Go out in style, Chad.
Category: Game chat (Page 13 of 23)
Jerry Sands got a decent amount of coverage while hitting 35 homers in the minor leagues this year, so his being named Dodgers Minor League Player of the Year comes as little surprise. But the Dodgers Minor League Pitcher of the Year flew a little further under the radar: Rubby De La Rosa.
De La Rosa
A 21-year-old righty from the Dominican Republic, De La Rosa started the season at Single-A Great Lakes and had a 3.19 ERA with 55 strikeouts against 66 hits and walks in 59 1/3 innings (relieving in the first half of the season before being shifted into the rotation for five starts). Following a promotion to Double-A Chattanooga, De La Rosa started eight games, averaging 6.5 innings per start, and had 39 strikeouts in 51 innings against 59 hits and walks. In August, he made six starts that each lasted exactly seven innings, in which he allowed a grand total of seven earned runs.
Meanwhile, more established prospects like Chris Withrow and Ethan Martin had their struggles, while another contender, Elisaul Pimentel, was traded. Allen Webster, a 20-year-old who spent the year with Great Lakes, finished with a 2.88 ERA and 114 strikeouts in 131 1/3 innings, but in the end, De La Rosa rubbed the Dodgers the right way.
Is the opposite of being “shut down” being “shut up?” If so, the Dodgers shut up Clayton Kershaw.
Shut up …
Los Angeles shifted rotation gears again, deciding today that it would be Hiroki Kuroda taking the rest of the year off. Kershaw will now make a final start Friday, on six days’ rest, followed by Chad Billingsley on Saturday and Ted Lilly in the season finale Sunday.
I’m going to Friday’s game, so I’ll be happy to see Kershaw pitch in that sense. But I think the Dodgers were right with their initial instincts, and that they might as well throw John Ely out there Friday rather than make Kershaw get back on the horse.
- Dee Gordon is so skinny — how skinny is he? — Dee Gordon is so skinny that Bryan Smith of Fangraphs has serious questions about how good the Dodger prospect can become, especially if he doesn’t walk as much as a Brett Butler, steal like Tim Raines or play defense like Ozzie Smith.
- “Wilson Valdez grounds into double plays the way Weezer puts out new albums nowadays,” writes Michael Baumann of Phillies Nation, “often, indiscriminately, and sometimes with disastrous results.” Valdez is only the second player in the past 40 years or so to reach 20 GIDP in under 375 plate appearances. With a runner on first base and under two outs, Valdez has 20 GIDP and 18 hits.
- John Lindsey’s callup made Jerry Crasnick’s ESPN.com list of top inspirational moments this season.
Tim Brown of Yahoo! Sports writes movingly about Rangers manager Ron Washington.
… Eventually, when Sports Illustrated published the story of the big league manager who’d tested for cocaine, he’d have to come clean to his friends, and his players, and the world.
The Rangers wanted him in counseling. They wanted no more surprises. They struggled with the concept of a middle-aged man turning to cocaine, but they chose to believe. What they wanted most of all was honesty.
The next day, when baseball was in the midst of spring training and roiling with the news of Washington and cocaine and demands he be fired, Washington admitted he’d smoked marijuana and taken amphetamines as a player.
”Whoa,” Daniels thought wryly, ”too much honesty.”
But, Washington, who had completed the drug program, endured extra testing and eventually returned to the regular pool of annual random tests, continued to apologize. For every television camera, he bore the consequences. For every newspaper, he promised to be a better man. For every fan, he wore the taunts and bowed his head.
”I couldn’t react in a negative manner,” Washington said, ”because they were right.”
And he managed his ballclub.
”I was proud of him,” Rangers third baseman Mike Young said. ”And I’m proud to play for him.” …
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- Tale of a sale: Roberto Baly of Vin Scully Is My Homeboy passes along this story of how someone bought a ticket stub from Jackie Robinson’s major-league debut.
- Mark Saxon of ESPNLosAngeles.com previews the Angels’ challenging offseason.
- Did someone say “4+1”? I should have copyrighted that …
Matt York/AP
John Ely has allowed 11 home runs and 29 walks in his past 49 1/3 major-league innings.
John Ely has allowed 11 home runs and 29 walks in his past 49 1/3 major-league innings.
It’s getting harder and harder to remember the John Ely we all want to remember.
Though Ely never trailed Saturday until allowing a sixth-inning home run, he surely did struggle, using 101 pitches (nearly half of them balls) in 5 1/3 innings and walking five unintentionally. He had six consecutive outstanding starts from May 6 to June 1; since then, he has had three quality starts out of 10 in the majors, with an ERA of 7.48 and 5.3 walks/2.0 home runs per nine innings. Opponents are OPS-ing 1.002 against him in that time.
During Elymania, everyone marveled at his ability to pound the plate, and the value of that is borne out on first glance at his splits: Ely has allowed a .567 OPS after getting a first strike on a batter, .983 after ball one. However, it’s not quite that simple, because Ely is also allowing a .929 OPS when batters swing at his first pitch.
According to MLB Gameday, Cole Gillespie’s pivotal three-run homer Saturday came on a 80-mph floating changeup over the meat of the plate that followed an 87-mph fastball for a strike. Ely had the count to his advantage, but the pitch just wasn’t good enough.
None of this is enough to make me give up on Ely, but he is going to need to find a way to raise his game. The walks contribute to his trouble, but simply throwing strikes isn’t enough. He somehow has to get back to fooling people.
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Josh Fisher at Dodger Divorce goes beyond the legal realities of the McCourt case to offer his take on what really happened with the disputed post-nup agreement.
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To my amusement, in the Dodger press notes, Dodgers communications vice president Josh Rawitch has been tracking Chin-Lung Hu’s rise up the chart of all-time Dodger leaders in games played by a shortstop. Friday, Hu passed Rafael Bournigal to move into a tie for 29th place, and Saturday, Hu left Oscar Robles in the dust. Hu’s next game at short takes him past Kevin Elster.
According to Rawitch, the Dodgers will finish the season with 593 player games lost to the disabled list, the team’s lowest total since 2002. The Dodgers crossed the 1,000-game mark in 2008 and 2009.
Stanford’s Owen Marecic scored touchdowns on a rush and on an interception return in a 13-second span today. I’m looking for John Ely to get a strikeout and hit a homer.
Loomis Dean/Getty ImagesBing Crosby with Pirates Manager Billy Meyer during Spring Training, 1948.
Film of the classic 1960 World Series Game 7 was found in the wine cellar of Bing Crosby and will be shown on the MLB Network in December (first reported by the New York Times).
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Hong-Chih Kuo will stay on a regular throwing program in the offseason, reports Ken Gurnick of MLB.com, because long offseason rest has seemed to have done him more harm than good.
In some ways, I think “Jolie Louise” tells the story of the 2010 Dodgers and their fans. Click the link for the lyrics (scroll down for the English). They are him, and she is us.
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In the wake of Denver Broncos receiver Kenny McKinley’s death, Woody Paige of the Denver Post wrote about his own brush with suicide, eight years ago. “In loving memory of Kenny McKinley, no longer ask “Why?” — ask “What can we do to save thousands of others?”
Dave Stephenson/Icon SMITed Lilly has allowed 11 homers and 10 walks since being acquired by the Dodgers.
On Trade Deadline Day, I got some grief for calling Ted Lilly “an inconsistent, 34-year-old pitcher in decline” – not so much about the “34-year-old pitcher part” as the other parts. I did say he would improve the rotation, but I saw some warning signs (which made me skeptical that the benefit would be worth the cost of the trade, which included swapping Blake DeWitt and two prospects and getting back Ryan Theriot).
In the immediate aftermath, Lilly pitched exceptionally, something I acknowledged most directly about a month ago following his two-hit shutout of the Rockies. But looking at Lilly today, the question marks about him haven’t gone anywhere.
Lilly, who had a 1.29 ERA in his first four Dodger starts, has had a 7.09 ERA since. Those numbers are skewed by two extremely poor starts – he has had quality starts in seven of his nine games as a Dodger. In any case, right now, Lilly has a worse ERA in 2010 than he had in 2009, and a worse ERA as a Dodger than he had as a Cub. So for all the plaudits he has received as a Dodger, his trajectory isn’t a straight upward line. And, he’s still 34 – he’ll be 35 in January.
None of this is to denigrate what Lilly has proven capable of – seriously, he’s done good – but simply to be on guard for what Lilly is going to be worth going forward.
According to several reports, both Lilly and the Dodgers seem to want come up with a deal that would bring the free agent back to Los Angeles in 2011. And heaven knows, the Dodgers need pitching for next year. But there’s a real risk of overpaying for Lilly.
Last winter, many Dodger fans felt the team couldn’t live without Randy Wolf. Milwaukee committed $29.25 million to Wolf for 2010-2012, and in the first year of that contract, he has been a below-average pitcher. And now he’s 34.
The winter before, many Dodger fans felt the team couldn’t live without Derek Lowe. Atlanta committed $60 million to Lowe for 2009-2012, and in the first two years of that contract, he has been a below-average pitcher. And now he’s 37.
Perhaps the best analogy to made with Lilly, however, is to use Casey Blake, a midseason acquisition who performed well at age 34 (35 that August) for the Dodgers in 2008, thus encouraging the team to sign him for three more years. They got in return a solid third baseman in 2009, a borderline one in 2010 and who knows what for 2011. The most likely path for Lilly would be similar.
One of the criticisms I got of my original assessment of the Lilly trade was that I failed to take his pre-2009 seasons into account, several of which (including a few in his prime) were poorer than his 2010 season. So how could I say he was in decline? Well, he was clearly in decline since 2009. If you want to look back farther than that, then you have a pitcher who was medicore at times, improved, and then most recently started to slip again.
Everything depends on cost, but based on what Lilly figures to command on the free agent market, if the Dodgers sign him, it could turn out to be a deal that looks good at first and not good at all in the end. The thing is, given the pitching vacancies the Dodgers are facing for 2011, that kind of fate with Lilly, Hiroki Kuroda or whomever might be unavoidable.
Jeremy Lundblad of ESPN.com compares the Dodger offense to Colorado’s Troy Tulowitzki, and it’s not pretty.
Did you know that the Dodgers are on pace for the third-lowest September batting average for a team in the past 50 years — and that’s after batting .306 in the Colorado series?
On the bright side, here’s something from the Dodger press notes: “According to John Labombarda at Elias, (A.J.) Ellis became the first Major League player to go 7-for-8 or better in a series (.875 BA or higher, minimum seven hits) since Pittsburgh’s Freddy Sanchez had eight hits in nine at-bats in a three-game set at Wrigley Field in May 2009. The Kentucky native was the first player to do that for the Dodgers since Jim Gilliam went 7-for-8 in a two-game series at Chicago in August 1959.”
I’m going with one of the best Dads in the world to Dodger Stadium today to see one of the best pitchers in baseball.
The Loser’s Dividend, September 25, 2005:
The last two Dodger games I have attended, a loss and now today’s victory, have been the two most pleasant I’ve been to all season. Both came after the team’s sub-.500 status was assured, a condition that seems to have weeded out the high expecters (expectants? expectationers?) who would only be satisfied by a victory. The best that people hope for now is that a baseball game be played. That’s all. Throw the first pitch and we’ve already won. The Dodgers of September 2005 offer no other guarantees, and so we find ourselves at the major league equivalent of Little League, where it’s a celebration when someone doesn’t fall on his head and it’s considered poor form to rain criticism or curb hope. Call it the Losers Dividend. It’s a very relaxing, freeing payoff (abetted by the ease of ingress and egress to Dodger Stadium that the smaller crowds provide), enough to make one up and move to Kansas City or Tampa Bay so this can be reinvested and experienced permanently. …
Tampa Bay wouldn’t have been a bad choice, as it turned out.
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- Old friend Takashi Saito has a 0.46 for the Braves since the All-Star Break, but his shoulder is ailing.
- Eric Stephen of True Blue L.A. noticed that Brandon Weeden, a minor-leaguer who came to the Dodgers in the 2003 Kevin Brown trade, is now quarterbacking at Oklahoma State. Weeden, who last pitched in the minors in 2006, will be 27 next month.
The press conference, blow-by-blow.
Joe Torre looks emotional as he sits with Don Mattingly and Ned Colletti.
Frank McCourt is making brief introductory remarks, thanking Torre, including for always doing the right thing for the organization, including the difficult trips overseas in Spring Training. He then welcomes Mattingly, jokingly asking, “Are you ready?”
Colletti speaks next, also with the praisy stuff for Torre and Mattingly. Mattingly’s work ethic is big for Colletti.
Torre: “This decision was a long time coming. It wasn’t easy.”
“Baseball has been my life, and hopefully will continue to be my life in some other capacity.”
He reiterates that he thought, after he left the Yankees, that he was done managing until the Dodgers called. He was reluctant to accept at first because New York was his daughter Andrea’s only home, but his wife convinced him she would adjust.
“This year has been a struggle, no question, but the fun of managing was still there. I was telling someone today, I manage a lot by instinct, and you have to make decisions by instinct … and that’s what I did today.”
“Up until the All-Star Game, we were very excited about where we were going. Since then, we have struggled, and I have (had trouble) finding something to help. … During the second half of the year, it got to the point where I just felt that this ballclub needed a different voice, a younger voice, and there’s no one I feel more secure in turning the ballclub over to than Donnie.”
“Donnie, it’s all yours, pal.”
Mattingly: “Watching Joe the way he treated people, the way he handled situations, there was always a different perspective when you talk to Joe. … Joe’s helped me, and I thank Jo so much.”
“I think maybe I sabotaged his second half … our offense since the break. Sometimes you think you don’t quite know what you’re doing out there.”
“But I’m excited about this opportunity. I’ve been working a long time toward it.”
“I’m sure I’m going to make mistakes and plenty of them.” But he added he would learn and work hard to overcome them.
Now, questions from the media.
Back to Torre:
“Turning 70 (was the turning point). It sounds funny because I don’t feel hard, and I hope that continues. … but as I said a few minutes ago, maybe they need a different voice. … Even though the game has not changed in terms of the way you play it and the way you win it, but the players have changed.”
“(Ally) didn’t believe me until we’re sitting here today that I wasn’t going to do this anymore.”
“Ned and I are going to talk about (a next job) sometime in the next month probably.”
Colletti: “Joe and I talked the other day in San Francisco … very recently, a couple of days ago.”
“When I talked to Joe about coming here, I talked about … the continuity we’d like to establish. I’d like to have a successor on the staff.”
“We talked to Major League Baseball, and told them what our thoughts were, and they gave their blessing to it (exempting the team from minority interviews).”
Torre: “I don’t anticipate (managing somewhere else). If I say I never want to manage again, it closes a door and really makes me feel old. I don’t anticipate managing again, but I’m certainly not going to not listen to somebody if it sounds intriguing. … But I certainly don’t have any visions of that being the case, that I’m going to manage.”
Mattingly: “I know the one thing is, you’ve gotta be yourself. There’s going to be parts of Joe in me, but there’s also Billy Martin in me, there’s parts of Lou Piniella in me, there’s parts of Dallas Green. … (But) I’ve got to do it my way.”
“There’s only one way to play the game, and that’s the right way. Small things change games. Guys might do different things (in the locker room) but you still … do what you have to do to win the ballgame.”
“Billy Martin was lots of things, as a young player you were catching the grief. I learned that real quick … if it’s between you and an old guy, you’re getting the blame.”
“Yogi, I played for Yogi, and if you were 0 for 4 or 4 for 4, he treated you exactly the same. I really felt that was the way to go.”
“I have a confidence in myself. I feel ready. It’s baseball, and I’ve been around the game a long time, not necessarily in the manager seat, but you have relationships with players, you see how the game’s played when you win (and) when you lose.”
“I know people are going to question, and that’s understandable. In my heart, I know I can do this. It’s not something you back away from … it’s a simple process, a belief in myself that I can do anything I put my mind to.”
Torre: “Right now our plans are to be in California, yes. Ned and I are going to talk next month. We moved our Safe at Home Foundation (here) … and certainly going to spend more time helping Ally.”
“I just need to be involved in baseball, because I’m most familiar in that, most comfortable in that – something where I think I can be of use.”
Mattingly: “Definitely want a bench coach with experience. Something Ned and I will sit down over the next few weeks and discuss.”
“I’ve seen ’08 and I’ve seen ’09, and we were able to do some pretty good things. I’ve also seen young players come and struggle at times … you hit a little plateau and you have to reevaluate where you’re at … have to take that step back to go forward.”
“I’ve seen it before (in the younger players), I know it’s there. It’s just a matter of reaching it.”
Torre: “I had heard that Los Angeles was laid back. In the time I’ve been here, not only have they made me feel welcome here, but I sense so much passion at this stadium that made me feel very special, and I know the players fed off of that, so I’m certainly going to miss the fans out here.”
Former Dodger owner Peter O’Malley, who has publicly been almost completely silent on the current ownership issues with the team, told Bill Shaikin of the Times that he believes the team should have new ownership.
He said he is not interested in returning to ownership but would be willing to smooth the transition for potential new owners on what he called a “short-term” basis.
“For many years, the Dodgers have been one of the most prestigious institutions in our city and throughout professional sports,” O’Malley said. “Sadly, that is not the case today.”
McCourt responded through a statement from his spokesman, Steve Sugerman.
“Frank has made it abundantly clear he is the long-term owner of the Dodgers,” Sugerman said, “and he looks forward to the day when his four boys own and operate the team.” …
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Dodger coach Bob Schaefer had some weirdly noteworthy comments today in an interview with Jim Bowden on XM radio. Mike Scioscia’s Tragic Illness has details.
One of them was a no-comment on Matt Kemp that was followed by a comment that indicates there is no love lost there. Another reportedly had Schaefer saying that Don Mattingly had turned down “managerial positions” to stay in Los Angeles, but I’m wondering if Schaefer really meant or said “managerial interviews.”
Also, it’s one thing for me to say the Dodgers have issues for next season, but it’s a bit unusual for a coach to say the team “will have to pull a rabbit out of the hat” to contend. Presumably, Schaefer has already plotted his own exit from the organization.
Schaefer said he doesn’t think Joe Torre will manage the Dodgers next season, but that he will stay in the game in some capacity. However, Torre told reporters that
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- David Brown has a barrel-of-fun interview with Vin Scully at Yahoo! Sports’ Big League Stew.
- Russ Mitchell is the only Dodger since 1920 to start a game at first, third and the outfield in his first season, according to Eric Stephen of True Blue L.A.
- One of my earliest memories as a baseball fan is reading in Baseball Digest about Rennie Stennett’s 1975 7-for-7 game, in which Pittsburgh shut out Chicago, 22-0. Chris Jaffe recalls the event in The Hardball Times.
- Howard “Howie” Levine, the longtime Grant High School boys basketball coach whom I first met more than 20 years ago as a Daily News sportswriter, has worked as a Dodger Stadium usher for 38 years. On Tuesday, the night that the Dodgers honor their employees of 25 years or more, Levine will sing the National Anthem.
Jay Gibbons is batting cleanup tonight for the third time as a Dodger. That would not have seemed likely a month ago, but Gibbons is far from the most unlikely Dodger cleanup hitter of the past seven seasons. Who’s your favorite from this list?
Dodger cleanup hitters since 2004
2010: James Loney (50 games), Matt Kemp (43), Manny Ramirez (41), Casey Blake (7), Jay Gibbons (3), Andre Ethier (2).
2009: Blake (43), Ethier (42), Kemp (27), Ramirez (26), Loney (21), Russell Martin (3).
2008: Jeff Kent (74), Loney (28), Ramirez (25), Martin (18), Blake (8), Ethier (3), Nomar Garciaparra (3), Andruw Jones (2), Mark Sweeney (1).
2007: Kent (132), Luis Gonzalez (20), Loney (6), Martin (1), Mike Lieberthal (1), Olmedo Saenz (1), Shea Hillenbrand (1)
2006: J.D. Drew (83), Kent (59), Saenz (7), Ethier (5), Garciaparra (3), Kemp (2), Loney (1), Joel Guzman (1), Ricky Ledee (1).
2005: Kent (110), Saenz (26), Ledee (10), Jason Phillips (8), Jose Cruz, Jr. (3), Jayson Werth (2), Hee-Seop Choi (1), Mike Edwards (1), Milton Bradley (1).
2004: Adrian Beltre (92), Shawn Green (63), Milton Bradley (3), Saenz (2), Juan Encarnacion (1), Robin Ventura (1).
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Al LaMacchia, the 1940s major-leaguer who became a scout for six decades thereafter, finishing up with the Dodgers, has passed away at the age of 89.
Bill Plaschke of the Times shone a light on LaMacchia when he talked about the scout’s recommendation that the Dodgers acquire Andre Ethier — a column that (and I certainly mean no disrespect to LaMacchia) inspired this response from Fire Joe Morgan.
My most sincere condolences to LaMacchia’s family and friends.
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Today is the 30th anniversary of Fernando Valenzuela’s major-league debut, notes Eric Stephen of True Blue L.A. The Dodgers will pay tribute to the occasion on Sunday’s game.
