Category: Baseball

2012 Kettleers Scouting Report

Opening Day is at home this year, beginning at 5 pm on Thursday the 14th when the Hyannis Harbor Hawks open the season against the Kettleer’s.

Coach Mike Roberts is returning with what looks like another exceptionally powerful lineup of college freshmen and sophomores. The other night my son and I played scout and ran the roster through The Google as it’s published on the newly (and nicely) redesigned Kettleer’s website to see if there were any surprises. On several occasions we admired the stats and commentary on the players’ college bios and started rubbing our hands with anticipation on what kind of talent would emerge through mid-August.

Early season rosters are notoriously flaky due to the MLB draft, the post-season college World Series, Team USA invites and sadly, not this year, Olympic team commitments as this is the summer Olympics when the ass-hats at the IOC decided to drop one of the truly global team sports in favor of, I believe, golf. So take this roster with a bit of latitude. Some will come, some will go, and some won’t show up at all. But whatever happens, June is a blast getting to know each and every one of the players and playing the game of trying to predict who the heroes will be during the August championships.

There’s no way of telling precisely who in the following roster will show up on June 14, but of the 20-man roster, only one returns from the 2011 lineup: Kevin Ziomek from Vanderbilt, a perennial feeder for the Cotuit team.

Vanderbilt supplies the most players this year, at three, LSU sends two. There’s a pair of Bay State natives, one Ivy Leaguer, and a lot of strong batting averages and low ERAs coming to town.

There aren’t any major renovations to the field worth mentioning, but the Cotuit Athletic Association is kicking of a $900,000 capital fund drive to give us home fans a new third-base grandstand and some other improvements to the bathrooms and snack bar. So, even if you are an annual booster, you may want to consider an additional donation to the fund so we can do away with the springy green planks and get something new on a level with the visitors’ stands behind the visitors’ dugout.

Given the wet weather and my belief that I saw a snow flake yesterday when I left the gym, this promises to be a chilly June and I don’t intend to get fooled again. So he who arrives on the 14th without a fleece and some mittens probably won’t make it to the second inning.

In related news, Deven Marrero, the all-star standout from the Kettleer’s championship summer of 2010 was the Red Sox’s first pick during the MLB draft. Here’s the news at the Boston Globe.

Update: and a great piece on ESPN about Deven with a lot from Coach Roberts.

Blackouts, devices and addiction: how Major League Baseball picks my pocket

I always point to the interactive/digital division of Major League Baseball as one of the most progressive and intelligent media companies on the planet. The official name of the operation is Major League Baseball Advanced Media, which indeed they are.

Nothing has come between the MLB and their digital future.  From consolidating every one of the professional franchises’ web presence and ecommerce operation under one common infrastructure to being the first to adopt and extend its content on every platform imaginable — from smartphones to tablets to laptops to game consoles — the MLB has come to define the true meaning of the second-screen viewing experience, extending the same television experience our grandfathers knew on black and white televisions to the brave new world of Moneyball statistics, multi-angle interactive shots, pitch-by-pitch placement analysis, and a general entertainment geekout that makes the most of America’s pastime while inducing its most rabid fans to part with serious cash each and every year. [that was the first 110-word sentence I’ve written in a very long time]

This season marks the fourth year I’ll be subscribing to baseball’s AtBat service. The first year was 2008, when I paid some forgotten amount — maybe $60 or $75 — so I could watch the Red Sox while I was stationed in Beijing during the Summer Olympics. There was something supremely comforting about sitting in my hotel room at 2 am and watching a day game live from Fenway.  Even simply listening to a WEEI radio broadcast on my Blackberry in the back of a Chinese taxi on my way to deal with some urgent customer issue at the women’s beach volleyball arena made me feel 100% the part of the Ugly American in a strange land.

For someone who lives on the road or constantly works outside of their home television market — mine is defined basically by the New England Sports Network’s footprint — the MLB service is a nice thing to have. Sitting in a hotel room in the evening with an iPad streaming the home team is a good thing — once you get past the pernicious and byzantine blackout restrictions — and even at home, while the game is on the big screen and blacked out from the device, the statistical GameDay service is a nice thing to have at hand if you want to geek out on some statistics during the beer commercials.

Here’s the pitch on the MLB commerce cart:

“You have selected 2012 MLB.TV Premium Yearly. Watch over 150 Spring Training games LIVE online with no blackouts. Watch home or away feeds of every out-of-market regular season game LIVE in HD quality. At Bat 12 is now included free with your MLB.TV Premium subscription: watch on the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and select Android phones (now available), PLUS, new connected devices for the 2012 season like Xbox 360(coming soon).”

The price: $125 (and for merely $20 more I can get all of Minor League Baseball as well).

This year the MLB seems to have decoupled the AtBat service from the video service, so I am confronted with a $120 subscription to the MLB.tv premium service if I want to continue to be able to watch home games while I’m in New York City during the week. (yes, in theory I could be Slingboxing off of my home DirectTV system). Since I am a member-in-good-standing of the BLOHARDS (the Benevolent Loyal Order of the Honorable Ancient Red Sox Diehard Sufferers of New York), I feel obligated to keep a steady stream of Red Sox infiltrating the backyard of the despised Yankees. I know I could get off my agoraphobic ass and watch the games in a Red Sox friendly bar somewhere in Manhattan, but I doubt I’d be able to do so in my boxer shorts and know I’d end up in an over-served condition before game’s end.

The reality is I’ll probably watch two dozen games in their entirety via MLB.tv, most of them on an iPad, some in airport lounges on my Android phone, and probably a lot of the very cool 13 minute compressed hit-by-hit recaps that are shown every morning after. As for relying on the second-screen GameDay function — basically an avatar of a batter facing out towards a digital version of the home team’s outfield surrounded by stats and an pitch-by-pitch animation and strike zone placement — sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I’m a very ADD fan who generally does something else while the game drones in the background — email, memos, reading — and look up at the sound of the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd, relying in the replay or rewind button to show me the action.

But I pay because I am a fan and fans are fanatics after all.  While the blackout policies always piss me off, and make me especially curse the national weekend and post-season blackouts induced by MLB’s exclusives with Fox Sports and ESPN, still I pay.

It’s a great racket they have going and deserves the praise it has received from both the tech and the financial press. There’s good reason MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman made a list of the smartest people in tech in 2010 (here’s an interview he did with AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka last spring.) I know of no other media organization that rose to the challenge, seized the opportunity, and then innovated against the technical opportunity like Major League Baseball — a remarkable feat considering the league consists of 30+ independent owners governed loosely by a commissioner.

 

Crawford regaining confidence on base paths thanks to Cotuit’s Mike Roberts

Crawford regaining confidence on base paths.

Cool story on NECN about how Red Sox Carl Crawford brought along Cotuit Kettleer’s coach Mike Roberts to spring training to help improve his base running. Any Cotuit fan knows the mark of a Roberts’ team is incredible basework and small-ball. Roberts’ son, Oriole Brian Roberts, is a perennial stolen-base leader. Together they wrote a book on the art of the steal: “You Can’t Steal Second Base and Keep Your Foot on First”

“For two days, after the team’s regular workouts, Crawford went back out to Field 3 to work with Mike Roberts, a former college coach and a baserunning specialist. Roberts and Crawford have worked together for several years, most recently before Crawford’s last season with the Rays, in 2010.

 
“It’s usually like for a reminder,” Crawford said of these sessions. “I don’t care how good you get at something, it’s always nice to have guys like Mr. Roberts come in and remind you of the little things that make you successful at it.
 
“Last year I lost my confidence on the basepaths and that’s one thing we were talking about, having confidence on the bases. It might translate to my playing better defense and hitting better.”
 
“The best word to use is ‘refine,’” said Roberts. “He’s got to refine [his technique]. And the other thing that I mentioned to Carl is by refining and working on the little things on basestealing, if it clicks, his legs are more alive, he has more confidence. With some of the athletes that I’ve worked with it seems that they have more confidence when they’re hitting, they have more in their outfield play, when they have to make a throw. So I think it transcends the entire game. A lot of people start with  offense.  With a player like Carl,  I think you start with his baserunning to regain his confidence.””

The Obligatory Sad Red Sox Post (or why I’m used to this by now)

Things just had to end the way they did for the Red Sox, it’s the natural order of things for the team, the type of epic finale the team is conditioned to deliver to its fans every fall. When the Red Sox win, they pull off the greatest comeback in all time (2004 ALCS v. Yankees) and when they collapse they collapse bigger and more completely than any other team in history (this September’s plunge). I’ve screamed at too many televisions, walked away and ignored the team too many times (only to be sucked back over and over and over) but this time, for the first time since 1967 it felt somehow right, like all was well in the world and life was proceeding according to some unseen plot written by an invisibly cruel author with a sense of melodramatic wit and irony. As it happened, as the thinnest of leads stood in the ninth inning, I knew with 100% certainty how it would end.

And so it ended.

I cheer for Fenway Park, the uniform, the memories of past Gods and all the beserk Massholes who get worked up like the fanatics we are. No need to climb the Mystic River Bridge today and throw ourselves into the dirty water, no need to point fingers, be ashamed, or blog plaintive purple elegies. I just hope this season cleans house and sees certain irritations go away. Namely: the eighth inning singing of Sweet Caroline. I hate this song. To quote my favorite Red Sox blog, Surviving Grady:

  • What’s the better song: “Sweet Caroline” or “Dirty Water”?
    • Red: Hey, I like “Dirty Water” as much as the next guy. But it’s played after the Sox win and, let’s face it, they could play “Careful With That Axe, Eugene” and the crowds would groove to it. It takes that Neil Diamond magic to get everyone up and dancing on a two-hundred degree August night.
    • Denton: “Sweet Caroline” can’t carry “Dirty Water”‘s jock. It was written about a 12-year-old girl for Christ sake. It’s like the pedophile national anthem. By a guy who now dyes his friggin’ chest hair.
    • Red: Maybe so, but “Sweet Caroline” gets about 15,000 college chicks up and shaking their asses every home game. Anything with that kinda power is down with me.
    • Denton: “Dirty Water” is a signature song. It means “we won, bitches, please exit our house quietly and respectfully while we proceed to party our winning asses off.” Do you want to hear Neil Diamond when some shitbum team is shutting us out 6-0 in the eighth? Didn’t think so.

 

Do away with the song, watch me buy a pink hat, kill the Wave, and suck for a few seasons so I can move up the waiting list for season tickets. That’s all I ask.

I’m rooting for the Tigers now.

And then they were gone ….

The definition of melancholy came to me last night in the top row of the home side bleachers at Cotuit’s Elizabeth Lowell baseball park: it’s watching 30 college freshmen and sophmores dressed in white and cranberry pin-stripes hug each other goodbye at the end of their first summer swinging a wooden bat in the Cape Cod Baseball League.

The last game started at 4:30, a half-hour earlier than usual due to Cotuit’s wonderful lack of lights and inability to play ball deep into the gloaming. I arrived on time, scorebook in hand, and staked out the top row for myself and my two kids while they bought t-shirts and caps from the Kettleer’s Store with my credit card. For some reason I thought Cotuit had a shot at making the playoffs, but alas, that was not the case. The team that won the championship in 2010 was finishing the western division of the CCBL in fat last and yesterday’s game was the swan song, the final act, curtains on an all-too-brief season that began in early June, seemed to never end in July and suddenly, like the day after Christmas, was over and done.

The worst part for me is February, when bored out of my mind and numbed by the black and white colorless movie that is Cape Cod in winter, I eventually turn my car into the parking lot and and idle in front of the home plate gate, staring through the chainlink backstop at the blue tarp protecting the pitcher’s mound and the stand of pines arced behind the outfield fence.

“Somehow the summer seemed to slip by faster this time,” wrote A. Barlett Giamatti in his famous sad ode to the game. It’s been accelerating for years it seems.  Where summer used to end in a procession of station wagons with bikes strapped to the roof on the afternoon of Labor Day, sad faces pressed to the windows in the line of traffic waiting to cross the Sagamore Bridge, it now peters out in mid-August, as the schools open ever earlier, pre-season soccer eats into sailing, and hurricane season lurks off the coast of Africa waiting, making me fret: “Will this be the year of the big one?”

Cotuit went out with a win over Brewster. A crisp 3-0 win where all went well, no major dramatics, some heroic catches and the usual eccentricities of Cape baseball. I ate a hot dog and popcorn. My children were next to me, their friends next to them. A friend I hadn’t seen since 1974 introduced herself and her children and I think we both felt older because of it. Ivan Partridge, the ageless booster of the Kettleers, who stands steadfastly at the chainlink fence and yells “Have a Hit!” at every Cotuit batter, stood before us in the stands and exhorted us to make some noise and “let the boys know how much you appreciated them this summer.” And so we cheered, dropped our bills into the plastic kettles passed out by the children, bought our 50/50 raffle tickets from the players working the stands, and scurried to the snackbar when the announcer declared it was two-for-one time as the concession owner tried to empty the shelves before lowering the shutters and locking up for the next nine months.

I started to regret every missed game, those lost chances to sit in the stands for three free hours and watch the timeless game, a little maudlin that this team would vanish forever, to be replaced by a new one next year, in the same uniforms but all different young men. Some would become stars in the big leagues. This year’s designated hitter, Victor Roache, was a pleasure to watch every time he came to the plate, and yesterday he received the top prospect award from the major league scouts who prowl the games looking for talent. So one never knows looking at the rosters which few will go on to become the next Chase Utley, Buster Posey, Jacoby Ellsbury, Nomar Garciaparra — but some will, and knowing that makes the process of getting acquainted with every year’s new team so worthwhile, so that someday you’ll be able to say: “I remember when he played for Harwich in 2008 …..”

Regret is a silly thing, so I stood and applauded while the boys hugged each other out in the middle of the diamond, stuck my pencil behind my ear, collected my trash, and headed for home.

“I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.” A. Bartlett Giamatti, former commissioner of Major League Baseball and president of Yale, The Green Fields of the Mind, from A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti

 

Do Sports Need a Soundtrack?

One of the great American sounds is that of a Wurlitzer organ inciting a stadium or arena full of fans to “Charge.”  It’s as much a part of the audible sporting experience as the crack of a bat, the hawking of a peanut vendor, and I heard my first at the age of nine at my first Bruins game inside of the old Boston Garden, taken there by my grandfather to watch from the nosebleed seats under the eaves. I’m sure the Romans played music in the Coliseum when the Lions played the Saints, but why does it strike me that the modern music experience at most sports simply sucks?

First off — there is the volume issue. Some wise marketing person in the front office of an NBA team apparently decided that lots of noise means excitement and more ticket sales and therefore out went th edict to turn up the PA and rock the roof off of the arena.  Bar owners have long known that loud music makes people uncomfortable and therefore thirsty. The New York Times reported on this phenomenon during the Mavericks-Heats finals.

“The Mavericks’ equipment involves more than simply pumping up decibels to levels that some experts fear could contribute to long-term hearing loss. Rather, with fans spoiled by earbud fidelity and 5.1-channel home theater systems, owners like the Mavericks’ Mark Cuban have turned hosting a game into producing an event — with “assisted resonance” and “crowd enhancement,” buzzwords for insiders and euphemisms for others.”

Granted, crowd noise can be a good thing — drowning out an opposing quarterback’s audible signals, expressing team unity as everyone lustily cheers for their local laundry.  I’d never begrudge a fan the opportunity to exercise their lungs. But being exhorted to “MAKE SOME NOIZE!” and led like sheep by pre-programmed call-and-respond routines is utterly inauthentic. And what’s the deal with the bad music? I’m sure some purist bitched about Wurlitzers invading stadiums, but do I really need to rock out to Aerosmith in between plays?

Stanley Cup finals. Goal is scored. Old days a loud buzzer went off along with a red light. Starting in Detroit, now every team has a supertanker fog horn and a big God Fart is flatulated whenever a goal is scored, and then an annoying piece of “We’re F$#ing Psyched!” music is played. To wit:

I think this b.s. started with soccer — vuvuzelas anyone?  — and the Ole Ole song the hooligans sing to keep themselves awake while the “beautiful” game drags on for over an hour without anything significant happening.

Baseball has become one of the worst. Every batter has a song which is played as they approach the plate. These songs are apparently relevant in some way to the player’s personality. Why? Who knows. I get it when Mariano Rivera, the Yankees’ closer strolls out of the bullpen in the ninth inning to “put the other team to sleep” and Metallica’s Enter Sandman is played. Cute.  Here’s the 2010 Phillie’s compilation, keep in mind you get to hear 15 truncated seconds of this weirdness everytime the player walks up to the plate.

I appreciate the fact that Wilbur Snapp, a baseball organist, got tossed from a game in 1985when he played Three Blind Mice after the ump blew a call.

 

 

 

Happy May

What better way to celebrate the First of May than a day game at that “lyric little bandbox” of  a ballpark, Fenway Park, aka the Shrine?

Surviving Grady put it best:

“It couldn’t have been scripted any better in Hollywood. The aging veteran pitching well in a spot-start. The aging DH coming up with a big hit. The much-maligned reliever…never mind, Jenks still sucked. And for the finale, the struggling free agent with a walk-off RBI single to win it.”

 

Taking it all in with my son at my side and fresh scorebook in my lap, to quote the cliche: priceless.


2011 Cotuit Kettleers Calendar

I threw together a quick Google Calendar schedule of the Cotuit Kettleer’s games for this upcoming season.

You can pick it up here and integrate into your own calendar.

Notable games:

  • Two double-headers. The first on June 12 at home vs. Y-D at 2 and 5 pm; the second away vs. Orleans on June 19
  • It’s always nice to think about the away games I want to commit to. Given that Orleans and Chatham are two of my favorite “away” ball parks. I’ll plan on the June 19 doubleheader in Orleans and Friday, July 8 at Chatham. Wareham, Bourne, YD, Brewster will all depend on standings and my motivation.
  • The all-star game will be played for the third consecutive year at Fenway on July 29
  • It always makes me a little sad to see the start-times move up a half hour in August to accommodate the earlier and earlier sunsets that make evening play impossible at the light-less Elizabeth Lowell park (lights in Cotuit would be a travesty so I’m afraid to even mention the issue)

 

Baseball scoring the Eephus Way

My friend Craig Merrigan alerted me to a funding opportunity on Kickstarter for a new baseball scoring system called the Eephus League of Baseball Minutiae. I paid my money, specified my t-shirt size, and a few days ago the three scorebooks I ordered arrived in a padded envelope.

These are elegant little black books — think Moleskine — with an orange belly band, and a back flap pocket with some little Win/Lose/Night/Day stickers, a handy scoring cheat sheet, and a big set of illustrated instructions. The target market for this scoring system is the novice scorer who wants to learn the venerable shorthand system of keeping track of a baseball game through the cryptic chicken scratches, symbols and abbreviations familiar to true baseball junkies.

I gave the system a whirl and scored a televised game — Red Sox at Cleveland — with a pencil in hand and my iPad set up to display the pitches through MLB 2011 — the one app I would take with me on a desert island.

The Eephus system is very basic but kind of cute. There’s even a space to write down what you had to eat at the game. But there isn’t a whole lot in the detail department, especially for stats geeks like me who obsess about pitch counts and need to be able to note AB-R-H-PO-A-E-2B-3B-HR-SB-Sac-HP-BB-SO and RBIs for each player. The fact the Eephus score card lacked an Error column or even an RBI column will consign the remaining two books to gift status. But the system is a great introduction to scoring, and the form factor is very nice as it will fit into a back pocket very easily.

I remain a fan of C.S. Peterson’s Scoremaster books – big 8×11″ spiral bound notebooks with a lot of room to sprawl and mark up, but need to give the publisher behind the Eephus League a huge thumbs up for making an important part of baseball fan-dom accessible to the tyro in need of a little style to go with their $8 beer. And they write a pretty darn good baseball blog too.

A scorecard, an iPad, the Red Sox, and all is right with the world