Category Archives: Baseball

MORE SUPPORT FOR HAVING COMPUTERS CALL BALLS AND STRIKES. I posted here a few weeks ago about how all the balls and strikes in an independent league game had been called by a computer. Now Cork Gaines on the Business … Continue reading →

FAT PITCHERS (COMMENT). My nephew, Andrew Schaefer, picked up an error in my post on Terry Forster and what a good hitting pitcher he was. The third paragraph confuses Forster’s lifetime at bats with his much greater lifetime figure for … Continue reading →

IS THE COMPUTER BETTER THAN THE UMPIRES? Although I have long been sympathetic to efforts to call balls and strikes more accurately, I found K.M.McFarland’s article somewhat disquieting. McFarland points out the major problem: “…the cameras stop tracking the ball … Continue reading →

HAVING A COMPUTER CALL BALLS AND STRIKES. I posted here a year ago about Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt’s position that a computer and not an umpire should call balls and strikes. Well, it’s happened. This article on the Wired … Continue reading →

TERRY FORSTER—THE BEST HITTER OF THE LAST 75 YEARS? With David Letterman retiring from his show, there have been references to the time in 1985 when Letterman called pitcher Terry Forster “a fat tub of goo”. Forster was a good … Continue reading →

THE PESAPALLO SCANDAL. I would have thought that pesapallo, a sport that is said to be especially popular in rural Finland, in a country which I consider to be made up of honest people, would not be associated with scandal. … Continue reading →

PESAPALLO —THE FINNISH VERSION OF BASEBALL. Brian Costa had an article in the Wall Street Journal (July 10) about pesapallo, a Finnish version of baseball. Ordinarily, it might be chauvinistic to look at another country’s sport as if it were … Continue reading →

A SINGLETON BEING MISTAKEN FOR TWINS. This earlier article on the MLB site by Jane Lee tells about how Pat Venditte’s father raised him to throw with both arms from when he was three (Venditte’s father thought it might give … Continue reading →

AN AMBIDEXTROUS PITCHER SUCCEEDS IN MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL. This article by Jane Lee on the MLB site describes how, in an amazing first, Pat Venditte pitched two scoreless innings in the major leagues using his left arm to pitch to … Continue reading →