things I learned about in baseball this week/how i learned to stop worrying and love baseball

Feel better soon, try to get Paxlovid if it's still available to you.

now see normally when my female Red Sox friend sends me a clip with a caption like that it’s usually to highlight that some player’s dick is visible through their pants - none of these morons wear cups anymore

xp oh I’m fine, I’m just full of mucus, we’re really in bad cold territory

ty though :)

Feel better. Here are two quality names I found in my baseball reference travels:
Jack Glasscock
And possible time travelling Eminem alias, Slim Sallee

I found out thanks to good baseball Twitter user Brent Rooker that all players get their uniforms tailored to fit them and this has both been glaringly obvious and also incredibly revelatory? It explains why the uniforms photograph so well and how a guy can slide face first into home and his uniform shirt will stay put.

I also didn’t realise that they wear the same sets of uniforms all year, but it makes perfect sense if they’re tailored.

It really makes a big difference aesthetically; baseball players come in a variety of shapes and sizes but nobody has a belly hanging over their belt, nobody looks bad or uncomfortable or awkward. When you look at a picture of a player during a game, the line of the uniform follows the form of the body and there’s no messiness or distraction. Photos of players in motion always look incredibly dynamic to me in part because the uniforms photograph so well and follow the form.

Genuinely think the aesthetic game is underrated regardless of how players interpret it.
https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/04/Francisco-Lindor-2.jpg

https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/03142023_cal_160528.jpg?d=1020x1530

Isn't there something in Ball Four about that? Maybe Pepitone refusing to take the field unless his uniform was form-fitting?

i’ve still never understood how you can have a professional sport where people slide into each other etc and part of the uniform is a leather belt with a metal buckle

xp yes you’re right!

xp I was watching a video with Lucas Giolito and Tyler Glasnow talking about their huge feet…Glasnow said when he was in the minors they didn’t have cleats in his size so if he left them behind he’d squeeze his feet into cleats that were two sizes too small “cos otherwise you get yelled at”…they both fondly reminisced about the special spare belt with elastic that clubs carry for guys who lose theirs.

Jokes aside that’s probably why Judge has his number on his belt, right? You’re not finding another one for him in a hurry.

Second London series trip next year - Mets/Phillies, you have no idea how much I’ve been praying for Shohei not to sign with the Mets before the tickets went on sale today

Looking forward to a good time with users Tracer Hand, SV & Fongles

Odor was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, on February 3, 1994.[1] His first name is a combination of his grandfather's name, Douglas, and his grandmother's name, Nedia; in keeping with the family custom of giving boys names that begin with the letter "R", the "D" in Douglas was changed to an "R," yielding Rougned.[2]

His father, also named Rougned, played college baseball for the University of New Orleans.[3] He has a sister[4] and a younger brother, Rougned José Odor,[5] who signed with the Texas Rangers organization on February 19, 2015.[6] His uncle, Rouglas, played for eight seasons in Minor League Baseball for the Cleveland and Milwaukee Brewers organizations

If Rougned Odor has multiple sons I hope they are all named Rougned as well.

Just one of the best Wikipedia entries ever.

'rouglas' is a legit great name

Looking forward to a good time with users Tracer Hand, SV & Fongles

As am I! But... what's this "Fongles" business

It’s in relation to what I discussed with you earlier

oh no what did fizzles do now

didn’t know my surname despite us having met double digit times irl & attended baseball together

Watching this video of Manny being Manny and I’m nearly in tears at the Damon cutoff interception, what the fuck was he doing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQjTXct8e3k

From the Athletic history of the Idiots:

Arroyo: Millar had all these quick little sayings he’d say in the dugout. We were playing the Orioles and they were just making a bunch of errors. It looked like “The Bad News Bears” out there. Bill Mueller hit the ball and there was another error. Millar said something like: “Look at this! They’ve got the Dancing Bear and the poodle with extra long ears!” He was referring to a circus. But anything he would say, if it got a laugh, Manny would repeat it. For the next two years, every time Bill Mueller would get a hit, you’d hear Manny go…

Millar: “Papi, Papi, the poodle with the long ears and the dancing bear!”

Arroyo: He thought Millar was talking about Bill Mueller.

Timlin: Every time (Manny) would walk by, he would say: “Billy, you’re the dancing bear.” And Bill would laugh and smile and Manny would walk off and he’d go: “I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”

the thing about that cutoff is that damon’s arm really was that bad

this is the one i always remember. manny finds time to high five a fan in the middle of turning a double play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md8j_Sq5Nbs

Lmao fuck Aubrey Huff

I’m into Bobby Valentine lore this week. What a weapon!

According to CBSNews.com, Bobby Valentine threatened to punch WEEI host Glenn Ordway in the mouth after comments about his managing style in regards to him being late to a game in Oakland. Valentine was quoted as saying:

What an embarrassing thing to say. If I were there right now, I'd punch you right in the mouth. Ha, ha. How's that sound? Sound like I checked out? What an embarrassing thing. Why would somebody even, that's stuff that a comic strip person would write. If someone's here, watching me go out at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, working with the young players, watching me put in the right relief pitchers to get a win, putting on a hit-and-run when it was necessary, talking to the guys after the game in the food room—how could someone in real life say that?

Boston Red Sox players blasted manager Bobby Valentine to owners John Henry and Larry Lucchino during a heated meeting called after a text message was sent by a group of frustrated players to the team and ownership in late July, three sources familiar with the meeting told Yahoo! Sports.

The owners called the meeting for Boston's off-day in New York on July 26 after first baseman Adrian Gonzalez, texting on behalf of himself and some teammates, aired their dissatisfaction with Valentine for embarrassing starting pitcher Jon Lester by leaving him in to allow 11 runs during a July 22 start. It was the latest incident in a season's worth of bad relations bubbling between Red Sox players and Valentine.

From the beginning of the Red Sox's courtship of Valentine this offseason to the double-barreled votes of confidence last week, the match of the hard-nosed Bobby V with the laissez-faire Boston clubhouse seemed tenuous at best. It has proven far worse, personified best perhaps by a picture circulating around via text message, according to a fourth source.

Pedroia, notorious among teammates for his wit and humor, is in the foreground with a giddy smile, his tongue wagging and both thumbs up. Next to him is allegedly Valentine, face down on a table, apparently asleep. A caption accompanies the picture: "Our manager contemplating his lineup at 3:30 p.m."

Former MLB skipper Bobby Valentine, who most recently managed the disastrous 2012 Red Sox, is now the athletic director of Sacred Heart University—but as evidenced by this random bar video, he still loves sharing anecdotes about his old MLB charges. When a fellow patron brought up Dustin Pedroia, Valentine divulged some interesting (and NSFW) stories about the second baseman:

He's like the windup baseball player...He's in uniform at 10 in the morning, and he's walking around with his batting gloves on and his bat. And it'd be a night game. It's f*cked up.

His handshake is much weaker than the waitress who's waiting on you guys. It's not a dead fish. It's a handshake, just like this girl's handshake.

He gets hit with like 95-mph pitches on his hand, the hand looks like this, you think it's broken in eight places. The next morning, it's not swollen. He says, 'Oh, I'm different than everyone else.'

Valentine, 62, crashed his bike in Central Park on Tuesday while reading a text message from second baseman Dustin Pedroia, according to The New York Times.

The report said that Valentine ended up with his bicycle at the bottom of a ditch after "he had to swerve to avoid the umbrellas of two French tourists walking in front of him. The bike skidded, and he lost his balance and went careening head over pedals down the side of the hill by the road."

Valentine suffered minor injuries to his knees and hips.

"I shouldn't have been reading a text while I was riding. That's the wrong thing to do," Valentine said, according to the Times. "But at least I was wearing my helmet."

gyac, I assume you're aware of one of the most famous Valentine moments when as Met manager he was ejected from a game and snuck back into the dugout wearing a disguise?

Literally Tracer Hand’s first question, incredible stuff! And yes.

The 2012 Red Sox thread has gems like this

Sean McAdam ‏ @Sean_McAdam
For those who've asked about lineup switch: Valentine admitted he thought MINN starter Liam Hendricks was LHP, hence 1st card filled w/ RH

Also? Going here

https://clementemuseum.com/

The 2005 Japan Series will always be near and dear to my heart and I was pretty sure there was a thread on here about it but maybe that was on the sandbox? but hell yes, I rank it as one of the best series in the past 20 years and for that reason I hold BobbyV in esteem higher than most everyone else on here. Unfortunately the english language coverage is pretty scant at best*. I'm on the road but I will try to find some good video recaps when I'm home later.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Japan_Series

I actually did a short, three-minute interview with Bobby Valentine the one and only time I was on a major-league field as press. ("Press"--a short-lived Canadian monthly called Innings.) '86, I believe, when he was managing the Rangers. The memory stands out because he snapped at me over one question, and that was more or less the end of the interview.

Me (paraphrase, too lazy to go hunting downstairs): "You came up with the Dodgers at a young age, played semi-regularly for a couple of seasons, and then seemed to not really get a chance after that. Do you think that has made you more open as a manager to giving younger players a chance?" (Texas had at least three up-and-coming potential stars at the time: Ruben Sierra, Oddibe McDowell, and, sort of, Pete Incaviglia.)

Valentine (glaring): "Not at all."

lol. I read so much stuff about how he talked to reporters like that during this year and it seems vmic.
The managers who survive, lots of them are very hard-bitten tough guys but almost none of them came across as badly as Bobby V.

Idk how other Sox managers have done it (though I know Tito was HIM) but with Alex Cora he usually comes across as reasonably calm even if they’ve had a terrible result because you are just feeding a frenzy in that media market. The classic Cora bit is when he’s tired of answering questions about his terrible teams and goes “we’re good?” which is Cora code for get me the fuck out of here.

https://streamable.com/rmf3ep

The question was well-intentioned--in my mind, I was complimenting him as a manager--but I can see now where Bobby Valentine the player could take offense, especially if his sporadic playing time later had more to do with injury.

Thought this would be a good thread to post this and hope others share as well.

Just proves I watched way too much baseball and need a life:

https://i.imgur.com/4uZrPpL.png

I’m jealous I haven’t had mine

Til willie mcgee is a 34 win player

I was watching an old episode of Chris Rose Rotation with Lucas Giolito earlier and during this episode he dropped a piece of info that had previously been hinted at by other players but only today confirmed: most players don’t wear cups

Ranked list of Red Sox starters I want to see in Pittsburgh in order of preference:

1. Bello
2. Sale (if good)
3. Kutter Crawford
4. Giolito
5. Sale (if bad)
6. Pivetta

We are seeing three games so I have a 60% chance of seeing Bello at least. When I complained about not knowing who the starters would be more than a week in advance my better half was like, who cares about who the starter is? But wtf can you really expect from an Astros fan.

Things i learned about baseball this week: it’s really really really really really really really really hard to hit a ball.

Went to a batting cage in Akihabara yesterday to try hit a few dingers. First time I picked up a bat since I was 11, and back then it was just primary school softball for one session of Physical education. Good lord that ball comes at you fast. Managed to get the bat on a handful and put one or maybe two in the air with a few of grounders and a few foul-tips along the way. This sport is impossible and anyone hitting anything above 62 mph is a God amongst men. Wife was getting itchy feet after three rounds; thus ends my baseball career. Figure I’ll stick to watching

Sadly there were some Americans putting on a good show in the cage next to me during all of this. At least they were polite, giving me some grace probably due to the Aussie accent

In LL, our grade 6 (11-12yo) #1 pitcher was this massive country boy whose FB was clocked at 80mph... but was wild af, which worked to his advantage as most kids we faced were absolutely terrified to be in the box with this aggro manchild throwing straight gas at your head at ~3/4ths of the distance of an MLB mound.

I had to hit against him during practice and I only got one XBH hit off him (oppo bloop/dying quail).

lol i think the most i was ever overwhelmed -- to the point where i kind of had to decide to swing ahead of time and hope i could stop myself if it was a ball -- was against n1ck v1zz0cca as a 12yo in LL on a 45-foot mound

on the bright side, i guess, there was no need to worry about anything off-speed

If you want real fun go into the 80mph+ cages. I think it’s easier bc the ball doesnt move as much and it’s easier to track from launch to bat

^frmr hockey goalie advice so ymmv

Aubrey Huff update: lmao

Occasionally I’ll stumble down a rabbithole Twitter conflict goldmine.

Today’s is fantastic:

Retired MLB player calls out girl for thirst trap video. Turns out he had slid in her DMs on Christmas Day and he’s married.

He deleted his account. pic.twitter.com/Nf4o6oR5BQ

— Jack Raines (@Jack_Raines) January 1, 2024

The whole Aubrey Huff thing is both wildly funny and sad. In Joan Ryan’s Chemistry book which covers the 2010 Giants, she writes about Huff. Like, you can see a real person under the bravado and she did so:

Not everyone sees the thin layer of paranoia that coats certain clubhouses, but Aubrey Huff did, and right away. His history and personality had conditioned him to expect it. He reflexively scrutinized teammates’ words and tone of voice for the subtle derision, the hidden agendas. He was still in many ways the uneasy, awkward kid in Mineral Wells, Texas, whose father had been shot and killed at the apartment complex where he worked as an electrician. Aubrey was six years old. On weekend nights during high school, he preferred the batting cage behind his mobile home to the minefield of teenage social life, swinging the bat beneath the floodlights long after his mother, grandmother, and sister had gone to bed. He was the most valuable player at the three-thousand-student Vernon College in north Texas before transferring to the super-competitive baseball program at the University of Miami. He felt like a sheltered hick among the brash, frat-boy athletes. He adopted an arrogant, hard-partying, sarcastic alter ego he called Huffdaddy. That’s the person I met when he arrived at the Giants’ spring training facility in January of 2010.

I happened to be in the hallway when Huff arrived at the Giants’ Scottsdale, Arizona, ballpark for his first day of spring training. He strutted toward the clubhouse like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever: shoulders back, chin up, grin wide, as if crowds might part to make way. This was Huffdaddy, the swaggery guy with armor around his insecurities. He was girding himself for a fourth new clubhouse in five years. He stuck his head into a side room where coaches were drinking coffee around a conference table. “Aubrey Huff,” he announced to each man, circling the table and shaking hands like a seasoned salesman. In the clubhouse, a few other early-arriving players were changing out of their street clothes. Huff knew they’d be well aware of his reputation as a shitty teammate. He set down his equipment bag at his locker and braced for the chore of introducing himself to men who might be less than excited to have him on the team. He was stashing deodorant and shaving cream when pitcher Matt Cain appeared with his hand out, welcoming him to the squad. Then Tim Lincecum came by. One by one, players greeted him. “There was an aura in the air, the way everybody talked to each other,” Huff said later. “The way everybody looked at each other. It just felt so much different than anything I’ve been a part of.” Later, he watched as players from all different backgrounds squeezed shoulder to shoulder around a table in the middle of the clubhouse, slapping down cards in high-stakes games of booray and hearts…

By the end of spring training, Huff was periodically joining the card games and lobbing sarcastic Huffdaddy remarks across the room. But he kept a safe distance. He knew he was just a replacement part and operated as he always had, like an independent contractor loyal only to himself. Early in the season, however, that changed. The Giants were playing the Pittsburgh Pirates in San Francisco. Huff crushed a pitch to the right-field wall. As the ball caromed past the fielder, he rounded first and made for second. Already gasping for air, Huff tapped second and headed to third. His eyes bulged at the sight of the coach leaping wildly and waving him home. He chugged down the line and slid across the plate with the grace of a sandbag, completing one of the most entertaining and least likely inside-the-park home runs in history. Teammates swarmed Huff in the dugout, roaring with laughter and slapping high fives. Huff sank onto the bench, red-faced and heaving, but also laughing. Someone handed him a cup of Gatorade. Young third baseman Pablo Sandoval fanned him with a towel. In the clubhouse after the game, the barbs and howls erupted all over again each time the TV showed replays of Huff’s runaway-beer-truck trip around the bags. The funniest digs came from Huff himself. “That’s when I felt finally that I was really part of a team,” Huff said later. “I finally felt part of the guys.” …

Over time, he began to feel an ease he hadn’t known since, well, maybe ever. He became more open to the everyday signals of trust and became more trusting, more accepting, and less self-centered in return. His life outside of baseball was a mess — he was still drinking and popping Adderall, and his marriage was still crumbling — but with his teammates he could be the person his teammates seemed to think he was. He began arriving at the park early and leaving late. He rediscovered his power at the plate and led the team in doubles, triples, and home runs. Most surprising, he found teammates gravitating to him for advice or a laugh, as if he were a leader. “They’d ask me about things,” he said, “and that had never happened to me in my life.”

Epic Huff content not expected but very appreciated!

It’s the use of a personal kind of dumping ground thread, the Aubrey Huff multi paragraph post I apparently had in me 🫡

this is kinda funny ('huffdaddy') but good lord

imagine having to create a whole new persona for yourself simply to not be an asshole. and then still utterly fail

The book says he was intimidated by Pat Burrell who was the real deal ito being a huge jock, and later they became friends and Huff was influential in Burrell being picked up by the Giants in 2010, where he flourished, became a leader of that team and hit like 18 home runs from June onwards. Yet even though Burrell was meant to be quite crass and such, he was also known to help younger players and gave money to SF’s homeless and so on.

Burrell arrived in the clubhouse seeming not a bit humbled by his failure in Tampa Bay. Broad-shouldered and square-jawed, he commanded the attention of every room he entered. His good looks and regal bearing brought to mind the prince in Beauty and the Beast, though he was princely in few other ways. Like Huff, he had a vulgar bent that stood out even by baseball standards. But he had a reputation for playing hard and smart, for being a winner. He blossomed in his new environment, just as Huff had. He rediscovered his passion and energy. He radiated confidence. And the clubhouse, like the superorganism it is, absorbed that passion, energy, and confidence and became something new. Not radically so. More of a shift, the way a dinner party changes when a particularly charismatic guest arrives.

Burrell would round up teammates for pregame stretching with an old-fashioned “C’mon, boys!” When the team lost, he let no one hang his head: “We’ll get ’em tomorrow.” He slung an arm around the bench players about to pinch-hit in a tight game. “You got this,” he’d say matter-of-factly, more reminder than exhortation. He pushed the players to look out for each other. After a Giants pitcher struggled through a long inning, wearing himself out throwing way too many pitches, Burrell barked at upcoming Giants hitters, “You have to take pitches! Give our guy time to catch his breath!”

Was talking to my friend about missed calls and I had to tell her about this legendary bungled call from the 2nd base umpire here. Posey himself thought he was out! Yes, The Lincecum Game isn’t The Lincecum Game without those 9 scoreless innings and 14 ks, but that miserly Giants offense would have wasted it if not for this utterly hilarious missed call!

https://streamable.com/yast4i

https://i.postimg.cc/W4q31WPT/IMG-4044.jpg

For some reason, I thought I’d posted about Gregor Blanco’s catch in Matt Cain’s perfect game before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wu2wRJoDVH0

How did he read that play to get back in time?

"And this is hit out into the alleyway," announced Duane Kuiper, his voice charged with alarm.
The flight of the ball offered no hope. The sight of Blanco, racing over from right field, did.

"A long run for Blanco..." Kuiper continued, "and Blanco's gonna dive...and he MAKES THE CATCH!"

Blanco was the right fielder, but the ball wasn't caught in right field. When Blanco skidded on his stomach to a stop on the warning track, he wasn't far from straightaway center. Years earlier, the Giants figured out before anyone else that it made sense to play the right fielder well off the line at AT&T Park. But Blanco's positioning was flat-out ridiculous. He wasn't supposed to be there, and yet there he was, holding aloft the little white prize so that umpires could see it.

"Everybody kept telling me, What are you doing, playing there?'' Blanco said. "Coaches told me that with Schafer, play a little more to the gap. I think I played a little (farther)than that.

"Melky caught his ball. I told myself, You have to catch this one, too. In the dugout, Bochy turned to bench coach Ron Wotus and asked if he'd ever seen an outfielder make a catch in that part of the field. They were in agreement. Neither had.