Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
When I was a kid I received a copy of You Know Me Al from my uncle Sam Plummer, who was not really my uncle, but I thought of him as one all the same. The version I got was a collection of the You Know Me Al comic strips--it wasn't until years later that I learned it was a book before it was a comic. I loved the gift, not so much because I was especially taken with the strip, but because it combined comics and baseball and Sam was thoughtful enough to know that (a die-hard Cubs fan, Sam later introduced me to the records of Fats Waller). Somewhere along the line I lost the book but a few years ago I saw a copy in a used bookstore. My heart skipped a beat and I nabbed it. For those of you who have never seen it, here's a peak at a strip:
Here's another one:
I still prefer the book, but this version is pretty great.
I think it's still largely conventional wisdom. Al Leiter certainly thinks so; he says as much about once per game when he calls it for the Yankees. "He's gotten him out with the inside fastball the last two times up, I think you keep throwing it there until he proves he can hit it."
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