DoolittleBrothers

The neowinter has finally lifted and it’s a warm, sunshiney day in Kansas City. Now will somebody please tell the bushes and trees in my yard that it’s not autumn? Ah, yard work. I’m pretty bad at it. I just am not an outdoors person. If we lived in the suburbs, I surely would have been ejected by now. Nonetheless, with all weather-related excuses now expired, looks like I’ll have to push the mower today. The yard is bad enough that even I am embarrassed.

Royals mercifully had a day off but now are in Detroit, where they’ll face Verlander, Maroth and Bonderman. Sneaky how Leyland slips Maroth between those two young fireballers. The Royals counter with Greinke, De La Rosa and Meche, who have pitched pretty well this season. (Actually, my wins-added metric has Greinke second to King Felix.) The free-swinging Tigers aren’t a terrible matchup for De La Rosa but his bubble will burst sooner or later. The guy just doesn’t know where the ball is going from one pitch to the next. But I’m rooting for Jorge — we have the same barber.

My “Stat Guy” series returns to the KC Star in tomorrow’s editions, unless I get squeezed out because of more Chiefs retiring. I hate NFL news this time of the year. The first installment of SG this season will focus on FanGraphs.com. I was a little slow to get on board with David Appelman’s creation, but now that I am, I can’t believe I ever watched baseball without it. I’ll link to the column tomorrow and post a Q&A with David that we did this weekend via the miracle of e-mail.

Finally, I want to link to this entry in Joe Posnanski’s blog. In particular, I want to direct you to his comments about Statis-Pro baseball. Brian and I were Statis-Pro fanatics, especially the basketball version. We played the baseball version as well. I remember the game as being obviously flawed (no real platoon splits, no playing time limits though I probably artificially introduced some because I’ve always been like this) but very fun and quick to play. The basketball version, which we modified to suit our tastes, is still produced by a guy here in Missouri, Springfield I believe. Just go to E-Bay and search on Statis-Pro. He has every ABA & NBA season ever played for sale.

Alas, Statis-Pro, which was produced by the Avalon Hill Game Company, went by way of the T-Rex when personal computers began their swift assimilation of the American culture. Unlike Strat-O-Matic, who made the necessary adaptations to survive, Avalon Hill was unable to produce computer versions of their sports games and they died out. (Other sports games they made included Paydirt, Statis-Pro Football and a college version of Paydirt that I can’t remember the title of.) But to this day, I am still running the same basketball league that I created for Statis-Pro Basketball in the early 1980s. (I use Strat-O-Matic these days.)

This entry was posted on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 8:46 am and is filed under Blogroll, Royals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.