Tangled up in Blue since 1883.
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The Library of Congress has been posting some awesome historical pictures on Flickr, inviting users to tag and comment on them as a means of both sharing and helping to categorize various collections. A goodly number of them have been old-school baseball photos, including some from Brooklyn. Here’s a few posted today:
George Cutshaw at:
Frank Allen at:
Hub Northen at:
Red Smith at:
Pat Ragan at:
I’m too busy melting in 100°F heat (is my calendar off? this is September 25th, right?), but if I weren’t, suffice to say I would be jumping up and down in great happiness.
Congratulations to the Los Angeles Dodgers, 2008 NL West Champs!
Now we just have to see who we’ll be playing in the first round. According to this story it’ll be the Mets, Phillies, or Cubs.
You don’t want to get your hopes up, but you refuse to wallow in pessimism. You feel your heart leap with every bit of good news, and your stomach fall with every thing bad. You suffer from uncontrolled smiling and from random shivering. You declare you can’t watch the games, then wind up doing it anyway.
Yep, must be September.
It’s the 23rd today. The Autumnal Equinox has just passed, and we’re standing at the precipice of not only the playoffs but within hailing distance of winter. Being a baseball fan is like having some form of seasonal affective disorder, with irrational glee every spring, then (most years) glum resignation as the 162-game countdown finally runs out.
If your team is lucky, you get to play more games after that.
If your team is really lucky, you play in the last game of the playoffs.
If your team is astoundingly lucky, you win that last game.
See, there goes that shivering again.
The Dodgers have six more games to determine if they get to play more. They must cobble together some combination of five wins or Diamondback losses between tonight and Sunday to keep playing in October. They play three games against the Padres and three against the Giants, both of whom would simply adore destroying Dodger hopes and dreams this year.
There are wars and rumors of wars. The American economy is doing its best impression of a beached whale. Plagues of locusts and frogs are raining down across the land, and there’s probably some giant meteoroid headed our way.
Never mind all that. This is important.
You don’t want to watch.
But you will.
Update: It looks like MSN decided to drop that video. :P
Here’s a lower quality copy from YouTube. If anyone knows of a higher quality one, let me know in comments:
Let me give you another example of the Red Sox propaganda machine hard at work. Peter Gammons (I know, big surprise) posted an ESPN Insider article on Friday in which he discusses the Pedro Alvarez situation and includes some more shots at Manny. Check this out:
Management people point out that Boras proudly orchestrated the Manny Ramirez shutdown in Boston and, as Boras has told GMs, got Ramirez where he wanted him in Los Angeles. Getting a player to opt out in the middle of his contract and essentially refuse to honor what he’d signed isn’t easy, but the Red Sox are 16-8 since the trade, and, when they scroll down the ESPN.com sortable stats, find that Jason Bay has more runs created than Ramirez.
Unlike Gammons, I actually went to ESPN’s sortable stats and did some sorting.
As I mentioned in “Who wrote Bill Shaikin’s column?”, Manny hit .347/.473/.587/1.060 for the Red Sox in July. How is that not honoring his contract, especially with Big Papi out of the lineup?
Here’s August 1st-31st for Manny and Jason Bay:
Player AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO BA OBP SLG OPS Ramirez 106 21 44 7 0 9 25 18 18 415 508 736 1.244 Bay 111 22 35 6 2 4 29 8 26 315 358 514 871
Not to take anything away from Jason Bay — he had a fine August — but to suggest that his fine August was significantly better than Manny’s in any way is just Red Sox propaganda of the worst kind.
I like Peter Gammons and his writing; he seems like a personable guy. But this is just blatant and willfully wrong.
The “still can’t let go” brigade has landed in the LA Times somehow with Bill Shaikin writing a story that wouldn’t have seemed out of place, like, a month ago. “The two sides of Manny being Manny”. No Dodgers apart from Manny are quoted. Several Red Sox are. I guess the propaganda squad wasn’t content with the east coast coverage and had to do a poison piece out here as well.
This gem ends the column:
The Red Sox were 11-13 with him in July, and the Dodgers were 11-16 with him before Saturday. The Red Sox were 17-8 without him.
“There,” a Red Sox official said, “is your story.”
Yeah, because Manny was the only guy having an effect on either team’s record. You know how many ABs David Ortiz had in July? 23.
And what about June, when the Red Sox went 16-11 with Manny?
Manny hit .347/.473/.587/1.060 for the Red Sox in July. But, you know, don’t let reality get in the way of your agenda.
I have a feeling the “There is your story” quote was the Red Sox “official” telling Bill Shaikin he had sent him a Word document with the story in it already written.
A Rockies series at Dodger Stadium starting tomorrow night. Colorado is eight games back of the D-Backs and Dodgers in the NL West, but are coming off a three-game sweep of the Nats. The Dodgers are 7-3 in their last 10 games, with a four-game sweep of the Phillies, as well as winning two out of three from the Brewers — both pennant contenders in their respective divisions.
Probable pitchers:
19th: Jimenez vs Kuroda
20th: Francis vs Billingsley
21st: De La Rosa vs Lowe (day game)
Should be a good series.
ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark has a bee in his bonnet. I use that cliché purposefully, as his latest column chastising Dodger fans for cheering Manny Ramirez sounds nothing so much as an old biddy waggling her finger at the children playing stickball too loud in the street.
“Paying Manny $100M would set a dangerous precedent”
Hey, we couldn’t be happier for those Los Angeles Dodgers, who are selling about 30,000 tickets a day now that they’ve moved their home games to Planet Manny. But we’d like to ask one little question of all those people in L.A. who are showering their man Manny Ramirez with so much love:
What the heck are you cheering for?
Mostly the balls flying over the outfield walls. Also the scoring more runs than the other teams. I like that part especially.
Just like the old biddy stereotype, Stark has a gaggle of gossips feeding him column-ready one liners — GMs and other league sources, all anonymous of course.
“It really bothers me,” one GM said this week of the Manny-mania lovefest that has unfolded in L.A….
(And here I’m seeing the GM throwing himself on a Victorian settee, casting an arm over his eyes and attempting not to faint in despair.)
…”What he did in Boston was criminal. Now he goes there, and everything’s OK? No, sir. It doesn’t change the fact that how he got there was criminal.”
Criminal? Really? Go read up on Darryl Strawberry or Michael Vick and get back to me on “criminal.”
Here’s the crime that Manny perpetuated on the Red Sox in July: .347/.473/.587/1.060. The nerve!
Look, everyone knows how much ESPN functions as the propaganda wing of the Boston sports establishment. Listening recently to the normally sedate Peter “Older Biddy” Gammons splutter anti-Manny invectives in between Red Sox talking points, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out where his allegiances lie.
But even Gammons has moved on now. It’s been forever in ESPN Attention Span Time, and it’s only a little surreal seeing Manny in Dodger Blue. I know you’re feeling antsy what with the Angels and Devil Rays (insert Paradise Lost joke here) owning your Boston overlords’ butts this season, but let it go already. Don’t you have any Brett Favre dead horse residue to nudge fitfully with your toe?
Quoth Matt Kemp, “Having him on our team is crazy.” Yes, yes it is.
Some rank dreaming here, but just imagine if the Dodgers re-signed Manny in the off-season, somehow fixed Andruw Jones, and then had Matt Kemp in right. Now, I love Andre Ethier and hope he sticks around, but think what it would be like to have those three power beasts roaming the outfield! Yikes!
Update: Manny doesn’t just hit the ball a long way, he also has the power to save you money.
Because Ramirez hit a home run in the fifth inning, children under 15 can get into Universal Studios at no charge with a ticket stub from Sunday’s game and the purchase of an adult ticket. (LA Times)
With Andy LaRoche on his way to Pittsburgh, and with the rental Casey Blake likely only here this season, all eyes will turn to Blake DeWitt next spring.
From the Dodgers minor league report today, seems like DeWitt is doing pretty well so far in his first AAA experience:
BLAKE CAN RAKE: INF Blake DeWitt is 6-for-14 (.429) with a double, a triple, two homers, and seven RBI in three games since being optioned to Las Vegas on Saturday…the 22-year-old was selected by the Dodgers in the first round (28th overall) of the 2004 draft.
