So what can a guy who never, ever hit to the opposite field teach those young impressionable kiddies about the fundamentals of hitting? Though I generally consider the role of hitting coach high brand quackery, it's still an odd choice. What next--Mitch Williams as pitching coach? David Wells as trainer? Lenny Dykstra as CFO? I could keep this up all night. Oh, but look at the time. Shucks.
Read more...A good way to be sure the curtain is closing: Your home run calls sound like, "Ken Griffey Jr.! Number 625!" It may be true that Griffey is, in fact, coasting along the final few miles, the odometer turning evermore slowly until the friction of the road brings him to a halt. But I make it a point not to eulogize the living, and I wish other people would do the same.
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Sophisticated Ivy League research.
Participating in this study entails answering three brief questionnaires (about 10 minutes total). Additionally, we will ask you to nominate 3 friends or family members to answer brief questionnaires about you.
Very shortly, Rickey Henderson will give his Hall of Fame speech. Rickey, of course, played many years with Jose Canseco on the Oakland A's. Without turning this into a Raul Ibanez thing, let's just acknowledge there's a probability greater than zero and less than one that he took steroids.
Over at Craig "Shyster" Calcattera's NBC Sports blog, I had an Andy Rooney moment after reading a post he made regarding a failed attempt at a start-up baseball league in 1959. The comment being more substantive than anything I've posted here in a while, I thought I should re-post it here.
Call me crazy, but I could see the idea of a rival league gaining momentum in the not-too-distant future as the live game experience continues down the path toward stimulatory overload. Assuming that chairback touchscreen monitors and the like will become MLB-wide status quo within a few decades (and assuming that most farm and indy-league teams will piggyback), I expect an underserved market of fans to emerge whose ideal live baseball experience is still an escape from their plugged-in, clamorous world--not the extension of it that MLB have become. It seems the market is already palpable, and it's not just made up of people over fifty.
I'm 25. I love the internet. I love loud music. I love things that flash lights and make noise when I touch them. However, I do not desire these things when I'm watching live baseball. Some things go together well. Others do not. Modern MLB games are like fine merlot with Skittles and a side of fireworks. I long to be one of those fans in the grainy newsreel footage, and I worry for the fate of the endangered organist.
The Pirates make a trade. The trade upsets the players. The players lash out at management. 79 articles are written about the trade. And not a single one has "mutiny" in the headline. How does this happen???
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If you haven't heard yet, Dontrelle Willis is back on the DL, again for an anxiety disorder. And again, the circumstances are a little fishy. As such, I assume the next day or two will see plenty of people calling shenanigans and just as many, like me, calling time out on the people calling shenanigans.
"I've talked to everybody and I don't feel like I have any nervousness out there," Willis said. "I've got so many moving parts that if one's out of whack from time to time it happens.
"This is not the first time I've had control problems, but I've been able to overcome it, so I'm not worried about it."
Willis has been his usual gregarious self during a three-game interleague series against the Cardinals, constantly joking around with teammates. He even punctuated many of his comments about going on the DL with laughter.
I've already lent my genius consulting services to the Brewers. Hopefully, it caught the eye of the White Sox people too because I just came up with a brilliant idea for them. That's what we do here at Vinnie's Brilliant Ideas, Inc., and it's a fool-proof business model. We pay me to think; I churn out brilliant ideas, which is a matter of habit for me. Just another day at the ofice.
Let's be like Fergie Jenkins and use made-up numbers to figure out how big of a waste this will be, shall we?
"The Oversight and Government Reform Committee always takes seriously suggestions that a witness misled the committee while testifying under oath," Rep. Edolphus Towns, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said in a statement. "Investigators will begin a review of this matter and, upon learning the results, I will determine appropriate next steps."
Bleed Cubbie Blue: We now know, presuming the report on Sosa is true, that the joy [of the 1998 home run race] was indeed stolen from us. The numbers put up were put up by cartoon figures, not baseball players as we had known them for decades earlier. I know, I know, amphetamines in the 50s and 60s, other PEDs, other ways of cheating, ad nauseum . . . we were sold a bill of goods. They all swore up and down that they were honest -- "Flintstone vitamins," Sammy told us with a straight face. Now we know that face was lying to us, presuming the report is true.Speak for yourself, homie. I still feel perfectly joyful about the homerun race because--sorry to burst your bubble--pretty much every pro athlete you watch is, on some level, cartoonish. And here's another eye opener--you probably haven't lived a single day on this planet in which someone, somewhere hasn't lied to your face about something. People lie. I lie. You lie. We all scream for lie lie. Get over it. Whenever I read / hear stuff like this, I wonder--How much of the 'roid (out)rage has to do with fairness to the other players, the record books, etcetera, and how much has to do with the critic's own feelings of lost connection? "Sammy, I thought we were best buds! I thought we shared all our secrets! But you lied to me! I don't know if I'll ever be able to love again *tear*."
Bugs & Cranks: It's expected because Sosa's career progression and statistics smack of performance enhancing drugs; there's such a dramatic spike in his power later in his career it almost moronic no one though to question Sosa at the time. Sosa's halfhearted denials and severe drop in performance after baseball began drug testing only amplified the expectation that his superstar turn was aided by the juice.Hmm, that's an amusing take on things. You'd be right if you consider age 29 to be "later in his career." Then again, you'd also be a fool. One need only click through a few of Slammity Sam's highest comps on BR (Killebrew, Stargell, McCovey) to notice that peaking during the 29 to 32 range (or later) is perfectly normal. Maybe the leap was more dramatic, but again, unless you're Fergie Jenkins, you have no idea how much of this improvement may or may not have been due to PED use. Attribution to a smoking gun, e.g. steroids, is super easy when you have post facto knowledge that, yes, this factor was in play. And we should all have such selective memory. People did question his production at the time, especially following the McGwire andro controversy (See: Flinstone vitamins).
Deadspin: The real outrage here, as it was with A-Rod, is not who's on the list but who's doing the leaking, a story that for obvious reasons The New York Times will not be writing. You'll remember that those tests results were supposed to be confidential--a perfectly reasonable expectation of any employee who submits to a drug test--yet now they're trickling into public view, merely because somebody wants to remind you to care deeply about steroids in baseball again.
Wasn't this a scene from Major League 2? More importantly, why does Jacobs (a.k.a. Progressive) Field attract so much wildlife? My guess is that the site was once a thriving wetland ecosystem before us evil humans disembowled it to make way for our silly baseball games. Whatever the case, I'll get to the bottom of it.
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