2011 MLB Season

[ghost of miles]

Storybook moment:

Jeter's 3-2 count home run for hit #3000

History with an exclamation point indeed!

The entire at-bat, pitch-by-pitch.

...and Jeter ends up going 5-5 and knocking in the game-winning run in the bottom of the 8th.

Edited July 9, 2011 by ghost of miles

[MartyJazz]

O.K., the Yankees played 18 games with Derek Jeter on the DL and won 14 of them. Since he's returned, they've played four games and they're 1-3. Someone help me understand why it's more important to kiss this guy's ass than it is to win ballgames. I just hope that after he get's his 3,000th hit, they do what they should have done weeks ago and move him down in he order. If they don't, then something is seriously out of whack in the Bronx. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

My timing has been bad this year, the way I've denigrated Gardner and Swisher and then all of a sudden they start producing. But your post in light of Jeter's theatrics in today's 5-4 Yankee win, really takes the prize

[Dan Gould]

Jeter should enjoy it because the next press conference of note will consist of him saying something like

"I just work here."

and

"Joe makes out the lineup card, I bat where they tell me to bat."

and the piece de resistanze:

"Yes I intend to play through 2014."

[Dave James]

O.K., the Yankees played 18 games with Derek Jeter on the DL and won 14 of them. Since he's returned, they've played four games and they're 1-3. Someone help me understand why it's more important to kiss this guy's ass than it is to win ballgames. I just hope that after he get's his 3,000th hit, they do what they should have done weeks ago and move him down in he order. If they don't, then something is seriously out of whack in the Bronx. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

My timing has been bad this year, the way I've denigrated Gardner and Swisher and then all of a sudden they start producing. But your post in light of Jeter's theatrics in today's 5-4 Yankee win, really takes the prize

Mea maxima culpa! Even if you're not a Yankee fan, and even if you think Jeter may be more out for Jeter than for anyone or anything else, that HR has to give you goosebumps. Congrats to the Captain.

[Chalupa]

Fucking Ryan Overpaid Howard.

[Tim McG]

Just got back from the Bay Area after taking in a little golf and a Giants game with my son. Zito won a nail biter 2-1 over the Padres. High fives all around. A fun day. The next day we were in the North Bay playing golf. He beat me by 10 strokes. It was a great two days together.

I remember taking my son to his first game at the old Candlestick Park when he was just 5 years-old. All he wanted to do was ride on his Daddy's shoulders and walk the parameter of the stadium. So that's what we did. I don't think I saw three innings of the game, but what a great day at the ballpark. When ATT [then Pacific Bell] Park opened he wanted to ride the slide behind left field. It was about time to leave the stadium to catch the BART back home and the line was a mile long. So we just watched. Another great day at the ballpark, however bittersweet. He's 21 now and a strong young man I still take to the game.

In this morning's paper, I read in horror as another man's son was screaming for his father as he fell to his death from the upper deck in Ranger Stadium. And for the first time in months, I cried like a baby. All he wanted was a souvenir ball for his 6 year-old son. All he wanted for his son was to "catch" a baseball and keep it in his brand new mit. Now it's all gone. Suddenly, that day I disappointed my son by not letting him slide on that big glove at ATT is put into perspective.

I think any man who has taken his son to the ballpark knows Shannon and Cooper Stone better than anybody. Such a simple act to take a son to a baseball game with too tragic an ending. Still, when I look at that big glove in left field...I wish I had it to do all over again and say "yes". This morning, I learned of a young boy's broken heart and the loss of a father who obviously loved him so very much. Thankfully, I'm still here for my son, he will not.

And my heart just bleeds for that boy.

Edited July 10, 2011 by GoodSpeak

[Big Al]

let me add that C.J. Wilson is exempt from all of this, his post-game comments and demeanor after the most vile, bitter, wholly unnecessary and uncalled-for loss of the season being that of a person of true character. He may be a total jerk in his personal life, I don't know, and that's none of my business one way or the other.

FWIW, I've met him and he's a good guy. My son whipped him at one of his Guitar Hero fundraisers that he has (or had, I don't know if he does this anymore, this was three years ago when Nathan was in 6th grade), and he had a great sense of humor about the whole thing.

[Dave James]

You can say what you want about Yankee fans, but what that kid did who caught Jeter's 3,000th is spelled C-L-A-S-S. I know he pulled down a bunch of swag for his efforts, but he could just as easily have been like most of the incredibly selfish people who catch an historic ball, hire an agent and try to take someone for every last dime they can. This guy just gave Jeter the ball. :tup

[JSngry]

Josh Hamilton is fine.

[BERIGAN]

Derek Jeter gets hit #3000 with a home run? Beautiful! Only the second player ever to do so... Wade Boggs did it that way as well.

Well, congrats to the Yankee fans, and to Jeter. Amazing way to do it!

Brewers back in 1st place.

Hope springs eternal.

Hey, I thought the reds would run away and hide from the rest of the division, right now, anyone can win it, except the cubs and Astros.

[BERIGAN]

Fucking Ryan Overpaid Howard.

Yes, indeed! Everyone should be able to make an over the shoulder basket catch every time! 71 RBI's with basically no protection behind him, and never seeing a right hander after the 6th inning of a game.....he sucks! Tell ya what, trade him to the braves,(you all paying most of his ridiculous pay, of course!) we will put Freddie Freeman in Left...yep, we will give you, ummm...Scott Proctor, Scott Linebrink, Nate McLouth, and Jordan Schafer! Make it so!

Goodspeak, I'm not a Father, but I had the same feeling seeing the play. He just wanted to get the ball for his kid. It was a reminder to everyone how tenuous our hold is on life...

To other news...Chipper Jones had his aching knee fixed up yesterday....he was playing with a torn meniscus plus a cracked knee cap! I guess 8 homers and 46 RBi's is pretty impressive for a 39 year old on one leg....

[Dan Gould]

Josh Hamilton is fine.

I'm sure the ballpark is a refuge - but isn't the greater challenge after the game, and when he closes his eyes at night? It sounds like he is OK but I wouldn't make the conclusion off of him hitting a walk-off homer.

[Tim McG]

Goodspeak, I'm not a Father, but I had the same feeling seeing the play. He just wanted to get the ball for his kid. It was a reminder to everyone how tenuous our hold is on life...

That's a fact, too. You just never know when your time is up on this Earth.

Well put.

Josh Hamilton is fine.

I'm sure the ballpark is a refuge - but isn't the greater challenge after the game, and when he closes his eyes at night? It sounds like he is OK but I wouldn't make the conclusion off of him hitting a walk-off homer.

Exactly, Dan.

The article I read also included an interview with Hamilton. He was up all night with his wife and kids talking it out...and it still bothers him when he tosses a ball up into the stands.

Then he hit a fan the next night with a foul ball; he needed stiches. Nope, this one is going to take a while.

[Patrick]

Tribe getting trounced early on Sunday. Verlander starting for Tigers against KC. Looks like the Tribe won't be in first place at the ASB. But they will only be 1/2 game out, and showing promise, much more promise than anyone predicted in March. Plenty of "what ifs" for that team--among position players, only Asdrubal Cabrera and Travis Hafner can be said to be exceeding expectations. And plenty of key position players are not meeting them (Sizemore, Choo, Santana head the list). With the glaring exception of Fausto Carmona, pitching staff has performed quite well (though Mitch Talbot has struggled lately--I don't think many reasonably expected him to have a solid year). Masterson and Tomlin have been tremendous, as has most of the bullpen.

Go Tribe.

[ghost of miles]

You can say what you want about Yankee fans, but what that kid did who caught Jeter's 3,000th is spelled C-L-A-S-S. I know he pulled down a bunch of swag for his efforts, but he could just as easily have been like most of the incredibly selfish people who catch an historic ball, hire an agent and try to take someone for every last dime they can. This guy just gave Jeter the ball. :tup

I know, Dave--I just read the story myself, and it makes a great baseball moment even better:

Fan simply gave Jeter back the ball

...but nice of the Yankees in return to give him all of that swag anyway.

[JSngry]

Josh Hamilton is fine.

Which is not to say that he's completely "over it". I don't know if you can - or should - ever be over anything like that. But he does know that ultimately it was an accident, and he does know that what's done is done and that whatever figuring out of it all has do be done might take a lifetime, and in the meantime, he's got a job to do, which includes supporting the people who have supported him, the families, from immediate to team to organization to fans to (now, especially) every kid watching him play the game, supporting them by continuing to ply his craft as best he can. Being a "person of faith" means different things to different people, but in Josh's case, it seems to mean handling your own business as best you can, and what you can't handle, trust that your support system, tangible or otherwise, will help you get through.

LTB & I were at the game last night (her first ever as anything other than a "tagalong mom"), and I tell you - the air was electric when Elvis got on with two out and Josh came to the plate, especially since Elvis got on by what was more or less a brain fart by Oakland's defense. It could easily have been Out 3. Everybody there was fully aware of "the incidents of the past week" (a phrase that has become as common around here as "DAMN it's hot..."). The people in our section were not just pulling for Josh to win the game, they were pulling for Josh himself, for some sort of collective closure and "personal triumph". RBIA crowds are not always the most collectively intense group in baseball, to put it mildly, but....something beyond just the ballgame was in the air at that moment, definitely.

I've seen some blasts in my life, but that one...wow. We we behind the plate, 23 rows up, and from that angle the ball looked for a while like it was going to go over the roof, it was such a blast. As it is, it landed about 5th row upper deck, but point being - that ball was gone the second it left the bat, and everybody knew it. If ever there was a "Purpose Driven Hit", this sure looked to be one.

To use the cliche, "the crowd went wild", and most everybody knew what it meant past the Rangers for the first time this year absolutely refusing to lose.

Refusing to lose is how you get through life's tougher moments. At least, that's how people who do get through them get through them. Of course there are scars and wounds and bleeding and all other sorts of torture, and sometimes it never stops. But those who survive do it by refusing to lose. In the immediate post-game interview, Josh said that he had been thinking that it had been a while since he had hit a walkoff (3 years to the day, as it turns out), and that maybe he should start thinking about getting that done when he had the chance.

Getting it done when you have the chance - is that not ultimately the best way to appreciate life, to honor whatever it is that puts us here with our various abilities? Sentimentalizing and dwelling on the past, be it the triumphs, the tragedies, or even the horrors are good as far as they go, but doing is the only way to actually move ahead. And make no mistake - Josh Hamilton is moving ahead. Not without (still more) baggage, but he is moving ahead. Not everybody can, or would. But he is. And he needs to be - there is a whole lot of baseball left, and his team is just now starting to play like it needs to play to get done what they need to be done. Hopefully it is not too late, but you never know, Lost time is not found again, which is something that Josh Hamilton knows better than most.

Josh Hamilton is fine.

[ghost of miles]

Jsngry--I'd intended to respond to Dan's thoughts as well, but you already made, with more eloquent elaboration, some of the points I would have made. All I can add is that Hamilton seems to be genuinely invested in faith, recovery, or whatever you want to call his grounding philosophy, and that part of that philosophy is accepting that life will continue to present painful challenges to you (often unexpectedly) after you've gotten your big, positive changes underway, and that dealing with them is part of the game (so to speak). Also, Hamilton was making a gesture of spiritual/material generosity, and while it's a terrible irony that the father died as a result of attempting to receive it, it's ultimately the kind of random and tragic outcome that the universe tends to offer up. (I'm a "person of faith" too, much as I despise how that phrase is used in our media culture, but I don't believe this man's death was an "act of God" or that it had some profound, hidden meaning, the Creator moving in mysterious ways and all of that kind of talk.) If Josh Hamilton had relapsed, gone out driving, and slammed into this man's car, thereby killing him, Josh Hamilton would not now be "fine." But that's not what happened. I don't doubt that he feels not just bad about what happened, but disturbed that he was directly involved in the sequence of events. I don't doubt that it will linger with him for awhile; but I also don't doubt that he'll be able to "move on" (another phrase that gets used to the point of abuse, but so be it), in terms of accepting that painful, difficult, and almost-inexplicable moments and events are going to happen. And while pills, alcohol, or other methods of altering one's consciousness can perhaps chase that knowledge away for a little while, they ultimately bring on their painful difficulties that are even worse, at least for Josh Hamilton and a whole lot of other folks wired in similar ways.

[ghost of miles]

On a lighter, everyday-baseball note, what a pitching duel today between Shields and CC! With the Yanks scoring the game's only run as a result of two Tampa Bay errors. And why, oh why have the Orioles not even played to their .400 level against the Bosox? Losing today as well, 7-6 in the 5th, which means in all likelihood we'll go into the All-Star break with Boston in first place. Still, at the beginning of the season I would not have predicted, not by a longshot, that NY would be anywhere near Boston in the standings at this point. But what with the road/home schedule remaining, A-Rod's either missing a month or playing with a power-crippling injury, and the uncertainty of how well Garcia and Colon will hold up through the brutal August/September stretch of games (though we at least now have a better-pitching Ivan Nova to step in if either Garcia or Colon goes down), I'm still guessing that the Yanks are ultimately competing for a wildcard spot. That they actually even have a chance to make a race of it in the division is a pleasant surprise.

[BERIGAN]

Jesus H. Christ. The Phillies starting left fielder Raul Ibanez went 0 for 4 tonight bring his season avg. down to .154!! He turns 39 one month from today and is making $11 Million this season. We are fucked.

Congrats!!! You are now a level 5 whiney ass baseball fan, the Red Sox level!

Last April, Ibanez hit .222 with one homer. .243 Pre all star break, .309 after the break. Few folks of any age in baseball work out as hard as he does. And players have actually been productive at that ancient age.

by the by, your fucked team is 18 and 9 and in a tie for first place. Without production from Left field. Without Chase Utley(who is supposedly going to start playing in games very soon)Without your closer.

So.Very.Fucked!

2nd best record due only to the fact that we had the easiest schedule in the majors - the Nats, Mets, Pads, Astros, D-Backs are not exactly playoff material. Are any of those teams playing .500 ball?? No. Ibanez is not going to regain the form that he had last season after the all star break unless he hires Greg Anderson. He turns 39 in less than 4 weeks. He's done. Utley is progressing but it's still uncertain when or IF he will be back. Even if he does make it back this season I don't think his body can take being an everyday player anymore.

Look, anyone who has watched the Fightin's this season know that they have a lot of question marks surrounding their hitting and bullpen. The Phantastic 4 are masking their problems - for now - but at some point the lack of hitting and miserable bullpen will catch up to them. The schedule is about to get a lot harder in May. So do we have a right to complain? Shit yeah. Am I giving up on my team a la the way a certain Red Sox fan in this folder did back in the first week of the season? Hell no. But as this team is constructed right now we are fucked. We will be lucky to sneak into the playoffs w/ this roster. Rube needs to get a bat or two and pray that Lidge and Contreras make it back if we are going to make any noise in October. So please do not promote me to level 5 just yet

BTW, Cole Hamels is just plain NASTY.

Well, clearly Ibanez is done! :P Are you happy today?

And yes, Hamels is still NASTY.

Edited July 10, 2011 by BERIGAN

[ghost of miles]

A-Rod elects to have surgery

The absolutely correct decision IMO. Although NY will certainly miss having him for the next month or so, it will also give A-Rod (soon to turn 36) a nice rest in the middle of the season. No doubt he'll take a few days to get back into the swing of things come mid-August, but he should be in good shape for the stretch drive in September. A bummer, though, that Eric Chavez is out with an injury as well right now.

[Chalupa]

So has Selig ordered a review of all of the safety railing in MLB's stadiums yet?? This is the 2nd time this season that a fan has fallen to his death at a game. What about the Rangers?? What have they done to make sure this accident doesn't happen again?? That's twice in two seasons that a fan has fallen out of the stands in Arlington and the 3rd time since the Ballpark opened in 1994.

Here's a short, interesting article on fan safety in professional sports venues.

[Dave James]

I know the Yankees have been scouting Amaris Ramirez from the Cubs as a possible trade deadline pick-up, so A-Rod's injury could put that move into the "likely" category as opposed to just a "maybe".

Edited July 10, 2011 by Dave James

[Chalupa]

Jesus H. Christ. The Phillies starting left fielder Raul Ibanez went 0 for 4 tonight bring his season avg. down to .154!! He turns 39 one month from today and is making $11 Million this season. We are fucked.

Congrats!!! You are now a level 5 whiney ass baseball fan, the Red Sox level!

Last April, Ibanez hit .222 with one homer. .243 Pre all star break, .309 after the break. Few folks of any age in baseball work out as hard as he does. And players have actually been productive at that ancient age.

by the by, your fucked team is 18 and 9 and in a tie for first place. Without production from Left field. Without Chase Utley(who is supposedly going to start playing in games very soon)Without your closer.

So.Very.Fucked!

2nd best record due only to the fact that we had the easiest schedule in the majors - the Nats, Mets, Pads, Astros, D-Backs are not exactly playoff material. Are any of those teams playing .500 ball?? No. Ibanez is not going to regain the form that he had last season after the all star break unless he hires Greg Anderson. He turns 39 in less than 4 weeks. He's done. Utley is progressing but it's still uncertain when or IF he will be back. Even if he does make it back this season I don't think his body can take being an everyday player anymore.

Look, anyone who has watched the Fightin's this season know that they have a lot of question marks surrounding their hitting and bullpen. The Phantastic 4 are masking their problems - for now - but at some point the lack of hitting and miserable bullpen will catch up to them. The schedule is about to get a lot harder in May. So do we have a right to complain? Shit yeah. Am I giving up on my team a la the way a certain Red Sox fan in this folder did back in the first week of the season? Hell no. But as this team is constructed right now we are fucked. We will be lucky to sneak into the playoffs w/ this roster. Rube needs to get a bat or two and pray that Lidge and Contreras make it back if we are going to make any noise in October. So please do not promote me to level 5 just yet

BTW, Cole Hamels is just plain NASTY.

Well, clearly Ibanez is done! :P Are you happy today?

And yes, Hamels is still NASTY.

A nice finish to the first half today. And yes Ibanez seems to like batting vs. Proctor.

[Quincy]

Here's a short, interesting article on fan safety in professional sports venues.

Attendance for MLB was 40 million in 2010. Given that many people I think the safety record is remarkable. The greatest danger in attending sporting events is if you are driving to & fro, and most likely the trip leaving the ballpark because of the drunk & tired drivers.

[Chalupa]

Here's a short, interesting article on fan safety in professional sports venues.

Attendance for MLB was 40 million in 2010. Given that many people I think the safety record is remarkable. The greatest danger in attending sporting events is if you are driving to & fro, and most likely the trip leaving the ballpark because of the drunk & tired drivers.

Damn it Quincy. Will you stop being the voice of reason when I'm driven by irrational fury? I had my pitchfork and torch ready to go.

That being said, I think that at the very least Selig should order an immediate review of all stadium railings regardless of the whether they meet the local code. I can't believe that the Rangers let their fans sit in the same area where Mr.Stone fell to his death w/out doing something about the railing. That's just nuts.