Marco Scutaro rode a lot of buses before he ever sniffed the big leagues. After being signed by the Indians in 1994, he played six full seasons in the minors. Then there were cups of coffee with the Mets in 2002 and 2003, but Scutaro didn’t get a shot to play every day until Oakland picked him up prior to the 2004 season, when he was already 28. In four seasons with Oakland, he showed glimpses of the player he might become, including a .269 True Average in 2006. He was never flashy, but he was an integral part of the A’s playoff run that year, a super-utilityman who played significant time at all non-first-base infield positions.

Now, at age 37, when most players are well into decline or out of the game altogether, Marco Scutaro is arguably in the prime of his career. After a terrible first month, during which Scutaro now admits he was suffering from a bad back, he caught fire. He put together a 19-game hitting streak, during which he hit .481. He’s worked just 12 walks this year, but he’s also struck out just 13 times. Scutaro’s current TAv is .294, and he’s already accrued 1.0 WARP in just 46 games.

I saw Mark Appel pitch once before. It was early last season, down on The Farm, AKA Sunken Diamond, when it looked for all the world like he would be selected first overall in the 2012 First-Year Player Draft.

His stuff was electric. Fastball sat in the mid-90s and his slider absolutely unfair. It was there, and then it wasn't. To his opponents—mostly good-enough college hitters whose careers would end when they received their diplomas—it must have seemed like the ball was teleporting, Nightcrawler-style. Here it comes, the BAMF! It's in the dirt, six inches off the plate.

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This might come as a shock to you, but there are some players who don't value advanced statistics.

I guess I always figured that major-league baseball players would try and take advantage of every possible strategic advantage, and a knowledge of statistics – his own, or a competitor's – can give a player an edge. So I was surprised to have my attempts to talk stats rebuffed by a couple of different Giants players before their game against the Braves last Friday night.

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I’m legitimately excited to be going to Houston this weekend to attend the Baseball Prospectus event at Minute Maid Park. It won’t be my first BP event, but it’ll be my first event as a BP staff member. I hope no one asks me any tough questions about baseball, because I don’t really know anything about the game. Luckily Jason Collette and Jason Cole and lots of other smart people will be there to field the tough questions. What should I wear? I don’t have any golf shirts or polos, so I hope the attendees don’t mind hoodies and cutoff jean shorts. 

I also hope the Astros have a better week this week than last. I mean, I don’t wanna necessarily hang around with a bunch of bummed-out front-office types and personnel. Let’s be frank here: Saying the Astros had a bad week is an understatement of the highest order. It started out with them beating Andy Pettitte, and went completely off the rails after that. They ended up losing six straight and suffered a four-game sweep, at home, at the hands of the Tigers.

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I have two amazing jobs, one of which is writing here, but neither of those pays my mortgage. For that I have a day job that is so arcane and boring that it does not even warrant description.

My other side job that doesn’t pay the mortgage: I play bass in Kowloon Walled City, a San Francisco-based band that’s been around since 2007. We’ve put out a few records and played a few shows. The pay is terrible, but the fringe benefits are great: Playing music not only keeps me from going insane, but it also gives me an opportunity to travel and see things I wouldn’t ordinarily get to see.

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I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but the 2013 Major League Baseball season is underway. It actually began on Sunday night in a contest that pitted the Texas Rangers against their newly minted division rivals, the Houston Astros. The game was broadcast on ESPN Sunday Night Baseball and logged a 1.5 Nielsen rating. That’s down pretty substantially from Opening Night 2012, when the Cardinals and the Marlins pulled a 1.8 rating. You can thank the Best Fans in Baseball for those extra .3 percent.

I saw quite a few people on Twitter and elsewhere complaining about Opening Night and claiming that only Opening Day is real. I call shenanigans on that. Highlighting one game on the night before Opening Day focuses national attention on a single matchup, making it feel special, like the single present your parents let you open on Christmas Eve.

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I’ve become slightly obsessed with the World Baseball Classic. When I learned the semifinals and finals of the 2013 Classic would be played at AT&T Park in San Francisco, I made sure to purchase our regular-season seats for all three games. I’m regretting that decision a little now that they’re flogging $5 bleacher seats for the second semifinal game, but the buyer’s remorse is minimal; after all, it’s not every day that an international baseball event is held in one’s own backyard.

The first semifinal game took place on Sunday night and pitted Japan, the two-time defending WBC champ, against a plucky Puerto Rico team that really had no business making it out of pool play. They faced elimination twice and beat Italy and the United States to guarantee a semifinal berth, ultimately losing to the Dominican Republic in what amounted to a seeding game. Had they won, they would have had an additional day off in which to travel to San Francisco from Miami, and they’d face the Netherlands. But they lost to the D.R., meaning they had to fly west immediately after their Saturday game in order to face Japan on Sunday on a short turnaround and as a heavy underdog.

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The third World Baseball Classic kicked off pool play this week, with six games taking place in Taichung, Taiwan and Fukuoka, Japan. I watched most of the games this weekend (all games are being aired on the MLB Network), and seeing the Netherlands blank Korea, then lose a tough one to Taiwan cemented the Dutch as my team in the WBC. Here are just a few reasons why.

1. They call it “honkbal.” That should be enough right there, frankly, but I doubt my editors would be happy if I submitted a 75-word article. They typically like to have some content after the green “paywall” box.

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If you set out to design a place that I would hate, it would look a lot like Arizona.

It’s got natural beauty, sure, but it’s usually way too hot, or too cold, to enjoy. Everything is spread out, Houston- or Los Angeles-style; you have to drive everywhere to get anywhere. And once you get there, odds are “there” is a prefab thing conceived by a team of hospitality management experts.

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I was never what you’d call good at baseball. My career peaked not at 27, when many pros come into their own, but when I was 12. I was one of the bigger kids in my league, and even though I hadn’t entered puberty, I already had the full complement of old player skills: good eye at the plate, low batting average, above-average power. On those occasions I did make contact with a ball, it stayed hit.

I was also a capable first baseman; the coach told me being left-handed gave me a reach advantage, but we both knew I was there because I lacked any semblance of speed or range. But when my fellow fielders threw a ball my way, more often than not, I caught it.

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Click here for part 1, including the introduction.

Here’s part 2: the best of the baseball team cookbooks.

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Baseball teams have a long history of charitable endeavors, and all 30 major-league clubs have official charitable organizations involved in various good works. One tried and true fundraising project is the “cookbook for a cause,” in which players’ wives compile their (or their husbands’) favorite recipes in a cookbook, which is then offered for sale to fans. I’m not sure exactly what the appeal is—are baseball wives known to be excellent cooks, or is making Jean Luzinski’s Squash Casserole a way of paying tribute to Greg? Nevertheless, these books have been produced for as long as I can remember.

I’ve leveraged the power of the Internet to find the best and worst examples of the genre.

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