Blyleven on Felix
Nice interview at Baseball Analysts with someone who started out as young and had a great career.
Cameron nooooooooo
Former Mariner and USSM favorite Mike Cameron ran into Carlos Beltran and was knocked out — they had to use the cart to get him off the field. Story here.
Man.
The manager’s fault
“A good defensive team gets licked 1-0 or 2-1 and you know what the fans say? They say, ‘They played so good and still they lost. It’s got to be the manager’s fault.'”
— Mike Kelley, who played various roles on the Minneapolis Millers, in 1965 on prefering players who can hit even if they can’t field
Rafael Palmeiro suspended
First top-tier player suspended for violating baseball’s new drug-testing rules.
Not much to say, really, except that while Mark McGwire was attacked for being evasive before Congress, Palmeiro was held up for his “angry” denials that he’d used steroids, as a contrast to McGwire (“”I have never used steroids. Period,” Palmeiro said. “I do not know how to say it any more clearly than that.” — CNN, March 17th) by Skip Bayless, in particular.
(Yes, comments are off here, and yes, off-topic posts on this in other threads are particularly prone to deletion. Steroid discussions take about ten, fifteen comments to descend into unmanagable horrors that won’t die, and I don’t have the time or resources to keep after them. Please either respect our wishes by not taking other comment threads off-topic. If you want steroid conversation, you could also pay us — up front — $50,000 to hire someone to work on the site full-time, at which point we’ll also build forums and who knows what else. Or you can vent about this travesty of site management by emailing us.)
The Feel-Bad Story of the Year
As we all know, Friday is Become Pessimistic About The Fate of Humanity Day. What better tale to start it off than this one, a sordid narrative about a Little League coach offering one of his players $25 to drill a teammate before a playoff game, the better to keep the weaker player off the field?
This would be sad and pathetic at any level of baseball, no matter what. It’s the details that make what Mark R. Downs Jr. is accused of doing all the more jaw-dropping. To wit:
* The kid who Coach Downs wanted plunked and injured was mentally disabled. Already, we’re approaching James Bond adversary level villainy.
* Keith Reese, the eight-year-old who says his coach offered him the payoff, testified that as instructed, he nailed his teammate with a throw to the groin — but the blow wasn’t hard enough, and Downs instructed him to hit him again, this time in the head.
* Downs allegedly admitted what he’d done to Reese’s father. Of course, the lawyer is disputing that. Coach’s cover stoy: The parent must have been confused from the time Downs offered a $25 bounty if anyone tagged an umpire. What? That’s your defense? He has this confused with another bounty?
Apparently, the coach had tried other strategies to keep the mentally challenged boy from playing, too, like telling his parents that certain games were cancelled. All of these are just allegations at this point, but Downs has been arraigned and will stand trial. The younger Reese’s account seems to paint a pretty damning picture.
Stupefyingly, the kid testified that Downs stiffed his little hit man! Sign up for fall league, and I’ll pay you then, ol’ Rifle Arm says the coach told him. No wonder the kid flipped on him.
Kicking down that 25 bucks might have saved him 25 years. If this story is accurate, even wearing David Byrne’s suit from the “Stop Making Sense” video, as he appears to be in the linked picture, isn’t going to generate enough sympathy to save him.
The coup de grace (or is that coup dis-grace?) comes in the last paragraph: “League organizers have said Downs won’t be allowed to coach again if he is convicted of criminal charges … Downs is not suspended and remains a coach in the league.”
Dave Bliss is probably still the most loathsome coach of the last 10 years, but if half of these allegations are true, this guy’s number two with a bullet.
A’s lead the wild card race
Oakland is now 54-45 and ten games ahead of the Mariners.
April 30th: Oakland 12-12, Mariners 12-12
May 31st: Oakland 19-32, Mariners 21-30
June 30th: Oakland 38-40, Mariners 33-44
We’ll see how this turns out. A s I recall, Dave and I were two of the only people unwilling to call the A’s dead this off-season. You can check out Dave’s December post on this if you’re interested.
At least when both teams sucked, there was some consolation value in it. Now, I feel like someone tripped me in mid-May, when team went from playing .500 ball to losing all the time, I’ve been lying around on the sidewalk all year, and passer-by keep kicking me in the side as they walk by.
Ugh.
Heavy stuff
In response to some topics that have come up in comment threads lately, as I tinker with maybe writing the USSM FAQ to help with frequently-rehashed topics, I offer for your edification:
Tom Ruane on batting orders (“batting orders matter even less than people have believed”). As in… almost not at all. I had a good argument with Rob Neyer about this once at a Pizza Feed: he held that it wasn’t such a big deal that it was worth caring about, and you might as well bat them in traditional roles and devote your energies to assembling a better bullpen or something. I argued that every run counts, and managers should constantly optimize… but for maybe three runs a year? You really are better off spending your energy elsewhere.
Tom Ruane on clutch hitting. (“One could argue that the forces at work here, if they exist, must be awfully weak to so closely mimic random noise, and if they are really that inconsequential perhaps we could assume they don’t exist without much loss of accuracy.”)
And here’s the 2003 Tom Tippett article “Can pitchers prevent hits on balls in play?” which I highly recommend.
The Attrition War, Padres
Part of a continuing series, follow-ups to the initial post detailing the Mariners history over the same period.
Do the Mariners, in comparison to other teams, suffer a higher rate of injury to their pitching prospects than other teams? Here, I look at the Padres.
The Attrition War, Orioles
Part of a continuing series, follow-ups to the initial post detailing the Mariners history over the same period.
Do the Mariners, in comparison to other teams, suffer a higher rate of injury to their pitching prospects than other teams? Here, I look at the Orioles.
You’ve got the wrong guy!
ESPN.com has a fluffy article about the Dept o’ Homeland Security busting up vendors hawking counterfeit merchandise (and “forged or illegally scalped tickets”).
So here’s what cracked me up:
“Our focus is not the individual vendor,” Moskowitz said. “It’s the criminal organizations behind the vendors. Those organizations are driven by greed, and anyone driven primarily by greed is dangerous to the public.”
Like Major League Baseball? Isn’t being driven primarily by greed the whole problem with capitalism in general (“I have a moral obligation to sell crack to schoolchildren if it’s legal in order to maximize shareholder value.”)
Not to mention, as Moskowitz put it, “The same methods used to bring counterfeit goods into this country can be used to bring in weapons, drugs or people.”
Wait, wait… so these methods they’re using to bring counterfeit goods into the country, along with weapons, drugs, and people… you’re going after the counterfeit goods? Could you please go after the other three? Because that’s what scares the crap out of me. Nobody’s going to blow up the Columbia Center with a fake Raul Ibanez jersey.
Now, I wouldn’t mind so much if they were busting all these vendors, tossing them in interrogation rooms and working their way up the system to close off those methods. But they’re not. If you read the rest of the story, they confiscate a lot of stuff but only make two arrests (though they “plan to question many vendors privately” which, uh, they could have done if they’d gone ahead and arrested them).
So what’s more… well: Read more