Olbermann is as good at blogging as he is at everything else

Keith Olbermann's Baseball Nerd. He's very good.

Hot on the heels of his electric election commentary, Keith Olbermann started an MLB Pro blog, Baseball Nerd. After briefly ensuring narrow-minded baseball readers like myself that there would be no politics on the blog, he proceeded to turn some of the more insightful, well-argued, entertaining baseball posts. He dances nimbly among the thorny bushes of history, culture, today’s game, players, &tc.

Many celeb-u-bloggers post a few times a month while a surrogate fills in the meantimes with calendar dates and such. I was prepared for similar from Olbermann. Not so, not in the slightest. The man’s brain produces and propels complete sentences into the media atmosphere like a surface-to-air gunner. It’s amazing, I don’t know where you get that kind of motor.

To wit: in his most recent post he finds a thread that ties together cases of the yips. I’ll leave it to you to explore those threads. I’ll say that his is not a rock-solid theory, but certainly an interesting one, and worthy of some meditation.

Baseball Nerd w/ Keith Olbermann

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A baseball-flavored visual design meander

Why shouldn't a catcher's mask look like a futuristic soldier helmet?

The Behance Network is an online bazaar trafficking in visual imagery, product design, graphic design, and all manner of effluvia. It’s a good way to survey the design scene (I’m an amateur audience, to be sure). I punched “baseball” into the search cell. Here are a few baseball-related design highlights:

– Designer Francesco Schiraldi takes a new design look at a catcher’s helmet. The flip-up visor is intriguing. Also check out his pitching machine, a War of the Worlds interpretation of that terrifying device.

– Some old-school mascot posters from Bruno Allard.

The SI cover featuring Zack Greinke offers a unique visual perspective. Add to that the World Series cover from last year, the recent Hamels and Pujols covers, and the Lincecum cover from July of 2008, and you’ve got some compelling portraiture from the old standby. Great photography seems to be the key here, with simple design. In the Hamels, Pujols and Lincecum covers, the design highlights the particular style and physical presence of the subject. It’s a keen way to capitalize on that style factor that makes baseball go.

Eschewing blatant cover cliche

On the topic of covers, baseball book cover designs most often include a) a player portrait or b) a large, artistic-seeming picture of a baseball. It makes sense, on one hand, and is pretty bland on the other. Now I Can Die in Peace by Bill Simmons is a notable exception (I haven’t read the book). Additional compelling cover designs of recent baseball books:

– Odd Man Out by Matt McCarthy. This cover takes the action to a place just off camera, in a madcap scramble for some ball, presumably.

– The Integration of Major League Baseball features a cover in the style of an old baseball card. Reminds me of the custom baseball cards mentioned in a previous post.

– Lefty, Double-X, and the Kid mixes new fontiness with old portraits, to a vintage-modern effect.

On Etsy, handmade products from the masses:

A pretty sweet baseball pillow.
A decorative baseball silhouette.

Dr. Baseball

Doogie showing more medical confidence than I could feign

My least favorite part of the Steroids Era–brought to the forefront again with the Manny news–is this call for fans to understand the medical & pharmaceutical ins and outs of all of these bizarre hormonal treatments, steroids, HGHs, &tc. I start to feel like a college kid again, who’s stumbled mistakenly into a conversation about pot paraphernalia with the water bongs and the bong bombs and the twigs and whatever.

To wit, this LATimes article, quoted in part:

The medication in question was human chorionic gonadotropin, or HCG, according to a source familiar with the situation not authorized to publicly discuss the issue.

A high-ranking sports doping authority said HCG could legitimately be prescribed for a man who does not naturally produce enough testosterone, but BALCO founder and convicted steroid dealer Victor Conte said it is often used to replenish testosterone levels at the end of a cycle of steroid treatments.

HCG is one of dozens of substances prohibited under baseball’s policy. Players can call a hotline to check the legality of any substance and can get a therapeutic-use exemption for any legitimate medical use of a banned substance.

So either Manny used to take steroids and is now taking this under-the-table med to replenish supplies of some chemical to some organ, or he naturally produces less testosterone than normal and must resupply his corpus with perfectly legal medication. That quick recap makes it sound like I now understand the situation, even just a little. I DO NOT. I don’t understand the situation at all, but I feel like I should understand it.

I don’t want to feel like I should understand this stuff. I don’t know what aspirin is or how it can treat a headache or a footache equally. I am not a doctor. Don’t make me be a doctor now. I just want to watch baseball.

Pitch-tipping: the new old piracy

King Kelly, now- beloved base-skipper

Doug Glanville posted a New York Times column about the A-Rod pitch-tipping allegation, in which he argues that:

If in fact there was a pitch-tipping scheme, I would expect a full investigation, not just of Alex but of any player who would share information with his opponent. It is that serious.

It’s a little hard for me to view this whole tipping sidenote with the stern and worried attitude that Glanville presents in the column. In 50 years, such episodes will be remembered fondly, as signs that baseball was still a quirky game with lots of little ins and outs and rules-trifling trickery. Excepting steroids (which I consider an entirely different level of “oh shit”), Pete Rose and the Black Sox scandal, the baseball literati and fanerati look back on most of the gambling and cheating and boozing and fighting from the old days as symbols of freewheeling charm and the anti-establishment nature of the game, with the canonization of rogue leagues and managers and players who were giant assholes. Here I’m thinking of your King Kellys (drank himself to death, ran from first to third directly), and your Ty Cobbs (old X-ACTO-Spikes).

It’s notable perhaps that pitch-tipping to the other team can affect the outcome of the game, in the manner of “throwing” a game. It remains, though, that if Honus Wagner devised a secret code between he and Nap Lajoie, with a double shuffle-left hand twitch-triple-spit, it’d be a fantastic quip about the simpatico between baseball legends. The stories that survive over time are those that transgress. The only incidences of nicety that last are those involving extreme nicety (Christy “The Christian Gentleman” Mathewson comes to mind).

Not so cute when it's contemporary.

In times like these, it bears remembering that people used to really fucking hate pirates. The global outrage over this Somali pirate business, with calls for government actions and protections and whatnot, echoes the way populations used to view the pirates of yesteryear. The bastards impeded commerce and scared everybody. Now, of course, our nations most beloved hero is a pirate: Ross Ohlendorf.

All I’m saying is that, as ever, let’s be careful about the nature of our unrest. For there will come a time when we’ll laugh at ourselves and the mess we made back then.

bigPumaLinks: baseball all the time edition

– Keeper of the Kohn, on Hulu. This is a documentary about Peter Kohn, the Middlebury College lacrosse team’s retired equipment manager. Kohn’s primary passion is lacrosse, but he made his way out to the baseball fields at Middlebury every once in a while to give us a pep talk, and to manage our equipment for a day or two. I knew little of him back then, and this video goes a long way to tell the man’s story. In early season baseball, Kohn, a master ball-finder, would head out into the trees behind the outfield wall at Forbes Field and return an hour later with three or four of the skankiest, rottenest baseballs you’ve ever seen in your life.

– The e-book revolution reaches the Mariners dugout, as the old (Jarrod Washburn and his paper dinosaurs) and the new (Brandon Morrow and his 3-year-old e-book reader) clash over technology, and bond over content. Geoff Baker of the Seattle Times

– Virginia Heffernan looks at the manner of discourse among reader comments on journalism sites. The Medium – NYTimes

– Fun Start: A concise overview of the season and its funness thus far. David Pinto, Baseball Musings

– Several days ago marked the anniversary of the interesting Bissinger vs. Leitch debate on HBO. Deadspin

– Keith Olbermann‘s apolitical baseball blog, Baseball Nerd, is pretty great, as well-thought and meticulous as you might expect. Baseball Nerd on closers, look-alikes.