Oscar Gamble Society

Oakland’s other first-round and supplemental picks:

24th pick - RHP Joe Blanton - this pick just looks better and better.
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As the years pass it becomes possible to evaluate Billy Beane’s 2002 draft decisions described by Michael Lewis in Moneyball. The obvious place to start is with the first round - Beane lusted after Ohio State’s Nick Swisher and mocked the conventional wisdom that Prince Fielder, fresh out of high school, was a great prize.

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I interrupt this regularly scheduled sports discussion for an issue that remains unresolved in my mind, despite much time spent pondering the merits of each side:  Which is it, Tesh or The Hoff?

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So MLB announced on Monday that the first game of the WS will be moved from Saturday, 10/20 to Wednesday, 10/24.  Thus, Game 7 will be played on November 1st, 2007.  Wow.

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I was just going to link to that one story in the Onion’s sports page, but there are actually too many stories worth reading to single one out:
http://www.theonion.com/content/sports

Plus, admit it - at first glance you figured there’s maybe a 10% chance its not from the Onion but just an extreme case of “Manny being Manny.”

http://torontosun.com/Sports/Baseball/2007/05/08/4162470-sun.html

How has this not been done before…. simply outstanding

I was listening to Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann on ESPN radio Monday afternoon, and they were talking about beer in baseball given the Josh Hancock tragedy.  They talked about a team named the Brewers (but not that they played in Miller Park) - and the fact that the Cardinals play in Busch Stadium.

Olbermann then offered a little history on that, confirmed here:

http://todayinbaseballonline.com/April%204/APRIL_10_19.shtml

According to Olbermann, Auggie Busch then went to his marketing people and told them to come out with a “Busch” beer - to take advantage of all the “free advertising” he’d be getting from the newly-named stadium.  So he ended up getting his way, having the stadium named after a beer of his… he just did it backwards (so that he could do it at all).

The solution to the conundrum of Barry Bonds as home run king just came to me. Nobody without some sort of axe to grind seems to want to see Bonds break Aaron’s record. Yet barring some Act of God (hint, hint, Lord) later this year Bonds will hit his 756th career homer. But recall that Josh Gibson’s career home run total has never been definitively established. I say that absent evidence to the contrary, we agree to assume that during his career Gibson slugged a home run total equal to Bonds’, plus 1. Or would a desire to recognize a Negro League player as the all-time home run king just be another manifestation of childish racial resentments?

That distinction appears to go to Todd Boyd who, when not ginning up racial controversies for ESPN, is a “professor of critical studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.” Not only that, he is the author of “The Notorious Ph.D.’s Guide to the Super Fly ’70s.” Wow. We’re clearly dealing with Algonquin round table material here. I see credentials like that and I’m thinking “My Dinner with Andre” meets “Take Time for Paradise.” Alas.

Boyd essentially claims that it is racist to presume Bonds used steroids because he hasn’t been convicted, and even if he did, its OK because blacks used to be prohibited from playing in MLB. Or something. Trying to wring a rational thesis out of this dog’s breakfast of racial grievances is a fool’s errand. Emblematic quote:

“At the end of the day, it would be great to see people put away their childish racial resentment of Barry Bonds and give the man his due, but as an adult I have no illusions that this is going to happen.”

Indeed. It is clearly my childish racial resentment of African Americans that moves me to view Hank Aaron as the true home run king. How silly of me to think otherwise.

Slate.com features an interesting article about the nascent trend of biomechanical analysis in baseball. It strikes me as the logical progression of sabremetrics; as with fielding, biomechanics is an area where there seems to be a paucity of data, leading to lots of conflicting opinions, many of which are likely to be proven wrong as data emerges to permit objective analysis. How is Leo Mazzone able to wring such improvement out of his pupils? And why does the improvement dissipate when they leave Mazzone? As with scouting in the days of sending mathematically illiterate guys out to look for five-tool players, it all seems like a field ripe for reinvention.