I haven’t seen an Edgar treated this badly since Edgar Buchanan in “Framed”!
The next year Edgar won the PCL batting championship (.363) and got another September call-up. In 1989, he actually made the team out of spring training but was still seen as a backup to Jim Presley, who hit 28 home runs in 1985, and was seen as the third baseman of the future. But ’85 was Presley’s high-water mark and the M’s finally traded him in January 1990. But even then, the club didn’t know what it had ...
David Roth Sings Selections from The Great American Gongbook.
Since he announced earlier this week that he’d be retiring from broadcasting after this year’s World Series, the discussion about Tim McCarver—which was always and already defined by a heavy payload of “ugh, this guy”—split in two. The more generous argument holds that McCarver—a player for 21 years, and a broadcaster for an astonishing 29 postseasons—was once a more generous and less grandiose broadcaster than he is in his prickly, ...
“When I was a little kid, I would cry when I would strike out,” [Jeff] Keppinger said after another whiffless day at the Chicago White Sox training camp this month. “I thought everybody was looking at me like I did something horrible or I stunk really bad because I had to walk back to the dugout. I felt everyone was laughing at me in the stands.”
Keppinger, like Albert Pujols and Dustin Pedroia, is one of the select few major leaguers with more extra-base hits and walks than strikeouts in his ...
Plate discipline is harder for hitters to apply against pitchers who consistently pound the strike zone. Increasingly, pitchers are doing that better.
Walk totals decreased in the majors for the third year in a row in 2012, dipping below 15,000 for the first time in a nonstrike season since 1992, when there were only 26 teams. Hitters, it seems, are simply not as feared as they were before testing for performance-enhancing drugs.
“Not that many people are walking - you want to know why?” ...
Buster Posey and Justin Verlander could team up to buy the Royals!
At 26 years old, Buster Posey already is a two-time World Series champion and the National League’s Most Valuable Player. Now he could be a Giant for life.
Posey and the Giants agreed to a nine-year contract on Friday, one that covers his three remaining arbitration years and buys out his first five years of free agency. The deal includes an option for 2022.
Posey had previously signed a one-year, $8 million deal to avoid ...
Meanwhile, baseball’s ratings continue to plummet, irrespective of month or matchup. Those record-low Series of the last seven years featured the game’s biggest attractions, from the moneyed villains of Boston and New York to storied franchises like St. Louis and San Francisco. None stanched the bleeding.
Regular-season games have declined equally. FOX’s Saturday audience has gone down an average of 800,000 since 2001. Sunday-night ESPN telecasts have shriveled by a million viewers in just the ...
And Kate Upton won the Sun’s “best cleavage” poll. Life is good.
The Tigers announced that they have agreed to terms with Justin Verlander on a five-year contract extension through the 2019 season with a vesting option for the 2020 season. Verlander will earn $180MM over the next seven seasons and the option is worth $22MM, meaning that he can earn a total of $202MM under terms of his new deal, sources tell Buster Olney of ESPN.com (on Twitter).
Including the vesting option, the SFX client has ...
Assorted MLB.com contributors (Marlon Anderson!) give their preseason predictions. I wanted to use this as a catch-all for all pundit predictions, so here are a few more:
Creepin’ Costen Shockleys my head hurts! BTW…I’ve just changed my punk band’s name to Anti-Proefrock.
Baseball is awash with more knowledge than ever before. The Phillies generated success with willful ignorance of that information. Fewer and fewer teams value their scouts’ evaluations as much as the Phillies do. That is where the Phillies seek their competitive advantage.
“We think we have one of the best, if not the best, group of scouts in the game,” said Proefrock, an assistant general ...
When you’re a Met if the spit hits the fan
You’ve got brothers around!
Zack Wheeler, one of the top pitching prospects in baseball, was reprimanded last weekend along with teammate Aderlin Rodriguez for an on-field incident that led to ethnic tensions in the Mets’ minor league clubhouse, according to organizational sources.
In a minor league intrasquad game last Saturday, Rodriguez, a 21-year-old infielder from the Dominican Republic, homered against Wheeler, 22, and “pimped it” around ...
Gus Triandos, a brawny slugger who won the hearts of Orioles fans starved for someone to cheer for in the 1950s, died Thursday at his home in San Jose, Calif. He was 82.
“My father died in his sleep,” his daughter, Lori Luna, said. “He’d been dealing with congestive heart failure for 10 years. It was hard for him to get up.
“His heart just gave out.”
A catcher and four-time All Star, Triandos played with the Orioles from 1955 through 1962 and was inducted into the team’s ...
Ty Cobb and Eppa Rixey are about the only holdouts still holding out and nobody knows exactly what Rixey’s kick is. Mr. Rixey is in daily communication with the emperor of Japan and the khedive of Egypt in regard to his grievances, but he neglects to address a part of his correspondence to [Phillies owner] Will H. Locke or [Phillies manager] C.S. Dooin.
Rodriguez’s Yankees are on track to have the highest payroll on Opening Day for the 15th straight year, climbing above the Los Angeles Dodgers to a projected $228 million with this week’s acquisition of Vernon Wells.
So now we know why the Yankees wanted Vernon Wells. :p
Didn’t Bob Gamere mention WHIP one time and get into all sorts of trouble?
Orel Hershiser, an analyst on “Sunday Night Baseball,” contended that “it’s easier to bring the stat to the broadcast if it’s a formula that everybody understands.”
“All of us on this call listening to my voice right now, nobody can tell me the formula for WAR,” Hershiser said. “We know what it stands for, wins above replacement, but how do you come up with a number? I think people know what an RBI is, know what a home ...
Mets left-hander Johan Santana has a “probable” re-tear of his left shoulder capsule, GM Sandy Alderson announced on a conference call on Thursday. He was examined in New York and a second opinion confirmed the diagnosis. Alderson said surgery is a “strong possibility.”
Santana, 34, first tore the capsule and required surgery in September 2010. He missed the entire 2011 campaign and went 6-9 with a 4.85 ERA in 21 starts in 2012 before his season ended in mid-August due to ankle and back ...
There are some very serious gay baseball fans out there who rank players by batting average and wins above replacement (WAR). The rest rank them by attraction and aspiration: who’s hot, who might be gay and who must be gay.
Most gay Padres fans in the early ’90s no doubt put boyishly handsome outfielder Billy Bean on the first two lists. Those who had him on the “must be gay” list share a unique status among baseball observers: they are sure they ...
KISSIMMEE, Fla.—The Detroit Tigers will start their AL title defense without a set closer after optioning rookie reliever Bruce Rondon to Triple-A Toledo on Thursday.
“I’ll tell everybody ahead of time, this is going to be tough,” manager Jim Leyland said. “It’l be a second-guesser’s delight, a second-guesser’s heaven.”
Need something to do this summer? Have a grand to spend? In the NYC area? Check this out:
From Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle to Munson, Jackson, Mattingly, and Jeter, no team has had such a great impact on America’s cultural history like the New York Yankees. Established over a century ago, this Bronx team has had a love/hate relationship with its fans. Yet, it has touched New York’s social, cultural, economic, and sports history with dazzling accomplishments, great stars, and big ...
The Yankees added Vernon Wells and Lyle Overbay this week. Wells, Overbay, and Ben Francisco are making the team, Rivera was told, according to MLB.com’s Bryan Hoch and others.
After reading Caple’s article, David Appelman and I began discussing the idea of reaching out to Sean Forman and seeing if he was interested in agreeing to a unified replacement level. Before we could actually even send that email, Sean reached out to us with the exact same idea. And so, today, we’re pleased to announce that Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs have adopted that unified replacement level, allowing our two models to now measure ...
“As Cromie was building an analytics department from the ground up, Mondry-Cohen’s fandom was sparking his interest in how baseball and numbers interact. He grew up in San Francisco, a rabid fan of the Giants. His father taught high school calculus and kept Bill James’s Baseball Abstracts on his bookshelf.
Through a family friend, Mondry-Cohen landed a job as a clubhouse attendant in the Giants’ visiting clubhouse. During the 2003 playoffs, he skipped class so he could sneak into the ...
Fear No. 1: The older players on the roster show their age or brittleness
This was the most common worry we encountered among Yankees fans. How did we handle it?
We cut the contributions of Andy Pettitte and Hiroki Kuroda in half, turning Pettitte from a projected 3-WAR pitcher into a 1.5-WAR pitcher and Kuroda from 4-WAR to 2-WAR.
We changed the 2.5 WAR we were going to assign Mariano Rivera to a 1.5.
Wish they had this back in the day…so my brother couldn’t tear up my precious Ralph Houk card, which then forced me to stick a mint-flavored toothpick clean through his prized gourami’s eyes.
For those of a certain age, adolescence meant collecting baseball cards. With the 2013 MLB season set to begin, Topps is bringing this past-time to iOS devices. BUNT: The Exclusive MLB Digital Baseball Trading Card Game is now available for the iPhone/iPod touch.
Be the first to collect four leftfielders without knocking over Mr. Tippet!
Tippet spoke in August at a seminar called Sabermetrics, Scouting and the Science of Baseball in a Boston University lecture hall that’s a five-minute walk from Fenway Park exactly three weeks before the Red Sox traded Crawford.
He and James had opposite viewpoints on how Crawford would fare. What follows is one of the more revelatory accounts you’ll find of a leading organization’s thought process and approach to ...
There’s no way to put this delicately – it was a bad day at the Sporting News.
Sources tell me that the Sporting News fired around 12 writers/editors today, and here’s a partial list of those who were let go:
* Lisa Olson, one of the last remaining members of the AOL Fanhouse “merger”* from 2011
* Clifton Brown, formerly of the NY Times, whose most recent column and mugshot are on the front page of the Sporting News right now
* Stan McNeal, their baseball ...
“I’d bet I can blow your block off without hurting you,” said William Millius in the bar room of the Central House at Millerton, Dutchess county, tonight, and then picking up a double barreled shotgun he blew off the top of the head of Ted Wolf. Death was instantaneous.
...
[Millius] was to have gone to Hackensack, N.J. tomorrow to be given a tryout as pitcher on the Troy team of the New York State League.
Dierker said last week he would end his contractual relationship with the Astros after April 15 because of his disappointment about not being selected for a broadcast job and concerns about the team’s direction.
After meeting with Crane, he said that while he will not have a contract for the 2013 season, he is willing to make limited appearances on a voluntary basis as his schedule allows and will revisit his association with the team after the ...
Tulowitzki is also a better hitter than Jeter ever was – a better hitter, frankly, than almost every shortstop in history. From 2009-11, Tulowitzki posted an on-base-plus-slugging of over .900. Only A-Rod, Honus Wagner and Ernie Banks have more .900-plus OPS seasons at shortstop. Lest you think it’s just a function of the thin air on Colorado, only Wagner, Vaughan, A-Rod, Banks, Barry Larkin and Alan Trammell have more seasons with an OPS+ – adjusted for ballpark and league, with 100 being ...
All that stuff stinks. But I could better tolerate such erosion if it didn’t coincide with the continuing loss of my heroes and personal icons. Time has taken Mickey, Cronkite, Carson, DeBusschere, Orbison and the great Bob Sheppard; Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy and the Great One, Mr. Gleason; Ray Charles, Johnny Maestro and Vada Pinson. And Lou Grant, Andy Sipowicz and Big Dan Ingrahm have retired. There isn’t enough Willis Reed and Elgin Baylor to suit ...
