[OTP-June] Economic Times: Hope politics, sports don’t get mixed up: Manmohan Singh

Chipper Jones: I’m loving retirement

Old deers, not so much.

Jones is experiencing life outside professional baseball for the first time in more than 20 years after hanging up his cleats last October to end what many consider a Hall of Fame-worthy career.

This will be the first summer Jones isn’t running the bases or fielding ground balls since he was 7. He’s not worried about becoming restless, though.

“A lot of people thought I would struggle with retirement because they thought I was just a baseball player, and you ...

Torrid April start distant memory for slumping Vernon Wells

I guess there’s a little Francoeur in every hitter.

After going hitless again in the Yankees’ 11-1 loss to the Red Sox at the Stadium, Wells is just six for his last 48, dropping his average to .253.

“I just have to ride it out,” Wells said, who went 0-for-4. “I know I can get back to where I was that first month or so, I just have to get back to it.”

Sounds simple, but for a player coming off two horrendous seasons with the Angels, it’s hard to think his April production will be ...

Hardball Times: Shut ‘em out, hit a home run: “Pappas games”

“Well, back in the late 50s and early 60s—I’m not going to toot my own horn—but the New York Yankees were the most dominant team in baseball. They won it every year. And we got beat the first two games they came in town. A sportswriter came up to me on the third day and said, ‘How do you beat the Yankees?’ And I just wanted to go home because I was pitching the next day. So I said, ‘well it’s very simple: you shut ‘em out, you hit a home run, you win.’

And what do I do the next night? I ...

OMNICHATTER FOR 6/2/2013

Harvey’s pitching today! So is Cat Latos’ dad! And Yu Darvish! And Cliff Lee! And Hyun-jin Ryu! And Clay Buchholz.

Basically, good pitchers are pitching today.

Bill James Mailbag - 5/29/13 - 6/1/13

From 2005-present, the AL is .553 (2106 games) [against the NL]...

This is an issue that I was just completely wrong about.    For years, asked about the relative strength of the leagues, I would say that I didn’t see how there could be a significant disparity between them.  The teams in the two leagues draft players from the same talent pool.  They send players to the same minor leagues to develop them, and they play against each other in those leagues.  They trade players between ...

ESPN: The Haunting of MLB’s A-List

A ROAD GAME at Miller Park usually means a stay at the Pfister, downtown Milwaukee’s historic hotel, which plays host to most visiting ballclubs. It’s got swank rooms, a prime location—and a major league reputation for spooking its guests. Rumor has it that the 120-year-old landmark is haunted by the ghost of its founder, Charles Pfister, who died in 1927. Sound silly? Tell that to these A-listers…

C.J. Wilson, Angels
I was on the computer one night, doing my typical shtick—surfing the web, ...

Baseball Prospectus | Overthinking It: Bill James, Base Umpires, and the Sabermetric Significance of Checked Swings

We all know that home plate umpires have different strike zones, and we’re aware that teams pay attention to and try to exploit that information. (Here’s a recent picture of some of Inside Edge’s umpire charts taped up in the Dodgers’ dugout.) But before I heard [Bill] James say it, I’d never considered that checked-swing strike rates might vary by base ump, or that pitchers might alter their approach accordingly. Of course, there’s no precise definition of what constitutes a ...

The unknown slugger: Héctor Espino - SBNation.com

There is a joke told by Mexican baseball fans about Espino arriving at the pearly gates of heaven with much less fanfare. St. Peter doesn’t recognize Espino and asks God what he should do. “Don’t be a coward,” God says. “Pitch to him.”

Most American baseball fans wouldn’t recognize Héctor Espino either, even though he was the greatest hitter in Mexican history and by many accounts one of the best hitters of all time. Espino played from 1960 to 1984. He had wrists like the barrels of baseball ...

WaPo | Why I sit out ‘God Bless America’

Stepping back, this also raises the question: Why do we all too frequently seek to invoke rituals that, in the end, undermine our common bonds? Not everyone in our nation or at the ballpark shares the same beliefs. From which god are we asking these blessings? What does the good secular humanist or atheist do during this song? Are we to assume that all deities will be in concert for those who believe in more than one?

Assault at Orioles game sends man to intensive care, police say

Matt Fortese came 75 miles from Hagerstown to meet Taylor Queen at Camden Yards. She drove more than three hours from Virginia. Their second date was going well, Queen said, until an hour of taunting from two fans boiled over into an altercation that left Fortese fighting for his life.

Fortese, a lifelong Yankees fan who wore his team’s cap to Wednesday’s game, suffered severe head trauma and a skull fracture. He was listed in serious condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center Saturday. Police ...

Lennon: Baseball’s new execs are Ivy Leaguers

Or…Google Boy wannabes more popular than Jesus now.

Remember wanting to play for the Yankees when you grew up? The next generation is more interested in running them—or at least drafting and signing the players, maybe even overhauling the farm system.

“If you go back 25, 30 years, the opportunities didn’t exist,’’ Sandy Alderson said. “First of all, front offices were smaller, staffs were smaller, and they came from more traditional sources. Now they come from traditional sources but others ...

BtBS: Chris Davis’ Absurd Season

This year, Miguel Cabrera is even better. His batting average is 38 points higher. His on-base percentage is 51 points higher. His slugging percentage is 50 points higher. He is walking more, striking out less, hitting for more power, hitting more line drives, hitting in the clutch, and basically making his Triple Crown MVP season look like a warmup lap. But guess what?

Chris Davis has been better.

Maybe you already knew this. Maybe you didn’t. If you didn’t, get ready to be blown away.

...

NY Times: A Mets Fan for Life, and a Deliriously Happy One for a Week

After the Mets’ first two victories, I received an e-mail from a good friend, Peter Kurz, who lives in Israel, where he has become the secretary general of the Israel Association of Baseball. Decades ago, Kurz and I played catch at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park in Manhattan, my imagined Tom Seaver to his imagined Jerry Grote.

“To all those Yankee fans who are crying this morning into their cereal,” Kurz e-mailed, “and to all those Met fans who are now on ...

OT: The Soccer Thread June, 2013

This month is all about World Cup Qualification.

June 7th: Jamaica v USA
June 11th: USA v Panama
June 18th USA v Honduras

Some other key dates:

June 4th: Jamaica v Mexico qualifier and AFC qualifiers (Japan v Australia being the key game)
June 7th: Full slate of CONMEBOL AND UEFA qualifiers (Portugal hosts Russia in a do or die game for Portugal)
June 8th: Full slate of CAF qualifiers and the final day of Segunda featuring what could be a relegation playoff match between Villareal and ...

Jose Valverde’s ninth-inning collapse denies Max Scherzer win No. 8

You can’t spell Verve Lad without Valverde! (and The Legion of Substitute Heroes is freakin’ calling)

Max Scherzer retired the final 16 batters he faced. It was the kind of performance that shows why he hasn’t lost this season.

Scherzer left with a 5-3 lead, but remains 7-0.

Jose Valverde allowed two home runs in the ninth inning, including a three-run walk-off home run to Chris Dickerson. The Tigers lost, 7-5, on Friday night at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

“We obviously let one get ...

Stephen Strasburg leaves after two innings with injury

Washington Nationals pitcher Stephen Strasburg has left his start after two innings against the Atlanta Braves with an apparent injury.

Manager Davey Johnson said after the game that Strasburg has a strained right oblique, according to the Washington Post.

He will head back to Washington to have his side examined.

The right-hander grimaced after throwing a changeup to Brian McCann, the sixth batter he faced, with one out in the second inning Friday night.

Strasburg retired McCann on a ...

OMNICHATTER for JUNE 1, 2013

Let’s try not to have any games be PPD by tornado warnings today, okay?

Megdal: How Domonic Is Dominating

Plus…The Domonic One has 2 more taters tonight.

This may come as a surprise if you’ve watched him play lately, but Domonic Brown — Phillies outfielder and current team leader in home runs with 13 — was having trouble hitting a single ball out of the park during batting practice Thursday afternoon before a game against the Red Sox.

Make no mistake: The ball was carrying in the late-day heat, teammates were reaching the small pockets of early gatherers at Citizens Bank Park with ...

Casting True Yankees Fans: Wall Street Guys, The Working Man, Hipsters

The Empire takes many forms…

A tipster who has access to these sorts of things passed along a casting call today for an AT&T commercial saluting the fine career of Mariano Rivera. (Mo, if you’re reading, we apologize for spoiling the surprise.) The memo explains exactly who is a true Yankee fan, by central casting’s lights. They wrote, “We are ONLY looking for REAL YANKEE fans.”

So who, exactly, are these “REAL YANKEE fans”?

  1. Wall Street types, men and women of all ethnicities, who will ...

Miles: Dale Sveum, meet Pythagoras

Hypotinuse or not?

I’m not sure how far Cubs manager Dale Sveum got in mathematics with the Pythagorean Theorem. As most of you know, you can calculate a team’s “Pythagorean” or “expected” won-loss record based on its run differential. I’ll spare you the details here.

Despite their actual won-loss record of 22-30, the Cubs go into this afternoon’s game against the Arizona Diamondbacks with a run differential of plus-6, having outscored their opponents 214-208. Their ...

Passan: MLB will not implement international draft

Major League Baseball will not implement an international draft for 2014 and may not revisit the subject for another three years, temporarily allaying fears of those worried one would destroy the vibrant baseball culture in Latin American countries, sources told Yahoo! Sports on Friday.

The league and the MLB Players Association are expected to announce Friday they did not reach an agreement and plan to table the idea of an international draft for the rest of the current collective-bargaining ...

Beckett worried his career may be over

Endgame: Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.

The level of local goodwill that Josh Beckett built with his historic 2007 postseason faded over time, and all but disappeared in the 2011 chicken-and-beer fiasco. And there’s no doubt there are plenty of people—a local talk-show host, most notably—reveling in his 0-5, 5.91 start for the Dodgers.

But only the most heartless among us can be happy with the shocking news, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, that ...

Jordan: Interview with former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent

So much for that planned Fay Vincent/Pete Rose Happy Hour Event.

We hear this congratulatory phrase—the post-steroid era—being thrown about to explain lower ERAs and fewer home runs. How do you react when you hear that term? Do you think it is accurate? Has the war been won, at least in baseball, or merely a battle?

I do not believe there can be an end to the “steroid era.” The problem will be with all athletics permanently because there is so much money at stake that cheating will always be ...

Matthews: Can Mark Teixeira and Kevin Youkilis rescue the struggling Yankees?

But you must also recognize that Teixeira and Youkilis are mere Band-Aids, hardly sufficient to close all the wounds from which the Yankees are currently bleeding.

After all, they can only play first and third. The Yankees are are still getting precious little production out of their shortstop, their catcher and both corner outfield spots.

And the pitching, which has been the glue that has been holding this ragtag collection together, might be starting to come apart at the seams.

Phelps had ...

Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 5-31-2013

Milwaukee Journal, May 31, 1913:

The Washington baseball club has purchased land adjoining the right field fence on the local ball grounds and will enlarge the garden because of the large number of home runs made in that part of the field. Three circuit clouts were features of yesterday’s game and a couple of these were over the right field fence.

It worked. Griffith Stadium became a notoriously difficult place to hit home runs.

MLB: Votto and Choo are down with OBP

Dusty Baker, not so much. (quickly heads over to chemicalland21.com for product updates)

It is some kind of oddity or irony or sabermetric injustice that they are providing this OBP assault in the first one-third of a lineup drawn up nightly by the man oft-associated with being anti-OBP. But Dusty Baker, who once famously made the observation that “clogging up the bases isn’t that great to me,” will tell you he’s not so much anti-OBP as he is anti-OBP obsession. OBP, he said, means nothing if ...

OMNICHATTER for MAY 31, 2013

Everybody doing interleague is done, but there are plenty of interesting series for the weekend. Hey, look, Red Sox-Yankees!

Crisis Magazine: DeMarco: When a Crowd Becomes a Mob

Yeah, but if was Crisissy Magazine, it would be a different story.

It was Victoria Day in Canada and the Toronto Blue Jays were hosting the Rays of Tampa Bay. The word “hosting,” however, hardly applied to the treatment that one Yunel Escobar, the Rays shortstop, received, who was lustfully booed each time he came to the plate.  When he homered in the 9th inning, he was booed again for employing his signature gesture as he crossed home plate—stretching his arms out to indicate the ...

Scioscia familiar with Mattingly’s hot seat

And here I thought FOX was supposed to be a family type thingee…

If anyone can can sympathize with the plight of Dodgers’ manager Don Mattingly, it’s his counterpart from 35 miles down the freeway, Angels leader Mike Scioscia.

“Nobody ever said it was going to be easy managing in the big leagues, especially in Los Angeles,” said Scioscia, who’s been the target of media and fan criticism after missing the playoffs for the past three years and getting off to rought starts the last two. “I’m ...