Tag Archives: baseball

Uganda, the LLWS, and a milestone for African baseball

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If there is one continent out there that can truly be said to be untouched by baseball, it is likely Africa. Baseball is, of course, popular in North America, Asia, and parts of South America. There are small professional leagues in Europe (mainly the Netherlands and Italy) and Australia. But Africa, birthplace of humanity, is in some ways the final frontier of baseball. Only South Africa has any sort of baseball tradition, playing in the first two World Baseball Classics and producing several minor leaguers over the years, most notably Gift Ngoepe, the first black South African to play professionally, who was featured in a Sports Illustrated article a few years ago. South Africa, however, is one of the most advanced nations in Africa, and has, since the end of Apartheid, been more-or-less a country that has avoided much of the strife and war that has plagued several African countries.

The same cannot be said for Uganda, which makes the accomplishment of the Ugandan Little League team all the more special.

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Ozzie Guillen is silent, Jose Reyes’ streak ends, and Eritrea comes into play in the 6th episode of “The Franchise”

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First off, let me show you the “Carlin Word” count for Wednesday’s episode of The Franchise for Ozzie Guillen:

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There weren’t any. The total number of times he’s used a swear word on The Franchise remains at 105. On average, Ozzie Guillen swears about once every two minutes.

So, there you go, people-only-here-to-read-about-Ozzie-Guillen-language. Now, everyone else, go after the jump to read my observations

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Further Thoughts on Melky Cabrera’s Steroid Suspens— HOLY COW, ANOTHER PERFECT GAME!

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Well, as I said yesterday, Melky Cabrera, having a career year that seemed too good to be true, apparently… was too good to be true. He was busted for PEDs- increases testosterone, to be more exact. His suspension severely hurts the Giants and casts a serious pall upon his season thus far, including his All-Star MVP.

But, lucky for Melky Cabrera, Felix Hernandez proceeded to throw a perfect game, totally distracting everybody from the fact that, well, Melky Cabrera had been busted for PEDs. And not only did he throw a perfect game, he struck out 12 doing it! That’s almost in Cain/Koufax territory! I mean, just look at what the AA Mariners in Jackson, Tennessee (including Felix Hernandez’s brother) did when they saw it. There is nothing that gets baseball to come together quite like a good perfect game. Perfect games to baseball fans are what NASA landings are to space geeks, what a 3-overtime playoff game is to NHL fans, and what the Winter Olympics are to fans of curling. It instantly gets our attention, all of our attention.

So, well, Melky Cabrera is one lucky person. Well, other than having his free agent stock plummeting and missing the rest of the season. But at least he wasn’t the biggest story of the day. So, uh, good for him.

The Players v. Bobby Valentine (AKA The Palace Hotel Mutiny)

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Baseball is full of stories of teams that turned on their managers. In the early 1950s, for example, the St. Louis Browns were so happy that Rogers Hornsby had been fired that they gave Bill Veeck a trophy in appreciation (whether they actually did or if it was another Veeckian publicity stunt is up for debate). But rarely have there been revolts quite as slow-motion and public as the one unfolding in Boston, which is worthy of a comedy movie, a sort of reverse-Major League in which a team of All-Stars and colorful characters goes below even lowered expectations. Oh, and instead of Lou Brown, this team is managed by Bobby Valentine.

Although this clubhouse drama has been going on all year, it has once again been burst into the forefront thanks to a report by Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports that revealed that several major Red Sox players blasted Valentine during a meeting with club officials on July 26 at New York’s Palace Hotel (or maybe it was just some meetings about the overall poor performance of the club, but it seems like the accounts of it being a player revolt outnumber those accounts). This post has been created to summarize the details and provide levity to such a spectacle. Much of the information in this posting can be found in Passan’s tour de force.

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Getting a lay of who is still in it, who isn’t, and who could get back into it

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Well, with the Olympics now over, it’s time to return to 100% baseball mode. Okay, 97% baseball mode. You never know when I might decide to go off on a tangent about football or the movies or something.

But right now, all baseball. With the season about to enter it’s last month-and-a-half of madness, it’s time to figure out where all the teams are and who, exactly, still has a shot at reaching the playoffs. With the addition of the second Wild Card, this means more teams than previous years have at least an outside shot at the postseason. Of course, that doesn’t mean every team has an outside shot. So, here are how every team can be classified, in rough order of least to most chance of reaching the playoffs.

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Baseball Public Service Announcement: Manny Machado

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We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog for a special Baseball Public Service Announcement to inform you of Manny Machado of the Baltimore Orioles, who hit two home runs in just his second MLB game. That, by the way, made the 20-year-old the youngest person to ever have a two-homer game in either his first or second game.

Go after the jump for more.

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Great Baseball Lies: Old replica uniforms with names on the back (and other inaccuracies)

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Quick: What’s wrong with the picture below?

Okay, how about this?

The answer is: Neither of them are correct. In fact, they both have anachronisms in them: the Ruth jersey, for example, has the famous “NY” logo on the jersey itself, something that they didn’t do until 1936, by which point Ruth was retired.

But the biggest lie on these replica jerseys: they have names on the back. To the casual fan, perhaps, this is not anything out of the ordinary. After all, teams have been having the names of the players on the back of their uniforms forever, right?

They’d be wrong. In fact, the first time any MLB team had names on the back of the uniform was in 1960, when the White Sox started doing it.

So, in other words, Babe Ruth never wore a Yankees’ jersey with his name on the back (no Yankees, not even those of the present day, have their names on the back, with the exception of some recent batting practice uniforms). Ted Williams never had his name on the back. And, quite frankly, if you don’t know immediately that a “3” on the back of a Yankees uniform means Ruth and/or a “9” on a Red Sox uniform means Ted Williams, perhaps you should be paying more attention the history.

So, for giving people a false image of baseball history and insulting the intelligence of devoted baseball fans, I hereby declare that having names on the back of retro uniforms is one of the Great Baseball Lies.

Baseball’s children

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In a bid to combine their powers and increase the chances of returning to the Olympics, baseball and softball’s international federations (the equivalent to soccer’s FIFA or basketball’s FIBA) recently decided to merge. How well this will or won’t work, as well as what effect this might have on things like women’s baseball or men’s softball, remains to be seen. However, it does give a good excuse to look at some of the “children” born from baseball. See after the jump.

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What type of Olympians would MLB stars be?

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Getting into the Olympic spirit, the folks across the pond at the BBC have created a neat little website that lets you enter your height and weight and it then tells you which Olympian is similar to you. Well, in theory, anyway. I’m sure their bodies are made up of way more muscle than the average Joe. I mean, I certainly am not built like a weightlifter, but it said I’m most similar to one.

However, let’s do a far better use of this already useless technology: find out what type of Olympic sport baseball players would play. Now, as I said, there is a difference between having the same height and weight as somebody and actually having the same type of body and abilities as them, but in general some things hold true: somebody who is smaller is more likely to be a gymnast or a weightlifter, while somebody tall is more likely to be playing hoops.

So, let’s get down to business:

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RETRACTION- The Orioles are not dead

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On July 17, I declared that the Orioles’ playoff hopes were dead.

However, since then, the Orioles have somewhat stabilized, and are now 6.5 games out of 1st in the AL East and only 1.5 out of a Wild Card spot. Therefore, as I thought they would drop completely off the map by the end of July as they struggled heavily, I must retract my previous statement: the Orioles are alive.
At least for now. They continue to be playing far better than their run differential suggest (they’d be 46-59 if their record reflected their run differential!), and, while they didn’t make any moves at the deadline and have had Jim Thome and Brian Roberts go on the DL, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they will at least somewhat remain in it so long as they can continue defying the gravity of their run differential problem. They are winning close games but losing blowouts.

It will, in the end, all come down to how they play against their AL East rivals. And in MLB’s toughest division, I’m wary of making predictions.