[Daniel] Murphy’s consistency at the plate, his onslaught of singles and doubles, has buoyed the Mets while they have tried to cope with numerous injuries and several high-profile departures. Entering play on Wednesday, he was fifth in the National League in batting with a .319 average. The fact that he started the season as a role player — and that he missed all of last season with injuries — has made his ascent all the more impressive.
At the same time, he is presenting the Mets with ...
Well, at least the kid wasn’t asking Craig Counsell; that would REALLY have been setting himself up for disappointment.
“I’ve got to tell you guys a story before you go,” [Casey] McGehee told reporters. “It was pretty cool.”
...
“This morning, I got to meet a little kid. His name’s Clayton,” McGehee said. “Clayton was being pretty shy, and I kept asking him, ‘Do you have any questions for me?’ He wouldn’t ask me anything. Finally, jokingly, his dad asks me, ‘Why don’t you hit a home run for ...
Over those 200+ innings, the position players have posted a 7.64 ERA, and a 7.82 RA/9. That ERA is supported by the peripherals, as the position players have generated 77 strikeouts, 157 walks, and 33 home runs. The home runs aren’t laugh-out-loud horrible, but they’re bad, and the strikeout-to-walk ratio is ghastly. Predictably ghastly, sure, but ghastly nonetheless, as position players possess neither command nor putaway pitches.
But there was one statistic that blew me away. One statistic ...
“We’re talking to people involved in the investigation and we’re taking this very seriously,” said an MLB executive who spoke to ESPNNewYork.com on condition of anonymity. “Because he had been warned about this before, I would say a possible suspension would be very much in play.”
The allegations, first published by RadarOnline.com, are that the New York Yankees third baseman played in at least two of the games, one of which took place at the Beverly Hills mansion of a record executive at ...
Three members of the Williamsport Crosscutters, a Short-Season Class A team affiliated with the Philadelphia Phillies, suffered minor injuries when their bus was involved in an accident on Staten Island.
Police say the accident happened at around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, but had few other details.
Who’ll Be The Next In Line…Or The One After That, Or The One After That, Or The One…
‘‘[Cubs general manager] Jim Hendry called me on a Tuesday to say I did not get the job in Chicago,’’ Sandberg said last week before his IronPigs beat the Pawtucket Red Sox. ‘‘Which, later on, I was not surprised about. Because later on, he mentioned I wasn’t even the third or fourth guy in line. There was no other job offering other than, ‘We’d like you to come to spring training, hit a ...
CJ could become a stem-cell innovator, but we’ll all still blame him for being all the Tigers could get for David Wells!
Certainly I hope this procedure gives me the results I’m looking for and a chance to do what I love again. But bigger than that is the future of stem cells in sports medicine. I’m fascinated when I think about what’s going on in my shoulder right now.
I asked Jeremy if he thought this therapy could be used proactively. After a few years of professional baseball, all ...
Ryan beat out a grounder to shortstop Eric Sogard and was behind first baseman Conor Jackson as Jackson held the ball while facing the pitching mound. When Ryan saw no one covering second, with Jemile Weeks having gone over to back up first base, he took off and slid in safely at second without even drawing a throw.
Ryan then popped up and headed for third, seeing third baseman Scott Sizemore had run over toward second and no one was near the bag at third, either, ...
Boston youth resist The Charm of the Highway Strip and don’t Get Lost on The Wayward Bus en route to The House of Tomorrow.
Yogi Berra once said you can’t think and hit at the same time.
However, the New York Yankees legend never attended the MIT Science of Baseball program. It encourages eighth- and ninth-grade inner-city boys to learn baseball-related math and physics each morning and then apply those principles on the ballfield in the afternoon.
Most baseball fans know Adam Dunn is having a really, really bad year. They found out Wednesday just how bad it was.
Dunn’s struggles ranked just below the fallout from the recent debt crisis on the front page of Wednesday’s edition of The New York Times, just below the fold on the nation’s newspaper of record.
“As Chicago’s Designated Hero, Slugger Strikes Out,” reads the headline of the story by Sam Borden.
Historians years from now will look back on Aug. 3, 2011, and come ...
During his era he was one of the best catchers, Johnny Bench being the best and the other two being Thurman Munson and Carlton Fisk, and all are in the Hall of Fame except Munson. An argument can be made that during the years Thurman Munson and Fisk played, Munson was a better all around catcher both offensively and defensively. Munson’s lifetime statistics also compare very favorably to Hall of Fame Catcher Roy Campanella whose career was also ended ...
David Laurila: You had a productive a career that looks even better after accounting for era and park factors. Were you underrated?
Ron Fairly: I think everybody feels that maybe they weren’t appreciated as much as they [should have been] for the contributions they made to ball clubs. I think it goes without saying. A lot of players feel that way.
I think my numbers would certainly be better today. I played in an era — the 1960s — that might have been the most ...
A 60-point drop off in batting average, and all of a sudden you’re calling him a fake…huh, oh ####.
The Ichiro Suzuki impersonator at Safeco Field who has been posing for pictures and signing autographs for the past few home games was doing a pretty good job up until Tuesday’s night game against Oakland.
He had it all: the No. 51 jersey, the baseball pants tucked perfectly into his socks at the knee, the slightly bent bill on his Mariners hat, the Asics shoes, the light black beard and even ...
I, by changing into a beast, give the animals here intelligent leadership…AS ONE OF THEM!
Maybe they call it “Beast Mode.” You have seen the Nationals’ first baseman Michael Morse and his now-famous t-shirt during MASN’s Nats Xtra postgame show interviews, haven’t you?
...Guys like Werth, Rick Ankiel, Danny Espinosa, Laynce Nix, Ian Desmond and Morse play baseball not to avoid contact, but to seek it out. This is the kind of team the Nationals are becoming. Pants are ripped up, there is mud ...
Station now closed, I offer to drive her to her East 65th apartment so she’s home safe and suggest she come back for her car later. Once there, I ask to wash up to get the dirt off my hands. She directs me to the bathroom, and while I am drying my hands, her man comes home and I hear Nita explaining the chain of events to him. As I emerge from the bathroom, here is this 6-6, 290-pound guy looking right through me.
NEW YORK, Aug. 3.—Somebody lost his wooden leg at the Broadway exit of the American league baseball park late yesterday. A policeman found it and sent it to headquarters, where it was made the subject of a general order that every policeman in the city shall be on the lookout for the owner.
[Paul Goldschmidt] blasted a two-run homer off Tim Lincecum to lead the D-backs past the Giants, 6-1, on Tuesday night at AT&T Park.
The win was the fourth in a row for the streaking D-backs, who are now tied with the Giants for first place in the National League West. Arizona has won eight of its last 10 while San Francisco has dropped five straight.
...
After popping out in his first at-bat against Lincecum, Goldschmidt, who led the Minor Leagues in homers with 30 at the time of his ...
For better or for worse, TLR, the one-man CIA of the MLB, was up to his usual psychological warfare Tuesday on both the opposition and his own players.
Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols was hit by a high-and-tight pitch. Brewers All-Star Ryan Braun took one in the back a few minutes later. And St. Louis catcher Yadier Molina could face a suspension after making contact in a heated argument with plate umpire Rob Drake.
...
Pujols and Braun each were hit by a pitch in the seventh, and Molina ...
Starting Tuesday, Aug. 2, any Rogers customer can catch live streamed Rogers Sportsnet coverage of every pitch, hit and home run of the remainder of the 2011 Blue Jays regular season games anywhere they want through Rogers On Demand Online and on their smartphones with Rogers On Demand Mobile.
This is basically an advertisement, but does any other team offer free streaming of games to customers in their mlb.tv blackout zone? As a Jays fan, this is awesome.
Unless realignment is a fait accompli, this might put last month’s rumors to rest, as approval would seemingly reduce or eliminate MLB’s leverage over Crane and the Astros ...
Barring an unforeseen hitch, MLB’s owners will be discussing and putting to vote the sale of the Houston Astros to Jim Crane as part of the upcoming quarterly MLB owners meetings set for August 17-18, according to league sources.
The sale has been held up as the league has addressed the bankruptcy of the Los Angeles ...
Proof, that much like The Super-Moby Dick of Space…The Yallof Effect, will indeed consume all in its path!
It’s a far cry from a decade ago, when whip-smart GMs such as Beane and Theo Epstein could pluck undervalued players out from under aging GMs whose generation still cherished flawed measurements such as batting average. Now, Beane found only frustration with the kind of homogenous, risk-averse thinking of the industry.
“What you’ll find is that the window for a small market team will ...
13. Los Angeles Angels/Kansas City Royals Tony Reagins: Look, I gotta be honest with you, the Vernon Wells trade didn’t work out like we had hoped. Now Bourjos is hurt ... it’s a mess. What are you looking to get in return for Francoeur and Melky?
Dayton Moore: Not for sale!
Tony Reagins: Oh, come on. Just one of them. We have prospects. There’s this 20-year-old kid who was just up. Fast as the wind. Name is Mike Tr ...
Dayton Moore: Not for sale! Nosiree! Can’t do it! They’re really, ...
Hisashi Iwakuma, one of the top starting pitchers in Japan, has hired a new agent as a prelude to coming to Major League Baseball as a free agent in 2012.
Iwakuma, a star right-hander for the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, is expected to rank among the elite starters in a free-agent market that could include CC Sabathia, C.J. Wilson, Mark Buehrle, Japanese countryman Hiroki Kuroda of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Yu Darvish of Japan’s Nippon Ham Fighters. Sabathia can become a free agent if he ...
Woo-hoo! Can’t wait for the “Is Edgmer Escalona the Last of the 200 Game Winners?” type articles to follow!
Granted, only the White Sox have really committed to this thing. But if there were Twitter just for baseball strategy, six man rotation would definitely be trending.
Why, though?
A couple of reasons, I think.
The obvious reason is that teams are more concerned than ever about wear-and-tear on their starting pitchers. They’re always on the lookout for a chance to give a ...
Hall of Fame officials have also not revealed whether the Young jersey has already been examined by the same textile analysis outfit that determined Halper’s Joe Jackson jersey was bogus.
While Hall of Fame spokesman Brad Horn did not respond to several inquiries made by Haulsofshame.com he did respond to blogger (and Spink award winner) Murray Chass when asked about how many items from the original Halper purchase had been rejected?
As one of my old managers used to say…“If you’re really not good at any sport…try out for football.”
That’s the nature of pro football. At least 95 percent of NFL fans have never seen their favorite team — or any other team — in person. I’m not pulling that figure out of a hat. A couple of years ago George Will, when he served on baseball’s Blue Ribbon Panel, told me they conducted a survey indicating that the number of football fans who only knew the game from their living room sofa was ...
