Susan Slusser of the SF Gate reported this morning on a botched call that resulted in Bob Melvin of the Oakland A’s being tossed kicking and screaming from a game against Cleveland last night for arguing after a home run review didn’t go his way. With two outs in the ninth, Adam Rosales hit a drive to left field that seemed to clearly hit a railing above the edge of the wall tying the game, yet...
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Beginning In 1985, as owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, Bud Selig and numerous other owners colluded to undermine free agency by agreeing not to sign other teams’ free agents. The owners were taken to court and eventually ended up paying 280 million in damages to the players. It was with this failed attempt at collusion that the seeds of the 1994 work stoppage were sewn. In 1992, Fay Vincent, then...
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It had been a sweltering hot summer in NY, so hot that my dad and I had taken to sitting out in the backyard to listen to the games. It was July 13, 1977, and the Mets were playing the Cubs. They were losing 2-1 in the bottom of the sixth in spite of an 11-strikeout effort by Jerry Koosman. We were eating watermelon and cheese. I remember spitting watermelon seeds out towards the tomato plants...
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John Charles Bradbury, an Economics Professor at Kennesaw State University, did a fascinating study a few years back on whether changing managers really has an effect on turning a team around. What he found was that ultimately managers had little to no effect on performance output given the same personnel. In a nutshell, good players make good managers. The only real difference was one of...
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You know I bet you could build a supercomputer that would be able to manage the NY Mets. Maybe something like the robot from Lost in Space. A robot would probably have put in Juan Lagares instead of Collin Cowgill in the late innings last night … That’s because robots are nothing if not logical. Robots don’t go on intuition or hunches, they don’t make bullpen decisions based on their gut …...
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