I ran across this:
Wondered how you’d translate, “I’m your huckleberry.” The circumlocution lacks the punch of the original.
Archive for December, 2007
While Searching for Something Else
Monday, December 17th, 2007End of an Era
Saturday, December 15th, 2007Jim Edmonds has been traded to the San Diego Padres with cash for David (Drew?) Freese, who graduated from Lafayette in West StL County. I’m sorry to see him go, I’ve been as big a fan of his as anyone else. I feel sorry for Freese—how much shit will his friends give him for being the kid Jim Edmonds was traded for. Thanks to Jim for all the great things he showed us and my sincerest wishes that he rebounds next year and helps the Friars win their division.
Freese is a solid prospect—old for his level, but he’s got power and on-base skills, including no qualms for letting pitches hit him. John Sickels has him rated a C+ prospect, saying:
Other C+ guys include Drew Cumberland, Luis Durango, Drew Freese, Danny Payne, Nick Schmidt, and very good LOOGY Joe Thatcher. All interchangeable with the C+ guys above.
So I suppose he’s either the 10th best prospect in the Padres system or the 26th, depending on how you feel about this trade.
In addition to picking up depth at the hot corner in the low minors, this cuts probably $6 or $7 million bucks off of next years payroll. The P-D article speculates: “Trading Edmonds allows the club greater fiscal flexibility as it intensifies a search for additional starting pitching.“
Why not bring up one of my favorite dead horses to beat on—trading for one of the few potential #2 starters who wouldn’t cost the farm.
Thanks to SBNation Braves ‘site Talking Chop, I’ve got video of his outing in the Mexican league, a one-inning performance that saw him strike out a batter, pop another up, and get the last to ground into a 6-4 forceout. Unfortunately, one batter singled up the middle and when Hampton tried to kicksave the ball, his footing gave out and he injured his hamstring. Turn down the sound, because it stinks in this video:
If the gun’s to be trusted, his velocity was sitting around 85, but he dialed it up to 88 and 90 for strikes, and 91 for a ball way up and away. He wasn’t fooling anyone with the off-speed pitch. That’s not too shabby for your first outing in two years, though. I’m still behind the idea of picking him up. A portion of the fanbase would crap themselves with horror, but Hampton might only run you $2 million more than what we were paying with Jimmy Baseball on the roster if the Braves wouldn’t chip in. It’d be a one-year deal with the Rockies paying Hampton’s buyout, so he wouldn’t cripple you in the future. DeWitt wanted him on board in 2000 until the bidding war went plaid. Can’t imagine he’d be too terribly opposed to taking a high-risk flyer on him now.
Further commentary at 3:30am:
Some excellent highlights of Jim Edmond going over the wall start out that video—I stopped watching when the music kicked in, so don’t know what comes after.
Before anyone joins me on my bandwagon (solo-jalopy?) Mike Hampton is not a peripherally sound pitcher. He’s never struck out 7 batters per nine innings pitched in any season of his MLB career and hasn’t struck out over 6 per 9 since the year 2000. He hasn’t struck out twice as many batters as he’s walked since 1996. From afar, he profiles as Jason Johnson standing in a hole 8 inches deep.
I still want him in the rotation at some point, to reclaim his career with Duncan. He’s got the assortment of pitches: the four-seam fastball, the cutter, the curve, and the big sinker. He’s not worth the 8.5 million reportedly left on his contract, but he’d be worth half that, I’d think. Maybe 2009.
In any case, I’d rather Hampton for one year than Silva or Lohse for four or five.
Updated at 4:30am:
Another big trade today, with Doug Weight, Michael Birner, and a seventh-round pick going to Anaheim for Andy McDonald. Looking forward to Sunday’s game against the Flames, another team I like. Wonder if I’ll fall asleep at some point.
All-Glove, No-Hit Shortstops
Friday, December 14th, 2007If he’s actually got a glove—something that’s in dispute—we’ve got one of these in Cesar Izturis, and that should help the pitching by improvement in defensive efficiency. A legitimate all-glove, no-hit shortstop changed teams today when Adam Everett was non-tendered by the Astros and quickly snatched up by the Twins. I’m surprised he signed so quickly and for so little, although the market for shortstops is not particularly hot.
It’s another indication that we probably got burned on Izturis.
David Eckstein signed with the Toronto Blue Jays today. This is interesting because it may mean that yet another slick defensive SS could be on the move in John McDonald. McDonald was among the truly elite defensive shortstops last season at +17.5 in fewer than 800 innings on the field last season. McDonald had just signed a two-year extension in September for $3.8M, they have Aaron Hill at the league minimum at 2nd, and Marco Scutaro backing them up for $1.55M, so picking up Eckstein was a major surprise to me. They’ll be devoting a lot of 25-man roster space to the middle infield if they don’t move McDonald, whose contract includes incentives based on games started.
Here’s a list of some shortstops, their ZiPS lines and defensive ratings for 2008, and their 2008 pricetag:
- Adam Everett: .240/.284/.332 (EX) $2.8M
- John McDonald: .244/.289/.313 (VG) $1.9M
- Cesar Izturis: .252 .296 .318 (AV) $2.85M
- David Eckstein: .289/.348/.356 (AV) $4.5M
- Brendan Ryan: .265/.315/.351 (AV)$0.39M
I’ll be pulling for Brendan Ryan to have a big spring, but I’d consider McDonald an upgrade over Izturis—defensively, contract, and Ex-Cub factor-wise, at least. It wouldn’t surprise me if those offensive projections exceed Izturis’ after adjusting for change of league, as well.
More Maj
Friday, December 14th, 2007Thought I’d do a little write up a gamelog on Jameson Maj, who made two professional appearances last season. Apologies to Toronto and Pirates fans for the shallow descriptions of their A- players, about whom I know very little. The first was on August 25th:
He came in with no outs and runners on first and third. His first batter faced was Victor Santana, who’s big and raw but not yet remotely dangerous at the plate. Santana grounded out to Maj, scoring the runner from third and advancing the other from first to second.The next batter was Luis Sanchez, a switch-hitting shortstop who also isn’t exactly a terror at the plate. Sanchez singled on a line drive to Tommy Pham in CF. The runner on second advanced to third.
With first and third, one out, up came Ben Zeskind, a switch-hitting LF with nice power. Maj struck him out swinging.
Next was Adam Calderone, a lefty CF with speed and a pretty good batter’s eye. He singled on a line drive to Tommy Pham, scoring the runner on third. First and second, two outs, two runs in.
He ended the inning by inducing Darin Mastroianni to ground into a 6-4 force. Mastroianni was a D-II first team All-American before leaving school for the Blue Jays farm. In his final year of college, he put up a .409/.484/.549 line with 22 strikeouts to 31 walks. His first professional line was .287/.391/.409 with 42 strikeouts to 36 walks last year.
By my count, he faced two right handers and three lefties in this outing, collecting two groundball outs, two singles to center, and striking out a batter.
His second outing was shorter and more successful, on August 28th:
Clay Long was having a rough time getting out of the fifth inning. He’d walked a batter, allowed a stolen base and a run to score on a wild pitch, a single, and double, and two home runs in that frame before Maj came in on relief. Long had struck out a batter and a baserunner had been caught stealing second for two outs. At the plate was the Spikes clean-up hitter, a .312/.362/.487 right-handed first baseman by the name of Justin Byler, who was already 2-2 on the day with a home run. Maj struck him out swinging.Byler went on to single again off Thomas Eager and ended up scoring the go-ahead run.
Dammit, I’m ready for baseball season already.
Sleepers for 2008
Saturday, December 8th, 2007Here’re three minor-league players that I expect to make significant progress in the 2008 season.
Juan Mosquera: A 19-year-old 5’10″ switch-hitting shortstop from Panama who had a successful season in the Dominican Summer League, batting .299/.484/.338 with a 39:51 ratio of strikeouts to walks. He stole 18 bases, which is good—but in 28 attempts, which is bad. Only four of his forty-seven hits went for extra bases. He’s on Jeff Lunhow’s radar, saying of scout.com’s DSL Cardinal position player of the year:
Mosquera … works for everything he gets. He is a high energy player who doesn’t wow you with his tools but he gets the job done. From the day I tried him out on a dusty, hot field in Panama City to now he has progressed.His weight is listed at 154 lbs and he’s not playing in any Winter League that I know of. Ideally, I’d like to hear that he’s on a nutrition and conditioning program to add 30 pounds over the next year and that his offseason is devoted to nothing but eating good food, lifting weights, and watching every clip of Rafael Furcal on record.
I expect Dan Nelson will be promoted to AA Springfield for 2008, and that Oliver Marmol or someone will take his place at A+-Palm Beach. I’d be happy to see Mosquera get a shot on the A-Quad Cities shortstop job, leapfrogging Kozma who should probably do extended spring training then stay at Batavia until his bat comes around. I thought Wladimir Mendoza would be more successful moving form the DSL to the American pro-leagues—here’s hoping Mosquera does a better job adjusting and adds some pop to his game in his third professional season. If he finishes the season at Palm Beach, he will have succeeded mightily in going from sleeper to prospect. (And it would also indicate that Kozma made strides as well, who I’d like to see finish the year in the Quad Cites.)
Brian Broderick: A 21-year-old 6’6″ 205 lb RHSP drafted in the 21st round in 2007 out of Grand Canyon University. In 88 2/3 college IP, he struck out 74 while allowing 22 walks. He continued this fine control as a professional pitcher, striking out 53 to 7 walked batters. He was an extreme groundball pitcher with Johnsonville (2.26 G:F) but couldn’t burn dem worms after being promoted to Batavia.
He allowed line drive rates around 17% at both levels, suggesting that he may have trouble keeping more advanced hitters from squaring up on his strikes and also needs to improve vs. lefthanders, but I like the size and control combination well enough to see him emerging as a legit prospect next year. I’d like to see him start at Quad Cities and dominate there before skipping to AA to start 2009.
Jameson Maj: A 22-year-old 6’4″ 225 lb RHRP who signed on the last day possible and threw only 1 1/3 inning at Batavia, striking out two batters and allowing two to single on line drives (both to left-handed hitters, although he struck out the third lefty he faced.) The sample size renders it meaningless, but his two non-K outs were grounders.
Before signing, he pitched 24 innings for the Denton Outlaws in the wooden bat Texas Collegiate League. In those 24 innings, he struck out twenty-six batters while walking only three. I don’t know where to find BIP data for the TCL, but in those 24 innings, he recorded four putouts and seven assists. So of the 46 non-K outs he pitched, he personally had a hand in fielding 11, or 24% of the BIP. Brandon Wood, perhaps the Platonic ideal of the high-K/9, high G:F pitcher, had a hand in just under 15% of his non-K outs, so we can reasonably assume that Maj keeps the ball down.
And before that, as the closer for Abilene Christian University, he recorded 72 strikeouts to only 4 walks. For the season, across three very different levels {NCAA D-II, Texas Collegiate League (high quality amateur), and short season A-ball, he showed phenomenal control with high strikeout rates and extreme groundball tendencies. He’s big and strong, and mature enough to rise quickly through the system. I’d like to see him start the year closing for the Swing of the Quad Cities (or whatever they’ll be called next year) with Josh Dew skipping to High-A, where he should look very, very good as a flyball pitcher in a flyball pitcher’s park. If he’s as good against pro competition as he was against collegians and amateurs, and his skillset looks like it should carry over nicely, he could finish the year as high as middle relief in AA.
Those are my three picks for sleeper prospects—players that most fans who have a pretty good idea of the farm system may not have heard of and who I think will have breakout seasons and finish the year as real prospects heading into 2009.
Hmmmm…
Friday, December 7th, 2007I’ve got some pretty aggressive home remodeling projects in the works. Doing some major renovations to the crappoir this winter: new tub/shower; moving the sink and it’s plumbing to the other side of the room; new walls, ceiling, and floor; redoing the wiring; and putting in new lights and mirrors.
I’m planning on doing the kitchen during the Spring: extending the countertops, installing a dishwasher, building a fridge enclosure and pantry, and adding a breakfast -nook-type counter-area.
Finally, I came up with the idea recently to split my great room into a separate living room and dining room, with a built-in entertainment center in the living room. That room is too big and not set up right for any kind of reasonable furniture arrangement. I’d been struggling with how to solve that mess since I bought the place five years ago (has it been that long?) This would be a pretty radical remodel, but one that I’m very confident will be worthwhile. It wouldn’t be particularly difficult.
But what I’m really thinking about is something for the kitchen remodel in the Spring. I figure I could add around $250-$300 to the budget and build a kegerator into the cabinet under that breakfast countertop. How great would it be to have something like this sticking out of your counter?
I’ll post some detailed plans after I draw them up this weekend.
Best Joke of the Day
Thursday, December 6th, 2007It was a busy day, spent in my office recording and editing, so it was one of the only jokes I made today. It’s at the end of a comment I left to this interesting post contextualizing the absurdity of the 2008 Marlins payroll now that they’ve dumped their two highest-paid players, I wrote this:
With the revenue Loria’s drawing, you’d think he could dredge his own island off the Miami coast and build a stadium on it, plus a bridge connecting it to the peninsula without public financing.Something like these man-made islands in the UAE could be super cool. Imagine it, an island shaped like a Marlin with nothing on it but a ballpark, parking garages, and a few resort hotels with views into the stadium.
I gotta say, though… The 2008 Marlins might be the best $10,000,000 baseball team since the 1989 Cubs!
You see what I did there? Totally flouting the tenet not to compare across eras. Totally high-larious.
Steve Martin
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007I got a kick out of this review of Steve Martin’s new book and especially this video linked from it:
You may recognize that he uses the balloon animal bit in a largely unappreciated movie, Parenthood. “Your lower intestine.” [Hat tip to David Pinto]
One of the funniest things I remember from the time my grandma spent the last few years of her life living with my mom involved Steve Martin. She was in the family room, where I’d left Comedy Central on the television. I was in another room, reading or something, and heard my grandma erupting into gales of laughter. I went in to see what was so funny and she was watching this brilliant hangdown-joke.
The end of that video clip brings me to another observation. At work, we use a piece of (very useful) software called Cleaner XL that’s currently published by a company called Autodesk. Formerly, however, it was made by a company called Discreet. When they shipped the software, it came in a brown cardboard box, unmarked except for the word “Discreet.” I assumed the mail carriers and secretaries all think I’m some kind of pervert, having items delivered to my office address in a Discreet brown box.
Breaktime Thoughts
Monday, December 3rd, 2007Proud to see the Rose Bowl committee saw fit to invite Illinois to the Rose Bowl where they’ll face USC.
Some new songs I’ll be nailing on Wednesday night:
I ended up at a bar with karaoke last night and did my Louis Armstrong impression to “What a Wonderful World.” Got a really good response.
Sistered Rafters
Sunday, December 2nd, 2007I’m pretty damned proud of myself right now. I did my annual roof inspection/gutter cleaning the week before Thanksgiving and discovered that a noticeable sag on one of the slopes of my roof was caused by two broken rafters. When I worked in construction, I learned how to fix a whole lot of things and build a lot of stuff new, but I’d never dealt with this before. So I did what any reasonably book-smart person with a basic level of competence would do: checked out some old books on carpentry and roofing from the library.
The section of my roof that needed repairs is over the oldest part of the house—construction that’s over 100 years old. The roof is shake-shingle with asphalt over that, so instead of plywood sheathing, there are 1X4′s running the length of the slope with shakes nailed to them, and modern shingles nailed into the shakes. While crawling around in the attic, I discovered a few repairs, where the shakes had been torn off and plywood nailed to the 1X4′s. That was a happy discovery—I hadn’t known that was kosher and thought I’d need to tear down to the rafters if serious repairs were needed.
So here’s what I did. I pre-drilled and screwed in two sisters apiece (or scabs, just lumber the same size as the existing, broken rafters) on both sides of the damaged rafters with the halfway point at the point of damage, so about four feet on each side of the break to make a rafter sandwich. Since the rafter was bent, I only screwed in on the upper halves and so the lower halves of the sisters were sticking out from the roof’s interior face.
I couldn’t find a good description of how to jack up a roof in this situation, so I kind of improvised. I screwed together two pieces of lumber perpendicularly lengthwise, so that I had a long piece shaped like an L on the ends and sawed another piece in half and did the same thing to make a short piece shaped like an L on each end. These are apparently called stiffbacks or troughs by people who know what they’re doing. I screwed the short piece into the sister rafters by where the original rafters had broken and screwed the long piece into the attic joists underneath the stiffback on the rafters and a little towards the outside of the house (fortunately close enough to a load-bearing wall that I wasn’t too concerned that I’d collapse the ceiling below). I eyeballed it so that the two were on a very slight angle towards the broken rafter in the middle of the sagged region. Then I angled in a piece of 2X4 so that it was resting between the two stiffbacks and pounded the bejeesus out of it with a sledgehammer until it was in straight, then pounded it down the two strongbacks. Since I’d angled them a little bit, the distance between them decreased as you move down the troughs, and so when I’d hammer the vertical piece of lumber along them, it would lift up the roof a little bit, with the weight dispersed from the sister rafters down into all the joists and into the load-bearing walls supporting them. Once I got it hammered down the stiffbacks a little ways, I angled in another 2X4 that my assistant had cut a bit longer than the first and did the same thing, hammering the two supports down the trough a little bit at a time. When I could, I angled in another 2X4 that was a bit longer still and kept going. After four of those supports where run down into the troughs (and the first one had fallen out) I had the roof jacked up perfectly straight since the sister rafters made contact with the 1X4 roof sheathing. I went outside to take a look and was extremely pleased to see that the roof was now perfectly straight.
After admiring the fruit of my labor, I climbed back into the attic to drill and screw the sisters to the old rafters below the break. Figured there’s no harm in leaving the supports where they are through the winter. Come Spring, I’ll have to carefully hammer them out and let the sisters start carry the full weight of the roof.
Now I’ll watch some Mizzou v. Oklahoma and get all the black boogers out of my nose.