Answers to fantasy baseball questions (and much more) since 1996
Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Braves Win
Rafael Furcal broke out of his early season slump by going 3-4, and most spectacularly hitting two dingers while swiping two bases. Someone with better Retrosheet skills than I can perhaps give us an idea of just how rare multiple homer and steal games are, but Furcal owners are surely pleased as punch. The unfortified kind.
Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Red Sox 8, Yankees 5:
““We have to give Sheffield a lot of credit,” Damon said, “for him to restrain himself the way he did.””
I’ve complained plenty about the way baseball-fan altercations are reported, but this AP story carried on Yahoo finds a proper balance. Hmm, maybe that’s because I don’t think fans should ever punch players, and players should not ever punch fans.
In this case, Gary Sheffield wins. Big time. And Johnny Damon recognizing that is a sign of how big this problem is.
Only Baseball Matters | MLB and San Fran Giants Observations from John Perricone and friends
This one is about Edgardo Alfonzo, who is off to a fast start after losing a noticeable amount of weight this past offseason. And after carrying a noticeable amount of extra weight the two disappointing seasons before. This is the sort of thing to add to the mix of info, a reason to favor Alfonzo over someone of roughly equal talent.
Most of the time a fast start is just a fast start.
Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Ask Rotoman
The new column is up, with an evaluation of Victor Zambrano, a comparison of Xavier Nady and Calvin Pickering, some easy but telling points about point-based scoring, and a look at the second-tier starting pitchers who have a chance at being stars this year.
ESPN.com – MLB – Box Score – Orioles at Devil Rays
Brian Roberts matches his 2004 HR total in the same game Sammy Sosa hits No. 1. Roberts also steals a base, and there are four innings left to play!
Yahoo! Sports – MLB – Sanchez won’t appeal suspension
I’m not out for blood in this steroid thing, but I think those that say they’re coming clean should actually come clean. The commissioner and many players in baseball have said that being suspended and publicly outed was the big punishment, but with Alex Sanchez’s 10-day suspension for a drug that he isn’t naming but is saying was legal when he bought it, all the maneuvering has been to find wiggle room.
Maybe that reflects the expansive gray area that each individual case was built upon, but if we’re going to endure the hysterics of those crying for PED blood, we need to offer up a less heinous alternative to policing the situation.
I’m not certain how to move forward on this, because I think the privacy of players up to the point they have certainly broken the rules is paramount. But mostly I’m for full disclosure. I’m willing to have my toxscreen made public, and not because I don’t use steroids to beef up my use of adjectives. We do what we have to do, so why shouldn’t players? At least if what we do is legal.
An awful lot of secrets used to be kept by people who derived great power from their access to information. I sympathize with an individual’s right to freedom, but I think in the end the more information that is made public the better able the injured and oppressed will be able to set things right. And the less like the exploitative will be able to get away with their crap.
I hope so.
Major League Baseball : Fantasy : Ask Rotoman
It happens every Wednesday. Yes, a new Ask Rotoman column. This one looks at Joey Gathright, rules for steroid suspensions, a Chipper for Jason Bay trade (on a day Chipper steals a base and hits a homer), and the problem with two-fer-one deals–especially in early season.
I was trying to find who the HR leaders were at the end of last April for this week’s mlb.com column. I used to keep a pretty full set of Baseball Weekly around for this purpose, but they got pretty ratty and took up a lot of room and I could find most of what I wanted to find in them more easily online. Like that sort of data stuff was everywhere.
Except looking for it today, all I could find was 2005 data. All the big sites now have the same format. I asked MLB.com stats honcho Cory Schwartz if it was buried somewhere on the site, but it isn’t. They no longer offer past season sortable splits.
Bummer. But I kept looking and came across this page at baseballmusings.com. I haven’t had time to explore, but this front end to the retrosheet database seems to work great. It isn’t fancy, but it’s fast and I suspect will become a most valuable tool in the months to come.
Bravo.
Baseball America: 38 Suspended For Steroids
About equally distributed between pitchers and hitters. This list isn’t limited to performance enhancing drugs. Minor leaguers are tested for recreational drugs, too. But still, if the problem with steroids is the uneven playing field they create, what do we do with all the evidence that pitchers are using, too? (I think it is still true that the only players caught using steroids by the Olympics testing regimen were pitchers, though that could have changed.)
This announcement, as the story makes clear, covers only the players with spring training in Arizona. There will another covering players in Florida, presumably soon.
I don’t know if this is going to work, but if you get the Google Maps and see a satellite image it is either of Shea Stadium or my old house out in Orient NY. In either case, you can get from one to the other if you want. This new feature offers all the fun of looking out of an airplane window on a perfect clear day, without the cost or the food. You don’t actually get anywhere, but you can’t have everything.
(Okay, the link just takes you to the Google Maps page. And if you type in Shea Stadium it doesn’t get it. But if you type in LGA you’ll get to LaGuardia Airport. Click on the green park area to the southeast (by the inlet), then zoom in as far as you can. Click on the word Satellite in the upper right corner and bingo, you should see Shea.)