John Farrell and Torey Lovullo looked down toward the Twins bullpen. They saw some stirring, as Minnesota lefty reliever Brian Duensing had grabbed a ball and tossed it a few times.
Then Duensing sat down. It was then the Red Sox manager and his bench coach knew they had put the right people in the right places.
“It’s a good feeling,” Lovullo said after the Red Sox’ 12-5 win over the Twins Saturday night, “when all the puzzle pieces fit perfectly.”
With the score nothing to nothing in the sixth inning, an angry cow temporarily broke up a baseball game between factory employees recently at Altoona, Pa. The cow upset the players’ benches, charged the fielders and then disappeared.
Alex Sanabia is on the Marlins. The odds are at least decent that you’ve never heard of Alex Sanabia before. What’s he all about? Let’s see ... leads the league in losses ... kind of a control pitcher in the minors ... 24 years old ... drafted in the 32nd round, just a round after William Mays ... but pretty nondescript, mostly.
...Spitter. He’s the spit guy. The guy with the spit. Yeah, I remember him. Ol’ Spitface with the spit coming out of his face. Good spitter, that guy. Loves to spit. ...
Welcome back, JM Catellier…and his “own unique statistical formula”!
The average 20th century Hall of Fame starting pitcher has 258.3 career wins. That number is dragged down by Sandy Koufax’ 165 victories, but he can’t be omitted from this exercise as I consider him the best starting pitcher to ever throw a baseball.
Former Boston Red Sox ace Pedro Martinez retired following the 2009 season with just 219 wins and only two 20-win seasons. Is it possible that he’s a first ballot Hall of ...
But what really left teammates in awe of Sale was his performance on a charter flight to California. In a four-hour masterpiece, Sale packed two ice cream sundaes and, by one teammate’s estimate, around 30 bags of potato chips into one of the skinniest bodies the sport has ever seen.
“I may or may not have done that,” Sale said.
Sale is one of baseball’s most promising young pitchers, a dazzling left-hander coming off an All-Star season in 2012. ...
Seems as if The Barry Bonds Family Foundation has welcomed a new member.
“I don’t try to compare me to anybody,’’ Bonds said. “I was the best on the field. I did more things than he did. My game was different than his game. So comparing him, to me, there’s no comparison.
“He doesn’t have my MVPs. He doesn’t have my numbers. Well, not yet, anyways.
“But does he have that ability? Yes, he does.
“Does he have that gift? Yes, he does.’‘
...“Winning a Triple Crown is amazing to me,’’ Bonds ...
Boz pays homage to the gritty, gutsy, scrappy, first place 2013 underdog Yankees:
Perhaps for the first time in their history, the Yankees now epitomize exactly the kind of team that always used to try to beat them: a group of inspired-by-adversity, too-old-or-too-young, one-last-chance players who band together to prove that baseball is a team game, not just an aggregation of talent and fat contracts.
Put a few all-star seasons, such as Cano’s 31 RBI, Kiroda’s 1.99 ERA and Rivera’s 16 ...
Before we chatter today, let us please make sure we all have those in the path of the tornado in Oklahoma yesterday in our thoughts.
Today’s games include: Matt Garza’s first start of 2013, the Orioles try to break out of the free-fall, Strasmas comes to San Francisco and Greinke goes against Milwaukee.
Wonder if Paul Anka can pen another hit after this nosedive…
But the thing that was most striking about Pujols is that he was always exactly as good as he had been the year before. He never had a bad year. He never had anything RESEMBLING a bad year. They called him “The Machine.” If you take the WORST statistical totals he had those first 10 years – that is, the lowest batting average he had over those 10 years, the fewest home runs he hit, etc.—you STILL come up with this season:
There have been 188,593 pitches thrown thus far this Major League season.
When you break that down, it works out to 292 pitches per game, 32.69 per inning, 3.85 per plate appearance.
If you miss one here or there, even while in attendance, you are anything but alone. The sport generally allows us to take our time settling into our seats or casually conversing with our nearby neighbors or strolling the concourse in search of food. The pace and plot of the game are such that, while any pitch ...
A person’s head collides with an object. Unprepared for the impact, the head jerks in a violent whiplash motion. The person collapses, rolling on the ground and holding his head, before rising slowly and unsteadily. Eyewitnesses testify that the person was confused or disoriented.
“By definition, that’s a concussion,” says Dr. Daniel P. Perl, a professor of pathology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., the American military’s medical school. ...
Rays manager Joe Maddon insisted Monday he was right — and the umpires were wrong — in the interpretation of replay rules on Sunday, saying it was “baseball anarchy” and “sandlot” for crew chief Gerry Davis to “make stuff up on the field.”
But an MLB review found that that Davis did follow guidelines properly in awarding the Rays’ Matt Joyce a home run.
...“Regardless of what they say, that rule is not in the book where you can change a double to a ...
Over the first 12 days of September, Langford went the distance against the Yankees, Orioles and Royals. Langford, who wore No. 22, had thrown 22 consecutive complete games.
Finally, on Sept. 17, in a game at Arlington, Texas, A’s manager Billy Martin marched to the mound after Langford had pitched 8⅔ innings and signaled for lefty reliever Bob Lacey to come on. Lacey induced a groundout from Buddy Bell to save Langford’s 17th victory.
I just linked this in the Cano-Pedroia Time Warp Thread, but I felt like maybe it needed wider exposure. Remember when Gregg Zaun had the greatest website ever? Well, Ben Zobrist (& wife) appears to have gone to the same school.
I was surrounded in the clubhouse the other day, with no escape. Two players wanted—emanded—to know why there was even an MVP debate last year in the American League.
So technically, the great debate from 2012 rages on. Six months after the winner was announces, we are still talking about it.
These two players, like a seeming overwhelming majority of players, couldn’t understand why anyone supported Mike Trout in the apparently ongoing ...
Baseball teams change at a glacial pace. I’m not talking about how a team does in a given season…that can change quite dramatically…I’m talking about what a team is: the broad scope of a team’s talents, their strengths and weaknesses. A team that’s good at converting a double play generally stays good at turning the double-play, just as a team with a terrible bullpen can’t make that bullpen a strength, at least not quickly. A team that gets lots of production ...
[Heinie] Zimmerman is said to have been incensed by [Cubs owner Charles] Murphy’s statement…that Zimmerman would be able to play when he could get his hat on with a shoehorn, charging Heinie with having a swelled head.
This afternoon Zimmerman told [Johnny] Evers that he would not play, as he was ill. They then had a redhot argument, in which Zimmerman declared that he was tired of carrying the entire Chicago team on his shoulders…Evers informed Zimmerman that he ...
Gutting the new manager has never been easier, thanks to the ax effect!
The Dodgers were swept over their weekend in Atlanta, getting outscored, 16-8. Their bullpen allowed 12 of the runs. And Mattingly’s postgame quotes were the equivalent of bad body language, the thoughts of a manager who doesn’t know how to snap his team out of it.
Watching Sunday’s meltdown on television, I thought, “Mattingly might be gone tomorrow.” And then I got a text from a rival scout, one who has no ...
Roster of Rubbish? I know some people were down on who joined Armisen on stage…but this is ridiculous!
And Collins’ team isn’t winning. So you should understand why he might be losing it. He turns 64 later this month. He was run out of Houston and Anaheim. There is no next managing job. This is more than his last best chance. It is just plain his last chance to prove he is a good major league manager.
...For if you know whether Collins is a good manager or bad manager based on his Mets ...
If you wondered what Cabrera would do for an encore after winning the Triple Crown, he’s sailing along. His batting average is 83 points higher than it was at this time last season. He also has three home runs and 13 RBIs more than he did after 42 games last season.
...For his part, Cabrera seemed almost embarrassed by the attention. He said he took no joy from doing great things in a loss. He also said that any talk of comparing him to the all-time greats is premature.
Wonder if this includes yesterday’s gripping Trevor Ploof…
But those numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Advanced defensive metrics tell us what our eyes have likely suggested all season—that the Twins’ defense, for the most part, has very limited range.
It’s true that Twins fielders, collectively, don’t make many errors on balls hit to their range radius—but that radius is not very large. And it’s impossible for a fielder to make an error on a ball he can’t get to.
Shades of Hairspray!...“It was a time of tradition, a time of values, and a time…to shake things up.”
For a journalist, chance encounters at a restaurant or a hair salon can become a major opportunity for advancing a story and in some instances the journalist is in the right place at the right time because he was with his wife. I had a very chance encounter with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Saturday afternoon in lower Manhattan because my wife happened to have an appointment at a ...
Ho-hum. Another night, another Mitch Moreland home run.
If you’re scoring along at home, that makes Mitch 10, Internet Trolls and Media Infidels 0.
Count me in that latter category, I must confess. I thought the real Mitch Moreland was the one we saw for three years and in the first three weeks of this season — a .264-hitting kind of guy, who couldn’t hit lefties and infrequently drove in an important run.
Hal Steinbrenner spoke at Yankee Stadium on Saturday. He disagreed with the assessment that tickets are overpriced in the Bronx. This is different point of view than what I generally hear from fans. This is what Hal had to say about ticket prices being too high:
“You hear about that in the media,” Steinbrenner said. “You don’t hear that there are thousands and thousands of affordable seats in the $25 range for every game, not to mention the specials that we ...
New Green book looks to be a diamond Dallas page turner.
It is a good, lively book and it mirrors Green’s good, lively 6 decades in the game. He rips only three people, Bobby Valentine, Art Mahaffey and Gene Mauch.
“Valentine is a phony and that’s what I call him in the book,” Green grumbles, choosing to skip details of the possible backstabbing while Dallas managed the Mets.
He reveals that in the minors Mahaffey cared only about his numbers. “He didn’t root for other guys to win, because ...
Sweet spectroscopy! The argument is rolled out again!
It’s not surprising to hear what two scouts from each league, who both have watched a lot of the American League this year, say about Dustin Pedroia.
“Nobody is playing his position better in baseball right now than Pedroia,” said the AL scout. “He’s playing out of his mind. The plays he’s making — you just don’t see that stuff every day, but you see it with him every day. Honestly, I’m surprised he doesn’t get hurt ...
As it turns out, Livan Hernandez gave us the highest pitch count from a single game in the past ten years, throwing 150 pitches against the Florida Marlins back in 2005. A handful of pitchers have rivaled that total since 2002, including Edwin Jackson’s 149 pitch no-hitter, eight-walker from just a few years ago. Hard-nosed, flame-throwing strikeout beasts like Randy Johnson, Jason Schmidt and Kerry Wood all topped 140 pitches at one point or another in the last decade, yet remarkably it was ...
