Jay’s Ditch Deja Vu Yesterday I bailed out of work early to attend the Yankees-Diamondbacks game. Unfortunately, just like last year’s Ditch Day, Mike Mussina had less than his best stuff and made a mess of things. Mussina fell behind most of the hitters, including going 2-0 on .154-hitting backup catcher Rod Barajas, who hit …
Archive of entries posted by Jay Jaffe
The Barry Bonds Walkathon I had the pleasure of attending Sunday’s Yankees-Giants matchup, the one which was somewhat overbilled as Clemens vs. Bonds. It didn’t exactly live up to the hype in terms of classic showdowns, but it generated more than its share of heat, and a great ball game nonetheless. This even though Bonds …
Mitt Fit Earlier today, for reasons known only to the gremlins that run amok inside the Internet and the faceless automatons who supposedly man the tech support lines for addr.com, this site was down. Despite a great day at work (the boss really liked the new book I’m designing) and good news on other fronts …
Yikes! Oakland general manager Billy Beane has tried to shake up the A’s in the last couple of weeks, making some very questionable roster decisions in the process–most notably, sending down highly-touted rookie first basemen Carlos Pena and trading outfielder Jeremy Giambi. Beane’s track record in creating a viable contender out of the small-market A’s …
Bobble Bobble In addition to winning 288 games in the big leagues, Tommy John is remembered as the guinea pig for a medical procedure which changed the game of baseball. In 1974, the 31-year old John underwent an elbow reconstruction procedure which was so successful that it allowed him to pitch another 14 years in …
Something for the Kids If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed the relative infrequency of my posts lately as well as my bitching about how little time I’ve had to write here. As you would suspect, these two situations are not unrelated. For the past three months or so I’ve been engrossed in various phases …
It’s Not a Significant Sample Size Until Bernie Williams is Hitting Above .300 You can practically set your watch by it: Yankee centerfielder Bernie Williams is a notoriously slow starter, but inevitably, he reels off a sorching month which brings his stats to the level of the guy in the catalog. With 13 hits in …
White Flag In the most baffling trade of the season so far, if not the decade, the Oakland A’s shipped out Jeremy Giambi to the Philadelphia Phillies for futilityman John Mabry. Predictably, the move has drawn the ire not just of A’s fans, but of statheads sympathetic to the A’s cause and cognizant of Little …
Jaywatch The Rocky Mountain News ran a nice where-are-they-now piece on former Colorado Rockies first baseman Jay Gainer on Monday. Gainer, as you may or may not have read elsewhere on this site, homered on his first major league pitch in 1993. That was as good as it got for him in his six weeks …
Busy, Busy, Busy The big project which has been keeping me from devoting very much time to this site is about two (grueling) weeks away from completion. More on that in the near future (there’s a baseball angle there, naturally). In the meantime, I did manage to write up my first game of the season. …