Baseball Archives - Page 5 of 9

Why are sports teams from locations?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why are sports teams from locations? I mean, it sounds like a silly question, but it’s not like the players or the coaches are from there. What’s the point of having a team from New York or Tennessee if you let people from all over play on it?

Thanks,
Jesse

Dear Jesse,

This is one of those questions that makes complete logical sense but, because it challenges a foundational aspect of the sports world in our country, is difficult for a fan to understand and answer. The fact that teams are tied to locations and that they represent the city, state, or region they’re from seems like an unassailable truth of sports. It’s not though. After doing some research on the topic, I’ve found an interesting example of one league that works completely differently. Let’s start with a little history, move on to the way things work now, and then look at an interesting exception that may be a harbinger of things to come.

From the very beginning of organized athletic competitions, sports have been a way for competing political groups to safely play out conflict. The ancient Olympics were dominated by individual events like running, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing. Nonetheless, the competitors were there to represent the city-states they came from. Wikipedia’s article on the ancient Olympics states that the “Olympic Games were established in [a] political context and served as a venue for representatives of the city-states to peacefully compete against each other.” In the United Kingdom, some medieval soccer-like traditions survive and are still played. The Ashbourne game is a two-day epic played over 16 hours and two days each year that pits the Up’Ards against the Down’Ards. Instead of being the instantiation of a international or inter-city conflict, this game is a (at this point) relatively friendly version of a rivalry between city neighborhoods. There’s a natural human tendency to define oneself by splitting the world into “us” and “other” and where you live or where you come from is the obvious way to do this. Sports has always provided an outlet for group identity and simulated conflict.

Much of the early history of sport in the Americas is a history of college athletics. College sports, by their nature, are tied to a location and (however inappropriately) to an institution. The identification of teams with cities has also been present in American professional sports from the beginning. In baseball, the first professional team was the Cincinatti Red Stockings in 1869. The first professional hockey team was the Canadian Soo from Sault Ste. Marie in Ontario, Canada. Confusingly enough, the Canadian Soo played its first game in 1904 against the American Soo Indians from Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, United States of America. Wha?? Football has an interesting professional history in the United States. For over forty years, there were professional players but no professional teams. Individual players were being paid to play on teams that were nominally amateur teams. It wasn’t until 1920 that the first professional football league came into being. The American Professional Football Association had teams from Akron, Buffalo, Muncie, Rochester, and Dayton. Basketball is a much newer professional sport. Its first game was played between teams representing Toronto and New York in 1946.

Even early on, teams were not made up of players from the team’s location. One reason is that some areas simply produce more top-level talent in some sports than others. It’s not financially smart for a league to only have teams in the core player producing areas, so instead, the players themselves travel and become ambassadors for spreading the game. For example, every single player on the 1940 Stanley Cup hockey champion New York Rangers team was from Canada. The 1949 Minneapolis Lakers may have had a slight over-representation of players who went to college in Minnesota with three, but the rest of their players went to schools around the country in California and Utah and Indiana. The famous 1972 Miami Dolphins, the only National Football League team to go undefeated throughout the regular season and playoffs, only had two Floridians in a roster of 50+ players. Aside from some areas just growing better athletes in some sports, the implementation of player drafts to balance the selection of players by professional teams and eventually free-agency to allow players some say in where they play serve to scatter players throughout the country.

As the big four American sports have spread throughout the world and our professional leagues have simultaneously gotten better at finding talented international players, the division of players from team location has become even more obvious. The NHL and NBA wouldn’t be half as good without players mostly from Europe, nor would Major League Baseball be as compelling without its (mostly) Central American and Japanese imports. While some teams have specialized in finding players from a particular region — think the 1990s Detroit Red Wings and Russia or the current Red Wings and Sweeden — international players have played anywhere and everywhere.

The idea of having teams made up of only players from the city or region they represent is a fun one and there are many counter-factual thought experiments around the internet in this vein. Yahoo recently posted a ranking of NBA teams if made up of only players from the team’s area. Max Preps published a map showing current NFL players by home state. It’s clear from the map that California, Florida, and Texas rule supreme, but I’d like to see the stats controlled by population to see which state is most efficient at producing NFL players. Quant Hockey has two interesting visuals about where NHL players come from. The first is a history of NHL players by home country, showing the increasing internationalization of the game and league. The second is an interactive map where you can look up the home towns of all your favorite (and least favorite for that matter) NHL players. The official NBA site has a similar map for NBA players. That the league itself bothered to put this together is an example of how important it feels the international nature of its sport is.

Sports teams aren’t all tied to locations. If we take a brief detour to the basketball crazy country of the Philippines, we find one of the most unique sports leagues out there, the Philippine Basketball Association. This league is made up of twelve teams. Team names are made up of three parts — a “company name, then [a] product, then a nickname – usually connected to the business of the company.” My favorite example is the six time champion Rain or Shine Elasto Painters owned by Asian Coatings Philippines, Inc. Teams are completely divorced from regional affiliation and play in whatever region the league rents for them to play in. This may seem like it’s completely crazy to those of us who are used to leagues in the United States, but it could be the future. Consider the increasing visibility of corporate sponsorships. In all leagues here, we have stadiums that are named after companies. The Los Angeles Lakers share the Staples Center with the Los Angeles Clippers and hockey’s Kings. The Carolina Panthers in the NFL play in the Bank of America Stadium. This isn’t a new fangled thing, remember that baseball’s historic stadium in Chicago, Wrigley field bears the name of the chewing gum its owner in the 1920s sold. The next likely step in the process is having corporate sponsorships show up on the jerseys of sports teams. This has already happened for most soccer leagues. Scott Allen wrote a nice history of this process for Mental Floss. The process has taken a long time, from the first corporate jersey in Uruguay in the 1950s to the final capitulation of the famous Barcelona football club in 2006. Allen provides several funny sponsorship stories, including my favorite, about the soccer team West Bromwich Albion:

From 1984 to 1986, the West Midlands Health Authority paid to have the universal No Smoking sign placed on the front of West Bromwich Albion’s jerseys. The campaign featured the slogan, “Be like Albion – kick the smoking habit.”

While the NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB have resisted giving up their jerseys to their sponsors, speculation is out there that they soon will. Total Pro Sports has even designed a series of NBA jerseys with each team’s corporate sponsor on the front in anticipation.

Will the future be a complete takeover of teams from their old regional identities to new corporate ones? Or will we remain in an uneasy compromise between location and corporation?

We’ll find out together,
Ezra Fischer

What is a bye in sports?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is a bye in sports? I’ve heard that word in a bunch of different contexts but I’m not totally sure what it means.

Thanks,
Samuel

Dear Samuel,

In sports, a bye refers to a period when a team or player would normally compete but for one reason or another does not have to in this case. In mainstream sports like football, soccer, baseball, or basketball, it has two common uses. The first is a scheduled week off in sports where teams play weekly. The second is in the context of a playoffs or a tournament, when a team or player is rewarded for earlier success by getting a free pass into a later round. We’ll take a quick look at each meaning in this post and then spend a moment on the word’s history and derivation.

In leagues where teams play weekly, like professional and college football in the United States and soccer in most European leagues, teams sometimes have a week off. In the NFL, each team has one week off during a seventeen week schedule during which they play sixteen games. This is a great thing for players and coaches to rest up in the midst of a very physically and mentally challenging season. An unintended but intriguing consequence of this is that it wreaks havoc of fantasy football owners whose start/sit decisions are made a thousand times harder on weeks when important members of their team aren’t playing. When organized this way, a bye week is an equitable way of rewarding all teams with the same amount of rest.

In tournaments and playoffs, a bye week rewards a team or player by guaranteeing entry to a future round of play. Let’s take a single elimination tournament, like the NFL playoffs or a tennis tournament. If you wanted to design a tournament or playoff without byes, you would start at the finals (two teams) and go back: semifinals (four teams,) quarterfinals (eight teams,) the round before that (sixteen teams), and again (thirty-two,) once more (sixty-four.) Choose a number from those and you can have everyone play the same number of rounds. If, instead of four teams, you want to start with six, one easy way of handling it is to have two games (four teams) while two teams wait to play the winners of those games in the next round. This gives you two rounds of four teams each, followed by a final with two teams. It’s not “fair” because it gives a significant advantage to the teams who don’t have to play in the first round, so instead of selecting these teams or players at random, the reward of the bye goes to teams or players who have performed better in previous tournaments or in a regular season. Using byes in this way is one strategy the organizers of a sport have for balancing the excitement of an inclusive tournament with the goal of getting the two best teams or players into the finals so they can play each other.

The word “by” has lots of meanings in English but the one that I think most clearly represents its current use in a sports context is as an adverb, meaning “so as to go past” as in, “the reindeer ran by the puzzled pig.” This fits the use of the word in sports fairly well, even if the word has shifted from being used as an adverb to a noun: “The Dolphins have their bye week this week” or “Serena Williams has a first round bye in an upcoming tournament.” Another possibility, called out in this Yahoo answers post, is that the word is used because it means “something secondary.” This is supported by a great discussion of byes on Stackexchange’s English language site, where a person named Hugo points out that the first use of byes (and how they still work in some throw-back competitions like dog racing) were an attempt to make competition more fair, not less. When a dog (or human athlete) could not compete in a tournament, their opponent would have to complete a bye or a secondary form of the game. Advancement to the next round of the playoffs was guaranteed but, in order to keep things fair, the athlete would have to tire themselves out as much as they would have if they had had to play. In the case of dog racing, the dog would have to run the course anyway. In human sports, I’m guessing a substitute was brought in to compete just as a workout partner.

Hope this shed some light on what byes are,
Ezra Fischer

Why can't pitchers pitch more than once every five days?

Dear Sports Fan,

I watched the World Series last night. The announcers kept saying how unusual it was for Madison Bumgarner to be pitching so well and so much after starting a game a few days ago. What’s up with that? Why can’t pitchers pitch more than once every five days?

Thanks,
Lucy

Dear Lucy,

Last night, San Francisco Giants pitcher Madison Bumgarner pitched five scoreless innings to drag his team to a World Series Championship. His performance is being lauded far and wide as the best thing since sliced bread and the bravest thing since Charles Sullenberger landed his plane safely in the Hudson River. Just check out some of what people are writing about Bumgarner’s performance last night:

“What Madison Bumgarner just did is supposed to be impossible.” – Deadspin

“He’s not human. We gotta do something about this guy. We gotta take him to the doctor, I guess. I don’t know. It seems like he is a robot.” – teammate Gregor Blanco, as told to Sports Illustrated

“I’ve seen a lot of great pitching performances. What Madison Bumgarner did over the last 72 hours is unlike anything I’ve seen. Incredible.” – sports columnist Jeff Passan on Twitter

It was clear, even to a novice baseball fan, that Bumgarner pitched wonderfully last night, but what isn’t as clear is why his performance was seen as being so inhuman and heroic. This is because starting pitchers normally can’t pitch more than once every five days. In order to properly appreciate Bumgarner’s performance, it’s useful to understand a little bit about why that is. It seems like throwing a ball shouldn’t be something you can only do once every five days, but that seems to be the case. Why is that?

Here’s the important thing to understand. Pitchers don’t throw the ball. That’s what you or I do. Pitchers throw their arms. This is why it’s so damaging to their bodies that they can only safely and successfully do it once every five days. Pitchers don’t generate force with their arms, they generate force with their legs and hips and torsos and use their arm as a lever and guiding mechanism. This means that their arms are subjected to however much force their bodies can generate. Bodies can generate a lot of force. Way more than arms can. Arms however, aren’t really evolved to handle that much force. What ends up happening is a little bit like what happens if you try to use a plastic knife to open a can of paint instead of one of those little metal keys or, if you’re like me, a screw driver. Here are a couple facts about the force pitchers generate from a Popular Mechanics article on the topic by Jeremy Repanich:

When a pitcher cocks his arm, where it is turned back to the point where the palm is facing toward the sky, there’s about 100 Newton-meters of torque on the arm, which subjects the arm to the same amount of stress as if the pitcher had a 60-pound weight hanging from his hand in that position… From that cocked position, the arm snaps forward to its release point in 0.03 seconds, and at its peak speed, an elite pitcher’s arm rotates at upward of 8500 degrees per second.

A baseball team uses its pitchers like medieval armies used those rock flinging machines, the trebuchets. Seriously. Compare the motion of these two hurling entities.

First, Madison Bumgarner:

Next, the Trebuchet:

It’s impressive but also a little scary. Going back to Repanich’s article, here’s what he has to say about pitchers who pitch close to 100 miles per hour:

The amount of torque needed to throw in excess of the century mark is greater than the amount of force the ulnar collateral ligament (the elbow ligament Strasburg tore) can withstand before giving out, according to tests Fleisig has done on cadavers.

Indeed, pitchers injure themselves frequently. The amount of force they use in their pitching motion tears things in their elbows and shoulders. Every pitch they throw strains their arms a little more, pulling and stretching ligaments to their limits and beyond. The more they pitch, the more likely they are to injure themselves. Starting pitchers may pitch up to around 120 times in a game. After a game, they do everything they can to heal the damage done during the game. They ice, they rest, and they wrap, they probably do all sorts of other stuff too that we don’t know about and maybe don’t really want to know about.

What Madison Bumgarner did by pitching perfectly on two days rest was prove that he could will his body to perform when it shouldn’t have been able to or prove that his body is unlike everyone else’s. Either way, it was pretty impressive.

Hope this makes more sense now,
Ezra Fischer

Why are game sevens so great?

If you’re a sports fan, there is nothing better than a game seven. If you’re a fan of the team in the game seven, it’s the most dramatic, heart-wrenching, nerve-wracking, squeal inducing sports situation your team can possibly be in. If you’re simply a fan of sports but don’t have a rooting interest one way or another, game seven is a joy. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about and why game sevens are so great, read on.

Sports has developed a wide variety of ways to decide which team or person is the best. The most common ways of doing this are round-robin tournaments, single-elimination tournaments, multiple-elimination tournaments, and three, five, or seven game series. Sometimes a combination of these approaches are used. There is something to be said for each form of playoff but the one we are concerned with today is a seven game series. In a single elimination tournament, like March Madness in college basketball, a team that loses once is eliminated forever. In a double-elimination tournament, a team that loses twice is eliminated forever. This could go on to infinity if you wanted it to. In a quadruple elimination tournament, a team that lost four times would be out. In an undecuple (yes) elimination tournament, a team that loses eleven times would be eliminated from the tournament. The seven game series is a version of a quadruple elimination tournament where two teams play each other in successive games until one team has won (and the other team has lost) four games.

Just reaching game seven in a seven game series tells you so many things about the series. For one thing, both teams have won (and lost) three games. The two teams are close to even in skill and determination, otherwise one would have been eliminated before then. There have been lots of ups and downs during the series. There’s been enough time for the players on the opposing teams to get to know each other and (usually) develop an explosive mixture of begrudging respect and bubbling disdain. This is magnified in sports like hockey where so much physicality is allowed during the game. It’s also magnified the farther you go in the playoffs. A first round game seven is not as dramatic as a second round game seven. Some sports, like baseball, recognize this and save the seven game series for later rounds, using shorter series earlier on. A game seven in the Stanley Cup finals, the NBA finals, or the World Series is the absolute pinnacle of sporting drama. The team that wins these game sevens are achieving life-long dreams and reaching the highest professional success possible.

Even if you put all the other factors aside, game sevens are still really cool because of their emotional resonance for the players. One common complaint about professional sports is that the fans care more about the teams than the players do; that the players are mercenaries who do it just for the money. In a game seven, you know that every player who steps on the pitchers mound or the batting box, every player who vaults over the boards onto the ice, every player who grabs a rebound or makes a layup, somewhere, in the back of their heads is thinking “Game seven, World Series/Stanley Cup final/NBA final…” just like they did when they were nine years-old in their backyards playing with a friend or two. Game sevens have a way of reducing sports back down to their essentials. Box out. Dump the puck. Make contact. Keep your eye on the ball.

Tonight the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants play in game seven of the World Series. Let’s enjoy it.

What different kinds of pitchers are there in baseball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What different kinds of pitchers are there in baseball? It seems like a very specialized position. I keep hearing people label pitchers in all sorts of different ways, “junk pitchers, submariners, middle relievers,” but I don’t know what all the terms mean. Can you help?

Thanks,
Jan

Dear Jan,

There are a lot of different ways to describe a pitcher. “Junk pitcher, submariner, and middle reliever” are not only three different descriptions but they each describe a different class of description. “Junk pitcher” refers to the kinds of pitches a pitcher throws, “submariner” describes a pitcher’s throwing motion, and “middle reliever” describes when, during a game, a pitcher plays. One of the cool things about baseball is that none of this is rule based. All pitchers are the same according to baseball rules. It’s convention that defines how pitchers are classified. Let’s run through each category and look at the common descriptions and meanings together.

Pitchers classified by the pitches they throw

Junk pitchers – Junk pitchers specialize in throwing slower (relatively slower — they might still throw up to 85 miles per hour) pitches that fool a batter by curving down or sliding sideways as they approach the base.
Knuckleballers – A knuckleballer is an extreme version of a junk pitcher. These pitchers basically only throw one type of pitch — the knuckleball — which flies in such a tortured way that it’s often hard for the catcher to even catch it, much less a batter hit it. Because the pitch is thrown so slowly, these pitchers can have very long careers.
Power pitchers – Also called fireballers or flamethrowers, these guys throw extremely hard. Nowadays, a good power pitcher can throw in the upper 90s or even 100 miles per hour. Their pitches may not move as much in the air but it’s extremely hard for batters to “catch up to them” before they’re in the catchers mitt.

Pitchers classified by throwing motion

Sidewinders – Sidewinders throw the ball with a motion a little like a normal frisbee throw. Their arms stay around shoulder or chest level throughout their delivery. These pitchers are rare in American baseball but oddly common in Japanese baseball.
Submariners – Submariners are a rare breed of pitcher that throws the ball with a motion that brings their hand almost down to the ground before releasing the ball. It’s a crazy looking thing but it’s often very effective, partially because throwing the ball this way makes it move in unusual ways as it approaches the plate.
Normal pitchers – The vast majority of pitchers in Major League Baseball throw with the same overhand motion that most of us were taught to throw with as kids. They just do it with so much velocity that, if you watch them in slow motion, it looks like they’re going to rip their arms off their body from the strength of their throwing motion.

Pitchers classified by when they pitch

Starters – Starters are expected to pitch for the first six innings of the game. They will often throw close to a hundred pitches before wearing down enough to be taken out of the game. Starters pitch only once every five days. That’s how harsh this job is on their bodies.
Middle Relievers – Middle relievers take over for a starting pitcher who needs to be substituted before the eight inning. They’re the least valued members of the pitching staff but also often the most versatile.
Closers – These pitchers come in to “close out” a game in the ninth inning when their team is ahead. They are specialists and most throw relatively few types of pitches. Often they are fireballers but once in a while, a very effective junk pitcher can excel in this role.
Set–up men – Set-up men are a relatively new innovation. They’re specialists who come in just for the eight inning to “set-up” the closer. Think of them as the second best closer on the team. The Kansas City Royals have made a splash in the 2014 season by using two set-up men, one for the seventh inning and one for the eight. They may have just created the position of the set-up set-up man.

Pitchers classified by how they try to get batters out

Ground ball pitchers – Ground ball pitchers aim to get batters to hit their pitches but to do it only under circumstances that the pitcher controls. Through placement, speed, and spin, the pitcher serves up only pitches that he thinks will result in an easily fielded ground ball.
Fly ball pitchers – A fly ball pitcher, like a ground ball pitcher, pitches “to contact.” They don’t try to avoid having the batter hit the ball, they just manipulate the situation so that when a batter does get a hit, it flies harmlessly up in the air.
Strike out pitchers – Strike out pitchers don’t want anything to do with the batter hitting the ball. They would much rather strike the batter out through deception or brute force or a mixture of the two than have them hit the ball into play.

These aren’t the only ways to describe a pitcher (he’s a bum/ace) but they are some of the most common ones. See if you can use one or more of these descriptions the next time you watch a baseball game.

Happy watching,
Ezra Fischer

Why do baseball managers use so many pitchers?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was watching the World Series last night and the San Francisco Giants used so many pitchers in that one inning. I didn’t know they were allowed to do that? What were they thinking? It obviously didn’t work.

Just wondering,
Garrett

Dear Garrett,

You’re right that the San Francisco Giants use of relief pitchers in the bottom of the sixth inning was unusual. They tied the record for most pitchers used in a single inning at five. That’s an unusual number of pitchers but what they did was not illegal and their reasons for doing it were pretty normal as well. Like you said, it didn’t work — the Kansas City Royals scored as many runs in that inning (five) as the Giants used pitchers.

Baseball teams in the post-season are allowed to have 25 players on their roster. There aren’t any rules about how many of these can be pitchers. In fact, the Kansas City Royals chose to carry one fewer pitcher than the San Francisco Giants for this World Series. The Giants have 12, the Royals 11. Of those pitchers, each team has four that are expected to start the up to seven games in the series. That leaves eight pitchers for the Giants and seven for the Royals. Each team has a designated closer who pitches the ninth inning if their team has the lead. The remaining six or seven pitchers are miscellaneous relief pitchers that their managers can choose to use however and whenever they want in a game. The Royals manager, Ned Yost has chosen to use two of his relief pitchers, Kelvin Herrera and Wade Davis almost exclusively for the seventh and eighth innings, but all of this, even the starter/closer/relief pitcher distinctions are just tactics, not rules. The only real rule regarding pitching substitutions is that once a pitcher starts pitching to a batter, he’s got to finish that batter unless he gets hurt.

So, fine, teams have a lot of pitchers and they can pretty much use them however they want. Why would the Giants manager, Bruce Bochy, want to use so many of them in the sixth inning last night? Aside from the first pitcher, each of the next four was determined in part by a simple concept: “when a pitcher and a hitter pitch or bat with the same hand, the pitcher typically has the advantage.” Let’s see how it played out:

Pitcher 1: To start the inning, he went with the starting pitcher, Jake Peavy. Peavy had pitched well in the game up to that point, letting up only 2 runs, and had only thrown 57 pitches. Starting pitchers can usually throw close to a hundred pitches before really breaking down, so, although he’s doubtless being second-guessed today, I don’t see anything controversial about starting the inning with Peavy. That said, Peavy did not start the inning well. He let up a single and then walked the next batter to put two men on base.

Pitcher 2: Seeing that Peavy was in trouble, Bochy decided to take him out of the game and put in a relief pitcher. The next batter up was Billy Butler. Butler is right-handed and hits much better against left-handed pitchers or southpaws than he does against righties. In terms of batting average, a flawed but well-known statistic, he goes from being a .321 hitter against lefties to a .255 hitter when facing a righty. So, Bochy brought in right-handed pitcher, Jean Machi. Butler outfoxed him and hit a single to the outfield which allowed the two men on base to score.

Pitcher 3: The next batter up was Alex Gordon, who bats lefty. Again, Bochy chose to change pitchers because of handedness, so he brought in Javier Lopez, a lefty. This time it works — Lopez gets Gordon to hit a fly ball to the outfield for an out. No runners advance.

Pitcher 4: Next up for the Royals was their catcher, Salvador Perez, who is… you guessed it, a righty! Off Bochy goes again to the mound to remove his pitcher. This time he brings in Hunter Strickland, who is, you guessed it again, a righty. Things go really off the rails for Strickland. He gives up a double to Perez and then a home run to Omar Infante. Why did he get to face two batters? Because Infante, like Perez, and Strickland for that matter, are both righties.

Pitcher 5: Up comes Mike Moustakas, a lefty, and off goes Strickland to be replaced by Jeremy Affeldt who throws with his left. Moustakas singles. The next batter is Alcides Escobar. He bats righty, but Bochy, perhaps thinking he’s made enough of a mess of things, doesn’t bother replacing Affeldt with a righty. It works out for them when Escobar hits into a double play to end the inning.

So, there you go — most of the mysterious comings and goings of the Giants pitchers last night can be attributed to the simple desire of the Giants manager to have right-handed pitchers face right-handed batters and left-handed pitchers face left-handed batters.

Thanks for the question, enjoy the rest of the World Series,
Ezra Fischer

Great baseball shirts from Baseballism

If you’re a casual baseball fan like me, you’re probably more interested in the game right now than you’ve ever been before. That makes this the perfect time to invest in some stylish, clever baseball apparel for yourself or for the baseball fan in your life. Baseballism is a great place to find baseball apparel that looks and feels good. The “premium off the field brand focusing on the class, tradition and history of baseball” was founded by four former college baseball players who had, earlier in their lives, run a baseball camp together. Their style plays on the traditional aspects of baseball without taking on the conventional and a slightly ugly characteristics of old-school baseball uniforms. You can purchase some of their shirts on Amazon here. I’ve highlighted a few of my favorites below.

6+4+3 = 2 — A simple gray shirt with this non-mathematical equation that makes sense only if you know that 6 refers to the shortstop, 4 refers to the second baseman, and 3 refers to the first baseman. When the three are involved in a play, in that order, it’s a double play (2 outs) with the shortstop fielding the ball, throwing it to the second baseman who touches the base to force the first base runner out and then throws it to the first baseman to get the hitter out. It’s a clever but knowable baseball reference.

This shirt is available as a T-shirt for men and women.

Baseball Blue Print — The field is one of the most unique things about the sports. While most sports are played in mundane, boring rectangles, baseball is played on a diamond within a misshapen fan-like field. Every baseball stadium is slightly different in its shape and dimensions. This Baseballism shirt shows the necessary geometry and dimensions for creating your own baseball diamond.

Baseballism Men’s Blue Print Shirt

Kit Keller — This women’s tank pays homage to Kit Keller, the younger sister of the main character in the classic 1992 baseball movie, A League Of Their Own. Kit pushes her older sister to go to Chicago with her to try out for the All-American Girl’s Professional Baseball League which really did exist and played for 12 years, beginning in 1943 when many male major leaguers were in the military services.

Kit Keller Women’s Tank

Take Me Out to the Ballgame — If you ignore the slight gender inequality of this shirt (why can’t a woman take a man out to the ballgame?) and just focus on it’s excellent (Mets) colors and design, you can relish in the fact that a song first popularized in 1908 by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer remains instantly recognizable today.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame Tank

2014 World Series Preview

The World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the San Francisco Giants begins tonight, Tuesday October 21, at 8 p.m. ET on Fox. World Series preview articles cover the internet like so many fallen red and yellow leaves. Two stood out to me as being of particular quality and interest.

Joe Posnanski’s Rule of Three focuses on the biggest tactical story line of the baseball playoffs so far. It’s not Kansas City’s love of the bunt, it’s another of their innovations – the use of three one inning relief pitchers to pitch the seventh, eighth, and ninth innings. All teams have a specialist pitcher, called a closer, who pitches the ninth inning when their team has the lead. Most teams have a designated “set-up man” who pitches just the eighth inning. The Royals have taken in one step farther, designating a pitcher to pitch the seventh inning too. So far, it’s been extraordinarily successful: the Royals have won 94% of their games this season (regular season an playoffs) when they had the lead after six innings compared to just 88% for all other teams. Will their success continue and if so, how will it reshape the game in the coming years?

Rule of Three

By Joe Posnanski for NBC SportsWorld

For more than one hundred years, baseball postseasons had been dominated by the starters, by Bob Gibson and Sandy Koufax, by Christy Mathewson and Curt Schilling, by Whitey Ford and Chris Carpenter. Everyone believed in it, from old-school thinkers like Detroit’s GM Dave Dombrowski to Moneyball mogul Billy Beane. You win in October with great starters, and so Detroit and Oakland went to get themselves great starters.

The Royals’ three-man closing law firm of Herrera, Davis and Holland has been the single dominant weapon of the postseason. In the wild-card game, while Lester and the A’s bullpen disintegrated, the Royals’ threesome kept the Athletics scoreless in the seventh, eighth and ninth. That allowed the Royals to come back. In the Angels series, the threesome kept the Angels scoreless in those pivotal three late innings, and the Royals took control with back-to-back extra-inning victories.

You know the old joke about the guy who prays daily to win the lottery and then finally hears a heavenly voice say: “Look, I’d like to help you, but you have to buy a lottery ticket first.” The Royals might have been lucky getting those three pitchers. But turning that trio into perhaps the greatest closing machine in baseball history is the Royals’ doing.

For a less tactical but much more emotional approach to the World Series, we go over to Grantland and life-long Royals fan Rany Jazayerli. He digs into how it feels to love a team that loses for twenty five years straight and then suddenly, almost without warning, is in the World Series.

One Away: The Total Improbability of the Royals’ World Series Run and the Agony of Potential Defeat

By Rany Jazayerli for Grantland

The team that couldn’t win anything for nearly three decades suddenly couldn’t lose. The Royals didn’t lose to the A’s, when by all rights they should have. They didn’t lose the ALDS to the Los Angeles Angels, who led the majors with 98 wins this season. They didn’t lose the ALCS to the Baltimore Orioles, who posted the second-best record in the American League. They haven’t lost once in eight playoff games, the first team in baseball history that could make that claim. They haven’t lost even though they’ve gone to extra innings four times, were tied in the ninth in a fifth game, and won two other contests by one run. They’ve literally won one game in the playoffs whose outcome wasn’t in doubt until the final pitch.

There’s also an element of survivor’s guilt, as with an infantryman who watched his friends get slaughtered at Ypres. Having dealt with failure for so long, it’s difficult to adjust to success, especially when it comes at the expense of A’s fans, who have watched their team lose seven elimination games in a row now, or Orioles fans, who had gone longer without seeing a World Series than Royals fans had. There’s a sense that if the Royals don’t finish off their dream season, the suffering of A’s and O’s fans will have been in vain — that it will be easier for fans in Oakland and Baltimore to accept defeat if they know that one of their comrades in lucklessness went on to defeat the entrenched powers that be, the San Francisco Giants, who have won two of the last four World Series.

Crazy as it sounds after the Royals have gone further than I ever dreamed they would, I’ll be more disappointed if they lose now than if they had lost three weeks ago against Oakland. Winning hasn’t diminished the fear of losing; it has only heightened it, and a championship is the only release.

Between a rock and a needle

This article about baseball made me smile. It’s spot on and it has implications across sports. In baseball, amphetamines and then steroids made the game more compelling for fans. In cycling it was the dominance of Lance Armstrong aided by sophisticated blood doping. The violent collisions are a big part of why people like football but they come at a severe cost to the long-term health of some players. What is the right balance between clean and compelling? How can leagues navigate their way towards a healthy equilibrium?

Fans Sick of the Steroid Era Shouldn’t Complain Now

by William Rhoden for the New York Times

“You can’t have it both ways,” I said, pointing to the television screen as another batter grounded out. “You can’t tell baseball to get rid of steroids, rage again at so-called steroid cheats, and then complain when you get this.”

Baseball’s conundrum is how to present a clean game, and a quicker one, too, for that matter, that can attract more young fans. Nine-inning games that last nearly four hours are not the answer.

As to whether baseball is a sounder game now than it was when balls were flying out of the park not long ago — that’s a matter of taste.

Beautiful Baseball Stadium Prints

With four teams left alive in the baseball playoffs, fans of the San Francisco Giants, the St. Louis Cardinals, the Baltimore Orioles, and the Kansas City Royals are freaking out about their teams with good reason. Making the semifinals (called the American League Championship Series and the National League Championship Series) is an achievement in and of itself. For fans of the Orioles and Royals in particular, this year will be one to remember for a long time. One of those teams (they play each other) will make it to the World Series after only making the playoffs once since 1997 (Baltimore) or not at all since 1985 (Kansas City.) If you live with a fan of one of these teams, you might want to invest in one of these wonderful minimalist baseball stadium prints by S. Preston. Not only are they great presents but they’re also a good defense against your fan buying a regular sports poster to remember the season by; one that you will not want hung in your living room. A gift of one of these prints says, “I like how big of a fan you are and I support your team” without saying “let’s turn our house into a locker room.”

S. Preston is a “graphic designer and digital artist, born and raised in Canada, now living in sunny California.” These prints are a side project for him but an extremely successful one. As I think you’ll see from looking at his work, he’s a super talented artist. In his minimalist stadium series, he identifies one signature element of a stadium and designs a beautiful version of it. All of the prints are available for sale on his site in a number of different sizes and configurations. Particularly cool is the option to have the stadium name, city, and the date it was built excluded from the design. If you choose this option, you’re left with a striking, colorful representation of your or your fan’s favorite stadium without any words on it to clue in the uninitiated. Here are links to and samples of the prints for the four remaining teams in the playoffs. Follow this link to S. Preston’s website if you’d like to check out any other stadiums.

Kansas City Royals – Kaufman Stadium

The Royals are my favorite team remaining. They’ve lost forever and now that they’re good, they bunt constantly. It’s fitting that this is one of my favorite of S. Preston’s prints. I love how this print immediately makes you think of the Royals without showing a baseball, glove, bat, field, or anything.

Minimalist Kaufman Stadium

Baltimore Orioles – Camden Yards and Memorial Stadium

The Orioles are my second choice to win the World Series if the Royals can’t do it. They’re a bright, vibrant team from another long-suffering city. S. Preston not only creates visuals of current stadiums but also of some great stadiums that are no longer in use. Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, demolished in 2002, is one of the stadiums that got S. Preston’s retro minimalist treatment. I have to say, I love the Camden Yards one — it shows just the B&O Railroad warehouse that sits behind the outfield of the stadium and still, you can tell what he’s getting at.

Camden Yards

Memorial Stadium

St. Louis Cardinals – Busch Stadium and Busch Memorial Stadium

St. Louis is one of the most successful baseball franchises and I’ve heard that it’s a more crazed baseball city than any in the country. If so, the city’s living rooms should be full of these prints. Both prints are great — the modern one identifies itself by the St. Louis arch mowed into the outfield. The vintage print shows the sky, the upper deck, and some very cool architecture on the roof.

Busch Stadium

Busch Memorial Stadium

San Francisco Giants – AT&T Park

If you only know one baseball stadium, you probably know Boston’s Fenway park because of its signature Green Monster wall looming over left field. If you only know two, you probably know Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field with its classic brick walls covered with ivy. If you know three though, you probably know San Francisco’s AT&T Park because you probably saw it on the news when Barry Bonds was busy smashing balls over the wall and into McCovey Cove where lunatics in kayaks waited to grab them. That image is the one S. Preston chose in his second (and the only one still for sale) design of AT&T Park.

AT&T Park Version 1

AT&T Park Version 2