Resolutions/Goals for 2013
So typically I post an entry on or around the new year setting out my goals for ballhawking the next year like this and this. Well, given this is the definition for resolution:
the act of resolving or determining upon an action or course of action, method, procedure, etc.
2012 in review: Observing Baseball
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. That was a sentence automatically inserted. But this here is me, Mateo, writing. With this year of 2012–during which a ton of people mistakenly interpreted the end of the Mayan calendar to say that the world was going to end (the Mayans never predicted anything near that)–closing, I’d like to thank everyone who reads, comments, and generally supports this blog for doing so. It’s nice to see that people wan to read my junk, and I do appreciate it.
Anyway, what you are about to read is a statistical breakdown of what happened here at Observing Baseball in 2012. First I must whore my own entry, though, so if you want to check out the same thing from last year, click this link. The amount that the blog itself, and thus the numbers of the blog, have grown is absolutely ridonculous. And that’s not me–or at least I hope it’s not me–that viewed the blog five more times than in 2011 and commented way more times. (Well I did comment way more times, but it was because you guys were commenting way more times and I was replying to them.)
Now that I’ve done that, let me tell you that I’m not the only blogger who got this report and wanted to share it with the world. Here are the blogs that I follow or could find that have made their reports public. (Yes, I actually did go through MLBlogs’ top-50 trying to see who had made their reports public.) First let’s start with the blogs I follow that published an entry about their report. (If you click the name of the blog, you will be taken to their entry about the report):
1. This is a Very Simple Game…- I was the number three commenter on her blog in 2012 with 29 comments. Woo-hoo! If you think I’m lying you can double-check it by checking out Kristen–that’s the name of the author–’s report 
(I had to add in a bit of her style to make this a true “Simple Game” plug.)
2. Dodger Blue World- Number three again. This time it was with 25 comments. (If I left 29 comments on Emma’s blog, I would have been tied for top-commenter on the site. But, alas, the year was fleeting and I can only be so obnoxious with my over-commenting streaks.) Si piensas que no fui numero tres en terminos de comentarios, puedes asegurar lo en la entrada de Emma. (Again, had to throw some Spanish if I wanted it to be a true Crzblue [her nickname is Crzblue on account of her love/healthy obsession with the Dodgers] plug.)
And here is a stat report I came across because I follow the blog’s author of Twitter:
3. 9 Inning Know It All- I actually just started following Mr. Randolph. I saw that he posted a comment on the “Latest Leaders” entry in the MLBlogosphere page asking if there were any other bloggers out there who were on Twitter or anything like that.
Finally, I have the link to this last one because the author, Nick Badders, told me he was going to publish his entry today. I don’t have the link to the actual entry he plans on publishing about it–nor do I want to ask him for it since he’s probably asleep right now–but I figured he had already made his stat report public, so I got the link to link to. If you want to check out his entry when it comes out today, here’s the link to his home page and you can just keep checking back until he publishes the entry. Update: Nick has since posted his entry, so if you want to check that out, the name his blog is now linked to that:
4. 7000 Coliseum Way- I actually didn’t make Nick’s top-commenter list, but I assume I was just on the cusp of it. If you want to check out the entry where I talked about the radio show I did with Nick, link to that here. Oh, and by the way, the entry that Nick posted is by far the longest of any of these. How long? I have never written an entry that has more words than the one he just published.
And here are a couple of blogs that have posted the annual reports since I wrote this entry:
5. A View From the Bullpen- This was one of the two blogs written by Wayne Peck that I talked about in my last entry, remember?
6. Ballparks on a Budget- Go check it out; it’s free. (See what I did there? I’m such a dork.)
And now here are two more that published after I made that last edit. The latter of which isn’t technically his annual report, but Tony Voda did do his 2012 year of blogging in review:
7. My Serendipitous Life as a Baseball Wife- Yay for the use of multi-syllabic words and rhyme in the titles of baseball blogs.
8. Plouffe’s New Hairdo- I’ve referenced Tony several times in the past month, but if you didn’t catch any of them, he is a fellow Minnesota-based ballhawk.
And another blog entry that has since been posted, which I came across as a result of me following the author on the Twitterverse:
9. If You Write It, They Will Come- It isn’t the actual stat report, but Brad goes over his 2012 season in baseball and such. He was one of the proud few Fan Cave applicants who were selected to go to Arizona, so it really is something to check out.
And yet another one of the blogs I subscribed to has posted an entry, so here’s yet another addition:
10. Minoring In Baseball- I just barely made it onto Mike’s top-commenter list, but I was only two comments away from the number 3 commenter.
And yet another update. Wayne published the annual report from his first blog, so here’s that link as well:
11. Collection of Baseball- See description of number 5 A View From the Bullpen.
And another late entry comes to us from Chris Hernandez, who you may remember from various Yankee Stadium and Citi Field entries:
12. The Ballhawker- I came in third in terms of commenting by just one comment. ( I forgive him for using the wrong agent noun in his title.)
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 40,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 9 Film Festivals
Click here to see the complete report.
Again, thank you, and I hope you have the awesomest 2013 you’ll ever have.
Proofread (I’ll explain this in my next entry, which, by the way, is about New Year’s Goals/ Resolutions and will be up tomorrow when it is 2013.)
230,787 Words Written so far…
MLBlogs I Recommend: Collection of Baseball & A View From the Bullpen
Welcome to the first installment of the “MLBlogs I recommend” entry series. Because it is the first of its kind, I’m just going to take a paragraph or two to explain what this type of entry is and how it came about.
I follow a bunch of blogs on the MLBlogs network. As of the beginning of this entry, the exact number was 30. While I won’t lie and say I read every single entry from all of those blogs that I follow, I’d say I read over 80% of the entries these blogs produce and I try to comment every so often just to let the writer know that I am in fact reading. Anyway, with all of this involvement in the MLBlogs community (I’d like to think I’m in the upper half of MLBloggers in terms of involvement. I can go on semi-sabbaticals of a couple weeks, but I try to make up for it by being overly involved other times–like now.) I realized that I don’t really promote any of the content from any of these bloggers I consume and enjoy. Thus, the series “MLBlogs I Recommend” was born. I’ll usually only do one blog per entry, but I’ll explain why this is different a little later. What I’ll do in each is basically just describe what the blogs write about and why you should read them (if they’re your thing).
In this inaugural entry, I go over the two blogs of e-friend and fellow ballhawk, Wayne Peck. He writes two blogs: Collection of Baseball and A View From the Bullpen. I’ll first go over the former and then I’ll go into the latter. If you’ve read this blog long enough, you may recognize Wayne because I wrote about him and the other ballhawks doing charity work at the beginning of the season to try to help get their message and cause “out there”. Maybe this picture will help jog your memory:
Anyway, onto the first blog we go.
Collection of Baseball-
Wayne started this blog close to 2.5 years ago in April of 2010. It is pretty much your standard ballhawk blog during the summer months. This can be seen as a negative, but ballhawk entries aren’t really meant to be different stylistically. What makes ballhawk entries different from one another is that they’re of different people. Each one takes you on a journey with a different person and tells a different story with a different writing style. However, I will say that Wayne probably puts more emphasis on his charity work than any other ballhawk blog out there. And it’s not in a “Ooh, ooh. Look at me being such a good person for doing stuff for charity” sort of way; it’s because he cares an extraordinary amount for his cause. His charity push is called Snagging Baseballs for Puppies. More specifically, the money people donate as a result of his baseball snagging goes towards helping the Seattle Humane Society . Like all ballhawks, he throws in some more random things during the winter to pass time, but for the most part entries deal with ballhawk schtuff and whatnot. So, you should read this blog if you want to read the ballhawking adventures a nice, Seattle-based, army veteran. Did I mention he’s a veteran? Oh well, I did now. “But Wayne’s a baseball fan, right? He must have some opinion on the daily on-goings of baseball such as trades, free agent signings, and things of that nature. Well, what place better to put all of that stuff than a baseball blog. Why doesn’t he write about that stuff there?” Well, I’m glad you asked (even though you probably didn’t), because that brings us to blog #2.
A View From the Bullpen-
This was a blog Wayne started in August of 2011. The basic idea of it was it was a place where he could write about just baseball. Collection of Baseball was for writing about going to games and ballhawking but this was for writing about his opinion about baseball’s happenings. A.K.A the “typical” baseball blogger. As in, whenever a common person thinks about a baseball blogger, they don’t think about a ballhawk; they think about the amateur (the technical meaning of it, no the derogatory meaning) sitting at home and typing up their opinions about what x manager or general manager should do or why trade x was good or bad. Oh, and if you’re wondering, I’m almost certain that the blog’s title comes from the fact that Wayne’s usual spot at Safeco Field is the “Pen” area in right field, so it’s his way of saying that the blog is just his view of this game that we all love and enjoy.
I think I’ve given you enough links to be able to navigate your way to both of these blogs. I hope you enjoy. And if you like what you see of Wayne and his two blogs, why don’t you go ahead and give him a follow on Twitter?
And while you’re at it, you might as well give his Facebook page a “like” as well, right? (Yes, I am giving you all of these links in the text that I am writing. I know with some computers there are just links everywhere, but I actually inserted links to his various sites in the places that look like they have hyperlinks.)
Oh, and if you haven’t voted for the entries you would like to see me write about in these coming baseball-less months, here’s the poll to go ahead and do that. After the poll I will list all of he expired entry ideas, along with how many votes they had when I finally did write about them and took them off of the poll. After that, I will include an easier-to-understand ranking of the remaining poll options:
1. Ballhawk Interviews- 33 votes
2. Stadium Profiles- 26 votes
3. Ballhawk Profiles- 33 votes
4. Dissect (a) Baseball(s)- 26 votes
5. Tour Target Field when there’s snow on the ground- 26 votes
6. Weird Observing Baseball Facts and Records- 28 votes
7. New Observing Baseball Icon- 17 votes
8. MLBlogs I Recommend- 33 votes
And the current rankings as of me typing this:
T1. Observing Baseball Trivia and Ballhawking Gear- 31 votes
3. Ten Minutes With Two GMs (except on the poll I didn’t write any of the numbers out because I felt lazy that day)- 29 votes
4. Characters of Observing Baseball- 28 votes
T5. My Favorite MLB Players and Salute to Up-and-Coming Blogs- 27 votes
7. Ask a Statistician- 26 votes
T8. Instructional Videos and Complimentary Tickets!- 24 votes
T10. My Favorite MLB Teams and Gate Opening Times of MLB Stadiums- 22 votes
T12. Blast From The Baseball Past, Battle of the Retreival Devices, and Reference Guide to Ballhawk Terms- 20 votes
15. Evaluate and Critique Ballhawk Stats- 18 votes
16. Look at MLBlog Themes- 16 votes
17. Format of the Entries- 13 votes
18. Informal Tour of AT&T Park- 3 votes
19. WordPress Stats and Things- 2 votes
If you have no clue what any of these ideas for entries mean, I explained most of them in this entry I am linking to right now.
Only you can prevent forest fires.
Sorry…wrong end-sentence. Here’s the right one:
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New Observing Baseball Icon (Part 2)
If this isn’t your first time reading this blog, you’ve probably seen my “Observing Baseball Icon”. You know, the one I designed and wrote about in this entry. But…for those of you who are too lazy to click the link for whatever reason, here’s the icon I’m talking about:
Now, let me clarify the thing that everyone I have talked about the icon in person with has asked me: “Mateo, isn’t that a logo.” No, it’s not the logo. The unofficial logo for Observing Baseball can be found *within* the icon (it’s the circle with the “OB” in it), but this image itself is not the logo.
Anyway, I liked this icon when I made it during my high school’s senior internship, but now that I look back at it, it’s really cluttered and is too “me, me, me” for my taste and probably everyone else’s. So, with the new year coming up, I decided I have excuse enough to remake the icon. I thought of the basic idea for the logo pretty quickly, so while we were filming the “How to Dissect/Deconstruct a Baseball” video, I explained to Jonathan what kind of picture I wanted him to take for the logo. He failed:
So then I took a picture of him showing him how I wanted it to look–which also ended up being a failure of a picture, but he got the idea:
Anyway, we took the final picture that I ended up using right after that:
I knew I wasn’t going to write this entry until about Christmas, but the day I was supposed to leave to San Francisco for Christmas, I remembered that I don’t actually have Photoshop on my laptop, so–almost an hour later–I had the new icon edited and ready to go:
Then I thought, “How would it look if I went with black instead of white?”:
The I thought, “You can’t see my hand in that one; let me change the angle of the color gradient.”:
Then I thought, “My two favorite colors are orange and green. Why don’t I make those the two background colors?”:
Then I thought, ‘Well, I might as well see what would happen if I used an all-bright-colors background.”:
Then I thought, “Why don’t I make it Christmas colors for fun, since that’s coming up soon.”:
Then I realized that I probably should have darkened the red in the logo, because red and green are complementary colors, so I did that:
And then I thought I should go to bed and stop messing around with color schemes in the computer lab.
So, I ask you, my dear readers: Which would you like to see the most as the icon for Observing Baseball moving forward? Vote for your favorite in the poll below:
And as always, vote for which entry(s) you would like to see next if you haven’t. ( I know it’s annoying, but it’s just in case someone new comes along whenever. I don’t want them to have to go back like five entries just to be able to vote for the entries of their choice.):
And here’s the link to where I explain what these different entry types mean.
I guess I should mention that with this entry coming out, there will be still three more entries coming out between today and January 1st. They will be published three days straight. So they will go December 30th, December 31st, and January 1st. The last one, however, will just be me publishing the stat report that WordPress sends out at the end of the year. It should be interesting for all of you guys regardless, though, if you’re into that kind of stuff.
228,527 Words Written so far…
Weird Observing Baseball Facts and Records
Ah weird numbers: my specialty. So, it was completely natural for me to write this entry. What better to do than find arbitrary statistics about my blog and place meaning in them. Just call me the Tim Kurkjian of the MLBlogs world. (Kurkjian still does the “Kurk-gems” segment, right? I’ve pretty much stopped watching Baseball Tonight in favor of MLB Tonight on MLB Network.) Here goes some of the random numbers.
Words:
First, let’s start off with the big one: number of words total. Over the course of this blog, I have written 225, 518 words. That’s a lot of words. I am astounded by this number personally. With the number of entries I currently have up, that works out to an average of 823 words per entry. However, you’ve got to keep in mind there are certain kinds of entries that are way under and over this average. For example, none of my “Re-view of the Preview” entries even reached this number. I don’t think any of them even surpassed the 600 word plateau. With the average for the thirty of those being 200-300 words, it brings the average way down. If I had to guess, my average ballhawking entry is probably in the 1,400 word range. My longest entry ever is 3,631 words. You can check that out here. It was when I met up with the Cook family in Washington D.C., so I decided to take up Todd Cook’s style of writing for a day and over-document. It wasn’t my longest entry by a mile, though. The next closest entry in terms of words was my informal tour of Citi Field where I covered a lot of ground in general with a guest by the name of Alex also joining in with me. (And for the record: no, he didn’t accompany me on my mini-tour of Citi Field. He entertained himself in the club level while I ran around the stadium for five minutes.) You can check out that entry if you’d like by clicking these words I have typed in this sentence. That entry was 3,344 words long. The least amount of words I have ever written in an entry is 19 words. The reason for it was because the entry itself was pretty much a video entry, so the 19 words were the introduction the video. Click here for the link to that entry. I believe it was my first video filmed with a high-quality camera. And by high-quality, I mean not a webcam. As for the quality of the video…Eh, I made an unsuccessful attempt at a homemade teleprompter that is very obvious when you watch the video. It’s pretty bad looking bad at it. But hey, cut me some slack; it was my third video ever.
Baseballs given away:
Next fact: The past two years I have snagged 384 baseballs. Of those, I have given 110 of them away. For those who don’t have a calculator, that is 29% of the baseballs I have snagged I have given away. Whenever I talk to people and they ask me the question everyone asks ballhawks: “What do you with all of the baseballs?” I tell them that I give about a third of them away. So that’s pretty accurate, right? In 2011, I gave away 34 of 161 snagged (21%). The most I gave away that year was 4 baseballs in a game. I can’t remember when that was, but to me now, that’s a low “high” number. I think my lack of giving stems from the fact that I was snagging baseballs at a ton of different stadiums for my successful period of ballhawking in July, so I didn’t have to worry about pleasing any ushers for later games. I was planning to give the majority of my baseballs towards the end of the year when I wasn’t as mobile. When this happened, however, I hit an absolute cold streak where I wasn’t snagging more than three baseballs at a game that often at all. As such, I didn’t have that many baseballs to give away. As a result, the middle of the summer remained my peak for giving away baseballs. In 2012, I gave away 76 of 223 baseballs (34%). This was lead by games where I gave away a ton of baseballs. The most I gave out in a game was 7 baseballs ( I snagged 9, I believe that day). However, it was one of three games where I gave away 6 or more baseballs this year.
Pictures:
In my entries I have used a total of 4,545 pictures. That averages out to 16.5 pictures per entry. That’s a lot higher than I would have guessed. Although, I guess the list is top heavy with ballhawking entries bearing the brunt of the load. The most pictures I’ve used in a single entry was the same as the entry where I wrote the most words ever with 80 pictures.
Commemorative Baseballs:
I have snagged 30 commemorative baseballs since I started this blog. I snagged a Citi Field commemorative baseball in 2010, but besides that, all of my commemorative snags have come this past year. My record for snagging commemorative baseballs in one game is 7. This came–I believe–when the Nationals were using nothing but Shea Stadium and Nationals Park commemorative baseballs.
Time Spent On Game:
I have roughly spent 40,882 Minutes on the 85 games I kept track of either the “Time at Game” or “Time Spent On Game” stat for. That’s over 681 Hours I have spent on baseball games. If you don’t know how the stat works, it is the time I spend at the ballpark itself plus the time I spend traveling to and from the ballpark. For the games where I only had the “Time at Game” stat, I added a round amount of hours (usually 2 hours for local games) to the total I had in place to account for transportation time. For those without calculators, the average amount of time I spent on a game was 481 Minutes or just over 8 Hours.
Video:
As of late I have been incorporating videos a little more than before, but I have been using videos in my entries for over a year now. As a result, I have uploaded 6074 seconds of video to YouTube for this blog. Why seconds? Because have you ever tried to add up times when they’re in this format: 6:51+ 4:26? No, because it’s annoying as heck. Also, I do have other YouTube videos out there (I’ll get to some of those in the next entry), but these are the videos made for the purpose of incorporating them into a blog entry. If you’re wondering what that seconds mark translates into in the 0:00 format, though–First of all, get a calculator; I’m sick of doing all of the math for you–it is 101 Minutes 14 Seconds. If you divide that by the number of videos, it is an average of 6:20 per video. However, I should include the caveat that the shortest video I have put on YouTube is 6 six seconds, which kind of throws off the average (and can be found in the entry I’m linking to here). Meanwhile, the longest video is 16 Minutes 2 Seconds. That was the entry where I took apart a baseball a couple weeks ago.
That’s all I have for you for now. Surprisingly–even though it doesn’t appear that way–this entry is over 1,000 words. However, if you have any obscure stats you think of and would like for me to include, leave your suggestions down below in the comments, and if it doesn’t take an eternity to calculate like these almost did, I will calculate it and add a section below that last one right above this paragraph.
I realize I have been off schedule lately, but the holiday/finals time threw a wrinkle in my plans. So, to make it up to you, I plan to have published three new entries (in addition to this one) by/on January, 1, 2013. While it is pretty set in stone what those three will be, you can keep voting on which entries I will write after those in this poll down here. I will include all of the already-used ideas below it as well as the rankings of the remaining categories:
1. Ballhawk Interviews- 33 votes
2. Stadium Profiles- 26 votes
3. Ballhawk Profiles- 33 votes
4. Dissect (a) Baseball(s)- 26 votes
5. Tour Target Field when there’s snow on the ground- 26 votes
6. Weird Observing Baseball Facts and Records- 28 votes
And here are the standings for the remaining poll items as they stand while I type these words:
T1. Observing Baseball Trivia/MLBlogs I Recommend- 28 votes
3. Ballhawking Gear- 27 votes
T4. My Favorite MLB Players/Characters of Observing Baseball- 25 votes
6. Ask a Statistician- 24 votes
T7. Salute to Up-and-coming Blogs/10 Minutes with 2 GMs- 23 votes
9. Instructional Videos- 22 votes
10. My Favorite MLB Teams- 21 votes
T11. Gate Opening Times of MLB Stadiums/Complementary Tickets!- 20 votes
T13. Blast From The Baseball Past/ Battle of the Retreival Devices- 19 votes
15. Reference Guide to Ballhawk Terms- 18 votes
16. Evaluate and Critique Ballhawk Statistics- 16 votes
T17. New Observing Baseball Icon/Look at MLBlogs Themes- 15 votes
19. Format of the Entries- 12 votes
If you’re confused as to what all of these names mean, here is the link to the entry where I explain nearly all of them. And here is the entry where I explain the other two.
Also, you can vote which of the remaining days you’d like to read an entry on. I don’t know, for example if people are more or less likely to read something on Christmas, so here you can tell me that. Unlike the other poll, though, you can only vote for three days and not as many times as you’d like:
227,100 Words Written so far
Tour Target Field in the Snow
Here it is. It was cold. I hope you appreciate it:
Here is the poll if you want to keep voting on which entries you want to see:
Particular attention be paid to “Weird Observing Baseball Facts and Records” and “MLBlogs I Recommend”, since they are tied for the top spot as I write these words.
1. Ballhawk Interviews- 33 votes
2. Stadium Profiles- 26 votes
3. Ballhawk Profiles- 33 votes
4. Dissect (a) Baseball(s)- 26 votes
5. Tour Target Field when there’s snow on the ground- 26 votes
And again, here’s an explanation of all of the items on the poll if you have no idea what any of them mean.
Dissecting/ Deconstructing Baseballs
A long video, but I wanted to be complete with this video rather than rush it and get it out on time. Enjoy my incompetence:
Keep on voting for the entries you’d like to see. If you’ll notice, I’ve taken the parts of the poll down that have already been written about, but I’ll include at the end how many votes they had when I took them off:
1. Ballhawk Interviews- 33 votes
2. Stadium Profiles- 26 votes
3. Ballhawk Profiles- 33 votes
4. Dissect (a) Baseball(s)- 26 votes
If you have no idea what ay of these ideas mean, here’s the link to the entry where I explained them.
Also, the newest “Latest Leaders” entry came out on the MLBlogs’ Central blog and here I am:
Yeah, I’ve visited a lot of MLBlogs (all of the ones in gray). But more importantly, thank you to all of you guys for reading. Really, thank you. If you want to check out the full entry with links to the other blogs and all that good stuff, here’s the link to it.
Another thing is I was thinking of making a blooper video for this particular video, so you can vote for that here. I got a request from my camera man and guest star to do so, but I want to know if that’s something you’d actually be interested in:
Ballhawk Pofile: Zac Weiss
Age as of November, 30, 2012: 20 (January, 25th, 2012)
Home Stadium: PNC Park
Home City: Pittsburgh, PA
Throws: Left (It’s really more of a “catches right” thing, because obviously one does not throw a ton while ballhawking, but no one says “catches right”, so yeah. Zac is actually one of the very few ballhawks who is left handed. The only other one who comes to mind is Alex Kopp.)
Total Baseballs as of November, 30, 2012: 434
Yearly breakdown:
In only his fourth year of ballhawking/snagging baseballs, we can see that Zac is on the steady upwards climb in terms of his ballhawking — still not having a season where he hasn’t improved his per-game average from the previous season. This is comes at no surprise to anyone who knows of Zac’s work ethic.
Top-5 “toss-uppers”:
Yes, it’s very top heavy. Some may use this as a criticism of Zac, but what naysayers fail to recognize is that getting 37 or 29 baseballs from the same person requires something admirable in one shape or from. Getting that many baseballs from one person requires 1. A dedication to ballhawking long enough so that you could get that many baseballs from one player or coach without him recognizing you. or Zac’s approach: 2. Foster a good relationship with him so that he’ll toss you that many baseballs. Zac has his charity initiative (which you can read about if you click this sentence), so he brought it up with both Heberto “Herbie” Andrade and Euclides Rojas, and they feel as though they are doing good by tossing him baseballs — which they *are*. This might seem cheap, but Zac had to start the charity in the first place, and can you really look negatively on a person for starting a charity? At that point, I think you are just looking for reasons to dislike a person. In addition, he also fosters the relationship between Andrade and Rojas by speaking to them in Spanish. Learning Spanish, of course, not being something you just learn in a day.
Top-5 Locations of Snags:
The ballpark all of these snags should come as no surprise, since PNC Park is by far the park Zac has attended the most in his career as a ballhawk. However, the location of the balls he snags within PNC Park is very odd. Of the eight ballhawks on mygameballs.com who list PNC Park as their home stadium and have snagged more than 5 baseballs in 2012, Zac is the only one whose highest “snag location” isn’t the left field bleachers. While this makes sense, since left field is the place where the season ticket holders are restricted to in the first half-hour of the gates opening, it means that once the rest of the stadium opens, Zac –more so than anyone else — takes advantage of this fact and flees the left field bleachers. As one reader put it:
” … Zac [plays] a completely different strategy than all of the other PNC regulars. For God knows what reason, all of the other regulars seem to battle it out for BP homers in the LF bleachers. Those seats seem to get fairly packed out there. Meanwhile, every single game I’ve seen him at Zac ends up in the handicapped seating area (or seats right behind it) in the RF foul corner. I am 100% on board with this strategy. There is almost no competition, or very little. And it gives you great access to the visiting team’s pitchers — which actually results in a lot of the “competition” being autograph collectors. [Down] the RF line, you can scoop up foul grounders over the short fence. There is very little foul territory and it is very easy (and frequent) for foul balls to hop into the crowd. I have no clue why more [people] don’t go down there…”
Breakdown of baseballs year-by-year:
From this we can see that he has a pretty steady ratio of hit balls to thrown balls. While people — like with the people who threw him the most baseballs — might see the surplus of thrown balls when compared to hit balls as a negative, this again is not necessarily the case. Sure, hit balls may be worth more to some people, but they aren’t objectively harder to obtain or anything like that. Zac’s style has just lent itself more to snagging thrown balls. Along with going elsewhere besides the left field bleachers when the stadium opens-up, Zac also does his homework when it comes to the players so as to increase his odds of tossing out a nugget that gets a ball tossed to him. Additionally, he has one of the main attributes of a hit-ball ballhawk down: speed. So it’s not completely the case that he is unskilled at getting hit baseballs, but his ballhawking just doesn’t pan-out that way as to snag a ton of hit balls.
Snag Tracker:
I’ve pretty much covered this. I could do something further on this with another ballhawk in future profiles (if I do others), but Zac has snagged a total of 10 baseballs outside of PNC Park, so it would be pretty redundant to do it here.
Top-5 Games:
Those aren’t bad highs for a career 3.12 Balls Per Game; not bad at all. If you want to check them out, the links to his blog entries on those games, they can be found 1. Here, 2. Here, 3. Here, 4. Here, and 5. Here.
Finally, if you want to check-out Zac’s blog in general, it is:
Stadium Profiles: Turner Field
Overall Grade: A
Aesthetic Grade: B-
Turner Field really isn’t anything special when it comes to looks. That and it has tons of ads when you look towards the outfield. For me, ads, unless they blend classically with the stadium, are a negative. On the positive side, because it is built in the style it is, it has some oldish charm to the stadium. The scoreboard is beautiful and prominent. The reason I had it on the positive side of a C is it really doesn’t have anything that detracts from the game experience, but it has certain qualities that enhances the visual aspect of it.
Atmosphere: A+
Two words: Tomahawk. Chop:
You may have heard of it and know of the rhythm of it. Heck, you may have even heard it on TV during a Braves. However, there is truly nothing like being there when they get going at Turner Field. I mean really getting into it. I was there when there really wasn’t much of a crowd, but even with my experience in those three days, I feel the moral obligation to do the chop along with the Braves fans whenever I see a game of theirs on TV. Besides this, you may or may not know this, but the Braves have the largest geographical fan base of any team in the major leagues:
Okay, I know it looks like the Rangers do in the map, but I think they’re being very generous to the Rangers and the two Florida teams. I think the three teams surrounding the Rangers have a bit more of that territory, and the two Florida teams are still very young. While they may hold the majority of fans in the regions highlighted, everyone over the age of 45 in the region is more likely to be a Braves fan than anything else. Both the Marlins and the Rays have been around for less than 20 years. Anyway, the ultimate point I’m trying to get at is that there are a lot of people who travel to Braves fans. Therefore, the crowd is more likely to be passionate. Who do you think will be cheering louder: the fan just getting to the game as a way of relaxing after work or the person who is taking vacation days just to visit their favorite team’s stadium. I hadn’t even considered the geographical factor until I got to Turner Field and talked to people about where they were from. More so than any other stadium I have visited thus far, there were a ton of people from out of town.
Fan Experience: A
First of all, I consider “Atmosphere” a contributing factor. Secondly, I couldn’t tell that well about the stadium as a whole, which is why I held off on giving this an A+, but the sample of people I encountered in my three days there were definitely nice in the aggregate. It really did feel like a southern hospitality stereotype was coming to fruition. But more than that, it was so refreshing coming from the New York City environment. For example, in New York you can for the most part tell it is the vendor’s job. In Atlanta, the beer vendors have fun with it. There are vendors that use humor in their selling in New York, but their default emotion while saying the jokes is one of emotionlessness; whereas some Atlanta vendors had the demeanor of a stand-up comedian while in the stands.
Turner Field also has a couple other things going for it in the “fan experience” sub-category. First, maybe I’m just blowing this out of proportion because of my familiarity with the Yankees and Mets, but I liked that it didn’t seem like even though they had this vast fan base that they were “too good” to cater to the paying fan. Also, even though I never entered it. Turner Field looks like possibly the best play area of the stadiums I have been to:
Well except for the Nick-loving kids. For the record, the reason it is a Cartoon Network themed play area, it is because the team was owned by Turner Broadcasting Systems, which is a part of Time Warner Cable, owner of Cartoon Network.
Another great thing about Turner Field’s fan experience is they have a pretty neat museum. It isn’t free on it’s own like most museums, but if you go on a tour of Turner Field (before batting practice), a ticket to the museum is included that you can use all day. If you want to check out these along with other pictures I took on the 4th of July game, here is the link to the gallery on Facebook.
Details: A+
This is where you see what a team is made of. In the details of the stadium.The lazy, unimaginative teams fail here and the better ones thrive. As you can see, the Braves are in the later category. If you didn’t know, my trip last year was at the beginning of July (4th of July 2011 was my first game there). Atlanta in July is not exactly the arctic tundra. Therefore the touch the Braves had with installing fans in the center field concourse/plaza that sprayed water was absolutely magnificent.
Even better, an oft overlooked feature: the seats. The Braves –although not spectacular– have (sadly) one of the better seat designs in the major leagues:
Yes, details.
Ballhawking During Batting Practice: A+
Dat gap:
This is what we in the old country call Glove Trick Heaven. (Side Note: If you try to get a ball via Glove Trick or other retrieval devices in left field, you have to be quick on the draw, because there are probably a couple other people with a device on hand. I would factor this into the equation, but I’m only evaluating the stadium itself.)
Left Field:
Wow. Yet another heavenly sight. This is debatably the best outfield section in the major leagues for snagging baseballs in the major leagues. The seating goes all the way from the foul pole to the batter’s eye. And while there may be another place in the major leagues where this is the case (I can’t think of any), this is the only one where all of the individual section go across in a more or less straight line. The simplicity of it makes it absolutely gorgeous in terms of ballhawking, and the sheer amount of space in the outfield makes it amazing for snagging hit baseballs during batting practice
Center Field:
While center field sections usually aren’t the way to go, this is a pretty viable back-up plan. It may seem like light years away from home plate, but even though the home bullpen acts as a partition between it and the right field seats, the rightmost section in the center field seats is really right-center field when you think about it. It’s just the mentality that makes people think it is further than it actually is, but it doesn’t take a shot to reach that section, which can be a nice place to camp out if the left and right field sections of the outfield are crowded.
Right Field:
This is what it is: a right field section for when lefties are up. I’m not particularly in love with it, though. First of all, the home bullpen takes out a prime section and makes it so players have to pull the ball a bit more than usual to get it into these seats. Then there’s the fact that the seats don’t open until an hour after the gates do, so maybe there’s a negative association there. But finally, the gap in right field is so much smaller than the one in left and center:
It is a maximum of three feet (probably one or two, so really the only balls that go down there are dropped baseballs by fans in the first row.
Ballhawking During the Game: A
While the outfield is a great place to be during the game if it’s not crowded, it’s not very crowd-proof if there are a bunch of people during the game, since Atlanta is 22nd in home runs in 2012. That means if you get moved back like tens rows due to fans, there is a slimer chance for a game home run. However, the place to probably be for the game is the cross-aisle behind home plate (highlighted by the green line I have included:
I personally didn’t stand back there, but it was because I had pretty much an entire section to myself:
For the record, I did catch a foul ball, which to this day remains the only foul ball I have ever technically “caught on the fly” off of the bat of Nate McLouth. If you want to check out the gallery from that July 5th game, I’ve linked this entire sentence to the page. Heck, I might as well give you the July 6th gallery while I’m at it. Here’s that link. I was also with my mom for this whole roadtrip, who wanted me to sit with her, but otherwise I might have gone to the cross-aisle once this section filled up a little.
Special thanks goes out to Todd Cook for allowing me to use many of his panoramic pictures in the entry from his plethora thereof. If you want to check out his gallery of 10,000,000 pictures and more, check out his museum by clicking on the words you just read.
Anyway, that’s that. Keep voting for the entries you would like to see:
If you have already voted and have a different perspective, I have taken the repeat voter restrictions off and they will remain off for 24 hours after the publication if you want to vote again. However, I do please ask you to only vote one additional time.
And although Ballhawk Interviews is the next most voted subject, I still have to ask you guys who you want to see interviewed, so in the meantime, I will do an entry on whatever the second most voted on item is in the poll (hint, hint, for those people voting a second time). Meanwhile, here is a poll to let me know which ballhawk you would want to see me interview:
Disclaimer: As of now, none of the ballhawks have agreed to be interviewed (since I just sent the e-mail five minutes ago), so the person who is interviewed is the highest voted-for person who agrees to be interviewed; not necessarily the most voted-for person period.
Finally, since Ballhawking Gear is one of the entry types that is in second place, keep voting on how you would like to see it:
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