“My goal is those 51 home runs that will get me to 500,” he said. “That’s my immediate goal. I just ask for God’s blessing of good health and to get those 51 home runs. I wish for three or four more years.”
...In 16 seasons, Guerrero stands 35th on the all-time OPS list at .931, three points ahead of Hank Aaron, 10 points behind Willie Mays. He is 35th on the all-time home run list, 11 ahead of Andre Dawson, three behind Carl Yastrzemski. He has a career .318 batting average, ...
Multiple baseball and finance sources told the Daily News they are hearing that the team the Steinbrenner family has led to seven World Series titles could be put on the block in the wake of the record sale price of $2.175 billion the Los Angeles Dodgers went for in April.
“There has been chatter all around the banking and financial industries in the city for a couple of weeks now,” one high-level baseball source told The News.
John McCloskey, former manager of the Brewers, who went west two years ago to the Union league, has been having his troubles in the far west. This season John has put a club in at Ogden, Utah, and has been finding it a hard matter to pay expenses. Well, it went so far that John was forced to call in the public for help or else toss up the sponge.
Figgins, 34, has no role on this team. He lost his leadoff spot. He rarely gets into the lineup. Maybe he’s the most versatile player on the team, but playing him just takes innings and at bats away from younger players with promise.
In a different setting, he could be the veteran role model who helps the young players in their development. But he hasn’t been much of a leader.
Does Mark Teixeira need to learn from Carlos Peña?
Baseball strategy is not a puzzle with a single solution. Instead, it is a dynamic system, in which a tactic that works against one approach can be neutralised by another. And when it comes to shifts, the response is as clear as the sea of empty infield dirt abandoned by the defenders congregating on one side of the diamond…
Sluggers who can bunt are the new market inefficiency, and the first team that has its power hitters practising this ...
Mets first baseman Ike Davis has looked terrible all year. He missed some time in spring training with a mysterious ailment—doctors identified Valley Fever, a lung infection—and, after a torrid stretch at the end of spring, OPSed .550 in April and .439 in May. There’s plenty of talk of sending him to the minors to fix his problems.
What are those problems, anyway? David Schoenefield says Ike can’t hit the outside pitch. Bill Petti says pitchers won’t throw ...
If this is the player Alex Rodriguez is for the rest of his career—decent hitter, occasional power, solid fielder and reliable baserunner—he will be comparable to what most teams are sending out on a daily basis, a middle-of-the-road major league third baseman.
But that is not the player the New York Yankees traded for nine years ago, and it is certainly not the player they chose to sign to a contract extension potentially worth $325 million that will not run out for another five seasons.
What’s going through your head? Are you replaying an at-bat from a previous inning or is it something totally different?
“Nah, it’s stuff not related to baseball. I’ll have a conversation I had with a friend from the night before playing through my mind. Or I’ll be thinking about some science article that I read the night before. I don’t know, ‘Flying cars are pretty awesome.’”
“But when you actually look at it and think about the statistics behind it, it makes a lot of ...
As Gawker notes, it’s an open question as to who’s writing Canseco’s tweets. “Do you write all of them?” I ask him. Canseco suddenly gets interested in the giant American flag out near center field. “Yeah,” he says, not meeting my eyes. “Uh-huh.”
Do you know what “trolling” means, Jose?
“Trolling, yeah. … It’s like fishing a lot.”
Well, sort of…...
Later tonight, Canseco stands on the dugout steps, apart from the other Tornadoes, staring into the distance. I ...
In 1965, after Houston unveiled its marvel, complete with luxury suites, almost tasty food and beer served at clean Formica counters, comfortable press boxes and cushioned seats, other cities quickly followed suit. There was the Kingdome in Seattle—now gone. The Sun Dome in Tampa, Fla. Minneapolis’ Metrodome. And New Orleans’ Superdome, considered an improvement—bigger and better—on the Astrodome.
“Eventually, it’s always about money,” said Bob Bluthardt, former chairman of the ...
For the second straight game, Carlos Pena is batting leadoff for the Rays. In the same lineup, Drew Sutton is hitting cleanup
...Maddon has taken the former laughingstock of baseball to the playoffs three of the past four years and currently sits with the third-best record in the American League. And he utterly refuses to follow some boilerplate lineup card, instead choosing to actually use his head ...
So far this baseball season, Buck has hit only two home runs. This is surprising to some, perhaps even a red flag for teams that question his ceiling and also wonder about the level of competition in rural Georgia. But all you have to do is spend one day in Baxley and you’ll see Buck’s ridiculous power during BP. Stick around for a game and you’ll see that Buck, who hit 14 home runs as a sophomore, doesn’t get many pitches to hit. “And he’s not going up ...
I had no idea the E. in E. Howard Hunt stood for Expel!
Not only have the Phils spent the last few months both changing their story and outright lying about the injuries to Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, but now we hear that they wouldn’t let the Inquirer’s Bob Brookover into their facility in Clearwater? Outrageous. This is Watergate-level stuff.
Newspaper reporters are representatives of the fans. Therefore, not only should reporters be let in to see Howard’s rehab, but fans should be, too. ...
Bah! Toothless McHenry once invited me into a quickly disrobing chaotic mosh pit. “Stay Out/Stay Alive”
Before we reached Yankee Stadium, I tweeted that I would be attending the game instead of analyzing the action with Bob Lorenz at the YES Network studios. Soon after that tweet, I received an invitation from Vinny Milano. Better known as Bald Vinny, he is the maestro of the Bleacher Creatures.
...After the Yankees trotted to their positions, Bald Vinny’s eyes darted from player to player ...
and they certainly ain’t built for speed. Bottom Line: They ain’t built for comfort.
The New York Mets are off to the most cognitively dissonant start in baseball.
In the standings, they look like a contender. Entering Monday, they were a surprising 22-19. But on the stat sheet—and we’re not talking doctorate-level statistics here—they look overmatched. They’ve been outscored by 31 runs, the fifth-worst mark in baseball. Even the 15-25 Colorado Rockies (minus-27) have been better.
He has to come back. Would YOU want to end your career tied with Arlie “The Freshest Man On Earth” Latham in career hits?
So where does that leave us?
• A player who was one of the elite hitters of his generation.
• Ten Hall of Fame-caliber seasons, plus a great partial season in 2000 (.297/.388/.561 in 114 games) and a not-so-great 2010.
• A terrific postseason performer.
• A player who didn’t win an MVP Award but fared well in the voting.
“Ban Johnson is the most egotistical, the most overbearing and the most stubborn person in baseball today and his attack on the Detroit players and myself was most unwarranted,” said Ty Cobb, upon arriving home from Washington today.
“One of two things is certain. Either he was dead wrong in this affair or he ____” and here Ty expressed the “short and ugly word” in emphatic fashion.
“Johnson cannot harm me by keeping me out of the game. He only harms the ...
But you have to believe that Emmanuel Burriss is not long for this roster.
The switch-hitter did himself another disservice Tuesday when he didn’t run out a popup that Brewers catcher Jonathan Lucroy caught in fair territory in the second inning. Cameras caught Giants manager Bruce Bochy chewing out Burriss something fierce.
“Yeah, I did,” Bochy said. “He’s better than that, and that’s what I told him. There’s no excuse for that, ...
What’s more unusual than a team hitting back-to-back homers? How about one fan catching both of them. That’s what Caleb Lloyd did on Monday night at Great American Ball Park.
He gave the second home run ball to the friend who had convinced him to go to the game and provided the tickets. Knowing it was Leake’s first career homer, Lloyd saved that ball and offered it to the pitcher for an autograph after the game.
R.A. Dickey is a pitcher for the New York Mets, and the only man in the majors currently throwing a knuckleball. His new memoir, Wherever I Wind Up: My Quest For Truth, Authenticity and the Perfect Knuckleball, is a story of perseverance more than anything. He had a difficult childhood marked by abuse and poverty, but found his gift in baseball. Early on in his career, the Texas Rangers offered Dickey a lucrative contract but retracted it when they discovered a physical abnormality that ...
Minutes after the Las Vegas 51s finished this extra-inning baseball game, infielder Chris Woodward rushed to the clubhouse and cracked open his laptop computer.
The 35-year-old Woodward, who has played in parts of 12 seasons in the big leagues, is preparing for life after baseball by attending online course at the University of Phoenix. After nearly three years of taking classes, he’s a few credits away from a degree in business management. Make no doubt about it, balancing the ...
As one of my druncles used to say…“If Billy Pierce pitched for the Yankees…they’d name a President after him!”
Does he belong in the Hall of Fame? Historically, those who’ve thrown 3,000 innings with an ERA+ above 120 have done very well in Hall of Fame voting. Among those who meet that threshold and have appeared on a Hall ballot, only Kevin Brown, Will White, and Silver King have failed to garner induction.
Alas, with that 119 ERA+, Pierce falls just short of that admittedly arbitrary ...
Santos has been stretched out to throwing from 120 feet and hopes to expand that to long toss—approximately 250 feet—by the end of the week. Pitching off a mound would come next followed by a rehab assignment in the Minor Leagues.
That should keep Santos out for at least the next three weeks, but the club is hesitant to put any official time frame on the rehab. Before that happens, the Blue Jays want to make sure he is 100 percent healthy, which does not currently appear to be the case.
When you do a lot of work with projections, one of the things that takes some getting used to is the inevitability that your soothsaying will miss the mark on several occasions. Baseball teams have a lot of moving parts, and over half a year there's great potential for assumptions to go awry, askew or afoul.
With a quarter of the season already behind us, we have a great deal of new information on teams -- some good, some bad -- and unless Bud Selig comes up with some crazy new idea to make ...
Although you should keep in mind the context a trade is made in, only time proves who profits best from a deal.
There was some talk on Twitter this morning about Neal Huntington’s worst moves (and I might make a list of those later this week), so I thought I’d take a look at his best ones. A couple of things here. First, I generally take the position that the best time to evaluate trades is when they happen (draft picks are a different story, since there’s a limited amount of information ...
Back in 1997, a freshman standing just 4’8’’ and weighing 70 pounds enrolled into Saint Francis High School (Mountain View, CA) in hopes of making the baseball team. By his senior year, this Ecksteinian young man was still only 5’5’’ but beefed up to 140 pounds. Saint Francis, always a high school baseball powerhouse, penciled the switch-hitting senior outfielder into the very bottom of the order (9th). He would finish his high school career with 1 HR and no ...
Bar security did not accept that answer, and one of the people with Smith told police “Roundhouse security became rude and disrespectful.”
It was at this point in Smith’s explanation of events to police that the officer remarked in the report that “Mr. Smith became upset with me because I did already not know who he was.”
The report then said that the pitcher’s girlfriend leaned forward and stated, “He’s a pitcher for the Cleveland ...
