Jack Z: Don’t get your coffee without him.
Early this morning, Jim Bowden tweeted that perhaps the Mariners’ motivation for inserting themselves into the rumored multi-team Justin Upton trade scenarios was to ensure Texas was out of the running for Josh Hamilton.
Mariners involvement in 4 team blockbuster proposals is to utilize prospects to make sure TX gets Upton so they can actually sign Hamilton
— JIM BOWDEN (@JimBowdenESPNxm) December 6, 2012
I don’t know who Dan Haren is, so I’m just going to go ahead and see which baseball players died on this date in history.
Even when morose, the author is hopelessly earnest.
Among the name-heavy, stat-light players are Walter “Footie” Ockey, and the indomitable Dick Luebke. But another great [unpronounceable] name stands out: Emil Yde.
Rookie sensation turned hipster.
Professional athletes require a supreme amount of self-confidence to weather the daily ups and downs of competition on a national stage.
For Major League Baseball hitters, that’s especially true: as the old adage goes, if you fail 70% of the time, you’re doing pretty good.
Sometimes that confidence extends into hubris, which might be the case with Marlins outfielder Justin Ruggiano:
@ken_rosenthal no we don’t. I got this.
— Justin Ruggiano (@justinruggiano) November 29, 2012
Ruggiano’s breakout 2012, in which he posted a triple-slash of .313/.374/.535 with 13 HR and a .390 wOBA in 320 PAs for the Marlins while playing all three OF positions, is giving him the confidence to claim far more than just starting CF job for his team in 2013. In fact, he’s ready to solve all manner of problems:
My previous holiday gift idea, posted on this very same internet yesterday, was sort of tongue-in-cheek — though I would be pretty damn stoked to meet, greet, and inevitably imbibe into oblivion with Wade Boggs.
This baseballing gift idea is perhaps more versatile and easier of which to make use. It’s Amelie Mancini’s Left Field Cards. NotGraphs’ resident (though AWOL?) expert on art, cats, baseball art, and cat art Summer Anne Burton featured Left Field Cards in a post back in April (and any of the art featured therein would make a fantastic gift, too, if you could lay your hands on any of it), but I thought it was worth mentioning again because the items are so very artistic, not to mention affordable.
If you’re not like my mother, you still have holiday shopping to do.
For the Wade Boggs fan in your life, look no further:
Yes, that is Wade Boggs throwing a knuckleball for the Yankees.
Wade Boggs is sort of the Bill Murray of Major League Baseball: both are cloaked in urban legend, always cool (in the sense of being unflappable and being hip), funny, and unpredictable; both had sorta underrated careers but have devoted followings.
That said, you can imagine all sorts of things that might happen should you give the gift of meeting, greeting, and candidly speaking with Mr. Wade Boggs to the Wade Boggs fan in your life…
Let’s say the Wade Boggs fan in your life meets, greets, and then speaks candidly with Wade Boggs on the topic of ocean fishing and how the Wade Boggs fan in your life just can’t stop wearing crappy Hawaiian shirts — the Wade Boggs fan in your life even wears them as undershirts, just like Wade Boggs does! The Wade Boggs fan in your life is very likely to hit it off with the Chicken Man, Wade Boggs.
It is the offseason. Our main character — for convenience we’ll call him ZG — sits on a regal yet dingy chaise lounge looking out the livingroom window of the house he is renting. The sun shines, through the vertical blinds and especially, it seems, onto ZG. He watches intently as some kids play hoops across the street.
He goes to his bedroom, slowly walking up the winding stairs. In the bedroom the sun slides through horizontal slats but still attaches to ZG. He begins to strip. We see his sullen ass, his athletic legs. He puts on new clothes, clothes that we immediately might identify as his “basketball clothes,” culminating in a jersey, which is thin, old, but bears his surname. Perhaps his jersey from junior high.
We see his feet from above — from his perspective. They are goofily large.
Next we see ZG in the bathroom, he puts on a blue, yellow, and white headband that hales from a different era, They clash with his athletic goggles. He looks into the mirror and says to himself, “Will I play in the NBA?”
It’s old news that the Tampa Bay Rays extended Evan Longoria’s contract through, possibly, the 2023 season. But even the most insightful articles, like the one written by FanGraphs leader Dave Cameron, are ignoring the fact that contractually is not the only way that Longoria is being extended . . . at least not in the following Photoshopped images, anyway.
Extend those obliques, Evan…
Nice try, James Shields . . . NOT!
Brad Lincoln is hunched in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, world-weary and rain-soaked. Outside, rain falls steadily. Lincoln is approached by two children who, to his surprise, know who he is. They begin to recite his high school and college statistics, his multiple awards won at those levels. Lincoln takes it in with an embarrassed smile, signs their baseball cards that bear his likeness, tells them how smart and generous they are.
After the children depart, summoned by their mother, an older gentleman, whom we know (thanks to convenient subtitles) to be Dr. James Andrews, approaches, his shadow in the shape of a crooked elbow preceding him.
“It’s time now, Mr. Lincoln,” Dr. Andrews says. Lincoln rises from his seat follows behind Andrews, putting one foot down fully before picking up the other. The gap between them grows until Dr. Andrews passes through a door and Lincoln is left alone in a hallway, a dim light directly above him. Lincoln hesitates for a moment and looks to his left, almost over his shoulder, at us.
***
Something happened to me today.
First I woke up and went into my kitchen. My kitchen, usually it is a happy place for me. Yes, haha, you are thinking, “Miggy likes to eat! Sometimes his jeans make him look so pudgy! Of course he loves the kitchen.”
Well, yes, I love to eat, but my kitchen has only good things for me to eat now. To play third base for the Detroit Tigers I need to be fit and so I eat good things. Lean meats, raw vegetables or steamed ones, mango smoothies, many fruit smoothies — sometimes one cookie at night if I hit a homerun. A cookie per homerun, Miguel, I tell myself. Uncle Burgos says that is why I hit so many homeruns this year.
It was very sad to me when I decided to not eat arepas, which are delicious fried pouches of fatty meats and cheese. My jeans do not like them, but I like them, but I like playing for the Tigers, third base, very much, and so I chose to stop arepas. At first I thought, Maybe I will just cook them to smell them; surely, that will satisfy me and then I can eat plants. I told myself I would cook the arepas, smell them, then feed them to Fuffenduke (he is my dog).
On this day in 1963, ballplayer Harold “Muddy” Ruel passed away, aged 67.
Muddy played in the Majors for twenty years with the Browns, Yankees, Red Sox, Senators, Tigers, and White Sox. He logged nearly 5300 Plate Appearances; he won World Series titles both as a player and a coach. After retiring as a player, he remained in pro baseball many more years as a coach, manager, and executive. He had a fucking law degree from Washington University in Saint Louis, and he was actually certified to practice.
The guy led a full life, one might say.