Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Nate Silver stepping aside


You saw this coming a mile away, but now it's official:

It was barely a year ago when I launched FiveThirtyEight.com, a political number-crunching website that I expected to receive a few hundred hits a day and occupy perhaps five hours of my time per week. Since then, thanks to a combination of being in the right place at the right time and making a few lucky predictions, the site is accumulating both many degrees of magnitude more traffic than that, and occupying a much larger fraction of my time than I could have ever anticipated. I feel very, very fortunate about all of this; indeed, there have been many moments, such as upon appearing on Stephen Colbert's show, when I felt as though I'd won the nerd lottery. However, as you've undoubtedly noticed, these other opportunities have meant that I've been able to devote less of my time to Baseball Prospectus.

Fortunately, we are a team of clutch performers, and Kevin Goldstein and Dave Pease have somehow found the hours to step up their contributions and keep the company running smoothly. Without the dedication of these two individuals, and others like Christina Kahrl, Joe Sheehan, and Will Carroll, I'm not sure that BP could have continued to exist in its present form. Kevin is now our Managing Partner, and he should be your primary point of contact for any and all business-related inquiries.

Here's wishing Nate the best as he devotes himself more fully to what is obviously the sexier, better-paying of his two gigs. Of course, since baseball is about a gajillion times more enjoyable than politics, here's hoping that he still finds the time to show up at BP on a regular basis in order to clear the mind, spirit, and soul.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 11:52am (9) Comments

CSI Arlington


This is interesting:

Arlington police are investigating the discovery of a man's body Tuesday morning near a pond at the Ballpark at Arlington. Few details are available, but the body was found at about 8:30 a.m. by ballpark security officers on the west side of the facility near Randol Mill and Nolan Ryan Expressway.

Did the victim have a fork in his back? If so, has anyone seen Andruw Jones?

Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 10:09am (3) Comments

Maybe they had more’n they could handle?


Jose Tabata is apparently married to a dingo:

A 2-month-old is back in the arms of her parents and the wife of a top Pittsburgh Pirates minor league prospect is suspected of taking the infant from a health clinic outside Tampa, authorities said Tuesday.

Amalia Tabata Pereira, 43, was being questioned by Florida detectives in Manatee County, where the girl was found unharmed Tuesday afternoon, a day after she was taken from the clinic. Plant City Chief of Police Bill McDaniel said authorities are looking to charge Pereira with false imprisonment.

She is the wife of Jose Tabata, 20, an outfielder and one of the top three prospects for the Pirates, who train in Bradenton, which is in the county where the infant was found. In a statement, Pirates president Frank Coonelly said they have received "no indication that Jose is believed to have had any involvement in this matter."

Given that she's 43 and Tabata is 20, this is not the first cradle she robbed.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 9:08am (5) Comments

For art’s sake


Artists have been selected to gussy up the area around Target Field:

St. Paul muralist Craig David and Phoenix artist Al Price were selected from among 84 applicants by a Public Art Steering Committee formed by the Minnesota Ballpark Authority (MBA) and project partners Hennepin County and Northstar Commuter Rail, the MBA announced Tuesday . . .

. . . David's project calls for murals along the 5th Street side of the ballpark. The $200,000 budget comes from the MBA's District Enhancement and Public Art Incentive Fund.

Price's project will be inside the Vertical Circulation building and is funded by $150,000 from the Northstar Commuter Rail Line. This two-story building will house the escalators and elevators used to connect commuters to the two levels of trains at the ballpark's transit station.

While I'm kind of an art idiot, I've long been a fan of public art projects. Old WPA murals especially, but also the weird sorts of things you find hanging around government buildings from the 60s and 70s. I can only guess that such beasts aren't considered good art -- well, maybe the WPA stuff has its supporters -- but my enjoyment of these works isn't necessarily an aesthetic thing. Rather, it's an appreciation that someone buried in a bureaucracy somewhere, however art-challenged they themselves might have been, thought it right and proper that a public building have some art in it.

I don't suppose Target Field will be getting a large mural setting forth the history of workers in America or some odd, unfortunately-colored geometric monstrosity like I walk past in my 1970s government office building each morning, but as long as it isn't a billboard for Audi or something, I'm cool with it.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 8:30am (4) Comments

See you at GenCon, Curt!


Those of you concerned that Curt Schilling's retirement from baseball means that he'll be writing more may take some comfort in the fact that No. 38 has a day job now:

Following the announcement of his retirement from baseball yesterday, former Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling spoke at the GamesBeat game conference in San Francisco about his next venture, 38 Studios. While he didn't reveal any new details about the massively multiplayer RPG he's been developing, currently code named Copernicus, he did chat a bit about the transition from playing on a sports team to running a game studio.

"I lived my life in reverse," he commented. "I spent the first half of my life retired," speaking about how he viewed baseball as what he would have done for fun,"and then 20 years later went to work," referring to the fact that he now has a "real job" -- or something much closer to one, anyway. He claims that he still loves what he does so much that he comes in to work at 7:00 AM because he's so eager to get started on the day.

I had forgotten that Schilling was into RPGs, but now that I read this I recall him talking about that in the past. I spent a little time in my youth playing these things, offline of course. I'm glad that minor obsession ended, though, because I can't think of anything more unpleasant than embarking on a campaign with a group of strangers only to have it become apparent later that one of them was Schilling.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 8:00am (10) Comments

What will they think of next


Wait, what?

Audi today announced that the brand is now the official luxury vehicle of the New York Yankees. The new relationship also includes the naming of the Audi Yankees Club, an exclusive viewing location and membership restaurant, located on the H&R Block Suite Level in left field. The sponsorship begins with the opening of Yankee Stadium and extends through the 2011 season.

Financial terms were not released.

I guess this means all non-Audi luxury cars driven by Yankee players, employees, and fans are now deemed "unofficial" contraband and will thus be confiscated and destroyed.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:30am (12) Comments

Next up, Mike Piazza


Will Leitch has an excerpt from Jeff Pearlman's new Roger Clemens book, and it ain't about Roger Clemens:

"There was nothing more obvious than Mike on steroids," says another major league veteran who played against Piazza for years. "Everyone talked about it, everyone knew it. Guys on my team, guys on the Mets. A lot of us came up playing against Mike, so we knew what he looked like back in the day. Frankly, he sucked on the field. Just sucked. After his body changed, he was entirely different. 'Power from nowhere,' we called it."

When asked, on a scale of 1 to 10, to grade the odds that Piazza had used performance enhancers, the player doesn't pause.

"A 12," he says. "Maybe a 13."

According to another part of the excerpt, everyone knew it, including many reporters. Which should make the next round of the media's faux outrage and lamentations of lost innocence all the richer.

Beyond that, Piazza recently announced that he's writing his autobiography. When the news of that broke, I opined that there aren't many superstars blander than Piazza, and that guys like him don't really make for riveting reading. One has to wonder now whether the pitch to his publisher involved a promise to be the first megastar -- non-Canseco division -- to come completely clean on PEDs in print.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 7:00am (18) Comments

Today at THT


As you may have seen already, THT's John Brattain has died unexpectedly. I've known John, in that way you know people on the Internet, for seven or eight years, and he's one of the few guys who literally made me laugh out loud. His sense of humor was right up my alley: punny, a little sick, and indefatigable. No matter how dark the subject matter, you could always count on John to crack wise, and I have full confidence that if any of us had died, he'd have some inappropriate yet hilarious comment about it all.

Unfortunately, I don't have half the game John Brattain had, and my funny seems to have escaped me in light of this awful news. As a result, I have no wise cracks at the ready for today's links.

I don't know what happens after we die, but if we retain some existence somewhere, I know John is shaking his head in disappointment, and somehow arranging things so I bend over and split my pants or something later today. I'll accept that. Just know, John, that if that happens and if the THT editors go all Tupac on you and start publishing your unfinished drafts posthumously, I'm going to freaking brutalize them in this space.

Wait, that's no revenge. You'd like that. Crap.

  • Brian Borawski has five questions about the Detroit Tigers.


  • Chris Needham has five questions about the Washington Nationals.


  • Over at Fantasy Focus, Derek Carty wonders whether Nate McClouth is a case of smoke and mirrors.


  • Finally, Michael Lerra plays fantasy roster doctor.


    • A fantastic, impromptu tribute to and remembrance of John can be found on this BTF thread.

    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:33am (0) Comments