The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball Blog

Because of a prior outside commitment, my posting over the next month is going to be much less frequent than it was, unfortunately.

What’s this site for?
Hey. I wrote my book, The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, over the course of three years and change. I set up this blog to talk about topics from the book, and particularly to add on to the book’s content. Any research project this size means that there’s a ton of information that gets left out, and I think much of it’s worth sharing.

Sometimes, there are current events that bring up book topics or research – for instance, when Lew Burdette passed, I wrote a little post on his spitballing.

Obviously, the most widely-known posts are those dealing with contemporary issues, and how they relate to baseball’s history. The latest, on Torii Hunter and how his gift of champagne to Mike Sweeney reminded me of the days when players and teams regularly took such gifts and payoffs, and how that led to disaster in 1919 (“A bubbly reminder of a corrupt past“).

I’m also posting reviews, short book excerpts, and notices of signing engagements. I’m trying to ape Tango’s Inside the Book site, which I’ve rather enjoyed.

I’m entirely fascinated by baseball’s history and its rules, and I hope to be able to convey some of that joy and make everyone appreciate it as much as I do. I would love it if the site got people interested in the topic and they bought the book. If that counts as self-promotion for you, I hope that I can provide enough good free stuff to overwhelm you.

Were you a hall monitor?
No. I was a horrible delinquent. My parents were on a first-name basis with the administrators of every school I’ve ever attended, and I spent a significant fraction of my time at school in detention. This may help to explain the obvious joy I take in the topic, and my admiration for Gaylord Perry and other scoundrels, and why I wrote a whole book on it.

Why bring up this incident, which I find trivial?
For whatever reason, I thought it was interesting. Maybe it touched something in the book, or some of baseball’s past, or whatever. I’m sorry you don’t find it as cool as I do, but hang around — whatever your taste is, I’ll throw something out soon. If there’s something you’d like to see in particular, drop me a line.

Isn’t it a conflict of interest to be a Mariner fan and write about this stuff?
I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. I love the topic, and I wrote a book about it. I’m not going to deny that I’m an M’s fan — but if you’ve read my stuff at USS Mariner, you know I’m a particularly critical one. I could, I guess, pretend that I didn’t grow up watching those wretched teams, and I’m not part of the beat-down, abjectly depressed Mariner Nation. But I am. I love baseball, and I’m a fan of the home team.

What’s the deal with comments?
Comments here are moderated, which means they don’t go up until I look at them and wave them on through. This is because so far, every post that touches a team’s current players gets me a ton of personal insults that just don’t add anything to a reasonable discussion.

Because I do, despite the most common accusation, have a life, that sometimes means it takes a while before I get to them.

Sometimes, when the signal:noise ratio gets too horrible, like when the Angels fans descended here, I’ll turn them off for a particular topic and request email instead.

So this is not a free-wheeling discussion forum of the kind you might be used to. Sorry if that’s a disappointment.