Scott Baker

Perfect through 6.

Boooooooo

Generally speaking, the Sox are still in good shape...

To take something from this past series.
Schilling looks very healthy. That makes the 1-2-3 combo very strong. Our number 4 has 16 wins...The bullpen is very strong.

The pitching is definitely there. There were questions about Schilling, but he's been very good since "resting".

The glaring hole? No Manny. Without rehashing early season posts, there were great concerns about this offense. They have scored a lot of runs. But they've gone through very bad stretches. They have no bench...although that will change tomorrow with the call-ups...

Maybe the Sox will luck out and the Yankees will get the Angels in the first round. Then they won't have to face them in the playoffs. I think that the Sox should think about sending down Lopez today to bring up Ellsbury or someone just so they are eligible for the post-season roster without someone going to the DL (although I am thinking that Snyder will probably get hurt some time this month for that very reason...and perhaps Hinske...).

I think that even the relatively easy games aren't going to be very easy without Ramirez in the lineup. Who in their right mind is going to pitch to Papi?

I think that Drew should be the leadoff hitter for the rest of the year. He is fast. He likes to walk instead of swing. And don't move Lugo or Crisp to the top. Put Papi there.

Drew
Papi
Lowell
Youk
Tek
Crisp
Pedroia
Lugo
Guerrero (oh, wait we don't have him)

Yes, you have a weak bottom of the lineup...no doubt. But you get Papi and extra at bat...After the first go-round it doesn't really matter in the AL.

I don't know...they need something to happen. I am not thinking that the lead will grow this weekend with the Yankees playing the D-Rays and the Sox facing the O's....

I know why most Yankee fans are so ignorant

It has to be from listening to YES. No wonder their fans think the Yanks are so great. The guys on YES tell them for three hours every day. I would swear it is the Yankees who are up by 6 games and have the best record in baseball.

Let the bone picking commence.....

Can you spell retahded?

I figured that since I had a little momentum I'd go with it, so here's yet another random post:

I saw this note about the Phillie's relief pitcher getting into an arguing match with a reporter in the clubhouse after Brett Myer's gave up 2 homeruns and blew the save. The exchange what something like this:

(non-italics mine, italics are actual quotes)
Reporter: Brett, can you talk for a moment about your thoughts on those 2 homeruns?
Brett: You know, I felt good out there but I wasn't hitting my locations exactly right and you know those were good pitches but the hitter just got enough I mean those were just pop ups.
Inquirer: Brett, sorry to barge in here, but can you say more about why you thought those two homeruns were just pops ups?
Brett: (Standing up, looking pissed off!) You're not even a beat reporter, you're a fill-in, you don't know anything about baseball You're fuckin' retarded.
Inquirer: (Being a prick) Brett, can you spell retarded for me?
Brett: (Outraged being held back by Pat Burrell) You fuckin' piece of shit! I'll fuckin' spell retarded for ya', F - U - C -K - Y - O - U !!!

The Phillies by the way are on a four game skid and presently 7.0 games behind The Mets for the NL East Division and tied with Division rival, Atlanta for 4.0 games back in the wild card. As we all know, Atlanta made the most mid-season moves, but seems to have stalled (3-7 in their last ten, including 1-3 against the Reds). However the Phillies have more to worry about as it looks like their bullpen's wheels are coming off. Beer Leaguer blogs that last night was the 22nd loss given up by the bullpen. (There are some good comments on their game post, an impressive blog!) It looks like it's the Mets' Division to lose.

Did Theo Listen in?

Grieve, Earl and me got together to watch last Saturday's Sox game. I can't remember if it was Grieve or Earl that pointed it out, but the Sox were not swinging at the first pitch and it was SO frustrating.

Sounds like maybe Theo was listening, from Fire Brand:

Ortiz hit his 22nd and 23rd homeruns of the season in the fourth and fifth innings of the ball game both coming on first pitch of each at-bat.

I fell in love with her in 1984 so I might be blinded

So it turns out Alyssa Milano has a Dodger's blog. In a related story, I am rather bored today. Back to Alyssa. So I had a crush on her from 1984 through the early 90's, culminating in her leading role asAmy Fisher in the made for TV movie. Such good stuff. So I couldn't resist reading her blog. Here are some excerpts from some recent posts:

Just as we love our heroes, we also love a good villain. A villain and a hero are two sides of the same coin. They are, in fact, inseparable. A villain doesn’t care what he has to do to achieve a goal. The villain cheats because he feels rules just get in the way and he works alone for what he believes to be “good”. A villain uses intimidation. A villain defies the laws of nature. A villain is only driven by ego. A villain is a character whose actions are important to the entire plot of the story. Barry Bonds is important to the big picture of baseball. He is a great media-made villain to the great socially made hero: Hank Aaron.

Ah... cough... cough.. cough... that's good stuff... funny thing though, she finishes up with,

Right or wrong, it’s over. We are left with judgment relative to our own rights and our own wrongs. Hero or villain, Barry Bonds is our home run king and one of the greatest hitters baseball has ever known.

What are we left with? Nothing really. We are left with nothing and upon further reflection, that’s what makes me a bit melancholy. I sat with my dad and watched a game that I could care less about, while a man I have no compassion for, broke a record in the sport I love and I truly felt nothing. No tears of joy. No goose bumps. Not even anger.

Nothing.

At least it’s over.

Well put! Ah... I can go back to loving her. All is right in the world. Plus, she wrote a pretty funny letter to Grady Little.

I am so happy my youth wasn't wasted in front of the TV.

Red Sox Closer Admits Having a Slutter

No that's not a typo, it's just a slow news day. So slow in fact that I had to go back to Wednesday's Globe to find something interesting. Actually, I really first heard about the news from the folks at Fire Brand of the AL. They did a piece on Papelbon and whether or not he is the best closer in the league. They make a pretty good argument that Papelbon is a top closer. Still I don't think he is the best this year and still has a lot to prove. As the folks at Fire Brand point out, one of the other 4 players to start their career with 2 straight seasons of 30 saves was no other than Billy Koch! (Kaz Sasaki and Todd Worrell being the other two). Man, what happened to Billy Koch? As it turns out, he ended his career by sticking it to the Blue Jays (signed and then quit forcing them to pay the rest of his contract).

Anyway, back to Papelbon's slut... (Boobs of Hazel Mae?!)... I mean slutter. Apparently, Pap has a new pitch which is a cross between a cut-fast ball and a slider, hence "slutter". And if you're wondering what the chair has to do with this, well that's what you get when you google "slutter".

The GYS jinx continues

GR, 9:06 am:
"Meanwhile, Baltimore seems to be playing pretty good baseball."

Later in the day:
Texas 30 (most runs scored by a team in 110 years), Baltimore 3

Gabbard got the win; Wes Littleton got the save. Seriously.

Equal time

Since everyone followed Bronson Arroyo's home runs when he was traded to the Reds, it's only fair that we do the same for Wily Mo with the Nats...

In 3 games: 5 for 11, with 2 HR and 3 BB. 3RBI, 4R, OPS of 1.667

Damn.

News from around the Blogsphere

Jay Mohr truly sucks as a columnist and a blogger. I doubt this comes as a surprise to most people. However given my personality I always like to give the benefit of the doubt to people. So I read his post and an article of his Foxsports.poop. I was turned on to his writing by the crafty folks at Deadspin. And wow, he SUCKS. First off, he is oddly defensive in his blog. Apparently, there were a lot of posts that mentioned how much he sucked and how he is a has-been. Honestly, I don't care either way, but if I had a column, even on a pseudo-news-outlet I would never spend any time defending myself. It just seems silly. That being said, his writing does suck. So maybe there is something to his being defensive! My favorite part of the one article I read, is that he comments on how he hates people describing a black athlete as "well spoken" and then two sentences later claims he hates hockey because "I can't root for a guy whose name on the back of his jersey has no vowels." What the? I agree it is not ok to be a racist, but I would also say that it is not ok to make fun of different ethnicities. Ah, that's fox for ya! Make it sound like they are fair and balanced when in fact they are as unbalanced as humanly possible.

Honestly, anything to distract me from Gagne's-gag-me.

Friday double header

I'm chained to my desk all day so will be following the 1:05 game closely. Anyone else around for a game thread?

Also, when Googling "two-headed turtle" I came across this amazing web page. Yikes.

Batshit

Holy Cow

Having grown up in enemy territory, I was exposed to many aspects of Yankeedom. Probably one of the best aspects was Phil Rizzuto. Not only did I get to watch him call many games but I got to see him in an endless stream of cheesy local commercials yelling, "Holy Cow" at the low prices. Maybe Grieve will actually remember what they were selling.

I learned a couple of cool things about Phil from his wikipedia page (linked above). First, he didn't always play close attention to the game! If he missed a play, he'd score it "WW" - "wasn't watching". I like that! Second, apparently he said a lot of stupid things, but my favorite is, "Bouncer to third, they'll never get him! No, why don't I just shut up!". Thirdly, I think my most memorable moment is his call of the famous George Brett pine tar incident. Finally, he was the play-by-play voice in Meat Loaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Light.

Scouter, rest in piece. Even Red Sox fans could appreciate the lucky, wonderful life you lived!

Bless you Mike Lowell

Sacre Blew

My gosh, that's twice in two outings that Gagne's given up a multi-run lead. So much for those "six inning games."

I know, I know, it's only a couple games, but the bullpen should not be the problem right now.

Wow

Obviously the big news has been 756, 500, and 300; but in my opinion this is the best story of the 2007 baseball season so far. It's hard to believe his implosion (4 BB, 2 H, 5 WP in 2/3 inning) was almost 7 years ago.

(Oh, and Joel Piniero got the win.)

756

Thank god that's over. Now we might actually get normal baseball news again. Five games...what's the bet on how low this number gets? I say they never get within 3.

Coco versus the Moose

The Sox escaped a close one yesterday when Coco was nearly run over by Moose the Mariner. It could have been the most freakish injury of all time. NESN showed the video about 100 times. And I got to watch about 20 extra times courtesy of TIVO because my daughter started laughing hysterically every time she saw the moose on TV.

Could you imagine if the Sox lost him to injury because of that? And Elsbury is on the DL in the minors, so they would have extra pissed off.

In other Mariner news, Jose Guillen popped off that the M's brought up Adam Jones - their top hitting prospect. And then Jones goes and has a pretty good weekend series, while Guillen struggles, including the golden sombrero on Saturday. Once an ass. Always an ass.

Finally...

The Yankees are done with the "feast on the bottom-dwellers" portion of their schedule. Their last 17 games were against the two bottom teams in the both the Central and East; they scored over 9 runs/game in that stretch. What's cool is that in that time they gained no ground in the standings. But now, 20 of their next 23 games are against teams with winning records; 17 of those are against division or wild-card leaders! This should be interesting.

Also, your 2007 trivia answer: "Clay Hensley." A known 'roider, and now a minor leaguer. Also, his name can be sung to the tune of this song, which is awesome.

Speaking of Clay Henry, I was once on a flight with him. Not too exciting, but for a little while it was the closest I came to a celebrity sighting in LA. But then I helped Flavor Flav get his luggage onto an airport shuttle (from the economy lot). In terms of celebrity sightings, you really can't do much better than that.

Clubs

This is pretty cool - tons of information & stories, in a single graph. Interesting stuff:

• Ted Williams' massive plateau for WW II (and a smaller one for the Korean War)
• Griffey's (non-war-related) injury plateaus
• The two largest accelerations in HR rates are...Palmeiro and Sosa, of course. Both had relatively umimpressive HR totals until they took off in their late 20's-early 30's (Palmeiro was the slowest to the 200-HR club...by about 3 years). McGwire started out fast, slowed in his late 20's, then took off again. Bonds was already well on his way to 500, when at age 34 he started crushing. But we knew that already.
• Ted Williams was the oldest to join the 500 HR club, at . I had assumed Murray was the oldest.
• Babe Ruth is insane. Not counting his pitching years, the only hitters to have consistently hit as many HR/year as he did are McGwire and A-Rod.
  

500 slaps

So A-Rod finally did it. Youngest to reach 500, beating Jimmie Foxx by 330 days. To become the youngest to reach 600 (currently it's Babe Ruth), he has to hit his next one hundred home runs in...4 years, 188 days. Which gives him until the end of the 2011 season. I don't see that as being a huge problem. Only question is: which team will he be playing for? My money's on the Angels (but I hear the Las Vegas Devil Rays have a really hitter-friendly park.)

Fun fact: A-Rod's Baseball Reference page is sponsored by "Posse N Effect", a "Beastie Boys Tribute Band". They're, uh, really good.

Game Thread

Earl and I will be having beers tonight...Unfortunately, by then, the game will be over. Unless there are millions of extra innings.

So, let's discuss the game now.

By the way, the White Sox crushed Clemens in the top of the second. All-in-all...8 runs scored. I was happy (insert light and cheery background music here).

Then...in the bottom of the second the Yankees scored 8 times (and the inning isn't over, yet!). (insert dark, brooding music here with a rising maniacal laugh).

Way back

Oh ho ho, Rheal, do not forget moi, zee other Franch Canadian relief pitcherre from zee 2000 Red Sox, John Was-din! While I am technically from Virginia, zee town I was born in was Fort Belvoir...clearly a stronghold for zee quebecois, no? Like you, I too am not out of baseball...just hiding in zee bottom of zee NL Centrál! Ees quite an anoymous life down here, no? Did you know zat I was a first round draft pick? Zut alors!

The Rheal Dheal

Oh ho ho, I now see zat you Boston Red-Stockings have just made a, how-you-say, blockbusting trade for none other than Monseuir Eric Gagné! Zut Alors! Apparently six years without a French Canadian relief pitcher is a bit too mahch, no? My uncanny québécois skills of deduction lead me to zee conclusion zat it is actually me, Rheal Cormier, whom you miss, no? And yet, why is for you do not trade for moi? I have been here, in Cincinnatti, all zis time! But, it is I, Rheal Cormier, who will have zee final laugh. "Ha ha ha", I say.

...you filthy Americans, with your "bullpen help", and your "non-waiver trade deadlines", and your "fast cars", and your "deodorant". You make me, how you say, seeck to my belly. I go now.