It was a smaller schedule yesterday, allowing Kyle Kendrick‘s complete-game victory to stand out more and snagging him the MVP of Yesterday. He also had an RBI at the plate!
MVP Standings, as always, below the jump:
Domonic Brown is having a breakout year, to the point where some have begun to call him “Dominant Brown”. And yesterday was a good example of why, as he went 3-3 with a HR and 4 RBI, as well as a walk in the Phillies’ win over the Brewers.
MVP Standings, as always, under the jump:
On May 21, our friend Michael Clair over at Old Time Family Baseball wrote an article over at Baseball Prospectus in which he did tongue-in-cheek scouting reports of ballplayers who did Playgirl shoots in the 1980s. While he didn’t provide a scouting report on him, among the players who Clair exposed (pun intended) was Steve McCatty, who is now the pitching coach for the Washington Nationals.
Upon seeing the image, the Nationals did what any team would do when such a photo is brought back to light: use it as a team-wide gag/inspirational t-shirt.
However, since that fateful day, the Nationals fortunes have fallen. They are a mere .500 since Michael Clair’s article went up*, have fallen another game back in the NL East standings, and would have fallen back even more if not for the fact that the Braves were almost as averagely mediocre as the Nationals were.
Oh, and Stephen Strasburg left last night’s game with an injury. And Bryce Harper may be headed to the DL.
So, did the Steve McCatty Playgirl shoot curse the Nationals? I don’t know. But, then again, it’s no less ridiculous than Colonel Sanders cursing a Japanese team…
*Yes, I do know that the Nationals were on a 4-game losing streak before the article went up. Now be quiet and let me tell the story.
Jonathan Lucroy went 5-5 with 2 HR and 4 RBI in the Brewers’ 8-5 victory over the Phillies yesterday, which makes him the MVP of Yesterday.
MVP standings, as always, after the jump:
Over the past few years, Josh Beckett‘s life has been a dark comedy. There were the fights with the media, the failure to live up to his contracts, and the whole thing with the fact he was one of the Red Sox who apparently were having chicken and beer over games of Call of Duty while the 2011 Red Sox burned.
But now, it looks like it will instead be a full-on tragedy, as the Los Angeles Times reports that Beckett has been feeling numbness in his pitching hand, something that could well end his career.
And that stinks. Because, while Beckett’s career has been in free-fall this decade, at his peak he was one of the best pitchers in the game, and, what’s more, he was awesome in the post-season.
In fact, it’s the post-season where, if this is the end, we will probably most remember Beckett. His first appearance on the national stage came in 2003, when he was the World Series MVP with the Marlins, finishing off the Yankees on short rest with a complete game shutout in Game 6.
That is more than can be said for many pitchers, but in 2007, he did it again, going 4-0 in his starts for the Red Sox, including winning the MVP of the ALCS, where he had a absurdly low ERA 1.93 ERA… which was actually higher than his ERA in the other two series he pitched in (although, admittedly, those series were sweeps where he only had one start).
Of course, after that, his career took a downturn. His postseason performances did a downturn first, with him going 1-1 with no ERA below 5.40 in the three series he’s pitched since 2007. While he was a regular season All-Star in 2008 and 2011*, he was no longer the above-all ace he once was. Since 2011, in fact, he is 7-19 with a 4.76 ERA in the regular season.
But, perhaps if this is the end, we should try to remember where he was best: the World Series. In his three starts (so admittedly a small sample size) and 23.1 innings pitched in the Fall Classic, Josh Beckett went 2-1 with a 1.16 ERA.
And that’s impressive.
*Before the ASG in 2011, Beckett was 8-3 with a 2.27 ERA, but the second half saw him be a just-okay 5-4 with a 3.73 ERA.
The most under-rated and overlooked piece of baseball television is the MLB Strike Zone channel.
You probably have no idea what I am talking about. That proves the above point about it being the most overlooked piece of baseball television.
Put simply, MLB Strike Zone is a twice-weekly (usually Tuesdays and Fridays, but occasionally Wednesday as well) injection of nonstop baseball. Available on it’s own channel on most cable and satellite systems that have a sports package, Strike Zone is similar to MLB Tonight, only with little-to-none of the talking heads and with zero commercials. It is, in many ways, similar to the NFL RedZone channel: minimal interruption, maximum game action.
Watching yesterday, for example, I was able to see, amongst many other things: the David Phelps‘ meltdown against the Mets, Ryan Zimmerman‘s first and second home runs (I only missed the last one because I did some channel surfing), several good defensive plays, the Orioles’ comeback and the start of the late games. I would have, had I just chosen one or two games and switched between them, missed a lot. But with Strike Zone, I saw more-or-less everything of note that happened in baseball last night, live or with only a short delay.
And yet, nobody seems to talk about Strike Zone all that much. Perhaps because it is relatively new- it just started last year, after all. Or maybe it is because it doesn’t seem to receive much publicity: I’ve only seen maybe one or two commercials for it, and it seems like MLB Network itself is more focused on getting eyes on the games they are showing on the network on the nights that Strike Zone is on.
With luck, more will start paying attention to Strike Zone, and, with luck, it could even be expanded to more days of the week. So if you haven’t already, check it out.
A man who had a major impact in baseball passed today, someone who helped teams win championships and aided some of the biggest names in the sport.
That man was Lewis Yocum, and he was a orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports surgeries like Tommy John Surgery, in addition to serving as the team physician for the Angels. His passing has been commented upon by many in the baseball community, with some declaring that they owed him their careers.
Which leads to this: should surgeons and doctors be considered for the Hall of Fame?
Well, the answer is probably no. After all, they aren’t in this for fame, and to try and say what makes a “Hall of Fame Surgeon” is fraught with questions I don’t think can be answered.
But, let’s just consider for a second the impact that some of these surgeons have had on baseball.
Imagine what the world of baseball pitching looked like before Frank Jobe. Who’s Frank Jobe? He’s the guy who first performed ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction surgery, where a UCL is replaced by a tendon from elsewhere. You probably know it as Tommy John Surgery.
Before TJ Surgery, to have a dead arm was a death sentence for a career. Let that sink in and then remember the full implications of that statement:
Hmm… maybe surgeons should be in the Hall of Fame. At least Jobe should.
As much as I want to put Angel Pagan and his inside-the-park walk-off homer here, the MVP of Yesterday really belongs to Braves pitcher Mike Minor, who threw 7.1 scoreless innings (striking out 10 and giving up only 3 hits) and went 2-4 with a HR and 2 RBI at the plate.
MVP standings, as usual, below the jump:
434.2 milliseconds. That’s about how long it takes a 95 MPH fastball to reach home plate.
It’s only about 34 milliseconds more than what it takes some people blink. Only 134 more milliseconds than it takes the slowest of us to act on reflex based on visual stimuli. Only slightly less time than it takes for a satellite communications system to receive and transmit information.
In the time it took you to read this blog post up to this line, about 13 seconds had past if you are an average silent reader. In that time, you could have had 28 fastballs go past you with another one about a third of the way towards you.
That sound you hear is your mind getting blown. Or maybe it’s of a fastball hitting the catcher’s glove.
In a Ken Rosenthal article earlier today, a rival GM said that Dodgers Manager Don Mattingly is practically trying to get fired after his infamous ripping into of longtime RF Andre Ethier on Wednesday. However, despite that and the horrible 19-26 start for the Dodgers, he is expected to still be the skipper of Los Angeles when the sun rises on Friday.
Therefore, if we were to foolishly take the rival GM’s quotation literally, we can only guess that Mattingly has not done enough to get fired. Therefore, I have suggestions for him as he tries to escape the black hole of horrible the Dodgers’ season has been so far:
The Baseball Continuum 
