OMNICHATTER for 4/23/2014

In which baseball players continue to play baseball…

Royals G.M. Dayton Moore believes hitting will come around

It’s pronounced ‘Gor-Don’.

Among the heart of the team’s order, only Alex Gordon is performing up to expectations, with a reasonable .294/.329/.441 slash line and a 114 OPS+. Billy Butler has one extra-base hit, Eric Hosmer has four, and neither has hit a home run. Salvador Perez is batting .095 in his last 10 games. Mike Moustakas has a .492 OPS.

The picture is not pretty. The power outage is the reason behind the team’s 9-9 start, general manager Dayton Moore believes. But it also ...

Josh Lueke Is A Rapist, You Say? Keep Saying It.

But during that Saturday night game, DRaysBay.com editor Erik Hahmann suggested that enough was enough. “It gets brought up every game by some ####### on twitter,” he tweeted. What ensued was a discussion, largely made up of male writers and fans, about the etiquette of reminding people that Lueke raped a woman.

Mike Trout And Bryce Harper Are Baseball’s Best Young Position-Player Duo Ever

With all the (deserved) hype surrounding Trout and Harper, I was wondering how the duo compares to other concurrent 22-or-under pairs of position players in the history of baseball. To answer that question, I looked at the most productive two non-pitchers age 22 or below in a given season, based on the combined number of wins above replacement they’d generated in the previous two seasons.
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By that standard, Trout and Harper are the most productive young duo in baseball history.
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If ...

Twitter / msimonespn: Who is hitting the ball hard ...

This is a list you don’t want to top. Run Segura, run!

The Baseball Equivalent of Hitting on 16 | FanGraphs Baseball

With his history in Seattle, it’s tough not to view Tony Blengino’s criticisms of the Mariners as axe grinding.

This article is not meant to pick on Lloyd McClendon or the Mariners in general. It could have been any number of managers or clubs – it just happened to be this one that did all of these things repeatedly in a single weekend, and lost more than one game as a direct result. Managers have the hardest job in baseball, in my opinion, and game strategy comprises a very small percentage ...

Two Brewers, two Pirates suspended for fracas | MLB.com: News

“Maldonado gets five games, Gomez three, Snider two, Martin one for Sunday’s fight.”

Crashburn Alley – Cliff Lee Is Still Very Awesome

Cliff Lee, the ace nobody seems to notice.

Baseball games still take too long. Blame the Red Sox.

With beer going for $9.00 a pop, every extra minute increases concession sales. But more money can’t be the cause. Right?

Baseball games still take too long. Blame the Red Sox.

With beer going for $9.00 a pop, every extra minute increases concession sales. But more money can’t be the cause. Right?

Martin Maldonado suspended

Milwaukee Brewers catcher Martin Maldonado has been suspended five games by Major League Baseball for his role in Sunday’s benches-clearing incident with the Pittsburgh Pirates, a source told ESPN’s Buster Olney.

Maldonado also was fined $2,500, according to the source.

The scuffle began when Milwaukee’s Carlos Gomez and Pittsburgh pitcher Gerrit Cole yelled at each other following the Brewers outfielder’s triple in Sunday’s contest.

...The benches then emptied, and as the teams converged, ...

Forbes: Valuing Derek Jeter: NYC v. Middle America

4193, not Jeter’s final hit total but a map reference.

Yet, the view of Jeter outside NYC and baseball’s high profile announcers and analysts, while ranging from appreciative to resentful, sees Jeter as overhyped. I’ve long lived in the intersection of Braves, Cardinals, and Reds territory and followed the Rangers and Astros based on childhood geography. To these fans and others in middle America, Jeter’s a very good hitting, limited-fielding shortstop with great durability and longevity ...

Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 4-22-2014

Milwaukee Journal, April 22, 1914:

Most of Bill Steen’s tough luck has come since he rubbed a negro hunchback bootblack’s head, trying to get lucky.
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Among ball players there’s a superstition that the scratching of the head of a [racial slur] hunch back will bring luck. Bill and Vean Gregg were believers in that “hunch” at Pensacola in 1913, so both hunted up a crippled bootblack and rubbed his kinky head.

Instead of acquiring luck nothing has come Bill’s way since but bad fortune…Bill wants ...

OMNICHATTER for APRIL 22, 2014

Among the MANY fine pitchers starting today are J. Verlander, J. Fernandez, M. Tanaka, J. Lester, A. Wainwright,and… Kyle Gibson?

Eno Sarris On Young Pitchers’ Declining Velocity

Here’s a nasty open secret about pitching: Young pitchers don’t get better as they age. There is no peak age. As soon as they start firing bullets they start running out of time. They’re born and then they start dying.

In baseball, is the right way the “white way?”

How fair is it for Latin and black players to be criticized for playing the game the wrong way? Is the right way really “the white way?” Who keeps track of the “unwritten rules?”

Just a few years ago, for the first time, more professional players were under contract (counting all baseball players at the major and minor league levels) who had been born outside the United States than were born inside the country. Most of those players are Latinos, prominently from Venezuela, the ...

High and outside

You go to a Colorado Rockies game now, you see a lot of people sucking on mints, gum drops and lollipops. They’re not kids with a sweet tooth. They’re adults with a hash habit. It’s edible marijuana.
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There’s a story going around town about a “representative” from a visiting MLB team (read: equipment guy) walking into a shop with a “grocery list” and walking out with an “armful” of stuff. There’s no limit for out-of-state residents on edibles, only smokables.

For ...

ESPN: W. P. Kinsella: Where It Began: “Shoeless Joe”

Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Field of Dreams:

I replied that to me, writing a novel was akin to a baker baking a loaf of bread: So long as the buyers pay for the bread, they were free to do with it as they chose. If they made dainty sandwiches, fine. If they fed it to their gerbils, fine. I realized that most books optioned for movies became gerbil food. I’ve never understood authors who are proprietary with their work, fighting any changes of plot or character. All I care about is ...

Mets add Bobby Abreu to roster, send down Andrew Brown

And Kyle Farnsworth is the new closer.  Richard Hidalgo is available…

The Mets have officially brought up Bobby Abreu to their major league roster, optioning down outfielder Andrew Brown as a corresponding move.

Abreu will serve as as a left-handed hitter off the bench…

Abreu hit .395 in 15 games at Triple-A in Las Vegas.

“He’s played very well at Vegas,” [GM Sandy] Alderson said. “And he’s a great hitting role model for our players. He’s a professional hitter and I think our guys can ...

Posnanski: The Royals: A history of power

BTW, the recent Schur/Poz draft of superheroes went (Schur first): Batman; Superman (Schur had the usual problems with him); Thor; Hulk; Dr. Manhattan (Poz had never heard of him or Watchmen); Wonder Woman; Aquaman (Schur blamed his kid, but good God); Spider-Man (finally); Professor X; Captain America

the Kansas City Royals single season home run record is 36, and Steve Balboni set it almost 30 years ago…

only seven team home run records survive from pre-1996. Six of the seven are impressive ...

J.R. Gamble: Albert Pujols’ 500-Homer Chase Is A Bore, But That’s Baseball’s Fault

Gamble in huff: The Sound Of Prostanozol.

Pujols is an interesting case. He’s never failed a drug test (that we know of) and before Miguel Cabrera went Triple Crown crazy, was considered the elite hitter in the game. Just 25 ballers in MLB history have ever hit 500 homers in their lifetime. His countdown to 500 should be a fan-frenzied, anticipated event. But there’s a massive legion of baseball fans, it doesn’t resonate with, because Pujols did it in the heart of the Steroids Era. We have ...

Deadspin: Here is a Chicken Playing Baseball

British Pathé, apparently seeking a permanent end to workplace productivity, recently uploaded an enormous amount of material, much of it previously unseen by the public, to Youtube.

Some 85,000 old newsreel clips have been posted to their Youtube channel. Feel free to use this space to posts your finds of any sports or poultry-related material.

Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 4-21-2014

Milwaukee Sentinel, April 21, 1914:

According to Charlie Barrett, [Yankees rookie Tom] Burr throws a natural curve on account of a bend in his right arm. This bend is not the result of a break, but is simply due to the fact that the young man’s arm chose to grow in a curve rather than in a straight line.

The drop, which most pitchers find difficulty in throwing, is easy for Burr. His team-mates have christened him ‘The man with the bowlegged arm.’

Burr never did pitch in the majors, though ...

Morosi: MLB must evolve to let players express themselves without rebuke

Evol not Love.

Sorry, everyone. I must have been busy waiting for Stephen Drew and Kendrys Morales to sign when this transaction came across the wire:

NATIONAL LEAGUE—Named Gerrit Cole as Special Baseball Ethics Instructor to Carlos Gomez, succeeding Brian McCann.

Look, I can’t support everything Gomez does. Sunday’s bat toss and trot to first on what he thought was a home run probably cost the Brewers a run. With his speed, he could have had an inside-the-park homer if he had sprinted out ...

OMNICHATTER for APRIL 21, 2014

The traditional 11:00 in the morning game in Boston starts off a 13-game slate today.

VIDEO: Brewers, Pirates brawl after Carlos Gomez triple

Dukes! Snider!

Brewers center fielder Carlos Gomez hit what he apparently thought was a home run and it actually ended up being a triple. Pirates starter Gerrit Cole didn’t appear to appreciate how Gomez reacted and told him so. And it was, as they say, on:

Ivan Nova’s season in jeopardy after tearing elbow ligament

Yankees right-hander Ivan Nova has been diagnosed with a serious elbow injury, the Yankees announced Sunday morning, putting him in jeopardy of requiring season-ending surgery.

NY Times: Who Made That Relief Pitcher?

In April 1903, a writer for Sporting Life described what might have been a baseball first: “Manager McGraw has originated a new plan,” the paper said, referring to John McGraw, the successful skipper of the New York Giants. “He will use two pitchers in every game, one being in the points five innings and the other four. No manager but one who has originality and nerve would attempt any such innovation, but McGraw has both.”

The team soon abandoned this idea, wrote Peter Morris, author ...

Zander Hollander, Sports Trivia Shepherd, Dies at 91

Zander Hollander, a journeyman journalist who rebounded from the merger of his newspaper in the mid-1960s by becoming what Sports Illustrated called “the unofficial king of sports paperbacks” — particularly a once wildly popular series of encyclopedic yearbooks — died on Friday in a nursing home in Manhattan. He was 91.

The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, his wife, Phyllis, said.

Before televised sports were pervasive and the Internet a nonstop gusher of sports trivia, Mr. Hollander ...

Tim Federowicz has rough night behind the plate - True Blue LA

Try not to feel the sympathy pain.