Dumbass Media 2007

If a fan doesn’t want to get bogged down in the minutia of VORP or OPS or equivalent averages, that’s all well and good; I loved watching baseball in the days when I couldn’t identify a breaking ball from high and tight heat. But if it was my job to watch baseball games and then inform the public about these very same games, I’d sure as shit make sure I knew everything I could about the sport, regardless of what language I used to write about what was taking place on the field.

Also the argument goes like this: St. Louis didn't win that many games last year and they won the World Series. All Baltimore needs to do is win that many games and they will win the World Series too...DESPITE THE FACT that the Orioles play in a division that also contains NYY and BOS; DESPITE THE FACT that he is using tiny sample sizes to show how 'see we're as good as the Cardinals so far); DESPITE THE FACT that he is massively overrating the Orioles' batting and pitching; I guess he's OTM.

I have Markakis and Cabrera on several fantasy teams, and I'm starting to see holes in Toronto that I didn't see before....

Then again, the Boston Red Sox are a third-place team that signed J.D. Drew in the hopes of improving. The Yankees went a week without a pitcher lasting more than five innings. The Blue Jays haven't put together two good years in a row since the wild card was invented. Sometimes, good teams have bad luck. It's not inconceivable that two of those teams—and a few more in the Central and West—could sag to the 83-win level. If that happens, Baltimore fans could be looking at a contender. I'd rather be looking at a good team.

Amid the press frenzy over Bonds’ unnatural bulk, the true role of the object on his right arm has simply gone unnoticed.

This is unfortunate, because by my estimate, Bonds’ front arm “armor” may have contributed no fewer than 75 to 100 home runs to his already steroid-questionable total.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003621797

o come on, that guy is a well-known illustratur who has studied the device closely by looking at photographs!

Jerry Green asks, What ever happened to hitting homers for the team?

Bonds played on one pennant winner in his 21-plus seasons. The Giants lost that World Series. But Bonds hit four home runs -- for the loser. His Pirates and Giants went 2-7 in various postseason ventures. Barry Bonds has hit more home runs than any other athlete in 131 years of Major League Baseball. But he is tied with thousands and thousands of lesser athletes in total World Series victories: 0. Zero, zilch.

It gets better:

Therefore, the current hot debate with the Tigers competing in New York this weekend is the American League's most valuable player competition.

A-Rod is being championed as the shoo-in for the MVP. He leads MLB in home runs and RBIs.

There is this bit of news for the great unwashed:

Magglio Ordonez hits home runs that win ball games. He hits singles and doubles that contribute to winning ball games. He hit a home run last October that won a pennant and sent his team into the World Series.

Ordonez happens to be immeasurably more valuable to his team than A-Rod is with all his fluff and flourishes, flubs and superfluous home runs.

But Ordonez happens to play for a team from the other side of America's great divide -- the Hudson River. The Detroit side.

Am I on the Detroit side? I can't figure out these new fucking maps at all??!?!?

lol. i love mags, but dude went like 3-for-16 against the yankees this past weekend...

Green conveniently left out World Series champion Frank Thomas in the roll call of prolifically homering underachievers.

Saying Ordonez hit a home run that won a pennant (in a sweep) is a bit of a stretch. It's even sillier to bring it up in an argument about an MVP race the year after.

http://www.thestamfordtimes.com/stamford_templates/stamford_story/314267280850556.php

My disinterest in baseball as a kid has lasted all my life. I'm still not interested in the game. I don't watch it on television or follow it in the newspaper. I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today's baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me. They're apparently very good but they haven't caught my interest. I also think baseball needs some rules changes, too. For example, the player who starts the game as pitcher should have to play all nine innings without a substitution. A pitcher hardly ever plays more than a few innings and then the manager replaces him with someone who isn't as good. I think baseball managers dominate the games more than the players do and more than coaches do in other sports.

I'M NOT INTERESTED IN BASEBALL AND I'VE NEVER BEEN INTERESTED IN BASEBALL. PLEASE CHANGE BASEBALL SO I AM MORE INTERESTED. ALSO KILL ALL PEOPLE NAMED RODRIGUEZ. THANKS BYE!

that being by Andy Rooney totally kills the fun :(

Tyler Kepner's NYT lead is a prime example of why I'm rooting for a LAA-Indians ALCS:

"There are two other teams that will make the American League playoffs, because that is what the rules say. But on nights like this, the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox seem to be the only bodies in the baseball universe. Everything revolves around them."

Get the MVP vehicle booster seat ready for Chone.

u mad! West Coast AND on team w/ Vlad?

Not mad in the least! I love Desmond DeChone "Chone" Figgins.

CNNSI's Peter King:

Never a good idea to pitch to Derek Jeter if you could pitch to Bobby Abreu instead. I don't care what the stats say. Ask Curt Schilling if, with first base open, he'll ever want to pitch to the best player of my lifetime again.

Haha PETER KING is not young either which makes it a double whammy of ignorance!

Curt Schilling, would you ever want to pitch again, with first base open, to the best player of Peter King's lifetime?

what was Bonds doing in Boston?

steroids, lol.

chip caray is just fucking awful. really. i would rather listen to sterling & waldman.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/sports/baseball/09sandomir.html?ex=1192593600&en=b1ffc631d63cebad&ei=5070&emc=eta1

Caray does not distinguish a go-ahead run from a winning run
this was driving me crazy

THANK YOU.

That attitude led him on Sunday, after Rodriguez’s first hit of the series, to say, “And here come the Yankees!” A-Rod went back to the bench on Jorge Posada’s double play.

After Damon’s run-scoring single in the third, he said, “And here they come!”

No, they didn’t: Jeter promptly grounded into a double play.

Yeah he was terrible. Easily the worst of the four TBS teams, I thought.

William Rhoden asks, Are the Red Sox Ready to Become the Yankees?

With the Yankees’ empire in decline, the implications for Boston are significant and perhaps terrifying. The Red Sox could sign Alex Rodriguez, and he and pitcher Josh Beckett could be anchors of a Boston dynasty.

The possibility is there for the spending: no more just missing the brass ring, but rather grabbing that ring season after season. But does Red Sox Nation really want to do this?

Yeah, 'cause the Yankees' strategy of acquiring A-Rod to be the anchor of a dynasty really paid off in championships.

(not knocking arod's value, just the idea that one guy wins championships/free agent supremacy leads to baseball supremacy)

I'm reading Rhoden as saying they'll have the goal of a WS every year, not that they'll win it.

(and they are already 'the Yankees,' btw)

boston sort of has a dynasty already dudes

2 pennants in 4 years, not quite yet

(also, 4 postseason appearances in 8 years)

Agreed and agreed...but

Boston may or may not be ready to take the leap and become baseball’s Attila by treating the off-season like a shopping spree, snapping up the best free agents, assembling all-star teams and beginning the season with a “World Series or bust” mentality.

What annoys me is that, if he's talking generally about having lots of cash and not being shy about spending it, Rhoden ignores the fact that Boston has been doing this for some time now. And if he's specifically talking about a chance to "buy championships"--that is, by depending on free agent signings to "assemble all-star teams", well then he's missing out on what half the gms in the game seem to already understand--that the secret of the baseball success has more to do with a homegrown core of cheap talent than big free agent buys.

lol this selena roberts piece so packed w/ 1/2 ass insinuations

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/sports/baseball/22roberts.html

Anyone read this Borasssssss article in the NYer yet? LOL:

This spring, he mailed a letter to Commissioner Selig, in which he outlined a proposal to alter the format of the game’s most sacred ritual, the World Series. Why not make it nine games, instead of seven, he argued, and hold those extra two games—the first two games—at a neutral site? Cities all over the nation, or even the world, could compete for the honor of playing host, as with the Olympics. “It’s a fact that our game needs a forum that’s akin to the Super Bowl,” Boras explained to me not long after he’d sent the letter. “People don’t go to the Super Bowl for the game. Most Super Bowl games are not competitive, or good games. They go there for the event. They go there for the three-day weekend.” He described a vision of “corporate hospitality,” including a “gala, like the Oscars,” during which the M.V.P. and Cy Young awards, among others, would be announced, with all the finalists present and on view, and presumably walking the red carpet in sponsored menswear. Who could argue against such a change? It would mean more money for the owners, more “marketable content” for the media to broadcast, more attention for the stars—more everything.

That would be so shitty.

Sponsored menswear can take a hike as long as we get an all-October best of nine and retain "Steal a Base, Steal a Taco" (though "Hit a Home Run, Plate a Taco [or whatever they called it last year] must be reinstated whenever a Weaver is in a WS).