Cube Notes

+ I think this is one of those features of which only about 5% of site visitors are aware. The Head2Head module allows you to search batter/pitcher matchups for the last 50 years and it now updated to include 2007 data.

The feature allows you to search by last name or full name. If there are more than one possible names for a search (Santana yielded many), you will be prompted to choose which player you intended. Its really quite easy to use.

All matchups are listed with grand totals listed below. Each at bat includes the # of outs, the score, the runners and the resulting pitches and outcome.

Another important thing to know about the Head2Head module is that it is available quickly from anywhere on the site. By simply typing Cano vs Santana in the search box on any TBC page, you will be redirected to the Head2Head module. Typing in Robinson Cano vs Johan Santana will provide you with the head to head details immediately.

Turn, Swivel, Ow

+ My home office has a monitor and a television. When I am sitting at my desk looking at the monitor, my television is at about 4:00. In other words, to see the television, I must pivot about 115 degrees to the right. Tonight, I had hockey on while I worked and the Montreal Canadiens mounted an impressive comeback against the Washington Capitals forcing me to swivel/pivot in my chair about once every ten seconds to keep track of the action. I also started to work out with weights again this week and have been sore for the last 2 days (pecs, biceps, triceps) and I woke up this morning with a pain in my upper back.

Turn, swivel, ow. Back to work. Turn, Swivel, Ow. Back to work. That was my night. Too bad Ovechkin ruined the comeback with his 4th goal of the game in OT.

+ MLB Trade Rumors is an incredible web site. Until recently, Tim Dierkes had a day job and he still managed to post about ten times a day with the latest rumors. He's now full-time and he's on top of everything going on in Major League Baseball and if you haven't already subscribed to his RSS feed, I highly recommend it.

+ Hot Stove New York has figured out the best way to take advantage of TBC sponsorships and has earned a sizeable discount in the process. Jeff at HSNY has sponsored all remaining Major Leaguers on the Mets and Yankees for a year. Check out Brian Schneider's page, just above his stats.

If you're interested in return traffic, its always best to sponsor pages related to your site. its contextual advertising. By sponsoring many pages for the same subject, you increase your exposure to your intended audience. HSNY has also leveraged the banner functionality on the sponsorship and so he will likely leave a lasting impression on all Mets and Yankees fan visiting these pages.

Fantasy Baseball Sherpa is another sponsor who has taken advantage of the bulk rate by sponsoring several major leaguers over the last week.

That's not to say that sponsoring a single page has no value. Remember, the ultimate purpose of the sponsorships is to show your support to the site while receiving something in return. But there's no reason why you can't leverage sponsorships to give you a lot more.

+ Tonight's Curb Your Enthusiasm episode: Interior Decorator

+ Its been a busy week for updates (finally) so far and its only Tuesday. We started with the 2007 Independent League Statistics and then the 2007 Japanese Stats. And now, I am pleased to announce the release of the 2007 Boxscore data.

This is game-level data for all 162 games for every team in the majors. It includes boxscores, team logs, player batting logs, player pitching logs, a daily view of scores and standings and links on all pages on the site. Once again, for those who don't know what is different about our boxscores compared to other sites, we include Milestones, Streaks, Notable performances highlighted and the ability to add game notes for those games with interesting occurances. The only thing missing from the package is the update of batter/pitcher data and that is executing as we speak.

+ A little not to those of you who are planning on wearing a new shirt tomorrow. Make sure all the XL stickers are removed. I found a big XL sticker on the back of my shirt while at the company gym at lunch time.

+ I had a nice moment tonight with the children. One of those moments where having children is tremendously joyous. I was doing the dishes and listening to my iPod when my two young girls aged 5 and 3 came waltzing into the kitchen to do what they call, "Their Pretty Dance". They have a "funny dance" where they alternate pointing both fingers up to the sky, open their mouth and point their eyes upwards while goose-stepping in random directions. It really is quite funny. I always ask for the funny dance but my 3-year old said that since quiet music was playing (and not funny music), she would do her pretty dance. So Corinne Rae Bailey comes on the iPod (my wife's selection, I swear) and they start to twirl and spin and move to the music and it occurs to me that the 3-year old actually might know what she is doing. It was one of those happy "I'm glad I have kids" moments. That is in direct contrast to the 8:25am "What the heck are you still doing in your pajamas when we have to be out of the house at 8:30am" moments that occurs every Tuesday and Thursday before preschool.

+ You don't have to be Jewish and neurotic like me to love Curb Your Enthusiasm. Its the official comedy series of The Baseball Cube and related sites. Tonight I watch The Bracelet from season 1.

+ Back to baseball, there are lots of projets in the pipeline and you should see more frequent updates from this point forward for both TBC and THC.

+ I have updated Japanese player and team stats for 2007. It was actually included in the Indy Stats update but with the lack of updates lately, I thought I would split up the announcements.

+ I noticed a glitch with the Independent Stats update. Apparently, on player pages, the team was not linked to the team stats and it was a code issue and it should be resolved in the next update, most likely tonight.

+ I'm jealous. On Sunday, my nephew had a birthday party at a place called Zig-Zag-Zoo. Its a McDonalds play park multiplied by about 50. Its an obstacle course for preschool survivor. Its an arena for American Gladiators, toddler edition. Its a 5-story play structure with slides and ladders and tunnels and everything I would have played with when I was five. "When I was your age," I start to tell my kids, "we only had a stupid McDonalds outdoor park that was closed each winter. Our legs would stick to the hot slide and there were always sticky coke puddles on the merry-go-round." Soft leather couches surround the play structure and there is a snack-bar for parents to spend more money. Its genius.

+ Boxscore data from 2007 is coming soon. This is a part of the site that I would really like to bring to the forefront but with all the other sites out leveraging the same raw data, its really not TBC's forte.

+ The 2007 Independent League Statistics have finally been published. I certainly learned an important lesson this year when it comes to the Indy stats. I had long dismissed these as secondary stats and I am only now realizing the reliance that some players have on TBC being updated with this data in a timely manner. It seems that for many players, its part of their baseball resume and posting the data in late January certainly doesn't help. I'll do my best next year to attack Indy stats a lot sooner.

Surprisingly, I've also received numerous requests for college summer league and winter league stats for players. I'm seriously considering all of them, maybe at the expense of Spring Training Statistics which are neat to have but possibly irrelevant.

+ There are still lots of odds and ends to tie up for 2007 and I admit that I am way behind since I had spent a great deal of time last fall either travelling or working 100% on The Hockey Cube. I'll also be the first to admit that normally when I get into a project, it is very hard to pry me from it. Its actually this tenacity which has allowed me to get through some big projects like the Historical Draft section, the boxscores and the historical minor league stats dating back to 1978.

The Year in Review pages, team information, Japanese stats and even the 2007 boxscores are still not up to date and I hope to be able to get through all of these projects before next season begins.

+ Roberto Hernandez Stadium in Aiken, South Carolina is home to the South Coast League's Aiken Foxhounds. Did he pay a sponsorship fee or is this an actual dedication? I also came across Bruce Hurst Field in St. George, Utah, home of the St. George Roadrunners.

Am I just jealous? Nah. I have my own stadium in, of all places, El Paso, Texas. Apparently there is a jewish population in El Paso.

+ One of the features I will have on this blog are reasons why I consider myself to be a geek. I feel that once you are married and have children, its once again cool to be a geek so here's reason #1.

+ Its 1994 and four friends are headed off to Daytona Beach for spring break. We're in a Pontiac Sunbird and 24 hours later, we're in Florida. Its the Monday after the Daytona 500 and so the hotels are full of race fans. We can tell because everyone one of them is wearing a Nascar t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Half of them have sunglasses and/or a cowboy hat.

I don't know even why I am here. First of all, I don't travel well and I spent Delaware to South Carolina with high anxiety and frequent trips to McDonalds restrooms. That super-sized Coke at the Wendy's in Wilmington, Delaware didn't help. Second, I'm not a ladies man and I don't pretend that I came down here to score with the chicks. Remember, this is a post about proof as to why I am a geek, not a stud. Finally, I am only 20 years old and 354 days. Florida law says you need to be 21 years old to drink and I am 11 days short and the bars down here don't think this is close enough. So they put a stamp on my hand that says "No Alcohol". Quebec law says you need to be 18.

We spend 7 days here and we meet some girls but they all drift off because, well, my friends are also pretty geeky. We play miniature golf. We play Beach Volleyball everyday and we sit and we watch the wet t-shirt and bikini contests. And of course, we hit the bars where I can drink $6 Cokes with my friends and instead of feeling buzzed, I feel the need to pee every 7 minutes. I don't dance, I don't really care for loud music and I don't like staying up late. Again, I wonder why I am here. We start the week trying to be like the Romans in Rome but we end up being 4 geeky Montrealers out of their element.

But on day 3, my friend and I discover a nearby amusement center and the best arcade game ever invented. Better than Gauntlet, better than Punch Out, better than Pole Position and even better than Track and Field. I believe it was called World Series Baseball.

Its the arcade baseball game with the Red vs Blue team. The pitcher has a lever to control the pitch. Pull back all the way, fastball. Slide the lever to the right, slow curve. Pull back a little, straight. Changeup. Pull back all the way, to the side. Slider or Screwball. And the batter had a lever as well and he could place his swing directly on the ball and hit for power or he could swing under, and pop it up or swing over the ball and ground it out. The game was amazingly realistic from an arcade perspective (not simulation). The game felt real and my friend and I played this game every day, 9 innings at a time. While most of our cohorts were chasing young women, drinking, partying and having college student fun, we were playing arcade baseball on A1A, with a stack of quarters lined up on the screen. 1 quarter = 1 inning. While our other friends were at the beach playing some volleyball or conspiring on how to get some alcohol, we'd be at the arcade, hitting the literal homers.

My memory of this trip is not very good overall. It went off like a rocket but ended up like a dud but I'll never forget World Series Baseball and the comfort it provided amid a week of general discomfort. I imagine it was the same for my friend who had an equal love for the game and its one of my favorite memories with him.

+ The purpose of this blog is to provide site updates for both The Hockey Cube and The Baseball Cube. But sometimes, it can be two months between updates. I like to blog, but I don't want to comprimise the purpose of this blog nor do I want to start another blog for other topics so I am stuck with the dilemma of what to do with this blog. Should I stick with the original plan and keep it for updates only or can I expand its purpose and make it free-form. That is, write whatever the heck I want.

I'm not a particularly interesting person. I don't have a glamorous life. I spend a lot of my time in front of a computer, at my day job, at home. I even play computer games with my wife. But I like the idea of sharing my thoughts and mundane experiences with the world between updates so I think I might actually turn this blog into something beyond updates. The main topic of this site will certainly continue to be The Cube sites and all surrounding them but I think that sometimes, life will get in the way.

I'll try to be insightful, witty and succinct. I'll try to stay away from bandwagon opinions and recycled fluff. I'll try to be original and somewhat interesting and hopefully some day, this will be a blog that you look forward to reading every day.

+ Fantistics Fantasy Baseball Insider Baseball has signed on with The Baseball Cube as an advertiser. They have a product called Fantasy Baseball Player Projections and its dubbed "Fantasy Baseball's version of the Theory of Relativity".

+ I don't know exactly what this means for The Baseball Cube but we have been promoted to a page rank of 6 by the almighty Google. Page Rank measures the importance and trustworthiness of your web site. The rating is on 10 and 6 is considered to be very good. Conversely, The Hockey Cube has a page rank of 0. 0 is not very good. But that is most likely because the site is new and I have not promoted the site beyond a small link on TBC.

TBC was actually a 6 a few months ago but we then got demoted to a 5 because we had way too many text links on our front page.

So why I am telling you this? I don't know. Maybe because I have nothing else to write about today or maybe because if you're a potential advertiser, I'm trying to send some hints your way that TBC would be a great place to drop your advertising dollars. Either way, you now know that TBC has a page rank of 6.


+ By the way, we have been getting a lot of emails about the absence of Independent League Statistics for 2007. I hadn't realized how many players actually relied on TBC to promote themselves to scouts and the absence of these numbers can actually make these players really nervous and edgy. I apologize for the delay in posting these stats, I honestly hadn't realized that the industry used the site in such a manner. I assumed it was just fantasy baseball players looking for a little edge.

All this to say that I should have these stats up by early February. Next year, I will try to get them up much earlier.

+ Layoff day came and went and I survived. We had a company meeting today to disclose that there will be more layoffs throughout the year but they'll all be with six weeks notice or more.

» Did you know that I am getting old? I know this because there is a player in my database with a birthday in the 1990s. Thanks a lot Johnny Bromberg. Then again, as long as I still see players who were born in 1973, I shouldn't complain. Thank you very much Todd Helton!

» My company (my day job) is laying people off today. Its like a minefield, co-workers disappearing from their cubicles, escorted out of the building, never to be seen again. It almost seems random though these things generally aren't. The company recently announced 15% layoffs due and so far, I haven't hit a mine. In some ways, I wish I could be ejected into the world of full-time webmastering but its not time just yet.

» B.J. Weed. Funny name. Huh, huh-huh.

+ For anyone who visits The Hockey Cube (THC) regularly, you'll have noticed an inconsistent update schedule. Ideally, I'd update the site each morning but since I have a day job, two young kids and a propensity to sleep-in, it rarely happens. The site is update daily. Its just not always the same time of day.

But it was never my intention for THC to replace nhl.com or any of the other superpower hockey web sites. It was never my intention to have stats update in time for your morning coffee. THC is not intended to complete replace the old Hockey-Recap.com either. THC's future is predicated on preserving NHL history and I am preserving history one boxscore at a time. While I capture and enhance daily boxscores, post standings and game logs, I'm also busy capturing historical boxscores from years past and hope for THC someday be known as the Retrosheet of hockey.

As of now, The Hockey Cube has boxscores for 2.5 seasons dating back to 2005-06.

+ Cube Notes is my latest attempt to keep fans of The Baseball Cube up to date with the happenings surrounding the site. Over the past few years, I've tried a number of methods to keep people up to date from blogs to newsletters and I've even tried to program my own blog but I think that the current blog is here to stay.

I've called the blog Cube Notes since the site will encompass all Cube Sites and not just The Baseball Cube (TBC). Though TBC is still our flagship site, The Hockey Cube is quickly gaining steam and I thought it necessary to provide a consolidated location for delivering updates to both sites as well as information on the pipeline.

I will apologize in advance for the plain-Jane design of the blog. Creativity is at the bottom of my list of talents.

Regular posting will resume very soon. Please subscribe to this blog to receive easy access to updates to our Baseball and Hockey sites as well as other interesting notes.