You have something special on your hands, a true phenom, a man among boys on the baseball field, but because you’ve been around the game a long time, you know there are hundreds just like him around the country, and you understand that injuries happen and flameouts happen and life happens. So you use some perspective. You talk about needing to be realistic. You aim on the low side.

“You go out and have a good high school career,” Jeff Trout once told his son, Mike, “and you’ll have a ...

Still gobsmacked that a major league team is playing in a joint like the Oakland Coliseum, where the raw sewage flows more freely than the Bud Light. So too is A’s owner Lew Wolff, who tells Eric Fisher of SBJ that he is embarrassed by the mess but that it’s out of his control

You killed them. You killed the Mets. You killed everything. You’re a monster.

Bob Costas is often evangelical at odd times. His recent ill-timed (if not illogical) remarks about gun control felt like something reserved for the Huffington Post — not the goal post — where he was broadcasting a football game. Now his increasingly throaty, theatrical bent led him to say that the Mets’ celebration after Sunday’s victory was a sign of the “end of Western Civilization.”

But this time ...

Forbes article discussing how the Dodgers will realize much less money from their TV contract than they expected.

Schwabalicious, he ain’t.

FTW: What super-famous musician was born Stevland Hardaway Judkins in Saginaw, Mich. in 1950?

Swisher: Steven Tyler?

FTW: Stevie Wonder.

Swisher: (laughing) In Michigan. I’m an Ohio guy!

FTW: Besides the Cincinnati Reds, which two Major League Baseball teams did Pete Rose play for?

Swisher: The Phillies, and… what other team did Rose play for besides the Reds?

Jason Giambi (from a nearby locker): Montreal.

FTW: You guys should be a team.

FTW: In 1776, the ...

To counteract the Manmohan Singh Primer… the search for objective knowledge about hitting mechanics.

I compiled a list of the top 50 hitters from the 2012 season according to Fangraphs’ Batting component of WAR.  I then looked at side views of each of these hitters from highlights of the 2012 season in which each player hit a homerun.  In the case of switch hitters, I used the side of the plate where they were most successful.  In all but Melky Cabrera’s 2012 stats, that described their ...

In what equipment manager Steve Vucinich, a 46-year employee of the A’s, described as a first, the A’s and Mariners had to shower together in the Raiders’ second-floor locker room after today’s 10-2 Oakland win. Players from both teams trudged up and down one stairway in towels and shower shoes as both teams tried to get their flights out of town.

“It’s an unfortunate situation,” A’s third baseman Josh Donaldson said.

“Kind of a weird thing,” Oakland catcher John Jaso ...

LOAD UP GANG!!!

If a great picture studs an art show, you pay a visit before the exhibit ends. If a classic car is for sale, you raid the piggy bank before your dream auto vanishes. If a popular broadcaster announces his retirement, you try as long as possible to postpone the inevitable. Tim McCarver is about to leave us. Let us bid him an affectionate farewell.

Born 52 days before Pearl Harbor, McCarver was a fine 1959-80 major-league baseball catcher — one of only seven modern ...

Toledo News-Bee, June 17, 2013:

DENVER, Colo., June 17.—(Special.)—With two men on the bases and the star batter at the plate, an unknown minister attempted to interrupt a Sunday ball game here.

The minister stepped to the plate and, raising his hands in the air, started to sing a hymn. The umpire called for the continuance of the game. The ball sped from the pitcher’s hand, a hit was made and the runner from third slid over the home plate between the minister’s legs.

65 years later, the ...

Dumb Dora/Donald doesn’t pretend to be enough of an ____________ .

If an already-signed player who hits an average of 20 home runs and 80 RBIs per year makes, say, $5 million per season, then surely a second player who is averaging 24 home runs and 86 RBIs deserves $6 million per year. It made perfect sense in those honest days, before the introduction of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs to the game.

But teams made deals based on the supposed integrity of the accumulated statistics ...

About 90 minutes after the Mets gave up two runs on a can’t-anybody-here-play-this-game fifth-inning play in which they made two errors and nearly made a third, the Mets actually thought they had a chance. The Cubs still had three outs to get. They got one.

Nieuwenhuis, batting .097 at the time and already having gone 0-for-2 with a walk, nailed his first homer of the season by drilling an 0-1 fastball from Chicago reliever Carlos Marmol off the facing of the upper deck in right field. It was ...

Why…did he squat out the raw sewage problem?

When news broke in August that Colon had tested positive for PEDs, many, including yours truly, assumed the tubby, strike-throwing right-hander had tossed his final big-league pitch. Synthetic testosterone had rejuvenated his arm, helping him stretch his career into the late innings, and without it, he seemed destined to hit the beaches (wearing a shirt we’d hoped) back in the Dominican Republican.

But after serving a 50-game suspension, Colon is ...

12 games today, not counting college and such. Chatter up!

Tampa Bay’s star baseball prospect, heralded in the top five of any national ranking you will find, is officially on his way to the Rays roster. Five games back in the AL East, the Rays will play three games in Boston and four games in New York in the coming week, starting with a double header on Tuesday.

To say the least, Wil Myers has been destroying the minor leagues. Myers hit his fourteenth homerun of the season in a three hit performance yesterday, and has raised his batting line to ...

$1.44M sounds like a lot of savings to spend further down their draft. And a rare example of a top pick going back in the draft and making a ton more than the previous teams offer.

They like model Kate Upton. They like manager Joe Maddon. They like Ryan Braun as a hitter, but they love Miguel Cabrera even more. Much more.

They’re not too high on Milwaukee as a city in the circuit, but they disregard Oakland even more. Way more.

They wouldn’t want their daughters to marry any ballplayer, but especially if his name is AJ Pierzynski.

Those are some of the results in a survey of 146 major-league baseball players conducted by Athlon Sports, which is to publish the ...

In Tom Clavin’s revelatory and surprisingly touching new book, “The DiMaggios,” there is a quote from a syndicated sports column of the 1940s:

“The old-time baseball writers used to refer affectionately to (19th century reporter and groundbreaking statistician) Henry Chadwick as the Father of Baseball. It would seem fitting to bestow this distinction today upon Mr. (Guiseppe) DiMaggio. ... We know of no other father who has contributed that many sons to the uplift and perpetuity of ...

The hell with Teixeira’s meaningless .151/.270/.340 slash line…how are the Yankees ever going to replace his 12 RBI’s!? #francesspool

Up close, hitting coach Kevin Long harbored worry about his slugger. A staple of Teixeira’s pre-game routine involves hitting off a tee. When Teixeira attempted that practice left-handed, which places stress on the strained tendon sheath in his right wrist, he felt “discomfort,” Long said. His left-handed swing lacked “the whip and the bat speed that you ...

Manager Buck Showalter downplays the notion that he suddenly found religion on the shift.

“People were doing it years ago,” he says. “It’s not something new. Ask [1960s slugger] Willie McCovey. But a lot of it then was really tough, because you were basing it on just what your gut told you.”

...Orioles closer Jim Johnson, a ground-ball pitcher when he’s throwing well, says the shift has become too popular. “It’s fine on certain guys, but I think sometimes it gets a little carried ...

It might not be a uniform…but here’s one book jacket I’m going to dislike.

So, on top of buying and selling a wealth of baseball memorabilia on ebay, including Babe Ruth signed balls, bats and gloves from the 1920s and authentic merchandise from the 1890s, Kubiak started penning his thoughts.

“What the book is is a combination of instruction and how I develop what I do with players,’ ” he said. “It mixes with my major league days, too. There’s a lot of history of the game in it like how did ...

Scat Ballou: Is this the way to make a shiity column…? You bet it is!

Now, the Sox have taken it to a new level with the Brothers Drew.

Neither is very good, but there’s something about a Drew that whoever Boston’s general manager is can’t resist, be it Theo Epstein or Ben Cherington.

OK, J.D. Drew had a couple of respectable seasons with the Red Sox. And, OK, Stephen Drew is a good defensive shortstop. Still, starting with Opening Day of 2010, Boston has committed $37.5 million ...

Bill Madden! Elias Sports Bureau! Partridge Pattern Cords! It’s all here!

Why have extra innings, which used to be looked upon with great anticipation, instead been replaced by a sense of dread? And why are there suddenly so many of them? According to scouts and baseball execs I talked to, it starts with the gradual decrease of runs and homers since baseball instituted its ban of amphetamines in 2006.

“There’s less power in the game,” said one exec, “less examples of one swing of the ...

Got Omnichatter?

Just try going to another baseball game and not thinking of a routine flyball being “caught by the chap in the pajamas with the glove that makes everything easier.”

The origins of walk-up music are difficult to pinpoint. There is no “aha moment.” Or even an “A-ha” moment.

Loosely defined, the concept has been around for decades. St. Louis Cardinals leadoff hitter Lou Brock, to name one example, used to ask Busch Stadium organist Ernie Hays to play the “Theme From Shaft” for his trips to the plate in the early 1970s.

Sparky Lyle of the Yankees was also an early pioneer of baseball as musical theater. In 1972, his first season in New York, the left-handed ...