Sports Writing

That Adam Stern inside-the-parker was amazing. As was the Tek grand slam. And as someone on SoSH points out, the Sox players’ (Ortiz, Tek, Stern) total line in the World Baseball Classic: .750 / .786 / 2.667 for an incredible 3.452 OPS. Funniest shot was when they cut to Stern a few minutes later and he still looked breathless. And then on the MLB.tv feed they kept the studio sound on in between innings, and the announcers were talking about the mercy rule (“well, they haven’t got the 10 runs”)

Anyway, Singapore Sox Fan will decamp to New York for the whole of next week, catching up with old friends from college, that sort of thing - so service will be intermittent. Y’all be good now.

Barry Bonds would’ve been a Hall of Famer if he even had average seasons post-1998. And now… the Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams story does look damning, I must say.

Meanwhile, Pedro got married? I missed that too. I remember when Pedro first moved to the Mets, the NY Times had an article describing his life in the Dominican Republic (I wrote about it way back then), and it mentioned his girlfriend, and I was surprised - as Sam notes, it was strange to even think of Pedro as being anything but self-contained.

RIP Kirby. Off the field, he had his skeletons, but on the field - what a player. Here’s the family statement.

(Many, many dinners, by the looks of it.) So David Wells is staying. As Jimmy Durante once asked, Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay? Start to go / change your mind / start to go again / change your mind again… Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay? Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do - I go… I staaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy…

So you are ashamed After the loss, Ichiro? Next time shut up first.

Random baseball-related links - MC Hammer comments on the Yankees: Confidence is not a negative. Over confidence is. A-Rod is confident (another MVP year) based upon what he sees in his team and what he doesn’t see in other teams. It sets the table for a more intriguing season now that Alex Rodriguez is confident (good for baseball) and he’s talking (bad for us) and the rest of us are waiting, watching and hoping we will beat the Yankees and close his mouth! Go A’s! (Link)

I thought I’d highlight Have Bat Will Travel, the blog of Ev, a fellow SoSH member who’s quit his job as an investment banker so that he can try to play professional baseball in Europe. It’s just for a season, apparently - he’ll go to business school after that. But I still always find it cool when someone follows his bliss. From the FAQ:

Just watched Japan thrash China 18-2 in the World Baseball Classic. I was thinking “isn’t there a mercy rule?” Apparently, there is, but Japan wasn’t leading by 10 after seven innings (it was 11-2 at the top of the 8th), so the mercy rule only kicked in after the 8th inning.

So Manny returns to camp and all is (sort of) well: The saga of Manny Ramirez always seems to end the same way. No matter what happens, Ramirez shows up for work — eventually — and hits better than almost anyone alive

A great visual pun of a photo from this Sports Illustrated interview with Coco Crisp, even if it means an unfamiliar reader has no clue what Coco Crisp looks like. I quite like this random bit of trivia about his inheritance of speed:

Keith Foulke getting injections worries me. Stop posing with the ladies (via On the DL, a great guilty pleasure) and start getting better!

The 2005 season after I finished playing every danged game on MVP Baseball 2005 (Sox finished 133-29, thanks to some ridiculous pitching): Tim Wakefield won not only the Cy Young, but, in a shocker, pipped David Ortiz at the final stretch to win the AL MVP award. Of course, going 25-4 with a 1.42 ERA, 179 Ks, 1 BB (yeah, a 179 K/BB ratio is ridiculous, especially for a knuckleballer) over 253 1/3 innings probably earns you that.

Fungoes pulled up some interesting research on overextended sports markets, and linked it back to an old post I did on parity and how the existence of the AL and NL Central Divisions in baseball helps create parity in baseball. To further the point about the AL and NL Central Divisions acting as normalisers, the most recent World Series was a Central vs Central one. Which means, of the 10 teams in the 5 World Series since 2001, 4 have come from one of the East divisions, 3 from the West divisions, and 3 from the Central divisions. Hardly a sign of economic imbalance.

More random links taken off SoSH - 100 reasons to hate Derek Jeter. Admittedly a lot of it is not about the player but his deification by the media, which is what gets to me anyway. For instance:

Man, work is killing me. Here, go get Scott Podsednik something nice for his wedding. Come on, these lush hand towels aren’t going to buy themselves.

Still in off-season mode (and dealing with work), but thoughts on the idea that Roger Clemens might come back to Boston (here’s the SoSH thread on the subject): I don’t think Clemens has any sentimentality in him. But I still think it’s possible for Roger to have zero sentimentality towards Boston and still want to come back for the personal glory he would get through surpassing certain Sox records (the 192 wins he shares with Cy Young, for one). Chasing records isn’t sentimentality, it’s ego, and I think Rajah has that in spades. Still don’t think it outweighs his desire to be near home, or his desire for the money though.

Theo’s back. To paraphrase his relatives’ famed words: Lucky, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.

For fantasy baseball fans: A company that runs sports fantasy leagues is asking a federal court to decide whether major leaguers’ batting averages and home run counts are historical facts that can be used freely or property that can be sold. (Link)