Hope everyone has a great Labor Day Weekend, and you will no doubt have plenty to blog about as the races heat up while the temps start to cool off. Here’s something that might be worth blogging about as well. Tom "Tangotiger" is one of the most well-known and respected sabermetricians out there, so we thought it would be great if we could give some attention to his very worthy Scouting Report project. Our friend and BAM colleague Cory Schwartz posted about it on the Fantasy 411 blog, and you might want to pitch in and maybe blog about it and link to it from your MLBlog. Here’s what Tom sent us, for your consideration, and happy blogging…

Request for link to: http://www.tangotiger.net/mlb
"The 2007 Scouting Report by the Fans for the Fans"

For the fifth year in a row, I am once again asking for hardcore baseball fans to participate in the annual Scouting Report project, in which fans evaluate the fielding characteristics of players on their team.

So far, I have solicited fans through various team blogs, and have received enthusiastic responses.  For example, the results of 2006 can be found here.

Fans take this project seriously, as I have encountered less than 2% ballots which can be considered "junk".  (I have my own algorithm that determines the reasonableness of a ballot.)  One of the criticisms that I have encountered is that the sample would be biased, given that the fans were directed by one or two of their team blogs.  While I would contend that blogs do not engender groupthink, that’s really just my personal opinion.

The hope is that I can link to a mainstream audience, through MLB.com or MLBlogs.com, so as to reach fans that may be of a different mindset.  All results will be published at the end of the season, for all to see.  I’ll have the data segregated between the two sources of fans (my current crop, and one through an MLB site).  I will also be able to test how much junk ballots I’ve received to determine how seriously the mainstream fan takes this project.

Tom

Thanks to Sid McHenry for his article that we have just put in front of probably one of the largest audiences on the Internet. It’s a celebration of the great baseball cap tradition, and it is the centerpiece of our Cap Off Your Summer Sale promo panel that is on the mediawall of MLB.com as well as up to 30 club homepages (depending on room/initiatives with each club). Sid can tell you all about it…feel free to leave him lots of comments. We notice that our friend Coral got some nice linkage from that article as well. It’s a nice MLB.com clip for Sid’s resume, and just imagine what kind of traffic his article is getting when considering a weekday during the pennant races on MLB.com and our network of club sites. I think there’s a good chance that it’s more eyeballs than any U.S. newspaper will get today. This is an extension in our ongoing DVD review project involving MLBloggers, as noted in previous posts here…and another example of what you might stumble across with a subscription to MLBlogs. You can click around on various club sites and find it, and here’s just one example currently on the Dodgers’ homepage. I remember when people use to criticize baseball for "not marketing itself" effectively. Well, fans are now marketing baseball. What could be better than that? I think fans listen to other fans. Just go to a ballpark and you can tell.

Thanks to Carl Shimkin (aka Carl the Cabbie) for being the latest MLBlogger to get an MLB.com byline. His review of the 1977 Yankees DVD Set is now a panel on Yankees.com and will be considered for the same treatment on MLB.com the rest of this week.

Just last week, Brewers MLBlogger Steve Dempsey saw his review of the unbreakable records DVD (below) posted in our Barry Bonds/756 special area for many millions of viewers.

Here is the running list of this ongoing campaign we’ve started to turn MLBloggers into MLB.com writers, another pretty cool reason to have an MLBlog. More DVDs will be coming my way from upstairs at MLB Productions, and then I’ll put them up for grabs here.

Yankees 1977 World Series Collector’s Edition Set | Buy

Baseball’s Most Unbreakable Feats | Buy

Cal Ripken Jr./Legends Collector’s Edition | Buy

Twins 1987 World Series Collector’s Edition Set | Buy

Mets 2006 Team DVD | Buy

Beisbol: The Latin Game | Buy

If you look through my recent posts, you can see examples of how MLBloggers have been writing MLB.com articles reviewing those awesome DVD sets that come to my desk during the course of a year from MLB Productions upstairs. The latest such example is by Steve Dempsey, author of the My Brewers MLBlog. As part of ongoing, comprehensive and unrivaled coverage of Barry Bonds’ ascension to the top of the all-time home run charts (coverage that actually is more than five years in the making, with special areas for every milestone longball), Steve’s story takes a look at Baseball’s Most Unbreakable Feats and examines those magical records that seem unlikeliest to fall. I don’t have Photoshop handy at the moment so no screengrab, but as of this writing (4:19 pm ET on 8/10), it is part of the #3 panel on the mediawall of our MLB.com homepage, as a link in the Bonds/Hall of Fame Exhibit package. Steve’s story goes hand-in-hand with that of MLB.com Cardinals beat writer Matthew Leach, another MLBlogger. Next up: Carl Shimkin‘s review of the Yankees 1977 World Series Collector’s Edition DVD Set. Look for it later next week on Yankees.com and perhaps MLB.com’s homepage. There also is a Cubs DVD review outstanding, just waiting to land in my inbox from the assigned MLBlogger so it can be scheduled on Cubs.com. Once again, the tradeoff is an MLB.com byline and keeping the product, and we at MLB.com (and baseball fans) get content from writers in the MLBlogs community. I will let you all know whenever I receive any more new releases from Productions.

The MLBlog posts continue to pour in with reaction to Barry Bonds becoming the all-time home run king. It’s his moment, and now the collective reaction is the proof of his career to date. Whether it’s good or bad, it’s his making. I’m not going either way on this one and will let everything play itself out over time, but the one thing that DOES stand out to me with this record is how I felt when I watched Barry give his speech following Hank’s video. Watching the emotional thank you he gave his late father Bobby, watching his heartfelt words, all I could do was wonder where that Barry Bonds was hiding for these past two-plus decades. I’ve been around the game that long as well. I wish I had seen that guy a lot more often. It felt for a moment like he was unquestionably one of us, one of countless millions of ordinary people who just love baseball and have been part of the passage of the greatest rite of all. How many fans before that moment could even tell you what Barry’s voice sounded like other than a sound bite snapping at media? As a lifetime honorary Hall of Fame voter for the Baseball Writers Association of America, I’ve got a presumptive first-ballot vote waiting for him five years from whenever he hangs up the spikes. The only question is whether anything will unfold between now and then that could keep him off the ballot. Now it’s time to tack on more homers and make A-Rod’s mission a little harder, and it’s time for the court of public opinion to keep weighing in as you are doing now. No matter how you feel, I think you have to agree that the man with the mic was someone you could have liked a lot all along. If only that moment could have been multiplied by years and years. What do you think? That’s what I remember about 756. Not so much the homer itself. The human being emerging.

Back from one of the most unforgettable times in sports — the 2007 Hall of Fame Induction Weekend. Wow. Words can’t describe that one. Record 75K fans, a (cleaned up) Woodstock atmosphere, 55 living Hall of Famers on the same stage (most ever in one place), etc. After writing all those articles including our Induction mainbar on Sunday for MLB.com and BaseballHall.org, I thought it was appropriate to write about the memories we’ll take away from Cooperstown. Right at the top of my own list was walking out of the Museum late Saturday night after the private reception for Hall of Famers — and seeing
Cal Ripken signing autographs for the mob still packed on both sides of Main Street behind barricades after the earlier Red Carpet Parade. Fans on the other side would chant, "Please, Cal!" and he would accommodate them, and he wound up staying out there signing items until past midnight, despite a looming speech the next day. I got beside him and took a bunch of pictures (like these) for our sites, and I asked "Does this bring back memories for you?" Cal said, "Yes. Pretty wild." It made you think of the 2,131 victory lap. It made you think of all those seasons when he would set up at a certain spot and sign every last autograph. This impromptu Night Before The Induction Autographathon is my lasting memory from maybe the greatest weekend I have seen in 2 1/2 decades around pro sports.

Now that I’m back, I just saw something that I think pretty much says it all.

Click here and then where you see Sights and Sounds, click the first video link to view the full Hall of Fame broadcast. Go to the 1:28.21 timestamp on the media player. It’s the part where Cal is acknowledging his children, Rachel and Ryan. As the camera shows the children, look closely at the row right behind them. That’s John Travolta and Kelly Preston. I was wiping away tears as well, but wow, that was something else. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Travolta do that in any movie role. The 2007 Hall of Fame class. Tony and Cal. Like none other. . . .

Welcome back to our friend Tiff over at Party Like It’s 1982. We see that she stuck with her MLBlog title even after her beloved Redbirds ended their franchise-longest world championship drought last October. Now it looks like Brewers fans are the one partying like it’s 1982, though. Maybe you noticed that MLBlogger Geoff Jenkins just whacked that big walk-off homer Tuesday night to beat the Mets in Tom Glavine’s 300-win bid and in a possible postseason matchup. . . .

So, has everyone posted their Trading Deadline wrapup blogs? . . .

Thanks to our friend Alyssa Milano for a superhuman blogging effort. How much time do you spend on your posts? I told her how much we appreciate that kind of dedication to MLBlogs, and she emailed back, "Four hours!" You can tell, and take a look if you haven’t already. It’s funny when you think back to some initial skepticism about whether she really does her own blogging, and now you can see that she spent four hours working on that post just for fans. Pretty cool, and one reason why Entertainment Weekly says it’s the best celebrity blog out there. Right here at MLBlogs!