfectionist at the Plate

In late August of 1946, when I was 12, I watched Ted Williams hit the most vicious drive I have ever seen. The ball, in my memory at least, was still soaring majestically when it hit the seats in the third tier in Yankee Stadium. Forty-two years later, when I was 54 and he was nearly 70, I spoke with Williams about the drive, both of us magically still boys on this date because of the subject matter. As I did, and as the details of that game all came back, I watched a smile spread over his face. "Tiny Bonham," he said at the end, naming the Yankee pitcher. I am sure he remembered the exact quality of the light and what Bonham threw as well.

He remembered because he was highly intelligent and he employed the full force of that ferocious, aggressive intelligence in the pursuit of only one objective: being the greatest hitter who ever lived, which he might well have been. Pitchers, in his words, were dumb by breed, and he studied them constantly looking for, and usually finding, their weaknesses.

I love to learn how experts think about things. Some of them have an intuitive feel, but they're not very interesting. How can I get an intuitive feel for something that I know nothing about? But the analytical thinkers.... Talk about fascinating.

I picked up a copy of Ted Williams's book The Science of Hitting from the library a couple of weeks ago. In this book, he arrogantly -- but truthfully -- declares that hitting a pitched baseball is "the single most difficult thing to do in sport", then essentially declares himself the greatest hitter that ever lived.

Physically he had the skills needed: big, strong, 20/10 vision. But mentally, he made himself the best. In the picture at right, you can see how he broke the strike zone down into 77 sections: 7 balls wide and 11 balls high. Marked on each section is the average that he could hit for at each of those strike zone positions. The dark red, middle-middle spots were his "happy zone", where he would hit .400, down to the low and away strike where he would hit only .230.

The gray area around the strike zone shows what happens if a hitter adds just 2" at each edge of the strike zone. The area increases by 37%. He claims that you'd hit at best only .250 if you swing at those pitches as well.

10:45:13 AM  comment []    

Blogchalking

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Seattle, Greenlake, Howard, Male, 36-40!

via Sheila Lennon, via Dave   

10:14:07 AM  comment []