Weez - I betcha if you throw in a stadium adult beverage or 4 you can start looking for flights. :cool:
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Jim - So, will y'all continue to make the trek once they move down to San Jose? BTW, what is the latest on that? Still looking like 2015?
FWIW, as a Nats fan originally from the south/east Bay Area, I'm very eager to see how the new stadium works out. (It'll be a shame no longer being able to take BART to games...) I do think Mr. Moneyball did really well in the Gio Gonzalez trade - as I hear BA is now ranking three of those former Nats prospects among the A's top-10 prospects. This year may be tough, especiially with LAA and Tex among MLB's top-5 overall, but the future looks good for you 2-3 years hence.
:D
Four Days in May? Sounds like the title to an old thriller. Sked shows only one home series with the Tigs. May 10, 11, 12, 13. Two night games, one early evening and one day game. Looks like your options are limited. In fact, all the Central Teams only come out once this year.
And, we get the Rays, Jays and O's once, as well. We do get the Yanks and Sawks twice; that seems to alternate every other year. Inter-league home games are with the Pads, Bums (does anyone call them the Bums any more?) and Jints. I'd rather see more AL teams, to tell you the truth.
If you really come, I'd be happy to show you The House Al Davis Ruint.
Jim3K -- not really hot stove, but good baseball news for you, especially since the A's and 'Stros will be in the same division in 2013:
Milo Hamilton declares the 2012 season his last in the broadcast booth.
Not a hard prediction to make, given his age and the sale. I don't regard it as good news for me, but good for the Astros (if that's still their name in 2013). I just thought he was adding nothing to the Houston area baseball experience. I can say the same thing about the broadcast productions after having listened to the way they do their advertising. That whole business needs a re-start. Hope new owner Jim Crane can provide one.
From late January: Crane is already taking some steps as the team's NL membership winds down.
He's already ruled out a name change.
Sad news - local radio here in NY is reporting that Gary Carter has died, after battling brain cancer for the past year. No link yet.
ETA - link.
Yanks managed to drop him a lot sooner than that, sending him to Pittsburgh, along with $20MM of the $33MM remaining on his contract. There's apparently still some hondling over the minor leaguers coming back to the Yankees, though it's hard to imagine they'll be anything other than organizational filler. And given the money being transferred, the league has to approve the trade, but multiple writers have said it's more or less a done deal, so it looks like it will go through.
In lesser news, Tim Wakefield has announced his retirement, which is at least 15 years sooner than I expected him to hang it up.
In still lesser news, Hideki Okajima failed his physical and had his deal with the Yankees scuttled, which foils their master plan to have rostered every Hideki in major league history.
Yeah, the Yankee sites and the New York papers are saying the Burnett to Pittsburgh deal is all but done. Good deal for the Pirates, they get a workhorse pitcher for two years at $13 million (and two marginal prospects). Burnett might have driven us Yankee fans crazy over the last two seasons, but he's still a talented pitcher -- as he proved in the playoffs. His plus-five ERA is likely to drop as he moves from the third-easiest HR park in baseball to the sixth toughest (and Burnett is a fly ball pitcher who was hurt badly by the new stadium).
The Yankees come out okay ... they get $13 million back over the next two years, which they play to spend on a lefthanded DH (looks like Raul Ibanez) and maybe infield insurance Eric Chavez.
Burnett became expendable with pickup on Pineda and Kuroda last month ... and the fact that Phil Hughes has apparently reported in god health with his old velocity.
Sorry to see Tim Wakefield go ... hard to believe he was baseball's leading active winner (with 200 wins). Now that honor falls on Roy Halladay (188 wins). I think I heard that's the lowest total for an active leader in more than 100 years. Of course, that may change if 49-year-old Jamie Moyer (262 wins) come out of retiremnt as he's threatening to do.
In fairly well anticipated news, the Yanks sign Ibanez, and the A's sign Manny.
Ryan Braun wins his appeal, avoids a suspension. And mlb wants us to know they're not happy about it.
Quote:
"As a part of our drug testing program, the Commissioner's Office and the Players Association agreed to a neutral third party review for instances that are under dispute," MLB executive vice president for labor relations Rob Manfred said in a statement. "While we have always respected that process, Major League Baseball vehemently disagrees with the decision rendered today by arbitrator Shyam Das."
Looks like Braun got off on chain of custody issues. MLB will have to take that kind of thing much more seriously moving forward.
It'll be interesting to see what kind of fan attention Braun gets moving forward. "Not guilty" is not the same thing as "innocent".
According to www.mlbtraderumors.com MLB is about to announce an expanded playoffs plan for 2012. The MLB playoffs will expand from eight to ten teams for for this year. The two non-division-winners with the best records in each league (AL and NL) will be the wild card teams. This is good news for good, not great, teams from stronger divisions -- such as Braves, Nats, Marlins, LAA (?), NYY/BOS #2, TB, etc -- because it is now possible for a divisional third-place team to reach the postseason. Each's league's wild card pair will face off in a one-game playoff. It'll be interesting to see how they pick the location (best record or head to head?).
As a Nats fan in the tough NL East I'm loving this. I'm thinking Tampa fans or Toronto fans may rejoice as well. Good move by MLB to get more teams and fans engaged in the post-season. (The fact that there's more money to be made I'm sure didn't factor into the move...)
:rolleyes:
I'm not a fan of expanding playoffs, but I actually like this.
Why the contradiction?
I believe baseball doesn't reward its best teams over the course of the season enough. More than any other sport, an inferior team can win a short series. Letting inferior teams into the playoffs has let inferior teams play for and sometimes win championships.
On the other hand, now requiring the two wild card teams to meet in a one-game playoff gives the division winners a big advantage. We've had situations in recent years where teams in the AL East have coasted into the plyoffs, knowing it doesn't really matter whether they win the division or make it as a wild card team. NOW IT MATTERS.
It's still not a perfect system in my eyes, but it's an improvement. Teams will now wight to win their dvision and not be happy to settle for the wild card.
OF, I agree with everything here. I wish they had stuck with two-division leagues and left it at that, but that ship sailed long ago.
What concerns me is, what if the additional play-in game is a huge success with fans, and earns MLB a lot of cash? Then some genius will decide that if 10 teams is better than 8, then 12 must be better still, etc., until you're the NHL.
I feel like this increases the likelihood of an inferior team making a run in the playoffs rather than decreasing it. In many seasons, the Wild Card team is the second best team in the entire league. I imagine that a very, very good Wild Card team that has proven it's mettle many times throughout the duration of a long regular season will have their playoff hopes come down to a single game against a team that it bested by a large number of games in the regular season. The odds of their winning a single game against another team that is also good (but not better based on regular season records) are probably no better than 55-60%, at best. If they lose, the playoff pool is further diluted by an inferior playoff team. Finally, the winner of the playoff game will not have been able to set up their rotation to prepare for their next opponent, putting them at a bigger disadvantage.
I get that it gives a bigger advantage to division winners, but I don't see this as a good thing. Divisions mean very little now, and there is rarely competitive balance between divisions. I agree that Baseball does a poor job rewarding the regular season performance of a team, but I think that having three divisions per league is a big reason for that. Inferior teams often win their inferior divisions. I would prefer that Major League Baseball change the first round of the playoffs to a 7 game series to allow a little less luck into the equation.
I understand that Selig and company want to create as much drama as possible going into the final part of the season, when the teams that are not in contention play game after meaningless game. However, I feel this could be accomplished in other, more creative ways that do a better job of rewarding the top teams. What if baseball had its own version of Selection Sunday where the team with the best record gets to choose their first round opponent, even one from their own division, sparking an instant rivalry and insane amounts of drama? The team could take opponent's injuries and current form into account. Plus, if they lost the series, no one could blame the seeding policies of MLB. MLB could also go back to two divisions per league, making winning the division far more representative of regular season dominance.
Anyway, I fear that there will be a number of instances in which a team that was as bad as 5th best in the league gets a little bit lucky and makes a deep post-season run. This type of thing makes March Madness fun, but I don't see that as much fun after a 162 game regular season has already demonstrated who the best teams are.
Because too much bad news is never enough I guess, one of the few bright spots in Flushing over the past few years, Ike Davis, has been given a "working diagnosis of Valley Fever. Thus far he isn't showing any symptons, which is apparently not uncommon, and isn't under any restrictions with his workouts, but another promising young player, Conor Jackson, went from playing regularly and posting a .820 ops from ages 24-26, to playing 30 and 60 games the next two seasons after he came down with it. He played pretty regularly this past year, but was much less productive than he'd been prior to getting sick. Hopefully Davis will come through it unscathed.
Last season we saw the 4th best team in the NL get hot and win it all - that would seem to have already invalidated a big chunk of the regular season. If we want the regular season to have more meaning, MLB should go back to 4 divisions and eliminate the wild card entirely. (I actually wouldn't be opposed to this, but at this point that ship has sailed.)
I like the idea that winning the division will once again mean something. Any system invites some potential inequities but it has always bugged me that a 2nd place team enters the playoffs essentially on equal footing with three 1st place teams.
Andy Pettitte has unretired and signed a minor league contract with the Yankees, getting an invite to the major league camp. I didn't see this coming, but welcome him back if he can make the team. I guess Phil Hughes has more competition for the #5 starter's job. :cool:
http://newyork.yankees.mlb.com/news/...s_nyy&c_id=nyy