The Planetary Extreme Baseball Alliance

I've created a blog to write about the Arlington Bureaucrats. Feel free to visit and/or comment: The Baseball Bureaucracy. I will gradually be adding more to it as the season progresses.

June 21, 2009 - This week was a bit kinder to the ‘Crats than last week though there is still plenty of room to improve. The good news is that the offense has shown some signs of life and the pitching staff was fairly solid. We see this as an opportunity for our hitters to regain some of their confidence and to start improving their consistency.

We would like to congratulate rookie right-fielder Chris Wright on his spectacular debut. He was 10 of 20 on the week while hitting 3 home runs and driving in 7 runs. Rookie pitcher Jimmy Allen also had a nice week with another solid game and might have earned himself a few more spot-starts to help keep the arms in the rotation fresh. Michael Bender threw a complete game his first start back from the DL (might this mean he will start turning his season around?) Another tip-of-the hat goes to the entire bullpen for their stinginess: opponents only scored 2 runs off of them the entire week (and only one was earned)

Hopefully the team will build off this week and finish the first half of the season strong as we head into the All-Star break. Remember to vote for your favorite Bureaucrats in this year’s All-Star voting!

Original Article

Holy cow, I'm speechless! How cool is that? Congratulations on acing the "Making a good first impression" category.

Your blog looks extremely professional and the writing quality is perfect and highly realistic. I love what you've done there. I've bookmarked the site and will be checking in on it regularly. Any entries you make there will count towards your writing CP total, including the ones already up.

Would you have any tips for other owners who'd like to set up blogs similar to what you've done here? If we got enough people doing this, I would create a directory on the homepage linking to these blogs. You could post your articles directly to your blogs and I would copy them over to the homepage as warranted. I would definitely love to see more of these off-site blogs get started. Now I'm inspired to create one myself!

Borealis - Commissioner wrote:Holy cow, I'm speechless! How cool is that? Congratulations on acing the "Making a good first impression" category.

Your blog looks extremely professional and the writing quality is perfect and highly realistic. I love what you've done there. I've bookmarked the site and will be checking in on it regularly. Any entries you make there will count towards your writing CP total, including the ones already up.

Would you have any tips for other owners who'd like to set up blogs similar to what you've done here? If we got enough people doing this, I would create a directory on the homepage linking to these blogs. You could post your articles directly to your blogs and I would copy them over to the homepage as warranted. I would definitely love to see more of these off-site blogs get started. Now I'm inspired to create one myself!

Wow; congratulations on kicking it up to 11!

I agree. Good job with the blog. It's been discussed briefly about doing a project where we would have team pages. I have a "Featherheads.com" blog site too but haven't really touched it much. After this trade project, I'll work on it more. But I envision we could see teams putting up their own blogs, team history, awards and accolades, amongst other things.

It doesn't look as professional as yours but here's my cheapo site: http://sites.google.com/site/floridafeatherheads/Home

But anyway once again welcome to PEBA and keep up the good work!

Featherheads wrote:It doesn't look as professional as yours but here's my cheapo site: http://sites.google.com/site/floridafeatherheads/Home

Bookmarked.

Borealis - Commissioner wrote: Would you have any tips for other owners who'd like to set up blogs similar to what you've done here?

Absolutely!

There are several free-to-use blogging sites out there. I chose to use Wordpress.com to build and host mine because I'm familiar with their system. I've also used blogger.com before; it's good for people who have zero experiences with blogs. Wordpress.com offers tons of bells and whistles to customize your blog (though you can't manually edit the code of your 'themes' unless you pay a fee). blogger.com is a very straight forward blogging tool that will host your blog and manage your posts (it also uses your Google account if you have one).

Featherheads, I'm not very familiar with Google Sites. Are there any tips you have for using it?

I'm sure there are plenty of other blogging sites out there so feel free to post links if you can think of any. I can also help set up Wordpress accounts if anyone needs a hand. (Though no promises on how efficient I will be with the holidays coming up )

Good work on the blog!

Many, many months ago, I created, but never wrote an entries for, Anthracite Nation.

Bureaucrats wrote: Featherheads, I'm not very familiar with Google Sites. Are there any tips you have for using it?

I just started using it a few weeks ago so I have not gotten a chance to play too deeply with it. But so far it has been simple to use. You can basically just type and publish without any html or webmaster knowledge.

I'm not sure if google provides the best template for those looking for a simple web layout. It looks like the Wordpress offers a more blog-like feel.

'Crats Blog - September

Hey there 'Crats fans! This is General Manager Daniel DiVincenzo here to bring you a few Arlington Bureuacrats updates. August was a good month for us and getting Travis Bunch back from the DL really gave the offense a needed jolt after losing Right-fielder Chris Wright to a broken forearm. It's a bad break that he went down with an injury when he did as he looked like he was starting to get comfortable at the major league level. Since being called up, Wright had been one of the best hitters on the team with his .876 OPS over 171 at-bats. This might not be a huge sample size but we think Chris will be able to help our club next season if he comes back healthy and ready for Spring Training.

Read more >>

Posted to the homepage! Thanks for including the pictures and the links, Dan; it really helps.

New blog post:

Winter Report Card – 2010

Love the new look of the blog, Dan! Those who enjoy following our owners' blogs (which I hope is all of you) should make sure to update your link to the new Baseball Bureaucracy homepage, now located at http://danieldivincenzo.com/bureaucrats/. Great stuff, and I'm looking forward to seeing the evolution of this blog over the offseason.

I've been updating my blog again this off-season. I'd been neglecting it for a little while after life got busy.

For now, they are just some quick posts I've made over my lunch break at work and I don't deem them PEBA home page worthy (or worth the effort to link them and everything). I just figured I'd post them here because it'll be fun to look back and read them. Plus, it'll give you guys a heads up that I'm still alive :)

Lane Signs for Three Years

November 8, 2011 – GM Daniel DiVincenzo sure loves his (s)crappy outfielders! After locking up Travis Bunch for three more years in September, the ‘Crats offer Joseph Lane a contract of the same length. Thoughts:

1. Lane can’t hit to save his life.
2. Why are we locking up bench players for multi-year deals?

The team just shelled out $7,500,000 to a guy with a career .668 OPS? Sure, he had a decent year in 2009, but at this point you really can’t think he’s going to get much better. You know what this smells like? A conspiracy platoon!

It’s all starting to make a little more sense now. Bunch, a lefty, has smacked right-handed pitchers around so far in his career. Even though it seems he’s been in a pretty terrible decline recently, he was still an acceptable hitter when facing opposite-hand pitchers.

Here’s a surprise: Lane’s 2011 numbers versus lefties don’t suck as much as I thought they would. In fact, in a strict platoon, these guys might have had a combined .750 OPS last season (According to the fake math I did in my head). Should they pay $6.5 million dollars a year for a hitter like that? Eh, maybe not. How about a players that hits like that, but has above average defense? Maybe.

To summarize – I don’t think a potential Bunch/Lane platoon will be unbearable. It’s just dumb to spend that much money on two mediocre players when it could have been spent on a single solid player. Just saying.

Bureaucrats Clobbered by The Chief

November 25, 2011 – A victorious Tomás Yánez stands above the bloodied, beaten body of GM Daniel. At least, that’s how I picture the scene after yesterday’s arbitration hearing. Yánez submitted a salary of $5.5 million and the arbitrator decided in favor of the 27-year-old pitcher. The two parties were rumored to be over $1 million apart during negotiations prior to the hearing, so the judge most likely felt the club was low-balling their young pitcher.

Still, I don’t know how someone can justify paying a guy with a career 4.40 ERA and 35-37 record that much money. Hell, the team’s “Ace” doesn’t even make that much money. The Chief had a couple of productive seasons in 2009 and 2010, but was then demoted to a “swing man” position in 2011 after struggling mightily with his control.

With several youngsters competing for a 2012 rotation slot, it will be interesting to see how Yánez is handled. If he tanks during spring training, and some of the younger prospects shine, will the club eat the $5+ million dollars he’s owed? To make the decision even harder, Tomás seems to be a great clubhouse guy and is known to be an extremely fan-friendly personality. Will and ineffective Yánez be kept around for monetary and chemistry reasons, or will the best 25 players make the team?