http://www.yardbarker.com/rss/player/602 Recent articles about Scott Spiezio en-us Scott Spezio, had an arrest warrant issued yesterday, won't be making the trip. Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:53:37 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/172316 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/172316 The Angels are done and Tim Salmon ain't happy about it. If I understand these quotes correctly, Salmon doesn't think GM Bill Stoneman has surrounded Vlad with enough big bats in the lineup and isn't surprised that he was plunked by Boston's Manny Delcarmen because of it. "I love the way these guys won the division manufacturing runs," Tim Salmon said. "But why did we win the World Series? We won because Scott Spiezio hit a home run. We did not win because Scott Spiezio hit a single." Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:12:02 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/30238 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/30238 Every starter except one from opening day spent time on the D.L. Five of those players ended up having season ending surgery at some point. Fri, 21 Sep 2007 16:50:15 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/28051 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/28051 Veteran lefthander Jamie Moyer and Adam Wainwright, both with identical 13-11 season marks, dueled for 5 innings before each team notched a run in the 6th inning. But with two outs and a runner on 2nd base in the 10th, closer Brett Myers was tagged for the game-winner on catcher Yadier Molina's walk-off RBI single to leftfield, his 3rd hit of the game as the Cardinals edged the Phillies in their series finale by a 2-1 score. Thu, 20 Sep 2007 05:50:42 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/27855 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/27855 Phillies ace lefthander Cole Hamels made his return from the DL going 3 innings giving up 3 runs on 5 hits, but it took a 14th inning winning RBI single by pinch hitter Rod Barajas, rightfielder Jayson Werth's 3 RBIs a€" 2 of them with his 14th inning triple, an unlikely 2 inning clutch relief effort by Jose Mesa and a perfect one inning save by reliever Clay Condrey to nail down the Phils' 7-4 extra-inning win over the St. Louis Cardinals. The win was the Phillies' 6th straight win. Wed, 19 Sep 2007 08:31:03 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/27702 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/27702 Pics of some of the better beards in MLB History. From Sutter to Spaceman to Piazza's wife. Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:31:52 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/16167 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/16167 I like interleague play. It's cool going to new cities and playing against teams you don't face very often. I've never been to St. Louis or Cincinnati so I'm looking forward to checking out both stadiums. St. Louis has been a trip I've been looking forward to since the schedule came out. I know more guys on that team than any other team in baseball. Adam Kennedy is one of my best friends in the game. Then you have Eckstein and Spiezio, just a bunch of solid guys. It's going to be fun playing them. Those guys were all part of our championship team. We had great chemistry. I loved hanging out in that clubhouse and it showed on the field. It was a special group. I really like this year's team too. We have a good mix of guys, a lot of young guys and a bunch of older guys who've done it before. We can show the younger guys how to win. The young guys are hungry and that brings a lot of energy to the team but it's good to have the mix. You need a little of both. I guess I'm kind of in the middle. I'm not an older guy but I've been to the playoffs three times so I know what it takes to win. Ultimately you have to have talent and we do. You can only teach the young guys so much. You need talent to hang. Early on for me, Aaron Sele and Dennis Cook were here and they took me out to lunch every day on the road and taught me how to be a big leaguer. They taught me everything. I mean how to tip, how to act, a lot of things that go into it that you just don't think about. Fri, 08 Jun 2007 23:10:48 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/15758 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/15758 Another article from BVTN, this one with a statistical inquiry into how much teams are paying free agents per run they bring to the lineup. Very interesting read...the data table is cool to look at! Interesting stuff though when you look at that they're paying over $300,000 per run added to their line-ups. Somehow I think that MLB is awash with money Mon, 27 Nov 2006 19:37:19 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/5744 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/5744 • Scott Rolen leaves the bases loaded to end the first inning. Tony LaRussa writes "You suck" on a piece of paper, folds it, and passes it down the dugout to him. • Things you learn on the radio: LaRussa's been shading Eckstein behind 2nd for a number of Mets hitters throughout the series, despite the fact that the Mets have gotten key hits through that hole. • Fox's "Unsung Heroes" graphic for the series remarkably includes Oliver Perez and his 5 ER in 5 2/3 IP. This is why mediocre pitchers are millionaires in baseball. You know who else was unsung this series? Jim Edmonds. Forget about the fact that he's hitting .211 with 11 men left on base. Have you seen this guy's moxie? You simply can't measure it. His moxie is carrying this damn team. • Scott Rolen makes a key error at third. LaRussa calls up Doug Rader to have him take a dump in Rolen's locker. Message sent. • So Taguchi is four-for-four in this postseason with a double, two homers and four RBI. Memo to LaRussa: Start his ass in Game 7. Juan Encarnacion or Preston Wilson can sit. Full notes in The Swamp. Thu, 19 Oct 2006 05:25:06 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3695 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3695 - Tim McCarver has to be unhappy with the Fox Trax, the computerized strike zone graphic the network uses to recreate the previous pitch. When he says things like, "that would have been a called strike if Eckstein wasn't running" and then Fox Trax clearly shows that it wasn't near the strike zone (in fact it was off the entire radar), even he has to correct himself. Brain surgeons have to be much more accurate than that, Tim. - I know he's a businessman not a rapper, but when did Jay-Z go country? You might be a redneck if ... you shoot Budweiser commercials with Nascar drivers. If you're wondering why his song sounds familiar, you need to break out your Wreckz-N-Effect cassette and listen to Rumpshaker. - Buck and McCarver discuss Albert Pujols' public statements about how Tom Glavine wasn't that good in Game 1, despite giving up zero runs. Right after they finish, Pujols goes yard - as if to say I told you so - to put the Cards on the board. Wrong sport, I know, but that is positively Jordanesque. - Joe Buck reports that Tony LaRussa and Scott Rolen haven't spoken with each other since Rolen hid an injury from his manager. So that's why Scott Spiezio is getting key postseason at-bats. As for Rolen, that would be my strategy too if I played for the Cards. Figure out some way not to have to listen to Tony LaRussa. Good thing they're paying him more than $54 million over the next four seasons. More at the link ... Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:41:04 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3641 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3641 It may be time for me to fiddle with the rankings of my favorite sports. I dont go into this proposition lightly. After the most recent baseball strike, I abandoned the game. It didnt mean anything to me anymore. Overpaid athletes arguing with monopolistic owners about the kind of money no real fan will probably ever see. I turned off the news when the baseball coverage came on. I didnt follow any teams, any players, any games. Then I got sucked into the steroid wars of Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa. That was a fun summer, and by the end of it, I found myself with a new job which prevented any continuation of deliberately ignoring the baseball box scores. I started working at Topps, the baseball card company. Within a few months, I knew every stat of every Bowman card rookie and how many 161-game seasons Ripken had in his run for the record. It wasnt that he missed any games, it's just that the Orioles didnt need to make up a rained out game at the end of some seasons if it didnt have playoff implication, so some teams didnt play a full schedule every year. I didnt even know that until I started working at Topps. So much for my personal boycott of the MLB. Meanwhile, football was falling through the sky. After a decade of relative success in Buffalo, the Bills were sinking fast. They still havent come out of the dive they began back in the late 90s on the day Jim Kelly retired. I cried that day. Everyone stopped working for an hour to watch the press conference. Everyone in the city and the 30-mile radius of suburbs which constitutes Bills country. A lot of people cried that day, and we felt a little silly about it. Had we known where the team would be in 2006, giving the Lions their first win of the season, we would have cried a little harder, and not felt silly about it at all. It hasnt been easy being a Syracuse football fan, either. The Orange roundballers have done us well. They came through on the NCAA Championship in fine fashion, and they gave Carmelo Anthony to the NBA, and they gave northern Pennsylvania something to cheer about for 4 straight years in Gerry McNamara, which is a very big deal. People in northern Pennyslvania dont usually have much to cheer for. I spent much of my early adult life at Rich Stadium, getting completely blasted in the parking lot, going nuts in the stands, watching the K-gun offense shred disoriented defenses, in the heat, in the snow, in the rain. I saw the Bills beat Joe Montana, Dan Marino, John Elway. Football reigned while baseball waned. Of course, hockey has always been there for me. The Sabres played some great games and, through the 80s and 90s, I followed their rivalries with the Bruins, Canadiens and Capitols. The rivalries have changed. Now I get more riled up for games against Dallas and New Jersey and Ottawa, but thats a good sign - those are better teams. The Sabres, and hockey in general, have increased in value tenfold in the past 10 years, despite the lockout. And hockey - Sabres and lockouts and favorite teams aside - has one thing baseball and football will never have - the Stanley Cup. The most coveted trophy in American sports lore. The Cup speaks of tradition, honor, dedication and endurance. On Saturday night, amidst the afterglow of the first comfortable victory in the Sabres' so-far perfect season, football fell crashing to the ground. You cant spell "thugs" without da U. Florida International and the University of Miami took idiocy to a level not seen on the national news since Abu Ghraib. In the middle of the game, a fight broke out. Players were swinging crutches, helmets, possibly toddlers. They were stomping on one another, and the color commentary for the game, a U grad, was singing the praises of the fight like a drunken George Bush must have been howling about the humiliations of his prisoners captured on film. And then, on Sunday, the Bills lost to the Lions. On my way home from picking up a package on Sunday night, I listened on the car radio to the Bob Costas radio show, which I didnt even know existed, to his interview with the writer of a new Roberto Clemente book, or an old one - I dont know if the program was a repeat or not - it seems likely that it would have had to have been - I dont know why Costas would want to be doing a live radio broadcast during the first hour of game 3 of the National League Championship Series playoff game. Roberto Clemente - baseball's last hero, according to the author. I already agreed. On a trip to Puerto Rico, I had brought along several Clemente baseball cards to give to anyone I might meet down there. I spent a lot of time drinking rum at the hotel bar, and I gave some cards to my friend the bartender. Clemente is a hero in Puerto Rico, and his status there made me research more about the man, and he's now one of my personal heroes as well. His grace on the field and his stature off the field are not seen anymore, not much. After getting home, I watched the Mets-Cards game. Before I knew it, the sports world according to me, completed its topple. Jose Reyes of the New York Mets simply blew my mind. With a man on first (Scott Spiezio), Reyes intentionally dropped a caught ball on the dirt in the infield in order to keep Spiezio at first base while trying to trick him into being thrown out. Spiezio didnt fall for it, but was obviously confused. Reyes tossed the ball back to the pitcher and gave Spiezio a playground smirk and nod - I almost got ya, kid. What I've always admired about baseball was its perfect physics. Its playing surface is inspired by a higher power. Sixty feet between bases, 90 from home to second. No matter how the home run totals have changed, it's still tough to beat out the throw on an infield grounder, and stealing 2nd is still always a close play. And Roberto Clemente owned what remains perhaps the best right field arm in the game. Football is different. It's about brute force. But thats why I liked it. Thats why we loved Kelly, who was a rare kind of QB. Kelly dove headfirst into tackles. He blocked. It was something to admire, that kind of brute force, because his brute force respected the game. But now football and baseball seem to be going in different directions. Football's brute force is resulting in more facemask tackles, and the foot stomping we saw in Saturday's brawl, unfortunately, wasnt the first case of foot stomping we saw this year. Baseball, meanwhile, is reeling from the inflated heads of steroids and, interestingly, is redefining itself with the welcome antics of Jose Reyes and Willie Randolph-style coaching. Many of us knew four years ago that pushing people around isnt the way to go. But not all of us. Some donned military garb and said things like "Bring em on," and "Mission accomplished." But look where brute force has gotten us. Every disagreement results in another car bomb. At some point, we can only hope, the clever and articulate voices of grace and reason will prevail, like we saw in Roberto Clemente, as typified by Jose Reyes. And by Carlos Delgado, who, while in Toronto, refused to take the field in the 7th-inning stretch to listen to "God Bless America." He took a stand. Clemente died taking a stand - a peaceful and thoughtful one. McGuire and Sosa were admired as gods while they hit home runs with the brute force of their steroid-enhanced bodies. But their status melted when the truth came out, when the fans recovered from the power of their brute force and saw the truth of it. You can hit someone hard enough to make them cry, but eventually theyll stop crying, and you'll still be a bully. Because while the bullies are hitting, the little guys are reading, and learning, and fine-tuning the best approach to the constructs and confines of the game. Just as the baseball diamond's physics, in the end, favors the guys who can run down an infield hit, who learn to read the smallest movement of the pitcher's motion to first, the world stage favors knowledge and nuance, not brute force. So I think I'm leaning towards baseball, away from football. And I think the world is heading in that direction, too. We can only hope. Mon, 16 Oct 2006 15:03:52 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3526 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3526 Dude, Scott Spiezio has his hot wife tattooed on his left arm. I mean, she's hot in real life (link has a real photo of her too), but in the tat she looks like a chubby transvestite who's pulling down her pants to cop a squat. Mon, 16 Oct 2006 03:15:02 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3497 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3497 After letting the game get tied in the 7th, the Mets sent in Billy Wagner to hold the 6-6 tie. After he was taken out, the Mets were down 9-6 and ended up with a loss in Game 2 of the NLCS. It was an up and down game, and an impressive comeback against of the league's most reliable bullpen's. This is going to be an interesting series... Sat, 14 Oct 2006 12:35:30 -0500 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3433 http://www.yardbarker.com/author/article/3433