Same thing happened in Toronto; the Jays have never been the same since Gillick left. Labatt’s getting bought out by Interbrew didn’t help, either.
:smack: You’re correct.
Didn’t the Dodgers(?) also get better after he left them?
Yanks are rolling pretty well. I really like the post Boss regime. Hal Steinbrenner (The smart and quiet son) has control of the Yankee Empire and he is letting Cashman do his job.
The team looks solid across the board and the staff is excellent. Though Joba had a bad outing on Friday from the bullpen.
Rivera has barely been tested this year and is perfect so far.
Did anyone see Pirates pitcher Chris Jakubauskas get hit in the head by a Lance Berkman line drive yesterday? That is some fucking scary shit.
If i were a pitcher, i don’t think i could even get back on the mound after seeing something like that.
That’s what always worries me in watching my kid play - pitching or infield. Those composite bats that kids use the ball comes screaming off of sometimes.
David Price threw a 4 hit complete game (6-0) of the Jays to keep the Rays atop the AL East. Next up is 3 games against the A’s which should be a compelling series.
Baltimore finally wins one, 7-6 over Boston in the 10th at Boston.
How is it physically possible for Mark Texieria to be this bad? I mean, slow start, whatever, how can he be this bad? He is singlehandedly slaughtering my fantasy baseball season - him and that Vasquez bastard - which is why you don’t draft players from teams you hate, I guess. 
I don’t know on Teix, this is not just a slow start, it is a dismal start. His glove is still helping to win games at least. I still expect him to bounce back and start driving the ball.
As to Vasquez he seems to have lost his control. But I would have been a little afraid to take him in the draft. I had hopes he would do well but that NL-AL move always scares me.
And for the third game in a row, the Mariners lose to the White Sox by coughing up a game-winning home run late in the game. Sigh.
Teixeira got off to a bad start last year, too, so it probably doesn’t mean anything. Even .118 or whatever he’s at could be just dumb luck.
Toronto was spanked pretty bad by the Rays the last two days. It’s nice that they managed to get through most of April without being really horrible, but the team simply has no offense and their early hitting spree was a fluke. David Price was really good, don’t get me wrong, but he was not exactly facing the best hitters the AL has to offer. I saw some pretty terrible hitting; the Jays really don’t have any patient hitters at all except Bautista and Overbay, and Overbay is only patient because he can’t swing the bat all that well.
The roster composition of the Jays worries me. It’s not that I think a different approach would make any difference in their likelihood of competing - it wouldn’t - but that they still aren’t acting like a team with a plan. They traded Michael Taylor to get a slightly inferior but allegedly more MLB-ready prospect in Brett Wallace, but Wallace is still in the minors while Lyle Overbay is wasting at bats in the big leagues. They’re still wasting a roster spot on John McDonald, who I admit is a very likeable and hardworking guy but he couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat and he’s not as defensively amazing as people say. They put Randy Ruiz on the team and don’t use him. The third baseman, God help us, is Edwin Encarnacion.
The team’s pattern for years has been that they do a good job developing pitchers but don’t seem to have a PLAN when it comes to position players. Right now the team doesn’t really have a left fielder; they’re using Jose Bautista out there, usually, but Bautista is a utility player. There’s no real solution at third. Their shortstop is here for one year and there is no plan for what happens after that. The catchers are, as they seemingly are every year, whatever painfully slow guy was available on the cheap in the offseason. The first baseman’s a dead man walking. Their only major midseason move was acquiring Fred Lewis, and heaven knows why. Lewis seems like a nice enough guy but what does he do that the crop of 4th outfielders available at Las Vegas don’t do? I don’t understand why they’ve selected the players they have or why they left the players in Las Vegas that they did.
It’d be nice to say “well, they’re rebuilding” but it’s hard to be positive about that when you can’t understand what the hell they’re doing.
Oh goody, its time for another Cincinnati Reds fun fact: They have 8 wins. 7 of them have come in their last at-bat. And they just had their first win awarded to a starting pitcher the other day.
Yikes, my team fucking blows!
ETA: and what’s really depressing is how much money the team has tied up into two absolutely lousy starting pitchers. Aaron Harang, $15 million this season. Bronson Arroyo, $12 million.
Pretty good article on the Batter’s Box about “Cito Derangement Syndrome”.
Well, I could discuss Cito Gaston’s managing stupidies all day, but the difference between Cito managing and Cito not managing is just the odd game they don’t win because he refuses to pinch hit for someone who can’t hit. It’s the difference between going 73-89 and going 76-86. The thing is that when he has a good club, it doesn’t matter, really, because his weaknesses don’t appear when he has a solid lineup to work with anyway. His strength is motivating veterans and handling them correctly. His weakness is when he has to work new players in to the majors. His in-game strategy, overall, is not a huge weakness; he goes too far sometimes with hitters, but he handles pitchers well and avoids giving outs away. All in all he’s a perfectly good tactical manager. People get worked up about him because they’re ignorant.
So I could hit him for being poor in working with young players, but the thing is, he doesn’t have a lot of good young players to work with. Gaston can’t be blamed for the Blue Jays having very little talent. He’s not the guy who assembled it. When he was helping screw up the team in the mid 90s, it was a bad thing; he held back players like Shawn Green and Carlos Delgado while pushing players like Joe Carter far beyond the point of usefulness. But who on this team is he holding back? He gave Adam Lind a job, and he’s giving Travis Snider way more of a chance than a lot of managers would. Otherwise, his roster is devoid of young talent. Cito Gaston isn’t the GM.
Should he be hitting Ruiz more? Absolutely. Does it really matter in the LONG run though? Nah, not really. What concerns me is the team’s long term process of developing and producing talent, and right now I see three position players on the team who might be useful in the long term. Just three.
To be fair to Gaston, he did give Shawn Green a chance as the every day right fielder in 1996, after Green’s very good rookie season as a sort-of platoon regular in '95. By the end of May '96 though, Green was hitting .219/.291/.342. Thus, back to platooning.
Besides, it’s not like Green mashed left handed pitching that much anyway, with an OPS of .678 in his breakout year of '98, and .754 for his career.
The Tigers are hated by the schedulers. They are on an 11 game road trip. It is part of a 42 games in 43 days schedule. They are playing Texas today. Then they come home to face the hot Twins who are already resting in Detroit because they have a day off. With Guillen hurt, we have to find a way to keep in the race .
Ryan Howard’s wallet just got a little fatter, as the Phillies have signed him to a 5 year extension at $125 million. The deal also includes an option for 2017 that could up the total tab to $138 million.
Finally! The Giants score a few! And against Halladay! Sanchez, with that sub-2 ERA, really makes the games exciting…
Joe
That won’t end well.
At that payscale, Albert Pujols is estimated to be worth $51 million/year.
Yeah, i know Howard has been awesome, but that seems like a lot of money and a pretty long contract for a 32-year-old (the age he will be when the extension begins).
I think that perhaps the most interesting thing is how much money they gave him when he still has almost two full seasons left on his current contract. If they had waited until next year, i’d be surprised if they had to pay more than that. It seems to me that they gave him about as much money as he could hope to make on the free agent market, and did so too early.
As J.C. Bradbury and quite a few other sports economists argue, if you’re going to give a guy a big contract early on, you should try to get a discount. There’s no point paying him his full free agent value a year early, because anything could happen in that year, and you can probably wait a year and pay the same money for him next year.
Most of the informed opinion on this deal seems to range from “It’s completely nuts” to “It’s not awful, but there’s a lot of risk involved for the Phillies.” I’d lean towards the latter.