Big Papi pulled up lame on a freaking home run last night. Not sure how long he’ll be out, but it doesn’t sound too serious. (ETA: not his HR, but rounding the bases on someone else’s).
My Reds fan friends actually say Votto’s injury happened at an OK time. Their upcomming series are with MIL, HOU, COL and SD. Not sure if he’ll return for the series against the Pirates.
I wish the Reds could have Encarnacion back. Dude’s having a year.
The Giants are about to head back east for another sweltering road trip. Here’s hoping they can improve on the 1-5 record from the last one. Thankfully, everybody else in the NL west has been equally mediocre (or worse) the last couple of weeks…
I liked Encarnacion when they got him, always have, and it always seemed obvious that asking him to play third base was bad for him.
He got a bad rep in Cincinnati, in part I think simply because they were asking him to do something he wasn’t able to do. In fairness, though, I have to assume his dedication to training wasn’t fantastic, since in Toronto he’s dropped about 15-20 pounds of flab.
An even better (or worse) deal than before, now that Sanchez has been DFA’d. I liked the deal at the time, as a Giants fan, and am ecstatic at Melky’s performance, but I’m sad that Sanchez couldn’t make it work in KC. But man, 44 walks in 53 innings over 12 starts, and an ERA of almost 8… Ugh.
Joe
Anybody see about Bill James deciding to defend Joe Paterno? First, apparently, on the basis that when he was a kid grown men often took showers with unrelated boys, second on the basis that Paterno evidently had no power within Penn State [“He had very few allies. He was isolated. He was not nearly as powerful as people imagine him to have been.”].
The Red Sox, reasonably enough not wishing to be associated with this sort of insanity, told him to sit down and shut up.
I loved James’s work back in the 80s, read all his baseball abstracts; I still remember a surprising number of his lines (“This ‘we ballplayer,’ Sparky, can’t hit, can’t run, can’t throw…”), and I learned an awful lot about baseball from reading his stuff. On some level I’m not all that surprised to see his comments about Paterno, though–I know James loves to be contrarian, and sees himself as someone who says what he thinks no matter what, and the quixotic nature of this certainly fits in with the whole defend-Pete-Rose-at-all-costs thing. (Did he ever admit he was even a little tiny bit wrong about that situation?)
I’m not here to try to argue about the Penn State case–there’s a perfectly good trainwreck of a thread in the BBQ Pit about that, if you like that sort of thing. But here’s what I find funny. In one of his abstracts, James did a very amusing commentary about people who were experts in one field who spent much of their time acting as if they were experts in another. Einstein’s Silly Ravings about Politics, Freud’s Musings on Subjects about which he knew nothing and Would Not Shut Up, that kind of thing.
Well, judging from James’s most recent comments, he’s absolutely right. We can add another name to the Einsteins and the Freuds! Congrats, Bill!
wheresgeorge04:
Hey, the Royals still got Ryan Verdugo in the deal. And he’s starting tonight, so I guess we’ll see if he makes up for the imbalance. (Yeah, right)
Then again, maybe not.
At the time of this post, the Mariners have scored the most runs in MLB on the road and the fewest at home. They’re a Jekyll and Hyde team. The dimensions of Safeco with Seattle’s climate just isn’t conducive for offensive baseball. It’s not psychological, visiting teams have a hard time scoring too.
Yanks are a comfy 23 games over .500 after sweeping the depleted Jays.
Matt Kemp hits his first homerun since returning from the DL, and it proves timely, as it’s a walk-off in the bottom of the 12th to prevent a Phillies sweep.
:exhales:
Fingers crossed that the trade deadline brings some help to the lineup.
From the MLBTradeRumors website:
That’s seriously depressing. Bill James was one of my heroes.
Emphasis on was.
How do you guys think Mattingly is as a manager? I haven’t followed him too closely, but he’s one of my top 5 favorite ballplayers ever, so I’m curious how he’s doing.
ETA: directed to NAF1138 and Asimovian.
I am generally pleased with him, and I root for him to be around for many years. However, I am definitely more of just a fan and not a baseball analyst, and I have heard from other fans that he has some of the same issues that Torre had with overusing the bullpen. I don’t have much of an opinion on it.
Oh Matt, how we’ve missed you. If we keep Matt & Andre healthy in the middle of the line up, we’ll be fine… even without a move.
They’re for real.
They’ve got great pitching, and good enough hitting.
They’re not playing above their Pythagorean, or doing it with one-run and extra-inning games; they’re 18-17 in those games, and 35-19 the rest of the time, through tonight’s game.
I like the way this team has been constructed. They developed the best farm system in baseball, waited for their talent to mature, added a couple of key acquisitions, and here we are.
This isn’t at all like the 2005 team that Frank Robinson had playing way over its head until he wore out the bullpen. I loved that team because it was so wonderful to have baseball back in Washington, and a winning team to boot (for awhile, at least), but even while they were winning I looked at all those 5-1-1-1-1 lines in the IP column of the box scores, and wondered how long they could keep it up. The answer was, half a season.
This isn’t like that team. They’ve got a manager in Davey Johnson who knows what he’s doing, isn’t going to wear out the team for a few extra wins, and believes in himself enough to tell the rest of the world to fuck off if it doesn’t agree with him. They’ve got great pitchers (even after Strasburg and Gio, their 3-4-5 pitchers have to be some of the best 3-4-5 pitchers in the game), they’ve got Bryce Harper and Ryan Zimmerman, this is a good team. Whether or not they win the division, they’re not going to fall apart down the stretch. And they’re going to be contenders for years to come, I think.
The guy didn’t come out in support of pedophilia.
He went out of his way to defend a guy who actively covered it up.
Just from the one quote Ulf provides, it appears that his arguments were crap. If someone is your hero because he helped you figure out how to really think, this sort of thing undermines the very basis of your admiration.