News, Notes and Quotes (July 11, 2005)
The “Random Baseball Links” folder in my bookmarks is more out of control than usual for some reason, so let’s do a good, old-fashioned link dump on this fine Monday (so I can start filling the folder up again this week) …
That place is a mess and really doesn’t deserve to be a Triple-A city at all. It’s just a terrible place to be at. Terrible stadium, bad weather, bad fans, bad atmosphere, going through customs. Hopefully I can play in front of some other scouts and somebody will make a move and I’ll get a chance to play again.
Once he arrives at the “terrible place to be at,” Newhan will no doubt receive a lovely ovation from the “bad fans” at the “terrible stadium.”
Compared to any other country, the baseball league here is the top, obviously. Therefore, if you have Japanese players, no matter how long they played in Japan, when they come over here, they are starting from zero. Technically, they are rookies. I just wish people would see it that way.
This year, when you see a columnist explain his non-vote for Tadahito Iguchi by saying he is respecting Japanese baseball, hit the B.S. button and send him that quote.
The phone startled Mike Sweeney in his hotel room the night before a game in Milwaukee. The clock on the nightstand read 3:30 a.m. as Sweeney warily reached for the receiver. He worried what the call might be about.
“Mr. Sweeney,” a woman said to the Kansas City Royals first baseman. “I want to come up to your room and take care of you.”
“What?” Sweeney asked, not recognizing the voice on the line.
“Look out your window,” she replied. “I am in the phone booth looking at you right now.”
Sweeney immediately hung up the phone and hurried — not to the window but to the door, turning the lock.
“It’s time to get an alias,” he said to himself.
A lot of thoughts starting with “it’s time to get …” may have gone through my mind at that point, but I don’t think “… an alias” would have been at the end of any of them.
Luckily for Womack being an athlete is one of the few professions where a person can perform horribly at their job and yet complain more than anyone else in the company. I’m not quite sure what the equivalent of hitting .243/.276/.266 is in the business world (I’m guessing it involves a class-action law suit or at least looking for a new job), but I’m pretty sure whatever it is keeps the people performing that way from saying much of anything, let alone complaining every few weeks.
His slide has been full of line drives. He is probably hitting more line drives at people than anyone on our team. It’s different if a guy is popping up or striking out. But he has been hitting the ball hard two or three times a night with nothing to show for it. To me, that’s more of an unfortunate period than a slide.
Interestingly, a lot of people would classify Perez’s entire 10-year career as “an unfortunate period.”