Tag Archives: baseball

How long can the Orioles keep this up?

Posted on by
1

The Orioles won again last night. In 15 innings, they defeated the Royals, rallying in the 9th to tie the game and then taking the lead for good with a Adam Jones homer in the top of the 15th. With the victory, the Orioles kept pace with the Tampa Bay Rays (who they are tied with), and extended their lead over the Yankees, who are now 3.5 games back. So we must ask: how are they doing this, and can they keep this up?

Maybe it’s the return of the classic logo…

One thing that really is standing out with the 2012 Orioles is how well the no-name pitchers are doing. Most of the All-Stars the Orioles have had since the retirement of Cal Ripken have generally been hitters: Miguel Tejada, Melvin Mora, Brian Roberts, Nick Markakis, Adam Jones, Matt Wieters, etc. The only exceptions have been B.J. Ryan in 2005 (who flamed out after a few years in Toronto in the late aughts)  and George Sherrill in 2008 (he now pitches for the Mariners), although Erik Bedard (who was slyly traded for Jones, Sherrill and others in 2009) could probably have been said to have been snubbed on at least one occasion. That likely will remain true this year: the Orioles will probably see Wieters (who should probably start) and Adam Jones make the All-Star Game this year if they keep it up. But it will be ignoring the no-name pitchers that are keeping them in the race this late in the season.

Take their bullpen. It is spectacular, and I, like most people, can’t name a single one of them without looking it up. Even I, who prides myself on trying to be at least vaguely familiar with everybody in baseball, is just that with the Orioles: vaguely familiar. I recognize the names when I see them, but if I were vacationing down in Maryland and ran into one of them in the Inner Harbor, I wouldn’t be saying “Oh, you’re Jim Johnson!” I would probably instead say: “Look where you’re going!”

And yet, Johnson is having a brilliant year. He has a 0.51 ERA and he leads the league in saves. And the rest of the bullpen has been doing great:

-Pedro Strop, who had been given to the Orioles as a player-to-be-named-later from the Rangers, has a 1.29 ERA in 21 innings.

-Veteran reliever Luis Ayala is the holder of 1.86 ERA and, along with Johnson, Strop and Darren O’Day, is one of four O’s pitchers with WHIPs (Walks and Hits per Innings Pitched) under one.

-Speaking of O’Day, he has the lowest WHIP of anybody in the Baltimore ‘pen: 0.873. Like Strop, he’s a cast-off from the Rangers: the Orioles picked him up off of waivers.

By comparison, the Baltimore rotation hasn’t been as good, especially at the top. Tommy Hunter (another Texas cast-off, arriving to Baltimore along with the immortal Chris Davis last season in exchange for Koji Uehara) is 2-2 with a 4.78 ERA. Jake Arrieta, arguably the best homegrown starter in the rotation, has also struggled, with a 5.21 ERA and a 2-4 W-L record. It leads one to wonder why Buck Showalter hasn’t promoted the two success stories in the rotation up a bit. Taiwanese import (via Japan) Wei-Yin Chen has yet to lose a game, and has a 2.45 ERA. Jason Hammel, a serviceable-but-unremarkable starter the last few years, is 4-1 with a 2.68 ERA.

In my eyes, the only chance the Orioles have of staying in the race in the long run is having the pitching hold up. This seems obvious, but it is true. No matter how well the Orioles hit, they cannot survive the apocalyptic struggle that is the AL East without pitching that can silence the Rays, Yankees, Blue Jays and Red Sox.

Whether they can is up for debate. Chen, for example, is still new to the majors, so it’s possible that the hitters just might not be used to facing him yet. Eventually, they will figure him out, and then, like every other pitcher, Chen will have to make more adjustments.

But if the Orioles keep this up- unlike so many of the previous years where they have teased the world with hot starts- the people who may need to adjust are the rest of the AL East, which somehow now finds itself even stronger.

Correct Predictions in History: Retractable Roofs

Posted on by
Reply

In the past week (the first in the Continuum’s history), I’ve brought predictions of yesteryear about how Kiko Garcia was going to be the Orioles’ shortstop of the ’80s and how bizarre the 2044 baseball season would be. So, to balance out the books a bit, here’s a article from the July 1945 issue of Baseball Digest:

Yes, friends, not only did Fred Russell of the Nashville Banner think that one day baseball defeat the “weather angle”, he thought that it would be possible to do it with a retractable roof. While Russell’s “apparatus” (as you can read about if you head to the Google Books link) is one of canvas (similar to how the Roman Colosseum had canvas to shade some of it’s seats centuries ago), he is more or less correct in his prediction that ball stadiums would be built to hold games despite the weather. However, he was wrong in how long it would take: it wouldn’t be until 1989 that a baseball team played in a stadium with a fully functional retractable roof (Toronto), although the Expos’ tried in Olympic Stadium (the “retractable” part of it never worked).

Why baseball is the best sport to follow on a day-by-day basis

Posted on by
Reply

Baseball’s long season is one of it’s greatest strengths and one of it’s greatest weaknesses. While football long ago has been able to surpass baseball in casual followers thanks to the fact you only have to pay attention two or three days a week, baseball is a day-by-day grind. This also leads to some… interesting things happening.
Take yesterday, for example:

-Brett Lawrie threw his helmet towards umpire Bill Miller and got him on the bounce, for which he will almost certainly be suspended.

-Stephen Strasburg somehow got Icy-Hot in his jock strap. My guess: somebody was trying to haze a rookie and grabbed the wrong jock strap.

-There was the whole thing with David Wright getting pulled so that he wouldn’t get hit as part of the unwritten rules.

-The Angels fired hitting coach Mickey Hatcher.

-The Orioles beat the Yankees and remain tied for first place. Although as a article yesterday at Grantland points out, they’ve been teasing everyone basically the whole decade.

-Josh Beckett, for one day at least, silenced the boo-birds.

And it is like that, day after day, week after week, month after month, from April to October. There is always something happening. Sometimes those somethings are trivial, some times they are important, but they always are happening.

Rockets Rigby’s baseball career was only the beginning…

Posted on by
Reply

Okay, so out of curiosity, I did some googling as to whether anybody else had written about the bad-but-interesting tale of Rockets Rigby and baseball in the year 2044. They hadn’t. At least, not as of this morning.

I did, however, find a bibliography for Mr. Jim Moore, and listed is a story entitled “The Good New Days” from Super Sports in March 1953. The site notes that it is a Rockets Rigby story about “21st century football”.

Wait, there were more Rockets Rigby stories, and he was a multi-sport athlete? My far-overdone analysis of “Rockets on the Mound” is already the most popular post in the Continuum’s admittedly young history, so obviously there is some interest in it. So, to paraphrase Andy Samberg as Nicholas Cage: “HOW AM I NOT BLOGGING ABOUT THESE STORIES!?!?”

The reason, of course, is that they aren’t available online like “Rockets on the Mound” is. Or are they? If you know where more of Jim Moore’s sci-fi sports stories can be found, let me know.

Great Bats in History

Posted on by
Reply

Josh Hamilton’s bat is dead.

No, I don’t mean his hitting ability, I mean his bat. Literally. It cracked a bit over the weekend. But this was no ordinary bat. It will go down in history as one of the great bats of baseball lore. It hit eight home runs, including four in a game, during one of the greatest weeks in hitting history. Such was it’s reputation that, before being sent to Cooperstown, the Rangers let people pay $5 (to charity) to pose with it on Monday. 

A few things about the bat:

-It’s a H359 Louisville Slugger. It was made to Hamilton’s specifications after he signed an exclusive deal to use the company’s bats. It’s made of M9 maple and is 35 inches long.

-Befitting Hamilton, who credits his religion with helping him defeat the substance abuse that nearly killed him, he has a Bible notation emblazoned upon his bats: Jeremiah 29:11. I looked that up, and here it is-

“For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”

So now that we know of this great baseball bat, what about some of the other great baseball bats in history? Read on to find out about some of them.

Continue reading →

Baseball in the Year 2044: A look at “Rockets on the Mound”

Posted on by
22

The internet is a great place. Really, it is. And one of the reasons it is great is that you can find practically anything on it. Take, for example, short stories. There are countless stories that are in the public domain, either because they are really old, or because nobody bothered to renew the copyrights on things from cheap pulp publications. It’s from one of those that “Rockets on the Mound” comes from. First printed in 1954 in Super Sports magazine, and written by one Jim Moore, it is the tale of a baseball team in 2044 and it’s star, Rockets Rigby, who is in a horrible hit-and-run flying car accident. Seriously.

But before all of that, check out this picture that goes with it:

First, let’s note the field itself. It has a lot of space, almost circular in appearance. I mean, look at all of those players practicing to the left of the diamond, where they are conducting warmups as the umpires descend with their jet-packs from the stratojet. As this huge amount of foul territory can show, Moore was foreseeing the rise of multi-use facilities, and the Oakland Coliseum in particular. Either that, or whoever was hired to do this image hadn’t seen a baseball field in their lives. Also notice how the fans are dressed. Apparently, in the 2040s, women will all wear pointed witches’ hats and gigantic collars, while all of the men will wear space-cadet helmets. Nobody wears plain-old baseball caps, nor even the hats men wore in public before President Kennedy made them go out of style. Also, the “stratojet” used to bring the umpires in seems to be powered by a rocket and has swept wings. An F-16 flyover it isn’t…

Anyway, a few things to keep in mind before we start:

Continue reading →

East Coast Bias and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball Part 3: Who gets ignored

Posted on by
1

As noted yesterday and the day before, ESPN does indeed have East Coast teams on Sunday Night Baseball more than many teams from other areas. However, it isn’t because ESPN wants teams closer to Bristol, it’s just that teams on the East Coast tend to do well both on the field and in the ratings, so it makes sense to schedule them more.

That said, there are some teams that end up getting the short end of the stick because of this. These are some of those teams.

Continue reading →

East Coast Bias and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball, Part 2

Posted on by
2

As we saw yesterday, ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball does, in general, feature more eastern teams than teams in other parts of the country.

But, as I said yesterday, that isn’t telling the whole story. Yes, there is an East Coast Bias in appearances, but that bias is not necessarily geographical so much as it is based on two factors: finding the best stories (which are usually the best teams), and getting the most eyeballs watching the games. In fact, at one point a VP of Programming and Acquisitions at ESPN even said as much.

Continue reading →

Texas + Baltimore= Wackiness

Posted on by
1

On May 10, 1972, the Texas Rangers (formerly the Washington Senators) faced the Baltimore Orioles for the first time. The game was a tight pitching duel between Dave McNally and Pete Broberg, who both went the distance. In a strange circumstance, the Orioles would win when, in the bottom of the ninth, Merv Rettenmund would score on a error by Rangers’ catcher Ken Suarez. In other words, not a single earned run was scored in the 1-0 Orioles victory.

This set the tone for the future of the two most bizarrely matched teams in baseball. When the Red Sox and Yankees face off, the games go forever. When the Orioles and Rangers face each other, games go to the Twilight Zone. So after that first game, where no earned runs were scored, here are some notable occurrences since then:

Interestingly enough, the weirdness magnet that is Texas-Baltimore did not start when the Rangers moved their from DC. On Sept. 12, 1962, Senators pitcher Tom Cheney went 16 innings and had a record 21 strikeouts.

Know of any other weird Texas-Baltimore games? Let me know.

Thoughts on Andy Pettitte’s Upcoming Return

Posted on by
2

So, Andy Pettitte is coming back to the majors, and will start for the Yankees this coming weekend. It’s been a tough few weeks for Pettitte, having to testify in the Roger Clemens trial while doing his warm-up starts for the various minor league affiliates of the Yankees. Everywhere he’s gone, though, he’s been treated like royalty. Take his start on May 6 in Rochester, where the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees have been playing most of their games this season as their stadium back in Pennsylvania undergoes major renovations.

I was at that game- I have the sunburn to prove it- and it was a packed house to see the all-time leader in playoff wins. I doubt I was the only person who was taking photos of his delivery as he warmed up before the first inning.

Andy Pettitte warming up before his game against the Pawtucket Red Sox on May 6, 2012. Photo by Dan Glickman.

However, it wasn’t the best of days for Pettitte. He went five innings, gave up three earned runs (five runs total), eight hits and two walks during his 92 pitch outing. He took the loss, and at one point even walked in a run with the bases loaded. However, while watching the game, I couldn’t help but get the feeling that he wasn’t entirely at fault, and that his performance on Sunday was not necessarily a indication of future success or failure.

For one thing, the fielding behind him was atrocious. The first run the PawSox scored, for example, was unearned, as the first basemen for Scranton dropped an easy pop-fly in foul territory (little known rule: an error in foul territory makes the resulting at-bat an unearned run). Brandon Laird was also extremely shaky at third, making an error and having some balls get by him that Alex Rodriguez probably would have gotten. Pettitte also managed to strike out five and do one of his patented pick-off moves, showing that he, at least against AAA competition, still has his stuff.

But, of course, AAA is just that, AAA. Facing the Boston Red Sox (even with how their season is going) is orders of magnitude more difficult than facing the Pawtucket Red Sox. He was able to escape potentially “big” innings thanks to his fastball and off-speed pitches, but that won’t work as often in the bigs.

But, well, the Yankees have been having trouble in the rotation, so what do they have to lose?  Pettitte will at least be an improvement over Freddy Garcia and/or David Phelps. If not, the panic in the Bronx will increase.