Old Time Family Baseball

I’ve received plenty of wonderful messages over the past few weeks and thought it would be a nice way to catch up by answering a few publicly. Perhaps we can do this every few weeks. As always, I can be contacted in the comments, on the Ask page, or via email. 

Here we go: 

Sspalmateer writes: 

“You should try using Google Translate with ESPN Deportes articles. They offer such excellent headlines as “Willy Mo Pena hit another home run and won Arizona” and “Hanley Ramirez’s prestige has declined in recent years considerablamente”

I love terribly translated gobbledygook. For fun I took a look and got: “Andrus wrist out of alignment by” How much is that wrist out of alignment?! 

Anonymous writes: 

“Believe it or not, but a team can do well without players who -gasp- wear their socks high. You make it seem like it’s antique; it’s still around man!”

While I enjoy high socks, that’s not the entire equation. Rather, it’s high stirrup socks, a classic look that has been fading away, reducing Twin City Knitting to the only major supplier left in the world. Not only that, but most teams only offer solid colored stirrups, ignoring the wonderful world of stripes. Off the top of my head, I can only think of the Rays, Giants, and Cardinals as featuring multi-colored socks. Wouldn’t Josh Outman look even better if he had a few stripes at the top of his stirrups? 

Alas, this question does alert me to a deficiency. We need a database that lets us accurately compare stirrup sock performance to non-stirrup performance. Any computer whizzes want to begin work on this? 

HauteTropique submitted this wonderful picture after seeing this photo of Heath Bell: 

The more Daniel Stern the better, I always say. 

Anonymous asks:

“Who do you think should be the starting pitcher in the All-Star game for each league?”

Tim Wakefield and RA Dickey. Barring that, Roy Halladay vs. Justin Verlander would work for me. 

TravisEqualsMusic submits:

“Eric Karabell of ESPN wrote and article titled, “Faces of the franchises … circa 2016”. This was a fun stab at guessing who will be the faces of each MLB franchise in 2016. You may have read it. Here are two exerpts:

“Chicago Cubs: Felix Hernandez, starting pitcher. Most people would say Starlin Castro, and I do like him, but when the Cubs trade the farm for King Felix late in 2012, he’ll become The Man. Sorry, Seattle.”

“Seattle Mariners: Yu Darvish, starting pitcher. One of Ichiro Suzuki’s final contributions in his Hall of Fame Mariners career is to convince the overpowering Japanese right-hander to come to the U.S. He accomplishes this a few months after King Felix is dealt to the Cubs.”

Is it wrong that I want to send Karabell a life-threatening e-mail (and what are the legal ramifications of doing such a thing), even if he’s giving us Yu Darvish?”

Here is a direct link to the article for those interested. I would certainly caution you from sending Karabell any life-threatening email for a variety of reasons both for legal concerns and human decency. I’m not a big fan of Karabell’s work and while I understand the difficulty and need to speculate to even write an article like this, his conclusion is pretty poor. 

Mostly because what prospects do the Cubs plan on using? Last year’s number one pick, Hayden Simpson, has not been impressive, and three of their top ten prospects coming into the season are members of the Rays organization. The Mariners may trade Felix Hernandez, but it will be for a much bigger bounty than the Cubs can offer. 

That’s it for this week, but send in some messages and we can do this again real soon.