Sports Writing

Classy thing the Nats did, wearing the Virginia Tech caps. Terrible, terrible news. What a messed-up world.

What is it about the Sox and left-handed pitching? Or the bloody Blue Jays? Or Gustavo “I look like a Bond villain” Chacin? Sadly, I fear the Dice-K and Pedro comparisons will extend beyond their repertoire of pitches and the electric atmosphere in the stands and towards the seeming vanishing ability of their hitters to hit and give them run support.

You know, if a ‘bad’ outing for Dice-K is7IP, 3ER, I will be a very happy man. But Felix Hernandez was on, on, on - at the rate Felix was going it didn’t feel like anyone could get a run, and I was just happy to see J.D. Drew get the hit.

I stayed up till 4am for this? Okay, I was also staying up to fulfil my OCD tendencies - cataloguing my MP3 collection - but still. Ack. What is it now, six games in a row lost to the Royals at Kauffman Stadium? The Kansas freakin’ Royals. Gil freakin’ Meche.

Gotta say, I love the Schilling-Shaughnessy feud. For one, Schilling will fight back. So you know it’s mano a mano, rather than all those potshots Shaughnessy took at Pedro, and still seemingly takes at any player of Dominican origin.

Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects has Matsuzaka as the #1 prospect. I suppose that’s true, insofar as Daisuke hasn’t proven anything at the major league level. But it’s still odd to think of players as old as Daisuke as prospects. Ellsbury (#33), Buchholz (#51), Bard (#81) and Bowden (#83) round up the Sox representation in the top.

Happy Year of the Pig to Singapore Sox Fan readers! May you not pig out like Pedroia. And all the best to all players born in the Year of the Pig - including one Pedro J. Martinez.

The Guardian had various intellectuals discussing their guilty pleasures, and Martha Nussbaum cited baseball. I’d argue anything that could inspire the first chapter of Underworld would hardly be a guilty pleasure for intellectuals, but Nussbaum’s comment on fan devotion is quite nice:

Come on, like it wasn’t going to get done. Theo has hearted J.D. with a hunka hunka burnin’ love for ages. The weird thing about J.D. Drew for me has always been that “J.D.” stands for… “David Jonathan”. It isn’t like there is something wrong with “D.J.”, so how’d that switch happen? Was he going by “Jonathan Drew” and that get abbreviated, the way people say “ATM machine” and “PIN number”?

Saints Rest does Win It For. While I respect the emotion - I have to say that I still prefer the original Sox ‘04 version, natch.

Well, January is a slow month for baseball blogging - no pitchers and catchers reporting yet. But watching cricket made me think - what if you had Pedro levels of talent but grew up in a place (like Singapore) where bat-and-ball games just weren’t very popular? Pedro doesn’t necessarily look like the most athletic of guys. For that matter, there’s lots of pitchers on the other side of the bulk scale - we’re looking at you, David Wells. I can see how someone who was a cricket god in Australia might have grown up to be a baseball superstar had he been born Stateside, but absent of bat-and-ball sports it seems honestly like some good, even great, baseball players would not be able to transfer their skills to another sport or another athletic contest.

May 2007 bring the Sox joy.

The Biz of Baseball had an article on voices on the state of the game, and perhaps it was the inner economist in me speaking, but I thought Rodney Fort’s was the most interesting and best observation:

Or, absent awful puns, check out my Christmas video of the day. Christmas Eve and the Sox have Matsuzaka, Lugo, and, um, Runelvys Hernandez. Life is good.

Daisuke has signed. The best part was reading this official State Department transcript, which starts off as you might expect, talking about the Six-Party Talks on North Korea, before going into a Matsuzaka sidetrack:

The John W. Henry purse strings keep loosening - looks like the Sox have signed both J.D. Drew and Julio Lugo, and kept Manny. Add Matsuzaka and this is one hell of an offseason for acquisitions.

I know, I know, I’ve been missing in action. Work took me to Nairobi and Vienna, which means all the Dice-K news has come and gone. Except that Gene Orza was quoted in the Globe as saying how unfair the posting system is, since the club gets all the money.

Kenny Rogers, pine tarred and feathered. But the humour is hearing Yankees fans go apoplectic about their loss to the Gambler and demanding some sort of restoration of the Yankees’ Rightful Place *cough*JasonGiambiWhiteyFord*cough*.

So the Tigers steamroll into the World Series with the 4-0 sweep of Oakland. It’s funny how much Mark Kotsay’s comments reflect Billy Beane’s “my shit doesn’t work in the playoffs” - except more erudite:

So weird - was listening to the Mike and the Mad Dog recording of Lidle’s call-in, where it got so bad I was almost feeling sorry for Lidle… and then this happens a couple of days later. Alan Schwarz has a pretty good, eerie write-up of Lidle.