Psychology is a funny thing. Lakers coach Phil Jackson is famous for calling out NBA refs in public, paying his fines, and then benefitting from the impact of calls going his way for a change. He is not the first coach in the NBA to do this, nor will he be the last. He just is, currently, the best.

Might we have seen something similar to this effect last night, but in baseball?

Continue reading this post »

Luis Polonia. "Atom Ant". In Part 1of our interview we looked back on the highlights of Luis' career. For specific references about his bio, check out his chronology at baseballlibrary.com.

In this concluding half of the interview ,brought to us by his agent, Christie Gibson (from www.luispoloniapba.com), Luis lays it all out there concerning the inefficiencies of the Angels Latin American scouting efforts, the challenges he faces among Dominican youth with PEDs and age cheating, the unfortunate loss of talented players due to unimaginative age discrimination by Major League Baseball, the growth of his Academy, and the exclusive news concerning his future prospects - including his own son.

**UPDATE**: In response to this interview, Luis Polonia has reached out to us here at HH and offered up his Facebook page and twitter account. Those can be found at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1103199717&ref=ts and http:/twitter.com/polonia respectively!

Continue reading this post »

Luis Polonia. "La Hormiga Atomica". "The Atomic Ant". In the early 90's, he was my Chone Figgins of the day. He began his American career with the Oakland Athletics in 1984 and ended in 2000 with the New York Yankees. In between, he won three World Series titles and played shoulder to shoulder with a constellation of baseball stars. In 1990 he came to the Halos from the Yankees in exchange for Rich Monteleone and Claudell Washington. He remained here until granted his release in 1993.

Polonia still ranks among the Halos Heaven Top 100, having dropped a little bit to #65. Not bad for only 3 seasons. There are good reasons: blazing speed and daring baserunning. Sure, he got caught stealing a lot, but I would like to believe that falls somewhat on the shoulders of the managers of his day, who were not as sophisticated as today's crew in creating and controlling good situations for speed burner skills. In a way, it was always like he was encouraged to get on base, but nobody knew what to do with him once he got there. So they just turned him loose. Pretty fun stuff to watch when the team itself is close to garbage.

Well, thanks to his agent Christie Gibson (from www.luispoloniapba.com), this week Halos Heaven got a chance for a private, one-on-one interview with Luis. It turns out that he is pretty active and pretty prolific. Believe it or not, he still plays professionally to this day. In fact, in 2006 he subbed in the WBC for Vladdie and outhit all other Dominicans. In 2007 he was THE major factor in the Dominican Republic national team securing the Caribbean Series title.

I can promise that in this interview there are a couple of newsworthy scoops. I encourage you all to read on.

**UPDATE**: In response to this interview, Luis Polonia has reached out to us here at HH and offered up his Facebook page and twitter account. Those can be found at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1103199717&ref=ts and http://twitter.com/polonia22 respectively!

Continue reading this post »

Here is an interesting take on the 2009 ASG:

Taking all the pitches that each player experienced, either while on offense or defense (even if just waiting their turn to bat while sitting in the dugout), and aggregating those numbers by team, I can take the team totals and divide by the total pitches possible for all players. I end up with a table that looks something like the following (teams arranged to match the current standings in each division)... after the jump... what jumps out at YOU?

Continue reading this post »

Yesterday, SoCalWine graced us with the announcement that his son, Tyler, was wedding Beth Peters prior to the start of the game, in a luxury box. Since my son (HaloVet) was treating me to field-level seats behind the home dugout, I was poised to take some snapshots from below of the ceremony. Enough folks were in that area already (for foul balls from batting practice, and autographs from players shagging flies in left field) that they started noticing me looking the wrong way, and up, and taking pics, and they began to follow my gaze and join in creating an audience for the ceremony and the congratulate the newlyweds!

Not to jump the gun on SoCalWine and the families, I wanted to share the pics here at HH. If any of these are interesting enough to anyone in the families, I obviously do have the originals that I will gladly hand over gratis upon request. I will keep them for quite a while, so there is no hurry for anybody to raise a hand.

Continue reading this post »

So, as many of you are aware, our AmyAngel is in hot pursuit of charitable funding on behalf of her AA UK baseball club, the Thames Valley Bisons. Things don't seem to be going well with Amy's search, and she came to us for guidance and tutelage.We tossed out a few ideas, and bandied about some methods that have worked for us in our respective pasts. Armed with that insight, our AmyAngel has gone off renewed, refreshed, and re-energized!!

Settle in as we follow Amy on her Epic Quest to discover the Lost Treasure of The Battle Nine!!

I present to you the first of our multi-part flowchart, Chapter One: The Runaround:

Continue reading this post »