In Response To The Livers

  When we started giving out awards in 1986, the major ones were trophies.  I fell behind in the 1990's and stopped giving out the hardware.  I have most of the trophies and am going to slowly update them.  When Ian Parfrey was awarded the Bill Weinberg MVP, that was the very trophy last given out to Phil Kotik in 1995.  I noticed that more than one of the winter meetings bloggers suggested that my  scratching Ian's name into metal with a fork was some sort of trick, conjecturing that I had Ian's name put on the trophy before the meeting.  The truth is that my mother often over-cooked beef and, as a child, out of necessity, I learned to press down very hard with my fork.  

   Josh Balsam is in charge of keeping the captain's records.  

   We adopted the scoring guideline that "any hit ball which a player with normal effort and average skills should field, but does not should be awarded an error."  Ian is correct that this gives a "break" to the pitcher who gets the hitter to pop out but the rightfielder is too busy watching the lithe Japanese girl with long, flowing hair, wearing a mini-kilt, knee socks and a form-fit white blouse unbuttoned to her navel walk by and lets the ball drop in for a hit.

  What I'm about to write will, necessarily, disparage many of our players.  I don't like doing this, but it seems the only way to properly point out the disadvantages of Sal's egalitarian movement.  

  The first point to be made is that two-thirds of our games last season resulted in score differentials of 3-runs or less.  Given the low quality of our skills (by professional baseball standards) this is remarkable.  As those of you who play in other leagues probably know, the blow-out (4 runs differential or more) is the norm. This is because the competition is uneven.  How do we accomplish such successful games with players like Havelock Hewes, David Rosengard and Charlie Block and only three real shortstops who only show up half the time? We do it by finding positions like pitcher, catcher and firstbase for those

with little range and by keeping Phil Ciccone and David Sommers at shortstop for the entire game.  Our new rule requiring sitting as evenly as possible without playing just thirds of an inning (now I'm giving Sal another idea) will mean that Gil Schmerler will be moving over to shortstop for an inning and Josh Balsam will be at thirdbase.  The result of a few easy grounders is a major rally.  Also, though Freddie Melendez claims it is "easy" to substitute 13 players evenly into a game, I bet he won't be able to do it.  I sat down and made two typical 13-player line-ups and it took me 15-minutes in a quiet room to figure it out. 

  One other reason we get even games is that we design the teams to be equal.  This is largely my responsibility and I do it very well.  Sal's suggestion that we allow two random captains to choose-up is a mistake.  Though we have had some stellar games with choosing-up (I'm thinking of one game when Seung and I were captains) the typical result is a blow-out.  Remember that the random captains are the same people who gave Marvin Cohen a gold glove.  Beyond mutual stupidity is the possibility that one of the captains is better at assessing talent than the other or has more information than the other and gets a much better team.  In fact, the very goal of choosing-up is to get the better team.  Isn't it better to create teams with the goal of being even?