All about elbows
JMB · February 4, 2007 at 7:18 am · Filed Under Mariners
An article from the North County (CA) Times. I’m sure some of you would have found this interesting regardless, but for those who might not have otherwise, there’s a Mark Lowe reference at the very end.
Yes, this probably counts as being even more news-starved than the Parque signing.
Well, hopefully, he’s right
nah. elbows and shoulders are interesting.
Time has come to a complete stop. It is crawling ever so slowly, until March 1st….ahhhh.
in a medical theme, Gwen Knapp has a piece about baseball concussions today, due to Matheny.
Wait! Breaking News!!!!!
Blaine Newnham rambles!
Anyone else get the impression that Bradley Fickes is a kid from Seattle who recently moved to NC. and submitted a paper he wrote for his freshman English course to the newspaper.
That Gwen Knapp piece is brilliant. I’ve been complaining about the way baseball treats concussion victims for years (for example, in 2003 Damian Jackson suffered a grade II+/III conscussion and the Red Sox LEFT HIM IN THE GAME); this is a welcome development.
You hear that? If the Ms hadn’t acquired Vidro, they would have “gerrymandered” the DH slot by using Snelling and possibly Morse.
Sportswriting at its finest.
No, you missed Newnham’s point. Not that I blame anyone for misreading that, um, “masterpiece.”
See, it was because we missed out on Schmidt ($15M). Once we replaced him with Batista ($8M), we were “able” to spend the other $6M on Vidro. Yay for us! (not!)
The gerrymandering was in the event that we’d signed Schmidt, then we’d have to “make do” with Snelling/Morse (ie, because they’re cheaper).
So, in his world, it was either Schmidt + Snelling or Batista + Vidro. Um, can I take option A, please?
No, I understood it. I was just making fun of his horrible use of the word gerrymandering. If he’d said gerry-rigging that’d be one thing, but gerrymandering definitely has a specific meaning confined to altering voting districts for political benefit, and has absolutely no place in the article.
Thanks, JH. I missed that reference. My mind was stuck on being “able” to get Vidro (as if that were a prize). Good point about mandering versus rigging.
#7 and #8,
While the Blaine Newnham article isn’t top notch I don’t think you can pick apart his quote when you only took the first half:
If they had signed Schmidt, they probably would have gerrymandered the DH, using Chris Snelling and perhaps Mike Morse. Who knows what would have been better?
Despite the noted rambling he seems to pretty much argue the same things that are being argued here on this site. Too much money was spent on not good players and/or too many years were given to players who might be worth the money but not the time.
My only argument about the article is the fact he uses the old “look what happened in 2001” argument that too many writers in Seattle rely on. 2001 in sports years is a loooooong time ago and I think most can say the Ms got very lucky this year. Not sure you want to use that same reasoning when building your teams in future years.