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Regardless of what happens from here on out we are going to have happy fans who have never known a WS title. With the Jays those fans are still kids. With the Dodgers, Mets and Royals those fans are no more than fresh-faced recent college grads. For the Astros and Rangers those fans are already getting their AARP membership invitations. And there are very few people living anywhere in the world who were drawing breath when the Cubs were not considered our Lovable Losers.
Have some Fresh Blood Links:
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Angels Baseball
Heritage: Just gonna throw this one out there. Mike Scioscia became Manager of the Anaheim Angels starting with the 2000 season. Just the season before, in 1999, the Angels had TWO Managers. And if the Mets defeat the Dodgers tomorrow night those two Managers - Terry Collins and Joe Maddon - will be facing off against each other for the National League Pennant...........
AFL: The Arizona Fall League has kicked off, and 11 of the MLB Top 100 pro pospects are in the lineups. From the LAA minors system we have only 1 kid to watch, left-handed pitcher Greg Mahle, who will be on the Mesa roster. Mahle is the LAA #15 prospect.............
Trout Porn: Yeonis Cespedes is making scouts drool. Cespedes is so good, he is almost as good as Trout. In some areas. For example, he is almost as fast............
Roster Ripples: (It's too early for Big Splash.) Jo-Jo Reyes, recently DFA'd, has cleared outright waivers and becomes a Free Agent, effective immediately. Reyes leaves us with a quite the legacy. 1 appearance. 1 batter faced. 1 pitch. 1 strike. 1 out claimed. 1 victory. And a Win Probability Added of 0.002.............
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Elsewhere in Baseball
UtelyGate: Commisioner Manfred appears to want to follow the emotions and go creating duplicative rules in the already massive MLB rule book to deal with the Chase Utley slide. We don't need a special rule concerning the play on the field. We already have the right rules, at 5.09(a)(13) and the cross-referenced 6.05(m). What we need is enforcement of those rules. What we REALLY need is the ability of the replay crew to re-adjudicate all the events that occur in a single play and come to the rescue of the ump on the field who are constrained by the bang-bang single POV focused reactionary method of decision-making which controls the game in real time. The ump at 2B was overly focused on Tejada's foot and the bag and not thinking holistically about what happened in the greater context. So he missed it all. And none of those other claims that so many people had all night (neighborhood play, failed to touch, etc.) should have been in the conversation. The replay officials saw it all just as well as we did. But the replay rules shackle them from rewinding everything and sorting it all out. That's what Manfred needs to change............
Play More Replay: And because of what I feel about UtleyGate, I agree totally with Rob Neyer. We need MORE replay. (We just need better people in New York capable of doing the job is a reasonable amount of time. It never takes us, the viewing audience, that much time to figure shit out.)...........
Thug Ravine: Dodger fans are at it again out in their parking lot...........
Tough Tooties: How does it feel Houston? You get no sympathy from around here, because if it weren't for September 13th you wouldn't even be there...........
Vindication!!: Finally, something that I have been warning you all about going back years and years (don't make me look up my own shit to prove myself right). The video graphics used on game broadcasts are an editorial cartoon, and they provide misleading information to the viewer. And the viewers are reacting to this bullshit and forming opinions. And that is wrong. And finally - FINALLY! - a credible source has come and joined the argument. (Ok, yeah, another blogger but this is Dave Cameron we're talking about). Honestly, my beef goes well beyond this point but it IS a good first step. I foretold that there would be a day when this problem would be openly discussed and today is the day we opened Chapter 1...............
Hot Dog!: True story (bear with me). My oldest brother was a huge Dodger fan (different story). Not a rich guy, he splurged and scored 4 tickets to a Dodger-Yankee World Series game back in the 70's out in the center field bleachers. Instead of taking his 3 sports-lovin' brothers (dick!) he took his wife and their best friends. Late in the game on a hot Saturday afternoon he got up and made one last run for beers before the stadium cut off alcohol to the thirsty fans altogether. There he is, standing in line, waiting, watching the game on the televisions above the concessions stands. Reggie Jackson comes to bat. Jackson clobbers a huge hit to deep left-center. It literally lands in my brother's empty seat. As my brother stands there in line screaming at the TV and hoping that his buddy got the ball (his buddy was, shall we say, "athletically timid") the guy in the seat behind my brother's reaches over and scoops up the lonely trophy and holds it up for the entire nation to witness. This was the game. And if you go to the 1:02:07 mark of this video you can watch it all happen again. Look for the guy with the striped shirt raising his hands in victory right at the bottom middle of your screen. Waldo's dad. Ok, story over. What's my point? Why drag you through this? Because nearly 40 years later, this same Dodger Stadium is now out on the bleeding edge of concession service and engaging tech startups to enhance the game experience. "Among the Dodgers Accelerator participants are a team that wants to speed up ordering hot dogs and beer at concession stands." My brother didn't live long enough to experience the Internet Age and, being a plumber, "accelerator" meant "Ex Lax". But he would certainly be the first person, dead or alive, to raise a glass to this idea!...........
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