Krystal D’Costa has a fascinating post up at Anthropology in Practice delving into the true heart of a baseball. Literally. From ripping out the stitches to unravelling the yarn to cutting open the rubber core to reveal the cork within, this is practically a baseball autopsy.
And, while it tickles the “take it apart” urge inside me (my parents couldn’t buy clicking pens when I was a boy), the post is more because it also delves a bit into the history of the game (cork? rubber? wool?) as well as into the sources of all those products and the labour that makes them.
Baseball may be as American as apple pie, but the ball they play with is global to the core.
If you’re interested in the anatomy of a baseball, click here.
It would have been the third perfect game this season — which is intense, considering there’s been less than two dozen in all of major league baseball history.
DETROIT—Armando Galarraga squeezed the ball in his mitt, stepped on first base with his right foot and was ready to celebrate the first perfect game in Detroit Tigers’ history.
What happened next will be the talk of baseball for the rest of this season and likely a lot longer.
Umpire Jim Joyce emphatically called Cleveland’s Jason Donald safe and a chorus of groans and boos echoed in Comerica Park.
Then Joyce emphatically said he was wrong and later, in tears, hugged Galarraga and apologized.
We can watch it over and over — the runner is clearly out. Already there is a growing clamour out there to give umpires the same benefit we’re enjoying: the benefit of using video replays to judge calls. This incident is only likely to intensify that.
But I say no. I say video replay is wrong for the sport, and not only because it would slow an already lengthy game.
Sure, umpires are fallible. They’re human. They make mistakes. Let that be part of the game. Let bad calls happen — the same way that dropped catches, wild pitches, and runners stumbling happens.
If pitchers never made mistakes, they would pitch “perfect” games more often than not. But pitchers miss their marks. If hitters never made mistakes, they’d bat 1.000 every year (and a single inning would last forever).
But we acknowledge that the players are fallible, and we watch to see which team is better than the other.
Well, let’s consider that the officials are a sort of “third team” out on the field. And, just like we don’t demand do-overs when two outfielders run into each other while chasing a pop fly, and we don’t demand a second chance if a throw is wide of the base, let’s not force umpires to double-check all of their decisions.
Bad calls will happen, sure. And they’re frustrating. But so are ninth-inning meltdowns.
Bad calls are part of the game. They add an element of unpredictability — keeping baseball a human endeavour instead of a computer simulation. They’re the real wild card.
This is kind of cool: after a full 18 innings of baseball, the San Diego Padres had burned completely through their bullpen and had even gone to the well for Friday’s starter, making him throw two innings against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Josh Wilson appeared calm and collected when he approached the mound for the Padres in the 18th inning Sunday at PETCO Park….
With no other options remaining, manager Bud Black signaled for the shortstop and former high school pitcher to head to the mound.
“We always look for emergency-type pitchers, and he was the guy,” Black said. “He was the logical choice.”
Amazingly, Wilson’s only been a Padre since mid-May — and he was called to pitch against his former team. Even more amazingly for an infielder, he actually pitched once for the Diamondbacks in early May. What are the odds?
Sorry to say that despite some fine pitching, he hung too juicy a strike out over the plate, and lost the game by giving up a three-run homer.
When Amy and I went to Minneapolis the other weekend, we took in a could of Twins games. Since it happened to be interleague, we got to watch them playpound the Milwaukee Brewers. It was sometime in the first few innnings of the first game that we fell in love with the retro Brewers logo above.
I don’t know when they changed to a newer logo, but plenty of people were still wearing the old M+B-in-a-baseball-mitt logo on their T-shirts. It was awesome.
It doesn’t include every logo ever — the blogger who compiled it says that he chose only the ones that were “interesting” to him — but there are enough to get a sense of some of the logo evolution.
Three things that I noticed right off the bat:
Many of the logos have evolved dramatically over the years, and sometimes elements get lost that I wish hadn’t.
There are clear “trends” in logo design. A lot of retro logos have rounded single letters that are pretty similar to the Brewers one. And a lot of the modern logos have computer-aided 3-D effects.
The Napster logo appears to have been ripped right off from the old Chicago Cubs logo. Go check for yourself!
I also loved that the Oakland As used to be the “Swingin’ As”.
Credit for unearthing this post to Draplin, who always has fantastic design links.
