Mornin D

Braves win. But the pirates won again too

Whoops. Fired for having a baby out of wedlock

www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2014/09/10/former-mets-executive-sues-coo-jeff-wilpon-for-having-a-baby/15406647/

www.azcentral.com/story/sports/heat-index/2014/09/09/report-foul-balls-cause-1750-injuries-per-season/15351341/

Wow. I was thinking 30 maybe a year

The Braves are a frustrating team, to be sure.  And, good finds on all of your stories/links.  All items of interest, especially the fans hit by pitch one. 

As I said before on it, to hell with those who think that bringing gloves to the yard is only for kids and unmanly.

BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Detroit Pistons' forward Greg Monroe, who is facing a two-game suspension after NBA officials learned he pleaded guilty to impaired driving in April, "urinated on himself during the booking process," the Huntington Woods police report documenting his arrest says.
Huntington Woods police released video footage of the Feb. 13 stop and arrest, which stemmed from a defective headlight, on Wednesday.

"I'm just trying not to be in the newspaper," Monroe is heard saying to the officers during his transport to jail.

"I play for the Pistons," Monroe said.

"You play for the Detroit Pistons," asks one of the officers in the vehicle. "Unless you told people that are going to tell people, we don't tell people," an officer is heard saying.

Monroe failed the field sobriety test, missing a letter while reciting the Alphabet with "slow and deliberate speech," swaying when asked to count backwards to 78 from 100 and unable to walk a straight line, the report says.

Riding in the passenger seat of the 2007 Pontiac G6 was the vehicle owner, a woman whom police transported to headquarters to await a ride. Police impounded the vehicle and report that the license plate had expired.

Monroe told police he and his passenger were coming from Bosco's, a bar in Ferndale, where Monroe had had two glasses of wine.

The arresting officer reported a strong aroma of alcohol in the vehicle.

"I've always been short, now I feel really short," one of the officers is heard telling 6-foot-11 Monroe before administering the field sobriety test.

The field breath test revealed Monroe had a .089 blood-alcohol level that, when tested by the official Data Master at the station, registered a .09 and then a .1.

Police stopped Monroe about 1:50 a.m., according to the dash-cam, and the in-station sobriety test was conducted about 3:20 a.m.

Monroe was suspended without pay and will miss games Oct. 29 in Denver and Oct. 30 in Minnesota.

"I take full responsibility for my actions and made a regrettable mistake," Monroe said in a prepared statement released by the Pistons. "I apologize to my family, the Pistons organization, my teammates and fans. I will learn from this and continue by work to be a positive influence in the community."

Monroe is entering his fifth season with the Pistons. He signed a qualifying offer with the club last week for $5.4 million and can become an unrestricted free agent next summer.

"The organization is aware of the matter resulting in the NBA's announced two game suspension for Greg Monroe," the Pistons said in a prepared statement. "Greg has taken responsibility in a conscientious manner and resolved the matter with his representatives."

I don't like to think of it that way.....

I have to admit, I definitely knew the Angels could catch the A'ss and win the division. What I didn't see.....is them being up by 9 games!

A combination of perspective, and knowledge of past history will cause one to see things differently.

Here is a story related to the Angles and there now winning ways.

www.sbnation.com/mlb/2014/9/11/6133507/los-angeles-angels-standings-playoffs-what-in-the

OUR BULLPEN LOST ANOTHER ONE?!?!?!

Any Ramones fans out there? Remember the song Teenage Lobotomy? In it, Joey sings about a girl with no cerebellum. Well, it actually happens.

DON’T mind the gap. A woman has reached the age of 24 without anyone realising she was missing a large part of her brain. The case highlights just how adaptable the organ is.

The discovery was made when the woman was admitted to the Chinese PLA General Hospital of Jinan Military Area Command in Shandong Province complaining of dizziness and nausea. She told doctors she’d had problems walking steadily for most of her life, and her mother reported that she hadn’t walked until she was 7 and that her speech only became intelligible at the age of 6.

Doctors did a CAT scan and immediately identified the source of the problem – her entire cerebellum was missing (see scan, below left). The space where it should be was empty of tissue. Instead it was filled with cerebrospinal fluid, which cushions the brain and provides defence against disease.

Is the answer for the woes that ail the Tigers bullpen Justin Verlander?

Difficult decisions come in lots of shapes. There are unpleasant difficult decisions, and there are what are sometimes called good problems to have.

The Giants recently made one of the former kind of choice. The Nationals have the latter before them. The Tigers have something oddly in between the two extremes.

Enough vagueness for you? Sorry about that. The subject at hand is the decision to move a starting pitcher to the bullpen. Sometimes a team's hand is forced, such as when Tim Lincecum endured such a rough stretch of starts that the Giants decided to give him a look in relief.

Sometimes a team has an embarrassment of riches, such as what the Nationals will face when the postseason starts. They simply have too many good starters, and a pedigreed a starting pitcher as Gio Gonzalez may find himself pitching in relief in October.

And then there are the Tigers, who face an issue somewhere in between the two. Justin Verlander, like Lincecum, is suffering a stretch that looks nothing like what we're used to seeing from him. Unlike Lincecum, he's still eating some innings and still turning in some decent starts, but still -- he has a 5.70 ERA since mid-May. He started trending in the wrong direction last year, and the slide picked up speed rapidly in 2014.

Yet as long as Anibal Sanchez is out, Detroit doesn't have a choice even if it wanted to get creative with Verlander. For all the potency of the front of their rotation, the Tigers lack starting depth. Verlander is currently their fourth-best starter, and for regular-season purposes, he'll be one of their five best even when and if Sanchez returns.

For a postseason series, though, the equation changes. The Tigers have three relatively obvious better choices for playoff starts -- Max Scherzer, David Price and Rick Porcello -- but not four. Sanchez would be the fourth, and should he return at full strength, there's a good case to be made that Verlander is the Tigers' fifth best starter.

But he might just be their best reliever. It's no secret the Tigers have issues in their relief corps. Detroit is 12th out of 15 American League teams in relief ERA, and even the Tigers' best relievers have been prone to walks and in some cases home runs. They could use a guy throwing hard and getting multiple outs. A guy like Verlander.


Verlander, known for most of his career as someone who got stronger as the game went on, has not lived up to that reputation this year. The first two times through the order, he's been more effective than on the third and fourth times seeing hitters.

The more telling numbers, though, pertain to his pitch assortment. Verlander at his best was a four-pitch terror. This year, he's only finding success with two pitches.

His slider has been quite effective (.56 above average per 100 pitches), and his fastball has been of a little less than average effectiveness (-0.47), according to fangraphs.com. His curveball has gotten pounded (-2.18), and his changeup has been a little worse than his fastball (-0.54).

In relief, two things happen: a pitcher shortens up his repertoire, and he throws harder. He could ditch the curve and the change, and it's entirely reasonable to think the fastball would gain some extra hop. Verlander's average fastball this season has been 93.2 mph, a career low. But in short stints he could probably dial it up closer to 95 mph, which was what he averaged during his MVP and Cy Young season of 2011. Suddenly you're looking at an awfully effective two-pitch pitcher, one with the ability to get more than two or three outs.

Now, there's one case that might be made against this plan of attack. That, of course, is Verlander's postseason history. And it's true, he's been quite an effective October pitcher.

In 93 1/3 innings.

That's not nothing. Those innings happened. But they're really the only argument in favor of Verlander being more than a back-of-the rotation pitcher this October.

Meanwhile we have 185 innings, and counting, of more recent pitching that suggest something different. They indicate that in 2014, Verlander is a hittable, decent but not first-rate pitcher. He is, this year, the Tigers' fourth- or fifth-best starter.

So, it seems that I am not the only one who has an I.T dpet. at work that doubles as the No Fun Police........

For me, when I log on from home, it is like I am seeing a whole new and different board, as not only are many sites blocked for me at work, but, also some basic features here that cause the look of a lot of pages and sub boards completely and totally.

In case you ever wondered why the baseball season is now 162 games long.


This week, Major League Baseball released the schedule for the 2015 season. You may have noticed that it starts later and ends later than previous seasons—but each team still plays 162 games, just as they have for decades. But how did MLB arrive at such a seemingly arbitrary number?

Let's start in 1920. There was baseball before then, but that's when when both the National and American Leagues settled on a season length that would hold for over 40 years. At the time, it was simple math: two leagues of eight teams each—there were no divisions yet—meant each team had seven rivals. For a few years, teams had played each of their rivals 20 times for an 140-game season. In 1920, this was expanded to 22 games against each of seven rivals, 11 at home and 11 away, resulting in an 154-game season.

Then, leagues started expanding. In 1961, the American League added the Los Angeles Angels and the Washington Senators. The following year, the National League welcomed the New York Mets and the Houston Colt .45's. "After the first expansion, each team had nine rivals rather than seven, and the 154-game season made for bad math," MLB's official historian, John Thorn, explains. To play 22 games against each rival would require an 198-game season, so MLB settled on 18 games per rival for nine rivals, for a total of 162 games.

(Thorn clarifies that yes, in 1961, after the AL had expanded but the NL had not, the leagues played seasons of different lengths. "Both World Series contestants opened their regular seasons on April 11 and concluded on October 1," he says. "NL had more days off.")

The season has been 162 games ever since, but it's taken some work to keep it there. "Even with further expansions, 162 became the de facto standard, and you had to get more and more complicated arithmetically to make it work," Thorn says. "So when we went to two 6-team divisions [per league] in 1969 the—I think brilliant—solution was to have more games against the teams in your division, thus enabling you to preserve the 162-game season."

The addition of a third division in each league in 1994, introduction of interleague-play in 1997, a final expansion to 30 teams total in 1998 and, most recently, the realignment of the leagues that necessitated perpetual interleague games last season has made for increasingly complicated scheduling and yet the season holds at 162 games.

These days, teams play 76 contests against division rivals, 66 against non-division league teams, and 20 interleague games—or 162 games. It works, but it feels a little random. The reason the schedule has stayed at 162 games is largely because to change it would be so difficult.

"No one wants to give up home dates," Thorn says. "So if we went to 158 games, each team would have to give up two home dates and that’s revenue." Meanwhile, a longer season would mean ending even later in the year than the late October/early November World Series of late. And unless the teams agreed to play at a warmer, neutral location (unlikely given, again, the potential hit to ticket sales) this could result in some seriously cold weather at the championship games.

It's not just the bureaucratic intricacies that have kept the season length consistent (although trying to imagine the MLB Players Association and the team owners reaching an agreement to ever add or subtract a single game is probably explanation enough). Baseball is, after all, a sentimentalist's game. "Baseball is a religion," Thorn says. "It becomes the 11th commandment: 162 games."