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Hank Thompson

via mlkshk.com

That is a great looking card.

NFL Stadiums to show Fantasy Stats

Madden NFL 06 purists have criticized the NFL's ambitious efforts, saying that ticket prices are too high and the games aren't interactive enough. One Madden fan from Phoenix, Arizona summed up the frustrations: "I'm supposed to pay twice as much as I paid for the video game for one lousy live game, not including beer and hot dog costs, and I can't even control what's going on in the game? What the hell is so fun about that?"

via kottke.org

"We know we have to continue to do more to keep fans coming to our games.," McCarthy said, according to the report. "We're looking at ways to further replicate the at-home experience in the stadium."

via espn.com

OMGGGGGGGG tabs

Status report - Adventures in the Pointless Forest:

I swept and brushed and swabbed and whacked and toiled and missed that one corner while Jane stood on the other side of the screen door, rattling it and gushing snot, suggesting "Out! Out! Out!" alternating with an occasional "Cheese?" And now the porch is merely ramshackle and dusty (except for that corner) rather than shameful and haunted.

Friend of Hello, TypePad Anil Dash remembers Aaliyah. The Nervous Cook enjoys mail-order banana cake. MyBlockNYC's video of the week feature at Paper has been a lot of fun. Mary Beard has been searching for the classical Roman site of Gaddafi's home town of Sirte. I enjoyed this lukewarm review of God in a Cup at Serious Eats. Books about obsession are generally less interesting the older you get. Four or five years ago I would have been all over that book!

ESPN made a white Michael Vick. So much going on here, but I don't have the time or space to really think about it. The Madden-style rendering is a surprise - wouldn't a photograph (certainly there are plenty available) have more to say? The consensus among my friends was that the entire article was unnecessary, but ESPN (and other news outlets) have invested so much money and time into the narrative of Vick's return that this kind of crap was unavoidable. The author (Touré) claimed he didn't like the packaging of the article, but what did he really expect? Vick's rise was an authentic and exciting story, one the media and the NFL were completely unprepared for, the kind of story and sports fans live for. The packaging and repackaging and retelling and retelling and retelling is wearisome. Will Leith's GQ article about Vick was thoughtful.

MarsEdit gets better all the time. I'm also back using BBEdit now (superior Lion support, some muscle memory remains), and those are the longest-tenured two pieces of software in my starting lineup (bash, perl, vi, etc. don't count).

Scott Boras Keynote at SABR 41

in 1982, Boras said, No. 1 draft pick Shawon Dunston signed for the same amount of money that Rick Monday signed for as the No. 1 pick in 1965. “Something told me this is not an institution that’s treating players appropriately," Boras said. "We’re hurting the game."

via sabr.org

It's been a messy couple decades for baseball, but my guess is that when the history of it is written, Scott Boras is going to be seen as a good guy, not a bad guy. While the NHL missed a season a few years ago, and the NBA and the NFL are shut down for the foreseeable future, baseball (as a whole) is in pretty good financial shape. A big part of that is a healthy union and strong agents.

What, to Juan Pierre, is the Fourth of july?

Juan Pierre and Avon Barksdale:

Making The Wire references used to be the way the city-dwelling, Chomsky-reading intellectual flaunted his cultural literacy. It was a way of signaling one’s membership in a certain “in-crowd”. But now that Bill “Teen Wolf” Simmons has watched the show and has given it his typical “the world began when I was born” Bill Simmons treatment, The Wire references feel as if they have been reduced to the level of mindless Anchorman one-liners. Any-goddamn-one can quote Omar Little out of the blue with no context, that’s no fun. What is fun for me is having a three hour conversation about how the socio-economic forces at work in West Baltimore parallel those that are at work more slowly on the docks, as shown in Season Two. What is fun for me (and kinda disturbing, actually) is reading about a drop in crime in the paper and cynically assuming that the numbers were fudged on orders from the Mayor. What is fun for me is noting that an unnamed city or state politician is “just like Clay Davis” and having people know exactly which politician you are talking about and agree with you. And on the occasion I did drop a stray quote here and there, at least I could do so without having to worry about sounding like Bill Simmons.

No spoilers, and I recommend clicking through to see the ending of this post.

Truth is Stranger than Fiction

Stolen from a tumblr.

via hello.typepad.com

Matt Wieters now working on a perfect month with runners in scoring position: just homered with runner at 2B, now 6-for-6 with 10 RBI RISP.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyBuster Olney
Buster_ESPN

The Mets Are Missing Something In 2011: Their Fight Song

Oh, the butcher and the baker and the people on the streets,
Where did they go? To MEET THE METS!
Oh, they're hollerin' and cheerin' and they're jumpin' in their seats,
Where did they go? To MEET THE METS!
All the fans are true to the orange and blue,
So hurry up and come on down -
'cause we've got ourselves a ball club,
The Mets of New York town!

This isn't the team of fat cats, spoiled by winning. These fans go nuts when something good happens for their team. True enough. My experience at Shea Stadium and Citi Field suggest that these fans are among the best that Major League Baseball has to offer. It would have been easier for them to switch to the Yankees at any point of their lives. And yet they soldier on, this butcher and this baker and these street people. Beyond all sense, all evidence to the contrary, they come each night to the park thinking the Mets have a shot to win.

There have been attempts to update the song a few times, but the song as recorded all the way back when the club was just a whisper of a hope that National League Baseball would return to New York. It was a promise paid for in heartbreak and hope. And in getting away from the group performances of it at Citi Field, perhaps this group of current baseball players inhabiting those uniforms have forgotten their connection to the fans. The butchers, the bakers, the people on the street. I sat through almost eight hours of baseball on Thursday. And at no point in the practically empty Citi Field did Mets' management make an announcement like this "Everyone from the upper decks please move down closer to the game, you've earned it. Everyone just come on down and cheer for these Mets." Maybe that kind of goodwill would have inspired the team to win a game that Thursday. Seeing the Butchers, the Bakers, The People on the Street cheering for the Mets. Instead the game ended with chants of "Sell This Team!"

via www.theawl.com

Wonderful post by Jim Berhle at The Awl. The Awl is the new The New Yorker... so. much. text. but once in a while you read something that you can't imagine having missed, you can't even remember what life was like before you read it. Like the story in The New Yorker about the murdered Guatamalen lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg, thanks Jason!.

Which is all to say I agree so strongly about the fight song. I have primordial memories of my Dad teaching me that song, I need to sing it at the ball park!

A Tale of Two Box Scores

Fangraphs announced new boxscores this morning: "available for both live games and any game dating back to 1974."

For the lazy, I've included a thumbnail rendering of the two box scores in the full version of this post. I appreciate the "dh=0" parameter in Fangraphs URL, apparently the circumstances of the game can be changed with GET requests. For subsequent boxscore upgrades, this Mets fan humbly submits: "better_bullpen=1," "if_beltran_and_bay_were_healthy=1," "2006_mets_team_in_2011=1," "lincecum_is_met=1."

“Kids used to learn football in the playground, but now they learn the game more by the video game,”

via www.nytimes.com

That's almost as sad as the concussions themselves.

Wieters

Stolen from a tumblr.

via hello.typepad.com

It's almost baseball time.