The Baseball Zealot

Hot Stove Starting to Heat Up

OmarVizquel The White Sox fired up the Hot Stove signing SS Omar Vizquel & Andruw Jones. Vizquel has been the best defensive shortstop of his time and will tutor Sox shortstop Alexei Ramirez. Omar might be headed for Cooperstown when he finally hangs them up, his numbers stack up with Ozzie Smith, and nobody flashed a better glove at short. Speaking of excellent fielders, nobody did it better than Andruw Jones, but that was in his day. Andruw isn’t all that old, but he got old in a hurry, with very old knees. Jones will not embarrass himself in the outfield with the glove, although he won’t add to the team speed, but he was brought in here for his bat and to provide some outfield depth.

After a career year with the Blue Jays, Marco Scutaro cashed in with Boston, where he’ll be the Red Sox everyday shortstop. Outfielder Mike Cameron’s new home will be Fenway Park, playing leftfield for the Bosox, which would mean Jason Bay will not be retained. The Redbirds made a wise investment bringing Brad Penny on board. Cardinals pitching coach Dave Duncan has to be licking his chops, adding Penny to a staff that already has Adam Wainwright & Chris Carpenter. The Atlanta Braves bolstered their bullpen by adding lefty Billy Wagner and righthander Takashi Saito. By signing with the Nationals, Ivan Rodriguez will serve as a backup catcher & mentor to Jesus Flores.

I’m sure there’s alot more to come, I’m especially looking forward to the Rule V Draft, which takes place on the 10th.

Searching for Baseball

At the end of each year, Google (as well as other search engines) does an analysis on what was searched on for that year. Rising trends, falling trends, trends in all aspects of our society. Google calls this trend analysis project “Zeitgeist” and they just released their results for 2009.

Looking at the fastest rising trends in the United States overall, we’re not going to find anything baseball related, sorry. Actually, nothing sports related. Twitter, Michael Jackson, and Facebook headed up the top ten of general keywords. Among fastest FALLING was “olympics” but that makes sense as 2008 was naturally a big year for it and it was going to trend downward.

What IS more relevant to our interests as baseball fans is search trends within the realm of sports. Fortunately, Google does parse that out for us. Here are some of the highest searched keywords within United States in sports.

Among baseball teams, there are no surprises. There’s a reason for that East Coast bias:

yankees
red sox
phillies
cubs
mets
dodgers
braves
tigers
cubs
twins

Taking a look at all sports stadiums, three baseball parks make the list:

yankee stadium
cowboys stadium
giants stadium
gillette stadium
lucas oil stadium
reliant stadium
dodger stadium
raymond james stadium
busch stadium
shea stadium

The Yankees’ ballpark gets the #1 nod for a couple reasons, I’m sure. One, their move to a new stadium. Two, they won the World Series. And three, well, they’re the Yankees.

Interestingly, no baseball managers made the top 10 list of sports coaches. Nor did any baseball rivalries. Both of them were dominated by college, NBA and football.

1. red river rivalry (texas vs. oklahoma)

2. michigan ohio state rivalry

3. unc duke rivalry

4. colts patriots rivalry

5. vikings packers rivalry

6. bears packers rivalry

7. georgia florida rivalry

8. giants dodgers rivalry

9. lakers celtics rivalry

10. steelers browns rivalry

coach k (mike krzyzewski – duke university basketball)
mike tomlin (pittsburgh steelers)
josh mcdaniels (denver broncos)
john calipari (university of kentucky basketball)
erik spoelstra (miami heat)
sean miller (university of arizona basketball)
bill belichick (new england patriots)
roy williams (university of north carolina basketball)
phil jackson (los angeles lakers)
tom cable (oakland raiders)

Interesting that the Packers get searched on two different rivalries.

There’s more info at the Google Zeitgeist 2009 web site.

APBA’s disk is shipping!

It’s cold as heck out there but it’s a good reason to celebrate baseball. The APBA Game Company has begun shipping their disks for the 2009 Baseball season.

While our APBA league (and many others) play the dice and cards version, the disk gives us an idea what the cards will look like. Those of us in leagues all around the country have been waiting with bated breath to see how our teams will shape up for the coming year.

Rob Moore has an article celebrating the fact over at The APBA Blog.

‘One-and-done’ Maddog

Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated wrote an article on those players who got between 15 and 20 votes in their first of eligibility for Hall of Fame consideration. “One-and-done” he calls them. Good enough to get more than a few votes but not enough to remain on the ballot for subsequent year.

It’s a list littered with players who were more than fair, in my opinion. Players like Lou Whitaker, Joe Carter, Ted Simmons (you’ll get a lot of arguments from Cardinals fans on this, I know), Rusty Staub, and Al Oliver.

One player on the list who I saw a lot growing up was thirdbaseman Bill Madlock. ‘Maddog’ has some interesting stats in way. Posnanski makes the point that eleven players have won four or more batting titles. Of those, ten are in the Hall of Fame. Bill Madlock is not. That said, I get the sense Posnanski wasn’t necessarily bemoaning Madlock’s omission from the Hall.

Madlock had a career .305 batting average to go along with his four batting titles. While he had that going for him, his stats look good-but-not-great otherwise. Bill Madlock usually hit the double digits in homeruns but never passed the 20 mark for a season. His highest was 19 in 1982 for the Pirates. Not much of a doubles hitter either from the looks of it. He passed 30 only twice.

He had decent speed also sometimes hitting double digits in stolen bases. Only once though did he pass 20 when he stole 32 this time in a split season in 1979 between the Pirates and Giants.

In essence, Maddog earned his paycheck by winning batting crowns.

Pay Attention! Stimulant exemptions up in MLB

There’s an interesting piece over at The Biz of Baseball on a report put out by the MLBPA and MLB. The report contains among other things, the number of players who were granted Therapeutic Use Exemptions (TUEs) from baseball’s drug policy due to their particular conditions. All told, 115 players were exempted in one way or another from MLB’s drug policy. Of those 115, an overwhelming 108 were being treated for Attention Deficit Disorder.

Here’s the breakdown:

Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD): 108
Hypertension: 2
Hypogonadism: 2
Narcolepsy: 1
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): 1
Post-Concussion Disorder: 1

During their mandatory testing in 2009, MLB found 11 instances of Adderall, a stimulant, which is an approved substance used in the treatment of ADD.

MLB players being treated for ADD is nothing new. A few years back, relief pitcher Scott Eyre was very open about his ADD and treatment for it. Apparently, he was bouncing all over the place before getting help. Once treated, he could focus and started to pitch better. Rumor has it, his bench-mates could tolerate him better, too.

Two things I’m taking away from this… One, I never knew the extent of those baseball players who have ADD (or, let’s face it, claim to have ADD). Out of the relatively small number of players that play in the majors, 108 is a pretty high number.

Two, it seems Adderall is the drug of choice to treat ADD among players. I know for a fact there is a variety of drugs out there that treat ADD and they don’t all work the same. It just seems odd that among the 3000+ drug tests that the MLB administered that another drug wasn’t found.

Finally, in case you are wondering (I was):

Hypogonadism is when the sex glands produce little or no hormones. In men, these glands (gonads) are the testes; in women, they are the ovaries.

I know… too much information..

TBS fires Chip Caray

With three years left on his contract, Chip Caray just got canned by TBS.

David Levy, president of Turner Sports, wrote in a memo to Turner employees: “Since the end of this year’s MLB playoffs, we’ve had several discussions with Chip Caray regarding 2010 and beyond. Both sides have agreed that now is the right time for Turner Sports and Chip to move ahead on different paths.”

That’s putting it nicely.

Place your bets on who his replacement will be.

Topps, Minor Leagues reach exclusive deal

Three months ago, MLB signed Topps Company to a major contract to produce and market baseball cards with the MLB teams’ logo. This was an exclusive contract to the detriment to other card making companies such as Upper Deck.

Now, Topps has scored another coup. They have reached agreement with Major League Baseball Properties in a multi-year licensing deal to produce certain nationally distributed Minor League cards.

The agreement makes Topps the only trading card manufacturer licensed by MLBP to produce nationally-distributed trading cards of top draft picks and prospects within Minor League Baseball, and will give Topps the rights to names and logos of the 160 affiliated Minor League clubs and current Minor League players in uniform on baseball cards and stickers beginning on January 1, 2010. In addition, Topps will now have the exclusive use of the Pro Debut logo. Its first product will be its 2010 Topps Pro Debut Series 1 to be unveiled in early March 2010.

As it was three months ago, this deal is exclusive.

Angels make a class move, vote Adenhart a playoff share

A nice touch by the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim players.

The team, who made the playoffs this year, voted deceased pitcher Nick Adenhart a full share of the playoff winnings according to the LA Times Blog. That comes out to roughly $138,000. The cash goes to Adenhart’s family, of course.

Nick Adenhart gave all he had for the Angels. Unfortunately, it for just one game when he pitched six scoreless innings in his MLB debut in April. That night, he was killed in an accident by a drunk driver.

Zeile fun

Looks like someone is floating Todd Zeile’s name out as a HOF candidate.

All kidding aside, Teddy Ballgame already posted earlier about TZ being the only player to hit for more than ten major league teams.

Apparently, he also committed more errors than anyone in the 1990s, a record I never knew about.

2009 MVP roundup: Joe Mauer’s power convinces the BBWAA

I was thinking about the 2009 MVP awards and getting all cynical about how the BBWAA only recognizes players when they finally start hitting the long ball. After all, Joe Mauer’s 28 homeruns was twice his previous high three years ago. Mauer had all (ok, most) of the tools necessary to garner the award already but the boost in power clinched it.

But then I thought back to last year. Oh yeah, Dustin Pedroia. As much as a surprise as it was to me, Pedroia came through with the 2008 MVP award with a measly 17 homeruns for the Boston Red Sox (yeah, yeah, go ahead… scream East Coast bias all you want. Yankee writers vote on this too).

A little bit of related MVP trivia… who was the last National League player with less than 20 homers to win the MVP? It’s been a few years. Answer at the end.

It was more than the power in of itself though. An intriguing statistic… Joe Mauer led the league in batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage. No big deal? Except it hasn’t been done since George Brett did it in 1980.

Cocky sports show host Sam Panayotovich, who guest posted the MVP predictions on TBZ in September, shot me an email. Referring to his article, he wrote, “Man, this guy was right on the money. ;).”

Sure enough, Sam correctly picked Joe Mauer and Albert Pujols to win the big one. But let’s be fair. Albert Pujols was a gimme. :) The entire BBWAA thought the same way.

Seriously, it was a nice call, Sam. Out of all of our analysts who predicted the awards, I think he was the only one to get them both right.

Mauer wasn’t unanimous and that’s not too surprising. What is strange is that the lone dissenting vote didn’t go to second place Mark Teixeira or even third place Derek Jeter. Fourth place Miguel Cabrera was the recipient of the gratuitous #1 vote.

Oh back to the trivia question, who was the last NL MVP player with under 20 homers???

It was Barry Larkin in 1995. Larkin hit .319 with 15 homers with 98 runs and 66 rbis. He also stole 51 bases and won the Gold Glove that year.