Happy Super Bowl Sunday!

I'm sure many of you are still mourning the fact that the Patriots will be watching this game on television just like us, after coming so close only to be eliminated in the penultimate round. Perhaps some of you are planning to root for the Ravens, because they play in the AFC with the Patriots - or maybe you can't stand to see the Ravens win again, so you're going to cheer on the 49ers?

Maybe you don't care who wins anymore, and you're just looking forward to a game that you can watch and be totally relaxed, unconcerned for the outcome. And then there are those of you who couldn't care less about football if you tried, are just biding your time until pitchers and catchers, and might turn on the Puppy Bowl later if you get bored and/or starved for cuteness.

I decided a while back that the playoffs are always more fun if you have a team to root for, even if your first choice has been eliminated. This year during the MLB playoffs, I arbitrarily chose to root for the Orioles and Giants for the duration, and lo and behold, the Giants went and won the whole damn thing.

And since I bought some Giants merchandise to celebrate, MLB.com doesn't know what to sell me anymore.

I've decided to stick with my winning city for this Super Bowl, and root for the 49ers, though I know even less about them than I did about the Giants (to be fair, I know at least a few players on every baseball team, but next to nothing about most football teams outside the Patriots and their perennial rivals).  So I hope no diehard 49ers fans will be upset that I'm jumping on their bandwagon so late - I seemed to be good luck for the Giants!

No projection for Lyle Overbay

2011: 121 games, .234 BA, .310 OBP, .360 SLG, 9 HR, 47 RBI
2012 projection: 113 games, .248 BA, .335 OBP, .404 SLG 9 HR, 41 RBI
2012: 131 games, .259 BA, .331 OBP, .397 SLG, 2 HR, 10 RBI
2013 projection: [None]

After a rather disappointing end to the 2012 season, Bill James and his team didn't do projections for Lyle Overbay in the 2013 Handbook. The Red Sox have only signed him to a minor league deal, with an invitation to spring training.

Overbay will make a good counterpart for the right-handed Mike Napoli, and is by all accounts, a solid defensive first baseman - assuming he makes the team out of spring training.  The Red Sox willbe Overbay's seventh team in the majors, but just his second American League team, as he spent 2006-2010 in Toronto.

Overbay has a lot of experience in different clubhouses, and his presence could be a good thing for the Red Sox this season - in addition to possibly platooning with Napoli against tough righties.

Happy (belated) Birthday to the late, great Jackie Robinson!

If you went to Google yesterday, you saw that the Google Doodle was legendary baseball player, Jackie Robinson.  Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, and has been a household name in the United States since he broke baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. 

For all the glowing remembrances that float around each year on Robinson’s birthday and on MLB’S Jackie Robinson Day (each year since 2011 on April 15), the actual difficulties Robinson endured at the hands of white fans and even fellow ballplayers are usually glossed over.

From Dave Zirin’s A People’s History of Sports in the United States:

In their first meeting [Dodgers’ General Manager Branch] Rickey asked his new second baseman, “I know you have the skills. But do you have the guts?” This meant, in effect, did he have the guts to take torrents of abuse and not respond?  A decade before the rise of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his movement of nonviolent resistance, Rickey was asking Robinson, a player with a hair-trigger temper, to turn the other cheek.

Robinson faced explicit racism from his managers, teammates, umpires, and white fans, and endured it all with a stoicism that might as well have been a superpower. Some onlookers decided that this meant Robinson didn’t hear or didn’t mind the taunts, racial slurs, and threats showered upon him at every turn, but that was never the case. When Robinson died of a heart attack at the age of 53, his wife Rachel reported that all those years of holding such powerful feelings of stress and rage inside had caused Jackie’s early death.

The definitive book on Jackie Robinson’s life is Jule’s Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy,  and it’s a must read for anyone interested in baseball, race relations, history, or just the story of an incredible human being. It tells of Robinson’s amazing athletic achievements (starting with being a varsity letter winner in FOUR sports at UCLA), and of his passion for ending Jim Crow and segregation (including the tale of being court-marshaled and then acquitted for refusing to give up his seat on an illegally segregated army bus).