metirish

McCarver during the game made reference to how this series is a nightmare for Mets fans...something along that line anyway.....come on Tim you know better than that.

Much ado about nothing......Rollins likes to run his mouth.... Watching the game last night I was thinking not for the first time about the lack of athmosphere at yankee games , even without the prompting of Buck and McCarver who brought it up several times the place sounded dead.....great pitching , lot's of squeaky bum moments and the crowd had nothing.

Keep bringing Rivera in for two innings....it'll hopefully catch up with him

Can someone pass McCarver a tissue , he sounds like he is going to cry talking about how Jeter made a bad play......

"Who's your Daddy?" How fucking lame is this crowd?

Willie Randolph....oh wait....

I'm liking Manuel the more I see of him from the link JCL provided The slugger, on the other hand, knows how to slug. And isn�t that the rarest thing in baseball to know about? Someone who has bashed home runs on a professional level must have some advantage that isn�t much talked about when discussing the factors that make up a good manager. Maybe they know that staying loose helps. Maybe it�s that they simply value the importance of slugging: They let their sluggers slug. Along those lines, I heard recently�I think it was during the radio pregame of an NLCS game�that Billy Beane, the Moneyball-inspiring general manager of the A�s, once played for Manuel during Beane�s minor league playing career, and that Beane has said that Manuel is the best manager he�s ever been around. I wish I could find a quote to confirm this, but I�m pretty sure that�s what I heard. It makes some sense. Manuel�s teams don�t bunt much, and though they steal bases, they make sure to do so in optimal situations, their success rate well above the level needed to make the stolen base a useful tool. http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/team.cgi?id=35316 1986 Mud hens

Tim Marchman on Girardi The Overmanager Why the New York Yankees' Joe Girardi is too smart for his own good. By Tim Marchman Posted Tuesday, Oct. 27, 2009, at 3:35 PM ET To play in the NFL, you have to make a show of going to college. To play in the NBA, you have to get through high school. To sign a contract with a major league baseball team, all you have to do is convince someone you're 16, provided you weren't born in a country with inconvenient labor laws. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining both the high reverence in which the intellectual is held in baseball and the low standards necessary to qualify as one. Mike Mussina's crossword puzzle habit was the telling detail that led a thousand profiles during his long career, limning him as a man apart from the rabble surrounding him in the clubhouse. The Chicago Cubs alone have multiple lousy relievers suspected of harboring deep thoughts because they went to Notre Dame. And Tony La Russa leveraged a never-used J.D. from Florida State University into book-length fawning from both George Will and Buzz Bissinger. Yankees manager Joe Girardi fits neatly in this line. If you don't know that he has an engineering degree from Northwestern, a team broadcaster will be happy to tell you. Often caught by television cameras modeling taciturn expressions while consulting thick binders full of arcane statistics, Girardi looks like an engineer, runs a game like one, and even talks like one. (How are the playoffs different from the regular season, Joe? "You have your parts, and you understand what you need to do with your parts, and you just go from there.") And in this year's playoffs, Girardi has done a fantastic job illustrating why baseball is a game for delinquents, not engineers. The quintessential Girardi ploy came last Friday, in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series. The Yankees were down one run with two outs in the top of the ninth inning when the Angels walked Alex Rodriguez. Because, as Girardi later explained to the press, an "extra step" can be so important in the late innings, he took Rodriguez off the bases and brought in one Freddy Guzman as a pinch runner. In six years in the majors, Guzman has one-third as many plate appearances as Rodriguez has career stolen bases. Nevertheless, the only reason the move would make sense is if Guzman had been brought in to steal. But Girardi held Guzman at first base, a position from which he couldn't score without an extra-base hit. You might generously estimate the odds of this move working at 1 percent, and I'd put them lower than that, given that Guzman has slightly more major league game experience than you do while (whatever his other flaws) Rodriguez is probably the savviest ballplayer of his generation. In exchange for at best a marginal edge, Girardi took out a player who'd hit something like half a dozen game-tying home runs over the last several days�in a game that was a couple of hits away from going to extra innings. This is no nitpick or isolated incident. Throughout the playoffs, Girardi has been allowing moderately decent starter A.J. Burnett to pitch to his own personal catcher�exiling starter Jorge Posada�because of the "rhythm" that Burnett enjoys with scrub Jose Molina. (Burnett walked five and hit two in his first start. Some rhythm!) The curious thing about these inane moves is that they don't�at all�match up with Girardi's reputation as a forward thinker steeped in statistical nuance. There's nothing more old school than pinch running on a hunch or citing the chemistry between a pitcher and catcher as a reason to bench one of your best hitters. The Yankee manager's overarching philosophy, then, seems to have less to do with statistics than with the notion that a manager needs to make slick maneuvers to win ballgames. Consider that in Game 3 of the ALCS, Girardi used seven relief pitchers in five innings, citing matchups and scouting reports as a reason to pull lefty Damaso Marte after he got one out on one pitch, only to bring in lefty Phil Coke as a replacement at the top of the next inning. Unlike his other dodgy moves, those bullpen antics�which at one point forced him to pinch hit for Mariano Rivera, a truly impressive bit of overmanaging considering that pitchers don't hit in the American League�may have actually cost the Yankees a game. After Dave Robertson, his third-best reliever, got two easy outs in the 11th, Girardi yanked him in favor of Alfredo Aceves, his fourth best. Aceves gave up two hits and the game was done. All these moves are the result of a search for edges that don't exist. This isn't the normal annoying tinkering we've all seen in 100 boring playoff games; it's a compulsive effort to control randomness. The difference between Aceves and Robertson is about 12 runs per 500 batters faced, meaning that the lesser of the two gives up about .02 more runs per batter than the other. Neither player is more likely to get any particular hitter out�whatever differences there are in the speed or break of their pitches are utterly irrelevant next to the role of sheer random chance. An "intelligent" manager like La Russa or Girardi consults his color-coded charts as he thinks deeply about whether Howie Kendrick's swing will work better against Robertson's curve or Aceves' cutter. A wise manager understands that there's really no difference and there's nothing he can do but call on a decent pitcher and cross his fingers. In this World Series, Girardi will be matched against a very wise manager, Philadelphia's Charlie Manuel. He speaks with a deep West Virginia drawl and doesn't boast degrees of any kind, having turned down a scholarship to Penn to help support his family. While Manuel isn't often tagged as a deep thinker, he does understand probability. Going on the recent evidence, that's a hell of a lot more than you can say for his opponent. Perhaps the most useful sabermetric insight is that the most recent at-bat, game, or season isn't necessarily a good predictor of the next at-bat, game, or season. Barring injury, a pitcher with 10 years in the majors and a 4.00 career ERA will likely give up four runs in his next nine innings and 40 in his next 90. There are hot streaks and there are cold streaks, but they behave so much like random variation that the best plan is nearly always to ignore them. While Manuel isn't about to hire Bill James as his bench coach, he clearly understands this principle. He pinch hit for a regular exactly once in the five-game NLCS and made just two defensive substitutions, clear evidence not only that he has a solid lineup but that he knows the soundest strategy is usually to roll out your best guys and hope they play well. Perhaps even more impressive was Manuel's handling of Brad Lidge. The Phillies closer had one of the all-time rotten seasons this year, and it got worse as it went along. He gave up nearly a run per inning in the last month of the season, and received wisdom was that Lidge wasn't going to see a meaningful inning in October. Then the strangest thing happened: Manuel gave him the ball, and he pitched brilliantly, as he has most of his career. In five playoff games, he hasn't given up a run. The whole time, Manuel has allowed that he's mostly been pitching Lidge for want of other options, but he's also said again and again that Lidge has been a terrific pitcher over his career and that nothing has happened recently to make him think he isn't. It's worked well enough to win him a second straight pennant. Manuel's general understanding that baseball is about players throwing and hitting and catching a ball is in perfect accord with the most sophisticated study of the sport. So is his simple insistence that players should be judged by more information rather than less. The Yankees have the better team, and would probably win the World Series if they were managed by a bag of sunflower seeds. The bag of seeds, at least, wouldn't pinch run for Alex Rodriguez, bench Jorge Posada, or swap relievers because of some minute difference that doesn't really matter. Girardi isn't wholly useless�he's refreshingly willing to use his closer outside of ninth-inning save chances, and he's dismissed calls to tinker with his batting order to aid slumping Nick Swisher. Still, if the World Series comes down to who has the smarter manager, the Phillies will win a second straight championship. http://www.slate.com/id/2233721

I know a few here like to play , interesting article where I feel McClelland sets it up nicely then skips to the end too fast. Integrating Major League Baseball retroactively with Strat-o-Matic cards. By Edward McClelland Posted Wednesday, Oct. 28, 2009, at 2:59 PM ET It's the bottom of the ninth in the Bronx. The Yankees are tied 5-5 with the Dodgers, and Babe Ruth is coming to the plate with two men on and two out. Future Hall of Famer Oscar Charleston is on first base. Tony Lazzeri is on third. And on the mound for Brooklyn is Martin Dihigo, the greatest Cuban pitcher of all time. This showdown never took place in real life. It couldn't have. Charleston, an African-American, and Dihigo, a black Cuban, were never allowed to play in the major leagues. Instead, this historic game was happening in Strat-O-Matic on the kitchen table of Scott Simkus, an amateur baseball historian from the suburbs of Chicago. Simkus has been playing the dice-and-cards baseball simulation since he was a boy. Strat-O-Matic has always been a great vehicle for answering what-ifs like How would Ty Cobb have hit against Sandy Koufax? or Would the 1962 New York Mets have lost to the 2003 Detroit Tigers? Until this month, though, it was impossible to answer the question What if baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis hadn't been such a stubborn bigot? The great Negro League ballplayers�Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Ted "Double Duty" Radcliffe�were missing from Strat-O-Matic's card sets, just as they'd been missing from the major league rosters of Landis' day. The black America of the early 20th century was invisible to white America, so there was no equivalent of the Elias Sports Bureau to keep Negro League statistics. The Negro Leagues also held a short 70- or 80-game season, supplemented by barnstorming against minor leaguers and semi-pro teams, so it was difficult to figure out where and when the teams had played�and how good their competition was. Hal Richman, who created Strat-O-Matic in 1961, had wanted to produce a Negro League set for years, but he didn't have the stats. "There was very little listed," Richman says. "Doubles and triples weren't even listed. Negro League statistics never had the accuracy of major league statistics. It was very light. It was almost nothing." Simkus helped solve that. His passion for Strat-O-Matic led him to the baseball shelves of the public library, where he discovered Only the Ball Was White, the pioneering history of Negro League baseball. Fascinated, he began reading old copies of the Chicago Defender, where he found box scores for the Chicago American Giants, the city's Negro League franchise. Simkus contacted Richman, offering to do the grunt work of compiling box scores from the Defender, the Amsterdam News, and other black papers. By typing the numbers onto Excel spreadsheets, Simkus was able to determine fielding averages, platoon splits, strikeouts. Baseball Almanac readers take those stats for granted, but they'd been unknown for Negro Leaguers. Strat-O-Matic statisticians then came up with a "major league equivalency" formula to adjust the numbers to major league levels by studying how Negro Leaguers had performed against minor-league teams, Cuban winter league teams, and barnstorming big leaguers. They determined that the quality of play in the Negro Leagues was somewhere between AAA and the majors. So Oscar Charleston, who batted in the .390s against Negro League pitching, won't hit that well when pitted against a cardboard Dizzy Dean or Lefty Grove. The cards, which depict 103 Negro Leaguers in their primes, were released this month. Like Simkus, I was a Strat-O-Matic fanatic in my youth. I relished the opportunity to play a game with the creator of the Negro League cards�and to correct retroactively the greatest injustice in sports history. And so that's how we came to integrate the 1927 Dodgers and the 1927 Yankees. I play the Dodgers. Simkus plays the Yankees. We draft five Negro Leaguers each. For historical accuracy, we choose only players who were active in 1927. I take Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Dihigo, Judy Johnson, and George Henry "Tank" Carr. Adding five great black players means I have to drop five white mediocrities. So in this alternate universe of equal opportunity, I send Doug McWeeny, Jesse Barnes, Chuck Corgan, Overton Tremper, and Irish Meusel to the minors. Simkus's picks make the Yankees' Murderers' Row lineup even more murderous. Now it consists of Tony Lazzeri, Charleston, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, John Beckwith, Biz Mackey, Bob Meusel, and Mark Koenig. But they have to bat against Satchel Paige. It's a close game. In the fourth inning, the Dodgers tag Negro Leaguer Smokey Joe Williams for five runs. But the Yankees battle back on an unearned run, a homer by Ruth (off the great Paige), and doubles by Gehrig and Beckwith. Paige leaves the game after the seventh inning, having struck out nine Yankees. He's pinch hit for, then relieved by, Dihigo, a star batter and pitcher�not an uncommon feat on 15-man Negro League rosters. In the bottom of the ninth the Dodgers still lead, 5-4, but Dihigo walks Koenig and Lazzeri. Then Charleston singles to tie the game, bringing up Ruth with the winning run on third. "You couldn't have written this any better," Simkus says. "We've seen Oscar Charleston, the best all-around Negro League player; Martin Dihigo, the best Cuban; and Babe Ruth, the best Caucasian player, all have an impact." Simkus rolls his dice. "Single!" he shouts. "Game over! Ruth beats Dihigo!" What a game. And what a demonstration of how baseball would have been different without a color line. The Yankees were still the best team, and Babe Ruth was still the best player, but the Dodgers (who went 65-88 in 1927 with an all-white roster) were a lot better. The Negro Leaguers raised the level of play. Cool Papa Bell even stole a base�which was common in the Negro Leagues, but rare in the majors between the introduction of the live ball and the ascendance of black players in the 1960s. "It doesn't take anything away from the legends we grew up with," Simkus says. "But it gives you a new appreciation for Satchel Paige, striking out nine guys in seven innings. You did see the overall quality of the major leagues improve, but it didn't take anything away from Ruth." The greats would still have been great, no matter who they played against. But now, we finally get to find out what might have happened if Satchel Paige had faced down Babe Ruth in Yankee Stadium. Would there have been a greater sight in baseball than that? http://www.slate.com/id/2233848/

Trouble in Dodger Town http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/sport/2009/1029/1224257604099.html Frank fired his wife...ouch...

She's a bit of alright

Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, who got booted from performing at Yankee Stadium after an anti-Semitic remark, has landed a new gig - singing for the Anti-Defamation League. Tynan will perform his trademark rendition of "God Bless America" at the Jewish watchdog group's meeting Thursday night Calling him a "good man," ADL honcho Abraham Foxman said Tynan has made a "sincere apology" and should not be ostracized because he "slips up on one occasion." For his part, Tynan told the ADL he was grateful for the chance to perform again in public and that he understands the "insensitivity of my remarks." Tynan got in trouble earlier this month when he began bantering with a real estate broker showing a property in his Manhattan building. "Don't worry, they are not Red Sox fans," the broker joked. Tynan replied, "I don't care about that, as long as they are not Jewish." The woman who was apartment shopping was offended and reported the remark to the Yankees. Confronted by the team, Tynan owned up to remark. He apologized to the woman and also made a public apology on television. "I would never want to hurt anybody's feelings," he said. "It was stupid of me to be so callous." Tynan was barred from performing at Game 1 of the ALCS between the Yankees and Angels - and has not been heard at the Stadium since.

Yeah he's what one might call a guru.....in what I have read about him over the eyars he is one of the most respected people in the game.

If you google the name you will get a hot looking chick......that's not who's coming here though this is our Sandy the saviour http://www.baseballamerica.com/execdb/?show=exec&eid=johnssa01

Joanna Molloy whoever she is says it's OK to now like Rodriguez A-Rod has gone from bad boy and playoff choker to New York Yankees hero kids can idolize http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/2009/10/29/2009-10-29_arod_has_gone_from_bad_boy_and_playoff_choker_to_hero_kids_can_idolize.html All is forgiven when you hit.....she won't have been pleased with the three strike outs last night...

Rubin By Adam Rubin Chip Hale is expected to be named the Mets� new third base coach after the World Series. Hale, 44, spent the past three seasons in that role with the Diamondbacks after six years in that organization as a minor-league manager. The other finalist had been former Phillies third base coach Steve Smith. While the indications have been that the hiring of a third base coach would round out Jerry Manuel�s 2010 staff � with Razor Shines moving from third base to bench coach and Sandy Alomar Jr. going from catching instructor to first base � that may not necessarily be the case. A team insider suggested the Mets may be interested in former Diamondbacks manager Bob Melvin as bench coach, although another source said �a bunch of names� are still being considered for a second external hire. The Mets also approached Rangers player development director Scott Servais about the same role with the Mets to succeed Tony Bernazard, but he elected to stay with Texas, a source told the Daily News. Hale signed a contract on Tuesday, the Arizona Daily Star in his hometown of Tucson, Ariz., reported. A 17th-round pick of Minnesota in 1987, the former infielder appeared in 333 games with Twins and Dodgers, hitting .277 with seven homers and 78 RBI in 575 at-bats.

The bottom feeders as they are known.

Lee was a master out there, that was fun to watch....

Does Girardi sit Posada in game two because Burnett needs his personal catcher? , looking at Posada's numbers against Pedro he has in 60AB's .186 BA .290 OBP 4 hr , 10 rbi and 8 bb

Chase phucking Utley....two home runs tonight , both on two strike counts Timmy tells us.