Coach Branch Rickey is trying to give the [University of] Michigan ball team some inside stuff. “With one out and a man on third, if you get a base on balls run down to first, turn the bag, and start for second. Draw the throw. If you’re out, you’ll score the man. These college catchers won’t get the man at the plate,” he tells them.
The more I read about Rickey, the more I like him. Maybe some of his ideas were unsuccessful, but you can’t say he was unwilling to ...
The thought goes like this: When a network pays huge money for a sports team’s TV rights, it hikes its carriage fee for cable providers. The best regional sports networks (RSNs) cost upward of $3 a month for cable and satellite providers to provide to each household. With monthly TV bills already exorbitant and more options to provide entertainment, from Netflix to Hulu and beyond, consumers could rebel against the single-payment system and choose what they view a la carte. One executive who ...
Bryce: No longer a fractal landscape…but a full season in.
Because the season started a little later last year, the past calendar year includes more than 162 games for a few guys, but Harper is right at 162 after yesterday. And in those 162 games, he’s been one of the ten best players in baseball. Some fun facts from Harper’s first full season.
Over the last year, he has a .234 ISO. Prince Fielder has a .233 ISO.
Harper is still learning how to hit lefties, which isn’t unusual for a ...
Hide your whiskey and lock up your women! Here comes the Hallion!
On Price’s next-to-last pitch, he thought he had struck out Dewayne Wise with a fastball, but Hallion called it a ball. Price, who appeared to take a step toward the first-base dugout, retired Wise on a comebacker on the next pitch.
“The 2-2 fastball to Dewayne Wise was a perfect pitch,” Price said. “I really don’t know why he swung at the next one since it was in the same spot. Then I walked off the mound. I was mad at myself ...
I look forward to seeing Dietrich at the next Immortal Love Pop-up Experience!
While Dietrich has been receiving plaudits for his talents on the field, there’s no denying his skills away from the game when it comes to juggling. Whether it’s with baseballs, flaming torches, machetes or (and this is where Marlins officials gasp) chain saws that are going, Dietrich has shown a skill that few others have mastered.
“I enjoy juggling. I love doing it as a hobby,” Dietrich said. “I love ...
It’s Matt Harvey Day! And Strasmas (note: Strasmas is cancelled on days where he doesn’t do well)! And St. Waino’s Day! And… uh…. the Feast of Theodore Roosevelt Lilly?
Oh, and the Astros come to the Bronx. They once no-hit the Yankees in the Bronx. That was a long time ago.
A couple of weeks before her ex-husband agreed to sell the Los Angeles Dodgers, Jamie McCourt reached a divorce settlement that gave her $131 million tax-free and several luxurious homes.
Now she says her decision was a huge mistake.
The team’s former CEO is seeking to have the agreement thrown out, saying she was misled about the value of the Dodgers that was later sold for $2 billion. A judge will hear closing arguments Wednesday in a bench trial that could ...
Early in spring training, before the exhibition games started, the Houston Astros practiced victory celebrations. It was part of their daily schedule - nothing fancy, just handshake lines, game balls and smiles, and maybe the outfielders would bounce together on their way to the mound.
“I’m a firm believer that if you want to be it, you have to be it before you are it,” Bo Porter, the Astros’ new manager, said in the visitors’ dugout at Fenway Park on Friday. “You want to send a ...
Dodgers prospect Yasiel Puig was arrested by police in Chattanooga, Tenn., early Sunday and charged with speeding, reckless driving and driving without proof of insurance.
A spokesman for the Hamilton County jail confirmed that Puig was booked Sunday morning and released a short time later. He has a hearing scheduled for the afternoon of May 14 in Hamilton County court.
Puig, a 22-year-old Cuban defector, signed a seven-year, $42-million contract with the Dodgers last June.
The NY Mets have been the Humpty Dumpty of the National League since missing their shot at greatness in ’06, when Carlos Beltran’s frozen mime impersonation on a called third strike ended the NLCS against St. Louis.
It’s been a broken cipher of coaching changes, blown division-leads and minimal talent. The final fall came when they sat on a wall with Ponzi-python Bernie Madoff.
The Mets have been rebuilding and preaching patience ever since.
Here we sit on April 25th and there are three aces who have yet to record a win for their teams: Matt Cain for the Giants, Cole Hamels for the Phillies and 2012 Cy Young Award winner David Price.
If I could have made a wager on this happening, can you imagine the odds I could have gotten? At least a million to one. But here we are, all three pitchers without a win.
Not only are all three without a win, but their teams have lost all 15 combined games the ...
Lancaster Barnstormers manager just don’t have the horses in which to choose from.
Do you look at OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage)?
“I don’t care about that. I mean, some guys ... (catcher Petey) Paramore’s OPS is good because he walks a lot. So that’s good for him. But generally I don’t look at it.”
What’s the most important thing to take into account when building a team?
“I talk to guys in the clubhouse and ask what they know about somebody. I talk to guys on the phone ...
Looking over today’s probable starters, Kevin Correia has a better W-L and ERA than R.A. Dickey, David Price and Cole Hamels. Small sample size or not, I propose Rule #2 of the Omnichatter: Baseball is weird. (Rule #1, of course, is don’t discuss your fantasy team.)
Anyway, full slate of games, with Braves at Tigers being the ESPN Game of The Week.
Bard’s problem is breathing, as Lee sees it. Maybe a run from the highest mountain in Maine, Mount Katahdin, to the ballpark would help, Lee said with a laugh.
“He wasn’t picking up home plate, he didn’t want to let go of the ball,” Lee said. “He was having an anal retentive moment, which goes back to Otto Rank and (Sigmund) Freud. When you start going back to your glove, you’re going home to mama. You want to break that habit. It’s a breathing problem. ...Read More...
While Hernandez has been one of the best pitchers in baseball for several years, it’s premature to say he’s on his way to the Hall of Fame.
According to baseball-reference.com, the pitchers with the most comparable statistics through their Age 26 season (Felix’s age last year) are: Larry Dierker, Dennis Eckersley, Greg Maddux, Frank Tanana, Bret Saberhagen, Joe Coleman, Ken Holtzman, Milt Pappas, Mike Witt, and Catfish Hunter.
Eckersley and Hunter are in the Hall of Fame — although ...
I ran across this excellent piece by the late, great Greg Spira … he was writing about the idea of pitching to the score, and he wrote two sentences that have stuck with me:
“The pitchers who get a reputation of ‘pitching to the score’ have one thing in common - they have all generally gotten good run support through most of their careers. It seems apparent to me that pitchers get this reputation because they get better run support than most other pitchers and thus have a W-L record ...
The statistics that tend to get the most attention (OBP, SLG and OPS) don’t become reliable until after well after the trade deadline!
But, that’s way off in May and we need to start making moves now. What we need is to find a way to take the stats that have stabilized (Swing% and Contact%) and predict other things which are likely to come to pass in the future. So, while Swing% and Contact% don’t seem to tell us much all on their own, we can use them to determine if other changes (that ...
(COOPERSTOWN, NY) – For every Hall of Fame player, there’s a scout who started him on the road to Cooperstown. Now, those scouts will have their place at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The Museum will unveil the new interactive exhibit Diamond Mines on May 4 with a cast of baseball luminaries on hand for the celebration. Diamond Mines, made possible with the support of the Scout of the Year Foundation, will begin a scheduled two-year run in the Museum’s second floor ...
90 CC’s sure as shiit ain’t pure thrust like 100 CC’s.
Something is different about Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia. To open the year, Sabathia’s fastball velocity has been down significantly. After averaging 93.04 mph with the pitch last year, Sabathia’s velocity has dropped to just 90.59 mph this April. The 32-year-old has already done a tremendous job making due with a diminished fastball, and will look to continue the trend against the Blue Jays Saturday. Through five starts, he has a 3.34 ...
No letter on catcher/non-eye catcher, Andy Etchebarren. And that’s a damn shame.
Another part of it is that Johnson learned that former Dodgers and Cardinals GM Branch Rickey - a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame and famously known for being the guy to sign Jackie Robinson - liked Johnson when he was a prospect in the Orioles organization.
As you can see in this letter found in the Library in Congress (and put online by Twitter user bettilupi), Rickey recommended to the Cardinals’ ...
The White Sox slugger is hitting a cool .108 on the season and has hit a combined .184 over 2011-12, but contends that some of that is due to the pressure placed upon him when his batting average is reported in the media and flashed on scoreboards.
“I’m telling you,” said Adam Dunn, whose batting average has dropped in recent seasons, “if people didn’t post people’s batting averages on the scoreboard or in the media, people would be batting .400. I’m serious. I believe that. ...
This is taking Vaseline’s® new Spray & Go® a bit too far!
Consequences for cheating? If you do well enough, you make the Hall of Fame. MLB won’t do anything about it. The Steroid Era may get the headlines, and it may fuel the debate today, but the seeds were planted when baseball let Gaylord Perry get away with throwing the spitball.
What is more damning is that Perry’s 1974 autobiography provided enough evidence for him to at least be suspended. Imagine if then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn ...
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.
