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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.
Continue reading
There will be a lot of new faces managing Major League Baseball teams next season. Joe Torre left the Dodgers. Lou Piniella left the Cubs. Cito Gaston left the Blue Jays — and those are just the ones who left voluntarily.
Bobby Cox is also leaving the Atlanta Braves. This retirement might be the biggest loss of all for the game.
Cox took an undermanned Braves team to the playoffs as a wild card despite losing Chipper Jones, Martin Prado and two key pitchers during the season. And he had the San Francisco Giants on the brink in the NL Divisonal Playoffs despite losing closer Billy Wagner and a bunch of errors by Brooks Conrad.
The better team won the series. But the Giants and their fans were classy about it, giving Cox a standing ovation for his years and contributions to the game.
Congratulations on your retirement, Mr. Cox. You’ve given Atlanta a heckuva ride.
Though the blogosphere, the Internets and the traditional media will be exploding with talk of Randy Moss returning to Minnesota, the biggest story in the Twin Cities sports scene Wednesday could be the opening of the Minnesota Twins/New York Yankees playoff series.
Yes, the baseball playoffs begin Wednesday and we, like every other baseball fan, have opinions on who is going to take home the trophy. Here are our first round picks.
Rich:
Tampa Bay over Texas, four games
Minnesota over New York, four games (or Yankees in three)
Philadelphia over Cincinnati, three games
San Francisco over Atlanta, five games
Tony:
Texas over Tampa Bay, four games
Minnesota over New York, fie games
Philadelphia over Cincinnati, four games
Atlanta over San Francisco, three games
Andy:
Texas over Tampa Bay, five games
Minnesota over New York, four games (If it goes five, Twins lose)
Philadelphia over Cincinnati, three games
Atlanta over San Francisco, five games
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.
Brushbackpitch.com has railed against the Florida Marlins and owner Jeffrey Loria several times for his use of baseball’s luxury tax money for personal gain.
Today Jeff Passan from Yahoo! Sports uses documents obtained by Deadspin to put the franchise’s distortion of its financial situation to get Dade County to approve a new ballpark, which will open in a couple years.
Deadspin has spent the last several days exposing financial documents Major League Baseball owners likely never wanted made public (Marlins’ president David Samson called it “a crime” in Passan’s piece, which might technically be true).
Passan’s column is good. I haven’t read the entire Deadspin series yet, but from what I’ve seen and heard, it’s worth a look. It takes a look at “the other side” of the game, which compared to the gracefullness with which Joe Mauer can hit opposite-field doubles all season long and makes it instead look as ugly as watching Delmon Young patrol the outfield.
But it’s the reality of professional sports these days.
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
I love that the New York Yankees did not get Cliff Lee from the Seattle Mariners.
I love even more that the Yankees were livid with the Mariners because they thought they had a deal and then Seattle pulled it away from them at the last minute.
But I am confused about how the Texas Rangers, bankrupt and under the operation of Major League Baseball at the moment, can take on more than a million in salary for a pitcher they likely will not retain after the season while giving up rookie hitting phenom Justin Smoak as part of the deal.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand that Lee is an ace. And I understand that Texas is in first place. Continue reading
Today was a helluva day in sports. Wimbledon participants Nicolas Mahut and John Isner are tied 59-59 in the fifth set of their match, setting all sorts of all-time records, including longest match played. The United States scored a goal in extra time against Angola to go from fourth place to first place in their group in World Cup early-round play. The win set up a Sweet Sixteen matchup against Ghana.
I spent most of my day at two airports.
Yes, today largely sucked. But I want to hand out some accolades to people who made it suck less than it could have. And then yes, I will tie this post back into baseball.
First thumbs up goes to the couple dozen people watching the U.S. play Angola at a bar at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport this morning. I’m not a huge soccer fan by any stretch. I don’t pretend to understand the game like I do football or baseball. And many of the passengers watching the match obviously were the same – they were excited with every scoring opportunity the U.S. had, even if they didn’t understand how they earned those chances. It was a lot of fun watching the waning moments of the matchup with a bunch of fired up people I’ll probably never see again.
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