Tunxis? They should all be in ####### straightjackets by now!
Tunxis Community College Foundation invites the public to “Beyond the Green Monster: Business Strategies for Major League Results,” with Sam Kennedy, president of Fenway Sports Management and executive vice president/chief operating officer for the Boston Red Sox, on Nov. 10, 7:30-9 a.m. at the Hartford Marriott Farmington.
...Kennedy helped conceive and execute the successful sales and marketing plan for the “Legends Suite” at ...
So a best-case scenario still has the Mets in need of more than $300 million in the relatively near term. That doesn’t cover any subsequent reversals that increase their exposure with Picard, nor does it begin to cover the $500 million in loans that the team is due to pay by June 2014, the loans of around $450 million to the affiliated SNY network due back a year after that, or the roughly $600 million still due in debt payments on Citi Field.
Ask yourself this: Exactly how does that leave any ...
Frank and several other Sox fans I’ve talked to over the past 12 or so hours are relieved for two reasons. First, we don’t have to pretend to root for these ######## anymore. Second, the old kick-in-the-balls feeling is back! We get to go back to our favorite pastime: complaining about this shitty team and its shitty GM and what the #### is wrong with Crawford and did you hear what this guy told me about what John Lackey did when he was at that bar in the Back Bay? When I woke up this morning, ...
An argument to use Matt Moore ahead of Jeremy Hellickson in Tampa Bay’s postseason rotation.
Matt Moore is quite probably the Rays’ best pitcher. It should be no surprise if he wins a Cy Young award next year…The Rays cannot afford to limit Moore to a few choice innings, any more than the Yankees would hold back C.C. Sabathia to make sure they could get out tough left-handers in the eighth inning. The more Moore Tampa uses, the fewer runs they will allow.
The magazine’s take on the odds of Game 162’s simultaneous comebacks, and why the Rays besting the Red Sox is good for baseball.
There was something on the order of an 0.5% chance the Red Sox would blow their nine-game lead over the Rays, and a 2% chance the Braves would lose their seven-and-a-half-game edge over the Cardinals. Then in tonight’s matchups, there was a 13% chance the Phillies would come back to beat Atlanta, a 5% chance the Orioles would come back to beat Boston, and an 0.3% ...
Are we sure that Mariano Melgar would pitch any worse than Luis Ayala?
Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That’s what you get most of the time. You stand in driver’s license lines, and watch Alfredo Aceves shake off signals, and sit through your children’s swim meets, and see bases loaded rallies die, and fill up your car’s tires with air and endure an inning with three pitching changes, a sacrifice bunt and an intentional walk.
But then, every now and again, something happens. ...
Just two championships in the last eight seasons and 90 win seasons in eight of the last night = failure. Red Sox fans are becoming what they have loathed for so long…YANKEES FANS!
The fact that it was Crawford dropping that ball last night provided the perfect parallel to all that is wrong with this team. John Henry and the baseball ops team, including digital darling Carmine, are so hell-bent on stats and mathematical formulas that they’re increasingly ignoring what is was that made them ...
Their body language grew progressively worse as the month dragged on, with their manager seeming more hopeless and desperate than anyone. They blew basic baseball plays, botched fly balls, dropped relay throws, ended games by getting caught stealing, threw meatballs, ####### at each other, admitted to being scared … you name it, they did it. They choked away Game 162 by getting three guys thrown out on the basepaths, by blowing a 3-2 lead in the ninth, by botching a season-deciding fly ball, ...
And the batting point Reyes lighthouse shall lead them…maybe.
I can’t speak for those booing, but I suspect some of the disappointment upon Reyes’ departure stemmed from the knowledge that neither art nor science has yet figured a way to capture the way fans feel seeing Reyes round second and slide headfirst into third, the thrill of the dash and the joy upon its completion. We knew we needed to relish it Wednesday — just like we did Tuesday — because we might never have it again. And ...
They will go down as the most thrilling 129 minutes in baseball history. Never before and likely never again—if we even dare to assume anything else can be likely ever again—will baseball captivate and exhilarate on so many fronts in so small a window the way it did September 28, 2011.
Starting at 9:56 PM Eastern, the grand old game, said to suffer by comparison from football’s siren sisters of gambling and violence, and said to suffer from America’s shrinking attention span and capacity to ...
It’s hard to describe just how epic the Red Sox’ collapse was — something on the order of Mr. Buckner’s play multiplied by itself two or three times over….
The following is not mathematically rigorous, since the events of yesterday evening were contingent upon one another in various ways. But just for fun, let’s put all of them together in sequence:
# The Red Sox had just a 0.3 percent chance of failing to make the playoffs on Sept. 3.
# The Rays had just a 0.3 percent chance ...
The Detroit Tigers may lose the spectacular “Ty” Cobb. The Detroit star has been quietly figuring for the past year for a minor league franchise, figuring on being a joint owner, manager and player. Last night Paul Cobb, right fielder for Lincoln and younger brother of the “Georgia Peach,” wired “Ty” advising the latter to buy the Lincoln franchise in the Western league.
I’ve never shot eighteen under par and I still don’t know where all those balls are, ...
Moments after allowing two runs in the ninth inning of the Red Sox’ season-ending, 4-3 loss to the Orioles Wednesday night at Camden Yards, Jonathan Papelbon talked about the fall-out from blowing the save, and how he will be approaching his future.
“I think this organization is obviously an organization I want to play for,” Papelbon said. “I have to let the offseason dictate that and whatever happens, happens. This isn’t going to define me. You look at some of ...
Everybody gets dead lettered. It was Frank Howard’s turn…
It is stunning and embarrassing that Howard has not been part of the Nationals’ organization. There is something purporting to be a statue of Howard on the center-field plaza of Nationals Park. Yet save for the occasion appearance before private groups, the Nationals failed to step up and make Howard part of the organization.
“I would have loved to,” Howard said when asked why he was not part of the Nationals’ organization. “But ...
Los Angeles Dodgers infielder Eugenio Velez has broken a modern-day major league record for a non-pitcher by going hitless in his final 46 at-bats.
Velez grounded out to second as a pinch hitter in the eighth inning against the Arizona Diamondbacks in the regular-season finale Wednesday night. He broke the record of 45 straight at-bats that belonged to Pittsburgh’s Bill Bergen (1909), Dave Campbell of San Diego and St. Louis (1973) and Milwaukee’s Craig Counsell this season.
The Tampa Bay Rays clinched the AL wild card with a stunning rally Wednesday night, overcoming a late seven-run deficit and then beating the New York Yankees 8-7 on Evan Longoria’s home run in the 12th inning.
The Rays’ win came four minutes after Boston blew a one-run lead in the ninth at Baltimore and lost 4-3. The Red Sox, who held a nine-game lead over the Rays in early September, and Tampa Bay began the final day of the regular season tied for the wild card.
The Cardinals have won the National League Wild Card.
As the Braves and Phillies played a cliffhanger, Chris Carpenter and the Cardinals did their part at Minute Maid Park. Carpenter dominated the Astros and his offense gave him five runs before he even took the mound in a 8-0 drubbing of Houston. Atlanta then lost, 4-3, to Philadelphia in 13 innings to give St. Louis the Wild Card.
The checkered game of Milton Bradley’s life contines…
Former Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley was free on $30,000 bail Wednesday after being arrested in Encino on suspicion of felony battery, according to City News Service.
Bradley, 33, was booked at the Van Nuys jail following his arrest at about 2 p.m. Tuesday, according to Sheriff’s Department records. He was released on bail about eight hours later, and was tentatively scheduled to appear in court in Van Nuys on Oct. 18.
Adds Maury…“Just in time for Halloween. Starring Sissy Spacek and John Travolta.”
So the “fishing” expedition is really saber-rattling. For one, it’s not just MLB that McCourt is trying to put on trial, it’s all sports leagues that have their own rules that they apply to clubs. Why not have McCourt go after the NFL, or NBA, or NHL? Where does it stop? The court has to remember the precedent that would be set with such a ruling.
But, that doesn’t mean McCourt isn’t going to lawyer ...
Putterman here is the world’s foremost appraiser of vintage HOF’s…
Every once in a while a career WAR total seems completely counterintuitive. This list features both players whose WAR is surprisingly high and players whose WAR is surprisingly low. Amos Rusie is statistically one of the most baffling players in Cooperstown. Rusie, both standout pitcher and mediocre outfielder in the late 19th century, was alternately impressive and underwhelming throughout a ten-season career on the mound. So ...
Bill Veeck was known for telling some wonderful tales and so I decided to see if one of his tales was actually true.
Joe Dimaggio had trouble hitting Satchel Paige, partly-I suppose-because Satch made him wait. Satch once committed the ultimate insult of walking a man deliberately to get at Joe, and then getting Joe to pop out. It was DiMaggio’s temperament to be a solid professional, to show no emotion, but you knew that Joe burned inwardly at the gratuitous slap and was hurting to get back ...
Chicago White Sox fans will be treated to four more years of “He Gone” and “Mercy!” after announcing Wednesday that television play-by-play announcer Ken “Hawk” Harrelson agreed to a four-year extension through 2015.
... yet the Mets still figured out a way to make a PR mess out of it. Reyes bunted for a single in the first inning of Wednesday’s game. The crowd went nuts. Then he was pulled for a pinch-runner in what might be his final game as a Met… Instead of leaving to cheers, the crowd boos the move.
Anyway, Tom Tango has a little different take on the MVP. His feeling is that if you put everyone from 2011 into a draft, the No. 1 player selected should be the MVP. Now, we’re talking about a real draft here—not a fantasy league draft. I suspect many readers here have played Strat-o-Matic or APBA baseball or something like that. So imagine every season from 2011 was available in card form. But include all you want—leadership, hustle, whatever qualities you want. You can’t game the ...
What’s next, that Willie Mays Hays didn’t really steal 100 bases in 1989?
The real problem with Moneyball, however, is not Lewis’s failure to understand baseball history. It’s his failure to see what was going on right in front of his and Beane’s eyes in 2002. In their book, The Beauty of Short Hops: How Chance and Circumstance Confound the Moneyball Approach to Baseball, Sheldon Hirsch and Alan Hirsch point out perhaps the biggest hole in Lewis’s analysis. They write that Moneyball
Yes, that was a Kirk Gibson-esque fist pump that Ryan Roberts broke out as he rounded the bases late Tuesday night at Chase Field.
And yes, it just so happened to come against the Los Angeles Dodgers, the team Gibson played for when he made it famous for his fist-pumping home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series.
Perhaps it was only fitting. For as improbable as the Dodgers’ run was that year to the World Series, so is this amazing, magical ride that keeps cruising along for the underdog ...
Let’s smash all the game 162 game chatters into one thread, shall we? There is a full slate of games, but as far as playoff races are concerned, these are the games that matter (although if you want to talk about any of the other games for any reason, feel free).
Red Sox (Lester) vs. Orioles (Simon) at 7:05 PM
Yankees (TBD- no, seriously, TBD) vs. Rays (Price) at 7:10 PM
Phillies (Blanton) vs. Braves (Hudson) at 7:10 PM
Cardinals (Carpenter) vs. Astros (Myers) at 8:05 PM
Look! Shiny, magical double zeros! There’s no reasoning…you’ve lost.
Derek Jeter was not in the starting lineup Tuesday night at Tropicana Field. It was likely his last day off for the season. The Captain is expected to start Wednesday night in the regular season finale and continue his pursuit to a .300 batting average.
Jeet is batting .298 in 543 at-bats. He would need to go 2-for-4 to finish the season at .300. If he goes 1-for-3 or 2-for-5, he would finish at .299. Now here’s a ...
Vice President Joe Biden was in Boston yesterday and talked about why he was rooting for the Red Sox.
Here’s the anecdote from the Globe’s Shira Schoenberg on our Political Intelligence blog:
Biden said his lead Secret Service man is from Boston. Before his plane landed, Biden said, “I said everyone bow their head. We’re going to say a prayer that Boston wins the wild card spot. ... I’m worried if in fact they don’t, he’s going to ...
