Thursday, July 30, 2009

Big news day

Holy crap. Let's start with ...

'Roids

So David Ortiz was on the juice. About 6 people in America are surprised. Look, his OPS in Minnesota was never higher than .839. His first year in Boston? 961. It increased every year until last season, when it dropped precipitously do .8877. This season? .720.

The 2004 Red Sox have now thoroughly earned the same asterisk which sits happily next to the '98/'99/'00 Yankees, the '01 Diamondbacks, the '02 Angels, and the '03 Marlins.

At this point, does it really matter? The whole league was juicing for a decade. There's no reason to keep players out of the Hall because the playing field was still level. It just happened to be artificially raised.


Kurkjian Doesn't Get It

Check this out. Yet another article about how pitch counts are supposedly stupid and don't help prevent pitcher injury. Yet more proof that athletes will never make good doctors. Josh Beckett actually gets it, and talks about how tired pitches are the worst pitches, but Kurkjian still misses this essential point:

Pitch counts matter because they are a last line of defense against Dusty Baker and Joe Torre.

If you have a pitcher likely to be abused, at the very least, make sure you have him on a pitch count so there's some minimum amount of attention paid to his health. I've discussed this previously.


Lamar Odom Resigns with the Lakers

About damn time. Why, hello 2010 NBA championship trophy.


Scott Feldman (and the Rangers) Are Playing Way Over Their Heads

Feldman's line in a 13-5 loss to Detroit: 2.1 IP, 10H, 6ER, 2BB, 1K, 2HR. I don't buy that the pitchers are better, and I don't buy that the defense is so improved that ERA's are tumbling from 5+ to 3.50. The Angels are lucky, but the Rangers are playing much better ball than their team makeup suggests. Regression, regression.


Idiot Gets Run Over By Train In Front Of My Dorm

I don't really believe in Twitter. I like it when athletes talk about relevant sports stuff, but for the most part, 99% of daily tweets are garbage.

But then, some idiot goes and runs out and gets hit by the T in front of my dorm. About a million cops show up, and I figure hey, why not, and tweet about it. Mark tweets about it too. Soon, BostonTweet gets wind of it and retweets.

You know that scene in Hackers, when Cereal Killer uses Razor and Blade's TV transmission hacks to broadcast to everything in the world with a TV tuner? And he turns around and goes "Dude, I kinda feel like god?" Well, this is sorta like that, kinda. Mark and I were literally the first people in the world to report news. This actually showed up over here today, which is pretty interesting, although I insist that my tweets did contain useful information. They also happened to contain humorous analysis, so eff you too, sir.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

God damnit the comments dont copy over from facebook... so ill summary my remarks

-'98 Yanks were clean, cant say the same about 99-00
-I love seeing the people who wore "A-Roid" shirts try and explain Big Papi's steroid usage

Marcus said...

Maybe they were clean in '98, but that's sorta the de facto beginning of the steroid era, so I'm not convinced until we get the proof we'll never have.

I want an Ortiz Roid shirt so bad...somebody needs to start making clever ones.