Rangers replace Carlos Pena with J.P. Arencibia to play at first

Tell ‘im, Wash.

J.P. Arencibia hit his way back to the majors with the Rangers…  Arencibia replaced first baseman Carlos Pena, who was designated for assignment after hitting only .136 in 59 at-bats.

Arencibia opened the season as the Rangers’ front-line catcher but hit only .133 in 60 at-bats… Arencibia fared better against Pacific Coast League pitching, hitting .279 with 14 homers and 41 RBIs in 190 at-bats…

Arencibia said that while in the minors, he decided to go “back to what makes me ...

Top pick for next MLB commissioner rejects job offer

Bud Selig begrudgingly accepts staying on the job another 15 years.

MLB Commissioner Bud Selig is set to step down from the position next January, and he already has a candidate in mind for who could replace him.

The thing is, he doesn’t want the job.

Steve Greenberg, a former MLB deputy commissioner and son of Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, is appreciative of the offer but doesn’t plan on taking it. Selig, who turns 80 later this month, has been baseball’s commissioner since 1998.

  ...

Vaccaro: Yankees greats have stumbled from where Jeter now stands

Jeter: I can’t OPS+ any more.

Sixty-eight games to stick the landing.

You don’t have to wander very far to know how challenging that can be. Mickey Mantle long regretted how it ended for him, a 1968 season in which he could barely walk, in which he hit .237 and knocked four points off his career average, leaving him at .298.

...Jeter, of course, is equipped with certain unique elements that will steel him from such problems. For one thing, he would have to go 0-for-428 to drop his career ...

Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 7-18-2014

An account of the game of the year from the Pittsburgh Press, July 18, 1914:

In the sixth inning, Wagner singled, after Mowrey had been retired, and took third of [sic] Viox’s drive to center. Bescher pegged to Stock, but when the Giant third-sacker tried to locate the ball it was missing. Wagner jumped up and started for home, and as he ran the sphere dropped from his clothing…Umpire Byron called Wagner out for interference.
...
The decision caused a mighty howl, which was participated in by ...

Instinct Magazine: Legendary Baseball Player Yogi Berra Comes Out Swinging For Gay Athletes In The MLB

Not as pithy, but as wise as any Yogiism he’s ever said (or didn’t):

In 1947, my first year in the majors, Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby also came in. They didn’t have it easy. But they changed the game for good, and for the good of our country. They made the game about equality and respect, the way it should be.

That’s why I’m proud and thrilled that Major League Baseball and Athlete Ally are making baseball even fairer, and better. Their alliance is in the spirit of what we teach young ...

Nightengale: Greenberg could follow Selig - but will he?

While Major League Baseball searches for the next commissioner to replace Bud Selig, several high-ranking industry executives believe they have found the right man for the job.

The trouble is convincing Steve Greenberg, 65, managing director of investment bank Allen & Company, to do it.

Greenberg, former MLB deputy commissioner and son of Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, loves the sport.

Just not the Commissioner’s job.

In addition to the increased workload, I guess he doesn’t want to take a ...

BP: Why are we playing the Hunger Games with minor leaguers?

Is this a good system? I don’t ask that question as an exercise in moral philosophy with the poor pitiable minor leaguers cast as a vulnerable group in need of protection. I’m asking this from the other side. Is it smart for teams in Major League Baseball to willfully pay their minor leaguers so little? Aside from cost-savings and the moralizing, could teams actually have more success developing players if they opened their wallets a little wider?

In addition to the points made in the ...

Tracy McGrady Retires From Baseball

That Baseball-Reference page is Popeye Jones ugly!

Former NBA star and Sugar Land Skeeters pitcher Tracy McGrady started the Atlantic League All Star Game Wednesday at Constellation Field before retiring from baseball after pitching 1.1 innings.

T-Mac struck out the last batter he faced, Atlantic League All Star Bryan Pounds, before walking off the mound to the applause of his teammates. The strikeout was the first and only “K” of McGrady’s baseball career and he kept the baseball for his ...

7-18-14 OMNICHATTER

Let’s get this started again! The second half begins!

Journal News: Recap of Derek Jeter Retirement Gifts

The big 2nd half issue at BBTF is likely to be the retirement gifts The Captain receives as he completes his Final Journey. To provide perspective, the LoHud Yankee Blog reviews the 1st half:

May 25 — White Sox
Once a powerful hitter for both the Yankees and White Sox, retired slugger Ron Kittle built Jeter’s U.S. Cellular Field retirement gift. Kittle created a bench made of baseball equipment with bases as the seat, bats as the back and arm rests, and baseballs used for decoration and ...

MLB Network: Christopher Russo Tongue Twisters

I dislike E.W. Scripps. I dislike Scripps. I dislike Scripps a lot.

Pitchman: How Tom Emanski changed the sport of baseball — and then disappeared

This checks out.

Teaching the Mechanics of the Major League Swing, featuring Houston Astros slugger Glenn Davis alongside a teenaged Eddie Taubensee, was released on VHS in the fall of 1986 and instantly became a hit. Newspaper articles about what Emanski — by then a New York Yankees associate scout (or “bird dog”), later poached by the Pittsburgh Pirates — was doing at Baseball World became more frequent. The Atlanta Braves even sent one of their struggling prospects, the highly ...

The Curious Case of Mark Buehrle

By almost every metric, Mark Buehrle is a thoroughly average pitcher. So how has he managed to find such success, especially at his age?

WaPo: Research supports the notion of the ‘hot hand’

Green and Zwiebel studied two million MLB at-bats from 2000 to 2011. They neutralized for the abilities of the hitter and pitchers — such as lefty-on-lefty matchups and stadium sizes — and focused on 10 major statistical categories, such as batting averages, home run percentages and strikeout rates.

They found that a hitter’s past 25 at-bats were a significant predictor of his next at-bat. When a player is hot, they found his expected on-base percentage to be 25 to 30 points higher than ...

Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 7-17-2014

Milwaukee Journal, July 17, 1914:

HAS DENT IN HEAD

George Weaver, captain and shortstop of the Chicago White Sox, who was injured in a collision with Demmitt, the left fielder, while going after a fly ball at Shibe Park yesterday, will probably be out of the game several days. Weaver has a dent in his forehead over his left eye as the result of coming in contact with Demmitt’s chin.

Seems like you’d get the exact opposite of a dent in your head if you ran into somebody’s chin.

John Feinstein: Len Bias, like Pete Rose, shouldn’t be in a Hall of Fame

A march to sheer madness…

There is no doubt a stain of mendacity on Rose that never fell on Bias. Rose repeatedly lied in depositions for the Dowd Report, the findings of which led to Rose accepting a ban from baseball in 1989. Rose only stopped lying about betting on baseball in 2004 because he was peddling a book and because he believed — as he said as recently as this week — that if he finally fessed up, Selig would reinstate him. He didn’t do it because his conscience caught up with ...

MLB, Fox release a joint statement about the lack of a Tony Gwynn tribute on Tuesday night

Calcaterra with the joint blowing statement.

“We are deeply saddened by the loss of Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, an extraordinary individual whose memory we have honored in numerous ways in recent weeks. The Baseball family has sadly lost a number of people this year – including Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner, Frank Cashen, and former All-Stars Jerry Coleman, Jim Fregosi and Don Zimmer – and did not want to slight anyone by singling out one individual.”

As I said yesterday, though a tribute ...

Michael Jeter?! Twitter goof births All-Star game’s most popular meme

“But what set this apart was how the Internet scooped up Michael Jeter and adopted him as the meme of the night. It was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter worldwide. A @MichaelJeterNY Twitter account debuted. And the Photostops started to roll in:”

I had a meme…..a meme just for you…..LYDIA!!!!!

The forgotten brilliance and influence of ‘Little Big League’

Ron Gardenhire should not have made this movie.

From the beginning, “Little Big League” looked destined to fail — and that’s not just because Pincus wanted to make a movie about the Royals. Pincus was an aspiring screenwriter with zero credits to his name. He had grown up on the East Coast, and relocated to Los Angeles to chase a career in Hollywood. But by the early 1990s, not much had materialized.

But there was one idea in his head, something that sounded fun. What if a kid managed ...

Daugherty: Reds, not Selig, should have final say on Pete Rose

I was going to name my next band Władziu Ziu Peddles…but Liberace’s Ghost is go!

If I were Bob Castellini and the Reds organization – and I most assuredly am not – this is what I would say to Bud Selig, right now, about Peter Edward and the 2015 All Star Game:

“It’s our game. If we want Pete Rose to deliver the game ball on a rolling stage with showgirls, slot machines and Liberace’s ghost, that’s what we’re going to do.

“We have groveled as you have tossed us crumbs. We have been ...

Texas Rangers deal Jason Frasor to Kansas City for pitcher

The Royals simply get tossed salad and scrambled eggs.

The Texas Rangers on Wednesday made their first sale of the season, trading RHP Jason Frasor to Kansas City for 26-year-old RHP Spencer Patton.
Related

Patton, 26, will be assigned to Triple-A Round Rock. He was at Triple-A Omaha this year, compiling a 4-3 record and 4.08 ERA with 14 saves in 34 appearances.Patton has 60 strikeouts in 46 innings so far this year, but has also walked 26 and allowed nine homers….

Patton, a 24th round ...

CNN: Is baseball on its way out?

“No one goes to baseball games anymore, its too crowded there.”

Except it’s untrue. Seventeen of the game’s 30 teams have poorer attendance than a year ago at this time. World Series television ratings get more disappointing year after year. Household-name players—I mean popular and scandal-free ones like Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter—have come to the ends of their careers, with no clear heir-apparents.

Is there a star player of today you’d go out of your way to see?

“Hey, Felix Hernandez ...

Bud Selig: Montreal ‘excellent’ choice for return

IF the build a fantastic new stadium.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig can envision Montreal making a bid to return to the major leagues…

“I think they would be an excellent candidate in the future. No question about it. That was very impressive,” Selig said Tuesday during a question-and-answer session with the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

“They have much work to be done,” he said. “There’s certainly in my case no hard or angry feeling toward Montreal. We tried to keep a team ...

Former MLB player Luke Scott fired from Korean team after confrontation with coach

According to reports out of Korea, Scott, who was playing for SK Wyverns, had been placed on reserve due to plantar fasciitis and was not pleased with how the team was managing his injury. After an argument with coach Lee Man-soon in which Scott called the coach a “liar” and “coward,” Scott told reporters the team did not respect his way of handling his physical condition.

Scott, 36, had a .267 batting average and six home runs in 33 games for Wyverns, and he was on the injury list ...

Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 7-16-2014

Pittsburgh Press, July 16, 1914:

Eight of the Boston Redsox [sic] were chased from the bench by the umpires yesterday for making uncomplimentary remarks about the Cleveland players.

I find it fascinating that this is buried deep in the “baseball notes” column. If eight players from one team got ejected in one game in 2014, it would be the top sports story everywhere in the country.

MGL: What’s in store for the Tigers in the second half?

Tigers don’t suck…at least according to MGL.

What does the rest of 2014 look like for the Detroit Tigers? We would expect their collective pitcher projections for the rest of the season to be nearly the same as before the season began. Their hitter projections might be a tad better and their defensive projections a tad worse. Overall, we wouldn’t expect their rest-of-season (ROS) win percentage to be much different from their pre-season win percentage, which was .543. That would give them a ...

Adam Wainwright says he grooved pitch for Derek Jeter to hit in All-Star farewell

Derek Jeter’s final All-Star Game went about as well as possible, even if it included a little help from the opposing pitcher.

Jeter went 2 for 2, including a first-inning double on a 90-mph fastball National League starter Adam Wainwright told a group of reporters he threw over the plate intentionally.

“I was gonna give him a couple pipe shots. He deserved it,” Wainwright said. “I didn’t know he was gonna hit a double or I might have changed my mind.”

Fivethirtyeight: Derek Jeter And the Other Worst All-Star Starters of the Past 40 Years

Wait Mark Loretta was an All-Star? Mark Loretta was an All-Star STARTER?????

Forty-year-old Cal Ripken Jr.’s 2001 All-Star Game start was awarded purely out of legacy, and it’s been frequently compared to Jeter’s this week. Ripken, however, had the worst first half of any All-Star Game starter from the past four decades, having played much worse than Jeter has thus far in 2014. Ripken’s first-half triple-slash line in 2001 was .240/.270/.324 (good for a 56 Weighted Runs Created Plus); ...

MLB Finally Acknowledges Glenn Burke, The Game’s Gay Pioneer

At tonight’s all-star game, MLB will recognize the career and contributions of Glenn Burke, a speedy outfielder who became the first baseball player to be out to his teammates, and the first to acknowledge it publicly after his career ended.

Burke left the game in 1979, citing the burden of keeping his personal life private.

Neyer: Get ready for Just A Bit Outside ... FOXSports.com’s new baseball destination

The future in sports journalism here - flannel-based reporting!

Welcome to Just a Bit Outside, coming to FOXSports.com on Wednesday. I’ve been doing this “work” for a long time now, and over the last 70-some years I’ve developed some pretty strong opinions when it comes to covering baseball on the Ultranet. You know, I was there at the beginning, covering such luminaries as Gus “No Shoulders” Wagner and Dale “Murderer” Sisler for the website of the Baltimore Picayune-Democrat, and I’ve seen it ...