LATEST STORIES FROM BUGS & CRANKS
Money-Management Corporation Ball. Fantasy Edition.
Last week the money-minds at Bloomberg Sports rolled out their new Fantasy Baseball stat thing for the ultra-über-mega-meta-hardcore-supergnarlyburritolicious geek within us all. A statgrubby masterpiece of intangibles that have been tanged and minutiae mined and worked over like a Mitch Williams slide-step, this tome of dust speck-boiling meisterwerk places the user directly in...
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March 14, 2011
Discuss
Johan Not Returning in 2011? Good!
New York Mets left-hander Johan Santana is in danger of missing the entire season because he is not progressing well from a Sept. 14 surgery to repair a torn anterior capsule in his left shoulder, the Bergen Record reported Sunday.
Good.
The newspaper said team officials believe Santana will be “lucky” to pitch this year.
And we’d be lucky if he didn’t....
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March 13, 2011
Remember when you thought you were a pretty good Wiffleballer? You had a special pitch. Sure, other guys maybe threw it faster, but you threw a ball that no one could hit solidly. They might not strike out, but they never got solid yellow plastic on your pitches.
Until that one day. That day when that kid no one had ever seen before came to your fabulous mansion of a house. The one...
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March 10, 2011
Designated Twitter: Don’t Call It a Comeback
The Designated Twitter: Oh no, they di’n't! But we sure did!
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March 10, 2011
Fans in sections 15 through 18, please stay alert
The Baltimore Sun reported Wednesday that if Derrek Lee’s still injured when the season starts, Buck Showalter will use Luke Scott at first base. Unless he meant he’d use Luke Scott as first base, there must be some mistake.
Bucky loves a glove man at the corners. And Scott’s a glove man, all right; a big, clanky metal glove.
C’mon, Buck? You’re kidding...
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March 09, 2011
Josh Hamilton = Charlie Sheen
So last night I met up with new kid Kevin “Koko” Chanel at this Blogs With Balls/Bloomberg Sports event to get some free drinks and appetizers and listen to Rick Peterson talk. It was right next door to this restaurant/bar Nova, made mildly infamous by another Kevin, ‘Duk Kaduk of Big League Stew who snapped this picture during last year’s World Series:
Last night, the sign...
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March 09, 2011
Breaking into Yankee Stadium
This story is ALL KINDS of awesome – another gem from my Facebook feed. Full credit to Deadspin for the photos and details.
Not like I would advocate trespassing in an unused venue, but if i had the cojones to break into any sports stadium myself, the old Yankee Stadium undoubtedly would have been my choice as well.
Still unconfirmed if these two actually broke in or knew...
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March 08, 2011
Fantasy Island: A Call For Questions
As some of you might recall, for a handful of weeks at the outset of last season, I (Tyler) tried to establish a fantasy baseball column in which I guided geeks in their stat-based pursuits. This ill-fated column, Unusual Fantasy, gave tips and juicy nuggets of baseball advice using exactly ZERO formulas, statistics or any other measured evaluations of any kind. I thought it was...
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March 07, 2011
Help a Brotha Out
Alright, so I took part in a AL-only keeper fantasy league last year, and had no real idea what the hell was going on. I know baseball, but fantasy baseball is a different world.
To make matters worse, I wasn’t all that familiar with how to tinker with my line-up, so between equal parts computer illiteracy, confusion and apathy, Nick Johnson stayed in my starting line-up for...
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March 06, 2011
Evil Empire Not So Evil
Any story that proves how and why the Yankees aren’t evil to the core is a fantastic story in my book.
Oddly enough, I think I first came across this on boston.com, actually. Breaking bread with the enemy stories always make for good press.
Last summer, Red Sox coach Ron Johnson’s 10-year-old daughter was horseback riding when a car struck her, almost killing her and...
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March 05, 2011
The Kids of the Grunge Era
I gotta admit – I’m staring at the 40-man roster and list of invitees to Tampa and seeing lots of unfamiliar names, mainly because I haven’t done my homework yet, and I try not to get too worked up about baseball until the snow banks fully melt from the streets of Boston. Except for the massive piles in the snow farms (well, and bus stops – thanks, city), we’re pretty...
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March 04, 2011
The scorecard from Heck
For someone who can rattle off all 23 ways a batter can legally reach first base, it’s oddly appropriate that getting there herself would present Bethany Heck’s greatest hurdle.
All she was trying to do was reinvent the baseball scorebook.
The graphic designer from Auburn, Ala., is the proud force behind The Eephus League Official Scorebook, a pocket-size version of...
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March 03, 2011
Orel, Robert And That Bald Guy On A Sunday
I dunno, I am just not one of those guys that can say he HATES Joe Buck.
Sure, like any real fan of the game, I would like to see Tim McCarver stuck on an anthill and covered in sugar-decayed Crunch Berries®, but who hasn’t wished for that? His expansive banalities and homespun torpor would make the most even-keeled gent dream of Saw VII-esque models of torture.
And it is...
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March 03, 2011
So, You Don’t Think They Can Dance?
I just read that Pittsburgh Steelers’ wideout Hines Ward, of all people, will soon appear on ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Apart from the obvious wondering whether Hines will lay a vicious forearm block on some other dance team while they’re not looking, something else in this news struck me as odd:
Where are the baseball stars in all this?
Think about it. Ward...
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March 03, 2011
Vaughn: “I don’t think I’m very good company right now.”
Before you ever start-we planned it first, forget the truth-accept your curse
–The Germs “Media Blitz”
It’s becoming clear, as media blitzes go, that the Charlie Sheen self-hype machine is about at hour twelve. What can he say now that will shock the public into thinking there is more to him than that which we are already overly familiar?
“Can’t is the cancer...
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March 03, 2011
Remembering Not To Forget Jody Gerut
Maybe I’m a little off my game. Or maybe I, like even the most avid baseball fans, haven’t been keeping up on Seattle Mariners news. It could have something to do with the caliber of player involved in the specific transaction. But it’s probably all three combined.
I almost missed the news of Jody Gerut’s retirement.
“So what?” and “What...
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March 03, 2011
Iran Protests Racist Red Sox, Youkilis, Lowrie
The Iranian government has sent an official letter of protest to Major League Baseball and the Boston Red Sox over what it describes as “racist numbering practices.”
“Anyone with eyes can see what the Red Sox are up to,” writes the Iranian state news agency. “Any time Jed Lowrie bats behind Kevin Youkilis, or as often happens in the slutty American pasttime...
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March 02, 2011
Bob Smizik Will Spell Player’s Names Anyway He Darn Well Pleases
Last night, Post-Gazette sports “blogger” and washed-up hack Bob Smizik wrote a post asking if, with his comments earlier in the day, Pirates pitcher Scott Olsen had himself confused with Phillies star Roy Halladay. This is what the headline looked like:
I took that screenshot because I figured some enterprising editor would catch the misspelling of, you know, the last...
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March 02, 2011
“Daddy, Why Does Sports Radio Lie to Me?”
Alright, I stole that title from the epilogue of Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports are Played and Games are Won, but that makes it no less true.
So much of what we know believe about sports can be, and was, debunked through psychology, percentages based on large sample size and economic analysis. And it was eye-opening.
To begin, take into consideration the non...
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March 01, 2011
The Seven Deadly Sins of Oliver Perez
This just in — Oliver Perez sucks. Yeah, we all know the story: Omar gave him a bad contract. We are paying him a lot of money to rarely work…and when he works, well, let’s face it — it rarely works.
Alliteration aside, if these Mets are going to continue screaming to the heavens (or at least to the Bronx), “SERIOUSLY, DON’T UNDERESTIMATE US!&...
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March 01, 2011
MLB Team Urinal Cakes: As Seen in San Diego
You remember those “There’s only one October commercials” from a few years back? God, those were ******. So ****** that around September 2009, in what perhaps was a premonition of how ****** October 2009 would be, I had an idea for a series of posts that I shared with Bugs&Cranks Editor-in-Chief S. Smitty Smithwicks.
Because there’s only one October,...
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February 28, 2011
My fifteen minutes with Chuck Lorre
Every television show has a “showrunner,” essentially the head writer and more. Beyond the entertainment industry, these folks are largely unknown; nobody really knew Larry David as a showrunner until Curb Your Enthusiasm put him in front of the camera. But last week, Charlie Sheen’s drug-addled ramblings has put Two and a Half Men showrunner Chuck Lorre onto the entertainment...
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February 28, 2011
Impersonating a Yankees fan
“Jesus Christ! I thought I was pissing next to Don Mattingly!”
Yes, the dude one urinal over had nearly wet himself … and me. We were co-workers at Newsday, me in news, him in sports. New Yorkers, which meant we played it nonchalant in the presence of celebrities. Right? Um, not this guy. I’m not sure he was really ever convinced that the Yankees first baseman...
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February 28, 2011
Albert and The Kid
Sometime this past fall, in an otherwise nondescript early season hockey game against the Vancouver Canucks, Sidney Crosby exited the penalty box and caught a break-out pass in perfect stride. In all alone against arguably the best goaltender in the game, Roberto Luongo, he made a few deeks before flicking home a wrister for the first goal of the game.
It’s highly doubtful...
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February 28, 2011
“We have lost a giant.”
No one could put it better than Vin Scully, so why even try?
I’m not nearly old enough to have seen Duke Snider with my own eyes, but grew up reading nearly mythological stories about “Willie, Mickey and the Duke” and Brooklyn’s lone Subway Series title in 1955.
Sadly, Willie Mays is the last of that trio with us any longer. Hall of Fame Dodgers center fielder...
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February 27, 2011
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