The Cubs need to increase the accountability of their players and they have to convey a message of enough is enough to their fan base to reverse a trend of empty seats and apathy that has been evident for much of the 2010 and 2011 seasons. Players who don’t want to do whatever it takes to win can no longer be allowed to enjoy a comfortable environment at Wrigley Field. A player who doesn’t want to play hard can’t be allowed to have a secure spot in the lineup.
The Cubs have some pieces that can be part of an improved team but until there is a major shift in philosophy regarding the types of players the Cubs acquire and an increased focus on improved fundamental play the Cubs will ...
? It’s unclear whether there was anything to the “Jose Bautista for Joey Votto trade rumor” (the what now?)
? (according to this and Robo’s recent tweets) Rockies wanted Josh Reddick, Felix Doubront, Will Middlebrooks, Kyle Weiland and Ryan Lavarnway for Ubaldo Jimenez and Seth Smith
? Mets wanted one of Robbie Erlin or Joe Wieland from Rangers for Carlos Beltran; Rangers declined and later put them in the Mike Adams trade
<a href="http://msn.foxsports.com/video?vid=650fe100-37dd-45bc-8723-306e071fc7e1" target="_new" title="">Full Count: Bautista is a bargain</a><p>
We can make this happen. Bring back the old logo, not as a third jersey, sometimes-on-a-Friday type deal. We have to send a message. With a change to the post-season structure, a deep pool of emerging talent and a general manager in Alex Anthopoulos who is as impressive and trusted as his last name is tough to spell, we have our opening. We need the logo back for next year. Spring training. Pride back.
If you’re with me, please treat the comment section below like a petition. Sign it and demand we bring the original Toronto Blue Jays logo back. The logo of Doug Ault’s 1977 opening day two homers. The logo of 1978 Rookie of the Year Alfredo Griffin. The logo of Bobby Cox. The logo of the greatest outfield of the ...
I tuned to the YES Network to make sure it was still an ESPN/Bud Selig clone and it was. Michael Kay announced David Ortiz’ stats v Mariano Rivera going into the 9th inning match up on Friday, August 5, 2011 in Boston. Kay says Ortiz does well against Rivera and
is 8 for 25.
Ortiz does well against Rivera but the stat deliberately omits 6 meaningful at bats in the two players’ careers and cheats the baseball consumer out of a larger sample size, ie the post season, stats for which are readily available.
Going into the at bat including post season Ortiz was
10 for 31. Six more at bats.
Even the so-called Yankee tv channel doesn’t dare mention post season stats. 13 straight years in the post season (1995-2007) made the YES ...
Or as that brave humorist, Helen Rowland-Office, once wrote…“Home is any four walls that enclose the right ballplayer.”
David Wright’s scorching drive in the first inning Friday night struck halfway up that infernal left-field wall at Citi Field for a one-run double instead of a two-run homer, just as Chipper Jones knew it would.
“It’s funny to see them hit the ball off the wall and look at me like, ‘God-damned, what do I got to do?’” Jones said Friday, before that 16-foot wall and Tim Hudson doomed the Mets to a 4-1 defeat, their fifth in a row.
...Citi Field is both modestly scaled and impossibly dimensioned, an architectural paradox. “I’ve played here long enough to know that’s not a home run,” Wright said of his double. There was ...
There is no issue with keeping guys on the bench engaged and keeping the starters fresh. Every team does it. And the Tigers do it, too.
But four guys in the same game? Does Leyland really fill out his lineup card on Thursday with Don Kelly batting second and playing first base (his first start there all season) and think that it gives his team the best chance to win? I doubt it. He looks at the fact that Alexi Ogando is pitching, the Tigers are 0-2 against him and that the benched players are a combined 0-17 against him this year and says to himself, “this may be a tough one for us.” Leyland wants to win and he needs to win this year or his sixth season as the Tigers manager will probably ...
Adjust onion, adjust belt…some good old-fashioned Bob Ryan.
The AL MVP award is shaping up as a Boston-New York battle, with Adrian Gonzalez, Jacoby Ellsbury, and, if his August and September rival his July, Dustin Pedroia all legit candidates, and Granderson very much in the hunt.
People who favor pitchers are also throwing in the name of CC Sabathia, who will take the mound this afternoon with a 13-2 record in his last 15 decisions, not to mention having surrendered just seven earned runs in his last 62 2/3 innings. Along those lines, you can bet Tiger boosters are putting forth the candidacy of Justin Verlander. But that’s not going to happen. The 2011 AL MVP was at Fenway Park last night.
Back in 2008 Shane Victorino made it clear to Dodgers pitcher Hiroki Kuroda that you do not throw at his head. Tonight, he made it clear to Giants pitcher Ramon Ramirez that it is not ok to throw at his back simply because you’re the defending the World Series Champions, down 8-2, and in the midst of getting embarrassed at home.
Shane was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. He tossed his bat aside, started towards the mound, and was temporarily restrained by home plate umpire Mike Muchlinski. All the while, Giants catcher Eli Whiteside was hopping up and down like he’d just freebased a Red Bull and speed.
Placido Polanco, who was on first at the time, joined the fray only to be form-tackled by the completely ...
The Los Angeles Dodgers and Major League Baseball have agreed on a bankruptcy financing plan for the team.
A court filing Friday in Delaware outlines a plan for the league to provide unsecured financing of up to $150 million for the Dodgers
Last month, a judge rejected the Dodgers’ financing arrangement with a hedge fund and ordered the club to negotiate with the league, which had offered better loan terms.
6) Andrew “The Scranton Horror” Brackman, RHP, Grade B-: 7.26 ERA with 58/69 K/BB in 76 innings for Scranton, 71 hits allowed. He is hounded by abominable, eldritch control problems, like insane flute music pulsating with a mind-bending disharmony of universal, ultimate chaos. Those who ruminate overmuch on the chthonic mysteries of Andrew Brackman’s career put their sanity at risk, as their mental boundaries melt under the hideous assault of such an unspeakable waste of talent and money. Ia! Shub-Niggurath! Ia! Ia! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Walks!
Tony Campana drove in a pair of runs with an inside-the-park homer and the Chicago Cubs beat the Cincinnati Reds 4-3 on Friday for their sixth consecutive victory.
It was the first professional homer for Campana, who also singled, doubled and made a nice catch in center field. Campana became the first Cub ever to hit an inside-the-park shot at Wrigley Field for his first major league homer.
...
Campana, among the fastest players in baseball, zipped around the bases and scored standing up before the Reds could even return the ball to the infield, electrifying the crowd while some fans were still looking for their seats.
It was the Cubs’ first inside-the-park homer at Wrigley Field since Sammy Sosa accomplished the feat against the ...
Baseball sent a warning to its major and minor league players last week that may sound odd, if not comical, but is a sign of these drug-testing times: stop ingesting deer antler spray.
Until the warning went out, baseball players, taking their cues from the body-building and NFL cultures, felt safe using a deer antler spray as an alternative to steroids with almost no risk of flunking a drug test.
Deer antlers? Yes, chemists have figured out that the velvet from immature deer antlers includes insulin-like growth factor, or IGF-1, which mediates the level of human growth hormone in the body, and is also banned by MLB and the World Anti-Doping Agency, among others, for its muscle-building and ...
You will be shocked at what this GM… (Beware of Porn Spam Bots on Facebook!)
In addressing the bloggers during last night’s Royal’s game with Baltimore, Moore said, “We’re not gonna out-talent anybody here. We’ve got one of the smallest markets in all of sports, period. Our owner is a terrific owner, but he’s not going to go out and spend a $100 million payroll when we can only sustain a $55 million or $60 million payroll in this market.”
Moore said there was a lot of criticism about why the Royals would sign a guy like Jeff Francoeur, “but the truth of the matter,” Moore said, “is we’re not going to out-talent anybody here in Kansas City. It’s impossible to do so.”
“Our team has to be better than anybody else,” the Royals GM went on to ...
Asked what changes the team might undertake this upcoming offseason, Ricketts was noncommittal.
“I don’t know just yet,” he said. “It’s something we’ll decide at the right time.”
“A lot of players on our team are from the Dominican Republic,” said Ricketts. “We thought perhaps if we had a little better facility down there we could give our guys more resources to attract and develop the right players.”
Ricketts’ youngest brother, Todd, was featured on the CBS program “Undercover Boss.” He went in disguise for a week during the 2010 season doing various jobs around Wrigley Field trying to find out what the club could do to help those who worked at the park.
What’s next “Shingles in Saskatchewan”? ...Read More...
What a spectacle of undignified behavior, of hypocrisy, of extremism, of civility abandoned, of epic brattiness. Could a despoiled city possibly have proved itself more worthy of its tarnished reputation?
I’m talking, of course, about last Sunday’s Tigers-Angels game at Comerica Park in Detroit.
Either get Krabbenhoft on the phone or have Bill James sit Papi down and explain RBI to him.
Despite a fantastic statistical season, the cranky side of David Ortiz surfaced again on Thursday night.
In a year that has seen the Boston Red Sox slugger battle pitchers from the Orioles and blame the media for being hit by the Yankees, Ortiz didn’t try to hide his emotions after Fenway Park’s official scorer removed a RBI that was Ortiz was initially given after an opposite-field single during Wednesday night’s game.
In fact, Ortiz was so angry about the reversal that he interrupted manager Terry Francona’s pregame press conference on Thursday with some loud expletives.
Clay Hensley got off with only a warning when pulled over for speeding while on his way to the ballpark Thursday night. The Cardinals were less kind to him than the cops.
It was a lousy day all around for the Florida Marlins pitcher, who walked three, hit two batters and gave up a home run in a matter of 2 1/3 innings as St. Louis prevailed, 7-4.
...“The outing was absolute (garbage),” Hensley said afterward. “I didn’t have any idea where the ball was going (Thursday night). It was hands down the worst I’ve pitched in my entire career.”
...In addition to plunking Freese in the helmet with the bases loaded in the third, he also struck Holliday in the left forearm with a pitch earlier in the inning.
One night near the end of the 2008 season, we played the first-place Phillies, in Philadelphia. Well, my teammates played. I watched from home. We lost the game, the fourth straight time they’d beat us. I flicked off the TV. If only I could have pitched tonight, I thought. I carefully flexed my elbow. It wasn’t coming around like I thought it would. My surgeon had warned me there’d be days like this, that every rehab had its peaks and valleys. But this particular valley had lasted too long.
...
All my years in baseball I’d willed myself to win—whether it was a spot in the rotation, a matchup with a great hitter, a game my team needed to make the playoffs. Could it be that what needed strengthening wasn’t so much my arm as my ...
I also noticed when Morel, Pierre and Vizquel came up, they had toothlessly raked (hold on to your worthy Kenworthy jersey)...30 extra base hits in 800 AB’s.
Entering their start against the White Sox, here’s what their walk rates were before their respective starts:
CC Sabathia: 2.40 walks per nine innings
Phil Hughes: 3.69
A.J. Burnett: 4.10
Ivan Nova: 3.47
For comparison, all six starters used by the White Sox this season have walked fewer than three batters per nine innings, so the last three Yankee starters were collectively below-average in the control department.
But wait, there’s more! Joe Girardi utilized a couple of his more erratic relievers without harm. David Robertson (5.7 walks per nine) recorded four ...
Why would anybody come here if they had a little pony?
Are you a traditionalist? Adrian Gonzalez is hitting .356, leads the league in RBIs, and plays for a first place team. He’s the classic model of what a league MVP has traditionally been. If you like RBIs and team win totals, you don’t have to look far to find your obvious candidate.
Did you grow up reading Bill James? Then you’re probably in the “best player should win” camp, and you prefer to reward a guy for what he did and not what his teammates helped him do. Jose Bautista is probably your guy, since he’s having one of the great offensive seasons in baseball history, and is far and away the best hitter in baseball this year.
Another look into the mindset of ballplayers from the other side of the Pacific (or at least one of those countries from the other side of the Pacific):
Kuroda said he heard that Larry Bowa, the Dodgers’ former third base coach, said on MLB Network that any player who refused to be traded from a noncontender to a contender should have his mental makeup questioned. (Bowa said in a telephone interview Thursday that his comments were directed at U.S.-born players, adding that he is aware Kuroda has different values.)
Kuroda said he agrees that an athlete’s ultimate goal should be to win, and he understands how Americans might interpret his decision to stay with the Dodgers as an indication that baseball isn’t his top priority. But he said ...
If baseball players are the pillars of one model of orderly society, art is littered with the corpses of social outcasts. Nietzsche and Van Gogh went crazy. Dostoyevsky was politically oppressed. Brian Wilson couldn’t get out of bed for a decade. But there’s a reason why A&E can get away with running low-budget shows like “Hoarders” and “Intervention” back-to-back for 24 hours at a time. Even in the baseball universe, we can’t escape the pull of human-interest stories. Roy Halladay didn’t become the best pitcher in baseball until he was forced to reinvent himself in low-A ball. Josh Hamilton recovered from hard drug addiction. Zack Greinke overcame anxiety. Of course, the oft-repeated ...
In short, he was exactly the ace the Mets wanted and more. Since then however, Johan has spent parts of 3 seasons on the DL including likely missing the entire 2011 campaign. The Mets aren’t getting anything out of their expensive starter other than a lot of headaches, he’s not putting fans in the seats at Citi Field while he sits on the DL, and they’ve won nothing since he’s been there and are currently a below average major league team (no matter what their record says). So the question begs, who is a bigger bust, AJ Burnett of the Yankees or Johan Santana of the Mets?
...In his first year in the Bronx, AJ went 13-9 but he had an ERA over 4 and led the league in both walks and wild pitches. ...
“quintessential role player”...The countdown to Kim Pinson begins now!
What he did:If baseball awarded the equivalent of Oscars, Pinson would have been a perennial Best Supporting Actor nominee. One of the quintessential role players of the 1960s, Pinson did many things well, hitting for average and power, stealing 305 bases lifetime, and finishing just shy of 3,000 hits. He was never really a star, overshadowed by Cincinnati Reds teammates like Frank Robinson and Pete Rose, though Pinson placed as high as third in MVP voting in 1961 when he led Cincinnati to the World Series. In another era, a fellow blogger told me, Pinson might have been more.
...Why: First of all, count Pinson as another great hitter who may have missed out on the ...
Celebrating Jake Beckley’s birthday…as only the locals can.
So with a decorative wreath from a Hannibal flower shop, I stopped and wished the local baseball hero a happy birthday.
I wonder what an early ballplayer like Beckley would think of the game today? What would he have to say about these enormous ballparks that can hold more people than there are in his hometown of Hannibal? The color barrier was broken long after he died. I’m curious what he would have to say about such a diverse group of men playing baseball today. The business of the game has also changed drastically since the early 1900s when Beckley was in the heyday of his career. I wonder what “Old Eagle Eye,” the nickname he earned, would think about free agency and ...
Lupica would make a great saber-dude because he certainly doesn’t watch the games. Oh…plus some choice Larry Lucchino-no’s.
When asked about the money the Red Sox spent this winter, Larry Lucchino, the president and CEO of the Red Sox and the guy who sets the tone there, said this:
“Every once in a while, you’ve got to prime the pump.”
Then Lucchino said, “We don’t spend money on free agents with any sort of frequency or regularity the way some East teams do. We rely primarily on homegrown players and the players we trade for (Gonzalez came in a trade with San Diego). But you can never eliminate any source of acquisition, including free agency, and we dip into the pool from time to time when we feel we must.”
Calumet farm burials be damned! A swift look at sabermetric use in the racing game.
But things have changed in racing, just as they have changed in other sports. The sabermetrics movement, defined by objective analysis, especially statistics, shunned the insider perspective in baseball and has altered the way the sport is run. In professional basketball, “stat geeks” use mathematical formulas in an attempt to assess a player’s contribution in more meaningful ways than a scoring average or a scout’s eye-test. Many teams have bought in, and most have advanced stats experts on payroll.
Over the years, a similar shift has occurred in racing. Class still counts, and horsemen still train horses, but speed figures have wormed their way ...
Ambrose McConnell, of the White Sox, has a queer hobby. He picks up pins of every description, never passing one by without stopping to gather it in. Amby has a theory that every pin picked up means a base hit for him…His specialty is hairpins.
It appears he found a total of 398 pins during his MLB career.
