*Sporting News Today is an e-mail quasi newspaper they deliver to your inbox everyday for free. It’s an interesting experiment, like a new-age version of the beloved National in some ways. It’s worth checking out; lots of information, although not enough in-depth stuff and real writing for my tastes.
I bring this up because they cover recruiting pretty hard, and Monday’s briefing on football recruiting is led with a look at Manheim Central’s Dakota Royer…
*For an antidote to all the anti-modern-methods-of-handling-pitchers nonsense you hear in the mainstream media (pitch counts are unAmerican, etc.), check out the latest issue of Sports Illustrated. Apropos to Stephen Strasburg, SI talked to nine former “can’t miss” flamethrowers from as long ago as 1950 (Paul Pettit) to as recent as 2001 (Mark Prior). It’s story after story of throwing 95 on the second day of spring training, of getting big-league rotation-anchor workloads while still a teenager, blowing out an elbow and being essentially told to rub some dirt on it and get back out there, etc, etc.
People focus on the game their favorite team blew last night and forget about the hundreds and hundreds of guys they never heard of who had their development butchered and faded into obscurity.
It’s not just the big-name guys; every decent-sized town in America has some favorite son who signed with a big-league club, went to the low minors, hurt his arm and was finished. I personally know at least two guys like that. They get salvaged today. No, they don’t turn into Warren Spahn, but they get careers…
*At the Barnstormers’ game the other night, we were talking about the “Major League,” movies. It turns out that “Major League II’’s gigantic cast included not just Charlie Sheen, Tom Berenger, Corbin Bernsen, Omar Epps, Steve Yeager, and Bob Uecker but… Keith Lupton, the Barnstormers’ VP for baseball ops.
The movie was filmed in Baltimore, and Lupton was then with the Bowie Baysox, the O’s Class AA affiliate. He played the White Sox’ first-base coach. He’s in the IMDB and everything. Keith said if you watch the movie on TV or DVD, he’s the very last name on the credits. Said he used a lot of Lee Strasburg’s “Method” techniques to reach deep down inside himself for the role….
*I thought it was a fine NBA season and the playoffs overall were excellent, but the Finals were a disappointment, almost an afterthought. Tough to know what to make of the Lakers and Kobe. It’s hard to think of them as a great team, and certainly their Finals opponent wasn’t ready to win a championship.
On the other hand, how many great teams did Jordan’s Bulls vanquish? This championship felt a lot like those - a team built around one very, very committed player with a great coach. The same coach, actually.
Kobe was of course impressive, but my take on him hasn’t essentially changed - a wonderful player who tries to be a team guy, but dominating individually is as important to him as winning, and once in a while, when things aren’t going great, that little bit of him that thinks like Allen Iverson takes over.
ESPN’s Bill Simmons has a (typically) long take on this here. As usual, Simmons reaches a bit and could use editing, but he’s mostly on the money…
*In my column last Sunday, I wrote about how the Philly media and the Philies’ Raul Ibanez unleashed fury on blogger Jerod Morris because, near the end of a long, fact-based analysis of Ibanez hot start, he wrote the following:
“…it’s time for me to begrudgingly acknowledge the elephant in the room: any aging hitter who puts up numbers this much better than his career averages is going to immediately generate suspicion that the numbers are not natural, that perhaps he is under the influence of some sort of performance enhancer. And since I was not able to draw any absolute parallels between his prodigously improved HR rate and his new ballpark’s hitter-friendliness, it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that “other” performance enhancers could be part of the equation.
Sorry Raul Ibanez and Major League Baseball, that’s just the era that we are in — testing or no testing.”
The Philly Daily News’ Paul Hagen had a very good feature in Tuesday’s paper on the training regimen that has helped Phils’ reliever Ryan Madson push his fastball from the low 90s to the mid-90s, which, near the end, including the following:
“In this era of baseball, of course, no pitcher is going to add that many miles per hour in his late-20s without raising suspicion that he has been helped by performance-enhancing substances.
Madson, who turns 29 in August, understands that. He began to smile even before the obligatory question was finished, and held out his pipe-cleaner-thin arm as a rebuttal. He’s skinny, 6-6 and 200 pounds.”
So when a blogger asks the question, he’s an idiot and a coward and it’s an outrage. When Paul Hagen asks it, it’s “obligatory”.
Glad we got that straightened out.
