The next game you watch, listen closely to how many times Fairly starts a sentence with “well…” in order to give himself a second lead time as his brain struggles to come up with an answer. Drives me insane. It’s like having a neighbor with wind chimes, or sitting near some woman who insists on snapping her gum every five seconds.
If you’re into alcohol poisoning (and who isn’t), here’s the Ron Fairly Drinking Game
1 drink:
“out over the plate”
“play for one run”
“put the game in motion”
“good piece of [hitting/pitching/fielding/bench-warming]”
“think opposite field” or “don’t [try/want] to pull the ball”
“Mariners are going to have to [score some runs/put some runs on the board]”
chug:
“As you can see…” (refering to on-screen graphic)
“I’ll tell you what…”
Highly Dangerous Bonus Chugging
“As we mentioned in the [x] inning…” = group must drink beers equal to number of innings between original comment and reference. Days count as 9 (for instance, a comment he made two days before= 18 beers for the group).
I should just keep this updated and stick it up on the sidebar, now that I think about it.
If this — 7 IP, 4 H, 2 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 7 K, 0 HR — is how Freddy pitches when Pat Borders catches him, I say let Borders catch him the rest of the season. It’s no secret Garcia and Wilson weren’t seeing eye-to-eye last time out, so why not give someone else a shot at dealing with him?
Oh, and would it be too much to ask for this team to score some freaking runs? It’s getting ridiculous out there.
Speaking of Adam Jones, Derek and I had a chance to see him play Thursday night (Derek has posted a few pictures, I haven’t gotten around to posting mine yet, and neither of us has talked about the game; I’ll attempt to remedy that). Like Dave said on the Future Forty, Jones’ arm is his best tool. He made several very strong throws from deep in the hole, and seems to have plenty of arm to handle SS as he moves up the ladder. His range looked pretty good as well, though it was only one game. If there’s something he needs to work on defensively, it’s making the pivot at 2B to turn the double-play. But hey, the guy just graduated from high school, so I’m certainly not complaining.
Offensively, he looked so far superior to Michael Garciaparra (who spent a few games at Everett late last season) it wasn’t even funny. Garciaparra reached at almost everything and appeared to be fooled on every pitch, but Jones had a much better approach, took good swings and made better contact. He certainly wasn’t what I’d call patient, but he wasn’t chasing junk, either. Well, for the most part at least. He looked pretty bad on a nasty slider from a side-arming righty in his final at-bat, but the pitcher in question was a recent college draftee who made most of Everett’s hitters look bad at the plate.
Speaking of celebrations, a new Future Forty has been posted. Chris Snelling finally vacates the #1 position, though he doesn’t fall far. Shin-Soo Choo’s stock is going down, and Travis Blackley cracks the top 5, as well as the first appearances on the lists by Adam Jones and Wladmir Balentien.
The final end-of-season minor league review will come tommorrow afternoon.
I think I’ve said this before — however not on this particular forum — but if George Steinbrenner really is stupid enough to fire GM Brian Cashman if the Yankees don’t win the World Series, the M’s should hire Cashman before the celebratory champagne is even dry.
I replied to a couple of emails today w/r/t roster rules, and after thinking it over, I’m not sure that I was right at all, and Pelekoudas was right: that the team can tweak roster composition through DL usage. The rule on this says the players eligible for post-season play have to be (essentially) on the roster or DL on August 31st. And so my first criticism of the Times article could be totally wrong, though the second one remains correct (pitchers-pitchers). Here’s how it would work. If you had (like the M’s) a roster of
15 healthy hitters + 1 DL hitter
10 healthy pitchers + 1 DL pitcher
When it came time to submit your roster, you then would be able to pick up to 16 hitters, or up to 11 pitchers. So if that’s the case, and it makes sense that it would be, now that I’ve given this some serious thought, I’d like to apologize to the people I already wrote back to.
What I don’t understand about this, then, is that if you wanted maximum flexibilty, you’d call up everyone DLed on the 40m, while optioning down anyone marginal you could on the 25m.
Aaalso, I don’t understand this part: if you’re going to bring Meche into the playoffs, optioning him off the active roster for August 31st in order to bring up a DL guy does you no good: you then have to use that DL guy to slip Meche back through, which means you’ve burned that spot (and a Meche option year) for no reason. Maybe they figure there’s a decent chance they’re going to have to shut him down for the playoffs, and want flexibility around him.
Some have submitted that post-season roster eligibility can come by being on the roster before then, even if it’s not then, but Rule 40’s pretty clear they have to be on the active/DL on midnight 8/31 to be eligible, so I reject that.
The other interesting thing here is that it does mean the Mariners don’t have to make choices about whether to carry Cirillo/Sasaki yet: the 8/31 eligibles include them, but they don’t necc. have to be there. If the M’s indeed decide they want, uh, Aaron Looper on there, while carrying 15 hitters, no problem — in fact, they still have a roster spot to play with on the hitter’s side.
Ron Fairly Zen Koan of the Day: “Don’t try to see how far you can hit the ball, see how hard you can hit it.”
Bonus: “Averages are great, but they don’t mean much for individuals. What matters is runs scored and runs batted in and the great players, they give you both.”
Errors in this article:
[Edited: turns out this first part is probably me being wrong, see subsequent post]
“That gave us 15 position players on Aug. 31” — Pelekoudas, then — “The idea was to give us flexibility,” Pelekoudas said. “We can go 14-11 (position players to pitchers) or 15-10 or even 16-9, although I doubt you’d see that.”
As you can see from the rules, pitchers have to be replaced with pitchers, and position players with position players. You can’t sub in Jamal Strong for Rett Johnson. So if they had 15 position players and 10 pitchers on August 31st, they’re going to have 15/10 in the playoffs.
“If Seattle wishes to name a player to fill Colbrunn’s spot, should he be named to the postseason roster, they can choose from any player who was in the organization on Aug. 31. ”
Nope, has to be a position player.
Bob Finnegan contributes a worthwhile column; News at 11!
Seriously, thats the best explanation of the postseason roster I’ve ever seen. Kudos to Pelekoudas for explaining it in english.
Also, this is likely all pointless, because the M’s postseason odds are dwindling by the day.
Last Game at Everett
What will be, I only presume, a long game of photo one-upmanship between me and Jason.
The woman in blue here
got very agitated when the outfield scoreboard was behind the game. She’d look at the press box and yell “Fix the scoreboard!” every five, ten seconds, as if people in the press box had super-extendable arms, or telekenetic abilities. Which meant that this guy
yelled back “Go do it yourself, fatty!” Except that he didn’t, because that guy’s worried about getting tossed out of the box by
this guy, who is the PA announcer and, uh, doesn’t look kindly on rowdy conduct in the press box and on something like
THE HEIGHT-WEIGHT RATIO MATRIX
tall
and +————–+ not so much
thin
there would be an obvious alliance,
So I, I mean he, kept his big yap shut for once and didn’t get tossed.
Flair
“If you want me to wear 37 pieces of flair like your pretty boy Brian over there, make the minimum 37 pieces of flair.”