Daily Archives: July 8, 2009

AJ Burnett looks to stay burning hot tonight against the Twins.

Here’s hoping he has another good outing.

Let’s Go Yan-Kees!

Or something like that…

Tom Verducci has a nice long profile of Earl Weaver in the current edition of SI:

As we are watching this 21st-century game in Fort Lauderdale, I ask Weaver if he has ever heard of moneyball.

“Moneyball?” he says, bewildered. “No.”

I tell him it’s shorthand for how Oakland gained a competitive edge by understanding, among many other things, the value of on-base percentage. “Ohhhhh, wait … a … minute!” Weaver bellows. “That was my favorite right there, on-base percentage! Don Buford wasn’t getting to play under Hank Bauer [Weaver’s predecessor]. He’d get in a ball game every now and then and feel like he had to get three or four hits. I told Buford, ‘I’m willing to play you as long as you have a .400 on-base percentage.’ All of a sudden he becomes a regular, and he’s walking a hundred times and hitting right around .300.” Buford had played 669 career games before Weaver was named Orioles manager on July 11, 1968. His OBP was .335. He played 617 games over the rest of his career, all for Weaver. His OBP under Weaver was .388.

Before Moneyball, before Beane, before Bill James—but not quite before Copernicus—Weaver, a white-haired gnome who never played a day of major league baseball, knew what worked. The most recent generation of general managers, armed with their computer printouts and Ivy League–educated assistants, all channel something from the Earl of Baltimore.

“I’ll tell you one thing he did that we all learned from,” Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein says. “He would develop arms on the big league level by bringing up a young pitcher and putting him in the bullpen, mostly out of long relief. Once he got some experience he could move into the rotation. The Twins did it with [Johan] Santana to perfection.”

And Now For Something Completely Different…

In case you’ve missed Ron Artest’s tribute to Michael Jackson, well, you just shouldn’t miss it. Bless him, Ron Ron’s heart is in the right place, but this clip ranks up there with Jesus is My Friend as the 3,653rd reason why You Tube is too good to be true.

The first person that came to mind when I heard that Steve McNair was dead was his wife. And not just because he was found in a car with his mistress. It was because of an old episode of HBO Real Sports I recall watching. McNair’s wife talked about the anxiety she had watching her husband play hurt repeatedly over the years. She came across as loving and sympathetic.

Now this.

Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Allen Barra had a nice, brief appreciation of McNair:

One of my mentors, Jerry Izenberg, who recently retired after more than half a century of sportswriting for the Newark Star-Ledger, offered me a nugget of wisdom: “If you’re in this business long enough,” he said, “you learn that if you’re a sportswriter — a serious, dedicated full-time newspaperman — then you don’t have a job. What you’ve got is a mistress.

“And mistresses make demands. You’ll pay for her one way or another. I paid her price in tons of coffee gulped on the run from plastic cups and in holidays spent away from my family while I was on the road. Mostly, though, I paid her price in loss of innocence through exposure to the evil side of sports in America.”

…There are some, for instance columnist Jay Mariotti of Fanhouse.com, to whom the circumstances of McNair’s death provide “a lesson to all of us about the differences between a façade and reality.” But McNair’s career was a reality, not a facade, and so were the hundreds of hours of commitment he gave to community service. The hours he and his wife spent loading food, water and clothes onto trucks for Hurricane Katrina victims (McNair himself arranged for the tractor trailers) and the three children’s football camps he personally paid for this year weren’t façades.

His death was a shock, and the manner of it cost me innocence I didn’t know I still had. But it didn’t take more from me than Steve McNair’s life and career gave back.

CC Sabathia allowed a run on three hits over seven innings last night and had more than plenty of run support as the Yanks pounded the Twins 10-2. Carlos Gomez robbed Alex Rodriguez of a grand slam and the game still wasn’t even close.

Photo by Jim Mone/AP courtesy of ESPN.com.

Every starter in the Yankee line-up got a hit. Mark Teixeira, who has been struggling offensively, had four, Brett Gardner had three, and Robbie Cano and Frankie Cervelli each had a couple. With Jose Molina set to come off a rehab assignment, Cervelli will return to Triple A.  But he sure has been fun to watch, eh?

Oh, and Alfredo Aceves will take Chien-Ming Wang’s turn and start tomorrow afternoon.