Marcano says the unraveling security situation in Venezuela had already taken its toll on the training routines that once existed. Teenagers signed by American ball clubs usually are routed through a network of baseball “academies.” Marcano says that until the middle of the last decade, there were about 15 academies in Venezuela. Now, he says, there are five. “They have been closing the academies,” he says, “mainly because of the security situation.” Venezuelan teenagers, he says, are now sent to baseball academies in the Dominican Republic. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/11/11/wilson-ramos-kidnapping-highlights-baseball-s-dangerous-venezuela-pipeline.html
I’m not sure you could have asked for a better soldier than Dave. He was the size of a double-wide trailer, as strong as a cart ox, and he worked like a team of draught horses. When I think of my time in Iraq, I can still hear his voice, always on time with some sarcastic joke to break the tension. Dave was a football player before he joined the Army. He played at the University of Miami at some point in the 80s. I don’t know what type of career he had in college or whether he was ever good enough to go pro, but he looked like a guy who could block: big, thick, and with a tree-trunk for a neck. Somehow he ended up wearing Army green instead of Eagles green, and the country is a better place because of it. Our unit spent 15 months in Northern Iraq and it didn’t take long for us to turn to sports to provide us with a respite from our daily grind. Each of us had a team or a sport that we turned to connect us back to the places we had left. http://phillysportsdaily.com/reader-opinions/2011/11/11/veterans-day-remembrance-the-sports-fans-i-served-with
One international scout detailed to SI.com how on a trip to Venezuela a few years ago, he and his colleague were pulled over by a group of men with machine guns who ordered them out of the car, jostled them around, searched them and inspected the car before letting them go. The scout also said he's been on several ball fields when he heard gunshots in the distance. "The threats are real," he said, "and the danger's real." Of the 234 foreign-born players populating rosters or disabled lists on Opening Day in 2011, Venezuelans accounted for 62, which ranked second only to the Dominican Republic's 86 - http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/joe_lemire/11/11/ramos.kidnapping/index.html#ixzz1dQOMmwF3
The Dodgers and general manager Ned Colletti, with his three decades in baseball, have gone sabermetric. In September the Dodgers hired Alex Tamin, a graduate of Johns Hopkins and UCLA School of Law, as Director of Baseball Contracts, Research and Operations. That was a confirmation that Los Angeles is joining the "new school" franchises with a strong belief -- not just an obligatory nod -- that quantitative analysis plays an important role in building a winning team http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/tom_verducci/11/11/dodgers.trackman/index.html#ixzz1dQP166wF
With apologies to Michael Lewis, what if everything you thought you knew about baseball was wrong? As our collective understanding of advanced statistical analysis in baseball grows exponentially with each passing day, we are now among a generation of baseball fans that has done more critical thinking about and retained more esoteric knowledge of the game than our parents could ever have dreamed of. Anyone who has seen MLB Network’s show on the evolution of statistics would think that between Henry Chadwick’s invention of the box score and Branch Rickey’s hiring of Alan Roth as a statistician, baseball fans in the 20th century consumed baseball metrics in only the most rudimentary of ways — via the dreaded batting average, home runs and RBI triumvirate. However, what if I told you that one of the most advanced analytical discoveries — one that sabermetricians hold near and dear to their hearts — was actually discovered before Babe Ruth ever played a game? http://www.fangraphs.com/community/index.php/was-woba-actually-invented-nearly-100-years-ago
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