Saturday: Full slate of ballgames. Also, a new episode of Doctor Who. But mainly a full slate of ballgames. Also, the last four rounds of the NFL draft. But screw that, it’s a full slate of ballgames. And, hey, guess what, it’s also the 191st birthday of Ulysses S. Grant…. but mainly a full slate of ballgames.
But it is NOT a place to talk about your fantasy team. It’s rule #1 of Omnichatter, written in the ancient days of earlier this week and passed down through history.
In a span of less than three innings, the Yankees lost their starting catcher for for more than a month and their fifth starter for an unknown amount of time.
Francisco Cervelli fractured his right hand in the first at-bat of the game, when a pitch from Ivan Nova struck him. He will require surgery and miss at least six weeks.
In the third, Nova departed due to pain in his right elbow. He will undergo an MRI later tonight.
Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria personally mandated the lineup card change that flip-flopped starting pitchers Jose Fernandez and Ricky Nolasco in a doubleheader Tuesday and left Marlins players furious with his continued meddling, three sources with knowledge of the situation told Yahoo! Sports.
Loria insisted Fernandez, the team’s prized 20-year-old rookie, pitch in the first half of the doubleheader at frigid Target Field instead of the scheduled Nolasco because the day game was expected ...
A film archivist at the University of Georgia discovered some rare baseball footage from 1919 that shows African-American plantation workers playing against workers from another plantation, complete with uniforms and everything.
If you drill down a bit you can find a link to the footage without the overlays. Said to be the earliest film of African-Americans playing ball.
Just hope this robot doesn’t turn into a bar room murderer like The Mighty Casey!
Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball — or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take swings at flying plastic balls, and though it may miss at first, it can learn with each new pitch and adjust its swing accordingly. Eventually, it will make contact.
“Connie Marrero had a windup that looked like a cross between a windmill gone berserk and a mallard duck trying to fly backwards,” former big league star Felipe Alou once said
Fave YankFan chant: “I’d like see Eduardo Nunez get 500 AB’s and see what he can do!!!” ~Nunez now has exactly 500 career AB’s.~
Eduardo Nunez is just not good. Among shortstops, with at least 60 plate appearances, he is currently tied for last place in WAR (-0.4) with the likes of Asdrubal Cabrera and Brendan Ryan. The latter is the only shortstop to have a worse wRC+ (6) than Nunez (37). Basically, the Yankees have needed him to step up for the injured Derek Jeter and he has done absolutely ...
After 50 years of pronouncing it \bru-NET\ big shot Baseball-Reference comes along and tells me it’s \brue-NAY\. F you Frank Messer!
Brunet was now 38, but he had no plans after baseball. He wanted to keep pitching. A friend of his, former major league shortstop Chico Carrasquel, convinced him to give it a whirl in the Mexican League. At the time, the league served as a bastion for over-the-hill major leaguers who still felt they had something to offer.
One of the most formidable tools in a pro baseball pitcher’s arsenal is the consistency of pitching motion when throwing different kinds of pitches. If your delivery looks the same to an opposing batter when throwing a 95-mph fastball, a 80-mph curve, and a 85-mph change-up, well, you’ve really got something there. Texas pitcher Yu Darvish is ripping up the AL this year with a 4-1 record, 1.65 ERA, and 49 strikeouts, which prompted Drew Sheppard to layer five of Darvish’s pitches on top ...
History was written into the baseball books today, as a result of the situation developing in the Giant-Phillies game yesterday. A man singled with three on bases, winning the game, but didn’t single, and the game was not won. The crowd swarmed out on the field, thinking the game was over, but…settled down to witness the finish of the game.
... [Pete] Alexander wound up to shoot the ball over to the pinch hitter. Umpire [Bill] Klem had his back turned ...
Casey Janssen ponders his fate as he looks at the baseball world for the time being. And sees only darkness.
Mention the numbers to Casey Janssen, and he’s quick to point out how early it is, and how the baseball schedule will eventually even everything out.
There’s a lot of that kind of talk going on right now with the Toronto Blue Jays, only while many of his teammates are expecting a natural progression to the mean, he instead raises the matter in reference to a regression.
This almost makes up for Darling’s “The Great Escape”/“The Sand Pebbles” Steve McQueen mess up from the other day.
Today’s game on SNY (the home of the Mets on TV in New York) between New York and the Dodgers featured riffs on “Dodgeball,” Darling’s fellow Hawaiian-born major leaguers, and lastly, a rant about the guys who cover the NFL Draft, which featured an old wrestling catchphrase from Ron. Cohen and Darling were talking about SNY pre-empting a potential game broadcast featuring Met ...
Screw Lilly…we need the Jeff Ledbetter Fair Play Act of 2013!
College baseball is on pace to set a record for fewest home runs and a 40-year low for scoring and batting average. Now some coaches are calling for a livelier ball to bring the numbers back up.
The switch to toned-down metal bats in 2011 has led to an offensive decline greater than many expected.
“The game isn’t the same,” Clemson coach Jack Leggett said this week. “It’s not as exciting.”
MoneyDUKE: I made baseball as much fun as re-doing your taxes.
Much has been made about Beane’s infatuation with on-base percentage — that was a major focus of the book and movie — and Duquette is also a big fan of seeking out hitters with high OBPs. But this current Orioles club isn’t exactly an on-base machine — with a .324 mark heading into the road trip.
“We are still working on that,” he said with a laugh.
Duquette points out that OBP was something he focused on when he was ...
“Bud Selig was adamant Thursday that he plans to retire when his current term expires on Dec. 31, 2014.” I thought Bud Selig’s choice of words was outfuckingstanding!
Selig touched on an array of other topics during Thursday’s meeting, which lasted more than an hour. Here are some of the highlights:
Selig said he watched the pregame ceremony at Fenway Park last Saturday, when the Red Sox played their first game in Boston since the marathon bombings, and cried. He was especially ...
Rick Camp, who provided swingman duties for the Braves from 1976-1985 died today. He was 59.
On July 4, 1985 Camp, an awful hitter, even by pitcher standards, hit a game-tying home run in the 18th inning of a rain-delayed game against the Mets.
Very good article, with different people’s perspectives on what it’s like to play in such a homer-suppressing environment. I had been unaware of the “marine layer”.
Petco Park has one of the coldest average game-time temperatures in the Major Leagues as well as one of the highest game-time humidity levels in the game. And that marine layer that rolls in off the Pacific Ocean, which sits outside the doorstep of the ballpark, makes it tough to elevate a ball at night.
Baseball New Zealand is hoping a Government-backed investment will lead millions of dollars of greater investment around the bases and sliding into the “mythical land of baseball talent”.
Government agency Sport New Zealand, formerly Sparc, has committed to a $40,000 investment in baseball over the next two years.
The investment is targeted specifically at getting more Kiwi kids active and playing sport and is the first time Baseball New Zealand has ...
Outfielder Mason Williams, who’s generally regarded as the top prospect in the Yankees’ farm system, was arrested in Florida early Thursday morning on charges of DUI. Mark Feinsand of the New York Daily News tweets further details:
Mason Williams arrested in Tampa early Thursday for DUI. Breath tests were under legal limit of .08, but he failed field sobriety tests.
And you thought the Twins were living under a rock.
Twins general manager Terry Ryan, who signs off on every major baseball decision the organization faces, leans back in his chair recently in the Target Field press dining room and tells a packed table of media that it was “just happenstance” that led to those ground-ball machines landing here.
“If you look at that statistical stuff, historically those guys throw ground balls,” Ryan says. “It’s part of the equation. You could talk to Jack a ...
BS: Do you have to be a stat freak to be a member of SABR?
ST: No, because I’m not one myself. I know a lot of them. I was a stat freak growing up and going into the box scores and all that. My interest is history, ballparks, minor leagues. A big part of our membership is people into statistical analysis.
BS: What is your favorite statistic?
ST: I can tell you some of my least favorite. Batting average is one of my least favorite. If there’s going ...
Baseball Info Solutions has timed pitcher deliveries and catcher pops for the last few seasons. When you combine the pitcher’s time to the plate and the catcher’s pop time, you can see the strength of that relationship:
My sense is that the guys in charge needed a non-embarrassing season to keep their jobs, to keep organizational faith in the process, and show that there were positive steps in the right direction, even if those steps didn’t result in a winning season just yet. They needed Jesus Montero, Dustin Ackley, and Justin Smoak to hit. They needed Taijuan Walker, Danny Hultzen, and James Paxton to pitch well enough in the minors to justify the hype. They ...
Relatives of Harry Coveleskie [sic]...received a message that he had been badly injured at Chattanooga, Tenn. While warming up preliminary to a game a bat slipped from the hands of another player and struck him on the head, rendering him unconscious.
HEADS UP!
Coveleski was fine. He was back in the big leagues in 1914 and won 20 games each year from 1914-1916.
Back in the 70’s a drunko friend of mine sent a perfume-soused love letter to Ava Gardner…and asked her why her face went crooked.
In many ways, Gardner doesn’t fit in with the New Yankees. I had to seek out video of him speaking to hear his voice. He has a gentle, South Carolinian drawl. There really isn’t much else to say about him as a person, because I don’t know much else and because no one has cared to ask him any such questions, or at least to write about the answers. If ...
But no team has committed to the committee as a full-season endeavor, even in theory, since those ‘03 Red Sox. Even the Tigers this time around seemingly viewed the strategy as a stop-gap measure following Rondon’s struggles.
“It’s just a balancing act,” Epstein said. “If you have a manager who buys into it and relievers who buy into it, the way Jim Leyland does at times, finds the right matchup. If you have a great left-handed set-up guy and ...
The Omnichatter. Sometimes, we have serious discussions about the games in process. Other times, we make bad jokes. Still other times, we go off-topic and talk about cult TV series. But no matter what, never forget the number one rule of Omnichatter: Nobody cares about your fantasy team.
In 2011, Strasburg threw first-pitch strikes 71.6 percent of the time, the highest in baseball. He carried over his “challenge” mentality from college and put fear of shame into hitters. Last year, he threw 62.3 percent, 34th among starters. Wednesday, he was down to 56.2 for the season, an awful 84th among 107 starters.
...
Until he gets his 0-0 phobia fixed, until he reverses the balance of terror between him and hitters, getting back to the level of confidence he showed when he arrived ...
