Ballpark quest - 60 ballparks

  Baseball play-by-play announcers, particularly those on radio, are an important part of the game, more so than in any other sport. If I have to drive somewhere, there is no better way to fill the time than to have a baseball game, any baseball game, on the car radio. I think it’s the pace of baseball that makes it perfect for radio. The announcers have time to describe the play as it happens, and good announcers can do it in a way that gives the listener the ability to visualize what’s happening. Furthermore, although there may be all sorts of people running around (baserunners, fielders going after the ball, throws, more throws, …), a good announcer can figure out who made the crucial good or bad play, not just the obvious things, but if a runner was aggressive or indecisive, or an infielder was not in the right place at the right time for a cut-off throw (more on that later). And the nature of the game, with the pause between pitches, and between batters, gives the announce...

  Tonight was the first time we saw the Reno Aces, the top farm team of our hometown team, the Arizona Diamondbacks. But why is it called a “farm team?” The short answer is that each of the 30 major league teams has one team affiliated with it at each at four minor league levels (AAA, like Reno, is the highest level), as well as at least one “Rookie League” team (the Diamondbacks have four, two each in the U.S. and the Dominican Republic). The contracts of the players on those teams are all controlled by the parent major league team for several years at the start of their careers. The baseball minor league system is the largest “farm system” in U.S. professional sports. Ice hockey has two tiers below the NHL, although only 27 of the 32 NHL teams have a team in the lower of the two. The National Basketball Association has one minor league affiliated with it, and the National Football League none. To a large degree, collegiate football and basketball are the minor leagues for...

    A computerized strike zone? Please. The sooner, the better. That topic is particularly appropriate today because one of the people mentioned most often in discussions of the idea, Major League umpire Ángel Hernández, retired last night. Hernández probably had the worst reputations among all the MLB umpires for missing calls, although every umpire misses some calls, and some umpires may miss more than Hernández did. But Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post points out that Hernandez had “the great misfortune of being bad at his job at a moment in time when everyone could see just how bad he was.” Umpiring is a tough job. When Kerry did the non-sports medicine for the Colorado Rockies during Spring Trainings in the late 2000s, she would also see umpires who came to town and had a sinus infection or anything like that. She got along with them great, although to a man they thought she was crazy when she said she would have enjoyed being an umpire. Many were nice people, s...