Here’s a question for you: name a left-handed starting pitcher who is nearly 7 feet tall, and who is now involved in a rumor about being traded to the Seattle Mariners.
If you said Randy Johnson, you’d be half right.
There are actually two, and the other is on the Dodgers — Mark Hendrickson is only 6’9″, to the Big Unit’s listed 6’10″, but he is over a decade younger. And costs over $13 million less. And usually has more facial hair, good for the chillier climate.
The other part of the equation is that Hendrickson is from Mount Vernon, Washington, a couple of counties away from Seattle, so his being sighted by Seattlest in a Pike Street hotel yesterday is certainly just him in town visiting other tall family members. This has not stopped Seattlest speculation.
What do you think, Mariners fans? Would Bavasi dare trade Sexson or Beltre for Hendrickson’s career 4.98 ERA and .291 BAA? Bavasi has high hopes, this pitcher is nearly as big tall as Johnson—and would be a whole lot cheaper. Could it happen?
Nah, probably not. Plus I’m pretty sure he couldn’t meet with the Mariners by the rules. But I bet we could be talked into trading him for Ichiro, straight up. ;)
The heartwarming story was great, and just in time for the holidays. As several other Dodger blogs have pointed to at the Times:
His name is Jim Governale and the recording is of word-painter extraordinaire Vin Scully’s over-the-air description of the final inning of the Dodgers’ 5-0 victory over the New York Mets on June 30, 1962, at Dodger Stadium, the only known surviving audio account of the first of Sandy Koufax’s four no-hitters.
Orel over at “Sons of Steve Garvey” updated their post about it to point out that audio has been posted over on dodgers.com. It is a joy to hear — so much drama in just a few minutes. Even if you know how it turns out, you still get caught up in the moment. And I love the interplay amongst the managers, umpires, and players, as Vin Scully describes their “jawing” at each other.
I wanted to check out the scoring for the game, so here it is over at Retrosheet: Mets at Dodgers, June 30, 1962. It was a Saturday game. None of Vin’s human drama is there, but there’s nothing like seeing that line of zeroes marching across the box score.
Baseball Almanac has a page about the game up as well, which includes a couple of cool tidbits:
Did you know that during the first inning Sandy Koufax also recorded a fabulous feat when he threw only nine pitches and all nine were strikes?
Two time batting champion Richie Ashburn almost ended it all during the sixth inning when he hit a sharp line drive into left field. The ball was lost in the lights by Tommy Davis who barely recovered and made a spectacular catch preserving the no hitter!
There’s also this choice quote from Sandy:
“To win. Nothing else matters, and nothing else will do.”
Matt Krupnick writing in the Contra Costa Times has a point about the difficulties of maintaining the Giants-Dodgers hatred nowadays:
The Giants have made it clear they don’t care about their own fans, but they could at least show some respect for Dodgers fans. Good rivalries don’t work without cooperation from both sides, and the Giants are broken right now.
So do I have to switch my primary hatred to the Padres? That’s a team dedicated to a productive offseason, so perhaps they deserve my ire these days.
Good news, Dodgers fans: The team’s beloved hot dog hasn’t yet opted out of any contract to bolt for shinier grills in Boston or Texas.
In fact, the Dodger Dog, one of the few remaining links to the days when the team relished World Series titles, has been nominated by AOL CityGuide for its City’s Best Hot Dogs 2007 honor in Los Angeles.
LA Times sports writer Mike Penner needs to have his joke license suspended for a couple of weeks for that one.
Rather than stoop so low as to make more bad puns in reply, I will instead link (sorry) to this cool page describing meeting up with the fabled Oscar Mayer Wienermobile in Woodland, California: “Biggest Wiener in Woodland”.
“I noticed that the Oscar Mayer Web site is laden with hot dog puns,” I said to her while unwrapping my new whistle. “Do you and Katie come up with new hot dog puns on a regular basis?”
“Of course,” she said. “Just the other day I sent my parents a St. Patrick’s Day card and wrote Irish I were an Oscar Mayer hot dog!”
From the perspective of a Dodger fan, there are two teams that are Evil with a capital “Eeee!” — the Giants and the Yankees.
There have been other rivals of the Dodgers over the years — back and forth with the Cardinals in the 50s and 60s, tangling with the Big Red Machine in the 70s, and then later, the NL West foes — but not even the disgust felt for the Anaheim Angels of Orange County can match the unmitigated Evil of the Giants and Yankees.
Which is why it’s so disconcerting to come across someone so out of touch with reality as to think the Dodgers are the evil team.
Such is the case with one Dennis Bennett of the blog Peridyd’s Progress, who is a fan of the Mariners and Padres. Dennis has a list of three teams that are, as he puts it, “inherently evil” — the Yankees, the Braves, and the Dodgers.
Dennis was almost ready to take the boys in Blue off the list, what with their off-season pitching strengthening and, as he writes,
This coupled with the fact that the Dodgers are no long owned by Rupert Murdock should mean that they aren’t on my short list of teams whom I always and unequivocally root against.
Almost ready, but he is unable to do so. Check out this snippy leap in logic:
So why the title of this post, you might well ask? Because the Dodgers, despite the fact that they were soundly beaten in the head-to-head contest with the Padres and therefore won the wild card, and not the division championship, despite having the same record as the Padres after 162 games, are claiming that they’re the “defending NL West co-champions”.
Hmm. Well, he is correct that the Padres won the season series, which is the tiebreaker when it comes to potential playoff seeding. And, in a strict reading of the rules:
Scenario #1: If there is a tie for a Division Championship and the winning percentage of the two Clubs tied for first place is higher than the winning percentage of each of the second-place Clubs in the same League, the Division Champion shall be:
The Club with the higher winning percentage in head-to-head competition between the two tied Clubs during the championship season…
I think it could be read both ways, but Dennis doesn’t like the idea of the tie.
Those aren’t the rules, guys. The rules state that if you end up having identical records at the end of the season, then the winner of the season head-to-head contest is the champion. Period. The Dodgers won the wild card, not the division. The Padres, ever lackluster in the post season, did, however, win the division.
It could be argued they won the division for the purposes of playoff seeding only, but it doesn’t really matter because here’s the crux of the matter:
That they would claim otherwise smacks of unsportsmanlike conduct–in the front office, which, to my mind, negates any boon they might have garnered by sloughing off the infamous Murdock as their owner.
In short, there are still 3 inherently evil teams on Amy’s and my list: Yankees, Braves, and, once again, the LA Dodgers.
I can’t begrudge Dennis his Mariner/Padre fandom. His love for his teams is obviously heartfelt — so much so in fact that he leaves aside rationality to declare the Dodgers inherently evil. Fandom is not supposed to be rational.
Besides, I think we all know the real reason Dennis and other Padres fans are being rules lawyers when it comes to the 2006 season:
And by the way Dennis, just in case it wasn’t clear: