March 2008 - Posts
Here are five swings at the start of the regular season:
1. Just a radical thought but does anyone think spring training is too long? Just asking because we hit Opening Day with an insane number of injuries ranging from nagging ones to season-ending ones.
Too many contending teams start the year with major players sidelined. The season is already too long. The 162-game schedule is not designed for any doubleheaders, enough off days for teams and March openers.
Now spring training is five to six weeks with an absurd number of games. You think someone might commission a study as to the possible relationship between long springs and high injury counts, but then again spring training has become about money. Owners charge high ticket prices and pay the players minimal sums. That equation will be tough to change.
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Injuries are a major story entering the new season. We know the list of those who are hurt, but overlooked are the players who must produce in the absence of those who are sidelined.
JON GARLAND AND JERED WEAVER
A double hit to the Angels rotation as John Lackey is expected to miss at least the first month with a strained right triceps and Kelvim Escobar has a shoulder injury that will sideline him indefinitely.
Lackey and Escobar were the Angels Game 1 and 2 starters from the playoffs. Now Garland must be the pitcher of his All-Star 2005 season, 18-10, 3.05 ERA. The problem is 2005 is the only season in which Garland had an ERA under 4.20 and a WHIP below 1.3. Weaver was strong in his first full year, but his growth must accelerate. Let’s put it this way: the Mariners’ chances to take the AL West look much better now than they did a year ago.
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In the earliest start to a major-league season ever, the Red Sox faced the A’s in the Tokyo Dome Tuesday, the opener of a two-game series that also had the teams meeting on Wednesday. Both games are considered “home” games for Oakland.
Consider the trip to Japan part of Boston’s price for signing Daisuke Matsuzaka. It was Boston that made Matsuzaka -- a revered sports hero in Japan -- the highest-paid import in big-league history and the Red Sox can’t hide him. They needed to bring him back to his home country, show him off and have him spread the gospel of Major League Baseball.
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Keeping with the theme of March Madness, I offer up my top eight teams coming out of spring training.
No. 1 seeds:
RED SOX: The defending World Series winners didn’t blink when it appeared the Yankees would trade for Johan Santana. The Red Sox have held their farm system prizes and with Curt Schilling a question mark, young pitchers Jon Lester and Clay Buchholz will be important. Interesting move in the release of catcher Doug Mirabelli as management showed it is not fearful of disrupting “chemistry.”
YANKEES: The Bronx Bombers still have a ferocious lineup. Despite the pitching questions surrounding Mike Mussina and rookies Phil Hughes and Ian Kennedy, this team will score enough to overcome any problems on the mound. Joba Chamberlain starts in the bullpen, which indicates general manager Brian Cashman is firmly in charge and, further, that youth will finally be served in the Bronx.
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The bitterness between baseball's most lucrative franchises and its teams that don't spend at the highest levels for players lingers beneath the surface for now, but in some places, it’s not too deep. The slightest flesh wound allows it to gush forth as it did for Yankees general partner Hank Steinbrenner last week.
It was the Yankees' dustup with Tampa Bay that triggered Steinbrenner's verbal blast. The tension started on March 8 when Tampa Bay's Elliot Johnson crashed into Francisco Cervelli at the plate, breaking his right wrist. Yankees manager Joe Girardi said the play was unnecessarily violent for a spring training game. And after the Yankees’ return shot -- Shelley Duncan’s hard slide into Tampa Bay second baseman Akinori Iwamura with his spikes high which ignited a bench-clearing incident -- emotions were flamed.
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Kerry Wood, Carlos Marmol, Cubs: Regular readers of my blog entries know of my focus (some might say obsession) on closers. Nothing is more gratifying for a team to own a sure thing in the ninth. Conversely, nothing is more damaging to a team’s psyche than uncertainty at the end of a game. Wood is showing remarkable life in an arm nearly pronounced dead a year ago. Marmol has a filthy slider, and is Wood’s set-up man. This could be a dominant duo.
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Live long enough and you hear it all. In a New York Times Magazine article last week, Yankees team president Randy Levine said “today the Yankees are an entertainment company with a baseball team at its core.”
Jarring though that statement is to a baseball fan; it is rooted in undeniable truth. And it reflects a subtle change in the baseball dynamics of New York.
The Yankees are still the kings, 13 consecutive years in postseason, charging towards four million in attendance during a single season, and owners of a wildly profitable television network.
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Only one thing is certain in the NL West: San Francisco is the last place team. Beyond that, any of the four other teams, the Dodgers, Padres, Diamondbacks or Rockies can win the division. And any of the four could finish fourth. With rapid growth from the front end of the rotation, the Giants could leap a team that crashes, but it’s very possible that the front four could all win between 80 and 90 games.
Balance is the preseason theme for the teams in the division, but youth should be a close second. While San Francisco creaked through last year and the Dodgers watched their clubhouse splinter along age lines, Arizona and Colorado remade their teams and changed the NL West outlook through new players.
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I have watched in amazement at the steady undercurrent from New York that, although perhaps not intended, minimizes Joe Torre’s achievements (four World Series titles and 12 consecutive postseason appearances) as the Yankees’ manager.
Maybe it’s the truism that we love to build people up, and then we love with more delight to tear them down.
So as the transition to Joe Girardi takes place in the Yankees’ clubhouse, here are some key storylines for follow:
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Troy Tulowitzki, who turned 23 last October, is less than three years removed from college baseball, and he is going to be a Sports Illustrated cover boy. How good is life for the Rockies’ shortstop (and the health of baseball) when America’s most prestigious sports magazine in its preview edition for the baseball season plans to feature three sparkling young talents: Tulowitzki, Arizona’s Justin Upton and Milwaukee’s Ryan Braun.
But it was Tulo (his only name in Rockies’ land) who played in the World Series last year as a rookie. It was Tulo who was universally credited as the soul of a Colorado team that defied baseball history with the sport’s greatest closing kick, and extended that run into the World Series.
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