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April 29, 2012

Holland and an imperfect game

I got my first chance to watch my nine-year-old nephew Holland play baseball on Friday. His game was, unsurprisingly, a very different experience from watching the big leaguers. I won't give all the gory details, but a short example from the third inning will show what made an impression on me.

Holland reached base on a 5-4 force-out. On the next pitch, the opposing catcher let strike one roll a couple feet away, and Holland swiped second. The next pitch, ball one, went in the dirt too, and Holland took third. Then, after a walk, the pitcher turned his back for a moment, and not only did Holland steal home, but in the confusion the runner on first got all the way to third.

From my rough scoring of the game (yes, I was scoring it), four and a half innings produced 18 instances of what in professional baseball would be judged wild pitches or passed balls. Nothing more need be said to illustrate the chasm between these kids and "real" ballplayers, right? The professional game, the true game, is on a plane of effective perfection, right?

Jump-cut to the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium that night. Game knotted at six, with Derek Jeter on first and Brayan Villarreal pitching to Curtis Granderson. The payoff pitch goes wild, and Jeter makes it all the way to third. Three pitches later, a slider goes off the end of catcher Alex Avila's glove, and Jeter beats the throw back to the plate to score the winning run.

This was a highly dramatic example, but not an isolated one. On that busy Friday night in major league baseball, there were four passed balls and 12 wild pitches (including two "dropped" third strikes) that led to 20 runners gaining extra bases. Ten of the 15 games on the schedule had at least one wild pitch or passed ball—and all five that didn't had at least one hit-by-pitch.

Maybe most interesting, one of those wild pitches led to that bizarre rarity: a four-strikeout inning. In the top of the eighth at Camden Yards, Oakland's Ryan Cook got the first two Orioles hacking, but strike nine to Adam Jones was a wild one that let Jones reach. Cook regrouped and threw strike 12 past Matt Wieters' bat to end the inning.

It was, according to MLB.com, the 59th four-K inning in history. (And the second one in four days. Who knew?)

So on a pretty ordinary day in baseball, arguably the two most interesting and memorable moments are defined by their imperfection, by someone goofing up. Kinda brings those multi-millionaire celebrities down to the level of nine-year-old boys playing for fun, right?

Well, no. Let's not get carried away. The pros are light-years in quality beyond those kids. But they aren't machines; they aren't infallible.

And thank God for that.

A flawless game is a sterile game. Tic-tac-toe holds no interest for anyone but kids, because adults can figure out the perfect strategy pretty easily and make a perpetual tie of it. Several years ago, computers solved the game of checkers, figuring out its optimum strategies, and the world of human tournament checkers has been reeling ever since. Once there's an equation for a game, the game is over. It's a solved puzzle, thrown out like a completed crossword in yesterday's paper.

It is the possibility, indeed the inevitability, of imperfection that makes the game what it is. The pitcher missing the outside corner; the batter getting under a fastball; the infielder's dive deflecting the hot-shot grounder. You can be perfect for a moment, or for a few at-bats. You might, like Philip Humber, be perfect for a whole game—but then there's the next game.

This should give us a bit of perspective. The players are going to keep striving for perfection, and we're going to keep rooting for our teams to exhibit it, and that's exactly as it should be. But the pursuit of that flawlessness is only interesting because it's so hard to achieve, even briefly, even for the best in the game. In baseball as in so many other endeavors, nobody's perfect.

Except for Holland's team, that is. They're 4-0 on the season so far—but there's still a lot of baseball left to be played.
Posted by: Shane Tourtellotte

January 04, 2012

Melvin Mora career highlights

As 2011 came to a close, former Baltimore Oriole Melvin Mora announced his retirement. This isn’t too surprising since Arizona (his last team) cut him midseason and no one picked him up. Still, Mora’s recent decision to out-and-out retire makes it official.

Mora had an impressive career for someone who was such a late bloomer. Only seven men who debuted in their age-27 season or later have ever played in over 1,500 games: Jimmy Austin, Bob Johnson, Ichiro Suzuki, Davey Lopes, Bill Bruton, Earl Averill and Mora.

Many of those guys had circumstances delay their start. It was the race line for Bruton, the Pacific Ocean for Ichiro, and Averill was a Pacific Coast League star before the minor leagues were fully tamed. Mora was just a late bloomer.

Now that he’s gone, let’s look back on his career with the Mets, Orioles, Rockies, and Diamondbacks. Listed below are his career highlights—his best and worst performances, the greatest and most important games he played in, as well as incredible and unusual occasions he was on hand for. Here’s the list:
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Posted by: Chris Jaffe

September 29, 2011

Oh, my!

Was that the most stunning night of baseball ever, or what?

A two-hit shutout by Chris Carpenter was the boring part as the Cards won, 8-0, and put the pressure on the Braves.

Atlanta was looking good for six innings, building a 3-1 lead. But Philly crept within one in the seventh and plated the tying run in the ninth.

After both pitching staffs held serve through the 12th, the Phils eked a run across on a Hunter Pence infield single, and David Herndon slammed the door on the Braves' season, sending St. Louis to the playoffs.

Things were even more absurd in the American League. As Boston took a 3-2 lead into a seventh-inning rain delay, Tampa Bay was getting blitzed, 7-0, in their rain delay-proof dome. Then the bottom of the eighth happened.

In an inning bookended by Johnny Damon at-bats, the Rays exploded while the Yankees pitchers imploded, and six runs were scored. That still left Tampa Bay a run short, though.

No problem, as Dan Johnson came in to pinch-hit in the bottom of the ninth with two outs. Down to his last strike, he launched a ball over the fence and knotted things up at seven runs apiece.

In the bottom of the twelfth, Evan Longoria—who had a three-run homer in that crucial eighth frame—ended things with a walkoff shot.

Meanwhile in Baltimore, Boston's Jonathan Papelbon came on in the ninth to finish off the Orioles. Things looked good as the first two batters went down swinging. But then Chris Davis doubled, and so did Nolan Reimold to tie the score, 3-3. Robert Andino—he of the inside-the-park homer the night before—singled in Reimond to put an end to the Red Sox's season.

A shutout, three comebacks, two extra-inning games and two walk-off hits. That last sentence oozes excitement, but it doesn't come close to capturing the sheer magnificent insanity of the evening. If the postseason offers anything close to Wednesday night's action, baseball fans the world over are in for quite a treat.
Posted by: Greg Simons

September 26, 2011

Hitters to watch in the final regular-season series

The final regular-season series begin on Monday with both Wild Card spots very much up for grabs. Boston and Atlanta each hold one-game advantages over Tampa Bay and St. Louis, respectively, with three games left to play. For these four clubs, the playoffs started a couple of weeks ago, but this three-game stretch will ultimately decide if the previous 159 games were worth playing in a quest for a championship.

Each of the four series is a division battle, and the key players for the Red Sox, Rays, Braves and Cardinals have had a large number of plate appearances to adequately gauge how their teams' offensive stars will fare in the final three days before the postseason.

Key Hitters 	 PA	  Slash Line    HR     RBI	 R     SB      XBH	   
Ellsbury vs BAL	 73	.424/.466/.712	 4	11	15	1	10	   
Pedroia vs BAL	 72	.338/.403/.600	 3	14	18	2	10	   
Longoria vs NYY	 62	.241/.339/.407	 2	 6	 6	0	 5	   
Zobrist vs NYY	 51	.293/.412/.512	 2	 7	 6	2	 4	   
McCann vs PHI	 58	.196/.293/.294	 1	 3	 3	0	 3	   
Uggla vs PHI	 62	.161/.242/.375	 3	 6	 8	0	 6	   
Pujols vs HOU	 50	.261/.320/.478	 2	 7	 8	1	 6	   
Berkman vs HOU	 31	.429/.484/1.036	 5	12	 6	0	 7	 

As you can see, the two Red Sox MVP candidates have torn up Baltimore pitching, and Boston may survive after all. Even if they falter, Tampa Bay's star players will come into their series against Yankee backups having struggled against New York all season.

Philadelphia will try to do its best to hold the pitching-strong Braves out of the postseason, and stars Brian McCann and Dan Uggla have to break out of their respective funks against the NL East champs. The Cardinals and their stars have done extremely well offensively against the feeble Houston pitching staff this season, especially former Astro Lance Berkman.

If the performances of these eight hitting stars are any indication of this week's outcomes, the Red Sox and Redbirds could very well be moving on for some October baseball, leaving the Rays out and the Braves crushed by their stretch run downfall.
Posted by: Shlomo Sprung

August 25, 2011

Mike Flanagan career highlights

Recently, the world heard the sad and shocking news that former pitcher Mike Flanagan died at the age of 59, an apparent suicide.

The main tragedy is the loss of the person. Others can speak of that loss far better than I. What I can do is a retrospective of his playing career, looking up some highlights for the late, lamented hurler.

The list of career highlights includes several types of games. There are the most important games he appeared in, some of the greatest games he saw, his personal highlights, some lowlights, and some of the stranger and more unusual things Flanagan was on hand for.

Here they are divided up by what teams he pitched for (Baltimore for a long time, then Toronto, then back to Baltimore).

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Posted by: Chris Jaffe


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