Other Stuff You Can't Make Up...

Eddie Griffin, who briefly played basketball for my alma mater and now plays for the Minnesota Timberwolves, has been sued over an accident in which the SUV he was driving slammed into a parked SUV, driving it up onto the sidewalk. Apparently, not only was Griffin driving drunk, but he was also driving whilst watching porn on a dashboard mounted DVD player and masturbating. Also, he doesn't have a drivers license. No mention of whether or not he was also talking on his cell, but it seems likely that the masturbation probably wasn't hands-free.

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Jeff Weaver was designated for assignment by the Angels today, another in a recent string of high-profile, high-salary, underperforming pitchers who have been unceremoniously dumped in the last couple of weeks despite still being owed millions (see also Russ Ortiz and Jason Johnson). What makes Weaver dumping especially ironic is that his replacement in the Angel rotation will be his little brother, Jered. Ouch. That's gotta sting.

If the price is right (i.e., dirt cheap), I wouldn't mind seeing the Dodgers try to get Jeff. He's not great, but he was adequate for us the last couple of years. It will also be interesting to see if the Dodgers decide to add to the string of DFAs by dumping Odalis Perez.

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You Can't Make This Stuff Up...

Headline at milwaukee.brewers.mlb.com:


Wise Hurt by Salad Tongs

I got it from the Griddle, where there is some, er, commentary.

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Getting Some Help for the Low Post...

So, Ned Colletti went shopping yesterday, and got the Dodgers... a power forward?

Jae Seo, Dioner Navarro, and a player to be named later were sent to Tampa Bay for Toby Hall and Mark Hendrickson, who played four years in the NBA before deciding to change careers. Not exactly an earth-shattering deal, although to listen to some of the hue and cry over at DT, you'd think that Neddy had gunned down a line of baby ducks with an AK-47.

It's a simple enough deal. Ned wanted Hendrickson, a lefty starter in the middle of his best year (although that's not really saying much), and Tampa has been lusting after Navarro for a while. Seo, a pitcher who's been maddeningly inconsistent in his brief time with LA, and Hall, a catcher, are the throw-ins to balance things off. The thing that has a number of folks incensed is the inclusion of Navarro in the deal. Navarro is young, moderately talented, and inexpensive. He is also, perhaps, the shining symbol of the DePo era, in that he was acquired by jettisoning fading star Shawn Green, and Green's enormous contract as part of DePo's housecleaning. What. Ever.

Don't get me wrong. I think Navarro is a decent player. He is not the second coming of Mike Piazza. The emergence of Russell Martin made him expendable. Martin is as good or better as a hitter, is better defensively, and apparently calls a better game than Dioner. Navarro wasn't going to be the starter for the Dodgers again unless Martin got hurt. He had value, and we didn't need him. It really doesn't matter whether Navarro was one of our treasured prospects or not. He was a treasured prospect who was projected to be our back-up catcher of the future (and really, I'd prefer a back-up catcher who's a little better defensively).

Do I think Ned got equal value? Nope. The problem Colletti had is that the Dodgers needed a pitcher who can go seven innings (something in really short supply in Dodger Stadium of late) more than they need an expendable catcher, no matter how talented or cheap, and in the current baseball marketplace, mediocre pitchers are more valuable than young, moderately talented catchers. People keep spinning the trade as if it's Navarro straight up for Hall, and viewed that way, it's a terrible deal for LA. But it's not that. It was Navarro for Hendrickson, with Seo and Hall as the throw-ins. Is that a good deal? Maybe, maybe not. It depends upon what other teams were offering for Navarro, if anything. Only Ned knows that. It's also going to depend upon how well Hendrickson pitches. It's certainly not worth the apoplexy some of the DT posters are displaying.

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From the Griddle comes this link to an article by Coulter wannabe, Lisa Fabrizio, at The American Spectator on the liberal infiltration of baseball.

So Bud Lite is fine with the gansta [sic] rap behavior exhibited daily by many ballplayers and celebrated gleefully by ESPN.

Gangsta rap? From all them white boys? Or is it all the Latino and Asian players of whom she speaks? One of the dismaying things about the current state of baseball is how few African-Americans are actually playing. The Dodgers have only two on their roster, Lofton and Kemp, as do the Yankees, the Sox, and the Mets. Still, I suppose in Ms. Fabrizio's teeny little mind, two blacks are two too many. There is far more wrong-headedness that I could comment on, but it's just not worth the aggravation. What an ignorant bunt.

Well, there is one thing...

While it's always been true that most baseball men have been known to wrap their tongues around an obscenity or two, it's most likely that these words were used off-the-record as modifiers and not central to a highly public press conference.

Someone needs to play Tommy Lasorda's opinion of Dave Kingman for Ms. Fabrizio.

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Sunday in the Ballpark with J...

Took a ride up to Pawtucket yesterday to watch the PawSox play Richmond with my friend, J. It was the first real nice day we've had in a while, although the breeze made it a little chilly where we were sitting in the shade. It seems like a lot of people were downright eager to get out into the sunlight, because when I got there about an hour early, the main parking lot was already full up. I had to park at the junior high across the street.

J. got caught in traffic and missed most of the first inning, so I was sitting in the midst of a small group of empty seats, scoring the game when the woman sitting a couple of seats down the row asked "Are you a scout?" Now, the color guard had been a group of Boy Scouts and adult leaders, so all I could think of was that she had somehow confused my tan shirt with a scout leader's uniform, so I gave her a puzzled look, and said "no." She then said, "Oh, you're just scoring the game for fun?" and I finally got it. She'd thought I was a major league scout. Oh, the rumors I could've started.

Where's Choi?
I'd hoped to see ex-Dodger Hee-Seop Choi play. He's been stuck down in Pawtucket ever since the Red Sox pulled him out of Ned Colletti's trash can. He's been such a cause celebre over at Dodger Thoughts that I was looking forward to seeing him hit up close and in person. Unfortunately for my hopes, Richmond started a lefty, so the PawSox manager decided to go with right-handed Dustin Mohr instead of left-handed hitting Hee-Seop. The move didn't make much sense to me because Mohr was batting a robust .164. Choi could hardly have done worse than that. Still, the scoreboard reported that Mohr had walked nine times in his last six games, and he responded to the manager's vote of confidence by going 1-4. Hee-Seop finally did put in an appearance when he popped out of the dugout with the rest of the team at the end of the game to celebrate a PawSox victory.

I did get to see a lot of Canadian National Hero Adam Stern, who's only hitting .234, but is "wicked fast," as the lady down the row opined the first time he batted. He does run very well. He beat out a bunt for a hit and stole two bases. Apparently nobody's ever told him that speed is the last thing the Red Sox look for when they bring someone up.

Afterwards, J. went home to plant tomatoes and stick sharp objects in her eye, while I picked up some Popeyes to go for my dinner.

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I got back home in time to witness a ninth inning rally by the Dodgers to beat Colorado. Rookie sensation Matt Kemp had two homers. Meanwhile, the Mets were beating the Diamondbacks like a rented python, 15-2. The upshot of this is that the Dodgers are finally alone in first place. Whoot!

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Who's on first... and second... and short...
Lots of speculation after the game on the roster moves coming up this week. There are two rosters that have to be considered. There is the 25-man major league roster, the current list of players on the major league club, and the 40 man-roster, which is the list of players with major league contracts who are eligible for the 25-man roster. Besides the 25 guys on the big club, the 40-man includes players on the 15-day disabled list (DL), and a few select minor leaguers. It does not include the rest of minor leaguers, nor any players on the 60-day DL.

Anyway, Jeff Kent comes off the 15-day DL tomorrow, which means Gagne will probably go back on it. Izturis is due back from the DL as well, but since he's been on the 60-day, it would necessitate not only sending someone down (probably Guzman), but also taking someone off the 40-man roster to open up a slot for him. That likely means Ricky Ledee will wind up moving from the 15-day to the 60-day DL (and off the 40-man). It's also being reported that heralded pitcher Chad Billingsly will likely be called up from Vegas, and he'll also need to be put on the 40-man, probably sending either Repko or Mueller to the 60-day. The only good thing about all the injuries is that if all these guys weren't hurt, the Dodgers would have a helluva a logjam of players to deal with. Meanwhile, the big question is which pitcher gets sent down/traded/released to open up a spot for Bills on the 25-man roster. You can almost hear the paper shuffling from here.

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The other thing of note from yesterday's major league games were three very bizarre plays.

The Player Vanishes...
The least bizarre had erstwhile Sox, now Royals, first baseman Doug Mientkiewicz catching a foul pop-up just as he ran into a rolled up tarp alongside the field in Kansas City. Normally they keep the tarps pushed right against the fence, but not this time. He fell over the thing, and vanished into an 18" gap between the tarp and the fence. The ump came over to have a look, and all you saw was a hand slowly come into sight gripping the ball to show he'd held on.

Yankee shocker! Damon runs into another player...
Next up was Nick Swisher's inside-the-park home run in Yankee Stadium, the result of a collision in the outfield between Johnny Damon and Melky Cabrera. They slammed into each other hard, with Damon taking Cabrera's mitt full in the face. Meanwhile the ball was rolling around the outfield as Swisher chugged around the bases.

Triple play...
Finally, there was the most bizarre triple play I've ever seen outside of a rec league, for which I'll just repost Bob Timmermann's account:

Lost amidst the excitement that any Tampa Bay-Kansas City game was the experience of watching the Royals turn an 8-1-6-5 triple play in the second inning.

David DeJesus caught a fly ball off the bat of Russell Branyan and threw home to try to get Aubrey Huff. The throw went over catcher Paul Bako and was backed up pitcher Scott Elarton, who threw to second, where shortstop Angel Berroa tagged out Rocco Baldelli trying to advance. Berroa then threw to third baseman Mark Teahen to appeal that Huff left early and umpire Bob Davidson, the man who loves to call people out on appeal plays (see Japan vs. USA in the World Baseball Classic), called out Huff for the triple play.

It was the sixth triple play in Royals franchise history, and the first triple play Tampa Bay has ever hit into.

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I have to mention here that I once played in a softball game in which my team turned not one, but two triple plays. I was involved in both, which were more conventional in nature (line drives caught with the runners going) than the play yesterday. It was the only time I ever played in a game where there was a triple play. Despite our fielding legerdemain, we lost the game 22-21 in extra innings.

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Less Tightly Wound...

It's the most important piece of equipment in the game. After all if it wasn't, they wouldn't have named the game after it. Anyone who's ever played softball understands this, because there are softballs, and there are soft balls.

Now, when we were kids, we were big fans of rubber-coated baseballs. These were identical in construction to real baseballs, except that the leather cover and stitches were replaced by a tough rubber skin with the stitch pattern molded in. The reason we liked them was that they lasted forever (just ask commercial batting cages), especially when you took into account the little brook that meandered alongside our local baseball field, just a few feet behind the batting cage. We were constantly fishing the ball out of the brook. Real baseballs don't travel as far after they get waterlogged, nor do they last very long. Since none of us had much in the way of discretionary income back then, rubber-coated balls were the best thing ever, because they lasted a long time. Later, when I was in high school and still labored under the vague delusion that I could actually be good enough to make the team someday, those rubber-coated balls were great for pitching against the cinder-block outside wall of our garage, upon which I'd drawn the outline of a strike-zone. The rough surface tore the skin off horsehide balls pretty quickly, but the rubber-coated balls just bounced back to me with barely a scuff mark. Later, when we were in grad school, my buddy Tom and I drew the same mystic symbol on the brick wall behind the recreation center at URI. Our dreams of major league glory were long gone by then, but it was still fun to pretend.

That was the same year I started playing softball in the grad intramural league at URI, and the rec department provided each team with two rubber-coated softballs. These were supposed to last us for the entire season, some twenty-four games. At the time, it seemed like an okay idea to me. Well, no. The rec balls turned out to be the most cheaply made balls ever. They were heavy, and a couple of innings of hitting was all that was needed to change their shapes to something non-spherical, a phenomenon exacerbated by the very stretchable rubber skin. We threw them out, and got real balls as soon as we could.

The thing is, even cheap baseballs are fairly consistent in their hardness. Maybe it's because hardballs are designed to be wound as tightly as possible to produce that characteristic hardness. Softballs are different. They are meant to be less hard than baseballs, but things get tricky on the question of how much less hard.

First off, a softball isn't all that much softer than a hardball. Even the softest will still leave a nasty bruise if a line drive hits you. But there are differences in construction that allow the balls to be marketed for different uses and levels of competition. The predominant brand, Worth, marked their balls with a colored dot to indicate how the ball was constructed. Blue dots meant "restricted flight," a ball that didn't rebound off the bat quite as hard as the "unrestricted" red dots. Most of the town leagues used blue dots to even things out a little for the non-hulking among us, while in less organized leagues (like the URI rec league), the better teams snuck in red dots to use on wide open fields (heh). The women got to use green dots, smaller and more tightly wound than a standard softball. I used to occasionally take a few swings in batting practice with a women's team I coached, just so I could tee off on those. In the nineties, when bat technology developed (and balls started being wound even more tightly) so that 150 lb shortstops could suddenly hit blue dots 300' in the air, "extra restricted" gold dots started being used in some leagues. They reminded me a lot of those old rubber eggs URI gave us.

But baseballs are supposed to be consistent, especially the higher up the ladder of competition you go. Or at least they used to be. The Colorado Rockies play in Coors Field, a stadium that is a mile above sea level. It's a bigger than average park, but the thin air at that altitude has made the place a veritable launching pad. While Colorado's hitters have benefitted greatly from playing there, their pitchers have generally turned into quivering masses of jelly just biding their time until they can declare free agency and get the hell out of Dodge Denver. Good pitchers can be reduced to tears after just a few outings at Coors. Many will attest that one of the greatest pitching feats of all time was the no-hitter Hideo Nomo threw there some years ago as a member of the Dodgers.

Recently, however, the offensive levels of Coors Field have been dialed back to about league average. How? Did they move the fences back? Nope. The Rockies are storing their official National League baseballs in a humidor. Humidifying the balls is a much subtler version of fishing the balls out of the brook. Humidified balls don't rebound off the bat as well as a dry ball. In effect, the Rockies are using restricted flight baseballs. Pitchers across the league are rejoicing, and it's helped get the Rocks off to their best start in yonks because their young pitchers aren't getting lit up all the time, which helps keep the shellshock cases down...

Of course, it helps opposing pitchers, too, as it did last night when Brad Penny threw the best game by a Dodger starter this year to shut the Rocks out, 3-0. This allowed the Dodgers to crawl into a first place tie with the DBacks, the first time they've been there in more than a year. Penny's had some rough, not to mention short, outings of late, but last night he was brilliant, going 8 1/3, the first Dodger starter to make it into the ninth this year.

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The Rockies made a trade before the game, picking up #2 WFAN anathema Kaz Matsui from the Mets for Eli Marrero. Matsui has been awful for the Mets since coming over from Japan, and I have no idea why the Rockies would want him. Well, unless the management, who are very concerned about player character, got confused about the difference between a player of good character, and a player who IS a character.

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Foul Ball

I finished Bouton's Foul Ball : My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark, and really enjoyed it. It's not really a baseball book, but rather a book about small town politics. There is an ancient ballpark in Pittsfield, MA, called Wahconah Park. It was built in the 1919. In 2001, the tennant, an Astros A team, announced they were moving to a brand new park in another town. The PTB in Pittsfield (i.e., the mayor, the bank, the daily newspaper, and General Electric, the town's biggest employer) put forward a proposal to build a new stadium to attract another team. The new stadium would be built at taxpayers' expense on land then owned by the newspaper, so all the PTB folks stood to gain financially. Meanwhile, the old park would be demolished. The townsfolk mounted a grassroots campaign in opposition, and managed to defeat the proposal when it came up on a referendum.

At this point, Bouton and his partners stepped in with a proposal of their own to renovate Wahconah Park with their own funds, in exchange for a long term lease which they would use to operate an independent league team. (The independent leagues consist of minor league teams that aren't affiliated with any major league team. Since they aren't part of a farm system, the teams tend to have more experienced players, including some ex-major leaguers, thus leading some to argue that the brand of baseball is better than you'd normally get in the low minors.) The proposal falls upon the deaf ears of the PTB, who are still trying to figure out how to ram through the new stadium. The book is the journal Bouton kept of their campaign.

It's a tough go. The main opponents are the mayor, a lame duck who relishes his power, and the newspaper, which because of its massive conflict of interest is almost totally against them, misreporting the story to its own advantage. And behind them both is the shadow of one of the world's largest corporations, GE, which over the years had dumped PCBs on nearly every vacant piece of land in Pittsfield. There are rumors that the newspaper's land is similarly contaminated, and the reason everyone is so hot for the stadium is that it's a structure that can be built without having to dig a very deep foundation, because god knows what they might find. Meanwhile, a couple of independent league teams, smelling new stadium, make their own proposals, bringing league politics into the mix, as well.

Most folks would take the hint and just walk away, but Bouton and his friend, Chip, are outraged. It becomes a crusade against tyranny for them, somewhat to dismay of their wives.

Tonight in the car, on the way to dinner, Paula and I talked about the "crusade."
"Chip and I are those rare individuals who could pull off something like this," I said. "Who else could do such a thing?"
"Single people, mostly," said Paula.

It's a book that resonates with me quite a bit, because of how disfunctional the local government around here has become. In my town, the school committee has started paying for police (at taxpayer expense, natch) to attend their meetings to keep order among the board members. The next town over has similar problems in their town council. There is a meanness and a pettiness that just has to be seen to be believed lately.

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