In this criminally underviewed youtube link, MVP and crazy face Maury Wills is singing “Somebody’s Keeping Score.” You may not know that Wills was an accomplished banjo player. Also, how come teams don’t do albums like this one anymore? Barry Zito, where are you?
Let’s have a toast to one of the least deserving MVPs and most incompetent managers of all time, and to this big pile of sacks.
How about a contest?
If my fantasy track record is any indication, I can pick injured players better than most. I thought I might take a look into the future and try to predict 2012’s All-Injured Team. A few rules:
1. Must be currently signed.
2. Must not currently be expected to be out for the season (Tommy John Surgery)
3. Will be judged at the end of the year by days missed
There is no prize except pride. Maybe in-season rankings, if enough people throw a list in the comments, and I’m sufficiently lacking in inspiration once every couple of months and want to post something that just requires a calculator.
Okay, great, here we go. Presenting…
My 2012 All-Injured Team
Sponsored by the folks at America’s Worst Hospital.
C: Adam Moore. Okay, maybe it’s cheating to pick a player who’s basically been injured since 2010, no longer has either of his knees, and isn’t even expected to play a major role on the team. But MLB.com insists he passed his Arizona Fall League test with “flying cartilage.” Sorry, “flying colors.” So, hey, if someone expects him to be healthy, he counts. I expect to see some Joe Mauers in the comments.
Roy Halladay and Chris Carpenter help a local fisherman who was bitten on the ass by an anaconda. They are celebrated as heroes. (In case you were wondering: anacondas don’t have venom, so there is no butt sucking.)
That’s a picture of the guy who got bit on his butt.
Chris Carpenter breaks his toe, but he’ll be okay. He’s a tough guy.
B.J. Ryan, meanwhile, drops a couple hundred bucks on a sweet fishing rod but it breaks on the second day of the trip and he spends the rest of the time sulking and cursing his own profligacy.
On the bright side, at least he doesn’t pee in the river.
Inspired by, and mostly stolen from, this MLB.com piece about Austin Jackson, but this is not really about Austin Jackson, unless saying it’s about Austin Jackson will make you more interested in reading it.
YOUR CITY — Your favorite team has spent part of their offseason looking at alternatives at troubled position, but that doesn’t mean they’ve given up on young struggling player doing things they wish that young struggling player would do.
On the contrary, they still see potential there. But they see some maturing to do in a bunch of critical baseball skills.
Somewhere between the rookie sensation who did something statistically unrepeatable, and the sophomore who reverted back to the mean, there’s the real young struggling player. That’s what your favorite team believes, and they hope time and teaching will bring out that form.
Wherein I skip the Rangers and the Angels because there don’t seem to be any rappers willing to wear their chain, not because I don’t like them. I couldn’t find anything sweet enough from either team to grace the hallowed cyber-pages of NotGraphs, and I’m betting you, dear reader, can’t either. Prove me wrong, preferably in the form of a cordial comment below. 🙂
Two things worth talking about when talking about Rap in the AL West. 1, that MC Hammer was a bat boy for the Oakland A’s, and 2, that there’s this rapper from Seattle going by the moniker Macklemore and he’s pretty damn fresh.
The Part About MC Hammer
It goes like this – when Stanley Burrell (the kid on the left) was a kid growing up in Oakland he would hang around the A’s parking lot, doing his thing. He eventually caught the eye of A’s owner Charlie Finley, who made him a batboy. Reggie Jackson started calling the kid ‘Hammer’, because he looked so much like Hank Aaron, and the rest is rap history.
The Part About Macklemore
Macklemore, a rapper named Ben Haggerty from Seattle, knows what he’s doing. And the dude loves baseball. Last year he released a track called “My Oh My” in memory of longtime Mariners radio announcer Dave Niehaus. It may be the best rap song about baseball, and the video honestly brings chills. I just found it today, and I’ve probably watched it at least five times.
Every year XXL magazine compiles a list of rappers to watch called the Freshmen list. This year they’ve released a list of 50 finalists, and have opened it up to the public. Macklemore made the cut. He’s got my vote.
Cognitive dissonance is a heck of a thing.
Like, I like Frank Thomas. He got a little sanctimonious at times, and his head was kind of misshapen, but he also was on the front of the first $20+ card I ever got in a pack (1990 Stadium Club, now on sale for $1), and for like seven years at the beginning of the 1990s he was like straight fire unleashed on the league. For those seven years he had a .330/.452/.604 line… 835 walks to 528 strikeouts…
Let me lay it on the line . . .
Via Brad Neely’s awesome George Washington cartoon.
Any report that I ingested a performance-enhancing drug is wrong. Or at least a little wrong. Come on, let me try and defend myself.
Yes, I failed a test, but then I passed a test, so that means I was innocent all along. Right? Like a college that only counts your most recent SAT score. Sure, I got a 600 two weeks ago, but this time I got a 2350, so, hey, that first one must have been a mistake. I used the wrong kind of pencil. You wanted my urine, and I gave you some vomit mixed with orange juice, or whatever it is that I did that ended up testing positive for synthetic testosterone. Maybe there was synthetic testosterone on the toilet seat and it somehow fell into the cup. Maybe I got mixed up between the sample cup you gave me, and that sample cup of synthetic testosterone I was carrying around for a friend. Some guy in the airport gave me a cup of his urine and told me to hold it for him. The security folks only asked about strangers packing my bags, not about strangers giving me their urine, so I didn’t think to mention it. I am completely innocent. Wait, I’m not sure I know what innocent means.
As part of my series of tweets illustrated literally, I take on this mysterious tweet from handsome Dee Gordon, aka “Skinny Swag 9”:
No, it’s not what you think. Albert Pujols is the very model of consistency as a baseball player. The man’s WAR has WAR. It’s not about Pujols deciding to spend the next decade in Anaheim either. He made the decision that he felt was best for him and his family and I wish him the best of luck.
Pujols has a different type of consistency problem, you see. The reader might recall that in 2006, when Ryan Howard won the NL MVP Award, Pujols responded like a petulant child in a press conference:
I see it this way: Someone who doesn’t take his team to the playoffs doesn’t deserve to win the MVP.
Howard’s Phillies, of course, missed the playoffs in 2006 while the Cardinals won the NL Central and, ultimately, the World Series.
Pujols probably deserved the MVP in 2006. Not, as he claimed, because his team made the playoffs, but because he was the best player in the league (his 8.5 WAR led the league and his .448 wOBA was best in the NL). Indeed, Pujols’s statement was colossally dumb for at least two reasons. First, although the Cardinals made the playoffs, they did so with an 83-78 record. The Phillies finished with a record of 85-77. Second, when in 2008 Albert Pujols won the MVP award in spite of his team missing the playoffs, he found himself in the awkward position of having to choose between (A) Rejecting the award on principle or (B) Accepting the award and admitting that he was wrong when he said what he said in 2006 lest he look like a hypocrite. But even this could be construed as a tacit admission that he was just being a sore loser in 2006.
