All posts by CarterHayes

MLB

VORS: Value Over Replacement Scribe

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With the reporting date for pitchers & catchers only a week away nearly upon us, now is as good a time as any to discuss where we go to read high-quality baseball writing. Since this place first opened in the Old Basement, the abundance & variety of the baseball blogosphere baseball content online has proliferated, to our considerable benefit. No longer must we endure The Poultry Man and his legion of Stribbies.

Here’s a list of who I’m reading these days, based on the sites in my trusty RSS reader & a couple bespoke apps for my pocket-dwelling supercomputer:

The Athletic

This is the new one for me this year. I’ve listed the Twins, Padres, & Rockies as my favorite teams. (I don’t understand why a Big 4 market like Colorado/Denver does not have Athletic presence, yet.) Twins coverage has been...disappointing, even after The Athletic hired a new beat writer. I’m hoping for marked improvement now that Spring Training is here. In addition to following Ken Rosenthal’s national baseball coverage, I’m also subscribed to Eno Sarris’ writing here, but I think Eno’s leaving baseball writing entirely to do the beer thing. (At least, that’s my underinformed impression.)

Michael Baumann & Ben Lindbergh (The Ringer)

Writing for The Ringer means you’ll get columns on more than just baseball from these two guys, but the baseball writing’s pretty good, and occasionally the other stuff interests me, too. Moreover, I find Baumann’s perspective on labor refreshing.

Fangraphs

My primary filter for Fangraphs flags all posts by Jeff Sullivan, who writes at least two posts a day and has a gift for interesting observations and engaging analysis. Beyond that, I flag posts about the Twins, Padres, & Rockies (and filter out those about the Yankmes & Red Sox).

The Hardball Times

I mentioned earlier that it amazes me that The Hardball Times turns fourteen this year. It’s survived longer than the combined existences of Grantland and Sports on Earth. My primary filters these days are for teams (Twins, Padres, & Rockies) and a couple pet topics (ballparks, expansion, & history). I flagged posts for a bunch of authors there at one time (including Dirk Hayhurst, Chris Jaffe, Brad Johnson, Dave Studeman, & Steve Treder), but most of my favorite regulars have moved on. I still miss John Brattain.

Jay Jaffe (Sports Illustrated Fangraphs)

I was never a Sports Illustrated guy until Joe Posnanski. I stuck around after JoePos left, mainly because of Jay Jaffe. Jaffe’s most notable for JAWS and his work on the Hall of Fame, but those are by no means the limits of his baseball writing. In the last year or so there was some pretty substantial turnover at SI, and some of the other writers I found there were laid off or moved on. The new folks haven’t registered much yet, and I have no interest in anything Tom Verducci has to say. Edited to add: And now I may never have a reason to visit SI again, since Jaffe has moved to Fangraphs.

Jonah Keri (CBS Sports)

I hope MLB returns to Montréal someday soon and Keri is there to document it. His love for the Twins’ erstwhile contraction-mates and all-in advocacy for Tim Raines’ Hall of Fame case put him on my radar, but he’s a gifted writer of all things baseball.

MLB Trade Rumors

I installed the MLBTR app on my phone primarily for the push notifications. I’m not a completionist with this site; there’s simply too much to read. So I’ll dip in on players & teams that interest me.

Joe Posnanski (MLB.com)

Stating this purely for the record. Now that JoePos is employed by MLB, I don’t have to filter through columns about scandal-tarnished NCAA football coaches, the Browns, golf, and whatever. He can keep writing about Springsteen, though.

Ed Thoma (Baseball Outsider, his personal blog)

Someone (AMR?) turned me onto Ed Thoma several years ago, and I’ve been reading ever since. Thoma’s based in Mankato and, while a sportswriter, is not a member of the BBWAA. His perspective is a bit more old-school than mine, but I like his features and find his perspective nuanced, even if I don’t agree with it occasionally.

UniWatch

I’ve been reading this since it was still a Village Voice column, and while Paul Lukas’ hobbyhorses get eyeroll-worthy on occasion, the quality of the sartorial anaylsis he & Phil Hecken provide is what keeps me coming back. They’re willing to take deep dives on minutiae that wouldn’t get that treatment anywhere else

Anyone’s bandwidth for writing on a particular subject is limited, which makes the answer to who you enjoy reading all the more meaningful. We only have so much time to keep abreast of the latest analysis, and probably even fewer moments to spend on longform articles. So, who do you consider worthy of that time in your day? What do you value most in the baseball writing you make a point of reading regularly?

WGOM Videos

Tinariwen – Assàwt (The Voice of Tamashek Women)

Video

https://youtu.be/s6VCATERMc0

Looks like I get a second day...

This song is a tribute to the Tamashek women fighting for freedom in Tinariwen’s homeland, Mali. The band, which has been exiled, recorded the album it appears on in Paris, Morocco, & Joshua Tree (I’m wondering if that was at Josh Homme’s studio). Collaborators on the album included Mark Lanegan, Kurt Vile, & Alain Johannes.

3 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 103 votes, average: 8.67 out of 10 (3 votes, average: 8.67 out of 10)
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WGOM Videos

Otis Redding – I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now)

Video 5 Comments

https://youtu.be/0vUc17A0SNY
Live at the Monterey International Pop Festival
17 June 1967
filmed by D.A. Pennebaker

Fifty years ago today, Otis Redding & the Bar-Kays boarded a plane heading to a one-night-only gig in Madison. It had been a tumultuous autumn at the University of Wisconsin as generations clashed over the Vietnam War, and one can well imagine students & music lovers anticipating the ascendant King of Soul’s visit as a brief moment of respite. The venue, The Factory, was just off State Street, midway between the university & the Capitol. Big O was the headliner with his backing band; opening for them was a Rockford-based group called The Grim Reapers fronted by Rick Nielsen.

Redding had played two shows in Cleveland & appeared on WEWS-TV’s Upbeat the day before, so he & most of the Bar-Kays flew in on his private plane. It was drizzling, foggy, & hovering around freezing in Madison, and Redding’s pilot, just ten months removed from earning his multi-engine license, was from Georgia. A few miles from Truax Field at 3:25 p.m., over Lake Monona, everything went wrong.

Otis was 26. Jimmy King (guitar) was 18, Ronnie Caldwell (organ) would’ve turned 19 in seventeen days, Phalon Jones (sax) was 19, and Carl Cunningham (drums) was 19. Ben Cauley (trumpet) was the only survivor. Also killed were the pilot & Otis’ valet (Matthew Kelly, 17).

Otis Redding & the Bar-Kays (with a special guest) on 09 December 1967:

So much music was left in that voice, those lungs, & those hands.

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Cup of Coffee

13 November 2017: November Darkness

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Thanks to a link posted by someone I follow on Micro.blog, I came across The Dark Feels Different in November, which introduced me to the concept of ma:

Ma loosely translates to negative space, to emptiness, vacancy, blankness. It is a pause, in time, space, music, conversation. “Ma makes nothingness palpable and tangible,” writes Ando. It’s a space ripe with an atmosphere of uncertainty, suspension, and possibility. The Japanese character consists of the graphic for door and for moon, suggesting “a door through the crevice of which the moonshine peeps in,” as the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren defines it in his Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino-Japanese. Ma is the crack that lets the light in.
...
The candlelight makes one better know the dark, the shadows, the spaces unseen. And the dark—the hollows and corners behind the curtains, above the rafters, the places where dimness pools—helps one better know the light.

Likewise, ma makes one aware of the presence of absence. It’s the gap where the moonlight sifts through; it’s the space between two slate stones that guide your steps along a path; it’s the hollow where ghosts gather; it’s the pause in conversation, the ripe silence of the unspoken.

It’s worth your time.

Cup of Coffee

23 October 2017: Love that Lutefisk

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On Saturday we took my mother-in-law, who is 100% Greek, to a lutefisk supper at a very old, tiny Norwegian Lutheran church within the exclusive economic zone of the People’s Republic. As she recently bought a place in preparation to move up here from Flatlandia, it was our way of welcoming her to the state. Arriving early, we walked around the churchyard. I noted a few headstones with dates of birth dating back to the eighteenth century, which one doesn’t often see in this part of the country. There was a marble cenotaph honoring seventeen congregants who served in the Civil War: six of the men were named Ole. There were also two Arnes & a Knut.