Baseball-related headlines from the front pages of major newspaper, as seen from the the Newseum website.
R.A. Dickey deal is finished
Globe and Mail (Toronto): The $24,000,000 Knuckles
Toronto Metro: Dickey’s All In
National Post (Toronto): DICKEY- Can these $25M knuckles put Jays over the top?
Toronto Star: TAKING JAYS TO THE TOP (alongside an image of Dickey on top of Mount Kilimanjaro last off-season)
Toronto Sun: DICKEY DEAL DONE!
Metro New York: CY YA LATER- METS TRADE R.A. DICKEY
The latest ins and outs for the WBC:
Go below the jump for the full look at who’s in, out and somewhere in-between for the World Baseball Classic.
The LA84 Foundation offers archives of old periodicals and magazines from sports history, many of them dealing with baseball. So, in the spirit of good humor and retrospective, I’ve looked at what was being written about baseball in December 1912, and now will write what I may have written back in December 1912. In 1912 style, of course.
Tinkers-Evers-Chance No More! Tinker to Cincy, Chance doomed to skipper Highlanders
Boy, oh boy! Imagine my surprise this morning when I read the news that the Chicago trio of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and the “Peerless Leader” of Frank Chance are to be broken up! The three, who so famously pricked the Giants’ gonfalon bubble in 1910 and won the World’s Series in ’07 and ’08, will no doubt live forever in the hearts of the people of the West Side of Chicago, but now they turn their heads to other endeavors. Only Evers will remain. Tinker, now the player/manager of Cincinnati, will have to face his old base ball brothers- including Evers- next season.
The same cannot be said of the Peerless Leader. He will be managing and perhaps playing for the New York Highlanders in the American League, an unenviable task given the low interest that is given to that club- indeed, I think this may well be a ruse to make what few fans the Highlanders have be hopeful after the dreadful 50-102 record in 1912. It will likely be a fool’s errand. The Highlanders’ lone star, “Prince” Hal Chase, has long been allegedly in the pocket of the gamblers, and could be crooked himself, allegedly. They have never been able to outdo clubs like Boston, Philadelphia and the American League’s Chicago. They are likely to always be afterthoughts, no matter what Chance does.
The American League East is in a interesting situation. For years, after all, there were some things that were for certain: The Yankees and Red Sox could be expected to come in first and second (sometimes flipping the order), the Blue Jays and sometimes Orioles would be a distant third, then the Orioles and Tampa would be taking the bottom two spots.
Then, suddenly, the Rays rose, becoming a factor. And so for the past few years, there were three teams in the AL East who could be expected to make a run at the playoffs.
And then came this past season, 2012, when everything went crazy. The Yankees still won, sure, but the Red Sox plummeted and the Orioles, despite the fact they were, on paper, maybe the fourth-best team in the division, ended up snagging a wild card spot. The Rays also were pretty good and made a good run at a playoff spot, and may well have gotten one if not for injuries.
But now, with the Red Sox again opening their checkbooks, and the Blue Jays having traded for basically every good player on the Marlins and now closing in on a deal for NL Cy Young winner R.A. Dickey, the question is… where is the weakness of the AL East?
None of the teams have gotten particularly worse- although the Yankees may not have signed anybody of note (save for Kevin Youkilis) and they have Alex Rodriguez out for the first half of the season, they can hardly be considered to have suddenly plunged into irrelevance. The Orioles haven’t really added anybody, but they’ve only lost Mark Reynolds, and most of last season’s historic bullpen will remain. The Rays have lost James Shields, but any rotation that has David Price and a lineup that has Evan Longoria is going to cause plenty of havoc in the standings.
The two teams that have added the most people- the Red Sox and Blue Jays- still have plenty of question marks. In Boston, for example, John Farrell will have to prove that his less-than-stellar performance as skipper in Toronto wasn’t just a result of the players he had available and the tough schedule he had to play. Toronto will have to avoid the injuries that devastated their pitching staff last season and integrate a bunch of new players into the team, all while also having the return of John Gibbons as manager. Gibbons had a sometimes tumultuous stint as Blue Jays’ manager from 2004 to 2008, and his hiring was something of a head-scratcher.
What does it all mean? It means that the AL East is a wild division, one with no clear favorite or clear unfavorite. It should be an interesting season in 2013.
Out of respect for the victims of the people in Newtown, Connecticut, I will not be posting this weekend. I will resume posting on Monday.
Please keep the people touched by this horrible tragedy in your thoughts.
Headlines about the biggest baseball news from the Newseum web site:
Story: Josh Hamilton signed by the Angels, spurns Rangers
Orange County Register: No Joshin’! Hamilton completes Angels’ lineup
Long Beach Press-Telegram: Angels Raid Rival
Los Angeles Daily News: Rounding Up A Ranger
Los Angeles Times: Angels sign star oufielder
Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Going? Going? Gone
Dallas Morning News: Out Of Left Field
After a few days, we now have another confirmation about the World Baseball Classic. Shane Victorino has said he will be playing for Team USA. Since it’s not official (since technically the Red Sox need to approve it), I’m placing him in possibly/likely.
Go below the jump for the full look at who’s in, out and somewhere in-between for the World Baseball Classic.
Josh Hamilton, the prize hitter on the free agent market, is a Los Angeles Angel of Anaheim. And so continues the movement of baseball’s greatest talents to the west. While it is true that Hamilton was already in the West Division of the American League, it shows that the old powers of the East Coast baseball establishment are no longer what they were- the money and the power is now out west. Consider:
What does this mean?
Well, for one thing, it means that staying up late will be a treat in the coming years. The struggles between the Dodgers and Giants will be grand opera, narrated by Vin Scully. The Athletics will have to once again find a sling in order to take down Goliath. The Rangers will have to do all they can simply to avoid falling into the basement of the AL West (thankfully, they will still have the Mariners and Astros to beat up on).
For another, though, it means, once again, that television and the ever-increasing riches in baseball- for all teams but definitely more for some than for others- have changed the game. The Los Angeles teams now are able to tap into more money than they had before, while established eastern powers like the Braves are trapped in bad deals. The big advantages that team-owned stations like YES and NESN once gave are now no longer so big. It’s a brave new world.
Finally, did anybody else hear that the Red Sox signed Ryan Dempster? Yeah, I almost missed it too.
The Australian Baseball League’s All-Star Game is coming up, and it pits the league’s best Australian players against the league’s best foreign players. This allows, interestingly, for something of a glimpse of what Australia’s World Baseball Classic team could look like.
The Australian roster for the ABL ASG, which can be found here, has seven players with MLB experience: pitchers Shane Lindsay, Chris Oxspring and Ryan Rowland-Smith, infielders Brad Harman, Luke Hughes and Justin Huber, and outfielder Chris Snelling, who was born in Florida but grew up in Australia. The WBC roster could add Grant Balfour, Rich Thompson and Travis Blackley, but they aren’t playing in the ABL, so they aren’t on this roster.
Some other notable names on the rest of the roster:
Allan De San Miguel, who has been confirmed to be playing in the WBC, is, as I noted back during my August projections for the Aussies, a light-hitting but good-fielding catcher who spent the past year in the Orioles organization.
Stefan Welch, who was in the Pittsburgh system last year, is a utility guy who can player first and third, although he played mainly third last season.
Elliot Biddle and Mitch Dening were also on my projections. Biddle was one of the best hitters in the ABL in 2011, while Dening was a Indy Leaguer in 2012.
Brendan Wise had a tough year in AAA, but he’s done well in the ABL this season so far, and well-deserves the spot he has on the team. He also will likely be on the WBC team.
One of the players who I did not have on my projections who is on the ABL Australian roster is Paul Mildren. Mildren, a lefty, spent eight season in the minors, reaching as high as AAA. However, he eventually washed-out, but is now pitching professionally down under. While he’s only 1-3 with a 5.40 ERA so far this season, there can never be enough lefties, so it’ll be interesting to see if he make the WBC roster.
Another player who wasn’t on my earlier projections? Corey Adamson. The San Diego prospect has been blazing his way in the ABL this season, one of the league’s leaders in batting average.
Overall, the Australians would do okay if they went to the WBC with this all-star-game team, but they’d probably have trouble advancing, since they are in a tough pool with Korea, Taipei and the Netherlands. Of course, in baseball anything can happen, and if enough MLB players take part for the Aussies, they could be a Cinderella team.
You can expect a full new projection for the Baseballroos sometime in the coming days.
It’s 12/12/12! So in honor of 12/12/12, perhaps it’s a good idea to note that two number 12s have seen their numbers retired in Major League Baseball.
The more notable of them is Roberto Alomar, who’s number 12 has been retired by the Toronto Blue Jays. Interestingly, Alomar is getting married today, so he must really like that number.
The other player to have number 12 retired is Wade Boggs. The reason this isn’t as notable as Alomar is because, well, Boggs had the number retired by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (now Rays). Boggs was from the Tampa area, and he had his 3000th hit in a Tampa uniform, so his hometown team honored him by retiring his number. Boggs wore 26 during his time with the Boston Red Sox, and switched to 12 when he went to New York.
Number 12, it should be noted, has far more retirees in the NFL: Jim Kelly, Joe Namath, John Brodie, Bob Griese and Seattle’s “Twelfth Man” have had it retired. Just a random thing I found that I thought to note.
The Baseball Continuum 