Archive for January 2009

The Baseball Crank returns with his annual review of who’s Hall-worthy and not. This year: the men behind the plate.

After a couple of troubling years, Zack Greinke took a step forward in 2008 and the Kansas City Royals rewarded him with a contract extension.

On Jan. 31, 1891, Goat Cochran was born. Cochran was just one of the players born on this date who would go on to earn a memorable moniker. Richard looks at some of the more distinctively dubbed players.

Remember last year when Jeter was being coy about what keepsake he was going to take from Yankee Stadium? Harvey Araton has the goods: Derek Jeter came clean Wednesday night. He pilfered the Joe DiMaggio sign, as I suspected. When I had last seen Jeter before covering the kickoff party to his celebrity golf classic […]

A good reminder that when the Ricketts start talking about renovating Wrigley Field, there is probably one or two right ways to do it and a thousand wrong ways: When Sam Zell floated a plan for the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority to buy Wrigley Field in a transaction separate from the Cubs, the talk was […]

I’ve had about as much fun with the Joe Torre book as anyone, but this is profoundly stupid: The Yankees are considering including a “non-disparagement clause” in future player and managerial contracts in order to prevent any more tell-all books such as “The Yankee Years,” co-written by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci. Speaking on the […]

If the case against Barry Bonds was as good as everyone says it is, why are the feds scorching the Earth in order to try and get the testimony of someone they’ve know ain’t talking for years? FBI and IRS agents raided the home of Greg Anderson’s mother-in-law Wednesday in what Anderson’s attorney said was […]

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Scott Ostler has a rip-roarer of a column today about the imminent collision between the Hall of Fame and steroids: I heard a local radio talker say he’s sure Kent was never a juicer because Kent isn’t that kind of guy. This radio talker is being grossly underutilized. With such psychic […]

You think I read this stuff because it constitutes excellent writing and analysis. The truth is that I’m writing a scathing tell-all book called “ShysterBall: The Hardball Times Years” and I need to know everything about Studeman, Treder, Brattain and the others before I throw them under the bus. Colin Wyers has part two in […]

In some situations managing roster value in Rotohog can be a challenge and require players to sacrifice some short term lineup optimization in order to remain competitive over the course of the season.