MLB Team Color Schemes

Red and Blue.  It seems almost every MLB team has one and many have both.  How many?  Someone's already done the work. Check out the Sports Design Blog. 

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159 ways to hit the ball

Puck, 1913.  Artist: Crawford, Will

The following list appears in Zack Hample's Watching Baseball Smarter (2008).  The author provides no citation, and as a search for the list name returns nothing, I assume for now it is his own compilation, a wonderful testament to the human need for novelty (and penchant for cataloging).  

159 WAYS TO HIT THE BALL 

Squib, squirt, nub, chop, 

Drive, line, send, pop. 

Lift, loft, lace, lash, 

Scald, slice, serve, slash. 

Slap, swat, belt, smack,

Loop, bloop, bounce, whack. 

Fist, flare, muscle, mash, 

Deliver, doink, unload, smash. 

Book review: Klein, A. (2014). Dominican baseball: new pride, old prejudice

Klein, A. (2014). Dominican baseball: new pride, old prejudice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

I finished this book just before leaving for a longish vacation filled with diversions a bit more appealing than writing a book review.  I didn’t want to let the reading pass, though, without saying a few words about an informative text that marks the end of a quarter century of baseball research in the Dominican Republic.  Klein’s first book, Sugarball (1991), was an ethnographic account of the sport on the Caribbean island in the mid to late 80s, including extensive discussion of the developing system of buscones and the MLB’s increasing interest in the country as a source of cheap and highly skilled labor.  In the interviewing years, Klein published several papers on Dominican baseball, as well as a book length project on baseball in a Mexican border town, in addition to research into the North American body-building subculture, and sport among Native American communities.

New pride, Old prejudice is something of an update rather than a full-blown ethnography, an analysis of the economic and political developments between the MLB and Dominican baseball.  While there are many irritants in the relationship, Klein concludes that the biggest problem appears to be the inability to agree on what constitutes a problem. The MLB, for example, sees the buscones as a nuisance, one to be reined in to create a more rational (and less expensive) labor supply.  Dominicans, on the other hand, are likely to see the buscones, in the absence of a strong government, as the actors most likely and most able to protect Dominican interests and procure appropriate levels of financial compensation for Dominican ball players.  It’s not clear how these issues will be resolved, but Klein feels that the fortunes of the Dominicans and the MLB are now tied so closely to each other that the two will sink or swim together.

For a lengthier look at this book, please see Dain TePoel’s review at Sport in American History:  https://ussporthistory.com/2014/10/06/review-of-alan-kleins-dominican-baseball-new-pride-old-prejudice/

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Japan Baseball Trip: More Tickets

Buffaloes online ticketing

Single tickets for Japan’s pro-league games are released in blocks, both to groups and across time.  Fan club members get first choice, and some weeks later, usually one to two months before game date, remaining tickets are released to the general public.

When I left off, I was waiting to purchase tickets for August games of the Eagles and Buffaloes. I was a bit worried about availability during holiday events, the Eagles during Sendai’s largest annual festival, Tanabata, and the Buffaloes on Yamanohi with last year’s champions and this year’s leading team, the Hawks.

As it turned out, there were plenty of seats available for both and the only inconvenience with the online order systems was being forced to input my name in kanji.  Foreign credit cards were not a problem.

I chose to print my own tickets.  The Buffaloes' system was somewhat easier;  the Eagles seemed especially cumbersome, requiring 1) entering a receipt number, 2) then on a succeeding page entering my email address, 3) checking my email for a link to a ticket, 4) saving the ticket as a pdf, then finally 5) printing the ticket.

All that’s left now is to get to the stadiums on the appointed dates, eight in all.

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