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Baseball Animals & Baseball Opposites

(Major League Baseball: First Base Books)

by Christopher Jordan

Fenn/Tundra of Tundra Books of Northern New York       2/11/2014       Age 3 to 7    26 pages each

978-1-77049-474-9 / 978-1-77049-518-0

“Baseball Animals celebrates the magical world of professional baseball and introduces young fans to each MLB team named after an animal. In this official MLB publication, children will enjoy following clues and guessing which animal is associated with each team, as well as learning why the various teams decided to name themselves after a tiger, a blue jay, or a diamondback snack. With detailed information and brilliant wildlife photography celebrating each animal, Baseball Animals will teach children about nature through the exciting world of baseball while they cheer for their favorite teams and players.

“Baseball Opposites introduces children to important early concepts through the exciting world of professional baseball. From such entries as safe/out to on/off and day/night, children will learn all about the much-loved game, while appreciating the many opposites that appear in the sport and in the word around us. With simple yet informative text and incredible action photographs of the players, this book is the perfect choice for young baseball fans to enjoy on their own, or for parents and caregivers to read to the next generation of MLB stars.”

Opening

Baseball Animals: “Which MLB team was named after a black bird with a bright orange underbelly? This bird likes to perch high in the treetops and prefers to eat dark-colored fruit such as cherries or purple grapes.”

Baseball Opposites: “small – A baseball is small. big – A baseball stadium is big.”

Reviews

Baseball Animals hits a homerun. The clue pages contain two clues: a rather easy clue, marked with a question mark, and a harder clue below that, marked with a hand-held magnifying glass. Not every easy clue is as easy as it might seem, at least for young kids. The other, harder clue, is great for older kids beyond the age intended for Baseball Animals and for adults. If you are a die-hard fan of Major League Baseball, both clues might be a breeze. Being a fan myself, but not one who thinks much of teams other than the ones she likes, I could not answer all of the questions. Of course, you also need knowledge of animals.

The answers, always on the next spread*, left side, includes a baseball player from the team in question. I believe the players are stars from their respective teams, but without an in-depth knowledge of MLB, I am not sure. The Baltimore Orioles, named after Maryland’s state bird, has at times used a cartoonish oriole while at other times it looked authentic. Personally, I love the cartoonish oriole logo but not because the team is cartoonish. Say that, and you can cease reading this review immediately. In addition to the beloved Baltimore Orioles, kids will learn about a couple of sea creatures, a few from Africa and Asia, the dessert, a great American symbol, and every young child’s favorite. Young children will love the close-up, full detailed photographs of the team-named animals and most will enjoy the same detailed photographs of the MLB players. An appendix lists—by division—each team’s location, date it joined MLB, and a color photograph of its logo. Young kids, especially boys, will enjoy Baseball Animals.

Baseball Opposites contains basic concepts young children need to understand. An understanding of baseball, or even simple enjoyment of the game, will give kids greater enjoyment of Baseball Opposites. Each spread*, contains one pair of baseball related opposites, in the upper-outer corners of each page. Next, is a baseball-related sentence using each term, located somewhere on each page, and finally, an illustration of the term—always an MLB photograph filling most of each corresponding page. MLB visually explains each opposite pair with baseball players or baseball objects. These photographic illustrations have sharp detail and some even help explain a baseball concept. Young, and old, boys will love the action portrayed on most pages. If lucky, their favorite team or player will be among those helping young children learn opposites.

Though all the terms are baseball related, most of the terms children should be learning at this stage, (age 3+). These include such opposites as on/off, up/down, open/close, hot/cold, sit/stand, and left/right. The opposites are not strictly baseball terms, such as infield/outfield or homerun/strike out, but do use baseball as the point of reference. Should this disappoint anyone, turn the pages until you come to the opposite safe/out. The umpire struts his stuff calling the player sliding into home plate, “SAFE!” The ump is calmer while declaring a Chicago Cubby out—on a three pitch swing and miss. Baseball Opposites also contains additional MLB information for the young and old baseball fan. Rather than a team-related appendix, a glossary of baseball terms fills the page: bunt, steal a base, switch-hitter, dugout, and GRAND SLAM!

Oh, wait. “GRAND SLAM” is not in Baseball Opposites. I meant to say Baseball Animals and Baseball Opposites are GRAND SLAM books for young baseball fans. Dad, it is your turn to read these books to your children, getting them ready for the baseball season. Though the 2014 season in nearly half-over, there is never anytime better than the present to begin something, unless, of course, when waiting for an inside pitch to drill down the third base line. That is something completely different to teach your child.

*Spread – A spread is the left and right pages when a book is opened flat. Eg. pages 2 & 3 may be a spread and the end page image is a spread.

BASEBALL ANIMALS and BASEBALL OPPOSITES: (MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL: FIRST BASE BOOKS). Texts copyright © 2014 by Christopher Jordan. Photograph copyrights © held by various individuals. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Fenn/Tundra of Tundra Books of Northern New York, Plattsburgh, NY.

Purchase Baseball Animals and/or Baseball Opposites at Amazon—B&N—Book Depository *on sale—Tundra Books—or your local bookstore.

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Learn more about the Sports (MLB — Hockey — NASCAR) series by Mr. Jordan HERE.

Meet the author, Christopher Jordan, at his short bio:  http://www.tundrabooks.com/authors/author.pperl?authorid=152647

Find more books at the Tundra Books website:   http://www.tundrabooks.com/

a division of Random House of Canada Limited:  http://www.randomhouse.ca/

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Also by Jordan Christopher

Hockey 123 (My First NHL Book)

The Little Beaver

NASCAR ABC (My First NASCAR Racing Series)

Hockey & NASCAR

123           Colors

ABC         Opposites

Animals    Shapes

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By Michael Humphreys

Baseball fans love to compare the players of today to the players who came before, but one must wonder how great the margin of error in these comparisons is. Is there any way of knowing who the real baseball greats are, and whose legend should stand the test of time?

Let’s take Omar Vizquel as an example. So says Wikipedia, “Vizquel is considered one of baseball’s all-time best fielding shortstops.” It’s true, Vizquel “is considered” a great fielder. Of shortstops, he

-holds the highest career fielding percentage of those with a long career.
-has participated in more double plays (and his primary double play partner just entered the Hall of Fame)
-is third in career assists
-has played more games at shortstop than anyone in major league history.

On top of all that, Vizquel has received more Gold Gloves than any other shortstop except for Ozzie “Wizard of Oz” Smith. Indeed, writers have described Omar and Ozzie as the “graceful Fred Astaire” and “acrobatic Gene Kelly,” respectively, of shortstops.

Vizquel has something of a signature play—fielding ordinary grounders (not just bunts) with his bare hand and throwing in one motion. He was the starting shortstop for the most successful American League team of the 1990s, second only to the Yankees. He hasn’t been much of a hitter, even for a shortstop, so it’s not unreasonable to infer he must have been a great fielder to hang on as long as he has.

But, after all that, how do we really Vizquel actually is one of baseball’s all-time best fielding shortstops? With metrics.

Let’s start with the question: What is the job of a fielder? To help his team prevent runs. At shortstop, this mainly involves converting ground balls into outs and getting the second out on double plays—in other words, recording assists. (It is very rare that shortstops catch fly balls or pop ups that couldn’t be fielded by at least two and as many as five other fielders. Most of the differences in putout rates for shortstops reflect how much they ‘hog’ these easy chances, not how many marginal hits they help their teams prevent. And line drive putouts at short are mostly dumb-luck plays.)

It is not the job of a shortstop (or any fielder) to look “graceful” or make trick plays. It’s not even a fielder’s job to avoid errors. In fact, a fielder who makes ten more successful plays but also ten more errors has just the same value as the fielder who makes an average number of plays and errors, because an error is no worse than a play not made.

Any fielding metric for shortstop needs to estimate how many assists a shortstop generated above or below what an average shortstop would have, playing for the same team. My system uses some arithmetic and the statistical technique of “regression analysis,” resulting in what I call Defensive Regression Analysis, or DRA.

DRA estimates the number of assists the league average shortstop would have recorded in place of the shortstop you’re rating by starting with the average number of shortstop assists per team that year and adjusting that number up or down based on statistically significant relationships between shortstop assists and other defensive statistics of the player’s team that are

1. not influenced by the shortstop himself,
2. as little influenced by the fielding quality of his teammates as possible, and
3. independent (approximately) of each ot

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Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University.  His newest book, Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training chronicles the history of baseball’s annual six-week ritual and how it grew from a shoestring-budget road trip into a billion-dollar-a-year business.  This week and next Fountain will be blogging about his adventures at Spring Training for Powell’s.  With their kind permission we will be reprinting them here.  Check out the final post below.

When St. Petersburg’s future mayor Al Lang was negotiating with St. Louis Browns owner Branch Rickey to bring spring training to St. Petersburg in 1914, the two men agreed that the city businessmen sponsoring the trip would pay for the Browns travel to St. Pete, and pay for their lodging while they were there. They also agreed that the comped traveling party would include five writers from the St. Louis newspapers. The newspaper guys were key for St. Petersburg. This whole spring training deal was an effort to get the city’s name out there, and how better to do it than through the datelines in big city newspapers. “There can be no cleaner, no more penetrating, no more exhaustive advertising for [our] city,” wrote the organizers, “than the letters and telegrams to their home papers, written by the high-class, competent correspondents and writers who always accompany these major league ball clubs during their spring training trips.” (My favorite part of that, by the way, is where it says: “high-class, competent correspondents and writers.” We sportswriters haven’t always gotten that kind of respect.)

Ninety-five years later, when the Phoenix suburb of Goodyear, Arizona committed to spending $100 million in public money to build a new spring training facility for the Indians and Reds, proponents talked about the national publicity spring training would generate, as Goodyear grows from rural farm village to a city with an expected mid-century population in excess of 400,000.

Nobody has ever been able to determine what the cash value of a newspaper dateline is, but for nearly a century, communities investing in spring training have touted their importance. When the Yankees came to St. Petersburg in 1925, for six weeks every winter, the dozen-odd daily newspapers in New York would carry daily stories with the St. Petersburg dateline, and St. Petersburg grew into a major city.

Hot Springs, Arkansas grew its early-century profile as a resort town by hosting eight different major league teams for spring training between 1900-1925. Before it was known as the home of Disney World, Orlando was perhaps best known to northerners as the long-time spring training home of the Washington Senators. Before they were a part of the American consciousness as Gulf Coast resort towns, Bradenton and Sarasota cracked the northern consciousness as the spring training homes of the Braves and the Red Sox.

Some towns are still best known to America as spring training destinations. Vero Beach, Port St. Lucie, and Lakeland, Florida all have their own individual charms, and the folks who live there do so for reasons other than baseball. But people beyond the borders of these smallish cities know them only as spring training datelines.

Some cities have outgrown their spring training datelines. Back in the early sixties, Fort Lauderdale was known for spring break and Yankees spring training. No more. The Orioles are there now, and spring training gets lost in the bustle of everything else that goes on in Fort Lauderdale. Even Yankees spring training, now in Tampa, is but a blip on the busy radar of that bustling city. St. Petersburg willingly let spring training go this year; the Tampa Bay Rays play their regular season games in St. Petersburg, of course, and the mayor felt that spring training might be in competition with the regular season.
But some towns still seek the cache of a national dateline. Peoria and Surprise, Arizona, anonymous suburbs northwest of Phoenix, bought themselves a bit of national presence when they brought spring training to town in 1993 and 2003, respectively. “Having Peoria, Arizona as a national dateline every spring was a real coup for us,” said Cactus League president and Peoria community services director J. P. de la Montaigne. Goodyear and Glendale feel the same way today.

But while these national datelines may have been, and may continue to be, good publicity for the warm-weather cities that host spring training, they are even better balm for readers in the cold-weather cities where those newspapers are published. Forget crocuses and robins. Nothing says spring to a winter-bound newspaper reader better than a spring training dateline from Florida or Arizona.

Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University.  His newest book, Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training chronicles the history of baseball’s annual six-week ritual and how it grew from a shoestring-budget road trip into a billion-dollar-a-year business.  This week and next Fountain will be blogging about his adventures at Spring Training for Powell’s.  With their kind permission we will be reprinting them here.  Check out the forth post below.

A reporter asked me today which was my favorite of all the spring training sites. I told her that I had always been partial to two places that lost spring training this year—Dodgertown in Vero Beach and Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg—and told her why—the history and ambiance of Dodgertown, that great view of Tampa Bay from Al Lang.

But that got me to thinking: How long can I keep saying my favorite spring training site isn’t a spring training site anymore, and what then, among the active sites, would now be my favorite?

There are really no bad spring training sites. Among the current inventory of spring training parks and facilities, all but one has been either built or completely overhauled in the last twenty years.

But which one is the best? What makes a spring training site special? Is it the grandeur of the ballpark? The new parks in Glendale (White Sox and Dodgers) and Goodyear (Indians) will certainly enter the conversation as more people visit them; but most discussions of grand spring training stadiums would probably begin with Steinbrenner Field, formerly Legends Field, the Tampa home of the Yankees. Surely Champion Stadium at Walt Disney World is as pretty as they come, its lines and construction evoking parks of the 1920s, with all the 21st century amenities. But as much as the visual evokes the heritage of the game, the damn place keeps changing its name practically every year. It’s only a decade old and it’s been known officially as Disney Field, Crackerjack Stadium, The Ballpark at Disney’s Wide World of Sports, and now Champion Stadium. What kind of heritage can there be a place that changes its name all the time?

The prettiest, most comfortable, most amenity-rich spring training ballpark is probably Brighthouse Networks Field in Clearwater, where the Phillies play, but it sits on one of the ugliest pieces of land in all of Florida, surrounded by high-voltage electrical wires and a particularly busy and soulless piece of U.S. Route 19.

So, is the scenery beyond the outfield fences important? Tough to beat the Cactus League parks then. Virtually every park looks out upon a mountain range, and in Tempe Diablo Stadium, the mountain looms just past the left field fence, sorta’ like the wall at Fenway Park only five time higher.

Is history important? With this year’s shuttering of Dodgertown, Winter Haven and Al Lang, that really leaves only two choices. Fort Lauderdale Stadium was built for the Yankees in 1962 and has been home to the Orioles since the Yankees left for Tampa in ’96. It’s a window on old-time spring training, which is exactly why it’s doomed. It doesn’t have the clubhouse, strength-training, or medical-rehab facilities to support a modern spring training, and it doesn’t even have room for the Orioles minor leaguers, who train across the state in Sarasota. So the Orioles will be leaving Fort Lauderdale for somewhere, maybe as early as next year.

That will leave Hi Corbett Field in Tucson as the last of spring training’s historical parks. Home to the Rockies now, it was built in the 1920s and has hosted spring training every year since 1947, when Bill Veeck brought the Indians there. It’s where the spring training scenes from the movie Major League were filmed; that alone makes it worth the visit.

How much weight to you give to the spirit of the fans when it comes to making a place special? Every team likes to claim that its fans are the best. Cubs fans and Red Sox fans are probably the most famous, but for pure unadulterated, demonstrative affection, it would be tough to top the sea of Cardinal red that fans wear to Roger Dean Stadium in Jupiter to watch St. Louis play.

Is the neighborhood important—you know, the old real estate maxim of location, location, location. Then it’s probably got to be Scottsdale Stadium, right in the heart of downtown, just a couple of blocks from the bars and restaurants of Old Town Scottsdale. It’s spring training’s only neighborhood ballpark, and what a neighborhood!

As I’ve traveled about spring training the last three years, I can’t tell you how many different places I heard someone say: This is the best complex in all of spring training. Or: We wouldn’t trade spring training sites with anyone. Or: There’s no place better for getting a team ready for the season. Or: I wouldn’t come anywhere else for spring training.

So bring out all the clichés: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Home is where the heart is—or maybe, more accurately: the heart is where home is. The best spring training facility? It’s really quite simple. That’s going to be the place where your team plays.

Charles Fountain teaches journalism at Northeastern University.  His newest book, Under The March Sun: The Story of Spring Training chronicles the history of baseball’s annual six-week ritual and how it grew from a shoestring-budget road trip into a billion-dollar-a-year business.  This week and next Fountain will be blogging about his adventures at Spring Training for Powell’s.  With their kind permission we will be reprinting them here.  Check out the first one below.

Waiting at the airport to go from Orlando to Phoenix has summoned thoughts of spring training travel, and the differences between March baseball in Florida and Arizona.

Travel is probably the critical difference between Grapefruit and Cactus leagues. It is at the very least the difference that gets talked about with the most passion and regularity. In Arizona, twelve of the fourteen teams are located in and around Phoenix. The largest spread between any two teams training in the Valley of the Sun is the forty miles between the Angels in Tempe and the Royals and Rangers up in Surprise. Two teams, the Rockies and the Diamondbacks play down in Tucson, just over a hundred miles from the center of Phoenix and players and writers—especially the writers—grumble whenever they have to make the 90-minute to two-hour trip through the desert for a game down in Tucson. “Ease of travel” is the one phrase general managers and team officials most regularly use when talking about why they like training in Arizona.

In Florida, by contrast, 90 minutes would be a rather short bus ride; the farthest distance between teams is more than twice the ride from Phoenix to Tucson. The bus ride from Fort Lauderdale where the Orioles train, to Dunedin, home to the Blue Jays just northwest of Tampa, would be 250 miles. Not surprisingly, the Orioles and Blue Jays never take that ride; they don’t play one another in Florida. And there are many other teams whose paths hardly ever cross in Florida. With teams spread from Fort Myers to Dunedin on the Gulf Coast, from Fort Lauderdale to Viera on the Atlantic Coast, and with three more teams spread along I-4 from Lakeland to Disney, the Grapefruit League map is a map of all of the Southern Florida, and long bus rides are the bane of everybody’s existence. When the Red Sox and Twins ride up from Fort Myers to Clearwater or Dunedin, the ride begins at seven in the morning and can take more than three hours. The ride home, through Tampa Bay’s punishing rush-hour traffic, is generally even longer. When the Orioles, down in Fort Lauderdale, go anywhere except up to Jupiter to play the Cardinals or the Marlins, it’s a sunrise-to-sunset affair. “Managing travel” so as to not lose too much time to player training is how Grapefruit League GMs and team execs discuss the travel challenges of Florida.

The weather gets a lot of talk too. For most of winter-bound America, there’s not a lot of difference between the sun of Florida and the sun of Arizona, but the locals in both states like to point out how theirs is better. “They get all that rain in Florida,” say the chamber of commerce people in Arizona. “You lose a lot of games and training time to rain.”

“Players don’t sweat in Arizona,” counters one Florida person. “They don’t get in the same kind of shape because they never sweat. You look at the conditioning of teams in the early season, and you’ll see that the teams that trained in Florida seem to be in much better shape.”

But the difference that matters most these days is money. Spring training is big business now, and since the beginning of this century, Arizona has spent $250 million in public money building and improving spring training facilities for major league baseball teams. Florida has spent too, but $100 million less than Arizona has. This has led to a dramatic shift in the spring training map. Since 1998, five teams have shifted from Florida to Arizona, with a sixth, the Cincinnati Reds, scheduled to join them in 2010. When that happens the leagues will be even at 15 teams apiece for the first time.

That has a nice symmetry, but it will surely not remain that way forever. Inevitably, some team will start to see a greener patch of grass and a greener pile of money in a new community, hankering for spring training, and the map will change again. It’s not likely to happen soon in this economy; state budgets in both Florida and Arizona are in tatters. But history shows us that recessions are not forever. Baseball and spring training surely are.