Rick Kaplan

OAKLAND (August 22) – Performance-enhancing substances are not the biggest threat to the integrity of the game. Neither are juiced baseballs or corked bats.

No, it’s the water !!

H20 is rising around our ballparks, threatening to momentarily turn the Grand Old Game into a water sport.

It may have begun innocently enough in 1973 with the Esther Williams-esqe waterfall and fountains beyond the centerfield fence in Kaufmann Stadium in K.C. Then there was the inclusion of a swimming pool at Bank One in Phoenix in case anyone wanted to get in some laps while the Snakes were getting shut out . . .

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WALKING AMONG LEGENDS

By George Devine, Jr.
Fox Sports Radio for Love of the Game Productions

KANSAS CITY, MO–A couple of weeks ago, when the Bay Area’s John Madden joined the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, OH, the coach turned commentator and pitchman suggested the busts of the enshrined talked to each other at night. Friday, when I visited Kansas City’s Negro League Baseball Museum, I wondered if legends who occupy a special place in the history of America’s pastime also converse after the visitors and the lights go out.

And like John Madden suggested during his acceptance speech in Canton, I also suspected these legends cast in bronze might even play against one another. At the Negro League Baseball Museum, the legends actually take their respective positions on the diamond. Satchel Paige stands the tallest, right smack in the middle of the diamond, ready to read the signal from his catcher Josh Gibson while Cool Papa Bell trolls left field. Any imaginative baseball fan must wonder if they switch positions at night, maybe take turns standing in against Paige.

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Baseball: Watch Those Predictions
by Glenn Dickey
Aug 16, 2006

BASEBALL IS the most unpredictable sport, with quite different results from day to day, as we were reminded in the very first A’s series this year, when the Yankees scored 16 runs in the opener but the A’s won the next two games.

By midseason in an NFL season, the contenders are clearly separated from the pretenders. It didn’t take that long for the 49ers and Raiders last season. The 49ers were clearly going nowhere after the first four games. The Raiders insisted they would be in the playoffs but, since they were on the losing side of the ledger from the first game, they were fooling only themselves.

In baseball, though, early results can be misleading. The A’s seemed totally out of the race in May but by the end of August, they were leading the AL West, though they slipped back in September. The Cleveland Indians, too, had a great midseason run and for a time, looked like the best team in baseball – but like the A’s, they missed the playoffs.

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Felipe Alou has been a baseball man since he started playing ball as a kid in the Dominican Republic.
Now he is towards the end of his baseball career
and he knows that a good manager is as good
as the talent he has on the field.
Prior to a game I sat down with Felipe and conducted an interview in Spanish(which here I
translated into English)

By Amaury Pi-González

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CROWD BEHAVIOR seems to be getting worse at baseball games, as Milton Bradley can certainly attest.

Bradley was taunted by fans in Boston and Baltimore during the A’s recent trip through the east. Manager Ken Macha sat him down for the final game of the Red Sox series, concerned there would be another incident.

Bradley is known for his short fuse, and fans were trying to get him to explode. This has long been typical of Red Sox fans, who are at best tied with Philadelphia fans for the most obnoxious in baseball, but Orioles fans have never had that reputation. Maybe they wanted some entertainment, which they weren’t getting from their team’s play.

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ZITO’S DAY

There’s no crying in baseball. There are no curtain calls in Oakland. But those of us at the A’s-Blue Jays game last Saturday challenged tradition to show our affection for Barry Zito.

Mind you, the ovation was partly a last-ditch effort to remind Zito (and Billy Beane) how much he means to us. Let me count the ways he has won us over these past six years: cerebral interviews, wild clubhouse celebration dances, and of course, that jaw dropping, feat-of-physics curveball. We did not want to lose all of that come Monday at the trade deadline.

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The Minnesota Twins started broadcasting some
of their home games in Spanish language radio
with ex Cuban great Major League
player Tony Oliva at the microphone.

By Amaury Pi-Gonzalez [Read more →]

Marty; There is a lengthy article in today’s New York Times, captioned “Loyalty to Bonds Is Mystifying and Misplaced”. It is personally timely. Last evening, at the dinner table with five very articulate, highly opinionated, grossly intelligent, liberal in the best sense of that abused word, close friends, I was subjected to withering criticism for my “too moralistic attitude towards Bonds”.

The unanimous opinion of the five, two of whom are fervent Giant fans, was that the continued federal interest in pursuing Bonds was overkill, unworthy of the money spent and energy expended. Bonds wasn’t a bank robber, a rapist, a child abuser. He may have been a knowing steroids user but he was not doing anything illegal and many others were as guilty of using performance enhancing drugs. The possibility of criminal charges other than perjury was not then under discussion

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Rick Kaplan
Staff Writer

OAKLAND (July 8) – “I finally got my man,” Moneyball maven Billy Beane told ESPN late Saturday night.

“We’ve had our eye on Andre Ethier since last winter. He fits our profile perfectly. A multi-tool kid at the bottom of the salary scale who can step in and fill a role at the major league level right now.”

Beane continued enthusiastically, ” I can’t believe Ned Coletti (the Dodger GM) let Ethier go! He is the kind of blue chip prospect that organizations don’t normally sacrifice to their short-term goals.. They gave us a kid who is going to be a star for years to come. And for Bradley and Perez! Everyone likes Bradley, but the kid isn’t able to stay in the line-up. And Perez, another nice kid, is a marginal player, at least in the AL.”

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Jul 12, 2006

IF THERE’S postseason baseball in the Bay Area this year, it will be in Oakland, not San Francisco.

The Giants improved their team with offseason moves, but their hopes for the postseason basically rested on Barry Bonds playing 120 games and being the hitter he was in 2004 and the division remaining as weak as it was the previous season, when the Padres won the title with just 82 wins.

Neither hope has been realized. The division is actually the only one in the National League with more wins than losses. Arizona seems to be dropping back – the Jason Grimsley case knocked the wind out of the Diamondbacks – but the Padres, Dodgers and Rockies all seem to be improved. That’s significant because the Giants play almost half their 162-game schedule within the division.

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