Archive for General

Sometimes it’s healthy to turn your backs on certain things

From the “gee, I did not know that” department: The guy who has been the P.A. announcer for every inaugural parade since 1957 got the gig because of baseball: Charlie, the PR spokesman for the Washington Senators, got the inauguration gig because someone was impressed with the way he introduced President Eisenhower for the first […]

Jim Rice: step aside, because this is what it means to be a feared hitter: A pair of 8-year-olds armed with baseball bats are being credited with stopping a man who had put a gun to a woman’s face and threatened to kill her The two boys came to the woman’s rescue on Sunday shortly […]

Jason at IIATMS has started rolling out all of the responses he got to his “what would you do if you were made Commissioner for a day” request. He got so much feedback that he’s going to break it down by subject. First up: relocation and territory rights, with a contribution from Keith Law and […]

From the department of randomness, comes a story about Peter Ueberroth place in civil rights history: There were a million people at the Martin Luther King Day parade in Atlanta in 1986, several hundred of whom still have a picture of Peter Ueberroth somewhere in their scrapbooks. Many of them probably didn’t know who the […]

As mentioned in the inaugural edition of this feature, “The people in my neighborhood” will periodically highlight the work of some of the (for now, anyway) lesser-known bloggers with whom I’ve had the pleasure of conversing and who, on occasion, loiter around ShysterBall comment threads waiting for you to make a mistake and then pounce […]

Scott Simkus has a piece up about Bill James, James’ website, and (a bit) about his upcoming book about crime. It ends in an interview of sorts. Based on the intro, you can tell it’s not your typical James profile: George William H. Bonney “Bill” James (born October 5, 1949) has been turning sabr-tricks since […]

Yet another Hall of Fame post mortem

Alex Brissette passes along an article about a political scientist named Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and the world of game theory (or, as they prefer to call it, rational choice theory) which, if you think about it a bit, parallels the story of Bill James and sabermetrics minus the humor and plus real world consequences. […]

One of the best things about blogging is that I’ve met a lot of smart and interesting people. Well, sort of met them in that way you meet people on the Internet. Commenters and emailers and folks like that. Even better, is that since I’ve started this blog, a handful of these folks have started […]