Lies, damn lies, and baseball.: This book about the 1903 World Series calls it "baseball's first World Series." Once upon a time I would have taken this ignorance for granted and just muttered a little, but with the increase of interest in nineteenth-century baseball in recent years there's no excuse for it. There's even a whole book about the World Series between the National League and the American Association, played beginning in 1884 (the Providence Greys vs. the New York Metropolitans). At first I thought "well, the publisher picked a dumb title," but I looked through the book and there was no mention of the earlier series, or even the existence of the American Association. Lies, all lies!

posted by languagehat to baseball at 04:09 PM - 3 comments

In Defense of Defense.: "Surprisingly, fielding statistics have been a much better predictor of playoff success over the last three decades than perhaps any other aspect of the game." (SpoFi NY Times may have missed this because it was in Week in Review rather than Sports, for some reason.)

posted by languagehat to baseball at 06:17 PM - 0 comments

This pisses me off.: I've come to accept, if not love, the wild card (especially after it helped the Mets), the excess of homers, and other features of modern baseball. (Not the DH, though -- one reason I'm an NL fan.) But the fact that batters are such sissies they charge the mound on an inside pitch, and pitchers are now afraid to throw them -- that destroys the balance of the game (and is one reason for the glut of homers.)

posted by languagehat to baseball at 11:42 AM - 4 comments