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Prince Fielder: king of the bottom feeders thanks to Scott Boras. Why is the consensus second best free agent for the 2011-2012 class, ranked only behind only Albert Pujols, still out there? What is keeping him from signing? He has been in contact and had contracts offered to him by what seems like half the team in major league baseball. Why isn’t he on someone’s roster yet?
Let’s look at his contract desire. He wants $25 million or more, and rumor has it that he wanted a 10-year deal, but it appears now that a six-year contract is all he is likely to get – due to his size and his mediocrity at 1st base.
Production wise Prince Fielder is worth $25 million per, but at 300-plus pounds, logic says his days at 1st base are numbered. And Fielder’s not a top 10 draw in baseball no matter how many homers he hits so, 10 years is out of the question unless you’re buying what Boras is selling, and if you are… may I suggest some Cottonelle or Charmin?
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I just read this post from Yahoo.
Wow. Another New York fan with a forum.
We’re gonna win the World Series.
Why?
Because CC is skinnier.
Because Derek Jeter has a new contract the the team didn’t want to give him.
Because we have great prospects.
BECAUSE WE ALWAYS WIN THE WORLD SERIES!
Even when we don’t.
Over the last couple years we’ve had some great debates about the inductees and potential inductees to the Pro Football Hall of Fame at our sister site, Zoneblitz.com.
We’re going to try to start doing the same thing here at Brushbackpitch.com as well, starting today.
Jeff Idelson, Baseball Hall of Fame president, announced on the MLB Network that, in his 14th year of eligibility, pitcher Bert Blyleven received the necessary 75 percent of votes to make the Hall. Blyleven’s self-promotion sometimes went over the top but his 287 wins, despite playing for some lousy teams, and two World Series championships certainly helped his argument. Nor did his career totals of 3,701 strikeouts and 242 complete games hurt.
Joining him will be Roberto Alomar, who played second base for seven teams during a 17 year career. He stole 474 bases, earned 10 straight gold gloves and made 12 straight All-Star games. He received 90 percent of the vote and, Idelson said, the third highest vote total ever.
They join Pat Gillick, who was tapped by the Expansion Era Committee.
That leaves a number of the 33 candidates on this year’s ballot still on the outside looking in, including Barry Larkin, Jack Morris, Lee Smith, Jeff Bagwell and several members of the controversial “steroid era,” which we’ve written about several times in other contexts and certainly will cover under this heading as well.
So what do you think? Are this year’s selections the right ones? Who should have gone in and who should have stayed out?
We’re looking forward to hearing from you at brushbackpitch.com.
I loved what the Texas Rangers did in 2010. They overcame near bankruptcy to contend. They sent a top-notch prospect and others to Seattle to grab Cliff Lee for a pennant chase and it almost worked to perfection, as the Rangers pushed San Francisco in the World Series before falling.
I also think the Rangers are going to be serious players for years to come. They are now well financed and a television deal with Fox Sports Southwest makes them a real, big-money player near the likes of the Yankees and the Red Sox.
But I’m stymied by the latest news from Arlington, Texas. Various reports have the Texas Rangers close to dedicating big money – about $96 million for six years, according to at least one report – toward signing third baseman Adrian Beltre.
Now, Beltre’s not a bad player, not by any stretch. By most accounts his defense at third base has always been very good, though there are also suggestions that he’s slipping a bit, and even if he isn’t yet, he’d be 37 at the end of a six-year deal.
The bigger question I have is his offense. This is a guy who has had two monster seasons out of 13 in the big leagues with the bat. He hit .334 with 48 homers, 121 RBI and a 1.017 OPS in 2004 at the age of 25. And he hit .321 with 28 homers, 102 RBI and a .919 OPS in 2010 with the Red Sox.
I hoped it was a bad idea that would fade away after the season ended but as Major League Baseball approaches its winter meetings next week it appears that further expansion of the playoffs is not only going to be on the table, but is likely to pass with little opposition.
Thus Major League Baseball will take one more step toward becoming another league that waters down its regular season in favor of a playoff format that invites too many teams to take a shot at the championship.
I initially didn’t like the expansion to four playoff teams with a wild card included but it was a necessity when each league was split into three divisions. And I grudgingly will admit that it has created some fantastic races, this year included when San Francisco, San Diego and Atlanta fought tooth and nail to the season’s final weekend over the last two playoff spots.
The Texas Rangers squeaked by the Tampa Rays tonight to win the American League Divisional Series three games to two. It’s been a fun series to watch with great pitching, timely hitting and momentum swings beyond belief.
I thought the series was over after Tampa manager Joe Maddon was ejected following Michael Young’s three-run homer, a shot that should never have happened because Young’s check swing on the previous pitch should have been strike three.
But the Rays collected themselves and continued battling, eventually earning the right to come back home for gave five after winning both games in Texas.
Watching the seesaw battle between these two clubs was a pretty dramatic contrast to the other AL series, which was won in dominating fashion by the New York Yankees over the Minnesota Twins, who despite a narrowed talent gap in 2010 could not come close to getting past their playoff nemesis of recent times.
I thought heading into this year’s series that things might be different. Early on it looked like there was a chance I could be right. The Twins led 3-0 in game one heading into the sixth inning.
But then things fell apart.
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Often times former catchers make good major league managers. Sometimes they get fired anyway.
Major league journeyman Matt Walbeck spent two years at the helm for the Altoona Curve, the Double-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 2009 the team finished in sixth place in the Eastern League. In 2010, the team captured the first Eastern League championship in its 12 year history.
On Sept. 29, Pittsburgh told Walbeck his services were no longer needed.
I’m not going to pretend I followed the Curve during their championship run, nor am I going to say I recognize even one of the names of the players on the team’s roster during the 2010 season. I can’t say I know anything about Walbeck as a manager or much about his background – other than I watched him play catcher for the Minnesota Twins back during the team’s dark years in the early 2000s.
But when a guy wins a championship, even in the minor leagues, it would seem he is doing something right.
The Pirates, who last had anything resembling a competitive team in the major leagues in 1992, only released a one sentence statement: “We appreciate Matt’s efforts and wish him the best in his future endeavors but felt that it was best that we allow him to pursue other opportunities,” according to general manager Neal Huntington via the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.
Dejan Kovacevic, the Post-Gazette’s Pirates beat writer, updated the story later with a comment from an unidentified source indicating that the move came from concerns about Walbeck’s communication with staff and players.
Okay, maybe he was a bad communicator. He won a championship at the Double-A level for an organization that, for two decades in the major leagues, has had virtually nothing to be excited about at all.And he was 312-224 in four seasons managing in the Detroit Tigers’ system.
Granted, there is more to managing in the minors than winning. But the Pirates finally have some young guys – Andrew McCutchen, Pedro Alvarez, Jose Tabata and Neil Walker among others, that interestingly have come from the minors over the last couple seasons. Not all played under Walbeck. Some did. And for an organization that has shown little promise for two decades, I would think continuity would be a good thing for a team that must have done something right in 2010 to win the league championship.
Walbeck certainly didn’t do it himself, but someone had to help those players reach that level.
Maybe the Pirates will prove this was the correct move. Maybe the players won the championship in spite of Walbeck rather than because of him. If so I’ll fall on my sword later.
Until then, it would appear to me that the once-proud Pirates franchise has given the city of Pittsburgh and baseball fans around the country another illustration of how the organization has spent two decades as a laughingstock.
It wasn’t as good as the 1971 incident during a Baltimore Colts game when Mike Curtis clotheslined an idiot fan who ran onto the field during the game.
But Atlanta outfielder Matt Diaz became my new favorite Major League Baseball player, at least for a day, when I saw footage of him taking out an idiot fan wearing a semi-Spiderman looking outfit while running around Citizens Bank Park.
The leg sweep didn’t keep Spiderman down but it slowed him up enough for security personnel to get him a couple seconds later. Incidentally, the Phillies might want to consider hiring a couple security people who don’t fall on their faces during the pursuit.
But as Kemp said in the yahoo story, the fan was lucky the outfielder chipped in, otherwise the 17-year-old moron might have been tased.
I’m surprised more players don’t get involved in these deals. Most of the time they’re just drunk and stupid, but look no further than the Royals/White Sox game from several years ago when two idiots attacked Royals coach Tom Gamboa after jumping onto the field from the stands to see that these morons could be dangerous.
Personally I think tasers are too good for these idiots. Fans don’t belong on the field during games and when they venture down there they deserve whatever happens to them. And yes, this season at least, Phillies fans have participated in several incidents that have reflected poorly upon them.
Kudos, again, to Matt Kemp.
The Philadelphia Phillies will soon put Jamie Moyer on the disabled list with a sprained ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow. For many pitchers these days that injury means a year on the shelf recovering from Tommy John Surgery. For the 47-year-old Moyer, however, there is a strong likelihood that it could mean the end of his career.
When I first saw news of the injury I cringed. And the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Matt Gelb confirmed Thursday that there is at least some chance that if the injury is, in fact, serious enough to require the reconstructive surgery that Moyer may instead decide to hang it up.
So why the fanfare? Moyer has pitched for nearly two-and-a-half decades for … seven teams, if I counted right. And the last half-dozen or so he has hardly been great. But he is a gamer. He got out of the gates slowly this year, creating speculation that his spot in the rotation and perhaps on the Phillies’ roster this season might have been in jeopardy. He turned things around, though, and in May became the oldest pitcher ever to throw a shutout.
Seems like no matter how hard Commissioner Bud Selig tries to build interest in the Major League Baseball All Star game he still comes up short.
There was a lot of hype leading up to the game this year, with debate over whether Omar Infante belonged in the game and whether rookie phenom Stephen Strasburg got screwed when he was left out.
But at the end of the day, despite all the hoopla, the game’s broadcast produced the lowest television ratings in history. Back in the mid-1960s and 1970s, the game used to produce ratings scores in the mid 20s and share ratings in the mid-50s.
(A ratings point represents one percent of the total households in the United States watching a given show. Share measures the percentage of television sets in use tuned into a program. So 20-plus percent of households with televisions used to watch the All Star Game and more than half of the televisions in use during the game were watching it.)
In 2002, the All Star game slipped to single-digit ratings for the first time and those figures have not returned to double digits in the years since. Tuesday’s game, according to the Los Angeles Times, drew just a 7.5 rating for a paltry 12 million average viewers. Continue reading
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