In the immortal words of Mr. Cub himself, the great Ernie Banks is known for saying “Let’s play two!” Ernie Banks played for the sheer joy of it! He always had a smile on his face and played the game like a little boy. Ernie Banks has been gone since January of 2015, but you can still feel his presence above and around Wrigley Field… especially during doubleheaders. What the…
The Dodgers have more RH hitters than LH hitters, but it is close – 7 righties to 5 lefties. Of course, the ratio of LH to RH is not nearly as great, so in that respect, the Dodgers are unique. The problem is that at least three of the LH hitters are the same guy… at least right about now (Bellinger, Muncy, and Rios). Those three players are all hitting…
Last year the Giants won 107 games with a rag-tag bunch of never-were’s, some has-beens, and a few wanna-be’s. Players like Brandon Belt, Buster Posey (now retired), Brandon Crawford, and Evan Longoria (has-beens) all come back to play at a high level. Then, players like Lamont Wade, Jr. Wilmer Flores, Darin Ruf played out of their minds at times. If you went position-by-position, it would have been very difficult to…
There are two types of people. Those that make assumptions without any logic or proof and those that need proof before believing anything. Before I jump right into this, I am going to give you a quote from Dodgers’ GM, Brandon Gomes about Andrew Friedman: He’s an incredible leader. His ability to take in a ton of different opinions and bake them in, his ability to say ‘I don’t know’ is…
Trevor Bauer: We shall never speak of this again… well, at least not much or not very soon. The appeal process will begin and there will be a lot of machinations and posturing and misinformation. In fact, once the suspension was announced, I stopped believing anything. The MLB PR Machine has cranked up. We hear there may be a third accuser. Was there really a second accuser? You are free…
I mean… is that even possible? How is it possible? As you read below what I wrote about the minor leagues, the Dodger system is just “riddled” with these power arms. I have never seen anything like it. Farhan can steal a player here or there (like Nunez) and their farm system is improving, but nothing like what is happening Down on the Farm in Dodgerland. It was announced yesterday…
Losing two straight to the D-Bags is about as low as you can get, and to those who are not worried about the Giants, well, you should start worrying right about now. You should worry about the Dodgers’ infield defense and the lack of hitting, but you can stop worrying about the starting pitching which is the best in baseball. It’s funny, but the starting pitching was just about the…
In 2008, Andrew Friedman took the Tampa Bay Rays to the World Series with a $51,000,000 Dollar Payroll. They didn’t win. The $112,000,000 Dollar Phillies did, but it was remarkable that the Rays made it that far on so little money spent. In 2021, the Dodgers did not even get to the World Series and their payroll was $262,000,000 Dollars. That’s more than 5X what AF paid in 2008. Of…
Who doesn’t like to be around a guy who always smiles, never complains, and is just a fun and outgoing person? The Dodgers had that guy from 2015 until 2020, when they won the World Series. He was the “Banana Man” – namely Kike Hernandez! The Dodgers have a history of having some characters in the clubhouse: Jay Johnstone and Jerry Reuss were also right there with Kike. The fact…
That is evidently Andrew Friedman’s new bullpen strategy and I happen to think it is a stroke of genius. We all know that bullpens are fickle and it is hard to predict with a great degree of certainty whether a pitcher who was great in 2021 will even be average a year later. Injuries happen and pitchers are bad one year and great the next. Now, it is not always…