August 30, 2010 at 9:54 am
This is the baseball glove I used during my Little League career, which ran from about 1978 to 1981. You can still see my name and uniform number (#14) written there, along with “McGee Real Estate” — my dad was the team sponsor.
This is also the baseball glove that I used on Sunday during the Gesa/Tri-City Dust Devils Fantasy Baseball Camp & Game. I played third base, which is the position I played most often during Little League. It was just like old times.
I’m still sore but would go out there right now and do it again if I could. It was that fun.
If you want to see some of the photos I took on the field during the game, and hear about my personal stats, you’ll have to read more over here.
August 9, 2010 at 10:34 pm
And I can’t stop watching them.
It’s weird. In a typical baseball season, I’ll watch the Mariners until about maybe 8:00 pm or so, when I come out to my office and get back to the day’s work. And then I’ll look for the score the next day. But for some reason, when the Mariners are possibly about to have their worst season ever, I’m watching a lot of games all the way ’til the end. It’s like I can’t stop watching. I can’t turn my head and look away. What creative way will they find to lose a game tonight? How will the broadcasters entertain themselves during this sleeper?
They’ve become the biggest train-wreck in sports. That’s gotta be why.
And Don Wakamatsu certainly deserved better than being fired today. If anyone deserved a firing, it was GM Jack Zduriencik. He’s the guy who built a roster with a bunch of guys that wouldn’t be good enough to play for any other team in baseball. He’s the guy who agreed to let Griffey come back for one more year. He’s the guy who thought Milton Bradley and Casey Kotchman were going to make the Mariners offense better.
The roster has been the Mariners’ problem all year long. The guys who spent most of this year batting 3-4-5 for the Mariners (Gutierrez, Lopez, Bradley) would be batting 6-7-8 on nearly every other team in baseball. If I knew on Opening Day that this team wasn’t gonna score any runs, why did so many other people expect Big Things? (The Mariners’ marketing dept. didn’t help things with those ridiculous commercials at the start of the year talking about the World Series, about Ichiro and Figgins being the best 1-2 hitting pair in baseball history, etc.)
In my perfect world, Zduriencik and Wakamatsu would have stayed together, taken a mulligan on this season, and started fixing the roster in the off-season. Oh, well.
I’ll say this: I bet Don Wakamatsu wins a World Series ring before the Mariners do.
May 7, 2010 at 10:54 pm
When discussing the Mariners’ offense, or lack thereof, I’ll resist the urge to say I told you so and just point out this bit of news from Geoff Baker at the Seattle Times:
But for opening March/April stints, the only Seattle team worse than the 2010 Mariners was the 1986 group.
That bunch of Mariners posted an OPS+ of 76, compared to this team’s 78.
For those unfamilliar with the stat, OPS+ is on-base-plus-slugging percentage in relation to how the rest of the teams in your league are doing in a given year. The base point is 100, so any number above that is the percentage above average that your team is while anything below that is below average.
So, the 2010 Mariners are 22 percent below the average in regards to the teams around them in their league.
Here’s the full piece if you’re in the mood to get really depressed.
April 28, 2010 at 8:57 am
As a Notre Dame and Seattle Seahawks fan, I would’ve loved to see Jimmy Clausen playing at Qwest Field for the home team next year. But when the Hawks traded for Charlie Whitehurst, that pretty much killed any chance they would also draft a quarterback in the early rounds.
Who will be better? I have no clue, of course, but ESPN has posted what amounts to a fairly ringing endorsement of Whitehurst’s chances for success. All based on the fact that he’s been learning on the bench for a few years.
Of the 128 quarterbacks drafted since 2000, 43 got their first start in their first season in the NFL. This data — courtesy of ESPN Stats & Information — shows that among this large group, the longer a QB waits to start, the better he performs once he does. In fact, completion percentage, TD/INT ratio and yards per attempt all rise over the course of his career the longer a QB sits to begin it.
Drafted QBs who didn’t get to start until their third or even fourth years have TD/INT rates nearly 50 percent better, and complete passes at a rate a full five percent better than rookie starters. But that’s not just in the first season; that’s for their careers.
(emphasis mine)
Let’s hope those stats prove true in Seattle when Whitehurst takes over in 2011.
April 23, 2010 at 2:27 pm
A few nights ago, I was watching the Mariners game on FSN Northwest. Former Mariner Jay Buhner was a guest commentator on the broadcast. I loved Jay as a player, but he’s not so good in the booth. At one point, his explanation of a poor umpire call was, “They’re human beings, too.” And describing the secret to Ichiro’s success, Buhner revealed that “he just knows how to hit.”
I had my iPhone with me when they put up a trivia question on the screen and invited viewers to send guesses/answers via text. The correct answer was “B”, so I decided to play along. And that’s when the adventure began. Here’s a screenshot so you can watch along as it happened.
The moral of the story: If you text the word “stop,” you could cancel stuff that you haven’t even signed up for. Oh, and there’s no human being on the other end of some text conversations. Now you know.
April 5, 2010 at 11:27 am
I love the Mariners as much as anyone and really hope they have a fantastic season this year, but unlike some other fans and prognosticators, I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid. I’m not convinced the Mariners will improve on last year’s 85 wins, much less win the AL West.
Why not? Lack of offense. I don’t see them scoring enough runs, not with the current lineup. Casey Kotchman and Milton Bradley would be fine 6 & 7 hitters, but on this team they’re the 3 and 4 hitters, or maybe 4 & 5. That’s pretty scary.
That said, still very excited about opening day and tonight’s season opener. Go M’s!
March 25, 2010 at 3:23 pm
Great article on CNN from Joe Posnanski:
There has never been a player like Ichiro, and there likely never will
I’ll just say this: My favorite Mariner since Edgar Martinez, and for several seasons recently, Ichiro was the only reason to watch a Mariners game. Very glad my son’s been able to see him play.
March 15, 2010 at 7:23 pm
If this NFL draft is so deep — and all the “experts” say it is — I wouldn’t mind seeing the Seahawks try to turn a couple of their high picks into several 2nd-4th round picks.
If memory serves, Seattle has three picks in the top 40. They could, in theory, trade at least two of those picks for extra picks and land 4-5 quality players. And the Seahawks need all the quality bodies they can find right now.
March 4, 2010 at 11:44 pm
ESPN just ran a piece on Sportscenter that brought back a flood of memories. I didn’t realize it, but today was the 20th anniversary of Hank Gathers’ death. I was in the gym at Loyola Marymount University when it happened, and was scheduled to interview him that day as part of my duties for KMBU-FM, the Pepperdine University campus radio station.
It all happened during the semifinals of the West Coast Conference basketball tournament. LMU — Gathers’ team — was playing in the first game of the day, and Pepperdine was scheduled to play in the second game. I don’t remember the opponents or anything else basketball-related about that day. Not to sound too melodramatic, but when you watch a man die in front of you, a lot of other details fade away pretty quickly.
LMU was an awesome team, and my Pepperdine Waves were pretty darn good, too. I certainly wasn’t an LMU fan, but I’m a Philadelphia native and felt some remote kinship to both Gathers and his teammate Bo Kimble, both of whom were also Philadelphians going to school in Los Angeles. I was happy to see them doing well, except when they played against the Waves.
I arrived early at the gym that day with my friend and radio partner, Kent, and we set up our radio broadcast equipment early so we could watch the first game and then be ready to start our broadcast back to campus. I don’t recall if I went directly to Gathers to ask for an interview, or if I went to LMU’s sports information director … but the agreement was that Gathers would come to our broadcast location at halftime of the Pepperdine game for an interview. His game would be over and we’d talk about that game and, presumably, a title game against Pepperdine. It was Kent’s turn to do play-by-play, which meant I’d handle the halftime interview. I was looking forward to chatting with him about Philadelphia, too.
And then pretty early on in the Lions’ game, Gathers dunked on an alley-oop and headed back to play defense. Only he staggered, stumbled, and fell to floor. His body shook a couple times and medical people rushed to his side. My memory is that he was on the floor for just a couple minutes with people working on him, and then they quickly moved him out the side door. I remember people crying loudly in the silence. I remember thinking it wasn’t a good sign that they moved him out of sight before really doing much medical work. But that’s all speculation and I have no idea what the story was at that point. I specifically remember not thinking he had died; there was no way Hank Gathers was going to die.
Kent and I were stunned, and at some point we switched into news reporter-mode. I’m guessing we probably tracked down Mike Zapolski, Pepperdine’s sports information director, and he made sure we were aware of what was going on. I recall there was some kind of news conference inside the building. They probably announced that the games had been postponed, but I don’t remember hearing that news. I don’t think they announced that Hank had died, at least not at that point.
I think Kent and I went — probably in Mike Z’s car — to the hospital where Gathers had been taken. By this time, all of the Los Angeles media were on hand waiting for the news — radio, TV, papers, everyone. I remember the doctors coming out and standing in front of a row of TV cameras. Rather than stand behind the cameras and not see anything, I moved around to the side/rear of the doctors so I could listen and record the statement for our news coverage. Since fans back at school were waiting to listen to our game broadcast, I remember Kent and I phoned in a couple live updates of what was going on.
I think, but I’m not positive, that I was the one who reported on our station that Hank had died. I remember being stunned that it happened. Beyond belief. I remember hating having to report that on the air. I remember thinking that I probably watched him die on the gym floor, but the doctors said he was pronounced dead at the hospital, not before.
The last thing I remember is going to classes the next day. All this had happened on a Sunday. Kent and I were in the same broadcasting class. Our teacher found us before the class started and took us aside. He said he was proud of us. He told us that he saw us on TV, standing near the doctors. He asked how we were and very delicately wondered if we wanted to talk to the class about what had happened. We decided that we would. And we did. I don’t remember exactly what we said, but we recapped the events of the night before. And some of our classmates asked questions about covering such a big story, and how we felt, and stuff like that.
I probably said that I felt numb. That’s what I remember. And although I don’t think about that day very much anymore … usually about once a year on March 4th when someone mentions it … I’m still kinda numbed by the whole experience. I was probably too young for it all, but really, is there ever a good age to experience all that?
February 10, 2010 at 10:01 pm
Twitter apparently averages about 40 million tweets per day, which makes the following an amazing nugget of information:
“As the game ended, one out of every two tweets on Twitter was about the Super Bowl!”
That comes direct from the Twitter blog.
Amazing.
Found via Techmeme.
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