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New for May The weather is warming, the playgrounds are full, the cherry blossoms are in bloom, all of which can mean only one thing: It's baseball season. It's always a renewed thrill to head up to the Bronx and sit in the sun on a beautiful spring afternoon - even if this will likely be known as The Year of Tony Womack, and even if the Boss man seems again intent on tearing down paradise and building a parking lot. For Quebecois, though, there was no Opening Day this spring, for the first year in 37 - the Montreal Expos are no more, and Youppi! is learning to lace up skates. I was at the last-ever Expos game, at New York's Shea Stadium last fall, and last month I took a drive down to D.C. to see them in their new incarnation as the Washington Nationals. Baseball Prospectus subscribers can read about it in my review of the game for BP; the rest of you will have to wait till my next column for Elysian Fields Quarterly this summer. Also in the category of articles I wrote but you likely can't read: I wrote an analysis of pitchers who were hit-unlucky last year and hence good bounceback candidates this year (for more on the concept of hit-unluckiness, see my colleague Jay Jaffe's excellent primer on defense-independent pitching statistics) for BP - or rather, for BP's twice-weekly column for the New York Sun. If you're a Sun subscriber, you can read it here; unfortunately I'm not, and none of the newsstands in my neck of the woods sell the Sun, so I'm not exactly sure what I even said in it, much less whether anybody read it. Though I do hear there was one guy on East 82nd Street who managed to find my article, immediately signed Casey Fossum to his rotisserie team, and hasn't forgiven me since. Spring is also a time of renewal, and of bearing fruit (well, strawberries, anyway - it's my website, allow me my strained metaphors), and a pair of projects are doing just that. First off, the long-awaited Field of Schemes Gift Shop is now open for business, where you can buy books and tchotchkes or just send me money to support the cause. (Fighting the good fight doesn't pay nearly so well as it used to, now that the revolution has been outsourced to Bangalore.) If you enjoy reading my work at fieldofschemes.com, or just enjoy drinking coffee from a mug with quotes from infamous sports team owners on it, please stop by and purchase some swag. And on the renewal front, This Week in the Other America is back from hiatus, to report on the Congressional budget agreement that was so monumental and historic, Newsday reported it with an AP story on page 20. As noted last month, I'll have more on this in an upcoming issue of Extra!, but for now this should do to keep you up to date and whet your appetite. |
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