Baseball 2012

[dps]

David Ortiz tested positive. That's an actual fact.

If you are really paranoid and equal opportunity then you have to assume everyone is guilty.  Yeah everyone says that Junior Griffey never took, but how do you explain 2005?  Omar Vizquel hit .295 (3d best in career) at age 39?  Must be on HGH.  How about Rickey hitting .315 for the Mets in his 40s? And Julio Franco - must be a giant steroid disguised as Dominican firstbaseman.

He was only 36 then, and the rest of his 30s were pretty bad so I doubt Griffey was on anything. There would have been more sustained success.

The others, yeah I could see it.

Griffey's 2005 is easy to explain--it's the only year between 2000 and 2007 in which he was healthy enough to play even 120 games:

2000:  145 games
2001:  111 games
2002:   70 games
2003:   59 games
2004:   83 games
2005:  128 games
2006:  109 games
2007:  144 games

2007 was pretty much a last hurrah for him--he played 143 games in 2008, but wasn't much good that year by his standards, and then played poorly in limited duty the next year and a half before retiring early in the season in 2010.

EDIT:  of course, that doesn't really prove (or even suggest) anything in particular with regards to steroids use or non-use.

[The Minsky Moment]

The others, yeah I could see it.

Point proven.

[The Minsky Moment]

Meanwhile Jeter is on his way to having a historically awful year in the field.

[sbr]

That's not good considering he has always been an average at best defensive shortstop.

[jimmy olsen]

Even when he was young his range was never that good.

[sbr]

Shortstops with limited range look better in fielding % because they get to fewer balls, giving them fewer chances for errors.

[jimmy olsen]

Bartolo Colon suspended 50 games for Testosterone.

My paranoia is looking good.

[Syt]

With the Bucs now 8.5 games behind the Reds I guess that's definitely been it for any play off hopes.

[jimmy olsen]

Just saw that Jim Joyce saved a woman's life last Tuesday.

Blows a call, costing a pitcher a perfect game = national news

Saves a woman's life = buried in a byline on yahoo/sports.com

[Eddie Teach]

Just saw that Jim Joyce saved a woman's life last Tuesday.

Blows a call, costing a pitcher a perfect game = national news

Saves a woman's life = buried in a byline on yahoo/sports.com

Death is a lot more common than perfect games.

[CountDeMoney]

Just saw that Jim Joyce saved a woman's life last Tuesday.

Blows a call, costing a pitcher a perfect game = national news

Saves a woman's life = buried in a byline on yahoo/sports.com

I know you're on the other side of the planet, so you're not likely to catch the big interviews on The Today Show and Good Morning America.  But please get run over by a motorized rickshaw today.  Twice.  You useless, fucking nigger simpleton. 

[derspiess]

With the Bucs now 8.5 games behind the Reds I guess that's definitely been it for any play off hopes.

Reds fans are hanging on every game like it's a playoff game.  It's actually kind of nice in a way to see them have something to cheer for.

Cards have managed to scrap to within 7 games of them, which makes this weekend's games pretty huge for both teams.  Of course, I'm staying out of that stadium given that I'm f-ing cryptonite.  Cards have lost the last 8 games I attended. 

I may chance it & go Sunday, though.

[sbr]

Looks like the Red Sox fire sale is official.  They dumped over $250 million in salaries (Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, Nick Punto) on the Dodgers for 2 top pitching prospects, 2 marginal position prospects and a decent MLB First Baseman with an expiring contract.  This is after the new owners of the Dodgers ridiculously overpaid ($2 billion) for the team.

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/blockbuster-deal-for-dodgers--red-sox-will-be-defined-by-dollars-and-sense.html

Years from now, we'll look back on what happened Friday, when the Los Angeles Dodgers played TARP to the Boston Red Sox, and marvel at the entire spectacle. It is August, the dog days, when the slog of the regular season begins to transition into the excitement of the playoff race. The only transactions of note are supposed to involve players going to and returning from the disabled list.

And here come the Dodgers and the Red Sox, two of baseball's jewel franchises, pulling off one of the biggest and most fascinating trades ever. A year ago, the Dodgers were in bankruptcy. Now, the Red Sox will send Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, Josh Beckett, Nick Punto and the combined $262.5 million remaining on their contracts to Los Angeles for top pitching prospects Allen Webster and Rubby De La Rosa, marginal hitting prospects Jerry Sands and Ivan DeJesus, and first baseman James Loney.

It will mark the biggest salary dump in the history of professional sports, a quarter-billion-dollar mea culpa from the Red Sox, who spent their way into the quagmire of mediocrity from which they've been unable to extricate themselves this season. And it will cement the Dodgers' rise from the nadir of Frank McCourt's ownership to their place as baseball bailout kings, the franchise that will chase talent no matter the price.

This is a dangerous game both teams are playing, the Red Sox jettisoning a pair of players they gave seven years and nine figures to ostensibly hit the restart button and the Dodgers playing the kid who blows his allowance on candy and wonders later why the dentist has to drill so much.

As fascinating as it's been to watch the Red Sox implode over the last calendar year, from September meltdown to the beer-and-chicken blame game to the ill-fated Bobby Valentine hire to the text message heard 'round New England, their story is the classic fall of the titan, one familiar in the annals of the game. Full of drama though it may be, it doesn't pack the intrigue of watching a new power establish itself with the fury the Dodgers have since the Mark Walter-Magic Johnson-Stan Kasten consortium acquired the franchise for $2 billion in March.

No longer are the Dodgers a baseball team. They are a conglomerate comprised of a multibillion-dollar television contract, an iconic venue in Dodger Stadium, a brand that again means something, marketing and merchandising arms that drive revenue and, sure, a ballclub onto which each of the aforementioned arms gloms. A Mexican-born star from Southern California signed to a relatively reasonable contract compared to his peers – Joey Votto at $250 million and Albert Pujols at $240 million and Prince Fielder at $214 million – and all he costs is a few prospects and taking on some may-or-may-not-work-out contracts? For the Los Angeles Dodgers, team, Adrian Gonzalez is nice. For the Los Angeles Dodgers, empire, Adrian Gonzalez is a coup.

The Dodgers abide by the spend-money-to-make-money philosophy as much as the gluttonous Yankees of George Steinbrenner ever did because not only are they lavishing it on players, they're stockpiling underachievers. So far so good with Hanley Ramirez. Crawford has 4½ years to earn his keep once he returns from Tommy John surgery. Beckett, like Gonzalez claimed off waivers Friday by the Dodgers, is operating with diminished stuff, and the Dodgers can only hope his escape from the toxicity of Boston – plus, sure, jumping from the AL East to NL West – will invigorate his career.

The Red Sox are whole again. It's not just losing Beckett, whose influence on the younger pitchers he was supposed to mentor emboldened them with the same self-importance he wears daily. Nor is it the symbolic gesture of running off one of the players at the forefront of the uprising against Bobby V, whose enemies keep getting picked off one-by-one.

This is about the money. It always was about the money. The Red Sox found themselves in an untenable situation financially because Gonzalez's and Crawford's contracts hamstrung them not just now but through 2017. So they floated Gonzalez on waivers, found a taker, convinced that taker to swallow Crawford's remaining $102.5 million and Beckett's $31.5 million, finagled a pair of starting pitchers with high-octane fastballs and turned $106.9 million in commitments for next season into $45.6 million worth of 2013 obligations.

Red Sox GM Ben Cherington saved his predecessor, Theo Epstein, from living down more than the Daisuke Matsuzaka and John Lackey disasters. The allure of deep pockets can turn a rational GM into a reckless one. Even for a team like the Red Sox, who come close to selling out every home game, the principle of fiscal responsibility must be more than rhetoric. Sloppy contracts have permeated Boston's roster since it last won the World Series in 2007.

Once the trade is official, its reshaping begins. Enough front-line pieces exist for the Red Sox to enter 2013 with hope, especially considering the depth and quality of their prospects and what the newfound financial freedom may afford them, be it Josh Hamilton, Zack Greinke or whoever else fears not stepping into the terrordome that is present-day Boston baseball culture.

To abscond to Los Angeles, to a pennant race, to a team that wants you is about the best deal possible for the four players set to join the Dodgers. Never mind that their new team is falling prey to the same thing their old team did, this idea that bright, shiny things are worth buying now even if their luster will fade soon enough. This is different. They are different. Everyone thinks he is.

Maybe they are. Baseball's natural order tends to restore itself. When one franchise is headed up, another must go down, the sport's equilibrium doing its job.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, fresh out of bankruptcy, want to take on somewhere in the neighborhood of a small nation's GDP worth of baseball players.

The Boston Red Sox, trailed by the stench of underachievement, infighting and mistrust, want to turn their 2012 roster into a relic and bury the sucker.

And on a random August day more than three weeks after the non-waiver trade deadline, each used the other to achieve an inherently risky goal. Whatever you want to call it, the second-richest team in the game held a private auction or a targeted fire sale or a white-flag parade and readied to divest itself. There to accept was baseball's newest power, MLB franchise 2.0, for whom no price is too rich.
Years from now, it'll still sound just as wild as it does today.

[Valmy]

Batting average is subject to a lot of variability year-to-year

Here's the batting average by age of another player:

36 .270
37 .271
38 .340

HINT: He is also a famous shortstop.

Cal was always changing his batting mechanics.  His numbers would swing wildly from year to year.

Anyway it is almost September and the Orioles are still in contention.  Even though it has been months I still do not know how they are doing this.

[derspiess]

So a little over a month into the season and the two hottest teams in terms of Runs scored/allowed differential are: St. Louis (+65) and Texas (+49)

And 127 games into the season, both teams still lead the league. St. Louis has +126 and Texas has +113.  Weird.