Category: Sports

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Pete Rose, a Threat to Integrity

A quote from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, pulled from the CNN coverage on the 17 players reinstated from their permanently ineligible status1Given how egregious elements of this decision are, it hardly feels worth nitpicking the nature of the phrase permanently ineligible as something that can be revoked.:

Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.

This is not obvious to me.

With institutions of culture like MLB, each notable player is a symbol, an icon, representing something greater than themselves. Who the institution allows to represent them fundamentally describes their standards, ethics, and beliefs as an organization. By walking back names from the—ahem—permanently ineligible list, Manfred is himself compromising the integrity of the game and claiming the reason Rose was banned was solely as personal punishment to he man, rather than a level enforcement of rules against betting on baseball that, though indeed having the effect of punishing the individual, also acts as a clear signal that the actions are not tolerated in the least.

This is a discouraging and cowardly move by a commissioner who does not care about the impact of baseball as a cultural phenomenon and is willing to sacrifice its ethos for… what exactly?

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    Given how egregious elements of this decision are, it hardly feels worth nitpicking the nature of the phrase permanently ineligible as something that can be revoked.
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Ella Black Series on Effectively Wild Podcast

Effectively Wild, a fantastic baseball podcast from FanGraphs, put out the third and final installment in the scripted series Only a Woman: Ella Black, Lost and Found. It’s an excellent historical dive into the first known woman baseball journalist in the late 1800s, who is woefully not generally known and has certain mysteries hanging around her work. Each episode is thoroughly engaging and well-constructed, and I only wish they were YouTube videos with basic imagery so more people would stumble across them.

Give the series a try. Each episode is about an hour and worth your time.

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My First Article For the SABR Games Project

I rejoined SABR a couple of years ago and focused my volunteer work on fact-checking articles for the Games Project. These accounts of past MLB games are notable in some context of the author’s choice. They could be historically impactful, meaningful within a player’s career, highlighted by a rare event, or any other such factors that make an otherwise mundane day in baseball history something worth remembering.

Last month I decided to try writing one of these articles. I trawled through the archives of Minnesota Twins history for interesting seasons and landed on an early game in 2009 that defined the year for Jason Kubel.

You can read the article here.

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2025 Fantasy Baseball

Some of the fine folks I met last fall through a casual baseball league expressed interest in playing fantasy baseball this season. Most of us had never played it or hadn’t played in years—my first and only time was sophomore year of high school. It turns out that making and running a league with good-natured people and without money on the line is straightforward and made even easier with a smartphone.

I’m the commissioner, and I run the league on ESPN. We have a straightforward virtual draft. There’s no lack of depth with only eight teams and 17 roster spots each.

Since I already follow baseball, I do understand what some people say about other fantasy sports (or sports betting) about having a reason to watch a game I otherwise wouldn’t. While that’s not true in general for me—I haven’t watched any March Madness, for example, despite having a bracket—I’ll have plenty of reason to tune into some additional baseball games during the day or if my preferred Twins or Giants have an off-day. I’m excited to have a small diversion and something to chat about with really nice people who love baseball, too.

As of Opening Day, here’s my team, You’re Killing Me Smalls.

Hitters

C: Will Smith (LAD)

1B: Matt Olson (ATL)

2B: Ozzie Albies (ATL)

3B: Manny Machado (SD)

SS: Elly De La Cruz (CIN)

OF: Aaron Judge (NYY)

OF: Christian Yelich (MIL)

OF: Brandon Nimm (NYM)

UTIL: Xander Bogaerts (SD)

UTIL: Maikel Garcia (KC)

Pitchers

SP: Dylan Cease (SD)

SP: Cole Ragans (KC)

SP: Logan Webb (SF)

RP: Felix Bautista (BAL)

RP: Jhoan Duran (MIN)

Bench

Joe Ryan, SP (MIN)

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Coding with Baseball

Last month, I finished going through Nathan Braun’s Coding with Baseball, a book I purchased around four years ago. If you’re at all interested in baseball statistics and want to build a quick foundation for exploring them, I highly recommend the book. It doesn’t hold your hand—it’s not a reference text, and you’ll need documentation for pandas, seaborn, and scikitlearn for the exercises—but it’s an excellent, concise overview that teaches exactly what you need with a straightforward style and relevant examples. It encouraged me to set up the Lahman Baseball Database on my computer and led me down a few rabbit holes, one of which I’ll explain here.

Continue reading “Coding with Baseball”