2014 MLB Season Thread

[Tigers6884]

20 years ago today...

http://m.espn.go.com/mlb/story?storyId=11313564

It's interesting to think that Matt Williams would've been the single season HR record holder, even if it was going to only be for a few seasons. I wonder if that was the point in his career where he started using steroids.

[Sport]

The Reds are 1-10 in one run games since the all-star break. They've also lost 4 games to the Red Sox by a total of 4 runs.

There's the difference between being a legitimate contender and being on the outside looking in.

[NJTank]

20 years ago today...

http://m.espn.go.com/mlb/story?storyId=11313564

It's interesting to think that Matt Williams would've been the single season HR record holder, even if it was going to only be for a few seasons. I wonder if that was the point in his career where he started using steroids.

I think Tony Gwynn would have hit .400 if they finished the season.

[crownking30]

Rob Manfred is the new MLB commissioner. Congratulations, Mr. Manfred. He'll probably be seen at All-Star Games, and at the World Series when he unveils the Commissioner's trophy to the World Champions of Baseball.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/11354603/rob-manfred-voted-next-mlb-commissioner-according-reports

[pmoehrin]

All things considered about the best outcome you could get.

I've met Werner before and he seems like a decent guy, but if he was the new commissioner, almost a guarantee there would have been a work stoppage.

At least with Manfred there's a chance there won't be one. Say what you want about Selig, but post '94 no other modern commissioner had a more peaceful labor tenure then him. That's the biggest hope I have under Manfred.

There's no need for either side to take anymore out of the cookie jar then is already being taken.

[crownking30]

Yankees fans shouldn't be so worried. They could play well for the rest of the season and try to get that second AL-wild card spot. If they get in and they upset teams, which is looking unlikely for the once mighty Yankees, then they should be proud of themselves for fighting to get in the postseason. The Yankees are another favorite team of mine, but this 2014 team isn't doing well.

[dfwabel]

Rob Manfred is the new MLB commissioner. Congratulations, Mr. Manfred. He'll probably be seen at All-Star Games, and at the World Series when he unveils the Commissioner's trophy to the World Champions of Baseball.

http://espn.go.com/mlb/story/_/id/11354603/rob-manfred-voted-next-mlb-commissioner-according-reports

So chances are he won't be at the CBA negotiations in 2016, at the table for any talks regarding the future of the Tampa Bay Rays, at the table to resolve the Nationals/Orioles local rights issue? Gotcha. Thanks.

[McCall]

Yankees fans shouldn't be so worried. They could play well for the rest of the season and try to get that second AL-wild card spot. If they get in and they upset teams, which is looking unlikely for the once mighty Yankees, then they should be proud of themselves for fighting to get in the postseason. The Yankees are another favorite team of mine, but this 2014 team isn't doing well.

I thought it was "win the World Series or the season's a failure"?

[ninersdd]

Just pathetic by the Giants. Playing a subpar team at home, they choke late. It just flat out irritates me that they were up 9.5 over their bitter rivals and they give that up with little resistance. Maybe this is a gross overreaction by me, but hopefully ownership puts the team on notice after falling apart for the last 2 months.

[SFGiants58]

The Giants' baserunning and bullpen tonight:

Maybe we can salvage the season, maybe we can't. Whatever happens, I know we have to do at least a little rebuilding this offseason (not too much, but enough to not crash like the train seen above).

[The_Admiral]

http://www.murraychass.com/?p=7831

How is Jerry Reinsdorf a loser? Let me count the ways.

On second thought, I have neither the time nor the space to do a complete count. I’ll just hit a few highlights:

In his career-long obsession with deflating players’ salaries, the chairman of the Chicago White Sox and Bulls was a central figure in the baseball owners’ illegal collusive activities against free agents in the mid-1980s. “Collusion was a $280 million mistake,” former commissioner Fay Vincent said in a television interview this week. “And Jerry was right in the middle of that. That mistake is the sort of thing that baseball cannot really tolerate ever again.”

In his ugly, mean-spirited way, Reinsdorf joined fellow owner and confidant Bud Selig in 1992 in orchestrating Vincent’s ouster from the office of commissioner. Reinsdorf and Selig wanted Vincent out because they were plotting to go to war with the players union in the 1994 labor negotiations and didn’t want Vincent getting in their way. The results of the 234-day strike they forced were disastrous.

In the 33rd year of their relationship, the 78-year-old Reinsdorf suddenly found 80-year-old Selig too secretive and complained that he lacked transparency, then used those same accusations against Rob Manfred, Selig’s chief aide and choice to succeed him, in leading a small group of misguided owners in trying to block Manfred’s path to succeed Selig as commissioner. Reinsdorf ignored his close, long-term relationship with Selig and induced the Red Sox triumvirate of John Henry, Tom Werner and Larry Lucchino to ignore that they owed their presence in baseball and their 13-year ownership in Boston to Selig. His legacy be damned, they would not let Selig go peacefully into retirement.

After Manfred, as the owners’ chief labor negotiator, achieved an unprecedented three consecutive labor contracts without a work stoppage (five strikes and three lockouts had preceded them), Reinsdorf accused Manfred of being too soft on the union and made it clear that he wanted to renew the battle for a payroll cap that the owners failed to get in 1994. He ignored the fact that the two decades of labor peace had created an unprecedented growth in industry revenue to $9 billion and sent values of the owners’ franchises, including his own, skyrocketing.

He failed miserably on Thursday in his brazen attempt to prevent Manfred from taking Selig’s seat in the commissioner’s office.

“Jerry was so over the top on this one,” a high-ranking official said after the owners’ meeting. “He had no chance. There was never a race here.”

This is Reinsdorf’s swan song, I suggested, his last hurrah. “Yes, it is,” the official replied.

No controlling owner has been around as long as Reinsdorf. If he ever had any usefulness, he has outlived it. If he succeeded at anything with his Werner initiative, it was in conning The New York Times into thinking that Werner actually had a chance to win.

“Tom Werner emerges to create race for commissioner,” said a headline on the Times’ web site Aug. 6, touting Werner’s candidacy. At that time, Werner had five votes, three fewer than he needed to block Manfred, who had 20 votes, three fewer than he needed for election.

If those vote totals represented a race, it was a race between the tortoise and the hare. However, a person who attended the owners meeting in Baltimore Thursday said, “There was never a race here.”

According to information obtained from people who attended the meeting, Tim Brosnan, MLB’s top business executive and one of the three candidates, withdrew from the race before the owners began voting.

The first vote was Manfred 20 Werner 10.

The second ballot was 21-9, and under the voting rules, that eliminated Werner because a candidate needed 10 votes to stay on the ballot. The owners, however, had to keep voting on an up or down basis on Manfred because he had not received the 23 votes required for election.

The third ballot produced a 22-8 vote.

Although the balloting was conducted secretly, with ballots placed in envelopes, Mark Attanasio of Milwaukee and Stuart Sternberg of Tampa Bay were believed to have switched their votes. Sternberg and Attanasio were the only owners besides Werner whom the succession committee, chaired by Bill DeWitt Jr. of St. Louis, had interviewed. They appeared before the committee at their own request.

Now, however, they were voters and had different reasons for voting the way they did. A few years ago, Attanasio publicly called for a cap on payrolls and was believed to have been told by Selig, whose franchise he had bought, to knock off that kind of talk. Selig was enjoying baseball’s labor peace and didn’t want to disturb it.

Sternberg’s team plays in a hellhole and has one of the game’s lowest payrolls, but he and his staff have done a remarkable job running the Rays and they seem to be willing to carry on the way they have.

Although both Attanasio and Sternberg presumably supported Werner on the first ballot, as the voting went on, they might have figured that a Selig-mentored Manfred would be better than a failed owner who made a mess of his low-revenue franchise 20 years ago.

But a curious vote developed on the fourth ballot. Manfred lost two votes, the results reverting to 20-10. What was going on? Had Sternberg and Attanasio switched back to voting no on Manfred? If anyone knew, he wasn’t saying.

Just as inexplicably, ballot No. 5 restored the count to 22-8

Now Manfred was again a single vote from election. Nothing was in his way but a single switched vote. It was delivered by the team that plays in the political capital of the country, the Washington Nationals.

One more vote remained to be taken, the traditional one that makes a winning vote unanimous.

In the end, Reinsdorf was joined on the losing side by the Red Sox, the Angels, Oakland, Arizona, Cincinnati and Toronto. Two of the losing owners suffered a second loss.

The losing group of dissenters proposed that the executive council members have their terms extended. John Henry of Boston and Reinsdorf, who has been on the executive council seemingly forever, are currently members of the council. It didn’t take the owners six ballots to reject the proposal.

Reinsdorf, who despite his mean-spirited manner, doesn’t like to be portrayed as such, explained in a post-meeting statement the reason for his position during the meeting.

Declaring it was the owners’ duty to scrutinize candidates, Reinsdorf, who aggressively questioned Manfred in a pre-election meeting, said in what could be viewed as an attempt at a conciliatory gesture:

“While Rob may not have been my initial choice for commissioner, the conclusion of a very good process was to name Rob as the person best positioned to help baseball endure and grow even stronger for the next generation of fans.”

Given my three and a half decades of familiarity with Reinsdorf, I don’t buy his explanations or excuses for anything he says or does. I have long given him credit for his hiring of minorities; no one does it better.

But when it comes to his public positions on baseball and other issues, I have to suggest that if Manfred’s victory over Reinsdorf’s puppet candidate will plunge the owner into an abyss of absence from baseball matters, the owners couldn’t have given Selig a better going away present.

Now that his candidate has won, Selig may even forgive Reinsdorf for his behavior. A man who knows Selig well told me that the commissioner was furious with Reinsdorf.

Not everyone is apparently. Just as the Times created a race Reinsdorf wanted where none existed, the New York Daily News credited the owner with succeeding despite Werner’s easily predictable loss.

“Jerry Reinsdorf got what he wanted Thursday,” a Daily News analysis said. “And that was a good old-fashioned owners fight and a not-so-friendly debate, culminating in a hard-fought vote for the new commissioner, rather than a rubber-stamp coronation.”

That’s a different take, all right, but that’s going far out of the way to excuse the man’s behavior of ill-repute.

This is outstanding. Jerry Reinsdorf is the biggest piece of crap in sports. I hope the Bulls throw a pep rally when our own rotten old bigoted tightwad finally goes away.

[crownking30]

Just pathetic by the Giants. Playing a subpar team at home, they choke late. It just flat out irritates me that they were up 9.5 over their bitter rivals and they give that up with little resistance. Maybe this is a gross overreaction by me, but hopefully ownership puts the team on notice after falling apart for the last 2 months.

Don't worry. Anything could happen with the Giants. They could win a wild card spot, and then anything happens from there.

[Still MIGHTY]

You've found a new catchphrase, I see.

[CMUBrent]

The Giants' baserunning and bullpen tonight:

Maybe we can salvage the season, maybe we can't. Whatever happens, I know we have to do at least a little rebuilding this offseason (not too much, but enough to not crash like the train seen above).

That .gif reminds me of the Tigers' bullpen and offense this season.

[Sport]

Reds enter the bottom of the 9th up 9-5 in Denver. Aroldis Chapman walks 4 straight to make it 9-6. JJ Hoover gives up a sacrifice fly to make it 9-7. Former Reds (Strikeout) Great Drew Stubbs hits a walk off home run.

And it's football season.

[TVIXX]

The Texas Rangers Season In A Pic

[Tigers6884]

The Texas Rangers Season In A gif

Fixed that for you.

[TheOldRoman]

http://www.murraychass.com/?p=7831

This is outstanding. Jerry Reinsdorf is the biggest piece of crap in sports. I hope the Bulls throw a pep rally when our own rotten old bigoted tightwad finally goes away.

RAR! HE SHOULD HAVE MADE MICHAEL JORDAN THE GM AND COACH CUZ HEZ THE BEST EVAR!! But do you have any actual evidence that he's at all bigoted, or are you just throwing crap at the wall because you don't like him? I'd put money on the latter, seeing as how Reinsdorf has been so outspoken about giving opportunities to minorities within the organizations.

[Seadragon76]

It's been too long since the Mariners have been in the playoff picture (13 years), but to see them in the 2nd Wild Card slot is a great feeling.

Now, they have a stretch of bottom feeders (Philly and Boston on the road and Texas at home) that they can feast on before the final push.

[dbadefense1990]

The Dodgers chances of being the other legitimate postseason contenders: