The other day, a clerical error on Major League Baseball’s part gave Athletics pitcher Travis Blackley another chance to be a freshman. As a result, the A’s — who had already received more than 60 starts from rookie pitchers — moved even further up the leaderboard of games started by rookie pitchers. But while many rookie-laden pitching rotations stumble, Oakland has gotten some of its finest efforts this season from its group of youngsters.
There has been a lot of banter about the Most Valuable Player Award this week. While the National League has an even field with multiple candidates, it’s the American League — with Mike Trout and Miguel Cabrera — that’s gotten most of the attention.
At the center of the debate is baseball’s triple crown, an incredibly rare achievement that is within reach for Cabrera. The fact that Trout is going to finish with the better season, regardless, has led many to pooh-pooh the fact that Cabrera has the chance to become just the 14th player since 1901 to win the elusive title. And while the triple crown in and of itself doesn’t signify greatness, it has only been won by great players. And most often, the league’s best player has won it.
A report broke yesterday that Rafael Soriano may opt out of his $14 million option for next season with the Yankees in order to once again test the free agent market. On the surface, this would seem like a foolish idea. And when you dig deeper…it still sounds foolish, unless he is pulling a move similar to what C.C. Sabathia and Alex Rodriguez did with the Yankees, which is to opt out of his current deal in order to get a fresh deal with additional seasons on it.
Life has not been good for Red Sox fans the past couple of months. Misery seems to follow manager Bobby Valentine. No matter what descriptor you choose to use, it hasn’t been pretty. And while the year is approaching historically awful territory for the franchise, it isn’t quite there yet, as there have been five other modern Red Sox seasons that were worse. What’s more, “historically awful” has a different meaning for the Red Sox than it does for other franchises.
Rockies hitters have always had a hard time producing above-average seasons once context is applied. As a team, the club has never compiled a season with a 100 wRC+. Outsized park factors continuously knock their stats down a few pegs, as do the adjustments hitters have to make to differing altitudes when the team hits the road. Even with that as a backdrop though, Dante Bichette’s 1999 season was an outlier for the ages — one that is not only historically notorious by itself, but helped the Colorado pitching staffs have one of the worst, if not the worst season in franchise history.
Bichette, who came to the Rockies in a trade requested by manager Don Baylor and executed hours after their 1992 expansion draft, was a fixture in the Colorado lineup for the franchise’s first seven seasons. He ranks fourth in the club’s annals in games played, and the only outfielder who has played more games than him in a Rockies uniform is Larry Walker. He ranks 10th in club history in wRC+ (minimum 1,000 plate appearances) and provided a bevy of memorable moments as one of the original Blake St. Bombers.
The phrase “fire sale” has been frequently heard in the same sentence as “Red Sox” this weekend, as the trade that sent Adrian Gonzalez, Josh Beckett, Carl Crawford and Nick Punto to the Dodgers had the tenor of one that gutted the team, and looking at their starting lineup on Sunday only reinforced that notion. But while the rest of 2012 may feature a slide not seen in New England since “Joe Kerrigan, Major League Baseball Manager” happened back in 2001, things won’t be quite so gloomy for the ’13 incarnation of the Olde Towne Team.
The trade brought the Red Sox down to approximately $46 million in guaranteed contracts, and many of those players are key cogs in Boston’s mainframe. Aside from those players, the team has 12 arbitration-eligible players, and they figure to double the payroll. Conservatively, let’s say that brings the payroll to $95 million. Let’s also allocate a conservative $18 million to David Ortiz, based on the assumption that losing Ortiz would be one public relations disaster too many for John Henry and his cohorts to handle.