Baseball Toaster was unplugged on February 4, 2009.
It is unseasonably warm but overcast this morning in New York. I saw a gang of Manhattan college kids wearing Eli Manning jerseys trooping to the subway this morning, on their way down to the parade. When I got off the train in midtown, more Giants fans--a father taking his young son over to Rockefeller Center, a group of high schoolers cutting school. Everybody likes a parade, right?
Not for nothing, but I'm not a fan of the Yankeeography series--I find the shows slick at best and maudlin at worst--but the box set is worth checking out for the bonus dvds, which feature player highlights. The best part of these highlights is that most of them are not cut-up like the ones we generally see on TV. In many cases, they'll show an entire at-bat sequence, pitch-by-pitch, in real time. The bonus clips are not thorough, and concentrate on home runs (I would have loved to see a fielding compilation for Willie Randolph), but still, it is refreshing to see baseball clips that don't rush by you like a slam dunk. I wish there was more of that. Plus, I'd love it if they did a spin-off Yankeeography show, one where they would honor guys like Roy White and Joe Gordon.
Finally, Roger Clemens visits Washington today. Pete Abraham summed up my feelings about this nonsense last week in a rant over on his blog.
Didn't Clemens bean Piazza with his official "key to the city" or something like that? Keyed his car?
Copy and paste the link below:
http://tinyurl.com/3y9dvz
MLB used to do it, I don't know why they stopped. Probably because there wasn't an interest in it?
At any rate, hopefully I'll be able to purchase some of these baseball related box sets that I hear so much about...
Uh, pardon me, uhh, as I come back
As I did it yo I heard you beg your pardon
When I travel to the sun I roll with the squadron
On another note - all this talk of Eli finally getting it together and this is why you don't judge a young quarterback too early, etc, etc - made me think of some of the young(ish) Yankee pitchers and perhaps young pitchers in general. When do you know someone sucks? Do we know for sure Igawa, for example, sucks?
I'm not sure what Igawa's early career projections were, but Cashman wasn't expecting him to be more than a middle rotation pitcher in the AL. Igawa probably doesn't suck, but he's probably not much better than mediocre. Nobody's expecting him to lead his team to a championship. It was Eli's job description.
Your point about people expecting too much too soon from athletes in general is still a good one.
offtopic - how long until Giselle dumps Tom Brady and starts dating, you know, a winner?
Offtopic - To be fair to Brady, he hasn't won a Super Bowl since before he and Giselle were an item, so I don't think he'll be dumped anytime soon.
And there are some Pats cheerleaders who might give Giselle a run in the looks department, so I think he'd be OK even if she moved on.
But we've been known to do the impossible like Broadway Joe
and yeah, no shortage of all sorts of love for Brady. A few women I work with think he's slumming it with Giselle and could do better. Imagine that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/sports/baseball/09larsen.html
Problem is that the NBC video is owned by a collector and rarely seen. MLB tried to buy one of the amateur videos last summer but apparently didn't offer enough. The article doesn't say what the story is on the other guy's video.
http://tinyurl.com/2kzy5t
The Specter thing is worse than it looks on its face, too. Specter's #2 leading campaign contributor is Comcast. And his #1 contributor is a PAC set up by a law firm that represents Comcast. To my mind, that changes the story from absurd to disgusting. On the bright side, this info is now in Specter's Wikipedia entry, so maybe he'll experience some fallout.
Oh, and Brady: the guy did march his team down the field for the go-ahead touchdown with 2:40 to play. I don't think his rep is much tarnished by this loss, even though he might take it harder than anybody. He's Jeteresque, if I may dare to say so here...
The battle for the 13th player spot is shaping up to be an interesting one. Assuming that Duncan is the 12th man, the Yankees are looking at Ensberg, Jason Lane, Chris Woodward, and now possibly Mench for that 13th spot. Like Ensberg, Mench has a history of hitting left-handers. My preference would be 1) Ensberg 2) Mench 3) Woodward and 4) Lane. If any of frontline players gets hurt (why am I thinking of Giambi?), they could then carry two of those players.
Native Tongues FTW!
god, I am so glad football season is over. how many days till pitchers/catchers? And anyone want to send me some 2008 Season Preview magazines? Last year the Sporting News issue cost US$24 equivalent here in Japan...
Would he gamble purjury charges on this?
Does he figure that if McNamee has no tangible evidence, that it is decided in his favor?
Would he gamble jail time that there is no evidence anywhere?
Is Roger innocent?
He almost got impeached for lying about something as criminal as getting a blowjob.
Now Clemens is accused of doing something that was/is as common in baseball as speeding is on the highway.
Is Roger pulling a Clinton?
I love Yankeeographies by the way. I also love that the Yankee Classics only exhibit games in which the Bronx Bombers reign supreme. I've never quite gotten the criticism of that policy. Why on earth would a network that caters to Yankee fans air a game in which the Yankees lose? Is the point to have your entire audience turn off their sets all at once?
I'm just hoping McNamee doesn't show up with a cigar.
Yes, the stakes are now very large, same as for Barry and for Tejada. The stained dress line is painfully funny, william.
It seems, Roger is relying on a stand-off with McNamee and Pettitte having nothing but hearsay to offer on Roger's possible drug use (which is likely). There will be no cancelled cheques here, we can be pretty sure of it, simply because if there HAD been, the strategy would HAVE to be different.
The x-factor may be 'correctness', the optics if the justice system goes after a black star and a Latino star for perjury and backs off the white star... this, of course, should be utterly and massively beside the point, but we live in the world we live in.
Speaking of the '01 Serious . . . the dazed feeling of shock - still present now 3 days later - that I've seen on so many Pats fans reminds me of how I felt after Game 7 in 2001. That the events that caused that shock, in both cases, occurred late on a Sunday night in Arizona, is a little too eerily similar for me.
34 The only criticism I have is that I wish they had more variety. Of course, I don't know who has the rights to the games, so that could be the issue.
Also, while Jeter has Arod as his more stats/no rings rival, Brady lost his when Peyton Manning won Super Bowl XLI.
I have a pretty extensive collection of Classic Games, so what I would love to see are replays of more mundane games. A random regular season tilt with Scooter and Bill White behind the mike, for example, would be a very nice treat.
I wouldn't mind seeing games like Tartabull's 9 RBI game, or Niekro's 300th win, for instance.
Murcer, Thurman's best friend, won it with a HR and a clutch single late in the game.
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