A couple from Jeff Johnson

Jeff Johnson is the Kernels beat writer for the Cedar Rapids Gazette.  He has a couple of post available:

The first is Jeff's own foray into the dugout. He spent an entire game in the Kernels dugout.  Here is the result:

Leave it to Cedar Rapids Kernels batboy Jon Teig to ease my trepidation and make me feel so welcomed.

“Jeff, what are you doing here?” Jon-Jon asked me a few minutes before the first pitch of last Wednesday night’s Kernels-Kane County game at Memorial Stadium.

I kind of wondered that myself. Earlier in the season, I casually asked Kernels Manager Bill Mosiello if it would be OK to observe a game from the dugout and write a story about the experience.

I didn’t really expect him to say yes. He did.

Read on.

Jeff drew the tough assignment with this post. It is titled. Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (video)
I won't swipe the video. Just head over there are take a gawk...er, leer, er, look.

Guess

I did not write this headline:

Whitecaps host skidding Timber Rattlers to open six-game stretch at Fifth Third Ballpark

Take a guess who did. Then, click the link to find out if your right.

Oh, and apparently, we have a new manager...

Manager: Jeff Ilsom

Wrote the guy who is perfect and never makes a typo or a mistake.

Another MWL Blog

John Rodgers, the long-time voice of the Kernels is blogging now.

Check out Rodgers Reflections.

A different point of view

Kevin Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus was at the game last night.

His thoughts on Eric Arnett are at this post:

Future Shock
The Things I See: Eric Arnett vs. Ian Krol

Rather than excerpt anything, just clink on the link and read it all.

To fill your RDA of Goldstein, Brewerfan.net did an interview with Goldstein to get his impressions of the rest of the Rattlers.

Since everyone (and by everyone I mean 2 people) is pointing out that I called Eric Arnett 'Kevin Arnett' on twitter today, I am just going to bring up this one exchange.

BF: How did Khris Davis strike you as a left fielder?

KG: Defensively? I have no idea. How do you judge a left fielder on one game? His reputation is that of a solid but unspectacular type.

He's right. You really can't judge Davis in left field based on one game...Especially since Pete Fatse played there the whole game last night?

Now, if you'll excuse me I have to find my shovel.

If I were so inclined I would use a smiley face here, but instead I will just point you to one of the post tags here.

A few housekeeping notes

#1) I cleaned up the sidebar. The countdown clock is gone. The Record attendance and the attendance comparison are gone.

There are a few things over on the right that I need to add, but I think that I will have time after today's game or at some point on the weekend.

#2) You may want to make plans to head over to the Post-Crescent's Sports For Lunch at the Paper Valley Hotel on Tuesday. I'll explain why after the game.

#3) You may want to head over to Let's Go Rattlers right now. Sweet pictures of players in their new '82 Brewers-themed Wisconsin jerseys.

Predictions

Ryan from Bernie's Crew has a post titled More Minor League Predictions.

The predictions are for the categories:

Player of the Year
Pitcher of the Year
Breakout Player
Breakout Pitcher

and Biggest Disappointment? Really? Oddball has a little something to say about that topic.

Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?

We welcome you

Matt Nelson of KCRG 9 in Cedar Rapids has a blog called Ballparks of the Midwest.

Last year he made the trip to a bunch of Midwest League ballparks and (apparently) made a television show out of it.

Here are his web reviews of:

Fifth Third Field
Oldsmobile Park
Dow Diamond
O'Brien Field
Parkview Field
Perfect Game Field at Veterans Memorial Stadium
Coveleski Stadium
Alliant Energy Field

If you click through to each review, there will be a link to video reports from each stadium. Worth it at lunch today.

Here is this year's tour. Just let us know when you are going to be up here, Matt.

Look who else is blogging

Mark Haley, manager of the South Bend Silver Hawks, is putting up some thoughts during Spring Training at the appropriately names Haley's Comment.

Another new MWL Blog

Nathan Baliva of the Peoria Chiefs has joined the MWL blogging brotherhood.

Playing in Peoria is the name.

This blog jumps to #2 on my favorite blogs on MLBlogs by an Italian. Still a distant second to this one. I mean he just can't compete with this.

"Just have fun with it"

Big League Stew had a fun little post this past weekend. He tried out for the Public Address announcer for Baltimore Oriole home Spring Training games.

Look to whom he went in the Orioles clubhouse for some advice.

Orioles Magic on the Mic from Big League Stew on Vimeo.

"If it's loud, I'll go there."

Good bye, Bubbler

One of our biggest on-line backers from Milwaukee is shutting down. SportsBubbler.com has its final day today. The project of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is being folded into JSOSports.com after today.

My understanding is the Jim Breen's excellent Bernie's Crew is moving over to the new site, and I'll update the sidebar with a new link when that is official.

Dan Walsh approached me around this time last year about writing a weekly column for the Bubbler. That's where This Week in Timber Rattlers Baseball was born. The final edition of my column (at least the final one at the Bubbler) may be found here.

Dan and the gang were always good to the Rattlers. They were there with coverage, a word, or a link when we had some news up here in the land of the Future Brewers.

More importantly, Dan got it. There are as many passionate sports fans in Wisconsin as there are sports options in Wisconsin. The Bubbler gave fans a voice and gave teams -- that are at times overshadowed -- coverage. It's not all Packers, Badgers, Golden Eagles, Brewers, and Bucks. There are Admirals, Panthers, and, yes, Timber Rattlers among others in there, too.

For that, I am grateful.

Dan's final post is here. A quick taste.

I've never been a great writer, but that wasn't the point. My goal was to entertain and provide an outlet to fans to discuss the topics of the day - sports and/or entertainment. I hope I was able to do that. I've meet some great people along the way like klwillis45 (the DD's first 'fan') and people I feel I at least know a little about, crichar3, BrewTownBoozer, brbutler, burniebrewer. rdeglow, coach and MushroomCloudMoFo (a great name) and many others I'm probably forgetting. Post-it Note Paul was a huge help as he knew more about sports blogs than I did and told me what I was doing right or wrong. Plus he kept telling me, "you gotta have more babes with big knockers on the site" So you can thank him for that. And thanks to all the readers who never commented, but showed up on my pageviews count. Your readership was greatly appreciated.

And your efforts were appreciated up here in Timber Rattler Nation. Thank you and good luck, Dan.

My Big Brewers Blog Book

Duk at Big League Stew has put together a series of links to follow the Milwaukee Brewers for the 2010 season. He calls it a blog book. It is not all-inclusive, but there are some familiar names.

Win Shares

Alex Remmington has been writing a series of posts about certain "new" stats over at Big League Stew. Today, he tackles Win Shares.

What Win Shares Means: Win Shares was first advanced in a book of the same name that Bill James wrote in 2002. It's an extension of an older stat of his called Runs Created that tries to measure the number of runs that a hitter has put on a scoreboard. (The earliest version of Runs Created was simply the product of OPS x Total Bases. Recent versions take many more offensive outcomes into consideration, including baserunning.)

Win Shares attempts to measure how many wins a hitter or pitcher has personally notched for his team in the standings. Unlike other new-school stats, Win Shares look quite explicitly at the standings: A 90-win team has more Win Shares to allocate than an 80-win team.

Win Shares are defined as 1/3 of a win — three Win Shares are equal to one team win. Why three? Well, the number is arbitrary. Since Win Shares are only whole integer values, James wanted to pick a number that was neither too small, so as not to lose a great deal of information in rounding, nor too big, because the estimators in Win Shares weren't precise enough to differentiate between 1/10 of a win and 2/10 of a win.

Much more at the post to help expand your mind.

Follow the Winter Meetings

Jim over at Bernie's Crew posted constantly yesterday and Duk at Big League Stew was live blogging.

I am just guessing that Day 2 will get just as much coverage...for better or worse in Duk's opinion.

Like a babbling class of ninth graders, the winter meetings have gone Twitter crazy.

From my viewpoint, this is both a very good and a very bad thing.

First, the good: At last year's meetings in Las Vegas, I'd estimate that no more than five or 10 reporters had a Twitter account (let alone understood how to harness its power for reporting). Followers weren't as plentiful either — the BLS feed probably had under 200 readers — and very few news items (if any) were born out of Tim Brown, Jon Heyman or Ken Rosenthal giving a quick forum to the lobby's loudest whispers.

Flash forward to this year. Now the thumbs of that national news trio are getting a workout and rare is the reporter who doesn't have an iPhone or Blackberry at his or her ready. For a public desperate to gain insight on their team's attempts to get better, the result is a never-ending diet of news, rumors and speculation. Fans don't even have to keep hitting refresh on their favorite team blogs to find out the latest. The complete elimination of distribution barriers is Christmas come early for the MLB Trade Rumors set.

But despite all that instant gratification, there's a hypocritical part of my info-hungry self that feels this whirring mix of puzzle pieces has drained a lot of the fun from what attracted us to the meetings in the first place.

Not to sound too crotchety here, but it used to be that reporters had an entire day before the next edition — or at least a few hours before the next blog post — to sift through all the B.S. and decide which passed muster and which didn't. The result would be a piece that would float a few possiblities that we'd be able to consume and mull over.

Now we have a conflicting wall of noise that's often hard to translate. Want to write a blog post that takes an analytical look at the pluses and minuses of a proposed deal from your local beat reporter? Want to chew it over with fellow message board posters? Better make it quick, because by the time you even write a title, there'll be 18 additional tweets that will make your item obsolete before you hit publish.

Interesting read as Day 2 dawns.

Instant request

In a comment to this post about voting for the 15th Anniversary Team Third Baseman, Kyle chimes in with:

I'm guessing you might know, so I'm wondering what ever happened to Bo Robinson? His numbers would suggest he hit pretty well at every level, but the M's had him repeat the Texas League in 2002 and his career nose dived from there. Is there something I'm not seeing?

I have always wondered about Robinson and why he never got a shot. I'll take a look around and see what I can find.

Thank you, Kyle. You just gave me a topic for Mehring Monday this week.

By the way, check out Kyle's posting over at Brew Crew Ball. Well, not posting. He kinda runs the place over there.

Ranking Brewers 2B prospects

Jim Breen over at Bernie's Crew ranks his top five second base prospects in the Brewers system.

Click over for details, but here's the list:

#1 Brett Lawrie
#2 Eric Farris
#3 Hernan Iribarren
#4 Scooter Gennett
#5 Brandon Sizemore

Lawrie and Sizemore both played for the Timber Rattlers in 2009. Rattler fans should be familiar with them. I will steal a little bit of Jim's thoughts on Gennett, a 16th round pick in the '09 draft.

Although I wanted to rank Scooter Gennett ahead of Hernan Iribarren, ranking a player who has not seen the field as a professional too high is irresponsible. His scouting reports rave about his advanced approach at the plate, especially for a prepster just out of high school. I am concerned that his 5'9" frame will limit his home run potential down the road, but the gap power should allow him to rack up plenty of doubles and triples.

Bravo, Lookout Landing

You may have heard that the St. Louis Cardinals have hired Mark McGwire as their new hitting coach for 2010.

The best post I have read on this is over at Lookout Landing, the Mariners blog on SB*Nation.

Despite a little irrational Raul Ibanez hate -- which abated a bit in this post today, I still check on their site often and I'm glad I found this one.

McGwire: See, what you want to be doing is hitting dingers.

McGwire: When you go up there, first pitch, you're looking dead red so you can hit a dinger.

McGwire: Sometimes you're gonna miss. That's okay. Stick to your guns. There's no more efficient way of scoring than hitting a dinger. That's what we want to be doing.

McGwire: The pitcher might pick up on your strategy. Don't worry about it. He's more afraid of you than you are of him.

McGwire: If he throws you something offspeed, like a curveball, don't be fooled. Just hit it for a dinger.

McGwire: Walks are good too. If the pitcher tries to get you to chase something out of the zone, don't swing at it.

McGwire: You only want to swing at strikes. Take balls. Hit strikes for dingers.

Click over and read the theoretical advice that Lookout Landing Mark McGwire is going to give to theoretical Skip Schumaker.

Best part of the post. They don't go for the easy PEDs reference.

One blog to check out

Chad Gramling's Baseball in Fort Wayne

I'm guessing that Chad will have some pictures of last night's celebration at some point this weekend.

We had a listener or Abbiamo avuto un ascoltatore

The proprietor of the blog Olive Knitting was tuned into the game yesterday and recaps the day in a post titled a new summer Sunday tradition...Did I mention she's in Italy?

top of the 4th...hear an announcement for the Fang soap dispenser give away (I missed the date when that game will be, make mental note to check the newsletter to see when this is and see if I'm eligible in absentia. Fang is, of course the mascot of the Rattlers), missed everything else that happened in this half of the inning.

That Fang Soap Dispenser Giveaway is August 6.

Thank you for listening, Timber Rattler fan in Italy...Or, Ringraziarla per ascoltare, il ventilatore di Rattlers di Legname in Italia.

Check the Daily Drink around noon today.

The latest edition of This Week in Timber Rattlers Baseball should be posted around that time.

I gotta pack. Check out is in an hour. More from the ballpark later.