Hideo Nomo Has a Posse

ESPN shall apparently brook no criticisms of Bud Selig. The host of their Baseball Today podcast, Peter Pascarelli, was summarily wiped from history after offering a nauseating and forced apology for saying of the recently erected Bud Selig statue outside Milwaukee’s Miller Park that it could be improved by the efforts of Wisconsin’s pigeons.

If you catch his meaning.

Anyway, it’s all reminiscent of the time ESPN also forced “news” anchor Scott Van Pelt to apologize to Mr. Selig for questioning the value in his $18m salary. The network’s not really fond of any kind of criticism that might jeopardize their relationship with MLB.

The network even went so far as to remove the comments from the podcast. The show resumed with no sign of Pascarelli, nor any mention of his fate from the hosts.

VANQUISHED!

Seriously, I thought I might have to wait until at least the regular season to kick this little series off, but the baseball gods give and the baseball gods giveth again. Ever since my favorite club decided to trade for Milton Bradley (not a bad trade, really, as it allowed them to flush the contract and BMI of Carlos Silva), I figured I would keep watch and follow his routine blow-ups throughout the season. I expect the Ms to do well and to be competitive in their West, but even if they fall on their collective face, well, there will always be the Milton Bradley Watch.

Bradley was interviewed by the New York Times – who were no doubt simply angling to antagonize the misunderstood outfielder and cajole him into a money quote or two – and asked about his troubles during his Cubs stint. Did Milton try to simply move on and allow the water under the bridge by letting bygones to be just that? Why no, he did not:

Two years ago, I played, and I was good. I go to Chicago, not good. I’ve been good my whole career. So, obviously, it was something with Chicago, not me.

Yes! The man’s been good his whole career. For the one year where he was not good, it was “something” with the city. “Something” with the fans, Wrigley, Lou Pinella, the traffic- whatever. Bradley claims the Cubs expected him to be a 30 HR guy despite never hitting more than 20 before his 2008 stint with Texas. Chicago manager Lou Pinella disagreed with the assessment.

Ah, Milton. It’s only March 4. The Ms have yet to play their second game of Spring Training. Already, the quotes are rolling in. It’s certainly some kind of divine intervention that the Mariners play the Cubs this year in interleague play; if only the game were at Wrigley.

Brian Fremeau presents a solid visualization of the interaction among AP top-ranked college football programs in 1989 and in 2009, showing clearly that the elite programs don’t play each other as much as they used to. It would be interesting to see it broken down by year to see if it’s an out and out decline over time or if there have  been peaks and valleys. Fremeau argues that conference expansion is the likely the reason, noting that in 1989, 25 FBS teams were independent, whereas in 2009 only 3 programs remained so, none of which were ranked by the AP.

Not much of a college football guy myself- maybe ‘cos the ole alma mater had no program- but it’s always awesome to see complex data represented in a simple, intuitive manner. Props to Fremeau.

Here they are in CSV with MLBAM’s venue ID added. Here’s a schema you can use should you want to run them into a database:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `park_factors`;
CREATE TABLE park_factors (
    venue_id INT DEFAULT NULL,
    year INT DEFAULT NULL,
    name VARCHAR(100) DEFAULT NULL,
    R FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    H FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    HR FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    H2B FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    H3B FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    BB FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (venue_id, year)
);

MLB.com provides, among other things, all of the pitch information for each MLB and AAA game in XML format. It’s the data that drives their wonderful little service Gameday. If you want to take a spin through what the data looks like, start here and poke around. What’s key, most folks agree, is the Pitch/FX information, but there’s also pitch-by-pitch logs for every game.

I’ve put together a little package which includes (1) a schema for a MySQL database to retain the information, and (2) a python script which will handle fetching and parsing the XML data found on MLB.com servers. If you’re interested in such a thing, you can download it from the github project page.

There is detailed installation and execution information found on the wiki at github as well but just to provide them here:

./gameday.py

With the following arguments:

• --year=XXXX four digit year
• --day=X,Y days in a comma separated list
• --month=X,Y months in a comma separated list
• --type=[mlb, aaa] optional: which league to process. Default is ‘mlb’. Any of the categories found here (AA, etc) should work- I’ve just worked with MLB and AAA.
• --verbose Shows every HTTP request
• --delta Uses delta mode.

When delta mode is run, the script will store the last date it processed in the database. Upon next execution, it will start from where it left off. This is useful for running the thing nightly to grab the latest stuff.