Joe Morgan is the analyst for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball. ESPN must consider him an expert to give him this job. His responsibilities include following baseball games and news and providing intelligent commentary. He does none of these things. Consider the following exchange from last Tuesday’s chat on ESPN.com: Lee (NYC): Joe, thanks for taking [...]
Posts under ‘Baseball’
What we learned this week from the Mets and Phillies
Mets fans need to take a Quaalude. Seven games into the season is too early to concede the whole season, especially when you’re set to face the likes of Kyle Kendrick and Adam Eaton in the next two games. The Phillies can melt down too. Four errors plus nine walks for the Phils in game [...]
This is a call
Let it be known that under no circumstances short of Notre Dame advancing to the final four, or beyond, should college basketball ever be brought up in conversation with me while the Mets are playing baseball. Penalties range from a vitriolic glare for a first offense to stabbing with readily available broken glassware for flagrant [...]
Baseball season is one game old, and I’m angry already
Oh, it should have been a beautiful start to the baseball season. I woke up just as the Athletics were giving back an early 2-0 lead over the Red Sox in Tokyo. No matter, as the A’s came right back in the bottom of the 6th, with Bobby Crosby bouncing a single up the middle. [...]
Supernatural
Despite suffering arguably the worst collapse in baseball history, the Mets finished only one game out of the playoffs. They won 88 games and are bringing back essentially the same team in 2008. Except replace Tom Glavine, and his 200 innings of corner nibbling, league average performance, with Johan Santana, and his 1+ strikeout per [...]
Dwindling A’s Bobblehead Collection
Oh the dangers of becoming an A’s fan. Don’t buy the jersey of anyone good and don’t collect the bobbleheads. We have about 15 bobbleheads, but here are the ones currently with the organization: When Stomper gets traded, then Beane will have gone too far.
New Respect for the Amish
AJ Jacobs from the magazine/website Mental Floss recently visited the Amish of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and discovered that the Amish love baseball: I spot a cluster of about 30 buggies. We pull over to see what’s happening. We have stumbled onto an Amish baseball game. Many discourage competitive sports. But here are 18 Amish teenage boys, [...]
Jeter’s a Criminal
When your baseball team has a historic collapse in the last two weeks of the season and rumors start that they might sign David Eckstein. When the likes of Purdue, Boston College, and Navy beat your football team. When your hard drive, nay, two hard drives fail within four days. When TV’s writers go on [...]
Innocuous
Here’s an exchange that recently transpired: Labmate: Are you rooting for the Rockies in the playoffs? Our Hero: Yes. They’re the most innocuous team left. Labmate: Innocuous? That’s a prompt for some learning action. Here’s the entry from Webster: adjective 1 : producing no injury 2 : not likely to give offense or to arouse [...]
Pitchers and catchers report in 141 days
Approximately. That’s about the amount of time it’s going to take for me to recover from this season. I will be paying only cursory attention to the playoffs, except to curse whenever the Yankees, Red Sox, Angels, Cubs, Phillies, or Indians win. I’m going to anticipate some questions here. “What happened [to the Mets]?” Most [...]
What a difference a weekend makes…
Thursday: The Phillies had just completed a four-game sweep of the Mets, closing the gap in the NL East to two games. Even if the Mets would have won just once in the series, the Phils would have been at least four back going into the final month of the season. The first loss of [...]
Why I read Beyond the Boxscore, and you should too
Gems like this, from their latest edition of BTB Awards: If you hear somebody ask what is wrong with Johan Santana this season, what with a “barely over .500″ record, you have my permission to punch that person in the neck. Also you have to love a column with a regular feature called “This Week’s [...]