The UmpBump team went on a sojourn to Tucson to celebrate the marriage of Coley and his lovely bride Suz. Well, we almost got everybody together, Nick couldn’t make it but thanks to the awesome reality-altering abilities of Photoshop, he joined in the celebration.

Congrats to Suz and Coley Ward!

While arguing a call made following a play at the plate in this afternoon’s Cubs-Pirates matchup, Carlos Zambrano (let’s face it, the man has some serious problems) nudged umpire Mark Carlson, earning him an ejection. But then Zambrano decided to give himself more authoritative powers and proceeded to eject Carlson in turn.

I’m still debating whether or not this is awesome or incredibly idiotic.

Unfortunately, the video does not show what Zambrano did following this, namely, throwing a ball into leftfield, taking a bat to the watercooler and of course, slamming his glove into the fence. Like I said. The dude has some serious problems.

UPDATE: Found a video of the post ejection Godzilla impression:

Just a quick reminder that it’s easy to get updates about new Umpbump posts on Twitter. Just click on our Twitter icon at the lower right corner of the screen, beneath the “marketplace” section.

What is Twitter? I’ll let Mr. Will Leitch explain it.

Continuing an annual tradition we began last year in this space, we here at UmpBump cast our ballots this year for who we think should be in the Hall of Fame who is not yet in.

The rules were simple: elect anyone you want, with no restrictions. Just like the real Hall, players who appear on at least 75 percent of all ballots cast are considered elected to the UmpBump version of the Hall of Fame. The voters consist of the main UmpBump contributors Alejandro, Coley, Sarah, Nick, and Paul in addition to three guest voters.

This year’s guest voters were our good friend, occasional guest poster, and loyal UmpBump commenter Melissa, the inimitable Kensai, who authors one of the very best Dodgers blogs on the web, Fire Ned Colletti Now, and the illustrious Dan Rosenheck, who writes for the New York Times and The Economist.

Here are the results of the balloting (names with number of votes received):

Rickey Henderson – 8
Tim Raines – 6
Bert Blyleven – 5
Andre Dawson – 5
Ron Santo – 5
Dwight Evans – 3
Mark McGwire – 3
Dick Allen – 2
Ross Barnes – 2
Bill Dahlen – 2
Joe Gordon – 2
Gil Hodges – 2
Joe Jackson – 2
Grant Johnson – 2
Sherry Magee – 2
Don Newcombe – 2
Jim Rice – 2
Pete Rose – 2
Ted Simmons – 2
Dave Stieb – 2
Alan Trammell – 2
Deacon White – 2
Harold Baines – 1
John Beckwith – 1
Charlie Bennett – 1
Pete Browning – 1
Bert Campaneris – 1
David Concepción – 1
Will Clark – 1
David Cone – 1
Bob Caruthers – 1
Darrell Evans – 1
Wes Ferrell – 1
Bill Freehan – 1
Jack Glasscock – 1
George Gore – 1
Bobby Grich – 1
Heinie Groh – 1
Stan Hack – 1
Paul Hines – 1
Keith Hernandez – 1
Charley Jones – 1
Jim Kaat – 1
Charlie Keller – 1
Cal McVey – 1
Dick Lundy – 1
Minnie Miñoso – 1
Dobie Moore – 1
Graig Nettles – 1
Alejandro Oms – 1
Buck O’Neil – 1
Johnny Pesky – 1
Billy Pierce – 1
Lip Pike – 1
Rick Reuschel – 1
Hardy Richardson – 1
Bret Saberhagen – 1
Reggie Smith – 1
Jimmy Sheckard – 1
Joe Start – 1
Harry Stovey – 1
Ezra Sutton – 1
Quincey Trouppe – 1
Lou Whitaker – 1
Maury Wills – 1
Jimmy Wynn – 1

As we can see from these results, this year UmpBump unanimously elected Rickey Henderson, who appeared on 100 percent of the 8 ballots cast. This is not surprising, as Rickey looks likely to challenge Tom Seaver’s record for percentage of votes received on the real Hall ballot this year. Tim Raines also edged into our verson of the Hall this year, appearing on exactly 75% of ballots cast (6 out of 8).

Also giving strong showings were Andre Dawson, Ron Santo, and Bert Blyleven. Dawson held steady from last year at 5 votes, while Santo and Blyleven made progress, both jumping up from 3 votes to 5. Mark McGwire and Dwight Evans also made up ground, moving up to 3 votes from 2 and 1 last year, respectively.

Several players who received significant support from UmpBumpers last year did not even get one vote this year. Players who got at least two votes last year but none this year included Jack Morris (4 votes last year), Tommy John (3), Roger Maris (3), Rod Beck (2), Albert Belle (2), Don Mattingly (2), Dale Murphy (2), Luis Tiant (2), and Joe Torre (2).

The forcast is for rain, but I’ll be at my computer starting at 5 p.m., live-blogging either Game 3 or whatever crappy reruns Fox shows while we wait for the skies to clear.

5:00: The tarp is on the field. Joe Buck says “It is pouring and the wind is whipping around.” Great.

5:01: Fox puts the weather map on the screen. Buck says the good news is the rain is supposed to clear eventually. Some old guy says there’s every reason to believe the field will be dry in half an hour. I’m sold. Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people with 9-5 jobs, we umpbumpers like to email each other rather than do actual work. Today’s email topic: the MVP voting, and specifically Umpbump’s MVP selections.

Paul: So just looking over our MVP picks so far, i realized something – why aren’t there more MVP candidates out west? So far, the only one of us to mention a player west of Houston was Nick’s pick of Martin. We’ve had Pujols, Berkman, Han-Ram, Utley, Howard, Chipper, Beltran, Mauer, Pedroia, Quentin, A-Rod, Youk, Huff, Sizemore, Halladay, and Martin.

Sarah: well let’s think–the NL West sucked so hard you can’t really have an MVP from any of those teams, I think. While I love Martin, I don’t think he really had that kind of year—the obvious MVP on that team in the second half was Manny Ramirez, without whom they would not be in the playoffs. But Manny disqualified himself by being a dick. Then there’s the AL West. First, the Angels. Whom would you pick from them? Again, the player who has carried them down the stretch was Tex, a midseason acquisition. Their starting pitchers have been the season-long key for them, but I don’t think any of them has had the kind of year that could crack the position-player-heavy MVP. The Rangers had some tantalizing players, but a) didn’t make the playoffs and b) don’t have a real clear candidate. Bradley didn’t play in enough games (IMNSHO) and the sentimental fave in July, then-triple-crown threat Josh Hamilton, faded during the second half. I think we generally have an East Coast bias on UmpBump, but I also think the West is just weak right now in both leagues. :-/

Paul: I came really close to putting Hamilton at #4 on my list. I wouldn’t say he faded in the second half. He still OPSed .874, which isn’t that much worse than his first half. I just think the media stopped caring because it had ceased to be a novelty story.  And voting for Lincecum isn’t a terrible idea.

Coley: I didn’t vote for Hamilton because he played for the Rangers and the Rangers sucked this season. They finished 21 games out of first place and four games under .500. I don’t think a player’s team needs to make the postseason in order for that player to get my vote. But the team does have to be good, and the Rangers weren’t good. The Cardinals were good, they just got stuck in a tough division. Ditto the Astros.

Paul: Texas was -66 in run differential. Houston was -31. and yes, the al west sucked. but they still had to play al central and east teams. so i think the two cancel out. To me, there’s not that big of a difference between the two teams. Besides, the Rangers led the AL in scoring. It’s not Hamilton’s fault that the pitchers are terrible.

Coley: I don’t use run differential when I evaluate if a team was good or not. I use wins and losses. And I agree it wasn’t hamilton’s fault that his team’s pitching was bad. But the reality is good players on bad teams don’t get MVP consideration. That’s how we’ve chosen to interpret the word “valuable.” If you want to argue that we should reconsider our interpretation of valuable, I’m all for it. Frankly, I’d go a step further and argue that we should get rid of the MVP award and give a Player of the Year award instead.

Paul: Ah. Therein lies the differences. I didn’t pick who I thought would win. I picked who I thought should, and W-L records and the talent level of his teammates don’t factor into my decisions. If you disagree, that’s fine, not gonna argue.

Coley: I didn’t pick who I thought would win. I picked who I thought should win based on what have become nearly universal standards: that a player is awesome, and that his team is a winner. Again, I think the latter standard is silly. But it doesn’t make any sense to ignore it, when everyone with a vote thinks it’s important.

Paul: i think you’ll at least agree that conventional wisdom isn’t always correct. and if you personally think it’s silly, why can’t you ignore it?

Coley: You’re probably right, Paul. It does make sense to ignore conventional wisdom if you don’t agree with it. You’ll probably sleep better at night. But the price you pay for ignoring the realities of MVP voting is that your opinions may be easier to ignore.

Paul: touche.

So after all the speculation and theorizing about whether MurrayChass.com is a real site written by the real Murray Chass, who used to write for the real New York Times, Sarah finally had the brilliantly simple idea of just calling up the real Murray Chass and seeing what he would say.

Wisely mentioning that she writes for the Boston Metro and glossing over the fact that she also considers herself a blogger (preferring instead to refer to “websites,” which, after all, UmpBump is), Sarah said she had heard some internet chatter that the site was a clever hoax, that she’d been discussing it with some colleagues, and that in the end she figured she’d better go to the horse’s mouth.

Chass was very intrigued as to why people thought the site might be fake and peppered Sarah with questions about that, while not giving away any information. In the end, since Sarah works for a newspaper (”something that’s actually printed on paper,”) and since she actually called him (he did acknowledge receiving “some emails” asking the same question) he said he would confirm that it was really his site.

So in the end, UmpBump’s suspicions turned out to be untrue. But you know what they say in journalism: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

First, New York Times columnist Murray Chass took the buyout.

Then he started a blog, except he isn’t calling it a blog, even though it clearly is a blog (Wordpress is blogging software, after all).

The Big Lead was all over this story. Deadspin covered it too.

But we at Umpbump were a bit skeptical.

Sure, the site’s url is murraychass.com. But anybody could buy that url. There’s no guarantee that Murray Chass is in anyway associated with the website that bears his name.

The screed on the site’s “about” page is almost too intentionally-unintentionally-hilariously Chass-like to be true. Yet, if the blog is a fake, why hasn’t Chass stepped forward to say so?

We did a little digging through the site’s CSS code and found a name, Ryan, and an email address. Jackpot!

Alejandro emailed Ryan and asked if Murray Chass was really behind murraychass.com. Here’s what Ryan wrote back:

Alejandro,

I cannot comment on your inquiry. However, I’d be more than happy to let you know you should direct your question(s) to comments@murraychass.com for a more official response.

Thank you,

Ryan

We directed our inquiry to the email address Ryan suggested. A few days went by. And then this – a post on murraychass.com asking if “the folks at umpbump (do) not have anything better to do but wonder about the author of this site?”. Ouch.

The post concludes with this cryptic line:

Perhaps by now the umpbump guys have figured it out for themselves; they should be able to figure it out. If they haven‘t, though, they will have to wonder for a while longer.

We’re still wondering.

We’re wondering why Ryan promised to answer our question, but never did?

We’re wondering if Murray Chass even knows there’s a website out there that bears his name?

We’re wondering what it will take to get to the bottom of this mystery?

But one thing we’re sure of: we won’t rest until we know who is behind murraychass.com.

Stay tuned.