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Positional Power Rankings: Designated Hitter
For an explanation of this series, please read Dave Cameron’s introduction from Monday. All the posts in the series can be found here.
Whether you believe that every team should have a designated hitter, or that no teams should have one, there is no denying that the DH is an interesting position. While it’s still a position of high-octane performance — as a position, DH’s .771 OPS was second-best in the American League, behind only first base — it is also the one that most resembles a carousel. Last season, teams started — on average — more than nine different DH’s. Seven teams — the Blue Jays, Mariners, Rangers, Rays, Twins, White Sox and Yankees — had more different starting DH’s than they did starting pitchers. If you’re scoring at home, that’s half the AL.
Looking into the Crystal Ball: MLB’s Social Media Future
This is the last of four stories on Major League Baseball and social media. You can read the first three parts here, here and here. Full disclosure: Major League Baseball Advanced Media employs FanGraphs contributor Paul Swydan, who wrote this series.
Major League Baseball and its Internet arm — Major League Baseball Advanced Media — started slowly in social media, but the pair has made incremental progress. Technologically, things are running smoothly, and last season the league had lots of success with its Fan Cave, among other initiatives. But what’s in the league’s future?
Certainly the best way for MLB to push the online envelope is to offer good content. But as we’ve seen with countless reality TV shows, what seems fun and exciting one year can soon becomes stale. MLB understands this. “We want the Fan Cave to continue to evolve, so that it’s fresh and unique,” MLB spokesperson Matthew Bourne says. This season, instead of MLB picking Cave finalists on its own, the league is giving fans their say. The league recently concluded a voting period that saw the initial 50 finalists culled down to 30. So far, the results have been promising: MLB’s public relations team said they received more than 1.2 million votes in roughly one month.
All 30 finalists headed down to Spring Training in Arizona this past week, and the league now is deliberating on who will make the final cut heading into the regular season. Once the group — which MLB has promised will include at least one woman — is chosen, fans will once again have the chance to vote off contestants until only two remain in October. “This is an engagement with our fans through social media, and what they say is very important,” Bourne says.
Social Media Expansion: Teams Get in the Game
This is the third of four stories on Major League Baseball and social media. You can read the first two stories here and here. Full disclosure: Major League Baseball Advanced Media employs FanGraphs contributor Paul Swydan, who wrote this series.
As the social-media revolution began, few major league franchises were fortunate enough to have a championship-caliber team. And perhaps only one was down the street from a company leading that charge. In 2010, the San Francisco Giants went on a historic World Series run while its neighbor was going on a run of its own. That company was called Twitter.
The close proximity between the baseball Giants and the social-media giant gave the team the online head start that perhaps no other team enjoyed — though several teams have now been able to replicate. And the rewards are still rolling in for those franchises.
Case in point: one of the first Tweetups organized by a club was one that the Giants hosted with Twitter founders Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, “They have been instrumental in helping us understand how to use Twitter to communicate and engage with fans,” says Bryan Srabian, the Giants’ social media director. Twitter, too, most certainly understood the value of a live baseball game.
MLB Expands Its Social Media Footprint
This is the second of four stories on Major League Baseball and social media. You can read the first story here. Full disclosure: Major League Baseball Advanced Media employs FanGraphs contributor Paul Swydan, who wrote this series.
While other leagues have seen attendance dips in the past few years, Major League Baseball has held strong. And though that success initially didn’t translate online quite as well — as the first part of this series indicated — baseball has begun pumping social media fastballs. Among its best decisions was allowing fans to share video.
Socially Awkward to Socially Active: MLB Online
This is the first of four stories on Major League Baseball and social media. Full disclosure: Major League Baseball Advanced Media employs FanGraphs contributor Paul Swydan, who wrote this series.
The evening of Nov. 11, 2010, turned into a pretty frustrating one for Kyle Scott. On that night, Scott, who runs the popular Philadelphia sports blog Crossing Broad, got an email from YouTube telling him that several baseball videos he’d posted were being removed from the site. While the videos were short — none exceeded 30 seconds — and contained scant game footage, they’d apparently gotten the attention of Major League Baseball Advanced Media. It wasn’t the first time that Scott had run afoul of MLBAM, but he was frustrated enough by the situation to write about it the next day. “They were short clips that we used for a quick laugh,” Scott says now. The Internet site The Big Lead picked up Scott’s story, and Scott says most readers “sympathized with our frustrations.” That MLBAM put the kabosh on Scott’s videos seems counterintuitive for a sport that’s constantly trying to expand its brand — and 15 months after getting the YouTube email, Crossing Broad averages nearly 1 million page views a month.
So is MLB a big-league bully — or is it simply protecting itself? And how does the league stack up against its peers on the American sports landscape? To figure that out, you first have to take a look at Scott’s case — or more specifically, to YouTube, where the league’s social-media firestorm began. Not only did MLB not post their own videos on YouTube, they actively sought to remove videos that fans had posted — a decision that ran counter to other sports leagues, which never took such heavy handed measures. Sometimes, as in Scott’s case, the deletions left a very public trail — and that critical fallout can have a lasting effect. But while MLBAM could have been more diplomatic about its position, the league’s online media arm had a practical business reason for taking such a hard line: the moneymaker called MLB.tv.
Here’s to You, Mr. Wakefield
Tim Wakefield wasn’t the best pitcher in Red Sox history (that’s Pedro Martinez), nor was he the most entertaining (guys like Bill “Spaceman” Lee, Luis Tiant and yes, Pedro, have that territory marked), but what he was one of the Nation’s favorites. For 17 years, he pitched, and acted, with the same stoicism. He never put himself above the game, and was always, always ready to take the ball, be it the top of the first, the bottom of the fourth, or the top of the 12th. He is set to announce his retirement today, but his legend will live forever.
Lest we forget though, his legend didn’t originate in Boston, but rather in Pittsburgh. Or, to put a finer point on it, Welland, Ontario. It was there that Wakefield began his transformation from banjo-hitting infielder to knuckleballer extraordinaire. The early results were promising — a 3.40 ERA in 18 appearances for the Bucs’ Low-A affiliate. Two and a half years later, he was in the Majors. He would finish third in the 1992 National League Rookie of the Year voting, despite not making his Major League debut until July 31. He built on his impressive two months in the postseason, winning two of the Pirates’ three games in the National League Championship Series against Atlanta, with both victories coming against Tom Glavine.