Jackie Robinson In 3-D

With perhaps days/hours to go before the baby, I’m doing a big push on Jackie Robinson to see how far I can get before my life changes so much.  I had a big day in the shop yesterday and took these stereo photos.

Together, they can be viewed in 3-D.  If you were one of those who could left your eyes relax and see those old 3-D, computer-generated drawings, then you SHOULD be able to do this the same way.  I can do it.  But it takes a few moments to get it.

The trick, for me, is to get far enough away from the two photos, so that they are a little smaller than a postcard, held at arms length.  Then you stare, allowing your eyes to relax and not truly focus.  When your eyes are relaxed correctly, you should see double–that’s 4 images.  Keep trying different pressures on your focus until the two center photos become 1 photo and it will be 3-D.  It’s eerie.  When you get it, you will KNOW, so if you are wondering, then you don’t have it.  Remember: Try and make the middle two images merge into one, so that overall, there are 3 photos, and only concentrate on that middle photo–that’s the one that will become 3-dimensional.

How did I take this photo?  With a 3-D camera?  Nahh, with my own camera.  Since I’m working with a tripod, and nothing is in motion, the time lapse between photo1 and photo2 can be ignored.  You couldn’t do this trick with live action, because p1 and p2 would not match.  But in the studio, you just take one photo and then move the tripod 80mm to the right and take another one.  80mm is about the distance between people’s eyes.  The “interpupillary distance”.  Actually, in the population, it’s much smaller for most and is smaller for women and bigger for some ethnic groups.  It runs between 65 and 83 mm.  At 25.4 mm per inch, you do the inch-math.

With the two photos of EXATLY the same thing and yet from two slight different (80mm apart) vantage points, they are about what your brain takes in and processes into one, 3-D image.  The slightly different perspective means that the right eye sees a little further around Jackie’s left side, than the left eye can see.  That info is used by your wonderful brain to give you all sorts of depth and distance information.  Imagine trying to golf without it!  “How far to the pin?”  “Where’s the 150 yd marker?”

And for you Liberals out there, remember, the beauty of the eye and the brain and the depth is pure chance–we’re talking NO INTELLIGENT DESIGN, right?  Don’t even think those words in a public school.

Before you go thinking I’m some kind of techy person, realize that 3-D cameras and looking at “stereo-images” like we are here, originated at about the time of the Civil War.  Stereo view photos were all the rage from about 1870 to 1910.  They looked like this:

They were viewed in a viewer that looked like this:

The slides were available as canned, commercially produced photos of current events and famous places and landmarks.  Think GAF-viewmaster from the 1970’s:

I’m not sure why they fell out of favor.  Perhaps WWI, which destroyed so much of what good was happening in the world around 1914.

Anyway, they did commercially produce stereo cameras for the home-gamer and here is one:

All you need is the ability to take TWO images simultaneously, one interpupillary distance apart.  Now if you search for these things, you will only find, I believe, film cameras from yesteryear.  There doesn’t seem to be any digital stereo cameras available.  There are a couple of guys who have hacked together two digital cameras, but the hack is never simple and the mounting and alignment is never easy.  Both lenses have to point at the same focal point out in space, or the pictures will look hokey–like mine!

What I want to know is why doesn’t SOMEone produce a decent digital stereo camera?  WHY?  With PC’s bringing down photography prices and giving us all sorts of exotic ways to display them, it’s a perfect marriage!  I have searched, but not recently, so it’s possible that there is something out there now.  If anyone knows of a product, comment in please.

For Jackie fans, Jackie may be getting his first paint today on the lower legs and shoes and pants.  It’s always the single biggest, quickest change in the statue and for a medium that goes crawling by in the hundreds of hours, this is a welcome thing.

Your crazy old uncle

Heard yesterday that Tommy LaSorda was going off about the steroid guys and how they should be banned for life and their records expunged from the book and so on and I thought to myself, “…when does LaSorda cross that line and just become your crazy old uncle who everybody just kind of laughs off, you know?  Like, ooh, that’s just Uncle Blabby–don’t really pay attention to him, he’s crazy as batpoop…”

Has he crossed that line already?

Although, to be fair, he is outspoken about things that are taboo.  Take this snip of a Hannity interview:

HANNITY: One time you said about Darryl Strawberry, it’s a character flaw because he was using drugs.

LASORDA: Absolutely. Anybody that takes drug and they try to pass it off as a sickness, that is a lie. They take drugs of their own free will, put it in their body of their own free will, realizing that: No. 1, it’s against the law, No. 2, it’s harmful to their body and No. 3, all it will do is lead you down the path of destruction.

Or these gems from a Pepperdine speech:  “There are three types of people in this world,” Lasorda said. “The person that makes it happen, the person that watches it happen and the person that wonders what’s happening.

“I hope that by talking to you today, you will all become the people that want to make it happen, or else it was a waste of time for me to battle the last hours of traffic to see you today.”

“I don’t know why kids take drugs,” he said. “They don’t make you smarter or prettier. Darryl Strawberry could have been one of the best players ever in this game, but he let drugs take over his life.”

Yankees 2009 Team Salary Payroll

Here are the MLB team salaries going back to 1993.  Figures are from USA Today.  Notice where the Yankees are each year and by how much.  It’s breathtaking:

Play this game

My wife and I play this game.  We turn on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and try to guess which character will utter the first “veddy”.

“Veddy” is the way an affected Hollywood actor/actress, will pronounce the word “Very” in the 1930’s and 1940’s and even into the 1950’s.

You know you’re going to hear the veddy, it’s just a question of when and who.  The easiest choice is to take any older male character, but it isn’t always that simple.  Try it.  You’ll see.

***

WordPress has changed the site and they’ve jam packed so many client side features in that there is too much processing for the client side machine now.  The result? When you type, there is a discernable, little lag between striking the key and seeing the character.  Veddy, veddy annoying, WordPress.

***

New York Post.

Mike Vaccaro, Jay Greenburg and Joel Sherman.

Are there any more little-boy-Yankee-rooters than these three CLOWNS, anywhere?  ANYWHERE?!

If you are a Mets fan: why WHY WHY would you EVER buy the New York Post?  It couldn’t be worse if Mike Francesa himself wrote every Met-bashing, Yankee-gloryfying word.

Friday, I think it was, I had to read that the Mets had better start spending like the Piggy Yankees, or be forced to be second-rate; a joke.

Memo to the Yankee-fans-at-the-Post-disguised-as-writers: We don’t WANT to be ANYTHING like the FILTHY, PIGGY Yankees!

We LIKE being second bananas–that’s what we are!  We’re the Amazins.  We **** and we love it anyway!  We don’t have to win to have a good time out at the *****n game!  We don’t want to pay 900 dollars per beer to stomp on each and every team that comes to town–THAT’S BORING!  That ain’t what it’s about you insecure, bullying Yankee fans~  Go away with your money and your bottomless insecurity!

What?  You say the Wilpons lost a few hundred million in a ponzi scheme?  hahaha….what would Casey say?  “…Just the Amazin’ Mets!”

pztztzttzttztzt…

****

You know, I’m 42 years old and I don’t think I’ve ever heard another human being pronounce the word “veddy”, in my life, for real, that is, not in a dopey movie.

****

TCM ran Bogart in The Big Sleep on Xmas night and then The Maltese Falcon.  The scene where Bogey goes into the book store and convinces the girl to close the shop, lose the glasses, let her hair down and drink raw Rye Whiskey out of paper cups, is perhaps the silliest, funniest scene in any good movie, ever.

And the smoking they do in these old movies.  Wow.  Bogey goes through like a carton of Lucky’s in The Big Sleep.  Smoke up Humphry.

Quote of the century from Bogart: “My, my, my, so many guns around town and so few brains…”

A Jackie Robinson tree grows in Brooklyn

And this is what we did with the tree:  (Sorry about the load times for those with slower connections).

A photo of the early going: just get that head shape down and begin to draw on the nose location and start to dig down and define it.  Until the nose is perfect, and there’s enough meat to do the other stuff in the right places, nothing else matters.

Everything looks too big and too thick because it IS!  But you have to start defining and establishing the features.  Remember, it’s take-away, so you always err on the side of BIGGER.

Somewhere around here I started to “recognize” “The Man” and not just “A Man”.  It’s a big moment.

Never touch the ears until the very end.  Last.  Because I said so.

Still a long, long way to go from here.  I have 3 other photos still in the camera, that are beyond this point.  The whole head came down and narrowed in size 10% at least.  The hat was re-worked to lost about 30% of its volume.  The ears, etc.  Come back and I’ll have the newer photos in here.  Merry Christmas!

How to argue with Yankee fans

[sigh] I have to go over this one more time, because I just heard it again.  I was lamenting the Yankees (and to a MUCH lesser extent the Mets) just spending ridiculous amounts of cash and rendering MLB a joke on a lot of levels.  Anyone who reads The Pinetar Rag is well aware of this, and probably tired of it too.

So a guy I know accuses me of being “Socialist” because I complain about the bigger market teams out spending the small market teams by 10-1 at times.

Here’s the correction:  “Socialism” is the situation when GOVERNMENTS heavily tax their population under the guise of providing goods and services that would otherwise be provided by the private sector.  So instead of choosing the item and paying for it out of your pocket, the government takes the money out of your pocket, in the form of taxes, and provides their government version of the service.  You no longer make the choice–the politician and the voters who stamp it, make that decision for you.  Once it’s made, you have no other options.

Now in baseball, it’s a professional sports league.  The league is holding out to the public, the concept that their contests will be fair contests among the teams.  If the contests were not viewed as “fair”, by the paying public, they would not pay money to see them–would not waste their time.  This is the concept behind the anti-gambling stance of Major League Baseball; to keep the game’s on-the-field-fairness-and-integrity sacrosanct, because everyone’s lively hood rests on that cornerstone.  A guy mixed up in gambling might be willing to “sell” games, as Hal Chase of the Yankees did with abandon in the 19-oughts and teens.

When I advocate that the league do something (salary cap) to prevent the Yankees from just buying up players and spending over 200 million while the lesser clubs have to get by on 30, 40 and 50 million, I advocate it because I don’t think the on-field contests are fair anymore.  How can they be?  I think the integrity of the game is compromised when the Yankees can do what they have been doing with all that money.  The Yankees’ spending is antithetical to fair contests.  It SHOULD be viewed with great alarm, but somehow, it isn’t.

The person who called me “Socialist” for wanting to cap or curb the kind of spending the Yankees do, is mixing up the contexts.  I don’t want the government to steal my freedom (taxes) and force me to take or leave their sub-par “services” whether I like it or not–with no “opt-out”, like with Social Security.  I’m not a Socialist.  That’s governments, got it?

But when I invest my time in a baseball game, I want some assurances that the deck isn’t just RIGGED with CASH, like it is now!  I want the league to address it themselves so I don’t have to think about it; so I can just enjoy the game.

The league is an artificial contrivance; a closed system.  By limiting the Yankees’ cash-sledgehammer, they are not being “Socialist”, they are actually delivering the product that they promised me; a fair product.

Anyone with a modicum of intelligence can look at a demographic map of the USA and see plainly, that all metro areas are not created equal, and thus, teams in those areas are not on equal footing with regard to generating cash!

Kansas City has 1.9 million souls.   Click here to bring up numbers in a new window

NY/NJ/CT metro area has about 19 million.

Only an idiot would set up a system where these two areas are considered “equal” in terms of cash generation.  You’re supposed to have a fair contest on the field but you are going to ignore these numbers?  My goodness.

So don’t advertise a “fair” fight on the field, when anyone who thinks about it knows it isn’t that way.

By this time in the fact-pattern, (usually from Yankee fans) I hear the talking points recited from memory, as if the Steinbrenners sent out a memo from their war-room, deep in the bowels (or the vault) of Yankee Stadium.  I’ll address the more common ones:

(1)  Money isn’t everything: look at the [names most recent high spending team that didn't win]

It doesn’t invalidate the Yankees’, cash-sledgehammer model if some other team wastes a lot money.  My goodness; anyone can blow through money!  Just because a fool squanders his money doesn’t decrease the VALUE of money, and the mountains it can move, for everyone else!  All it does is prove that one team and its management, was foolish that particular season, and no more.

The thought process is because the 1997 Orioles blew a ton of money, the Yankees can spend 100% more than the league mean, every year, and no one is supposed to notice?

Guess what?  We noticed.  The Orioles were stupid, but we’re not!

(2) The Yankees pay lots of luxury tax, and the “cheap” owners just pocket it

They do pay this but it is a pittance.  This money can not lift a Pittsburgh, KC or Cincinnati out of where they are: in small cash markets.  What it amounts to, in my opinion, is a line item on the MLB (and Yankees’) Public Relations Income Statement.  It is MLB’s way of fooling it’s customers (remember the fans?) into thinking, “see, we have addressed the spending disparity in our sport).”

No you haven’t!  Not even close! Since this thing went into action in 2003, the Yankees have paid out about 20 million per year.  During that same time, they outspent the league by an average of about 110 million PER YEAR!  So, even if you gave the FULL Yankee luxury tax to ONE average team spending 90 million dollars, the Yankees would STILL have outspent them by a whopping 90 million dollars, or, about DOUBLE.

Does that sound like they addressed it to you?  Me neither.  I’m not buying this.  But be fair, it’s wonderful PR, because many, many fans buy in 100% to this nonsense that the system is somehow fair.  And the media aids and abets the deceit, as they usually do in cases such as this.

(3) Owners like Pollad of Minnesota are billionaires who could easily write some checks and keep up with the Yankees.

This is my favorite because of it is the most “Candyland” of them all.  The premise is, “…the guy’s rich, so what if his team is in a small market, if he wants to compete with the Yankees, he can write checks out of his personal bank account!”

Listen closely to what’s being said. The owner, because others feel he “has the money”, should just DONATE his own PERSONAL money to his business, to keep up with the Yankees, otherwise, he is, somehow, not a “sport”.   This concept could be the height of Yankee-fans’-arrogance and stupidity.  For the honor of spending like a lunatic Steinbrenner, owner-X should PAY.  Pay for it himself.  Even if his business LOSES money in the process.

They want to tell another man how to run his business, and, basically, that he should run his business AT A LOSS, so that the Yankees and their fans don’t have to feel self-conscious about out spending the league by over a 100 million dollars every year!  I guess the Kool-Aid is: It’s ok that we spend like pigs because Pollad has untouched money in the bank.  [shaking my head] My goodness…

(4) The Yankees won with home grown guys like Bernie and Jeter and Posada.  It wasn’t money!

Because George Steinbrenner was banned from baseball and couldn’t trade them all away (he tried very hard to dump Bernie–read “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty” by Buster Olney), they DID have a home-grown nucleus, I’ll grant you.

But why did they win 4 titles in 5 years?  MONEY.  They payroll was the highest in baseball EVERY ONE of those championship years.  And the nucleus was young and not making the obscene money yet, so SOMEONE must have been paid to come in and help, and they were.  Mostly the big ticket pitchers.  The Key’s and Cone’s and Clemen’s and so forth.  So while yes, there were home-grown guys on the roster, don’t be fooled: the dynasty was resting on cash; lots of it.  Cash that towns like KC and Pittsburgh and Cincinnati don’t have access to.  Make no mistake.

(5) See?  Small market teams CAN win. [referring to 2003 Marlins]

Yes, it’s true, in 2003 the 150 million dollar Yankees lost to the 49 million dollar Marlins.  It can happen.  That’s because home field in baseball is only a 4% edge and the biggest edge you’re ever likely to see in the post-season is only about 65%, which means that 35 times out of 100, the lousy team will beat the juggernaut in a series.

But let’s examine what’s really behind this talking point.  Yankee fans throw this one out there as if to say, “sure we spend a lot, but you don’t have to spend to win…”  This is supposed to deflect attention from their massive cash outlays each year.

But there are 30 teams in MLB.  And the mean payroll in 2007 was 80 million. [click to see numbers] So let’s call 10 of them, the bottom third, truly “small market”.

Here are the last 10 world series winners:

2008 Phillies, 2007 Red Sox, 2006 Cardinals, 2005 White Sox, 2004 Red Sox, 2003 Marlins, 2002 Angles, 2001 DBacks, 2000 Yankees, 1999 Yankees

I can really only call the Marlins truly, “small market”.  So let’s double it and say that twice every 10 years, a small market team scales the heights.  So you might be tempted to think that, “…sure, about every 5 years, we have a puncher’s chance to run-out in the postseason”.

But not so fast!  There are 10 small market “trials” EVERY season!  That’s 10, different small market teams placing their small bets and spinning the wheel every year!  And out of all 10, only ONE of THEM scales the heights every 5 years or so.  But if you are one particular small market team, then you might have to wait longer.  You might have to wait 10 times 5 years = 50 years for your number to come up.  That’s the difference between referring to the population, and a given team IN the population.  Neat trick there, Yankee fans, but we ain’t buying it.  Being a fan in a small market stinks.  We watch our good players hit arbitration and then end up on the Yankees and coming back into town to kick the snot out of us.

Sure PNC park is the nicest place on Earth to watch a ballgame, but don’t blow the Yankee smoke up our bippies.  Please. –Fog

Jackie Robinson statue

Here is the raw 14″x11″x11″ block of basswood glued up and ready to be transformed into Jack Roosevelt Robinson’s head.  We’re already a few hours past this point in reality.  The rough out went faster than ever, thanks to new tools I purchased but the detail work is crawling.  Just crawling.  I’m having the “yips” about getting into the actual do-or-else stuff.  I haven’t done this kind of work in a year now and I’m low on confidenct and have found that when I get home from work and only have a few hours to play with, that I fritter away that time as a way to avoid getting into it.

This happens in the sculpting business.  You have to punch through, even if it means sitting there for hours and not doing much more than looking at photos and being scared to remove wood.  At some point, you will spot “easy” wood to remove and by doing that, you will be drawn in and eventually, you will get into the “zone”.

“The zone” is that hackneyed phrase that is used mostly in sports and sometimes in music.  It can be applied to any task, in my opinion.  It is, to me, that point where your brain stops processing “noise”.  Noise is anything not central to the task.  Once you stop processing noise (tired, time to do something else, worrying about x, hungry, what’s on tv), you get focused on the task or piece and instead of working on it with really only partial attention, you bring more of your abilities to bear on the task.  This feeds a loop in that, once this happens, results will quickly flow; results at a much faster rate than you are lately accustomed to.  Once that happens, you are going to be excited by the progress and that feeds your attention lock and stengthens it, leading to more and more positive results as measured against time.

Once you see the effect of this, the things that were creeping into your thoughts and distracting you begin to melt away.  You are less and less interested in them.  It gets to the point where even if you work very late and might ordinarialy be concerned that you will be tired for work the next day, in this case, you won’t care.  You will lose most of your concer with, and thoughts about, time.  You know you’re in the sweet spot and are enjoying that and thinking about time will only hinder you, so out it goes.  Now, you’re in “The Zone”.  You get a lot done.  You’re excited about it.  Your confidence soars and as a result, sticky problems are toppling one after the other, as you plow through the project.  It’s a great feeling.  It’s an energizing feeling.  It can spill over into other areas of your life.

Trouble is, getting in there the first time.

Jackie Robinson’s Million Dollar Legs

Early Robinson.  And clean for the most part.  Tonight, he was under piles of sawdust as the process of finding legs inside those wood blocks continues.  As you can guess from the position of the legs, this piece is going to be more of a pose, than an in-action.  Many hours of thought over a long period of time went into this decision and I could lay it out for you in detail if you want to read on.

Robinson’s batting pose is very “wooden”, for lack of a better term.  It looks posed.  It doesn’t look all that natural or fluid.  In short, it looks wooden.  And what I do is try to make wood look like people.  So a person who looks wooden to begin with?  No way.  Bad pose.

The other pose that folks associate with Jack Roosevelt, is running the bases.  Either the arms-akimbo-stopping-short-down-the-3rd-base-line-to-mess-with-the-pitcher, or, the slide into home on the steal of home.

Another problem with the “running” pose, is that to be truly running, you are leaving the ground each time you push off of either leg; that’s the definition of it.  So the statue wouldn’t have any way to attach to the ground unless you contrived it to be at the point of landing on the lead leg and that leads to the problems that the center of mass is then WAY off the point of attachment to the ground (base).  Technically, it’s murder and the look might be more awkward than effective.

These are, no doubt, iconic Robinson photos and/or poses.  But a statue that depicts baseruning, unless done just exactly correctly (and maybe not even then), might look very strange.  It’s too big of a gamble on a piece that may take half a thousand hours or more.

The other objection I have to the baserunning angle is that it slights the man, somewhat.  It’s as if you are saying, “this guy is in the Hall of Fame because he was fast”.  No.  That’s not right.  He is in the Hall of Fame for being a great all-around player.  He played gold glove type defense at several different positions, including first, where he was not accustomed to playing his first year.  He ran well, true, but he also hit something like .306 for his career.  And he was on the Dodger pennant winners in 1947, 1949, 1952, 1953, 1955, and 1956.  In 1950, the Dodgers lost on the last day of the season to the Phillies.  On the last day of the 1951 season, Robinson’s homer in the last game, clinched a tie with the Giants, requiring a 3-game playoff to break the tie.  You’ve heard of that playoff?  It went 3 games and it seems, The Giants Win the Pennant.The Giants Win the Pennant.The Giants Win the Pennant…etc.

He was a great all around player is my point.  He should not be cordoned off into the “speed” wing of the Hall of Fame.  He makes it easily in any era and on his complete game.  That is why, I have chosen to depict him at ease (somewhat of an accomplishment in itself, for this man, and many others), holding the bat on his shoulder and looking up as if to pose deliberately for a camera.  On his face, a little look of satisfaction; a look that only a veteran big-leaguer can have; not so much a look of professional competency, but more like professional pride.

So, no batting stance and no baserunning hijinks.  A deliberate pose.

To make up for the lack of action on this one, I am considering a radical pose for the next piece with one thin, solitary attachment point to the ground.  The idea that this extreme delivery photo may be posed for photographers is being researched currently.

Jack Roosevelt Robinson is underway

Here is the beginning of the life-size Jackie Robinson statue.  When looking at this photo, is there any question that it is 100% wood?

This statue is going to be my meisterwerk; better than my DiMaggio; better than the last Babe Ruth.  I’m feeling great at the controls and confidence is high.  I’ve gathered a surprising amount of Robby photos for the push on the head; enough so that I won’t have to go up to the library at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, to get photos.  That’s expensive.

Here’s what I managed to gather up:

The key is to have as many as you can with good detail of the head and from all possible angles.  You want just below and just above level.  Three quarter and profile and three quarter from behind.  Anything that will get you to be able to work out the 3-dimensional aspect of the head.  It has to look right from 360 degrees, not just from the front.  You’re taking the 2-D photo and trying to guess at what the 3-D object looks like.  The 2-D photo contains some 3-D information, but only around the edges.  If you had a series of 2-D photos at intervals of, oooh, say, every 4 degrees, you’d have all the info needed to do 3-D.

Have I thought of writing a computer program to do this stuff?  You betcha.  Will it help me now for Jack?  Nope.  But this is where being a sculptor is really meaningful.  This is where you make the piece alive or not–just a piece of wood (or pieces, as the case is).  All the marbles.  The challenge.

For this piece, I’ve decided to do a sort of time-lapse, so you can see it come together.  I think that might be fun.  The sawdust is not fun.  More as events warrant. –Fog

You Gotta Look Sharp

Here’s a few articles on pitch tipping, a hot topic around here lately. Here’s a quote from one of them:

Lefthander Andy Pettitte was an integral part of the Yankees rotation in 2001, posting a 15-10 record with an ERA of 3.99. But Pettitte got bombed against Arizona in the World Series, going 0-2 with a 10.00 ERA. In nine innings, Pettitte gave up 12 hits and 10 runs.

“He was tipping,” Torre said. “We knew [Arizona] had picked up on something, but when we looked at our video, we weren’t seeing it. We realized later it was because he was tipping in the early part of his windup, and our guys were only filming his delivery. We changed the way we did our video after that.”

Click to launch the original article in a new window

I love it. I mean, here’s genius Joe Torre basically admitting, “…yea, we messed up and lost the World Series”. I’ve always felt that this has to be the biggest baseball story ever NOT written. And to me, it just reeks of the media’s pro-Yankee bias. The writers are all a bunch of little boys who do not want to contemplate, even for a minute, that their “heroes” Torre and Pettite, are to blame for losing the Yankees another, nauseating World Series ring.

Other mere mortals would have been run out of the country. Torre? Stottlemyre? They are guilty of malfeasance in this case and yet you never read a word about it, didja? Nope. Everyone clams up and talks about what a cheap little hit Gonzalez got off of Mariano (another who can do no wrong despite blowing 3 postseasons: ‘97 Alomar HR, ‘01 Throwing ball into CF in G7, ‘04 getting ball with lead over Sox), but no one mentions the Yankees’ own part in the story.

And in baseball terms, it should be a HUGE story. But it isn’t. Why? For generations, you could read about the A’s having the Giants’ signs in the 1911 World Series, and also stories about whether the 1911 World Series was cooked, because gamblers got to the Giants. I think the Giants were probably dirty back then. McGraw was not above it. He had a man take money to the umps before the famous 1908 Merkle-replay game. And the A’s certainly were not above it as they threw the 1914 series to a seriously inferior “Miracle” Boston Braves team. After that double cross, Connie Mack KNEW he had a dirty team, but he didn’t know which ones, so he sold it all off. People still erroneously blame Mack for the fire sale, but he had no choice; he had dirty players and he couldn’t say for sure exactly who it was. And look at Eddie Collins: He was on BOTH of the dirtiest clubs in history: The 1914 A’s and the 1919 White Sox–and yet he was considered to be beyond reproach. Amazing. It must have been mighty frustrating to be on the level and see that going on around you in the days when, remember, the difference between the winners’ and losers’ share, was a journeyman’s yearly salary.

Anyway, my point was pitch-tipping and why wasn’t it getting more play in NY in 2001? But we all know why, don’t we? Suuure.

And some will argue (and do quite convincingly) that it isn’t such a great advantage as you might think. But tell that to the 2001 Dbacks. It IS a big deal. It does cost you ballgames. Sure, not everyone wants the info, but that doesn’t mean you don’t try.  When teams steal signs from the scoreboard (very common throughout baseball history), typically, one in three or four, does NOT want the info.  They feel it does more harm than good.

And not everyone is immune to tipping.  In fact, some pretty good twirlers tipped. Koufax tipped everything out of the stretch for his entire career. It didn’t matter. Bunning tipped during his perfect game no less! It didn’t matter. Pedro and Randy and Schilling have all tipped or been suspected tippers, at one time or another in there HOF careers. It happens.

It happens because throwing a pitch is a physical act and you may very well do things differently for different pitches and it isn’t just about the old high school pitcher, “…wrapping the curve ball”. No, not at the top level. Any wrappers have long since had a high school coach yell that out of them (High school coaches can yell, yes?). No, it’s a glance into a glove. It’s a finger waggle outside the glove. It’s the glove open or closed or wiggling or held high or held low or looping in the stretch or it’s a breath or facial tick or something that is consistent but not overt, and you don’t even know you are doing it.

I think it’s great fun to try and call pitches but the TV coverage is so lousy that you don’t get a chance. The director cuts to a closeup of the runner, the batter, the pitcher, the manager. It’s stupid. I want to see the shot from CF, over the pitcher’s shoulder, EVERY time. I want to see the sign put down and the location, and then see the catcher move to the location and set the target, and most of all, I want to see the pitcher’s full regimen each time. But the directors in the truck don’t get that and they never will.

How would I cover a ballgame?  First off, the camera would never be anywhere except over the pitcher’s shoulder.  Only VERY noteworthy things would trump that continuous shot.  I owe that to the intelligent baseball fans watching.  And almost NO crowd shots, please.  Never.  They aren’t the story.

As the batter is walking up to hit on each at-bat, the announcer would have to review that last AB’s pitch selection.  If there is none, then the “book” on that batter, from that pitcher should be reviewed.  You want to get fancy and show those montage shots of all the pitches?  Now’s the time.  But I’d be satisfied with a verbal, “…here’s Joe Blow, Webb started him with the sinker away last time and then sinker in and then slider away.  Let’s see…”

That’s it!  That’s what I want.  Why is that so hard?

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