This pitcher is 19 years old:
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Gooden’s last nine starts of 1984: 8-1, 76 IP, 1.07 ERA, 105 K, 13 BB. 19 years old.
Dwight Gooden’s curveball will break your heart
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Category Archives: Other Baseball
Today in underreported Spring Training stories
Within the next couple of weeks, you will inevitably read several reports about which Mets are in the best shapes of their lives and then several snarky blog posts (perhaps from this site) about those reports pointing out that players almost always claim to be in the best shape of their lives and there are dozens of those stories every spring. There’ll also be stories about pitchers working on new pitches.
That’s Spring Training, and it’s not really anyone’s fault. Everyone’s looking for something to write about and there’s only so much you can say about baseball players stretching.
What I’m hoping to hear more about soon, though, is something Matt Cerrone caught in the background of this WheelHouse segment. It’s hard to see for sure, but it looks as if Danny Herrera’s hair just might be in the best shape of its life. Look at the volume and body and sheen!
We’ve seen baseball players endeavor all sorts of groundbreaking work in facial hair, but we really haven’t seen enough recently in the way of fabulous flowing man-manes. Here’s hoping the diminutive screwballer keeps it, grows it, and both rinses and repeats in 2012. Also that he makes the team. 5’6″ lefty screwballers are the new market inefficiency.
Minor Leaguers
The best part about being in the Minor Leagues, I assume, is that they pay you money to play baseball. The worst part, I figure, is just about everything else: The constant travel on long bus rides, the brutal schedule, and trying to keep yourself fed and in shape on a small per diem in unfamiliar cities.
I imagine this is why all the Minor Leaguers on Twitter seem to spend so much time Tweeting about Chipotle. The restaurants are everywhere, they’re consistent, and they provide a hell of a lot of food for a reasonable price. Plus, though Chipotle could hardly be called healthy, it’s probably better than most of the fast and cheap options available on the road, and the burritos are packed with protein for the hungry young athlete.
Anyway, in celebration of all that, I’ve started this little side project: Minor Leaguers Tweeting About Chipotle. It’s short right now, so please, if and when you notice a Minor Leaguer Tweeting about Chipotle, draw my attention to it in some way.
YouTube doubler
Yesterday the estimable Jon Bois posted a link to something called YouTube doubler, a technology that allows you to play two YouTube videos simultaneously. This is amazingly useful for me, since one of my favorite time-killers is coming up with new scores for silly Internet videos, and until yesterday I had to juggle YouTube pages to do so and couldn’t share my silly hobby with the world.
Here are some:
Spelling Bee Faint
Waterskiing mishaps (mute the left one)
The Very Melancholy Baseball Show
Here’s one Shamik made:
And here’s one in honor of the A’s signing of Yoenis Cespedes:
WE EAT THE PIG AND THEN TOGETHER WE BURN!
I had some meetings and a lot of work to do this morning but I’ll have more stuff soon, I promise. For now, enjoy YouTube doubler.
Of interest to maybe no one but me
Toby Hyde is right in the middle of his always excellent Top 41 prospects series, and No. 20 on the list is a guy I’ve taken a particular interest in: 19-year-old pitcher Akeel Morris.
Y’all know by now that I’m often pretty down on prospects and prospecting, especially when it comes to pitching prospects that haven’t yet made it out of rookie ball. Toby reports that Morris throws really hard and “has flashed a plus curveball” but “has control issues,” which couple to explain why finished fourth in the Appalachian League in strikeouts and first in walks in 2011.
But that’s… well, whatever. I’ll concern myself with Morris’ performance more when he hits High A ball or something. What’s unusual about Morris among most Major and Minor League baseball players is that he was born in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands and went to high school there.
Three Virgin Islanders played in the Majors in the last 10 years, but all of them went to high school in the continental U.S. The last guy who went to high school in the Virgin Islands to play in the Majors is, as far as I can figure from baseball-reference, journeyman utility guy Jerry Browne.
There’s a bunch more on recent player development and scouting in the Virgin Islands here and a V.I.-specific baseball site detailing the history of the game in the islands here.
The way I see it, the more places that produce successful professional baseball players, the more people that get exposed to baseball. More people getting exposed to baseball means more people realizing how awesome baseball is, which means more people playing baseball and dedicating themselves to baseball, which means a bigger talent pool for Major League Baseball, which means baseball somehow winds up even more awesome. No pressure, Akeel Morris.
The Greek Scrod of Walks?
Turns out Kevin Youkilis is fully committed to this Boston thing:
This is supposed to be hush-hush and on the deep down-low, but you know us. It’s time to pop the bubbly because Kevin Youkilis and Tom Brady’s sis, Julie, are engaged!…
Friends report that Youk and Julie met at a postgame party at Patriot Place last year after that other New York team Jet-tisoned the Patriots out of the playoffs. Not a good night for Tom, but a rather good one for his sis!
It will be Julie’s first marriage and Youk’s second. He was married in 2008, but turns out not legally, to Ben Affleck’s ex, Enza Sambataro.
That’s right: Youkilis is engaged to Tom Brady’s sister after having been quasi-married to a woman who once dated Ben Affleck. He has also appeared in a Dropkick Murphys video.
Via Dustin Parkes.
Rusty Staub to be inducted into Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, which exists
Via Eric Simon comes the news that former Met Rusty Staub will be inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, which exists. Staub is not Canadian — he was born in Louisiana — but he enjoyed three straight All-Star seasons with the Expos from 1969-1971 (and another handful of at-bats with the club late in the 1979 season). That’s about all the claim to Canadian-ness it turns out you need for the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame.
Other Canadian Baseball Hall of Famers include actual Canadians like Larry Walker, Ferguson Jenkins and Kirk McCaskill, but also some with more tenuous connections to the nation, like Tommy Lasorda — who pitched for the Dodgers’ Triple-A team in Montreal for nine seasons — and the entire All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which had 64 Canadians including the catcher Geena Davis’ character in A League of Their Own was “rumoured to be based on.”
There’s obviously a waiting period after a player retires before he can be inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. I can tell because Matt Stairs isn’t in yet even though they (presumably) already have a Matt Stairs Wing full of awesome Matt Stairs memorabilia, including jerseys from all 13 of his Major League stops, an empty beer can that is believed to be from his first-ever postgame Molson, the original scouting report on Stairs by Expos scout Bill MacKenzie*, and, of course, a whole bunch of hockey stuff.
The Matt Stairs Wing is right near the early Winnipeg Slugger prototypes, across from where the wax statue of Kelly Gruber stands and kitty corner from where the actual Kelly Gruber stands, just sort of hanging around admiring the Canadian baseball history, considering his small role in it and secretly hoping someone recognizes him even while he insists to his friends that he hopes no one recognizes him.
Come to think of it, I should probably get to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. Worth it for the trip down memory lane to those times when Jason Bay was pretty good.
*- Actual name of Expos scout that signed Matt Stairs. Canada!
Cool
If you’ve ever wondered why Quad-A reliever Dirk Hayhurst is something of a baseball-nerd darling on the Internet, it’s because his book The Bullpen Gospels is really good. Not just good-for-something-a-ballplayer wrote, legit good.
Anyway, now it appears he’s bound for Italy to play baseball there and write about it. I’ve long fantasized about writing a book about baseball around the world — going to games every place baseball is played and detailing each place’s baseball culture. But it looks like Dirk Hayhurst is going to trump the hell out of that idea, and good for him.
Jeff Francoeur generous to Oakland bacon enthusiasts
They cooked and baked, from regular bacon to home-made chicharron with fresh cheese. All the way up to the chocolate-covered bacon. Seriously. They ate and they drummed, they shouted and had fun, they cheered and they ate some more. And when the game was over, there was a spare plate left for Jeff Francoeur….
The next day, he walked out to his position before the game, carrying a signed baseball in his hand. He spotted the familiar faces, smiled and threw the baseball over the fence.
There was a hundred dollar bill rubber-tied to the baseball. And an inscription: “Beer or Bacon Dog on me. Jeff Francoeur.”
– Bojan Koprivica, Hardball Times.
Oh, Frenchy.
Via Craig Calcaterra.
Here is a graph I made about Miguel Cabrera
Since switching leagues:
Tedquarters 