SB Nation User Blog: berselius

Cubs teammates show support for Sosa

berselius — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 00:42:39 -0000

Derrek Lee (link) and Kerry Wood (link) voiced their support for Sosa in separate articles in the Trib today.

First, from Lee:

But first baseman Derrek Lee believes the Cubs organization should pay tribute to Sosa with a day in his honor after the retirement becomes official, as it did with Greg Maddux.

"I think he carried this franchise a long time," Lee said. "I think it would be fitting. Obviously he has had the [steroid] allegations against him, but nothing has been proven. I think you have to do something for him. "The guy was the franchise for a long time, put up Hall of Fame numbers, and put fans in the seats."

-snip-

Should Sosa be elected to the Hall of Fame in spite of the suspicions?

"His numbers [say so]," Lee said. "Nothing has been proven. I don't think you can keep him out just on the assumption. I guess you have the corked bat stuff [from 2003], but that's all you have that's proven against him. I think if you look at the numbers, he's easily a Hall of Famer."

From Wood:

Asked about the Hall of Fame credentials of ex-Cub Sammy Sosa, Wood said:

"Sammy never failed a drug test, never got caught up in any of that stuff and there's no evidence that anybody has against him that he did something wrong. As his teammate for many years, he's one of the guys I remember who came in and was prepared to go every day. What he did in his career was amazing and he deserves some credit for it, I think."

It's not quite the ringing endorsement that Lee gave Sosa, but this is huge coming from Woody. From what I've heard there's no love lost between him and Sosa and rumor has it that he was the one who destroyed Sosa's boombox. Wood was with the Cubs during Sosa's peak years and is classy enough to not let his personal feelings towards Sosa affect his recognition of how valuable Sosa was to the team and baseball in general during those years.

Why I'm not that worried about the offense

berselius — Mon, 25 May 2009 06:13:48 -0000

Let's take a step back and look at a few things that have been happening to our underperforming batters (Lee, Soto, Bradley, Fontenot). For those who don't know, here's a brief intro to the stats quoted below. BABIP is Batting Average on Balls In Play). In general it averages out around .300, though batters with a higher line drive percentage (LD%) tend to have higher BABIPs. IFFB% is the percentage of all fly balls hit by the player that are caught by infielders (basically, popups).

Player	BABIP (09)	BABIP (Career)	LD% (09)	LD% (Career)	IFFB% (09)	IFFB% (Career)
Lee	.280	.325	12%	21.3%	17.6%	7.6%
Bradley	.200	.322	13.2%	21.0%	26.1%	11.6%
Soto	.266	.333	19.8%	20.4%	15.6%	7.6%
Fontenot	.222	.317	13.5%	20%	7.7%	5.1%

What does this table tell us? These batters have been exceptionally unlucky, especially Bradley. All four of these players are underperforming their projections, but there's simply no way that all four of them are this bad. Derrek Lee has in fact been heating up lately (.353/.405/.559 in the past 14 days), but these guys' overall numbers are so weighted down by their poor start magnifies any at-bat in which they fail to get a hit.

BABIPs this low are just unsustainable by hitters as good as this. Even Aaron Miles has a career BABIP of .312.

Cotts v Waddell

berselius — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:30:06 -0000

Cotts v Waddell

Since everyone seems to want Cotts' head on a pike these days, I dove into the numbers to show that his replacements aren't great shakes either. I was proved wrong, and now I'm starting to climb on the Waddell bandwagon

Via The Big Lead I'm surprised that Yankee Stadium is having these kinds of problems. I've heard...

berselius — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 14:27:13 -0000

Via The Big Lead

I'm surprised that Yankee Stadium is having these kinds of problems. I've heard that most of their games haven't been to capacity crowds either

Good news for Derrek Lee

berselius — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:48:50 -0000

Good news for Derrek Lee

In this article about Lee not playing in the WBC, we find this note:

On an even brighter note, Lee said it's almost 100 percent certain that his daughter, Jada, does not suffer from LCA, the congenital eye disease that causes blindness. Lee said Jada's vision began to stabilize last year and that perhaps she suffers from an auto-immune disorder. Needless to say, that's a big relief for Lee.

(h/t LOHO)

Joe Morgan may be done on Sunday Night Baseball

berselius — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 04:36:30 -0000

I say good riddance. I stopped watching non-Cubs Morgan-Miller broadcasts after listening him commentate on an A's game in the 2002 (?). The smugness was just OOZING out of the TV screen when the "3 run homer A's" couldn't win in the playoffs.

Some snippets:

His likely Sunday night replacement would be Rick Sutcliffe. If there is a switch, it is not a given Miller would stay in the "Sunday Night Baseball" booth, either. He too could be moved to another night or over to the radio side.

This would be pretty cool, if Sutcliffe doesn't end up broadcasting for the Cubs. He's not that much better than Morgan as a color guy, but at least he's not a spiteful jerk (Banks Boulevard indeed)

What's coming to light is how unpopular Morgan has become with many of his ESPN colleagues, who are less than thrilled with the way he prepares for a telecast. Some of them also don't respond well to what they call Morgan's haughty attitude, which he has displayed during some of his more outspoken performances in internal ESPN meetings.

Prone to on-air mistakes, Morgan also has come under some intense media scrutiny. And during those moments when he's made a mistake, the give and take between him and Miller can sound strained.

I guess he's started wearing thin on other people. I hope they don't sack the Fremp on accout of Morgan's downfall within the network

Edit: Whoops, had the screen open and forgot the Source. Also check out the columnist's CRAAAAZY moustache

Pictures from Saturday

berselius — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 04:53:34 -0000

Pictures from Saturday

Here are my pics from Saturday - we were using my wife's camera, but it died halfway through the game so we had to rely on my cheap-o pocket camera for these pictures.

This White Castle pic is probably my favorite in the set.

Baseball For Dummies

berselius — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:50:53 -0000

Baseball For Dummies

I saw this in the bookstore yesterday and thought it was a joke. Check out who is on the cover! Oh sweet irony...

The NCAA is taking lessons from MLB

berselius — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:49:17 -0000

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/opinion/buzz1.html?ref=opinion

I don't really follow college baseball at all (mainly because my university doesn't have a team), so I'm not really concerned with all of the 'tradition' etc. This is some pretty low stuff though - I can't see how the NCAA isn't making money hand over fist already, since they don't have to pay any of the players/teams.

The bit about the camera at the end was pretty low too - what a bunch of jerks.

Getting greedy - Imagine if....

berselius — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:20:36 -0000

We just gave up a pupu platter of prospects to get Harden...but do we still have the stuff to get Burnett? If we could send Cedeno + Marquis + some minor prospects to the Jays we could have a rotation of:

Harden

Burnett

Lilly

Dempster

*makes goggly eyes*

And we still would keep Pie and Vitters, our top two prospects. Of course, we would need a backup SS for Riot, but they are a dime a dozen. Maybe we could get one of their scrapheap SS (who are all suited to be backups anyway). Just so long as we don't get Eckstein back...there would just be too much Scrappy on this team.

H/T to GROTA for first suggesting the idea, thought I would move it over here...