is the baseball equivalent of auto-racing’s car wreck, in that he misses the point of the sport, but is too compelling not to look.

The NCAA playoffs are rough on college coaches. You have a team of guys who want to win, and maybe 2-3 pitchers adept at getting people out. Maybe just one, and he may have a good shot at a pro career. You’re going to tell me to shelve him in the late rounds and not try? Maybe the kid himself is selling out. If MLB really cared about developing college talent, it would subsidize 1-A programs to use wooden bats, which would save tons of arms.

So it’s 1991, there’s nothing better to do that drive for 45 minutes from my family’s upstate PA retreat to Williamsport to take in the Binghampton Mets vs. the Williamsport Bills. My bro-in-law, a Mets fan (whom I appreciate only because he suffered through the 70s with them) wants to see up-and-comer bopper Jeromy Burnitz. But I digress. Point is, I catch not a foul ball, but the bounce off a foul ball caught on the field and thrown into the stands. A bounce! I still have it though.

Later that season I go to Reading for the first time, which washes the memory of that crummy stadium in Williamsport out of my head. (Reading remains my fave place to watch baseball.) I take in a game and marvel at the HR distance off the bat of one Matt Stairs and think, this guy looks awesome.

Not ‘news’ per se – but jason jaramillo hit his first career home run tonight of of some guy named johan santana

article references what happened with CBP in 2004, but has any NY paper actually gone out and measured the distances? That bit of journalistic intrepitude put some egg on the Phils faces when the Lukoil power alley in LF was about 10’ shorter than the numbers said it was. The fence was moved back a bit in 2005, right?