Feb 22

Link of the day: Rewind Yourself!

Yes. (Click image for source.)

Explanation is here.

Feb 20

Five Foto “Friday” – more hockey!

Every Friday* of the baseball offseason, I will highlight five photos I’ve taken in the past year. Hopefully this will help us all get through the harsh, cruel winter.

*or late Saturday night, what of it?
Last weekend, my UNO Mavericks swept Wisconsin. Both wins were huge, and made way for a critically important shift upward in the standings for Omaha. I took pictures of both games. Here are five of them.

Mavs win! Jump on the pile!

From Friday's win: Jump on the pile!

The Mavs are ready for Game Two!

The Mavs being introduced before Game Two

Craig Smith, Justin Schultz and Mark Zengerle

The Badgers had begun to despair by this point.

Fight fight fight!

...so they started a fight! Well, SOMEONE started a fight.

Here comes the bride! On the Zamboni!

There was a wedding during 2nd intermission. Here is the bride on the Zamboni! She looks so happy!

Feb 17

When Websites aren’t quite ready to be published

…things like this happen. This is the Lancaster (Neb.) County Assessor’s official site. And it has a MS Paint drawing of a stick figure where a stately portrait of the assessor is supposed to go. The world is a silly place. On the off-chance that it gets fixed, I’ve affixed a screenshot below.

OMG.

This is really a thing that happened! Click image for larger version

This reminds me of an oopsie I saw on the Memphis Redbirds site several years ago. Of course I screencapped it for posterity:

One of these things is not like the others...

I don’t even understand why a player was upside down to begin with! Good grief.

Feb 14

Pitchers and Catchers and bears, oh my!

(OK, there are actually no bears. Just a bunch of pitchers and catchers.)

Cody Clark
Josh "Earl" Rupe

LOTS more after the jump!
Read the rest of this entry »

Feb 13

Blogger Shame: a random musing

With every new semester (this is my tenth!) comes a whole new set of introductions to classmates. Hi, I’m Minda, and I’m a baseball nerd.

….or, that is what I would say if I wanted all my new classmates to never talk to me again. Instead, I almost never tell new acquaintances that I’m a blogger. If I must mention it, I always get all squirrelly and say something like “I have a Royals website.” That itself sounds awfully nerdy as well, but not as bad as those hideous words “blog” and “blogger.” Outside of this comfortable little corner of the Internet, people don’t understand. You guys get it – we all love the Royals to a degree that simply reading Dick Kaegel’s cheerleading on Royals.com isn’t good enough. So really, all we are doing when we blog (or read blogs, or comment on them) is asking more questions and gaining more knowledge than what is handed out to casual fans. That doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, but out in the cold, harsh world, people just don’t get it.

And it certainly doesn’t help that most “normal” people don’t even follow baseball. So not only do they have to wrap their heads around obsessive baseball fandom, they have to face down that hideous word: blog. I think the non-blog reading members of the public – which is to say, most members of the public – still picture bloggers the way Bissinger et al do. Basement-dwellers. Freaks. 100% unattractive. I am, at most, one of those things, but that ugly little word, b-l-o-g, makes most people think I’m all of them.

So, I avoid bringing it up.

Feb 12

“Five” Foto “Friday”

Technically, it’s early Saturday morning. I know. It’s been a long day, so I’m not going to pick out just five photos from tonight’s UNO hockey win over Wisconsin. (HUGE win, by the way.) Here is a link to the set on Flickr, or you can watch it in slideshow form below:

Feb 11

Link of the Day: Win Jonah Keri’s book!

Do you like baseball? How about poetry? How about writing poetry to win a baseball book?

If you do…TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY! Go write a poem before 8 pm ET, tomorrow night (Friday). If yours is the best, you win a signed copy of Jonah Keri’s forthcoming book, The Extra 2%. If you do not win, you should buy it. For your convenience, I placed it right here on the page. Go forth and win…or buy.

Jan 31

Rob Neyer is this generation’s Bill James. Who will be the next generation’s Neyer?

Talk about burying the lede. Tucked away at the very end of a  fun column about the amazing Bo Jackson, is a note that Rob Neyer is leaving his 15-year-old spot at ESPN.

Of course, it’s this end-note that has everyone all abuzz, which is kind of sad for fans of Bo Jackson discussions. Already, several people have referred to Neyer as this generation’s Bill James – in other words, it’s Neyer’s fault that so many of us young whippersnappers are so into baseball stats.

In a few years, someone will write a farewell posts that makes bloggers say “______ was what Rob Neyer was for the previous generation of stat nerds.” Who will it be?

(I’m certain it won’t be me, by the way. Even among the most niche of niche baseball blogs, the traffic at this site barely registers as anything. You, gentle reader, are part of a teeny-tiny readership.)

Suggestions included RJ Anderson and Jonah Keri. Both are good ideas – Keri was pretty much it for me. A repeating theme among responses was that it won’t be someone whose work is super math-heavy, but a writer who happens to deal with numbers. Joe Posnanski, when he writes about sabermetrics, is that, even when he’s using stats that are not state-of-the-art. It’s about how to look at the game we already love, not just about calculators and spreadsheets (though we love those things too).

If I have a friend who is an old-school baseball fan, sending them a player’s FanGraphs page with no other context is probably not going to “convert” them. Instead, they need to be shown, in skillful language with with gentle patience, why these fancy numbers are there, what they do, and why they make being a baseball fan more awesome. That’s what Neyer and James have done for countless nerds among us.  That’s what makes their work matter.

Anyway, this was just a silly conversation on Twitter that I wanted to share. It’s silly because, as Twitter friend Bill pointed out, the next Neyer or James probably won’t be just one person: “Neyer and James were so successful that there are dozens of them.”

Jan 28

Five Foto Friday: Colors!

Every Friday of the baseball offseason, I will highlight five photos I’ve taken in the past year. Hopefully this will help us all get through the harsh, cruel winter.

Since winter is stupid and colorless, I decided to seek out some colorful summertime stuff for you this week. Hopefully that will be more pleasant than looking at more stupid snow and slush. Winter sucks.

Day Banny!

Look at that beautiful GREEN grass! And powder blue Banny!

Setting up the finish line

Reds and blues and greens!

Powerade Power Team!

Rosenblatt was a very colorful place.

HERMAN!

Herman was a lot of colors.

Casey!

Casey is a particularly bold shade of happy blue.

Jan 26

Motivational (?) statement from Eric Berry

For some reason I follow a bunch of Chiefs players on Twitter. Today, I found that reason:

Click to see original tweet

The last line kills me. Might not use it

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