You may remember his adventure with Spider-Man, but Billy the Marlin seems to have also visited a Galaxy Far, Far, Away… at least to promote a “Star Wars Night” in Miami…
Category Archives: MLB
MVPs of the Weekend (1st, 2nd and 3rd of August 2014): Tommy Medica, Jacob deGrom and Madison Bumgarner
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The MVPs of the weekend are Tommy Medica, Jacob deGrom, and Madison Bumgarner!
Standings, as always, after the jump:
Random Thoughts (August 3, 2014)
Some random thoughts this Sunday, some of them on baseball, some of them not:
1. I wish that that “double no-hitter” last night had continued past the seventh inning. That truly would have been a sight to see. Only once has there been a no-hitter both ways after nine innings, by the way.
2. I still can’t believe how bad Ruben Amaro Jr. is at his job as Phillies GM, at least as far as the last few years go. It makes the glory days of the late-aughts seem a million years ago, and the lack of prospects in the wings means it could be a long road back, especially if he continues to refuse to flip what few trade pieces he has left.
3. It’s good to see Manny Machado has once again become Manny Machado instead of that slumping guy from the first half who got hurt and threw his bat in anger. One of these days he will literally throw out a man at first while standing on the wall that separates the field from the seats.
4. It’s going to take awhile to get used to David Price being in a Tigers uniform.
5. A video you should see of a one-armed pitcher in a youth all-star game.
6. It’s over a week old now, but I still recommend “An Idiot in Exile” by Pat Jordan, on Johnny Damon’s post-playing days.
7. It is truly sad to see Jim Kelly as he is now, but also truly inspiring to see him continue on despite his cancer.
8. Guardians of the Galaxy is a fun (and funny) movie and I think you all should go see it.
MVP of Yesterday (July 31, 2014): Clayton Kershaw
9 Innings. 1 ER. 9 hits allowed but also 9 strikeouts. Zero outs recorded by the outfielders! Clayton Kershaw out-dueled Julio Teheran and won the game for the Dodgers yesterday. It’s his… FIFTH MVP OF YESTERDAY, PUTTING HIM IN THE LEAD!
Standings after jump:
How to Tell if a Deadline Deal is Real in Five Easy Steps (Humor)
1. Is it not past the Trade Deadline?
It ended 4:00 PM today, Eastern. So if somebody around midnight starts squawking on Twitter that Marlon Byrd is Bronx-bound or that the Dodgers have shipped Matt Kemp somewhere, they are WRONG. In theory such things could happen if they put them through waivers first, but it’s unlikely to happen this soon after the non-waiver deadline.
2. Is it an actual account?
Because, really, if MLB Network, Jim Bowden and ESPN all fell for various fake Twitter accounts today, so can you. Before you retweet that hot news about Joe Superstar going to City X for Prospect Z, check to see how many followers that account has (I’m going to doubt that the real Buster Olney only has 12 followers), and whether the seemingly-lower-case “L” at the end of “Rosenthal” is actually a upper-case “i” or a | symbol. Unusual spaces in the name or unprofessional profiles are also another clue.
3. Are other people confirming it? Is the team confirming it?
If all of Baseball Twitter is in agreement that the trade has happened, it probably is true. If the team says it happened, it definitely is true.
4. Don’t get fooled by obviously fake trades. The Yankees and Red Sox haven’t traded with each other one-on-one since 1997 and they aren’t going to start now.
Wait… what?
5. Also, assume any trade by Ruben Amaro Jr. of the Phillies is fake, especially if it involves any players from the team’s late-aughts glory years.
Because, seriously, after this year, I’ve come to the conclusion that Amaro won’t get rid of them until they retire.
MVPs of the last three days (July 28, 29th and 30th): Ervin Santana, JP Arencibia
I was going to just have a “MVP of the last two days”, but then Corey Kluber had to go and be awesome again with a 85-pitch (!!) shutout, and I realized nobody was beating that, so I decided to delay it until early Thursday.
So, the MVPs of the three days covered here: Ervin Santana, J.P. Arencibia and Corey Kluber.
Standings, of course, after the jump:
MVPs of the Weekend (July 25, 26, 27, 2014): Yasiel Puig, Clayton Kershaw and Carlos Santana
Yasiel Puig, Clayton Kershaw and Carlos Santana are the MVPs of the weekend. A special mention should go to Puig, who had THREE TRIPLES AND A DOUBLE on Friday. That’s impressive. Amazingly, this is his first MVP of Yesterday of the season.
Standings, as always, after the jump:
Future Possibilities for International Games
At the start of the season, regular season games were held in Sydney, Australia.* Whether you like it or not, it was not the first and won’t be the last time that MLB opened overseas. But, where will MLB go next? Here’s an overview of possibilities:
* This was partly written immediately following those games, but fell by the wayside until now, so here it is.
A Return to the Tokyo Dome
Used under Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en), taken by “DX Broadrec”.
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Baseball Pedigree: Has hosted baseball since it opened in 1988, home of the Yomiuri Giants, hosted WBC games in 2006, 2009 and 2013, hosted MLB season-opener games in 2000, 2004, 2008 and 2012. Japan is one of the preeminent baseball nations on Earth and host to the world’s 2nd most prominent baseball league.
Capacity: Between 42,000 and 55,000 (depending on configuration)
Pros: Japan is baseball-mad, has shown it can pack the stadium for MLB games, and the Tokyo Dome is highly-familiar to MLB officials and some players thanks to it’s many previous MLB-related events. Being a dome makes weather considerations non-existent, and Tokyo’s status as one of the world’s greatest cities allows for plenty for players to do when not playing.
Cons: It’s been done before several times, it’s a type of stadium that has been phased out of MLB, and, while this isn’t much of a factor that MLB cares about much, there is the time difference issue, with night games in Tokyo being early morning games in the Eastern USA and very, very, very early morning games in the western part of the USA.
Likelihood of return: It’s inevitable that MLB will return to Japan again sometime in the future, the question is whether the Tokyo Dome is the place it will happen. More-than-likely yes, but I’ll be looking at other possible Japanese sites later on.
(HIT THE JUMP FOR THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE)
Under the new Baseball HOF eligibility rules, the following players wouldn’t have been voted in
A new set of rules at the HOF makes the 15-year eligibility period only 10 years (players who already are past the 10 years will be grandfathered in). Besides making it that much harder for Tim Raines to get to 75% in time, this also makes one wonder who in the Baseball HOF voted in by the writers would have not been voted in under the new series of rules.
I checked, and these players wouldn’t have made it (of course, many of them may have ended up getting inducted by the Veteran’s Committee):
- Harry Heilmann
- Bill Terry
- Rabbit Maranville
- Dazzy Vance
- Gabby Hartnett
- Red Ruffing
- Ralph Kiner
- Bob Lemon
- Duke Snider
- Bruce Sutter
- Jim Rice
- Bert Blyleven
And now you know…
MVP of Yesterday (7-24-2014): Corey Kluber
Corey Kluber was awesome last night. No, he wasn’t just awesome, he was spectacular, going 9 innings of 2-hit ball! He struck out 10!
And… he got the no-decision. Because THIS happened:
(Facepalm) Well, at least you won MVP of Yesterday. It’s your second of the year.
Standings after the jump:
The Baseball Continuum 