Daily Archives: December 3, 2003

Mike C over at Baseball Rants is one of the great baseball historians in the blogging community. Stop by and catch his latest on the new Hall of Fame ballot. Mike isn’t alone, as Rich Lederer is right up there with him. Rich has a nice tribute to Warren Spahn up at Rich’s Weekend Baseball BEAT (not for nothing, but Mike C is due up next in Rich’s interview series with bloggers).

Here is a good passage from “On the Run,” Maury Wills’ autobiography:

I refuse to get upset with modern ballplayers who can’t bunt or run the bases. They said the same things when I was playing.

So it doesn’t drive me nuts to got to a game and see players who can’t execute fundamentals. There were only a handful of players when I played who could do the little things like bunting properly. The game hasn’t really changed that way. Managers get made because someone didn’t sacrifice a man over, but very few managers insist that their players learn to bunt.

…They don’t have a column in the papers to tell who’s leading the league in sacrifice bunts. You don’t see guys demand that their salaries be doubled because they lead the league in sacrifice bunts. There’s not glory for bunters. All bunting does is win ballgames.

…Learning to bunt takes a lot of time. The manager ends up assuming that some guys can do it and others can’t and he leaves it at that. You have to have time for infield practice. You have to have time for batting practice, the great priority. You have time for all that other stuff, but you don’t have time for bunting.

If Wills wasn’t a great bunter, odds are that he would not have lasted in the big leagues too long, no matter how fast he was. I think he makes a good point about bunting. Think Frank Howard or Rocky Colavito were ace bunters?

Gary Sheffield is still not a Yankee, and who knows if and when he will come to the Boogie Down (though I suspect he eventually will). There is a new member of the Yankees today though. According to Peter Gammons, reliever Paul Quantrill has signed a two-year deal worth $6.8 million. I remember not looking forward to seeing Quantrill come out of the pen when he pitched with Toronto a few years back. But as David Pinto points out, Quantrill is a groundball pitcher moving to a team with a mediocre defense. My man Cliff isn’t too thrilled with either Flash Gordon or Quantrill.

The Yankee bullpen is improving and I’m sure there will be much ink devoted to how much money the Bombers are spending on their relief corps. (You can just see the snide remarks about how the Yankee bullpen costs as much as the total payroll of some teams. Mike Lupica, can you hear me knocking?)

As for the Kevin Brown-for-Jeff Weaver scenerio, it seems to be a lot of hooey. The New York Post says the deal is not likely to go down, at least not as it is presently structured. The Dodgers could be interested in moving Brown for a hitter, and the L.A. Times says that the 39-year old righty would be open to being dealt.

Lastly, David Pinto has a link to an interesting article on New York’s favorite imported monster, Godzilla Matsui, who talks about his first year in the Major Leagues.