The Rangers beat the A’s today to clinch the AL West title, their first since 1999. I have often suggested that this drought is actually the Curse of Barry Zito.
Back in 1998, the Rangers drafted Zito, but they couldn’t sign him. Apparently they weren’t that far apart, but they wouldn’t give him what he wanted, so he went to USC. A year later, the A’s drafted Zito.
Since Zito reached the big leagues with the A’s in 2000, the A’s went to the playoffs five times and the Rangers went zero times. Also, Zito was 18-5 against the Rangers. It took the Rangers five years to beat him for the first time.
This story has taken quite a few twists and turns today. If you go read my latest at FanHouse you can get caught up.
Long story short: I still don’t think the Rockies were manipulating the balls. In fact, I talked to crew chief John Hirschbeck who said that he had no suspicions about any sort of manipulation of the balls by the Rockies.
“There’s nothing going on, really,” Hirschbeck said.
Also, the Giants were adamant about denying that they had filed a “complaint” formally or informally about the process. It was more of a conversation about the process, which prompted a change. Semantics, it seems, but there ya go.
I have a little blurb over at FanHouse about the latest YouTube “revelation” regarding the conspiracy theories about doctored balls at Coors Field. If you can read Lincecum’s lips in the clip, it looks like he’s saying “F—ing juiced balls, bull—-” after he throws a ball back to the umpire. This would seem to be a smoking gun, further proof of Jon Miller’s accusation that the Rockies slip non-humidor balls into play when they are batting. The Rockies, of course, have denied this repeatedly over the years.
I haven’t asked Lincecum about this, but you can bet me and my colleagues will be waiting at his locker when the clubhouse opens around 2:30 Colorado time today.
In the meantime, my take is this: I really doubt the Rockies are manipulating the balls. Anyone who has any part in that conspiracy would have to know he’d lose his job if anyone found out, so it just doesn’t seem logical that someone would take that chance on that sort of thing. It’s more believable that highly-paid irreplaceable professional athletes would cheat (ie, spit balls, corked bats, steroids, etc.) than the relatively fungible (look it up) low-level people that would be involved in this type of thing.
Here’s the latest edition of our awesome weekly show, The Baseball Hour, on FanHouse TV. We got Bruce Bochy to stop by, on the phone anyway, and talk about the pennant race. Then I talk a little about the upcoming Giants-Rockies series, which I will be covering in Denver.
As you know, I have an NL Cy Young vote this year. As you also know, the two numbers I think are the most important are ERA and opponents OBP. They measure how well a pitcher does his two most important jobs: prevent runs and get outs. I’ve always kind of struggled with a couple other elements, though: ballparks and innings.
I know that all ERAs are not created equal, because some guys pitch in Denver and some guys pitch in San Diego. I also know that innings pitched matters because the more innings you pitch, the harder it is to keep your ERA down. (More innings also makes you more valuable to your team, but I’m not as interested in that side of it. I’m not trying to figure out who the most valuable pitcher is. It’s the pitcher who pitched the best.)
Last year was my first year covering a full postseason without a home team, so to chronicle the adventure I converted my blog into a Travelogue. You can click the link to go back and read the posts to get an idea, but basically I wrote about how I got myself to these cities all over the country, and what I did when I arrived. It was pretty much about everything except what was happening on the field, because I was writing about that for FanHouse.
It actually turned out to be fairly boring (well, except for the dead guy) until the World Series, because I spent almost all of the first two rounds in Southern California, where I didn’t do much except eat, go running at the beach and play poker. The New York-Philly World Series provided lots of good fodder, from seeing the Liberty Bell to taking the train to going to New York’s museum of natural history. Lots of pictures, too.
There is a post over at Purple Row — the Rockies’ SB Nation site, their version of McCovey Chronicles — about all the fun tie-breaker scenarios. As you know, I went through this, from the Giants perspective, yesterday. The Rockies are in the best position for a three-way tiebreaker because they get to chose two games at home vs. one game on the road.
What’s interesting is the poll at the bottom of that post on Purple Row, in which Rockies fans voted on which scenario they’d prefer. Shockingly, they said they’d rather play two games.
