Back on the Mic

I am happy to announce that I am adding to my growing collection of part-time jobs.

I will be the public address announcer for Fox Chapel Area football this season. Friday night lights, I am about to ruin you.

Time for a bit of background. My job when I was attending Fox Chapel was public-address-announcer-slash-music-player for many sports: volleyball, field hockey, lacrosse and women’s basketball among them. It was just about the perfect high school job. I lived right by the school, got to watch all the games for free and do what I love — talking in a really low voice.

Note: My favorite name to announce was a boy’s volleyball player named — and this is true — Ronnie Seman. Spelled just the way you think it would tickle a high schooler announcing volleyball. You’re the best, Ronnie.

But one sport I didn’t get to announce was football. The big time! The thousands of fans in the crowd. The big stadium speakers. The students barely paying attention or have been drinking too much — too much Sprite, of course — to care.

Fox Chapel High Stadium

My office for four Friday nights this fall.

I’ll admit I am quite nervous. I need to get used to the pace and the calls for football games. It is new territory for me. Luckily, I get a spotter. And I get to see the teachers with whom I worked as a high schooler.

I can’t wait for 7:00 p.m. Friday. And if you’re in the area of Fox Chapel, I would love to see you there. Come up to the press box and say “hi!”

Suck it, Thomas Wolfe. You can go home again. And sometimes, you come even closer to where you belong.

10 Baseball Writing Resources I Can’t Do Without

I am interested in the work habits of people that work in sports journalism. I want to know their process. If you are a sports journalist and ever agree to have lunch with me, I will probably bother you with questions in that vein.

So I figure I ought to share my process for writing about baseball, or at least the tools I use to make my incoherent points.

 

Bookmarks

  • Baseball-Reference — The gold standard for career baseball statistics. The site is incredibly deep yet still loads quickly. The ability to click to total statistics from multiple games and seasons is a Godsend. And the Play Index is a joy, from simply messing around to incisive database searching. I love it all. So do you.
  • FanGraphs — The silver standard. I use it largely for WAR and wRC+, two great metrics, plus the projections they provide. FanGraphs is sneaky deep and almost comparable to Baseball-Reference if you know how to use it correctly. And if I asked you which player has the highest walk rate over the last 8 seasons, would you believe Jack Cust?
  • Baseball Prospectus — BP offers one of the subscriptions that is absolutely worth it for baseball writers. You quickly figure out why so many BP writers end up being hired by Major League teams — you will be instantly impressed the research and presentation of data within the articles. My favorite feature: the injury history on player cards, available even to non-subscribers.
  • MLB Depth Charts — Jason Martinez provides a top-notch source of rosters, transactions and depth charts for all 30 teams. It is certainly useful for fantasy owners, and indispensable for quickly seeing the lineups and rotations of unfamiliar teams.
  • Brooks Baseball — If you want to know a pitcher, you have to see what he throws. Short of actually watching the pitcher, the best thing you can do is look at his Brooks Baseball page. You will see his pitch types, velocity, pitch outcomes and so much more. It’s amazing this is all out there for free. Thank you, Dan Brooks.
  • Flickr Creative Commons — If you run a non-profit site, Creative Commons photos are indispensable for giving the site some visual pop. It’s amazing how many kind people (looking at you, Keith Allison) take great sports photos and allow them to be used for free. Or, in my case, mediocre photos.

 

Tools

  • Google Chrome — My browser of choice makes it even easier to do searches on players and teams. Chrome allows you to start typing in a website, hit Tab, then search on that website. [Update: As Shotgun Spratling pointed out, adding this is not automatic. Go to Chrome’s Settings and “Manage search engines…” Scroll to the bottom and add Baseball-Reference.com, plus other sites like weather.com, fangraphs.com, espn.com, etc.]I don’t need to go to the Baseball-Reference main site to pull up Adam Wainwright’s page. Just hit Command-T-B-A-Tab-W-A-I-N-W-R-I-G-H-T-Enter. Once you get in the habit, you’ll never go back.
  • Microsoft Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheet — If you’re not paying for Microsoft Office, Google Docs allows you to do most of the formulas Excel is known for. Professional statisticians may need more than Docs, but it’s perfect for me to make a list or tabulate an OPS.
  • Magic Recs — If you use Twitter, you should follow Magic Recs. The account direct messages you when it notices multiple people you follow talking about a certain topic or retweeting a certain tweet. It’s not perfect, but Magic Recs has a high hit rate for notifying me about important Pirates and MLB news, or just a cool nugget I should know about.
  • Buffer — Once you write something great, it deserves to be shared! Buffer allows you to schedule sharing of your content on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Plus. If you don’t want to set a specific time, just throw the link into Buffer, and the site will put in a time to send it to the world. Easy and free — my two favorite words.

Irony and Sincerity are Actually Both Good

It struck me a couple days into the Every Simpsons Ever marathon.

On Twitter, I follow many people who fall into the category of “Weird Twitter.” Now, these people groan and make jokes at the very idea of a “Weird Twitter” and at any attempts to properly describe what they tweet. But I think it’s safe to say there is a lot of trafficking in irony. They’re funny.

These people fill my timeline with jokes and rants mostly based around not liking something or someone. But when The Simpsons started airing Golden Age episodes every half-hour, the mood changed. Were the people who operate so consistently in apathy and antipathy actually… ((gulp)) enjoying something?

They were! They loved The Simpsons! And they were talking about it! Put aside the fact that I love The Simpsons too, but I was quite refreshed to see Weird Tweeters (some of them, at least) expressing their approval of something.

The question must be raised: do we need more sincerity and less irony? Would we improve from expressing more of our satisfaction and approval instead of our complaints and displeasure?

First of all, I certainly don’t think life requires this all-or-nothing mindset. If you are sincere about everything and have so sense of ironic humor, you sound like a bore to be around. I don’t want to be BFFs with my grandma. But if you’re always ironic and like nothing, well, what are we going to do together?

I believe in sincerity, and truly liking things. I am going to write more “Things I Like” Thursday posts, because as I put it, “Let’s spend a little less time railing about what we hate and a little more time sharing what we love. It’s the only way a meritocracy will work.”

I also believe in irony, as un-ironic as this post is becoming. I like @mattytalks and @woodmuffin and @robdelaney and a bunch of other people who make me laugh and happy. I like the sarcastic, witty shows that are out there. God this paragraph is terrible and I want it to end now.

Where am I going with this?

Unlike Aaron Sorkin in The Newsroom (a show I like!), I don’t think we need to “overcome the terminal irony.” But as with many things, be mindful of yourself.

Don’t just speak up about the things you hate, although there is a place for that. Don’t just talk about the things you like; you are more than the things you like.

And text me. We can watch The Simpsons marathon. I have 79 episodes on the DVR that I really should watch.

Read These Stories: Labor Day Weekend Edition

The long holiday weekend seems like a good time to start a new series — Read These Stories.

Clearly I am not committed enough to write something tangible every day, particular this past week when a family member was getting married. So when I am low on time, I will dip into my Pocket archive (remember when I named Pocket a thing I like?) to recommend a few stories you should read.

Is Softball Sexist? (by Emma Span)

You can probably guess how Span answers, but the joy comes in the journey to that answer.

I have taken it for granted that boys play baseball and girls play softball. But why? Girls in soccer don’t play on a smaller field. Girls in basketball don’t get a bigger basket. Girls in tennis aren’t forced to serve underhand. Why do we separate baseball and softball by sex for kids?

Span explores the unfortunate sexist history of this question in an editorial that took on new life after Mo’Ne Davis dominated male counterparts in the Little League World Series. Mo’Ne’s strong play can be a turning point that encourages more girls to play (and stay with) baseball, if we let them.

What’s Wrong With Baseball (by Tim Marchman)

Marchman does not write your typical “World Series television ratings are down; baseball is doomed” trolling column. He is far too good a writer for that.

Major League Baseball faces legitimate questions as it tries to maintain a large slice of the sports pie. Problem is, those questions, those issues, were largely of MLB’s own making. And the sport may be continuing to dig its “regional sport” grave.

Rob Manfred isn’t Bud Selig (by Jayson Stark)

The man who will be forced to answer those questions will be new MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. I didn’t think of the guy as much more than Selig’s right-hand Manfred, expecting him to act largely the same as ol’ C. Montgomery Selig.

Stark talks to team executives who paint a different picture. Sure, Manfred will not be a “steward of the game” commissioner like Peter Ueberroth was or Bob Costas would like to be. However, the team execs reveal a few ways Manfred will differ from Selig, and how that fact could change the game in the coming years.

On a glorious night for the Royals, Ned Yost manages to dump on the fans (by Sam Mellinger)

You need not be a Royals fan, nor even a baseball fan, to enjoy Mellinger’s evisceration of the Royals manager’s tone-dear comments.

It may help to be a sportswriter, though. I greatly appreciated Mellinger’s ability to stitch together his reporting, research, opinion and prose to write a fantastic column, all on a newspaper deadline. He’s also dead-on about the issue of attendance shaming, an act I’m sure you will see plenty of in September.

Exclusive: How Josh Shaw Fooled USC (by John Walters)

The saga of Josh Shaw breaking his ankles saving his drowning nephew, then oops not actually became an embarrassment to the USC athletic department, which put its full faith behind Shaw’s boy-who-cried-pool story.

But then, strangely, the outraged public packed up and headed out in time for the holiday weekend. But it is worth it to read the story of how Shaw fooled a group of very smart people, and the surprising character who called in to request a correction in Shaw’s original story.

Bad Wedding Jokes: Part 2

You said there would be Cake at this wedding, but I haven’t even HEARD “Short Skirt Long Jacket.”

((Me looking at the ten bags of makeup the makeup lady has)) “Yeah, I have all that too.”

“Dad, will you be getting your makeup done, too?”

—

((Doing the Love Train)) “People all over the world, join in! Start a love train!”

“I hate Train. Hell with Hey Soul Sister.”

—-

A Few Bad Wedding Jokes

I would like to present a few bad wedding jokes on the precipice of a wedding I will be attending Friday:

 

  • “Why do I need to go to this rehearsal dinner? I know how to eat dinner.”

 

  • “If this other guy’s the best man, why is she marrying the dude who cuts the dog’s hair?”

 

  • From my sister to the bride: “Good thing you’re having this wedding before Labor Day so you can wear white.”

 

(If the wedding is on a Friday)

  • Loved one:  “I’ll see you Friday.”
  • Me: “Probably.”

I like to put across an air of mystery.

 

  • “The priest said you can’t have alcohol on your breath when you get married. He said nothing about cocaine on the nose.”

And if you don’t like ’em, this is a free blog.