Today will be the first "Throwback Day" at Wrigley Field. The Cubs have decided to go with 1948 as the throwback year, despite the fact that '48 was one of their worst seasons; they went 64-90 and finished last for the first time since 1948, finishing 27.5 games out of first place.
There are other reasons for choosing '48 -- primarily WGN, as this is their 60th anniversary and thus, also the 60th anniversary of televised Cubs baseball. WGN will celebrate the occasion:
The game should be a treat for TV viewers, who can watch the first two innings in black and white with fewer camera angles. The telecast will try to go without a center-field camera and use basic graphics at the start, and then add a camera or another technical advancement as the game progresses. Commentators Len Kasper and Bob Brenly will don appropriate 1948 garb in the booth.
The 1948 Braves won the NL pennant for the first time since 1914. Let's hope these teams remember their 2008 roles, not those from 60 years ago. The weather may also be a factor:
Today: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms after 1pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 89. South wind around 15 mph.
Tonight: Showers and thunderstorms likely. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 68. South southwest wind between 10 and 15 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%. New rainfall amounts between a half and three quarters of an inch possible.
This wasn't done deliberately for the throwback day, but we have lucked into one of those old-fashioned pitching matchups, between the teams' aces. Apart from Jair Jurrjens, who got scratched from last night's game, Tim Hudson has been the Braves' best pitcher all year. The Cubs hit him pretty hard the last time he started against them last June 9 in Atlanta, but the Braves won that game anyway. The good news is that Jim Edmonds is the Cub who's probably had the most career success vs. Hudson (.444/.565/.667, 8-for-18, a double, a HR, five walks).
Z is 2-2, 4.88 in nine career starts against the Braves, the most recent being the Barrett/Zambrano Fight Game last June 1, after which Z went on a tear. Chipper Jones, who returned to the lineup last night and went 1-for-3, "dropping" has season average to .419, is .263/.440/.474 against Z (a double, a HR, four walks).
Today's game is on WGN, also SportsSouth (so on EI) and at the MLB.com Mediacenter.
In the Big Inning, Captain Craptastic Blew Out the Birds
"I hope he feels like crap every night, if he's going to hit three-run home runs." -- 6.11.08, Mike Lowell on Jason Varitek
Wednesday Night Box: Boston 6, Baltimore 3 Globe: Colon Again on the Money as Sox Cash In One Hit Wonders: Seven Sox Chip in with One Hit Is Timlin Getting a Commission on Papelbon's Next Contract? The Vulture Returns: And on the Fifth Pitch, Pap Proves Why He Needs to Bust the Money Market for Closers
Big Thumbs Up for Bart
(Boston Globe Staff Photo / John Bohn)
"Right now he's got a lot of movement, he's got a pretty good two-seamer going on. He's around 93, 94 [miles per hour], and if he wants to go higher, he's still got it. He's not easy to face. He pitches more; before, he was a power guy trying to blow everyone away. Now he's the guy that pitches around the plate and makes you swing early in the count. He has way more movement than he did before." -- 6.11.08, Orioles catcher Ramon Hernandez
Fenway Spank
(Boston Globe Staff Photo / John Bohn)
Ladies and Gentleman, Welcome to the Fenway Park Rat Race, Brought to You By Aramark, Servers of The Most Expensive Bad 'Food' in the World, That Actually Costs You a Whole Lot More in the End ...
"One food stand was cited for 'sausages thawing in stagnant water' and employees eating in a back kitchen. Another was cited for having 'a large amount of food crumbs and rodent droppings under the pizza oven, ' and soiled sinks. Still another had 'rodent droppings along floor and inside the hole in the wall' and 'rodent droppings underneath the service counter.'
One vendor was cited for a 'black moldlike substance' on the inside of a refrigerator, 'soiled frialator cabinets, ' 'rodent droppings throughout the stand, ' and a sink that was not set up to wash, rinse, and sanitize. Another was ordered to 'remove foul odor from stand' and to 'clean drains to remove odor.'
XM Radio and Reebok present the children of David Ortiz, D'Angelo (left) and Vitaminwater, who whisper to one another during the Nakona Bats naturalization ceremonies at the State Farm John F. Kennedy Library yesterday
Monday afternoons loss and the subsequent reaction from the press served as a reminder that Mariano Rivera has been so good for so long that analysts and writers alike seem to forget that hes fallible and is, in fact, capable of giving up home runs. The unusual component was that this was the second home run Rivera allowed in the series against the Royals, only the fourth time, as the New York Times pointed out, Rivera had allowed two homers in a series in his career.
All-Star voting ends at 11:59 PM ET on July 2, 2008, so there are less than three weeks left before the All-Star starters are chosen. It goes without saying that the Orioles won't get a sniff at a starting position. According to this article on MLB.com (scroll down to the bottom), the highest ranking Oriole is Brian Roberts at 2B, and he is in fifth place, waaay behind Red Sox (surprise) second baseman, Dustin Pedroia.
The managers' selections will come out a few days after the starters are announced. So, here's the question: since every team must be represented, who will be the Orioles' representative at the All-Star game? The only reasonable options for position players would have to be Roberts and Markakis, right? Since the OF positions are always jammed with potential selections, and since Roberts is having a relatively quiet year, I don't see Terry Francona picking either of these two guys.
So that leaves a pitcher. Just from my observations it would appear that the one-and-only-one teams usually end up getting their closer chosen. I could see Sherrill getting the nod from us, since he's currently second in the majors in saves (21, behind Francisco Rodriguez's 27). Frankly, I don't like this, as I would be willing to bet money he gives up a home run in the game (assuming he ever gets into it). As SC pointed out yesterday, he "has a tendency to make it exciting, " and the Orioles have been enough of a laughingstock on the national stage for my taste without an All-Star game debacle.
I couldn't see any other pitcher being chosen.
So, for those that care about such things, any opinions?
Before embarking on another foray into the recurring feature started a couple weeks ago with a post on Jerry Koosman, I wanted to emphasize three things about the project:
Michael Bamberger has a good piece on Chipper Jones, professional craftsman, in the latest issue of SI. The story reminded me of just how difficult it is to play the game, as well as how hard it is to stay healthy once an athlete reaches his mid-thirties. The mental and physical grind is considerable, no matter how well-paid these guys are. But my favorite part concerns just how tricky it is to measure success, even for a sure-fire Hall of Famer. Numbers are so enlightening in baseball, much more so than in the other major sports, but they can't tell us everything:
If I had told you, last June 16, when the Cubs were five games under .500, 6 1/2 games out of first place, and Carlos Zambrano threw a complete game in a 1-0 loss to the Padres at Wrigley Field (the same game in which Derrek Lee and Chris Young had their famous fight), that the Cubs' next complete game would be thrown by Ryan Dempster, almost exactly a year later, and it would put the team eighteen games over .500... well, you'd have put me away. (The Cubs, incidentally, are 96-65 since that game, a record that precisely matches what they did in their 1984 NL East title campaign.)
The Cubs' last complete game in a victory was thrown by Jason Marquis, also by 1-0, a shutout of the Pirates at Wrigley Field on May 9, 2007, where the only run was provided courtesy of a leadoff home run by... Alfonso Soriano.
And that is where we pick up the story of last night's 7-2 Cubs win over the Braves, because despite the terrific pitching of Dempster -- who threw a 119-pitch gem, striking out 11 and walking none -- most thoughts this morning are with Alfonso Soriano, who got hit by a Jeff Bennett pitch in his second at-bat and broke the fourth metacarpal on his left hand, sidelining him for up to six weeks. (Further discussion of this injury on this site: here and here.
This began the discussion in our group in the bleachers last night of who might replace him, ranging from Kenny Lofton (he'd ask for too much money, and would he go away quietly after six weeks?), Barry Bonds (NO! for many different reasons), and even Sammy Sosa (um, no, also). This team is resilient and will survive this loss. Soriano is maddening at times, with his occasional dropped fly balls and wind-whipping whiffs, but there is no doubt he can carry a team for weeks at a time, which he did during the mid-May homestand and last September.
The Cubs will likely recall Micah Hoffpauir, which they were probably going to do anyway with the upcoming trip to AL (read: DH) cities Toronto and Tampa. The Iowa Cubs were in Memphis last night -- whether a call was made already and Hoffpauir got a flight out early this morning, I don't yet know. The team was going to send Kevin Hart down after today's game with the DH coming up, so that likely means two I-Cubs are coming with the team on the road trip. Will it be Matt Murton, who could start in LF? Will it be Eric Patterson, who can play several positions and hits lefthanded? It could, I suppose, be someone like Josh Kroeger, who also hits lefthanded and could play left field and who, unlike Murton, has actually shown some power at Iowa this year (.483 SLG to Murton's .395), and Lou seems to crave lefthanded power. Kroeger, however, is not on the 40-man roster and it's full right now, so someone would have to be let go (why is Jake Fox still on the 40-man?). Or how about... Felix Pie?
My suspicion is that the Cubs will fill from within for now -- they could, from time to time, as they did last night, put Mike Fontenot at 2B and Mark DeRosa in LF, which also happened ten times when Soriano was out with his leg problems in April (the Cubs went 8-4 with DeRosa as their starting LF). They could also play Reed Johnson in LF with Jim Edmonds in CF, if necessary.
This is, and has been, a tough and always ready team -- they looked sharp last night in coming right at Atlanta starter Jeff Bennett, scoring seemingly at will in the first three innings, the big blow being Kosuke Fukudome's first-inning three-run homer, which was difficult to see from where we were sitting into the glare of the early-evening sun still shining brightly onto the right-field bleachers. At the time, too, the wind was blowing in -- it had shifted off the lake in the wake of an area of rain that had drifted north of the ballpark and dropped the temperature about 15 degrees. Later the wind shifted back to the south, blowing out; this might have helped the two-run HR that Braves backup catcher Corky Miller pinch-hit off Dempster in the seventh (how unlikely was that? Miller came into the game 2-for-32 this year and is a .185 lifetime hitter in 308 AB scattered across eight seasons with four teams).
Signs spotted last night: a big yellow sign reading "WE ♥ SORIANO" -- after his injury the resourceful group who had it got out a marker, put a circle with a line through it over the ♥, and wrote "DAROSA" on the back. Also spotted, a young woman holding up a sign reading "CSN I'M 18 TODAY" and her friend next to her with one that had an arrow pointing to her and reading "FONTENOT: SHE'S FINALLY LEGAL!" Truth be told, both these women looked older than Fontenot does.
Fun, right? Isn't that what this season has been? The Cubs will miss Alfonso Soriano, but they'll be just fine. That's the method of the 2008 Cubs. Hats off to Ryan Dempster this morning. He threw a great game and gave the bullpen the night off, which they sorely needed. Let's sweep this series today.
Kosuke Fukudome just misses a Brian McCann foul ball in the 2nd
Alfonso Soriano hit by Jeff Bennett's pitch (note ball on ground)
Mike Fontenot, running for Soriano, scores
Jim Edmonds catches Yunel Escobar's fly ball in the 8th
Click on photos to open a larger version in a new browser window. All photos by David Sameshima
As I write this, the Seattle Mariners have the worst record in baseball at 24-42. They stand 16 1/2 games behind the first place Angels and, worse, they stand a staggering nine games behind the third place Texas Rangers. The team will have to play inspired baseball for the rest of the season to just avoid finishing in last place, and suffice it to say, this isn't how the front office saw the 2008 season going.
"It's a completely demoralizing position we're in right now, based on the completely legitimate (preseason) expectations" was the line recently offered up by General Manager Bill Bavasi after last week's sweep at the hand of an Angels roster missing Vladimir Guerrero and Chone Figgins in a series where John Lackey didn't take the mound. Even with the reality of lousiness staring them in the face, the executives in charge of compiling this roster are unwilling to admit that this team was assembled poorly. It wasn't just a bad move here or an underperforming player there, but a long series of poor decisions that have led to this abysmal season. In fact, the foundations for this failure were laid years ago. Let's look at where this disaster started.
October 27, 2003
Coming off a 93 win season that saw the team fade down the stretch and fail to make the playoffs, Pat Gillick resigned as GM and was replaced by Bill Bavasi, but the basic plan for that offseason was laid before Gillick ever stepped aside. Central to that plan was the decision to decline an offer of arbitration to Mike Cameron, who badly wanted to stay in Seattle. Cameron was vastly underappreciated by the organization due to his contact problems and their failure to understand just how valuable his glove was in center field. Two weeks later, they announced the signing of Raul Ibanez to play left field, shifting Randy Winn to cover center in Cameron's absence. At the time, they noted the defensive downgrade but explained that it would be more than offset by the offensive improvement. Ibanez has hit well since returning to Seattle, but his defense in left field can only be described as atrocious and is one of the most glaring issues that has sunk the 2008 team to the bottom of the A.L. West. The seeds of the Ibanez-as-LF disaster were planted on the day that the team decided to jettison Cameron and make a conscious decision to sacrifice defense while chasing minor offensive improvements.
January 8, 2004
The Mariners organization has long been infatuated with player personalities and their effects on team chemistry, often making headscratching decisions based not on on-field ability but instead on thier preconceived notions of leadership and how the game is supposed to be played. That move is typified in the decision to literally give Carlos Guillen to the Tigers, as the organization had grown weary of his late-night drinking and his perceived negative influence on Freddy Garcia. They decided that they would rather go with Rich Aurilia as their shortstop - a guy who more fit their mold of how players should approach the game than Guillen. Aurilia was a gigantic bust and was released four months later, while Guillen has gone on to become one of the American League's best infielders ever since. It was impossible to see Guillen's breakout coming at the time, but the logic used - choosing to field a worse baseball team in order to have better people on it - has haunted the organization repeatedly over the years.
December 15, 2004
After a disastrous 2003 season, the organization was determined to make a big splash and find some new offensive stars to build around, using their financial advantage over the rest of the division to rebuild through free agency. They coveted Carlos Delgado's left-handed power, but after a long dance with him over contract terms, they got tired of waiting and threw $52 million at Plan B - Richie Sexson. Heading into his age 30 season and coming off a major injury while possessing classic old player skills, making a long term commitment to a player with Sexson's profile looked remarkably foolish at the time, and the concerns we raised about guaranteeing an aging Sexson big money have proven true with time. He's simply aged very poorly and is not a major league quality starting first baseman anymore, but the Mariners owe him $15.5 million for the 2008 season. Instead of looking at an aging veteran heading for decline and finding a younger, cheaper alternative, the organization focused on intangibles such as Sexson's intimidating power and ability to be an RBI man. Unwilling to admit that they had missed the boat on how he was going to age, Mariners fans instead got to watch his career end mercilessly during both the '07 and '08 seasons, while Sexson became the embodiment of everything wrong with this team.
December 22, 2005
If there's one glaring flaw the front office of the Mariners has, it's a total inability to evaluate pitching talent. They come from a bent that is entirely seduced by results and cares nothing about the process or the context that those results were produced in. Nowhere is this more obvious than when the Mariners gave Jarrod Washburn a 4-year, $37.5 million deal to leave the Angels and join their starting rotation. Washburn was coming off a 2005 season where he posted an obviously flukey 3.20 ERA, built entirely on a house of runner-stranding cards. His league high left-on-base percentage predictably regressed to the mean, and he went right back to being the #5 starter that he's been for years. Instead of being a solidifying force in the rotation, Washburn has given the M's 445 innings with a 4.72 ERA in a terrific pitcher's park since signing. Despite having to watch him implode in 2008, the M's are on the hook for another $10 million in salary in 2009, and they'd be lucky to give Washburn away at this point. Thanks to a pitching analysis based on results, the organization continues to just wildly misunderstand how to predict future run prevention, and this is most obvious with the Washburn contract. By the way, the next best offer Washburn had on the table was 2 years at a total of $14 million.
January 4, 2006
Faced with a strong desire for some "left handed sock, " the M's focused on a list of low-cost, one-year options to fill the hole at Designated Hitter. Completely ignoring the entire concept of replacement level, the M's disregarded every player on the planet that wasn't a proven veteran with a long track record of success, essentially ensuring they were going to get a washed-up old timer on his last legs. That guy turned out to be Carl Everett, and his could-see-it-coming-a-mile-away failure both doomed the offense and led to an even more heinous transaction, when the Mariners shipped Asdrubal Cabrera and Shin-Soo Choo to Cleveland in separate deals to acquire the DH platoon of Ben Broussard and Eduardo Perez. Neither of the new acquisitions did much to help an offense that was in disrepair, and the careless giving away of talented youngsters in search of proven veterans depleted the farm system of guys who could have helped the team down the line. When asked directly why the team chose Everett over free talent guys such as Carlos Pena, Bavasi replied that "we know Everett can hit 5th or 6th in the line-up, and Pena just hasn't proven that he can do that yet". Good call, Bill.
December 7, 2006
In another transaction that was bad enough on its own and unbelievably horrible based on the future events it led to, we have the inexplicable Rafael Soriano for Horacio Ramirez trade. The M's were tired of Soriano's lack of durability and believed that his elbow was a ticking time bomb, so they set out to trade him at the winter meetings that year. They settled on a left-handed National Leaguer with a NL fastball because "he'd won some games before" and the Braves were willing to make him available. Ramirez was a complete disaster, giving the Mariners 100 innings of below replacement level performance before getting released. To replace Soriano, the Mariners then converted 2006 #1 draft pick Brandon Morrow into a relief pitcher, believing that they needed a new power arm to replace the one they just lost. Two years later and Morrow is still stuck in the bullpen, losing precious development time and not being able to be viewed as a potential option for the rotation. Because Morrow wasn't considered starter material, the Mariners blew $48 million on tub-of-goo Carlos Silva and then spent a first round pick on Josh Fields in the 2008 draft in order to have a new power reliever in the organization to allow them to move Morrow back to the rotation eventually. By trading Soriano, the M's not only got back a horrible pitcher, but they also opened several holes on the roster that they then spent precious valuable resources trying to fill.
December 18, 2006
Finally, the cherry on top of this amazing series of bad roster moves. Determined to not let Everett go down as the worst designated hitter in organizational history, the M's made the decision to fill their DH role for 2007 with a broken down middle infielder who had the power of an eight-year-old girl. The Nationals simply wanted to move Jose Vidro, who didn't fit in a league where defense was required, and somehow convinced the Mariners to pick up $12 million of the remaining $18 million left on Vidro's contract. The rationale given was that a move to DH would somehow restore the 32-year-old's power and, besides, they really needed a #2 hitter who didn't strike out, despite the fact that they had a team full of guys whose best skill was contact and lacked power. Not surprisingly, Vidro's power never returned, and he's posted a .289/.350/.376 line since coming over in the trade from Washington. Only in Seattle would that be acceptable as a performance from a designated hitter completely incapable of playing the field or running the bases, but somehow, that's what the organization decided they wanted. Vidro's presence on the roster not only kept the remains of Ibanez comically chasing fly balls in the outfield, but it also has forced them to keep top prospect Jeff Clement languishing in Tacoma while he destroys Pacific Coast League pitching. Hilariously, Vidro's 2008 performance has been so terrible (.215/.260/.323) that most fans are amazed he hasn't been released yet, but John McLaren's lineup construction veers so far from reality that he's spent the last two weeks alternating between the 3rd and 4th spots in the batting order. Seriously, Vidro, he of the .583 OPS, spent several games hitting cleanup for the Mariners recently. I wish I was kidding.
Through it all, the Mariners front office has demonstrated a staggering lack of ability to evaluate and project major league talent. They have repeatedly misunderstood what makes a winning team and made brutally bad choices that are compounded by even worse decisions trying to fix the problems created by the first act of ignorance. Through it all, they've doggedly maintained that their ways are effective and will work despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Team President Chuck Armstrong, talking about the season and the job status of the front office on May 25th, uttered the following quotes:
"In my 23 years, I have never ever seen anything like this, " Armstrong said "We saw it the other way in 2001. I mean, you have to ask yourself, 'How did the Mariners win 116 games that season with that roster, compared to this roster?' This is just as inexplicable the other way."
"Their positions are secure, " Armstrong said "They are not to be blamed for what's going on."
"We have given no thought to making any changes in managerial personnel, " Armstrong said. "Same for the GM. Listen, he's part of the solution, not the problem."
What's worse than abject failure? How about rooting for an organization that can't even recognize the problem from the solution? The Mariners executives are so rooted in their ways, so dogmatic in their wrongheadedness, that there is seemingly no light at the end of this long tunnel that we call being a Mariner fan. $117 million dollars in payroll has bought them a roster on pace to lose 104 games, and through it all, they won't admit responsibility. It's inexplicable, after all. What else is there to be said?
David Cameron, along with Derek Zumsteg, authors the ussmariner.com blog that covers the Seattle organization in more depth than they care to admit. He also writes daily for fangraphs.com as he looks to remember what it's like to enjoy watching baseball again.
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(Boston Globe Staff Photo / John Bohn)
