Baseball. Blogging. Whenever.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

NBC Comment of the Day


All I have to say is boo friggin' hoo to these guys who get paid 7 or 8 figures a year to play a game... Suck it up and deal with it. Not like baseball requires much physical exertion, you stand out in the field and maybe sprint 8 or 9 times in a 3 hour span.

-- commenter "Cry4the$$$," who didn't take too kindly to my complaints about the Braves and Dodgers playing on the west coast last night following a late, east coast game on Sunday night.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:25pm (5) Comments

The horror, the horror


Rob, please come back from your vacation soon, because I don't know that I can take much more of this.
Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 4:46pm (12) Comments

You double-cross once - where’s it all end? An interesting ethical question.


Lots of talk recently about the ethics of blockquotes and linkbacks and all of that. First you had the AP being silly. Then, on Sunday, came the much-discussed Ian Shapira article in the Washington Post. Today Maury applies that to baseball, talking about the role of "aggregators" such as Baseball Think Factory, MLB Trade Rumors, MetsBlog and the like. Upshot: a lot of people are uncomfortable with how much use of primary material others are making.

While those articles don't deal with blog like this one directly -- they're really aimed more at spaces that put bunches of links together -- I think it's worthy to examine what common blogs do and to think about what's kosher and what's not when it comes to linking and blockquoting and what have you. This is not a legal fair use thing. That matters, of course -- the law is certainly the baseline -- but I'm not interested in talking about that right now. I'm talkin' about friendship. I'm talkin' about character. I'm talkin' about - hell, Leo, I ain't embarrassed to use the word - I'm talkin' about ethics.

To the extent I have a blog philosophy, it's that a blog should try to add independent value to everything he or she writes. Simply regurgitating a news article and extreme blockquoting is both useless and, well, wrong. You have to add something to it, be it insight, analysis, commentary or humor. For example, let's say that aliens invaded planet Earth on July 13th, and AP came out with a story headlined "Bud Selig cancels All-Star Game due to alien invasion." If you're a blog and you do any of the following, I think you're cool:

  • Provide insight: write a post that expands on the wire report, explaining, via your own reporting or the weaving together of lots of other sources, what's going on in greater detail. Say you're in St. Louis, and you know all about the discussions of other options that were had prior to the cancellation (e.g. spraying the ballpark with alien spray; moving the game off-planet);


  • Provide analysis: write a post in which you run down all of the ballplayers who may not get their All-Star bonuses as a result of the cancellation, and how that affects team payrolls or, say, how this particular alien invasion is far more disruptive to the season than the less-successful Roswell invasion was. Oh don't even try to deny it;


  • Provide commentary: write a post in which you lambaste Bud Selig for not anticipating the alien invasion and having a contingency plan for what any moron could have seen to have been an inevitable happening;


  • Provide humor: Write a post about how Jagul Gluket, despite coming from an invading alien fleet, had more of a right to be on the All-Star team than Jayson Werth.


    • If, on the other hand, you simply write a post that links the AP, says "that alien invasion is cancelling the All-Star game," quotes lots of text and ends with you simply sayng the equivalent of "hmm, interesting" or something similarly cursory, that's kind of a problem. If you don't have any sort of original commentary about it, but you still want your readers to read it -- something which represents "web-logging" in its original and perhaps most pure form -- do it link-o-rama style and just give a link that encourages click-through ("Plaschke thinks the alien All-Star thing is all Manny's fault; check it out"). Olney does that every day, and there's a lot of value it simply because you're turning on people to the story who wouldn't have otherwise read.

    The idea is a simple one: either add independent value, strongly encourage click-throughs to the original source, or forget it. Ultimately, if you can't point to a blog post and identify what it's doing differently than the news story, then there is probably something wrong with the blog post.

    No, I can't say I always abide by this perfectly, but that's certainly what we as blog should be shooting for.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 4:20pm (10) Comments

    Julio Castillo guilty


    That dude who threw that ball at that fan got convicted.

    Sorry for the brevity. I'm thinking about fair use and attribution and stuff right now, so I'm kind of afraid to type anything (another post to follow).
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 3:19pm (1) Comments

    Reason # 1,398 Baseball > Football


    From Florio at PFT:

    Multiple league sources tell us that the Chargers have fined cornerback Antonio Cromartie $2,500 for complaining on Twitter about the quality of the food at training camp.

    As best we can tell, this is the offending tweet, from July 31 at 3:46 p.m.: "Man we have 2 have the most nasty food of any team. Damn can we upgrade 4 str8 years the same ish maybe that's y we can't we the SB we need."

    That phrase translates to the following in English, we think: "Man, we have to have the most nasty food of any team. Damn, can we upgrade? Four straight years the same sh-t. Maybe that's why we can't get the Super Bowl we need."

    Per one source, coach Norv Turner has specifically told the team not to talk about any team matters on Twitter or any other online social media.

    For one thing, baseball almost always lets its players, you know, go out and eat whatever the hell they want, even during spring training. Even if they didn't, if someone complained about it, the next day there would be some kangaroo court cooking contest or something silly in which the guy complaining would be forced to do better. Or else someone would spike his burger with vinegar or something to show him what real bad food tasted like, and then they'd all giggle like junior high school students. No one would be fining anyone $2,500, that's for sure. I don't think the Army would even make you do push-ups for criticizing the sh*t on a shingle. They know it's sh*t and they don't care: you're eating it, and that's all that matters.

    I know this is a silly example of it, but there's a basic humanity about baseball that is almost nonexistent in modern football's, robotic, gladiatorial culture, and I just can't look past it and enjoy the game.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 2:35pm (18) Comments

    My Morning in Exile


    Thanks to the law, my day just exploded again. I don't think it will take me out of blogging all afternoon, but things may once again be light today. A thousand pardons. For now:

  • Brandon Webb has his owie fixed.


  • Wanna win the World Series? Beat up on the cupcakes!


  • See cathedral mountains, see the silver clouds below . . . see everything as far as you can see. Just don't get crazy and try to touch the sun, dude, because that's just whack.


  • If ebony and ivory can live together in perfect harmony, why can't the Yankees and the Red Sox?


  • It's never too early to get started with the neutral site World Series nonsense.


  • Beltran and Delgado are taking hacks and shagging flies, though it's not gonna make a difference.
    • Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 11:53am (2) Comments

    And That Happened


    All law and no blogs makes Craig a dull boy. Let's try to remedy that today, shall we?

    Nationals 8, Pirates 4: The Laughingstock Series went four games, and nothing was decided. Adam Dunn went 3-for-4 and was a triple short of the cycle. He may as well have been eight unicorns, cold fusion and a perpetual motion machine short, because you were just as likely to see that stuff as an Adam Dunn triple.

    Tigers 6, Orioles 5: I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that not many teams have tagged Justin Verlander for five runs right out the box and have gone on to lose the game. Heck, the Os had five hits in that first frame and only had three the rest of the night. I haven't seen anyone start so fast and peter out so quickly since Christopher Cross won all those Grammy awards back in '81.

    Padres 4, Braves 2: Can someone explain to me why the Braves had to play the Sunday night game right before flying across the damn country and playing on the west coast without an off day? Twelve teams had friggin' off days yesterday, but not the team who played the late game and had to fly to California? Sure, that's fair. And tired or not tired, I couldn't be more proud of my Bravos here, losing to perhaps the worst team in baseball on a night when they did not even play Adrian Gonzalez.

    Brewers 6, Dodgers 5: And lest you think that previous bit is my Braves' homerism coming out, it stunk that the Dodgers had to fly home and play without a day off too. Totally weak scheduling, here. At least the Dodgers had a chance here. Down 6-2 entering the ninth, the Dodgers came back to within one, loaded the bases and Manny Ramirez came to the plate . . . and flew out, alas.

    Diamondbacks 6, Mets 5: The Dbacks teed off on Nelson Figueroa (1.2 IP, 10 H, 6 ER) and could have turned it into a laugher. Instead, New York clawed back, though just not quite enough. You'll all be shocked to learn that Jeff Francoeur made the third out in the eighth inning with a bouncer to third to end a potential rally. Mark Reynolds took Sunday off, but still finished the series 5-for-12 with four homers and five RBIs.

    Cubs 4, Reds 2: Thank goodness for Kevin Gregg's tired arm, or else Lou might have been tempted to use him in this one. As it stood, Carlos Marmol just didn't have it in him to cough this one away, instead only allowing one late run. Mike Fontenot's three-run homer in the second was the big blow here. The Cubs are now 13-5 since the break. Paid attendance: 22,222. This means something. This is important.

    Astros 4, Giants 3: You don't see a ton of complete game losses anymore, but Matt Cain had one (8 IP, 8 H, 4 ER, 5K).

    Rays 10, Royals 4: Zack Greinke has his worst start of the year. He hasn't won since June 28th, though apart from last night he hasn't pitched too terribly. Eventually you just sort of get dragged down by the folks around you, I guess. More surprising than Greinke getting roughed up -- and maybe even more surprising than an Adam Dunn triple would be -- was Yunieksy Betancourt hitting a homer. As for the Rays, Willy Aybar hit two homers and Scott Kazmir got his second straight win.

    A's 3, Rangers 2: Just a thought, but if you're going to use Neftali Feliz out of the pen, maybe you want to think about using him as the closer. Dude pitched two innings, retired all six batters he faced in order, struck out the first four, in fact, with several pitches registering at 100 miles per hour. In the ninth, C.J. Wilson gave up three singles and a pinch hit triple to Rajai Davis, blowing a 2-0 lead.
    Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 5:42am (13) Comments