Baseball is Coming...

Handlebars 'n Pillboxes

Yesteday, the Cincinnati Reds unveiled the 2015 MLB All-Star Game logo:

Compared to Minnesota's 2014 blah-gasm¹, Cincinnati's logo is 100% uncut AWESOME. First off, it actually says "Cincinnati." Excepting those with expert knowledge of the Twin Cities' skyline, Minnesota's logo looked like a snapshot from Cloud City. Even better, Cincinnati hearkens back to it's heritage as MLB's first pro team with the inclusion of old-timey handlebar moustaches and pillbox caps.

This got me thinking²: What if every logo was as awesome as the Cincinnati All Star Game Logo? The answer, as shown below, is VERY.

Is anything as classy as pillbox caps and BMW? I
submit that there is not.

PBR seemed all too eager to don the Handlebar.
Damn hipsters.

If you were sexually confused looking at the naked mermaid
on your latte before, it's only going to get worse from here.

MORE MOUSTACHES, I SAY!

¹Seriously, what is that thing? An airplane? The visual manifestation of a Blatz-smelling yawn?

²A dangerous pastime, I know.

Why Chief Wahoo Must Die

AUTHOR'S NOTE: THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY RAN AT WWW.BUGSANDCRANKS.COM

I’d seriously hoped the first pitches of the 2014 season would 86 any banal offseason talk and finally dig in to some béisbol. Sucks for me, this isn’t the case in Cleveland. In the absence of free-agent splashes, logos filled Cleveland offseason chatter, and this shouting has spilled over into the regular season.

In January of this year, Chris Creamer at Sportslogos.net reported Cleveland had officially relegated Chief Wahoo to secondary status, promoting the Block C in his stead.
Then in late February, the editorial board of the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote that Chief Wahoo should be retired immediately.

Now, a few games into the 2014 season, Paul Lukas again brings Cleveland’s smiling mascot to the forefront in his latest ESPN.com column. The discussion centers on DeChief-ers, Cleveland fans who deface or remove Chief Wahoo from their team merchandise. Through a peculiar chain of events, your dutiful author ended up as a spokesman of sorts for the DeChief camp. The story includes a brief profile (and beefcakey picture!) of yours truly.

When Cleveland should be talking about our completely bad-ass Jim Thome statue, or the strength of our 5th starter, or if Asdrubal Cabrera will be trade bait come the deadline, we’re again shouting across a canyon to one another about the merits of Chief Wahoo.

There’s only one way this fire, sometimes fizzling, sometimes a roaring inferno, will ever be squelched. Chief Wahoo has to go. Now.

If you take away Chief Wahoo, then wouldn’t Notre Dame have to kill their Leprechaun to avoid offending the Irish? ‘Yankee” was once a derogatory term, what about New York? And Couldn’t Steel Workers object to the Pittsburgh Steelers? Where does it end?

This, the most common argument proposed against the removal of Native American nicknames from collegiate and professional sports, is ignorant and misguided. The core of any Wahoo discussion isn’t the symbol itself but who applies it and how. The Fighting Irish, at least historically, are actually Irish. Same with the Yankees and any other examples one wishes to lump into this hare-brained argument.

Think of it this way: a white guy can’t walk unannounced into a black neighborhood and holler, “What up my n—s?” Merits of the term (even among blacks) aside, it’s not a term for whites to appropriate freely.  Though a less odious example, it’s the same with a white-owned, white-run Cleveland baseball team applying a Native American caricature to their team.

Good counterpoints to this “…But Notre Dame!” argument are the Spokane (WA) Indians, a minor league baseball team, and to a lesser extent, the Florida State Seminoles. Spokane uses the name Indians with the full cooperation of the Salish Tribe. The team even employs a uniform which spells out the team name in the Salish language. In a similar vein, Florida Seminole tribes have given the go-ahead for FSU to apply Seminole iconography to their sports teams.

This is just Liberals looking for a cause. Natives don’t really care about Chief Wahoo.

It’s probably fair to say the Venn diagram of Wahoo-detractors and liberals forms a single circle. However, Civil Rights supporters in the ‘60’s were reviled as nosy liberals. The same goes for suffragists. While a smiling cartoon certainly isn’t on the level as the 19th Amendment or the Civil Rights Act, we must speak of any cause independent of its supporters.

Do Native Americans really care about a stupid cartoon? Yes and no. Most living on reservations have much bigger problems to tackle. Extreme poverty, poor educational standards and drugs sit higher on any to-do list.

There’s also the oft-cited study Sports Illustrated survey from 2002 (and another from the AP in 2004) claiming Natives support the use of Wahoo. Refutations of this study aside—and there aremany refutations—this is old information. Citing a 2002 study to defend Chief Wahoo in 2014 is like using cocaine to treat a headache. Once upon a time, this was the most correct prescription, but opinions evolve as new facts come to light.

As a middle-class, Midwestern white dude, my personal opinion on Chief Wahoo is basically toilet fodder. It’s not my culture being appropriated. So I must defer to the opinion of Native Americans. A Native group protested Wahoo outside a San Diego / Cleveland game this past week. Another Native American group pickets outside the Cleveland home opener each year. Editorials and surveys compiled by the Indian Today Country Media Network consistently show Natives want Wahoo gone.

Wahoo supporters then counter by asking, “why make a change when it’s such a small minority of people who want Wahoo removed?” The answer to this is simple morality: how many people is it okay to offend? Is it okay to offend 1 person? 100 people? 1,000? Where do you draw the line and who draws it? Even if Anti-Wahoo Native Americans are a raindrop in the American bucket, it’s their heritage, their symbolism. If Natives want Wahoo scrubbed from sports jerseys, then it’s our duty to get out the soap and water.

Chief Wahoo is meant to honor Native American heritage and Cleveland player Louis Sockalexis.

This is a much thicker knot to disentangle. Joe Posnanski recently penned an excellent history of Louis Sockalexis and the “Cleveland Indians” name. Go read it; it’s a fantastic article. The TL;DR version is that historical records show the team probably wasn’t named in honor of Sockalexis, despite the copy Cleveland’s PR department chugs out year after year. With the original intent murky, we again have to default back to the Natives themselves. If Natives deny being honored by Wahoo (and they do), then off he goes.

Now you’re being hypocritical. Taking away Chief Wahoo is taking away my heritage as a Cleveland sports fan.

Wahoo can’t be the average Clevelander’s heritage, as it was stolen from Natives to begin with. Removing Wahoo is kin to returning looted art to its original home. As a compromise, I’d offer Moses Cleveland as a good replacement logo. He’d look good on the corner of Carnegie and Ontario, no?

But Chief Wahoo is tradition!

If you want Tradition, go listen to Fiddler on the Roof. Upholding behaviors on the grounds of tradition alone is short-sighted and dangerous. The same argument–but it’s our tradition!–was used to defend laws preventing blacks and whites from marrying. Our traditions help connect us to the past, but we must weigh them against the greater good and reject them once the cons outweigh the pros.

By the same token, change for the sake of change is equally stupid. However, removing Chief Wahoo is change with good reason.

You can’t love Cleveland Baseball if you don’t love Wahoo. (And here I quote) “Go cheer for them asses in Detroit!”

Saying one can’t love a team if they don’t love its logo is ludicrous. First, love isn’t blind acceptance. Love is a vow to constant work, in good times and bad. If you truly love something or someone, you stand side-by-side and try to build something better.

Removing the political element, teams change logos every year. Bucco Bruce gave way to the Jolly Roger. Flying Elvis replaced Pat Patriot. The Tampa Bay Rays, the Dallas Stars, The Baltimore Orioles, the Carolina Panthers…the list of teams who’ve recently updated their logos goes on and on (and on). Do these new logos diminish their teams’ history? Do people who prefer these new logos love their team less? Don’t be stupid; of course not.

I understand Chief Wahoo is intertwined into many fans’ fond memories, but Cleveland Baseball isn’t a color or logo or a name. Call it whatever you want; Cleveland Baseball is Tris Speaker, Bob Feller, Jim Thome, Nap Lajoie, Larry Doby, Albert Belle. It’s 455 straight sellouts at Jacobs Field. It’s being crushed by the 1997 World Series only to come back eager for 1998. It’s a 10-game win streak to vault into the 2013 playoffs. Cleveland Baseball is cramming into my family’s Ford Aerostar van with my parents, my grandparents and my brothers; day-tripping to Jacobs Field, sitting in the top row of the top deck in melting heat, and loving every second of it. Cleveland could play their games in clown suits and I’d still pay money to watch.

Whether a follower of @DeChiefWahoo or @KeepChief, the fact is clear: Wahoo is on his way out. His smiling presence is being lessened every year. Instead of pulling the band aid slowly and bitching at one another for the next ten years, let’s put on our big boy pants and rip the damn thing off already. Please, so we can finally start talking about baseball again. Chief Wahoo is an irrevocable part of Cleveland baseball history, but it’s time he became just that: history.

Baseball Simulator 2014

We've only just released the game and he's
already Puiging.

It's Finally Here! Baseball Simulator 2014 updates Culture Brain’s Baseball Simulator 1.000 with 18 current MLB teams:

• Boston • Detroit • Cleveland • Atlanta • San Francisco • Washington • Texas • Kansas City • New York (A) • Los Angeles (N) • Cincinnati • Pittsburgh • Tampa Bay • Oakland • Baltimore • Arizona • San Diego • St. Louis

6 additional teams can be introduced via the in-game “Edit” function. The game’s default “Edit” teams (pre-loaded via a .sav file included in the archive) are:

• Los Angeles (A) • Seattle • Toronto • New York (N) • Milwaukee • Colorado

Look at those, sweet,  pixelated logos.
LOOK AT THEM!

Teams were chosen for the BBSIM14 roster based on their 2013 record (sorry Cubbies and Marlins, no soup for you). Previous releases also contained data for the remaining MLB teams. This year, to maximize available batters, this data is omitted. However, logo data for all 30 clubs exists in the rom, so any super-enterprising Miami fan could theoretically add Christian Yelich and Co. into the game if they really wanted.

McCutcheon v. King Felix: Doesn't get
much better than that.

Projected rosters, stats and PITCHf/x data from rotochamp and fangraphs.com; current as of 2014-04-23. An improvement from BBSIM2013, this year's release uses Sabermetrics to better depict players' abilities. For example, instead of .SLG representing a player's raw power, this release uses ISO. wOBA is used to dictate how big of a "sweet spot" each batter gets. And for the pitchers, pitch speeds, as well as lateral and horizontal movement are pulled directly from PITCHf/x data.

Like Baseball Simulator 2013, all teams have Ultra points for special abilities. Only the most clutch players, though, get special hits/pitches.

Papi's stat line looks wicked pissah.

The archive linked below includes a number of goodies. First and foremost, you get the rom, son. "Baseball Simulator 2014.nes" is tested and compatible with any number of NES emulators. Also in the archive is "Baseball Simulator 2014.sav" Copy this .sav file into the sav folder of your emulator to pre-load 6 more MLB teams via the game's Edit function. Also in the archive is the complete stat sheet for every team in the game and the Hacking Bible, should anyone want to make personal tweaks. 

DOWNLOAD BASEBALL SIMULATOR 2014 - THE ONLY NES BASEBALL GAME THAT MATTERS - HERE 
(upaded 2014-04-29 to include corrected .sav file)

After you've crushed your competition, tweet out screenshots and scores using the hashtag #BBSIM14. And although the game has been tested, some things slip through the cracks. Tweet @keithisgood with any bugfix requests or statistical oddities. PLAY BALL!

The Moses Cleaveland Tee

I know you've been waiting with bated breath. At long wait, in time for the start of the (World Series-winnin?) 2014 Cleveland Baseball season, the Fightin' Moses T-Shirt! Big thanks to our partners in this venture, TeamCLE tees.

Purchase one (or twenty!) here: 

http://teamcle.storenvy.com/products/6519289-moses-cleaveland

No Wahoo Cleveland Baseball Uniforms

After re-working a Cleveland Baseball logo should Chief Wahoo ever go the way of the dodo, the next logical step would be a uniform employing said logo. Again, I've worked on this previously. This iteration keeps Cleveland's current Block C logo--boring as it may be--and incorporates various other elements drawn from Cleveland's city flag.

Moses, meet Wahoo. I don't want no trouble out of you two.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently published an incendiary op-ed begging the Cleveland Indians to retire Cheif Wahoo for good. Personal opinions notwithstanding, the piece got me thinking: who or what would replace Chief Wahoo should he get 86'ed? I've tackled this issue previously and came to the conlusion Moses Cleaveland, founder of his (extra a aside) eponymous city, should take the reins from the divisive chief. My first attempt ended in whelming results, looking more Bob Hope than famous General.

So, take two on the Fightin' Moses logo for Cleveland Baseball! For comparison's sake, here's a pic of the rather serious-looking Moses Cleaveland:

We call this dour expression the "Cleveland Sports fans come playoff time" face.

And of course most are familiar with Cleveland's smiling caricature of a mascot:

So combining the two, we get something like the following. Enjoy.

Hey Cleveland: Chief or General?

Wahoo, meet Moses. Moses, meet Wahoo. I don't want no trouble out of you two.

Additions to the Baseball Lexicon

Boston's victory in last Night's ALCS Game 2 exceeded the limits of English's descriptive capacities. Detroit's late-inning defensive implosion following Nate Scherzer's strong start requires the following words be added to the English lexicon:

Anaptonym - (n.) A name which seems horribly unfit to its owner. Antonym to "aptonym."
      example: Prince Fielder's name is an anaptonym; he's neither a prince nor a fielder.

Scherzerfreude - (n.) the sense of happiness engendered by the misfortune (see: "schadenfreude") of Detroit piddling away one of Nate Scherzer's starts with a late-inning collapse.

      example: When David Ortiz hit his grand slam in the 8th inning of ALCS Game 2, a euphoric wave of warmth beshook me, wracking me with a Scherzerfruede which nearly caused me to wet my pants in delight.

To read more about Anaptonyms and Scherzerfreude, surf on over to:

http://www.bugsandcranks.com/keithgood/baseball/neither-prince-nor-fielder-be/

Puig's Plainview Pool Party

Last night we found out what really grinds Willie Bloomquist’s gears. Drafted in the 8th round out of college and then going unsigned? Fine. Bouncing between four baseball teams in three years? Okay. Relegated to utility roles, playing every position save pitcher and catcher? No problem. But swim in Bloomquist’s pool and Bruce Banner becomes the Hulk.

Following their NL West Division clinching victory over rival Arizona Diambondbacks, the Los Angeles Dodgers helped themselves to the pool beyond Chase Field’s centerfield wall. Arizona’s glorious H₂0 sullied Dodger Blue, Willy Bloomquist went beast mode on the media.

...READ THE REST AT BUGSANDCRANKS.COM

Cleveland Kombat

This strange photo can only mean one thing: another hardball masterpiece over at BugsAndCranks.com:

http://www.bugsandcranks.com/keithgood/baseball/cleveland-kombat/

The 33 Percent

The various metrics agree: Cleveland's shot at making the 2013 MLB playoffs hovers around 33 percent. With upcoming games in Atlanta and Detroit, that number is bound to fluctuate. As we stand, though, the odds of Cleveland’s October itinerary including anything other than rest and golf roughly equals the percentage of:

• Hold ‘Em hands which flush after flopping 4 of a suit.
• Americans who believe aliens exist.

Continue Reading at Bugs & Cranks.com...

Three True Outcomes

 

 It's the Adam Dunn way.

No Wahoo Cleveland Baseball

Today we run a hypothetical branding guide for when Cleveland's MLB team eventually (yes, eventually) drops Chief Wahoo from its identity. This set was featured on the website uni-watch.com

Disco Stu is Optimistic!

Mike Trout: NES Demigod

Baseball Simulator 2013

After months of development, keithisgood Electronic Media is pleased to present the official release of Baseball Simulator 2013! This update to Culture Brain's 1989 NES classic--Baseball Simulator 1.000--allows a player to compete with any current MLB team. The base rom (link at the bottom of the page) gives players the choice from 18 MLB Teams:

Baseball Simulator 2013!

Official rom coming soon...

More Baseball Simulator 2013

The completed team logo set for Baseball Simulator 2013:

Baseball Simulator 2013 Box Art

 Here's to hoping Baseball Simulator has Madden-Curse Powers and Miggy slumps below the Mendoza line this year...