Rest of baseball thread 2006

[PhillyPhreak54]

Good for Big Jim. And he continues to make the morons in this city who booed him and said he was done look foolish.

[Geowhizzer]

Thome just hit his 13th.

Nice to see him have a bounce back year.  Though he's no longer a Phil, I am still a Thome fan.

[The BIGSTUD]

Am I the only one who still thinks the Mets are a farse? They will inevitably collapse. The only question is who will overtake them. The Braves or the Phillies?

[MDS]

Good for Big Jim. And he continues to make the morons in this city who booed him and said he was done look foolish.

Well he was hurting the team by playing, but it wasn't because he was finished. It's good an all to tough it out during injuries, but when your injury is clearly taking away from your performence, you best sit it out. Jim tried for too long to play through it, and who knows, an extra day or two of Ryan Howard in the middle of June could have been that one game. Still, booing Thome like they did wasn't right. Boo David Bell.

[Geowhizzer]

Here's the story about the fan that sold his loyalty of eBay.

Excerpt:

And so until July 21, Carroll is a lame-duck fan. On that night, he and his friends will gather for their yearly get-together in Cleveland. They'll watch the Indians play Minnesota, then drive about an hour to Cleveland's outskirts. There, they'll gather around a table and start dealing cards. A few hours later, the champion of their annual Hold 'em tournament will win not only a bracelet but the right to choose Carroll's new team.

...Young called Carroll on Thursday morning and asked: What if you win the poker tournament? It has happened twice in the last six years.

"If I win," Carroll said, "your readers can pick my team."


So if Carroll takes the tournament and the most vociferous emails to pickchadsteam@yahoo.com come from Royals fans – a daily double of pigs-fly-and-hell-freezes-over proportions – then the Royals it is.

I'm sure we could come up with an... interesting way to promote becoming a Phillies fan. 

[PhillyPhreak54]

Good for Big Jim. And he continues to make the morons in this city who booed him and said he was done look foolish.

Well he was hurting the team by playing, but it wasn't because he was finished. It's good an all to tough it out during injuries, but when your injury is clearly taking away from your performence, you best sit it out. Jim tried for too long to play through it, and who knows, an extra day or two of Ryan Howard in the middle of June could have been that one game. Still, booing Thome like they did wasn't right. Boo David Bell.

Yeah, but the geniuses in the media here would've roasted him either way. If he plays, he's hurting the team. If he sits, he's being a vadge.

We heard BOTH of them from the wonderlicious WIP last year. After he decided to shut it down he was a Hoyda because he bailed out on his team. And they said that he chose to have the surgery in July because he didn't want to be traded.

And as we know, the brain capacity of most fans here is only enough to take on what WIP tells them to. So they told the lemmings that Thome was wrong and the "fans" let him have it.

[PhillyPhreak54]

Millwood gave up 9 earned tonight. His ERA is now 5.13. Good $60M spent there, Texas.

Eaton is still on the DL, Millwood is slop, Tejeda is not throwing well and Crazy Vicente is so-so.

Oh, and Juan PIerre robbed Barry of 714 minutes ago.

[Wingspan]

Millwood gave up 9 earned tonight. His ERA is now 5.13. Good $60M spent there, Texas.

Eaton is still on the DL, Millwood is slop, Tejeda is not throwing well and Crazy Vicente is so-so.

Oh, and Juan PIerre robbed Barry of 714 minutes ago.

yeah but this guy (who we gave up for wagner) isnt too shabby thus far

[PhillyPhreak54]

Yeah, Buchholtz is throwing very well. He's from Lower Merion too.

[Wingspan]

yeah, i hear about him all the time, his family is actually friends with my family.

although the last time i met taylor was when he was a jr in high school. nice kid. he was thrilled he was drafted by the phils. his family wasnt too happy when he was traded away.

[PhillyPhreak54]

Understandably so. Funny thing about that trade (I was just discussing it on the EMB too) was that Duckworth was the guy who Ed Wade was reluctant to give up on the most. Duckworth now is in the Pirates minors and couldn't even make that rotation.

[ice grillin you]

pink bats


http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20060509&content_id=1444759&vkey=pr_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

[PhillyPhreak54]

Every player in the Royals lineup had an RBI today.

I wonder when the last time that happened or if it has ever happened at all?

[ice grillin you]

Bonding With the Babe

In a March column titled "Time for Selig to Bury Bonds," New York Daily News sports pasha Mike Lupica wrote, "They will cheer [Bonds] in San Francisco when he passes Babe Ruth, and we will hear again that his most vituperative critics hate him, the arrogant black star, for passing the portly white guy who has been one of the famous names in American sports since the '20s. As if Bonds is breaking some kind of record by passing Ruth. As if we care about that anymore."

But as Bonds, now with 713 home runs, staggers on buckling knees toward Ruth's epic 714 total, Lupica has been proved painfully wrong. Even though the actual home run record is Hank Aaron's 755, the baseball world is on edge as Bonds approaches the Great Bambino.

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, whose gray, shadowed countenance looks like a map of Mordor, announced that there would be no ceremony when Bonds passes Ruth. "Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record," Selig said. "We don't celebrate anybody the second or third time in."

But as Selig well knows, the church of baseball puts its faith in a catechism of sacred numerology. The most historically important arguably is 714. As Josh DuBow of the Associated Press writes, "More than three decades have passed since 714 represented baseball's career home run record. Yet there is still something magical about Babe Ruth's old record. 'The average person probably knows 714 more than 755...but 755 is the record,' Cubs manager Dusty Baker said." It doesn't take Kreskin to divine the message Selig is sending by ignoring Bonds's run on history. In a Chicago Tribune piece called "This Snub's for You," Phil Rogers seethes, "Babe Ruth, celebrated as the grandest character in baseball lore, is being chased by an anti-hero whose act has grown tired and, at times, pretty much pathetic."

Even though Bonds has never been convicted of any crime, has never tested positive for a banned substance and has played the game at a higher level than any player of his chemically enhanced generation, he is the game's pariah, the media-appointed "symbol of the steroid era." Now that the owners have mined their billions from the 1990s home run binge, and everyone has a Congressional hangover, Bonds is persona non grata.

The thought of Bonds passing Ruth clearly makes Selig's pallor turn an even murkier shade of gray. Babe Ruth, Lupica's assurances aside, remains the most treasured and important figure in baseball history. Home runs are still called "Ruthian." Yankee Stadium is still the House That Ruth Built. Ruth is the man with the fifty-four-ounce bat, someone so portly the famed Yankee pinstripes were first stitched on just to make him appear less rotund.

Yet Ruth is also someone treasured through a vapor of nostalgia so thick that he has become myth to the disservice of all except those who use his dewy memory to bash present-day players for their moral failings. The truth is far more complicated. The description of a mercurial, complicated, egomaniacal star whose personal behavior might skirt legality is one that matches not only Bonds but Ruth as well.

Ruth's 714 home run record lacks the spit-shined purity his backers trumpet. The Sultan of Swat made his bones playing against only a select segment of the population because of the ban on players whose skin color ran brown to black. Ruth never had to hit against Negro League greats Satchel Paige or Lefty Mathis to amass the magic 714. Yet no asterisk for institutionalized racism mars the Babe's marks. Ruth also was a habitual user of a banned substance that was deemed unambiguously illegal by the federal government--a drug Ruth believed enhanced his performance: alcohol. Ruth was a star during the roaring prohibition 1920s, and as teammate Joe Dugan said, "Babe would go day and night, broads and booze."

But Ruth didn't just stop at the watering hole to find an edge. According to The Baseball Hall of Shame's Warped Record Book, by Bruce Nash, Allan Zullo and Bob Smith, the Bambino fell ill one year attempting to inject himself with extract from a sheep's testes. This effort by more than a few athletes of his era to seek the healing and strengthening properties of testosterone prefigured the craze for steroids. When Ruth fell ill from his attempted enhancement, the media was told that Ruth merely had "a bellyache." This was believable since Ruth was a glutton, famed for eating eighteen-egg omelets. The Sultan of Swat was also a glutton for women and violence, and he could be roused to fisticuffs if it was suggested, as it often was, that he was part black. The Babe's famous trade-out of Boston in 1920 was justified by Sox owner Harry Frazee by saying that Ruth was "one of the most selfish and inconsiderate athletes I have ever seen."

Of course in Ruth's day, without twenty-four-hour sports yipping and with sportswriting reduced to sonnets of heroism for a country weary after World War I, his flaws were essentially invisible to an adoring public. But Bonds's flaws are picked over, his every strikeout met with cheers by a herd of likeminded writers who who act more like the White House press corps than independent journalists.

It's a shame, because this could be an opportunity to reacquaint a new generation of fans with the singular Ruth. It could be an opportunity to explain that all heroes are flawed and no era is pristine. Instead, the media is smothering Bonds, and the rest of us, under the weight of a bowdlerized Babe.

[reese125]

its even more a shame that ESPN continues to air Bonds as a higher figure...sickening