Tag Archives: baseball

Winter Meetings Tweets of the Day (December 11, 2014)

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Throughout the 2014 Winter Meetings, I’ll be showcasing the best tweets. Here are yesterday’s.

Yesterday was the last day of the Winter Meetings. Stuff happened.

For example, Mat Latos was traded to the Marlins, but along the way his wife nearly had a nervous breakdown:

https://twitter.com/DallasLatos/status/543067387395059712

https://twitter.com/DallasLatos/status/543070684373868544

https://twitter.com/DallasLatos/status/543073000929898496

https://twitter.com/DallasLatos/status/543075589360730113

https://twitter.com/DallasLatos/status/543086304645623809

Meanwhile, the many deals on the hot stove left some dazed, confused and at times sarcastically passive-aggressive:

https://twitter.com/clairbearattack/status/543090393403760640

The trade of Yoennis Cespedes, of course, gave those goofballs at the BBQ some material:

But, let us finish with the true meaning of season: Hank the Brewers Dog dressed as Santa.

https://twitter.com/JATayler/status/543084669827575808

Adorable.

Winter Meetings Tweets of the Day (December 10, 2014)

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Throughout the 2014 Winter Meetings, I’ll be showcasing the best tweets. Here are yesterday’s.

 

The Cubs’ many actions have led to many noting that Back To The Future II predicted they would win the 2015 World Series. Leading Jonah Keri to make this observation:

Confusion reigns at times during the Winter Meetings:

The Dodgers made their presence known again, with a Dee Gordon deal with the Marlins. Among those they got back is a rather unfortunately named infielder:

The best quote of the Meetings was given:

The Astros are being optimistic:

And those loveable goofballs at the BBQ hit the nail on the head:

Today is the final day of the Winter Meetings, and it’s already been busy. Come back tomorrow.

Winter Meetings Tweets of the Day (December 9, 2014): Waiting for Lester

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Throughout the 2014 Winter Meetings, I’ll be showcasing the best tweets. Here are yesterday’s.

Yesterday was about waiting for Jon Lester:

…And that’s just other people! I was on the story ALL DAY under the hashtag #HasLesterSignedYet:

But then… this morning:

Yes, Jon Lester is signed! And he’s a Cub!

 

Now maybe something else can happen today since he’s no longer holding up the entire free agent market.

Winter Meetings 2014 Tweets of the Day (December 8, 2014)

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Throughout the 2014 Winter Meetings, I’ll be showcasing the best tweets. Here are yesterday’s.

The Veterans’ Committee didn’t elect anyone. This was an outrage that Old Hoss Radbourn would not let stand… until he thought about it a little:

Meanwhile, the entire proceedings are in some ways being held up by the fact that everyone is waiting to see where Jon Lester goes, and also how much he gets. Problem is, the news on him. It’s been Lester, Lester, Lester. So much, in fact, that I think poor “Yakyu Night Owl” may have gotten a bit confused (or, more likely, he was just making a joke about the Lester-thon):

Meanwhile, the Athletics are getting rid of everybody in one of those firesales that Billy Beane has every few years. It continued yesterday, with Brandon Moss and (although not yet official) Jeff Samardzija leaving town. These are like Marlins firesales, only slightly less aggravating for baseball in general and the Athletics always end up back in the playoffs in about two or three years anyway. Still, Jessica Kleinschmidt had a warning for all fans of the Athletics:

Oh, and Marc Normandin poked fun at one of the great off-season cliches: “Kicking the Tires”:

 

Come back tomorrow to see Tuesday’s best Winter Meetings tweets.

Famous For Something Else: Herman Wedemeyer (College Football HOFer and ‘Hawaii Five-O” Actor)

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Herman Wedemeyer was a All-American football player at St. Mary’s College and would later go on to be elected to College Football’s Hall of Fame. He also played two years of professional football and was a politician in his native Hawaii- where he also dabbled in acting, appearing as “Duke” Lukela in 143 episodes of the original Hawaii Five-O.

However, he also had a brief baseball career, playing in 15 games in 1950 for Sal Lake City in the Pioneer League, where he played alongside future MLB player Mike Baxes and also Wally Yonamine, who would be the first American to play in Japan after WWII.

Here are his stats:

Year Age AgeDif Tm Lg Lev G AB H 2B 3B HR BA SLG TB
1950 26 2.8 Salt Lake City PION C 15 48 12 0 1 0 .250 .292 14
1 Season 15 48 12 0 1 0 .250 .292 14
Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 12/6/2014.

THIS YEAR’S MYSTERY TEAM WILL BE THE ███████

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Next week, the Winter Meetings begin in Orlando San Diego. And while we no doubt will see funny images on MLB Network like Kevin Millar hanging out with Goofy at the Zoo and Brian Kenny trying to explain to Captain Jack Sparrow the Chicken why the win stat must be sent to Davey Jones’ locker  the slaughter, ultimately, it will be about one team. What team is that? Why, it’s the ██████████████!

Here’s how it will happen, of course:

The ██████████████, after all, will no doubt be the ones that will be rumored to be signing ███████████ on the first day, and the team that will be behind the massive three-team trade involving ██████████████████, █████████████, and ██████████████, which will feature ███████ and top prospect ███████, amongst others. Everybody will think the deal is nuts, but some will praise the ███████████’s GM, █████ ██████████, for his initiative and brilliant thinking. Others will call for his firing.

Meanwhile, the ██████████████’s current star, ███████ ███████, will then make a funny comment on Twitter about how he fell asleep in his █████████ home a few hours ago and is honestly wondering if he missed anything, and then make a second comment saying that this is the first time he heard about the ███████████ trade. It’ll be retweeted by everyone and become a meme, with people talking about how “█████████ is sleeping, make sure you do your deals now” or what-not. Everyone will be sick of it within 48 hours and it will then be resigned to the dustbin of baseball memes.

Then, however, a lull will fall upon Orlando San Diego for most of the second day. Instagrams of Joe Maddon walking around EPCOT SeaWorld and Alex Rodriguez showing up for reasons beyond mortal minds will fill the void while Ken Rosenthal is forced to tell Twitter people that A) he is taller enough to ride Space Mountain than a panda bear so stop asking and B) he’s too busy to go to Disney World the San Diego Zoo right now. But then, the ██████████████ will be rumored to have been talking to Scott Boras. But about who? The speculation will go throughout the day, until finally, we hear that █████████ has signed a deal! Except, it’ll turn out that that report is actually a fake account, and that ██████████ is actually going to somebody completely different.

Overnight, people will start talking about how lots of pizza is arriving at the ██████████████’s suite, and wonder whether this is proof that ██████████████ will be signing ████████. Nothing will really materialize, but, hey, it’ll kill time.

Then, later on, the ██████████████ will make that one final splash, signing ██████████. People will instantly declare them to be World Series favorites…

….and then, in 2015, they’ll miss the playoffs.

Whoops. Well, at least the ██████████████ will always have their great 2014-2015 offseason to remember.

(This article was originally published last year– hence the crossed-off parts)

Bizarre Baseball Culture: “CHALLENGE OF THE HEADLESS BASEBALL TEAM!”

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In Bizarre Baseball Culture, I take a look at some of the more unusual places where baseball has reared it’s head in pop culture and fiction.

This is gonna be fun. Today, I take my first look at a quintessential part of Bizarre Baseball Culture: “Strange Sports Stories”. A short-lived DC Comics anthology banner that popped up a few times during the 1960s and 1970s- at one point even having it’s own book for six issues- it’s title told you everything you have to know about them: they were sports stories that were strange. Sometimes they would be sports mixed with magic. Other times it would be sports mixed with science fiction. No matter what, though, they were most definitely bizarre. And, so, by definition, all baseball installments of “Strange Sports Stories” are going to be Bizarre Baseball Culture.

And we’ll begin with the very first “Strange Sports Stories” story, from waaaay back in December 1962 or January 1963 (it’s cover date was January, but comics often come out before the cover date, so it likely was already out in December- if not even earlier, as the GCD says it was on stands in late October), in The Brave and The Bold #45, the first “Strange Sports Stories” installment ever: “CHALLENGE OF THE HEADLESS BASEBALL TEAM!”

Note that this isn't an actual picture of my cover- my cover is in sort of crummy shape- the book is over 50 years old, after all.

Note that this isn’t an actual picture of my cover- my cover is in sort of crummy shape- the book is over 50 years old, after all.

Let’s go below the jump for more.

Continue reading →

Josh Donaldson is the best player most people aren’t familiar with

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In case you missed it, Josh Donaldson was traded from the Athletics to the Blue Jays in exchange for Brett Lawrie and prospects Kendall Graveman, Sean Nolin and Franklin Barreto. The wise among us immediately saw this as a great deal for the Blue Jays, at least in the short-term, and a puzzling one for the Athletics, at least in the short-term.

Then there were others who disagreed with these assessments. “Orioles Uncensored” perhaps had a good response to them:

While no doubt the people @OsUncensored was speaking to may have been Orioles fans who remember the Donaldson/Manny Machado spat of last year, the fact is that many people probably don’t truly understand how good a player Donaldson is. It’s not their fault, after all, Donaldson is a relative newcomer (he’s only played 405 career games) and has played his career in Oakland. His traditional stats aren’t too flashy (his career BA is .268), and last year was his first time as an All-Star.

So here’s a bit of a primer. Donaldson is a 28-year-old 3B (although he has played C in the past) from Florida, although he grew up and went to both High School and College (Auburn) in Alabama. He didn’t grab hold permanently in the majors until 2012, his age 26 season. He didn’t become the type of player who gets into headlines for being traded, though, until his sophomore season in 2013. He hit .301/.384/.499, and his WAR was second-best in the AL, behind only Mike Trout. While his averages were down in 2014, he still was the 2nd best in WAR in the AL, and he had the third best WAR overall across the past two seasons, behind only Trout and Andrew McCutchen. Why? Because WAR doesn’t just hitting- Donaldson is a spectacular fielder, winning the 2014 Fielding Bible Award (a more sabermetric version of the Gold Glove) while being credited with saving more than 30 runs since 2012. That, along with his hitting, make him one of the best 3B in the game.

And those offensive numbers that seem a bit low, by the way, will likely grow. He is now going from O.Co Coliseum- an infamous pitcher’s park- to Rogers Centre, where extra-base hits are plentiful and where the park factors are more favorable for the hitter.

So, that’s who Josh Donaldson is.

Bizarre Baseball Culture: True Comics #78 has a Stan Musial Biography

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In Bizarre Baseball Culture, I take a look at some of the more unusual places where baseball has reared it’s head in pop culture and fiction.

A shorter one today, as we go back to bio-comics, this time looking at Stan Musial. Now, I’ve done a bio-comic before, but this one is different because it’s from a different era- the Golden Age of Comics! To be more specific, it’s from True Comics #78, in August 1949, from “Parents Magazine”. This is from the late Golden Age, a time where super-hero comics were in a low period and were being replaced by crime, horror and romance comics, no doubt leading to good wholesome fun like this to held up as being the last bastions of innocent virtue in comics.

But I digress. Here’s the part of the comic with Stan on it:

Screen Shot 2014-11-16 at 12.01.23 PM

You can see it here, as it is in the Public Domain. Go below the jump for more:

Continue reading →

Baseball and Softball will probably be at the 2020 Olympics

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Guess what, folks? If a proposal passes next month, baseball and softball will be back in the Olympics, at least occasionally. The proposal, called Agenda 2020, is meant to try and solve some of the big problems facing the IOC, such as the fact that the increasing cost of hosting has made many global cities scared of hosting. For example, the 2022 Winter Games have had all but two candidates more-or-less drop out of the running because of local backlash. And the two candidates that are left are Almaty, Kazakhstan and Beijing, who don’t have to care about public opinion and which are hardly the dropped-out winter wonderlands of Oslo or Stockholm that basically everybody outside of Kazakh and Chinese politicians would prefer.

The agenda includes, for example, allowing joint bids or at least allowing for certain events to be held elsewhere, perhaps even in other countries. But the big thing for baseball and softball in this is this part of the proposal, according to Reuters:

Sports will also not wait seven years from approval to their Olympic first appearance, and instead could be brought in for just one Olympics to maximize the Games’ reach and attraction.

 

In essence, it would allow sports to be added to the Olympics on a temporary basis if it would allow the Olympics to be more desirable in the host country. Now, presumably the sports added on temporary basis still would have to be pretty popular internationally (don’t go expecting to see NFL players marching in the opening ceremonies the next time the Olympics come to the USA, for example), but baseball and softball definitely fit the bill, and the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Committee has been heavily calling for them in 2020. So… expect baseball in the 2020 Olympics, and probably anytime in the future where the Olympics are in America, Japan, Korea, etc.