Billy Paultz Reconsidered

The following post to the web site newslanc.com (Motto: “Break free from the monopoly press!”) came in reaction to my feature last week on McCaskey High School athletics…
An implication of the Sept. 21st Sunday News article “McCaskey’s Challenge” was that McCaskey High School’s teams are performing so poorly because the players are subject to all […]

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Two of my favorite journalists are Michael Kinsley and Christopher Hitchens, Kinsley because of his calm, relentlessly logical parsing of bullcrap, and Hitchens because he’s almost always either brilliant or hilariously insane or both.
Anyway, each of them has a fine dissection of campaign nonsense currently on Slate. Kinsley on John McCain making lack of experience […]

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The best book I’ve read about show business (not that there’s a lot of competition) is “Cavett,” by the former late-night talk-show host Dick Cavett (duh) with his college pal, journalist Christopher Porterfield, published in 1974. I recently found the book in my attic, beyond dog-eared, after assuming it had been long, long gone.
There […]

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Some things that have annoyed/amused/intrigued me lately:
*Re: The Phillies nice win over the Mets Friday. Nobody I heard mentioned that Johan Santana - who averages 200 innings a year and over 100 pitches a game - left a 2-2 game after eight innings having thrown 95 pitches, with a lefthander, Ryan Howard, leading off the ninth. The night […]

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Just happened upon this while aimlessly surfing, which reminded me of college, in Western Pennsylvania, a stronghold of the absurd and offensive practice of calling soda “pop.”
First, problems with the data the map represents:
1. It’s based on 120,000-some responses in a nation of 300-plus million.
2. It’s by county but not population; the “pro-soda” (read: sane) […]

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The popular consensus on A-Rod (to cite the most prominent current example) is he’s a “regular-season,” player, a “numbers guy,” who’s a girly-man when it really counts. It’s a real and obliteratingly large black mark on his career, supposedly. Exhibit A for this contention is his postseason record, which is .279/.361/.483 in 149 at bats, […]

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… the Phillies blowing out Cole Hamels looks like genius compared to some of the stuff the Brewers have pulled lately.  They have 14 pitchers on the roster. They have exactly three bench players, and one of them is a backup catcher (Mike Rivera) and the other two are lefthanded hitters (Craig Counsell and […]

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… it’s April, and he was over 100 pitches headed into the eighth inning in Milwaukee last night. Given that, you’d hope the Phillies’ ridiculous 5-4 loss to the Brewers might shut up the “pitch counts don’t matter,” crowd, or at least give those folks pause for thought.
Yeah, like that’s gonna happen.
The irony is this […]

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I know what you’re wondering, Avid Reader: Tell us, wise and benevolent one, what you think of Dick Vitale being voted into the Basketball Hall of Fame?
Glad you asked, AR. I’m torn, actually. For me, Dick Vitale’s career has always seemed like a Saturday Night Live sketch about a deliberately annoying sports broadcaster. That anyone […]

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Exactly what I expected- a pleasant feature that didn’t do James’ work justice. I liked Theo Epstein’s comment that James’ value to the Red Sox is more often the questions he asks than the answers, because it suggests the important truth that Sabermetrics isn’t about slide rules and formulas but simply about thinking.
I didn’t like Terry Francona’s, […]

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