For you Yankee fans out there, I'm going to commit the ultimate fan heresy and argue against ARod, and in favor of Boston's Manny Ramirez, as the greatest hitter in the game today. He doesn't have anywhere near the defensive value that ARod does, and he's more of a clubhouse canker (I won't say "cancer" as he's more annoying than destructive) but he gets my nod for a consistently good eye, consistent power, and postseason performance. 

Manny's career offensive numbers are better than ARod's in almost every department, even though he's been in the league only one more year than ARod. For the record, Manny sports a .312/.408/.590 line, with 500 HRs, 484 2Bs, and 1639 RBIs. ARod's line is still awesome, but lower: .306/.388/.578, with 525 HRs, 406 2Bs, and 1524 RBIs. Let's be clear: either one of these guys could spontaneously combust right now and still make the HOF on their first ballot. These are amazing numbers for their careers, and both should add on to them in the near future. Albert Pujols has some pretty eye-popping statistics, better than Manny, but he's only been doing this Superman act for half as long.

Continue reading "Manny Ramirez: Baseball's Best Active Hitter"

Nick Blackburn of the Twins was felled on Sunday by a line drive off the bat of Yankee Bobby Abreu, who's enough of a nice guy to show obvious distress as he ran to first. It's one of the greatest fears of any pitcher, as few have the instincts to get out of the way of a ball traveling 100+ MPH from fifty-five feet away (recall that the pitcher typically lands much closer to the plate than the sixty feet, six inches from the rubber to the plate).

Practically every game has its share of near-misses, with balls screaming past pitcher's legs, arms and faces, and giving the lie to any misbegotten notions that baseball is a game for sissies. Unlike football, hockey, lacrosse, or most other contact sports, baseball offers few protections to its players. Catchers get to be armored, home plate umps a little less so, and batters (plus this year, base coaches) can only don a helmet that still leaves their face exposed, and perhaps add a guard to previously injured elbows or shins.

Continue reading "Dangerous Projectiles"

I should preface this by saying I'm not a Braves fan and never have been. This is due to many factors, including my dislike of many things Southern (I say this having spent almost 10 years living in Alabama, and several more visiting my parents there), the annoying and insulting idiocy of the Tomahawk Chop and its associated "war cry," the stupid antics of rednecks like John Rocker (and the fans' tolerance of his ignorant ways), as well as their hegemony of the airwaves. Because they were always on TBS, it was hard to avoid the Braves, and in the days before my DirecTV Extra Innings package (AKA "Baseball Heroin") I'd watch the Braves games just to root against them.

This national exposure had the opposite effect on many people, however, and the Braves expanded their fan base immensely through the national distribution of TBS on standard cable and satellite packages, practically since the inception of cable itself. Fans in the forgotten nooks and crannies of the baseball map could always catch a Braves game, and transplanted Southerners could follow what was for many years the only team in the South.

Continue reading "Braves: America's Team No More"

Facing the second batter in last night's game against the Giants, Randy Johnson tied Roger Clemens at #2 on the all-time strikeouts list. With the third batter, he gained sole possession of the second spot, a place he should hold for a very, very long time.

Nobody on the active pitcher's list is within shouting distance of Randy's 4680 (and counting): Pedro is 1600 away, and it would take the thirty-five-year-old more than seven seasons to reach Randy, and that's at his career average of 248 Ks, a number he hasn't reached since 2000. Johan Santana, one of the best strikeout pitchers around, would take twelve years at his current 219-K average season to touch Randy, meaning he'd have to pitch until he's almost Randy's age, without injury or career decline. 

Beyond these guys, it's inconceivable that anyone would touch Randy, not in an age when starters go six or seven innings and then bow to the setup-man-and-closer combination managers so often employ. We haven't seen a 300-strikeout season by anyone not named Randy Johson since Curt Schilling did so in 1999, with precisely 300 strikeouts. Nobody other than Nolan Ryan, Schilling, Pedro and Randy have done it in the past twenty years, and nobody's done it more often in that time than Randy.

Continue reading "The Big Unit Climbs Over Clemens"

Well, it was all over ESPN last night, and the Seattle bloggers and sportswriters are buzzing about it: the normally cool-headed John McLaren lost his temper in yesterday's news conference. His Mariners are 18 games below .500 in spite of a $120M payroll, and they play like a team of Little Leaguers, or at least overpaid Little Leaguers who are just waiting for their candy bar and Gatorade at the end of the game. McLaren railed about how tired he was of losing, how tired his players are of playing hard but getting nothing for their efforts, and of how something was going to have to change--and soon.

Some of this outburst is a case of the shit flowing downhill, as Seattle owner Chuck Armstrong--himself a generally mild-mannered guy--ripped into McLaren and the M's coaching staff before the game Wednesday. It was the kind of shouting that the team could no doubt hear from the locker room, the sort of chewing-out session where nobody wants to meet your eyes when you leave.

Continue reading "McLaren Blows His Top"

Someday we will certainly look back on the last few years as some of the best years in baseball, as far as watching some significant milestones being broken. In between Bonds' maligned chase of Aaron and Randy's recent conquering of Clemens' K record, we've seen Frank Thomas, Jim Thome, and ARod all reach the 500-HR plateau, and Sosa reach 600, with Griffey knocking on the same door. Maddux recently won his 350th game, and Glavine won his 300th, and Smoltz recorded his 3000th strikeout just before he went down to a season- (and possibly career-) ending injury, and not long after Pedro reached that same level.

Then, last night, Chipper Jones hit homer number 400, becoming the only switch hitter to reach that level while maintaining a career .300 average. This in a year where he's currently hitting .418, one of only 14 players since 1980 to be above .400 in June, guys with names like Boggs, Carew, Walker and Gwynn. One can only wonder how many more homers Chipper might have hit, if he hadn't fallen to injury so often in recent times--he hasn't played more than 150 games since 2003, and has only cracked 130 games twice since then. He's got a few more years in the majors, so we may see him hit 500, and perhaps pass Eddie Murray (504) or the Mick (536) in the switch-hitting home run department.

Continue reading "Another Milestone Passed"

The Texas Rangers aren't known for making shrewd organizational moves. They were nicknamed The Strangers in the 1970s, in part because of their no-name team, but also for their proclivity towards hiring oddballs or also-rans. In the 1980s and 90s, striving for acceptance, they built a new ballfield (which has proved to be not only a sauna in the hot Texas summers, but also a launching pad for hitters) and enjoyed a brief window of respectability, appearing in their first postseason and winning their only playoff game in 1995. 

Then they signed ARod to a bazillion-dollar contract. To be more accurate, it was a 10-yr deal worth $252M, all the more remarkable because the 10-yr contract he just signed with the fat-pocket Yankees is only worth $275M, albeit for a later (and hence less productive) decade-long stretch in ARod's career.

Continue reading "Texas Rangers Show Some Character"

I don't watch horse racing much, but I did tune in to see Big Brown fall short of his attempt to win the first Triple Crown since Affirmed in 1978, just as I watched Street Sense, Smarty Jones and Funny Cide do the same. It was history in the making. But baseball hasn't had a Triple Crown winner since 1967, when Carl Yastrzemski in 1967, the year after Frank Robinson did the trick. There have been eleven horses to win the Derby, Preakness and Belmont since 1919, an impressive feat, as these are races of three different lengths in a five-week period, and the distances are typically more than the horse has ever run. 

Since 1878, baseball has seen 14 batters win 16 Triple Crowns, an unofficial award given to the hitter who leads the leagues in average, homers, and RBIs. This is an accomplishment spanning an entire six-month season, covering one ratio and two counting statistics, meaning the player must be both consistent and durable. For whatever reason--perhaps a greater parity in talent among players--we're currently in the greatest drought of TC winners ever, our forty years easily beating the previous ten-year gap between Mickey Mantle in 1956 and Frank Robinson in 1966.

Continue reading "Triple Crowns"

It's easy when you're blogging every day and playing fantasy baseball to neglect the big picture of where the teams are and why. On the one hand, I'm annoyed by fans who start moaning that their team is two games back of first when only a week's worth of games have been played. But the time is nigh to pull my head out of the everyday grind and take a peek at the standings, which are starting to settle in, and see what stories are out there.

AL East

Boston's on top, and that's no surprise, as they're playing solid baseball and trail only the Cubbies for the best record in baseball. Even with Ortiz and Dice-K kicking it on the DL, they continue to play strong, showing the depth of their bench and farm system. The surprise here, of course, is twofold; the Yankees and Devil-less Rays have changed places. It's Tampa that trails Boston by a game and a half, while New York is on the outside looking in, seven games out of first. It's only an underperforming Blue Jays team and the typically mediocre Orioles that are keeping the 32-32 Yanks from sealing up last place in the East, surely one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Continue reading "Time to Take a Step Back"

To Junior, it must have felt like giving birth after a long and complex labor. Hitting his 600th home run last night was probably the most overpredicted and overdue statistical milepost in baseball history. We've been waiting for this to happen for at least ten years, ever since he put up back-to-back 56 homer seasons for Seattle in '97 and '98. When that season wrapped up, he had 350 career longballs at age 28, becoming the fastest player in history to hit that many, a feat he repeated when he cracked his 400th.

It seemed inevitable that he'd break Ruth and Aaron's career numbers, and we waited for the chase to begin.

Then he left Seattle for his hometown Cincinatti Reds, and even embittered Mariners fans had to acknowledge that the move had a beautiful sort of symmetry: his father had begun his career with the Reds and finished it with the Mariners, and Junior seemed like he'd be following in Dad's footsteps, only in reverse. The Kid has often said his days playing alongside his dad in Seattle were his best, and that his greatest ambition had always been to be just like his dad.

Continue reading "Junior's 600"

One of my other writing gigs is at The Asian Reporter, where I write reviews, features, and a monthly column on Asian-American sports issues. Each spring, I write a preview about the prominent Asian major leauge baseball players, and that preview has grown considerably. This past year, I gave up trying to chronicle all of the probable Asian players and concentrated on the most prominent ones instead.

And one of the biggest names coming into MLB this season is Kosuke Fukudome, the right fielder who's at the heart of the Cubs' impressive lineup this year, and one of the leading candidates for Rookie of the Year. If he receives this award, he'd follow in the footsteps of countrymen Hideo Nomo, Ichiro Suzuki, and Kaz Sasaki (Hideki Matsui was edged out by Angel Berroa, a laughable omission in hindsight). And like all of them, Fukudome isn't "really" a rookie.

Continue reading "Japanese Rookies of the Year"

Two huge injury developments last night--one to one of the best all-around hitters in the game, and the other to an outfielder who's been red-hot the past few weeks. Both injuries should have big implications to their teams, one likely more than the other, and to the NL Central.

The first was to Alfonso Soriano, left fielder and leadoff hitter for the Cubs, owners of the best record in baseball. A pitch from Jeff Bennett cracked the fourth metacarpal of his left hand, right around the knuckle, and he'll be out for six weeks. By chance, I once broke this same bone in my left hand playing softball, and he's going to have problems with his grip until that bone gets completely healed. My bone was broken farther down in the hand, and the fact that Soriano's break is near the knuckle should make it even harder for him to regain his grip.

Continue reading "Bittten by the Injury Bug"

Though they don't seem as devastating as the Soriano/Pujols loss I wrote about yesterday, two key players have gone down on two other teams today. Cleveland put Victor Martinez on the DL, while Seattle placed its once-reliable closer JJ Putz back on the DL, both with elbow injuries. And unlike Soriano's freak fracture, there were hints at undiagnosed problems with both Martinez and Putz.

Putz hasn't really been himself all season, or at least not the closer we'd seen over the past two seasons, the one who put up two straight seasons of 30+ saves, with an unreal sub-1.00 WHIP and ERAs of 2.30 and 1.38. Last year, Putz was an All-Star and the 2007 AL Rolaids Reliver, and pretty much the one guy that Seattle fans could count on to deliver on a consistent basis. This year, that abruptly reversed itself, and Putz never really dominated the way he had in years past. He got his first save opportunity, blew his second, then was put on the DL with a strained ribcage muscle.

Continue reading "Two Big Injuries, Day Two"

Much like the Designated Hitter, the announced introduction of instant replay to Major League Baseball will likely have calcified supporters and detractors forevermore, and it seems just as inevitable that it will remain. MLB may begin reviewing home run calls this season, possibly as soon as August 1, according to a report in USA Today.

There are many hurdles to be hopped over before this is a reality, so the Aug. 1 date seems a bit soon, but if the umpires' union will agree and the logistics can get ironed out, we're going to see this sooner or later, and this year's playoffs (for better or worse) don't seem like an unlikely time that they might begin. This season has seen its share of disputed calls, which has accelerated the call for umps to use the same replay that all fans can see, although the 25-5 owner's vote at last winter's meeting was more of an impetus than any of those missed calls have been.

Continue reading "On The Merits of Instant Replay"

Apropos of yesterday's blog, about the possibility--really at this point a good probability--of instant replay being used in MLB, this weekend's round of interleague play got me thinking about how the game's already been tweaked. And how the purists protested, to no avail, when interleague was first introduced in 1997, but how it's now become an unqualified success.

We've all become used to the wrinkle in the schedule that pits AL teams against NL teams, once a matchup that we'd only see in the World Series. This is why people protested it when the idea was first floated, as if the only reason that people watch the Series is because of the novelty of the interleague matchup. Basketball and football have blurred the boundaries between their leagues and divisions with no ill effects to their ratings or competitiveness. NFL games will be hawked as "previews" or "rematches" of the Super Bowl, and nobody seems to care that this year's NBA Finals occurs between two teams that have already met twice before in the regular season.

Continue reading "Interleague Play"

OK, that title was irresistible, but in fact I'm going to say that Chien-Ming Wang's foot injury should force the Yanks hand in a trade, especially when combined with other injuries this season. Funny how little things can combine to lead to something even larger, accumulating momentum gradually until it becomes irresistible, as it has with the murmurs about a trade for C.C. Sabathia, which is really more the point of this blog.

The other connection to my blog this year is the DH argument--on the one hand, had both leagues used a DH, Wang's injury (which occurred while running the bases) would not have occurred. On the other, had Wang been running the bases all season, instead of just during interleague play, he might have had the balance and smaller muscle tone to prevent this sort of injury. But, as they say so often these days, it is what it is, and it's just as easy to speculate that he might have hurt himself earlier, had he been running the bases full-time.

Continue reading "Off On the Wang Foot"

Along with the rest of the Mariner community on this site (and Seattle fans across the NW) I've been howling for the head of Bill Bavasi, and that chorus of angry villagers only became more raucous as the Ms have stumbled to the worst record in baseball this season, and the siege on Castle Frankenstein had begun. Miraculously, Mariner management saw the light (or perhaps the flickering torches) and fired Bavasi yesterday, a move that began joyous celebrations across the tri-state area.

I have enumerated Bavasi's many GM sins before, but will briefly recall them here:

Sexson ($15.5M for a 1B hitting .217/.297/.392)
Vidro (a $8.5M DH hitting .222/.268/.325)
Adrian Beltre ($13.4M for .226/.303/.423)
Jarrod Washburn ($9.85M for 2-7, 6.09/1.55 ERA/WHIP)
Carlos Silva ($8.25M for 3-7, 5.79/1.46)

Continue reading "Buh-Bye Bavasi"

My attention is divided today, between the two coasts, and between moves major and minor.

Beginning in the East and the earlier time zone is appropriate to the biggest story: the firing of Willie Randolph. Say what you will about Willie, he’s been a classy guy in both New York teams (he earlier served as a Yankees’ bench coach) and deserved better. That Minaya reportedly declined to fire him on Father’s Day, only to axe Randolph in the middle of the night on Monday, replaces a reprehensible act with a cowardly one.

Randolph has been dangled like a pinata since May 1 or so, and the way his status was reportedly series-to-series has been utterly unfair. The baseball season is a long one, and the best of teams will lose a series now and again. To expect Willie and the Mets to go undefeated, in games or series, until management (or Minaya) felt better about him was unrealistic and unfair. To compound this with a late-night assassin-style execution of a guy whose worst trait seems to be an inability to light a fire under a team of well-paid professionals who should need no such motivation, is simply insulting.

Continue reading "Two Brief Bits"

As I remarked in my blog when he was released, Sidney Ponson has brought his teams little but grief to go with his occasionally adequate pitching. When the Rangers released him, I’d hoped that would be the last of Sir Sidney.

The nickname comes because Sidney was actually knighted in his native Aruba by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands (Aruba is offically part of the Netherlands). This knighting either signifies the paucity of suitable candidates in Holland, some wacky Monet-distance-effect that makes Ponson’s scurrilous deeds actually honorable, or the inevitable mental deterioration that comes with an inbred monarchical family with roots stretching back to the 13th century.

It seems the Yankees, however, want to give him another chance in the bigs, either dazzled by this royal imprimatur, truly desperate for pitching, or because of the inevitable mental deterioration that comes with an inbred baseball family with roots stretching back to the 1970s. For whatever reasons, the Yankees signed Ponson to a minor-league deal yesterday, with GM Brian Cashman saying the move was “an obvious one.”

Continue reading "Sidney "Poison" Ponson"

The dominoes continue to fall in Seattle, as John McLaren was handed his walking papers yesterday, three days after GM Bavasi tried on his own pink slip. In some ways, this was handled better than the Mets’ embarrassing and insulting firing of Willie Randolph. At least McLaren wasn’t dangled for weeks before a midnight assassination, and there were suitably kind words for McLaren upon his dismissal, with new GM Lee Pelekoudas obviously distressed about having to fire his longtime friend and colleague.

McLaren isn’t the problem in Seattle, of course, although his light touch with players probably wasn’t helping things any. Pelekoudas promoted bench coach Jim Riggleman to McLaren’s position, relying on his tougher style to whip the Mariners into a facsimile of a team that cares whether they win or lose. Owners often start at the top with firings, and so do GMs, so McLaren should have known his job security was ebbing.

Continue reading "Down Goes McLaren"

The Yankees and Red Sox are rivals in many ways—traditional and league rivals for years, they now regularly battle for free agents, as they might do with Indians trade bait C.C. Sabathia. And now both teams have some pretty crazy pitchers in their minor league systems, both of whom have a good shot at making the bigs in the next few years.

Boston’s entry is a little less unconventional, if only because they already have Tim Wakefield, baseball’s most successful full-time knuckleballer. R.A. Dickey of Seattle is the only other guy to throw it regularly (he’s got a 1-3, 3.97/1.55 ERA/WHIP this year, with 17-22, 5.70/1/57 career line), while guys like Mike Mussina use a modified knuckle-curve.

But Wakefield has succeeded with it since 1992, with a career line of 172-151, 4.33/1.36, respectable but not sparkling numbers. Since he’s 41 and his productivity has been steadily declining—he hasn’t seen the good side of 4.00 ERA since ’02, and has cracked 200 IP only twice since then. When Wakefield goes, the thought has long been, so will this magical pitch.

Continue reading "Two Kooky Pitchers"

The Reds have gone into Yankee stadium and in three consecutive games, their starting pitchers have held the Bronx Bombers, who are just beginning to wake from their early season slumber, to three runs.

That's pretty spectacular work for the Reds, but what’s more impressive is the guys who have been on the hill for Cincy. You’ve certainly heard of Johnny Cueto and Edinson Volquez, the two fireballing phenoms around which the Reds are building their future. Volquez has been electric, with a 10-2 record to go with a microscopic 1.71 ERA and 1.17 WHIP and 110 Ks against 45 walks. Cueto has similar strikeout numbers (81 against 34 walks) but has been more hittable, with a 5-7 record against a 5.01 ERA and 1.36 WHIP, although those numbers have been improving since the start of the season.

Continue reading "Daryl Thompson: One of an Endangered Species"

Well, if there was ever a reason to just hang up the cleats and call it a season, it happened to the Ms today and last night. After a brilliant performance where he hit the first HR by a Mariners pitcher, and the first grand slam for an AL pitcher since Steve Dunning of Cleveland in 1971 (that was before the DH was introduced).

Just as my colleage Jeff Wilson was calling for the banning of the DH--or at least the use of a pitcher in that spot now and again--Hernandez went down to an ankle injury in the fifth and had to leave the game. Even amid history, bad luck finds its way to the Mariners, the way a hitter on a hot streak will hit a dying quail just out of the reach of the second baseman for a hit, while he'll catch the same ball hit by another guy on a cold streak.

Luck just happens that way, and if the Mariners didn't have bad luck, they wouldn't have any luck at all.

Continue reading "More Holes in the S.S. Mariner"

And probably not your own Braves, either. I watched them boot the ball around last night with a long-time Braves fan; three first-inning errors led to three runs, and they never recovered, losing 4-3, in a game without Chipper and a host of others.

My Braves friend got so disgusted at the quality of play that he couldn't watch anymore. Dave Bush was unhittable for the first three innings and just when they seemed to get things going again, Yuni Escobar was doubled off first when Prince Fielder snagged a liner and dove back to the bag. Even though replays showed he was pretty clearly out, Esco got tossed for arguing the call. He'd strayed too far and was beaten back to the bag by a first baseman with the physique of Grimace. 

The Braves had to finish the game without him, a tough spot as their bench is short due to nagging injuries to Chipper and Escobar, who had to miss today's game due to his hip flexor (which might have been hurt by diving back to the bag the day before). His replacement Omar Infante pulled his hammy legging out a double, leaving the shortstop duties to Brent Lillibridge, a pinch-runner with all of four games' worth of experience with this year's Braves.

Continue reading "Not Your Daddy's Braves"

Shawn Chacon has been indefinitely suspended from the Astros and will likely be released or traded as soon as possible--that is, if any team is willing to take him on. This all comes after a clubhouse incident where Chacon knocked down his GM ED Wade, jumped on top of him and began choking him.

While some other blogs out there are making light of this, with post titles like "Chacon Goes Medieval on Wade" or otherwise lauding Chacon for enacting the Great American Dream--knocking your boss on his tail--this is, in fact, a level of personality abnormality so deep that even Sidney Ponson hasn't plumbed it.

Chacon, who has pitched in mediocre fashion for the Rockies, Pirates, Yankees and Astros, was dropped from the rotation last week, hardly a disservice to a guy with a 2-3 record against a 5.04 ERA/1.51 WHIP with 53 strikeouts, 41 walks and 16 HRs in only 85 IP. He set a record for nine straight no-decisions to start the year, a mark that reflects his own inconsistency and the Astros' awful bullpen. 

Continue reading "The Houston Strangler"

I'm going to deliberately provoke the ire of my easily ire-provokable friend/reader Drano by using horse racing once again as a blog segue (blogue? Have I created a word here?) For those who aren't privy to our emails--which is anyone outside of the NSA, I suppose--Drano doesn't like that I've mentioned a failed Triple Crown in horse racing while utterly failing to mention the victory of his team in the exciting Stanley Cup that happened a few weeks back. His team . . . the Stanley Cup . . . darned if I can't remember the name of his team or the sport he follows so avidly . . . but anyway, on to horse racing and baseball . . .

When it became obvious at this year's Belmont Stakes that Big Brown would not be the winner, jockey Kent Desormeaux pulled his horse up. That's the racing term for pulling back on the reins and slowing down a horse at the end of the race, when it becomes obvious that he's not going to win. It's done when the jockey feels there might be a health problem and that pushing the horse might hurt him in a race the horse no longer had any chance of winning. It made history, as Big Brown became the first TC-eligible horse to finish dead last--but better dead last than merely dead.

Continue reading "Rebuild!"

Apropos of yesterday’s blog about what a last-place team should be doing, let’s look at the Toronto Blue Jays, in a similar situation as the Mariners, if not nearly as dire. In last place in one of baseball’s toughest divisions, the 38-43 Jays canned manager John Gibbons on June 20, replacing him with veteran Cito Gaston.

I’d listed Gibbons as one of my 5 worst managers in the other blog I write for, because the Jays always seemed to underperform, and he’s had too many on-field and off-field run-ins with his players, from the easily provoked Frank Thomas to Shea Hillenbrand, whom he allegedly challenged to a fight.

I don’t mind a manager with a strong hand, but you’ve got to produce results, too, and Gibbons never could. And for every Thomas or Hillenbrand (or Dave Bush or Ted Lilly, two more players who had public feuds with Gibbons) there are likely other players who simply chafed under Gibbons.

Continue reading "The New Jays"

The game everyone’s talking about from last night is the near-no-hitter—so called because only eight innings were completed—by the Angels, who lost the game to the Dodgers—which is why the no-hitter was only eight innings: the winning Dodgers didn’t need to take their bottom-of-the-ninth at-bats. Got that?

Most people are focusing on the injustice of the fact that MLB doesn’t recognize eight-inning no-hitters, or that the Angels office is so weak they can’t even beat a team that doesn’t collect a hit. I’m more interested in Mike Scoscia having the managerial cojones to pull Jeff Weaver during a no-hitter.

One of the angles on this story, of course, is the AL manager facing an NL decision: had this been played in Angel Stadium, Scoscia wouldn’t have needed to make that call (since Weaver wouldn’t have been hitting). Instead, he made the tough call and lifted his pitcher for a pinch-hitter in the seventh, the kind of call no manager wants to make, the kind of call that leaves announcers speechless and fans stunned.

Continue reading "That’s Why They Make the Big Bucks"

All right. Are you ready for this? As the All-Star break approaches, the Tampa Bay Rays have the best record in baseball. That’s right. At 49-32, they’re a half-game ahead of Boston, the Cubs, and Anaheim. Whoa. Is this one of the signs of the apocalypse?

Perhaps, now that the “Devil” is gone from their team name, Someone Upstairs is shining down on them. More likely, however, the Rays have assembled a team from the old-fashioned formula of strong pitching and defense, and a roster that mixes savvy vets with promising youngsters. They’ve acquired these guys through smart drafting and trading, and a shrewd analysis of the free-agent market, not to mention just a smidge of luck and plenty of hard work and hard-nosed baseball.

They have some of the best young arms in baseball, including Scott Kazmir, part of The Trade in 2004 that sent him (and Joselo Diaz, currently stinking up the joint in the PCL) to the Mets in exchange for Victor Zambrano (No Longer In Professional Baseball) (NLIPB) and Bartholome Fortunato. James Shields was drafted in 2000, and Andy Sonnanstine in 2004. They traded for Matt Garza—ridding themselves of troublemaker (and extra outfielder) Delwyn Young—and Edwin Jackson, giving up Danys Baez and Lance Carter (both NLIPB). That’s some good swapping and drafting right there, and that’s their current rotation.

Continue reading "Hold On To Your Hats"