A few notes from Effectively Wild ep. 1465

Critical injuries of noted baseball writer and journalist Jen Mac Ramos

Jen Mac Ramos reports on baseball from the Central Valley of California. While driving with her husband, Josh Eisen, from her parents’ house early in the morning of Sunday, 1 December, a drunk driver struck their car, killing Eisen and leaving Ramos with critical injuries.

Link to a GoFundMe page to support her medical costs

One interesting article by Jen Mac Ramos: With Aroldis Chapman trade, Yankees and Cubs agree business and profit is more important than character

Link to a more comprehensive list of her articles

Origin and usage of the term “hot stove”

The term evokes the image of people sitting around a stove in the middle of the winter, talking about baseball. However, as the analogy has grown increasingly abstract over time and its origins more obscure, “hot stove” has come to represent postseason activity itself, rather than the speculation surrounding it. In modern usage, the stove gets hotter with more trades, contracts, and deals.

If there is no action, would the stove still be warm, and would the people gathered around it find other topics to discuss? Or is baseball itself the motivation to light up the stove and convene in the first place? Only in the latter case, I contend, would it make sense to equate the stove’s temperature with the intensity of postseason activity. In the former case, the stove has other fuel to burn, regardless of baseball’s combustible yield.

Trades since the beginning of the week

Given the preponderance of coverage on these player’s deals already, does it really make any sense to add another tinny violin to the symphony, or cacophony, of coverage that surrounds high-profile trades? Perhaps a more valuable contribution on my part would be coverage of some lesser, at least more obscure, dimension of the game. At this point in the major leagues, such dimensions might no longer exist, because there is probably a blog out there devoted to topics as arcane as they come, such as the influence of facial hair on team performance and player salary, or edaphological analyses of outfields.

That said, here is a recap of these high-profile trades. Actual journalists take all the credit for the details and contextualization I provide; only after my background in teams’ and players’ histories gets deeper will I be able to throw my own speculative observations into the soup.

Update: I did not have time to finish this. Sorry!