The Mariners released Richie Sexson today. I’m guessing he’ll be picked up quickly. He seems to be one of those players who really needs a change of scenery.
Yes, perhaps the Diamondbacks would be willing to take a chance on him. 
Hey, at least the Reds stole one from the Cubbies. Now all we need to do in order to make my 4-2 road trip wish come true is to sweep the Brewers in Milwaukee.
No problem!
I have no doubt that team chemistry exists. Of course employees who are highly motivated and content will perform better than ones who aren’t. Baseball players are no different. While I think the effect is dampened a bit in baseball by the sports individualized nature, I wouldn’t question that it is in fact a factor.
However, there are a couple of things I do doubt.
I doubt that you, I, or any other third party can determine whether a team’s chemistry is positive, negative, or anything else.
There seems to be this assumption that the Rays have good team chemistry. Why? Because they are winning a lot? They have mostly the same players as last year. Was this chemistry bad then? If they suddenly lose 20 in a row was the chemistry not as good as you thought? How bout the Dbacks? They overachieved significantly last year. Was it due to good chemistry? Why is the same group of guys underachieving this year? Did the Mets have good team chemistry last year? What if I asked you last August? Did the collapse mean they retroactively had bad chemistry?
One last example. The 2002 Angels overachieved their way to a World Series Championship. Clearly an example of a strong adhesive unit. Then why, after bringing back nearly the entire team (I think something like 24 of 25 players), did the team finish under 500 the next season?
The 2nd thing I doubt is that you, I, or any other third party can tell what effect Bonds would have on team chemistry. Being a jerk to fans or a jerk to the media does not make him a bad teammate. In fact, from what I’ve read, most people consider him to have been a good teammate. There are exceptions of course. Jeff Kent has probably been the most vocal in his distaste for Bonds. Does anyone want to argue that Kent wasn’t helped by Bond’s presence despite his animosity? Or that they couldn’t win together? The year the aforementioned Angels won the World Series, they beat the Bonds/Kent SF Giants.
Perhaps, he would have a negative affect on the Rays for the reasons mentioned or others. But what if signing Bonds allows the rest of the team to focus on baseball while Bonds draws the spotlight? What if the team is motivated by management getting them some help? What if the young hitters are helped by watching an all time great hitter hit. Hell, what if the rest of the team is incensed by the signing and gets motivated to prove that they are good enough to win without him?
If I was able to interact with the team on a daily basis, and knew Bonds personally, I might be able to make an assessment on what the signing would do to team chemistry. Then again maybe not, group dynamics are very complicated, and there are way too many variables to tell what exactly will happen. For me, as an outsider to make such an assessment, with no knowledge of team dynamics nor personal relationship with Bonds I find ludicrous.
I’m not arguing that chemistry doesn’t exist. What I am arguing is that no one here is in a position to know it. It seems to me that people define good team chemistry as the team played better then I thought they would and they seem likable. That isn’t remotely valid. It also seems that it is never used to predict team success, but just used to have a simple explanation to why unexpected things occurred. No one was arguing that the Rays would be really good this year since they will have a strong cohesive unit (Well, I was arguing they would be good, but I can assure you that wasn’t my reasoning). If you find a way to measure chemistry I’ll use it in my analysis. Until then I’ll argue based on the information knowable to me.
Having watched him up close for the last couple of years, I think there’s a better than even chance that he’ll take his problems with him.
I dunno what his other problems are, but the fact is he’s a big slow guy who’s now 34 years old. If it came as a surprise to the Mariners that he’s not very good anymore, that says as much about the incompetence of the Mariners front office as it does about Richie Sexson.
Reds somehow bumble their way into a win that Milwaukee was just dying to give away with errors.
Unbelievable.
Boston’s shortstop problem has solved itself. Good luck with your rehab, Julio. Take all the time you need.
I hate sports talk radio. They were bitching about how Minnesota was slaughtering the Tigers this week. Three straight 1 run games. That is not slaughtering.
What happened to the Twinks in Boston, now that there’s some good ol’-timey slaughterin’ for ya.
See you in October. Maybe.
You know who got slaughtered this week? The Rays were slaughtered 3-in-a-row (so far) by the Indians.
boggle
To be fair, for his first two seasons in Seattle Sexson performed as expected. He started off poorly last year, but he’d historically been a slow starter so everybody assumed he’d pick it up as the season progressed. By the time it became apparent that he wasn’t picking it up, the team was in a quandary.
The team as a whole was playing much better than expected, which allowed them to keep Richie around and hope he snapped out of it. There were a ton of fans calling the postgame shows asking why the Mariners didn’t just trade him, and the basic answer they always got was, “Who’s going to take him, hitting the way he is and with the contract he’s got [$14 million in '07 and $15 million in '08], and what are the Mariners going to get in return? Nobody and nothing.” It wouldn’t surprise me if they decided to take the chance that he might get off to a good start in '08 and then trade him while they had the chance. But once it became clear that it was going to be more of the same this year they finally decided to just write him off.
This article on the Mariners Web site provides a good, candid explanation behind the decision to finally release him.
Me, I wonder if his eyes have gone bad. I normally listen to games on the radio — I rarely watch TV and don’t even have cable at home — so I haven’t actually seen Richie batting very many times. But I was housesitting for my sister the last couple weeks and caught a few games on TV there. I could clearly see that Richie was squinting during his at-bats. It could have been because of the sun, but none of the other players were squinting like that. Maybe the squinting is normal for Richie, but I couldn’t say since this was the first chance I’d really had to see his face during an at-bat. I suppose if the squinting was something new that somebody on the coaching staff would have noticed.
They went 7-in-a-row this week, slumping back down the second place. The Sox are back on top to stay.
Eh, f*** that. Now that our 4-game sweep of the Rays is over (the Indians love to toy with fans by beating really good teams after 11-game losing streaks), I’ll be back to rooting for the previously-worst-team-in-the-AL to crush those stinky Sox!
Do you know how weird that bolded part looks to me?
Could the mysterious individual beating up on the Dodger voodoo doll please, for the love of God, give it a rest? Did you really have to take down Saito, too?
I have a feeling that the series against the D-Backs right after the All-Star break will tell us everything we need to know about the remainder of the season in the NL West. I’m not sure it’s going to be good news for the Dodgers.
I think it’s great, the Rays really have a good team this year and they’re playing extremely well except for this last week. I still think the Sox will win the division this year but Tampa is certainly on the map.
Where’s my pincushion? 
Holy shit the Rangers can pile on runs. I was hoping their pitching would be bad enough to let the Sox win, but it was just bad enough to toy with us, eventually giving us the loss. I’ll take my revenge when they come to the Cell. Why couldn’t the Tigers win their series against the Twins? (Or for that matter, why won’t the Twins go away?). Sox still appear to be crap on the road, especially in the AL West.
The first three games were one-run games. The Tigers could have taken the series, or at worst split it (barring a game-killing error).
The Twins are good and they’ve flown under the radar. The Tigers only play the Twins one more series the entire year. The White Sox (and Indians and Royals) need to do their part and beat up on the Twins.