If you’re here from the Glee Club Scavenger Hunt, you really want to follow this link
After Santana blew away the White Sox with a one-hitter yesterday, manager Ozzie Guillen came up with the following tactic to handle Santana for next time:

I’m going to call my mom in Venezuela to come here and cook for him. We’ll poison him. If he eats what my mom cooks, he will be in trouble to pitch the next day.

I guess that counts as a strategy. (I should mention that the article I read stressed that he was joking… just in case anyone actually believes that Guillen would stoop so low.)
In other news, I fared pretty well in my first week of fantasy baseball, dominating the pitching stats and holding my own in the offensive categories — and this with a good chunk of my players losing a game due to snow (Twins, Tigers, and White Sox). Unfortunately, looking at how the Twins are doing tonight, I don’t expect the same for this week. Who is Sidney Ponson and who said he could pitch today? Clearly not a good idea…

Ahhh, like the first day of spring, it’s finally here — opening day. (Okay, technically it was yesterday, but as I am neither a Mets nor a Cardinals fan, it was really today.) I caught the very end of the Tigers loss to the Blue Jays, and noted that ESPN was covering the Red Sox-Royals game so I changed the channel quickly expecting to rekindle my love affair with the Sox after last year’s end of season break. But, uh, Curt? While it’s awesome that you have a blog now, you’re not going to win me back by losing 7-1 to the Royals. It was so disappointing that I actually left after the fourth inning to go to the gym and work out. And I never work out.
But it’s okay, because those games were just warm ups anyway. At 7:10 pm was the nationally televised game featuring the reigning AL Cy Young, MVP, and batting champ and I would be plopped on my futon watching it. Santana came out of the gate firing rockets, giving me a good feeling about how the game might go. Joe Mauer, the starting catcher of my fantasy league, started completely in character by getting a hit in the middle of an inning in which none of the other Twins did anything interesting. Oh, Joe, I love you and you earned me two points tonight, but I really hope you get hits in bigger innings soon.
Then in the second, my starting first baseman, the reigning MVP, came up to the plate. I looked at the TV and, just because I felt like it, I said, “Just jack one out, Justin”… and then he did, on his first pitch of the season. Four points for me — one for the hit, one for the RBI, one for the run, and one for the homer. I jumped up and let out a squeal, realized I was alone in my room with no one to celebrate with, and picked up the phone to call my dad. And then, not two minutes later, while I was on the phone explaining how I had called Morneau’s shot, Torii Hunter decided to remind us that he had 30 homeruns last season too and he jacked his first pitch over the right field wall. He’s not on my fantasy team, but I didn’t particularly care at that moment.
Then came a dilemma: Monday is trivia night at our local watering hole and people wanted me to go. I looked at the game, I looked at them. I watched Santana strike out Melvin Mora to end the third and decided that with Johan on the mound and the Twins up by 2, the game was well in hand — and that I would try to convince the bar to tune to ESPN2.
Upon arriving at the bar, I realized that I wasn’t going to get my television choice in the main room… something about some basketball game. But as luck would have it, we went to check out the non-smoking back to find it empty with the TV remote just sitting unattended at one of the tables. I flipped to the game to find that the Orioles had gone ahead 3-2. I mildly panicked, but relaxed when I realized that the Twins had the bases loaded with only one out. They only scored one run that inning, but they picked up three more in the next (and three more points for me) and never looked back, eventually winning 7-4. In the fantasy league, I picked up 11 points from this game alone, 7 of them from Morneau.
No one else ever came to sit in the back room, so the waiter let us keep the remote and I was able to finish the game while also spouting out the occassional trivia factoid. Most popular first name in the world? Mohammad. Most homeruns for the Detroit Tigers in 2006? Brandon Inge. Best team in the American League Central? Minnesota Twins.
Okay, that last one wasn’t actually question — but that’s the right answer.

I’ve managed to join a fantasy baseball league this year, with none other than Joe “I’m on it” Graham as commissioner. The draft was this evening. I think I screwed myself slightly by grabbing Morneau and Mauer first when I perhaps could have grabbed some bigger bats, but really… the AL MVP and AL Batting Champ is not a bad haul. (AL Cy Young winner Johan Santana was taken before my first pick came up.) I think my big steal of the evening was Boof Bonser. They may mock me now, but when he has 15+ wins at the end of the season we’ll see who’s laughing.
And yes, I drafted non-Twins players too.
Without further ado, here’s my team, for better or for worse…

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With the power of Netflix, I’ve recently watched the entire 18 hours (plus bonus features) of Ken Burns’s* epic miniseries on the sport I love so well. Made in 1994, just before the strike that caused most of the country to re-evaluate its love affair with the game, it’s a beautiful film, full of trivia nuggets (Merkle’s Boner, anyone?) and interviews with legends now passed like Buck O’Neil, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle.
A few of the other reviews on Netflix complained about the New York/Boston focus, and I’d have to agree. The general response has been that the film is at it’s strongest covering the earlier years, when Boston and New York were the dominant cities with five teams between them. The film loses its way a little in the later years, partly because baseball as a sport has meant less to the country in the later half of the century. So, I can forgive barely mentioning the Twins until the coverage of the 1991 World Series because they weren’t around until 1961 — but it’s not like the Washington Senators got much coverage either, save for Walter Johnson. (Although really… no mention of Harmon Killebrew or Rod Carew? That’s just not right.) And as for teams I don’t care as much about, I think I could probably count on one hand the number of times the Cleveland Indians were mentioned and they’ve been around since the beginning.
That being said, for covering 100+ years of history, the documentary does a good job of carrying some semblance of a narrative, leaning heavily on the role racism has played in the game. In the “Making of…” documentary (a documentary about a documentary!), Burns says that Baseball is almost a sequel to his earlier work, which I was forced to watch all of in fifth grade, The Civil War. Given that, it makes perfect sense that the “hero” of the film is Jackie Robinson. He was using the history of baseball to further tell the history of America, something he also did later in his other epic mini-series, Jazz. For him, racism has been a central tenet for much of American culture, and I can’t say that I disagree with him.
Although, even I have to admit that Burns tends to over emphasize what is, at it’s core, just a game. But the florid prose he uses to describe the game puts me in just the right mood to ramp up for the upcoming season, despite overblown salaries, shady deals about television coverage, and possibly the worst commissioner we’ve had in a long time, if not ever. And so, I leave you with what is both the introduction and conclusion to the film…

It is played everywhere. In parks and playgrounds and prison yards. In back alleys and farmers’ fields. By small children and old men. Raw amateurs and millionaire professionals. It is a leisurely game that demands blinding speed. The only game in which the defense has the ball. It follows the seasons, beginning each year with the fond expectancy of springtime, and ending with the hard facts of autumn. It is a haunted game, in which every player is measured against the ghosts of all who have gone before. Most of all, it is about time and timelessness. Speed and grace. Failure and loss. Imperishable hope. And coming home.

* — Someone tell me the correct way to make Burns possessive… is it Burns’ or Burns’s?

Photo Mosaic of 5th Third Field in Toledo — Click to see details

I recently came across a program called Andrea Mosaic which allows you to make photo mosaics out of your own photo collection. After messing around with the pictures I happen to have on my laptop, I came up with a pretty cool photo mosaic of 5th Third Field in Toledo (from my minor league excursion last July) which is now my current desktop background. I set it up to use only baseball related photos, which includes ballgames I’ve been to, pictures from Cooperstown, and action shots from the batting cages we went to during Jenn’s bachelorette party. If you’ve been to a ball game with me in the past two years, chances are you’re in there somewhere. Overall, I’m pretty impressed with it — for comparison, the original image is here. I can’t explain why it likes the Red Sox logo so much, but refuses to use the Twins logo at all — I had both in the collection, I swear.

A few warnings if you want to try it yourself… you need a fairly large image collection if you want to make a good mosaic (or in some cases, if you want the algorithm to find an appropriate set of images at all). You can help that a little by allowing it to rotate, flip, and “alter” the images (which I think it does by changing the brightness and/or tint) and there’s also a neat extension which allows you to use frames from .avi files. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t clarify which codec and it’s clearly not all of them since it wouldn’t let me use a video Amrys took of Fenway.) It’s also a huge memory and CPU hog, and can take 20 minutes or more to complete, so don’t expect to multi-task too much while you’re playing around. But it’s a fun tool to waste time with.