A Mystery Fit For A Sultan

Over at the New York Times, they have a story about a short bit of footage of Babe Ruth that recently was discovered by an elderly man some among home videos in New Hampshire and donated the Major League Baseball Film and Video Archive (where our buddy Schiff is currently working):

The latest Babe Ruth film, unseen publicly until now, is part of a 90-second clip shot from the first-base stands at Yankee Stadium. There is no sound. But there are sweeping views of the park. And there is Ruth, obvious by his shape and waddle.

He is shown in right field, hands on his knees, glove on his right hand. To a casual fan, it appears unremarkable. But it represents the archive’s only game action of Ruth playing in the outfield — where he spent more than 2,200 games — other than a between-innings game of catch.

According to the article, there is no known film of Ruth pitching for Boston or doing anything more than warming up to pitch for the Yankees, either. Only a very small amount of footage of Ruth is know to exist (about an hour's worth), and given his immense popularity and the scarcity of it, when a new piece turns up, it's a pretty big deal.

Even though the film comes with no date and no sound, they've been able to deduce a decent amount of clues from it, based on the flag pole in centerfield, dimensions of and advertisements the outfield walls, lack of numbers on the jerseys, time of day, size of the crowd, positioning of the Yankees' dugout, batter on deck and the fact that Ruth struck out looking.

There's some interesting discussion starting over here on the Bats blog (and as always over here) as to what the footage can tell us, but the archivists think that it might be from one of the first two games of the 1928 World Series against the Cardinals. You can watch just the original film at the Bats Blog or a report about the MLB Archive with the main article. Check it out.

April All Over Again

After a rain delay of 12 minutes the gametime temperature sat at a rather chilly 55 degrees. The air was opaque with mist and a huge amount of seats sat empty. The atmosphere was eerily reminiscent of the game that Schiff and I went to on April 21st. Andy Pettitte was the starter that night as well, but the main difference was that the lefty lasted seven innings, gave up two runs and the Yankees came away with the win. Not tonight.

Tonight was another frustrating outing with RISP (1-6) although it wasn't as bad as the series finale in Cleveland (3-16), which they won. Pettitte got the Yankees in the hole right off the bat, allowing three runs in the first inning. Nelson Cruz hit a ball right back toward Pettitte that would have likely become a double play if it hadn't deflected off it Andy's leg. A DP would have ended the inning, but Ian Kinsler scored on the play and the Rangers worked across two more runs on a groundout and a single. The inning would have continued on longer if it weren't for Melky Cabrera's outfield assist, throwing out Marlon Byrd at third base from right field.

Pettitte did not look sharp at any point in the game, but the first was the only inning where the Rangers would do significant damage. Allowing 13 baserunners in 5 innings typically leads to more than four runs, but Pettitte has always found ways to sneak out of tight situations. The six strikeouts and the double play he induced certainly helped his cause. 

It looked as though his back problem was flaring up as replays showed him wincing as he labored towards first base in the fourth inning. He apparently got through whatever it was and came back out for the fifth, finished the frame and ended up throwing 104 pitches.

The Yankees brought home a run on a single by A-Rod, the only one they would plate in the first six innings. Despite throwing only 59 of his 98 pitches for strikes, Feldman mostly stumped the Bombers. He gave up three walks and five hits, the last of which being a homer to Jorge Posada before getting pulled in the 7th. Of the 14 outs Feldman got on balls in play, 11 were grounders. Although he's not a name brand guy, Feldman's ERA of 3.79 and 5-0 record in seven starts (four in Arlington) is nothing to sneeze at. 

The Yanks shot themselves in the foot plenty of times, however. A-Rod rapped into a double play with one out and the bases loaded in the third inning. After Johnny Damon advanced to third on an errant pickoff throw by Feldman, A-Rod struck out in the sixth with a man on third and only one out. He struck out again in the eighth with Nick Swisher on first, bringing the total number of runners he left on base to five. The bottom third of the line up, (Melky, Matsui and Gardner) reached base only twice in ten plate appearances and Jeter went 0-4 in the leadoff spot. When a four person stretch in the order has a night that bad, it makes it tough to score runs without hitting long balls. 

On the bright side, Nick Swisher filled in admirably for Mark Teixeira, going 2-3 with a walk. Brett Tomko also pitched terrifically in relief of Pettitte, throwing three shutout innings and keeping the game well within reach. David Robertson added his own scoreless frame in the ninth. 

One difference between this and the games the Yankees were losing in April was the level of frustration. April started off bad, and never really got better. There was a sense of angst building, but the Yanks' success as of late makes routine losses like this one much easier to tolerate. The opposing pitcher had a good night and they didn't manage to score enough runs. It happens. Fortunately, the matinee on the schedule today means the loss won't linger too long, either.

Game 14: New Yankee Stadium Live Blog Alert!

That's right folks, tonight Schiff and I will be reporting to you live from the Stadium as the Yanks square off with the A's.

Hopefully the game will go better than last time.

Because You Can't Put Blogs On Your Bookshelf

It might not have any Tolstoy, Dickens, J.D Salinger, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Nathaniel Hawthorne, but I'm sort of proud of my bookshelf.

If you took the time to look it over, you could probably find out a lot about me. It's a little skewed, because the entire left side holds roughly 19 poker books, but that was a big part of my life for a long time.

Dan Harrington, Phil Gordon, Doyle Brunson, Barry Greenstein, David Sklansky, James McManus and T.J. Cloutier taught me a shitload about poker, objective analysis, and life. Read Harrington On Hold 'Em Vol. I & II and you will destroy any home they will let you sit at it. Both Super Systems are packed with sound strategy for almost any variation of poker you have ever heard of. I would recommend Positively 4th Street to someone who had no interest in no-limit hold 'em because it is so beautifully written.

If you work your way right from there, you'll see a Matt Taibbi book, a dictionary, The Complete Encyclopedia Of Beer (actually quite incomplete), Running the Table, Why Golf?, In Search Of Burning Bush, um, another book (shut up, it was a gift)... John Daly's Autobiography, The World is Flat, New Rules, a Jimi Hendrix biography, Under a Wild Sky, The Devil's Teeth, The Last Voyages of Captain Cook, some Carl Sagan, The Hardball Times '09...

Continue East you'll find some Malcolm Gladwell, Harvey Penick, more Carl Sagan, Moneyball, Anthony Bourdain and Into the Wild. The Orchid Thief and The Heartless Stone are there too.

If a person has the inclination to put together a bookshelf, and you have the time to look it over, it will give you insights into their personality it would take months, if not years, to glean in conversation. Next time you are feeling nosy at someone's apartment, instead of looking through the pill cabinet, check out their bookshelf. It will tell you infinitely more about them.

I wish I had a blogshelf in my room. My bookshelf tells more of a history, while a blogshelf would represent a more current narrative. You'd see River Ave. Blues, the National Football Post, ShysterBall, Kissing Suzy Kolber and figure that I like the Yankees, football, intellectual baseball banter and that I'm an asshole. You might notice 538 and Floating Shawn and guess I voted for Obama. Schiff Happens would be kickin' it, along my most recent addition, HowFresh Eats. Those fellows can tell you about music, food and city living and do it right at my frequency.

Since there is no such thing as a blogshelf, and people don't usually look through each others RSS readers, all of those nuggets are lost to cyberspace.

Unfortunately, since I've started writing for this here site, I haven't even been tempted to crack a book. There's no time. At this point in my life, books are for vacations. My attention span is so frayed by RSS Feeds, Twitter, Google Analytics, Facebook, BitTorrent, and the other endless bounties of the internet that the commitment necessary to read a book is too daunting. I used to read books in the morning. Now, my Google Reader is overloaded and the first thing I do when I get up is reach for my iPhone and start chipping away at the unread posts.

Eventually, it might be unrealistic to expect to someone to read 400 pages on a single subject. Why would they? With an endless supply of constantly updated mediums, from which you can select the exact ones that pertain to you, it seems grossly inefficient to spend the time it takes to read a book. As an author, to dedicate months if not years and hundreds of thousands of words to any one topic is so far over my head, it's laughable. However, if you add up all the stuff I've written in this space since Christmas day, I'm guessing it would come pretty close to the length of a book.

But blogs are considered disposable. You coast through a post and it gets marked as read, never to been seen again, unless you so desire. Somehow, we pay $15 for a book, but a blog, which is by your side day in and day out, is considered worthless, monetarily. The argument has been made that since you don't read newspapers or blog posts more than once, you can't charge for them. How many magazine articles have you read more than once? People still pay for then AND they have ads in them.

Charging per post could never work, but blogs have to provide some value. Some are entertaining, some are educational, some funny, others analytical, most are current. Just because people are willing to provide them at no cost doesn't mean that they have no value.

What if blogs charged for their RSS feeds? Would it be worth $1 a month to me to not have to go to a site and check for updates? If you think time is money, then the answer is decidedly "Yes". I constantly hear people talking about the untapped taxable resource that marijuana represents, but it's not like the alcohol industry is dying out. With the foundation of the print media crumbling under our feet, I don't hear nearly enough people proposing ways to monetize the amazing amount of content being written out there on the Long Tail.

I'll put my money where my mouth is. Who wants my dollar per month? Craig, I've already told you I'd pay to read ShysterBall. River Ave. Blues, ditto. I would certainly have to pare down on the number of feeds I subscribe to, but the money those people would make from the subscription fees would make their content better. The best bloggers could make a living from writing and not have to work around a full-time job like many currently do.

You know why HBO is better than regular TV? Because in the late 60's Charles Dolan came up with the idea of a "Green Channel", to which people would pay to subscribe independently of their regular cable system. They had to overcome a massive churn rate initially, but look where the channel is today. 38 million subscribers. They eliminated the bullshit that an advertising-based system exists upon and got people to pay for the content.

Advertising is on the way out. No? You don't think so?

Do you have a DVR? I do, and for $10 a month every channel is HBO to me. I absolutely refuse to watch commercials, which is how they are supposedly "charging" me. The cable company is giving me the technology to basically steal from the channels they provide me. That is a sustainable model? (For the record, I was writing about this three years ago. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Anon.)

If you are like me, you are probably ahead of the curve and are only getting away with this because people who are older than us or less technologically inclined are still sitting through commercials. It won't last forever. People will still buy things without advertising. I pimp plenty of stuff in this space and don't get paid a dime for it. I'm just looking out for you Fackers and when I find something I like I feel the need to pass the word along.

People are so cynical that I don't think advertising makes much of a difference anymore. The communications are slicker, but our ability to tune them out far outpaces marketers ability to reach us. The only thing advertising is good for is awareness, but awareness does not equal purchase interest. Trust me, I work in market research.

I tune out advertising online and I'll take my headphones out during the commercial break on 1050 ESPN Radio too. I'm starting to listen to more podcasts like The Bronx View, KSK, On The DL, and the brand new Deadcast. In some ways, the content is better and there are no commercials. Stack those up and you are approaching a healthy portion of the work week. I'd pay for them too.

I'm not pretending to know where this is going. There are trillion variables and maybe people like Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky, who say charging for content will never work, are right. I'm not saying this for my own good, either. I've got a rough idea of how many readers we have and $1 a month from each of them wouldn't even begin to supplant my income, let alone our other contributors. I just think more people who have things that people value should jettison the free spirit of the internet.

Once upon a time there was Napster. Now there is iTunes. They found a way to bridge the gap between Wall Street and the Wild West, and on most levels, it works. There are ways to tame the internet, smart people just have to want to do it.

Doris Sighting!!!!!!!

Yup. That's her. Swear on my life. I obviously couldn't get a pic of her face because that would put me in her peripheral vision and that was a confrontation I was not at all interested in. That, and also I drew the line (for once). If I'm not going to put my face on this blog, I really shouldn't put hers, I don't think.

I really didn't know how this day could get any better. There are some things in the works that I don't want to mention for non-jinxing purposes, and the snow, and the shrimp fritters, and my new headphones...

I actually went back to Whole Foods to pick up some more those fritters, along with a sirloin for the grill tonight. I asked the guy at the meat counter for a steak that was about a pound and three quarters. He put it on the scale: 1.75lbs. Bang. I mean, who cares? But that was pretty cool.

That beer is the Dogfish Head Olde School Barleywine. It's 15% ABV.

I needed to stop by Pioneer on my way back to grab some more brews and walking in, I spotted the mythical beast known to you Fackers only as "Doris". I very nearly soiled myself.

I didn't observe her eating habits like Sampson did, but this is kind of similar as she was in hunter/gatherer mode. It's not everyday she leaves the apartment. Actually, this may have been the first time in 46 years.

We left Pioneer at about the same time, and I skittered back over the icy sidewalks, hid out in my entrance way and nabbed this shot.

Look familiar? It's blurry and everything, just like the original! There was a girl right there walking her dog who saw me do it and gave me this look. I shrugged my shoulders and went "It's a long story..." and scampered upstairs to write this post.

This was one of the best snow days ever.

Sean Daley from Atmosphere, would you do the honors?



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We should be back in sports mode tomorrow. Hopefully you enjoy the non-sports stuff too, because it's really fun to write. I don't really know where to even send these links, but if you read other blogs with similar content like Schiff's, feel free to point me in their direction or vice versa.

Need A Laugh? [Non-Sports]

It has not been the greatest of days so far for fans of the Yankees. But if you don't laugh at this, you are a vegetable.




(h/t Schiff)