The Naval aircraft carrier USS Yorktown participated in Pacific Theater battle campaigns during both World War II and the Vietnam War. Next month, the old battleship will serve as a launching pad of a different kind.
On June 18, the Class A South Atlantic League plans to stage the first round of its Home Run Derby on the flight deck of the Yorktown, which since 1975 has been a museum ship located at Patriot’s Park, which sits at the mouth of the Cooper River in Mount Pleasant, S.C., a suburb of Charleston. The championship round will then be held the next day as a lead-in to the Sally League’s All-Star Game.
- Dom Consentino, Deadspin.com.
Get your sea legs, Travis Taijeron.
After a few minutes, I noticed that someone had drawn a bunch of d—s all over the grease board by the door. So I pointed at them and asked, “Hey, who drew all the d—s?” One of the sound engineers immediately jumped up, ran over, and erased them with his sleeve. This is the new and mature Bieber. We can’t have d—s being drawn all over the place. People might get the wrong idea about filthy-rich 18-year-old pop stars.
Magary’s profile of Bieber for GQ is good and worth reading for Beliebers and skeptics alike. I felt silly censoring it, but you have to pick your battles. Also, it reminded me of something:
It doesn’t matter where or when, but once, while I was waiting in a dugout to interview a particularly young Mets Minor Leaguer, a chagrined media-relations dude emerged from the clubhouse.
“Yeah, ahh… I’m really sorry, this is going to take a minute,” he said. “He’s, ahh… he’s drawing d—ks on stuff.”
Later, I saw his handiwork. On a chalkboard in the clubhouse, a coach had drawn a stick figure. presumably as part of some demonstration. Once that drawing and the chalk were left behind for a group of college-aged guys, it was only a matter of time before someone added a huge cartoon wiener. From there, it appeared something of a wiener-drawing contest developed, with my interview subject and some of his teammates competing to draw the best or silliest one, or something. The payoff was a big chalkboard o’ wieners of all shapes and sizes, and, of course, a reminder that the prospects we track and follow and hype and debate and anticipate are still, in many cases, in their prime wiener-drawing years.
Kids.
This is a theme I hit on with some frequency, and there’s no strong conclusion here except to say that when you’re pouring over the stats of guys in their late teens and early 20s, it’s probably worth considering that they’re still very much guys in their late teens and early 20s, and there’s a lot of emotional and physical and mental development ahead of them. And it seems like, well, just a d–k thing to do to crap all over a guy with whatever platform you have when he’s still young enough to be drawing wieners on stuff without it seeming bizarre.
And I know some might point out that baseball players make the choice to play baseball professionally, and they sign up for the scrutiny when they do. And that’s definitely true. But they also make that choice at wiener-drawing age, right?
And when I say things like “that doesn’t mean it’s the right call”—thinking that it’s unlikely to have much if any benefit is not the same thing as being certain it has no benefit. It takes nothing away from the serious study of baseball—and in fact adds quite a bit to it, in my estimation—if we can be humble enough to admit that we aren’t certain when we shouldn’t be certain. In this case, there is still some unresolved doubt, and the Angels probably ought to have the benefit of it.
- Colin Wyers, Baseball Prospectus.
This is why Wyers is among my favorites of the numbers-heavy baseball writers going on the Internet these days. The borderline-to-downright arrogant air of authority that comes with much of the contemporary sabermetric analysis bothers me, because if anyone knew everything there is to know about baseball there’d really be no reason to keep studying it. Maybe it weakens conclusions to admit you might be wrong about something — and it doesn’t seem like there’s much accountability anyway — but I prefer honesty and humility to confidence where it should not exist.
During an otherwise awful night for the Mets, Terry Collins and David Wright got into a bit of a spat in the dugout that turned out to more or less embody what we like about both men. Patrick Flood has all the details and the interpretation.
For what it’s worth, David Wright seems like — understandably, and smartly — a pretty guarded guy, but absolutely every bit of evidence we have suggests he really, really loves playing baseball. Like even more than most professional baseball players. That’s awesome, and so is David Wright. Also, he’s hitting .408.
A couple weeks ago, I pointed out that you could isolate stretches of Wright’s merely good but not totally awesome 2009-2011 campaigns in which he fared as well as he had in his first 20 games of 2012. That’s still true: In 33 games from May 30 to July 5 of 2010, Wright posted a .414/.456/.662 line. And over a 38-game stretch from May 4-June 16, 2009, Wright hit .415/.503/.606. Maybe you could find another if you play around with the baseball-reference gamelogs. Which is to say, again, that this is a small sample size and maybe this is the best Wright will hit all season, and maybe he’ll go into an awful slump soon and people will start crying “traid” again.
But those are arbitrary endpoints, and there’s no arguing that it’s encouraging he’s started this season this way. Obviously.
Actually, here’s something funny: Wright has been so good in the first 33 games of this year that if you tack them on to the 102 games he played last year, it makes for a .291/.381/.470 line with a 139 OPS+, or a hell of a lot like vintage David Wright. The power’s not where it was from 2005-2008, but that’s the case around the Majors.
As for Collins: The only blowback I’ve seen to his removal of Wright and Murphy from last night’s game is that it sends a negative message to the rest of the players if he’s only protecting his two best hitters. Yeah, whatever. Maybe they’ll see the type of treatment they’d get if they became one of the team’s best hitters.
Wayne passed along this sandwich quiz from the BBC. I got five of seven, missing Nos. 4 and 5. But “prawn sandwich brigade” seems like a useful term that I’ll have to use in the future.
Mike Francesa doesn’t like Twitter because it’s inane and inaccurate.
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