The Ethics of Pitching Jesus High and Tight

I don't run into much baseball fiction on the web, but today Baseball Analysts has posted a short story by Will Carroll. It's not bad.

Irony VS. Joe Morgan, Round N: In an improbable development, Joe's failings are overshadowed by the clumsy attack of an ill-wisher

Joe Morgan has been slagged mercilessly and often on baseball blogs (particularly by Mike Carminati and Aaron Gleeman) for his vehement diatribes against the book Moneyball (which, for a while, Morgan seems to have believed was written by Oakland GM Billy Beane). The slagging now has moved beyond blogs to the San Francisco Weekly.

I'm no fan of Joe Morgan the broadcaster, but I see that article as unfair and flawed. Unfair in that it's a maliciously childish personal attack on Morgan. Flawed in that it succumbs to a thing for which it pokes Morgan with a stick (it's not even a particularly sharp stick). For instance:

Even as front offices scramble to hire just about anyone who can run a statistical regression, at least two books, one by Cardinals manager Tony La Russa, have been written more or less as responses to Moneyball...

...

"You know," Joe begins to say, as a makeup brush is dabbed along his forehead, "why don't you read the --" He catches himself. I'm pretty sure he's going to plug Tony La Russa's book.

The book the writer is referring to, Three Nights in August, is about the St. Louis Cardinals but it was written by Buzz Bissinger, not by Tony La Russa.

That's irony. Unintentional irony. I briefly wondered if it might have been intentional, but it isn't. Not from a writer who is capable of this sort of clumsy construction: Socratic exchange with Joe Morgan No. 1....

Does the SF Weekly have no editors?

Ah, it's good to know that yellow journalism is alive and well in both the mainstream world and in the so-called alternative world of blogging, and is being practised even on topics as ultimately trivial as baseball.

Three Beane Soup

The Athletics Nation site has another three-part interview (done in late June) with Oakland A's GM Billy Billy: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Blez: Do you consider him [Eric Chavez] a leader?

Beane: Yeah, I do. He leads with his bat and his glove. That's what leaders do. Leaders don't sit in the clubhouse eating Snickers bars and running their mouth....

The Digital Anatomist

The Digital Anatomist is just what it says it is. For instance, 3-D animations of the brain (requires Quicktime). Found it through a link at the Neuroscience Tutorial.

Small Things

The microscopix photolibrary has, among other things, pictures of chromozones and spider hairs.