Edgy MD

Lagares runs down balls like a good cop running down punks. Two straight scoreless from the nu guy. Time to sorta rock. [youtube:3fvfjmid]YmmjtzDrdGk[/youtube:3fvfjmid] ("Sweet Jane" + "It's All I Can Do")

That's the Daisuke we're paying $100 million for.

Is Hisanori Takahashi available?

Checked and... nope. I got one of three. For shame.

Doc 1985, Guidry 1978, Gibson 1968. OE: Koufax musta won it once. Pedro?

They usually get younger players, but he's maybe a good candidate for the AFL, so he can get something closer to a full season in.

I don't think he's somewhat limited. I think he's really poor --- at first, second, third, and short.

Ben Affleck @MyLifeIsAwesome Yeah, and Richard Dreyfuss last carried a film successfully as a leading man when? The Goodbye Girl? Any Stakeout fans? Glass houses, people!

We retroactively won the posting auction!

seawolf17 wrote: Seeing those synthetic screen panels around 2/3 of the cap on a professional ballplayer is a total hatfail.

seawolf17 wrote: I'm almost disappointed that Lino Urdaneta got another shot. He left Detroit with an ERA of infinity, which was awesome. It dropped to 63.00 when he pitched his inning for us. He probably caused the digital vortex by forcing the universe to attempt to divide by zero in order to account for him.

Not beating up on the guy, but my concern with him is that he doesn't bring much on defense.

Is it crazy that I should dream of a Dykstra/Wilson thingie? With Lagares and DD sharing center and then one of them sliding over to a corner for super-duper late-inning defense?

Lino did some of his best work pitching in the Digital Vortex League.

I'm a big fan of Duffy Dyer's work on Magnum P.I.

You don't want our knuckleballing philosopher back? Our banjo-hitting catcher? Our rightfielder that we barely handled as we fillped him in a three-way? Our manager who never made it out of Norfolk?

Attention is the new cocaine.* *Me, plagiarizing from John Cougar Lunchbucket.

Aces. Was it a modest re-write (where the writer could lie to himself that he wasn't really stealing from Ed) or a baldfaced copy-and-paste?

Good point. Circumstances a little different, but yeah, he had been outed.

Eh, there was nobody who didn't know Matsuzaka's history prior to him landing on this side of the Pacific. In fact there were some stories talking about how his history was going to be a good thing and some of his routines were going to teach a few things to American pitching coaches. I believe there was a Verducci story along those lines right around the time of his arrival. Right-ho! Good memory. More important, Matsuzaka is a potential agent of change. It's his throwing regimen, rather than his place of birth, that makes him the ultimate foreigner to major league baseball. If he succeeds in the U.S., he could transform the accepted industry practice of overprotecting pitchers. The system guarantees diminishing returns: Despite advances in medicine, nutrition and training, teams work pitchers less than ever before and yet pay them more. Then he supports that with a magic quote from Bobby Valentine that may be about a lot of differences between the US and Japanese games, but probably wasn't an unwavering endorsement of throwing 50 innings in a week. "After being part of this for three years," former big league manager Bobby Valentine says by e-mail from Japan, where he's the manager of the Chiba Lotte Marines, "I am convinced we do a bad job of coaching in the U.S. for pitchers."

Troy Tulowitzki sure has a good case. They may be reluctant to give it to a convicted juicer.

I don't know. Tweets are tweets, and all --- all nuance lost and whatnot. But I wonder if a Braves pitcher might see those exclamation points as a bit too cheery.

Justin Turner ?@redturn2 2m Hey @JasonHeyward hope you have a speedy recovery! Hated seeing that man, glad walked off on your own tho!

And that's not always an easy thing to understand. If the Mets were cruising toward a division title and the same team violently took out a key pitcher and key hitter, I'm sure a large chunk of the Mets fanbase --- and perhaps a meaningful amount of Mets --- would have trouble being understanding. I mean, Hudson and his wife took a huge step with offering absolution to Young, but then this on top of it reopens that wound. I'm just wondering out loud if anything might foster. And besides, you don't have to believe there was deliberate intent to grow bitter and retaliate. There's a moral gray area between intent and absolute innocence that one might call reckless indifference. Folks have gotten retaliated on for that as well.

In the quarterfinal of the 1998 Summer Koshien (Ed: the high school championship in Japan), Matsuzaka threw 250 pitches in 17 innings in a win over PL Gakuen. (The previous day he had thrown a 148-pitch complete game shutout.) The next day, despite trailing 6�0 in the top of the eighth inning, the team miraculously won the game after scoring 7 runs in the final two innings (four in the eighth and three in the ninth). He started the game in left field, but came in as a reliever in the ninth inning to record the win in 15 pitches. In the final, he threw a no-hitter, the second ever in a final. This performance garnered him the attention of many scouts. And any coaches reading, that's the way you treat a young arm.