Heyman: Joba is out of the 5th starter
competition

post from Zell's Pinstripe Blog on 21 March 2010 11:05:08 PM. © Zell's Pinstripe Blog

Jon Heyman just reported this on Twitter: SI_JonHeyman: joba is out of #yanks rotation derby. RT @JackCurryYES: No Joba-Hughes showdown Mon. Hughes will face Phils. Joba will work intrasquad gameSo, does this mean Phil Hughes has won the 5th starter competition? Let’s not forget that the Yankees were considering Alfredo Aceves and Sergio Mitre for [...]

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Heyman: "Joba is out of yanks rotation derby"

post from Sliding Into Home: A Yankees Blog on 21 March 2010 11:04:27 PM. © Sliding Into Home: A Yankees Blog

From Jon Heyman:

Joba is out of yanks rotation derby. RT @JackCurryYES: No Joba-Hughes showdown Mon. Hughes will face Phils. Joba will work intrasquad game

I guess this means they're going with Hughes. I can't say I'm surprised based on both pitcher's performances this spring, but I think this might create another problem with Hughes and whatever rules the Yankees set for him.

And if this is indeed true, what does it mean for Joba's future? Does this mean Joba is a reliever for good?

Joba himself seems to have future closer in his mind. Check out this exchange he had with Mariano Rivera recently via Pat Borzi:

Rivera, even at 40, remains the most feared closer in baseball. Chamberlain was waiting by the door of the clubhouse to be taken to an autograph session when Rivera walked by. Chamberlain, already in a chatty mood, suddenly fancied himself as Rivera?s successor and started bugging Rivera about retiring.

?You?ve got to pass the torch, four-two,? Chamberlain said, using common baseball parlance for someone?s uniform number.

By then, Rivera was nearing his locker on the far side of the clubhouse. He turned to Chamberlain, smiled and said paternally, ?Your time will come.?

Chamberlain answered back, ?You might be 50! I might be done by then.? Rivera, ignoring the last part, responded, ?Then it?ll still come,? with an equally big smile. That did not make Chamberlain feel any better. ?He might pitch until he?s 106,? he said.

While we shouldn't make too much out of a few random clubhouse comments, this does sound like Joba wants to close one day.

If this is what the Yankees want and this is what Joba wants then it's fine by me. I just think it makes the Joba Rules and all the nonsense they've put this kid through look a little pointless.

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Mike Sweeney's Time in Kansas City Offers Dark
Perspective on Mauer Deal

post from Royals Review on 21 March 2010 11:04:21 PM. © Royals Review

The baseball world is abuzz with the news that Joe Mauer will be a Twin for a very very very long time. Many people have and will viewed this contract situation as some kind of battle for baseball's soul, as the local hero Joe Mauer must be not allowed to become a Yankee or Red Sox (never quite mind what Mauer might personally want, one way or the other). Over the next few days, we can expect quite a number of "this is good for baseball" stories. I'm sure Poz is writing one now. Mauer will talk on Monday afternoon about how much he loves Minnesota, and the fans will flood message boards, blogs, and talk radio with similar sentiments.

But there's still no way of knowing how everyone will feel about this contract in 2013, or 2015, and especially not in 2017 and 2018. Reportedly, Mauer's contract is for $184 million dollars, and will cover 2011-2018, his age 28-35 seasons. That comes out to $23 million dollars annually.

Mauer is going to be paid fantastically well, and while I expect that this deal will be framed as having some kind of "hometown discount", considering where all the leverage in the negotiations lied, it looks more like a hometown premium.

As a Royals fan, I suppose I'm expected to feel good about this situation, as I must be resentful towards the bigger market clubs, and happy that Mauer stayed in the Midwest. However, that isn't really my reaction. Instead, I think about Mike Sweeney, and what happened when he signed his big contract in 2003. That contract looked great (or at least fair) at the time, and quite quickly transformed into a poison pill. By the end, a large percentage of Royals fans weren't happy that they'd been able to "lock up" Sweeney as a Royal. Instead, they resented his salary, and viewed him as a millstone on the franchise's hopes.

Sweeney's contract was initially for 2003-4, and if the Royals finished over .500 in one of those seasons, it would become a contract that lasted through 2007. The salary was set at $11 million per year. When the Royals went 83-79 in 2003, there was a general feeling amongst the game's romantically-inclined cognoscenti that the greatest winner was the Royals fans, who would now get to have Sweeney in a Royal uniform for the foreseeable future.

Prior to signing the first version of the contract in 2003, Sweeney was a career .309/.379/.501 hitter. However, from 1999-2002, Sweeney was even better, hitting .324/.396/.535. He averaged 146 games per season during that period. He brought little to the table in terms of positional value, defense, or baserunning, but he was one of the game's elite hitters. On the whole, Sweeney's contract would cover his age 29-33 seasons.

We know how the rest of the story turned out. Sweeney's performance slipped as he aged, and his health deteriorated. Between 2003-2007, the period in which he was paid $11 million dollars per season, Sweeney hit .284/.353/.476. Since we're talking about how these deals are received by casual or mainstream fans, that dip in batting average is especially important. Why wasn't Sweeney a .300 hitter anymore? What happened to those RBIs in the middle of the order?

In fact, the negativity surrounding Sweeney's performance was so prevalent that its surprising to see how non-terrible his numbers actually were. Sweeney's performance during that time wasn't terrible, it was merely mediocre for a slow, no-defense 1B. That wasn't what the Royals Fans Yahoo Group I was a member of during those years thought.

Of course, that was only half the story. Crippled by chronic back problems, Sweeney averaged 94 games played during those five seasons. Seemingly, he was always either on the verge of heading towards the DL, or just coming back from it. In 2006, Sweeney played in just 60 games, and in a sense his career as someone considered an impact every day player was over. Just three years before he was someone who was part of the Royals supposedly remaining viable in Kansas City.

We aren't at a point in our society where athletes can sit on the DL, continue to get paid, and have people be terribly understanding. The same people that would have screamed bloody murder if Sweeney had signed with the Yankees in 2005 (had his extension not vested) were now calling him "Mike Weenie" and questioning his toughness. As the Royals bottomed out in 2005 and 2006, his $11 million dollar salary was close to a third of the team's roster, and it certainly wasn't viewed as the team's commitment to winning. It was seen by quite a few as an encumbrance to winning, and a sign of the team's stupidity and bad luck.

Joe Mauer is better than Mike Sweeney. He plays a premium position well, and his a similar hitter. His career line is .327/.408/.483. Like Sweeney, he derives a lot of his peak value from batting average, and that isn't the happiest skill for giant guys as they age. He's also coming off of a sublime 2009 season. However, he is also a catcher, and his contract is considerably longer than Sweeney's was.

Mauer is also thought of as a great guy. So was/is Mike Sweeney. Sweeney was a very religious, devoted family man, who remained involved in the KC community and never once did anything that anyone complained about. It didn't matter. It won't matter for Mauer either.

As a baseball contract, this is a fascinating gamble by the Twins. It looks very risky from a baseball sense, and riskier than many think from a PR one. When it comes to "what it means to baseball in Minnesota" or "proving the overall health of the game" or all that kind of hooey, I would argue we all need to slow those pronouncements down. Things change and then they change again. And then they change again. The perception of the casual or mainstream fan is extremely fickle, so I'd be very hesitant to consider making them happy tomorrow much of a long term commodity.

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Rockies Review: Forging forward on the purple
path

post from Purple Row on 21 March 2010 11:04:00 PM. © Purple Row

More photos » Ed Andrieski - AP

Let's think about the good times. The Royals are not good times.

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Good evening, Rowbots. I apologise for the lateness of this edition, and also for the fact that we will be going in a slightly different direction tonight. It's still spring training, so I figured this was the best time to do so. (Hey, we don't really want to rehash all the pain of our latest entanglement with the Royals, do we? God, I can't believe we have to play them again this year). Arriving at the end of one part of my life has gotten me thinking about the importance that baseball is going to play in the next part of it, specifically the Rockies. They've been involved in my life in a bigger way before, and will be so again.

So if you feel like delving into something that's not specifically game-related, but is important to me and has to do with how much our favorite team is really part of who I am, then join me after the jump.

I've spoken candidly in the past about my struggles with severe depression during the year 2007, and how much the Rockies became part of both the crash and the recovery. Probably too candidly, come to think of it, but that was how it was. I feel that one of the beauties of sports is that they're not just games. That's why I always defend the fan's right to say "we." We pour so much of ourselves into this that it becomes a mirror for our own small dramas. The players, obviously, live it all the time, but every production needs an audience. It's a two-way conduit. We give as much as they do, albeit in different ways. We're not the ones who have to be at practice every day, spend half our time away from home, log up long miles, miss our kids growing up, and give everything we have to play a game we love for money that makes us richer than 99% of the rest of the world. But we, as fans, give our heart and soul. For better or worse. It's a little like a marriage, particularly when it gets abusive. Go figure.

It's not necessary to go into all the details, but my life is in the process of some major changes. I'll be graduating from college in May and moving halfway across the country, to a city where I'm very eager to live, but know approximately two people. It's a crazy thing to do. It's a leap I'm constantly worrying about my ability to make. It's also one I'm very excited for. One of the chief reasons for this is the fact that, barring any unforeseen circumstances, I will indeed be working for the Asheville Tourists. That's really what I was hoping to get out of my trip down there last week, and I'm proud to say that persistence appears to be paying off.

I can't overstate how much I want to do this. The idea of working in minor league baseball is one that nourishes me, because I love the game and I love this team. I don't care if I end up picking up garbage or scrubbing down a souvenir stand, late at night with the crickets shirring in the distance and the parking lot all but empty, the stadium waiting for another night and young men that dream of endless green outfields and light racks over LoDo. I checked the box that said I'd take any job. This will be the place that, while I'm in the middle of leaping out of the net, I'll always know myself.

My sister, Squeaky, is coming down to Asheville with me over the summer. She is doing this because we've been best friends for life, because she wants to support me, and because she's ready for something new too. But Asheville was always my place, not hers. She would be happy there, but she was looking beyond. She still is. She's got a lot of big dreams. But when we arrived at McCormick Field this past Tuesday, this charming little stadium tucked into the side of a hill just outside downtown, that was when she said, "Oh." That was when she fell in love with the place. We had baseball, the promise of long summer nights and $7 tickets and the game that's the same anywhere you go. When she saw that field, she knew she could live here.

Baseball is proving to be the constant in our lives right now. Again, it's not necessary to go into the details, but my parents are going to have to sell their house and move downtown. Since we've moved out and have our own lives (or are in the process of acquiring them) it's not something that we will be immediately touched by, but it's really hard nonetheless. I've lived here since I was nine years old, and when I go this Sunday, I'm never coming back. I'm sitting in the living room right now, looking at all the empty spaces.

I arrived home two days ago, right in the middle of the one snowstorm all week that they had to have, right when I was flying in. I'm fortunate enough to have two weeks of spring break, so I'm spending the second one here, trying to unwind. Once I leave Colorado again this Sunday, I don't know when I'll be back. This was sort of a last-minute thing, so I could come back and bid a proper farewell to all my old places.

Because of the snowstorm, my parents couldn't get out of the house to come pick me up. I had to work out the bus system on the fly, get out of DIA in a snowstorm and ride into Denver so my older sister, the one who works for the Rockies during the season, could rescue me and take me to her apartment. I wasn't very pleased about this and I was already in a strange mood; I've been working my ass off this semester and worrying so much about the end of my college career and the beginning of my new life, no matter how much I'm looking forward to it. There's so much to do and I don't know how, though I'm still working it out. I have to let go of the idea that it will only work out if I know how it does.

So I was on the bus. It was snowing, it was miserable. We arrived in downtown Denver, but it didn't even look familiar; we were coming up a way I'd never driven. I was still thinking. But then I saw that we were on 20th Street. Then I saw we'd passed Champa. And suddenly, I knew where I was.

I saw it, up ahead. It's not yet time for it. It was cold, it was undoubtedly empty. It was enshrouded in the snowstorm that it pleases Colorado to call springtime. But when I saw Coors Field, it was suddenly -- just for a second -- all right.

It's okay, I thought.

I'm home.

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Show #98: Spring Training Interview with David
OBrien of the AJC

post from Atlanta Baseball Talk on 21 March 2010 10:05:53 PM. © Atlanta Baseball Talk

DOB discusses McLouth, Heyward, club house chemistry, and his AJC blog.[...]

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The Cubs Kiss the Reds - Cubs 1 Reds 1

post from ChicagoCubsOnline.com on 21 March 2010 09:36:21 PM. © ChicagoCubsOnline.com

Game Nineteen - Cubs 1 Reds (ss) 1 - 10 Innings
WP - None LP - None Save - None

Lou Piniella's B-Team played to the Reds to 1-1 tie in Goodyear on Sunday afternoon. Carlos Silva started the game but lasted only two innings. Silva was lifted for a pinch-hitter in the third. Reports during the game indicated Silva left the game with a tender right quad. The Cubs said Silva's injury was not serious and he was lifted for precautionary reasons. Silva spent around 10 minutes in the bullpen trying to work through the discomfort.

Carlos Silva allowed one run on one hit, a solo home run by Laynce Nix in the second. Silva kept the ball down, for the most part. He walked a batter and stuck out two ... Brandon Phillips and Corky Miller.

The Cubs bullpen performed much better against a majority of Dusty Baker's everyday lineup. After Silva departed, the Cubs pen allowed only four hits in seven innings ... with three walks and eight strikeouts.

Lou Piniella's offense was non-existent on Sunday. They managed only eight hits and could not string any together against the likes of Justin Lehr, Arthur Rhodes, Francisco Cordero and Kip Wells.

Tyler Colvin (2-for-4 with a double and a RBI) scored the Cubs lone run in the fourth inning. Micah Hoffpauir accounted for three of the Cubs' eight hits ... and drove in Covin with a two-out single to right. Hoffpauir doubled in the ninth but was stranded at third when Bobby Scales grounded out to first to end the inning.

With the tie, the Cubs' Cactus League record stands at 11-7-1 ...

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Rockies 11, Royals 11: Chacin struggles in
Rockies' first spring tie

post from Purple Row on 21 March 2010 09:03:08 PM. © Purple Row

More photos » Ed Andrieski - AP

Through 9 innings, there were 22 runs, 32 hits, 9 walks and 4 errors. Jim Tracy didn't want to see any more.

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The Pebbles have made a habit of scoring late. For the second straight day, the Rockies came from behind late, this time on the strength of a two-run triple by Michael Paulk in the ninth to cap a 3-run ninth. The two run lead was not safe in the hands of Scott Rice, whose career highlight came June 3, 1999. Rice served up a two-run home run to Wilson Betemit. Both managers decided they had enough of what was a sloppy game, calling the game a tie after nine innings.

The game started off well offensively for Colorado as well. Even though it has taken awhile for Eric Young Jr to start hitting, he really has been hitting well of late. A day after hitting a walk-off three-run triple to close a five run inning, he led off another five-run inning with a single and stolen base in the first. A Seth Smith triple, Chris Iannetta double and Ian Stewart single facilitated the scoring.

Unfortunately, a couple prized Latin pitchers struggled, namely Jhoulys Chacin, who gave up five runs on six hits in the first inning. He rebounded to hold the Royals to one run on three hits in his subsequent two innings. The good news for the Rockies is their significant rotational depth, allowing Chacin (who just turned 22 this January) time to figure out his issues at Colorado Springs. Samuel Deduno continues to impress with his stuff, which is enough for me to be excited in spite of his four hits, two walks and two runs allowed in two innings of work.

Justin Speier and Matt Daley pitched perfect and dominant innings, striking out two each, and Franklin Morales was impressive again, allowing an "earned" run on the strength of a hit that was lost in the sun.

Seth Smith had three hits, Chris Iannetta roped a couple doubles, and Chris Nelson had a couple hits. EY2 drove in a run with a squeeze bunt, tripled and singled in addition to his leadoff single. Colorado came into the game leading the Cactus League in doubles and added four to that total, as well as three triples. We were also leading the league in errors, but it was Kansas City who had four defensive miscues while the Rockies were technically error-less.

Box Score

Scott Rice for closer!

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Heyman: Joba out of rotation derby

[...]

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March 20 1010 Demolition Video

Video Credit: Bobby Jackson

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Dodgers grant release to ex-closer Gagne (AP)

Former Cy Young Award winner Eric Gagne has been granted his release by the Los Angeles Dodgers. Dodgers spokesman Joe Jareck said Gagne asked for his release Sunday, six days after he was reassigned to their minor league camp. Gagne had an out clause and could have become a free agent but initially accepted the [...]

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