Love for Sale

From time to time, it behooves all of us to pay some attention to the man behind the curtain. If The Wire taught us anything, it's that institutions run everything, and that money runs institutions. In this month's Norman Einstein's, I took a look at the commissionership of baseball and why Bud Selig is both inevitable and the worst possible version of commissioner. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, so you should give it a glance if you're so inclined.

Here and There

Welcome to October, everyone. Baseball's gearing up for the postseason (or eulogizing an ending season), the NFL's getting up to speed and training camp reports are whetting our whistles for what's to come. It's an embarassment of riches, friends. To keep you company over the weekend, the new issue of Norman Einstein's is out today. Among the other worthy articles, two have some No Fours fingerprints on them:

• An examination of what, exactly, everyone got so upset about when LeBron and Chris Bosh joined Dwayne Wade in South Beach, Freedom and Agency.
  
  
• A roundtable discussion of Ken Burns's recent Tenth Inning documentary.
  

Enjoy, and get ready for the MLB postseason. As long as the Yankees don't win the Series, it should be a great time.

Bite-Size Morsels

I'm back from my wanderings, and should have a full-size post up shortly. In the meantime, enjoy the most succinct exegesis of hitting progression in modern baseball, thanks to Baseball Think Factory poster Morty Causa:

Everything in the current game wrt to hitting goes back to Babe Ruth and Ted Willaims. Williams is the philosophy-king of baseball hitting, and Ruth its "natural" genius. Ruth the precursor started it with hitting tons of home runs. Pitchers then had to be more careful. They couldn't let up. They had to be careful what they threw, how they threw it., and where they threw it. Ruth instinctively knew the way to counteract that was to make them even more careful by being patient. Williams took it from there and formed and articulated the philosphy. To be successful, the hitter has to get his pitch. To get his pitch he has to be patient. That means the hitter doesn't just swing at any damn thing the pitcher throws. He has to be selective. The hitter has to know the pitcher's repertoire. He waits on a certain pitch until the count forbids it. This tends to force the pitcher to throw a hitter a hittable pitch more than he otherwise would, although, of course, he, the pitcher, is still more successful than the hitter is. The ineluctable result of all this is that there will be more sort of an evolutionary arms race between the pitcher and the hitter.

Boom. The last century of baseball's core evolution in a paragraph.