I was so desperate for baseball news, I actually bought a fantasy magazine a few weeks ago. I’ll be honest: in the past few years, the game has lost its allure for me. Not the literary or historical aspects, but the actual guys who are currently playing. So I make my annual “resolution” to be better informed, so I thought that fantasy publication might be helpful. We’ll see.
But in the past couple of days, I picked up these guys:
Both are pretty much the same: reviews, previews, forecasts, stats, prospect assessments… pretty standard stuff. As fare as the features go, Athlon includes
- First Time for Everything
- 15 Things to Watch in 2019
- All-Century Team…So Far
- What’s up with the Stolen Base?
- The Rise of the Slider
- A Return to Parity
- 2009 MLB Draft Revisited
Lindy‘s features:
- State of the Game
- Fast Times (A piece on pitches)
- A Whole New Ballgame (about how layers from “yesteryear might have trouble recognizing the game being played these days. Funny, because you always hear how similar things are compared with the original “modern game.”)
- Trending (a mish-mash)
- Bill James “says the sport needs protection more than improvement.”
So I’m leaning a bit towards Athlon as the more fun of the two. Still to come: Sports Illustrated and, I assume, ESPN The Magazine, but I’m not sure. That publication has fallen off for me recently, especially moving from a bi-weekly to a monthly format. Makes their stories even more out of date, relative to what you can get on the internet. There might be a couple of new publications I’m not yet aware of.
To me, the best part of Athlon’s magazine was their “Calendar of the Weird.” I found myself looking for video of some of the entries. Here are a few I came up with:
- April 5: A bald eagle, flying around as part of the pregame ceremony, mistakes Mariners pitcher James Paxton for its handler and lands on his shoulder.
- April 14: Deven Marrero’s first “home run” isn’t, as teammate Alex Avila negates it by passing him on the bases.
- April 22: Brandon Belt sets the known record of seeing 21 pitches in a single at-bat, lining out on the last pitch. (Yes, it took 14+ minutes.)
- May 2: Yoenis Cespedes’ diamond necklace snaps as he slides into second base, scattering thousands of dollars’ worth of gems in the dirt.
- May 28: Making his initial major league plate appearance, Atlanta’s Dustin Peterson loses track of the count and trots to first base on ball three — then strikes out.
- May 30: A goose, chased from the Comerica Park outfield, falls two levels after crashing into an LED board, where it is wrapped in a blanket by a veterinarian and released after a check-up at the pet hospital.
- July 11: German Marquez’s home run off Daniel Descalso is the first in 32 years by a pitcher off a position player.
- July 31: As the Mets languish in a 24-5 beating by the Nationals, their TV announcers begin reading verbatim from the team’s media guide with the theme from “Masterpiece Theater” playing in the background.
- Aug 15: The Rangers turn a triple play that does not include retiring the runner — the first of its kind since 1912.
- Sept 29: A fan fires a Giancarlo Stanton home run back into the field of play — and hits him with it.
Bonus: What does it say about this guy that he was so willing to forego big bucks in defense of a teammate? On Sept. 27, “Two innings short of a $500,000 bonus, CC Sabathia is ejected from his final start of the year. (The Yankees eventually gave Sabathia the bonus money.” (Compare this to the situation 100 years ago where the Chicago White Sox’s Eddie Ciccotte came up a couple of games shy of the appearances he needed for a bonus because cheap skate owner Charles Comiskey order the manager to keep the pitcher on the bench. Needless to say, Ciccotte didn’t get the dough. Perhaps if he had, we wouldn’t have had the Black Sox Scandal.)
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