Dodger Thoughts

Jon Weisman's outlet for dealing psychologically with the Los Angeles Dodgers, baseball and life

Category: Uncategorized (Page 42 of 63)

Arbitration clock eight days and counting for James Loney

James Loney and the Dodgers will head to an arbitration hearing Feb. 18 if they can’t settle their salary disagreement beforehand, reports ESPNLosAngeles.com’s Tony Jackson, who also has a feature on Don Mattingly today.

Elsewhere …

  • Jayson Stark of ESPN.com mostly approves of the Dodger offseason, at least relative to the rest of the National League West.
  • The Dodgers have packed for Camelback Ranch, and Roberto Baly — the Carmen Sandiego of Dodgerdom — is on the scene. Check out his pics and video, including shots of 75-year-old James Hall, who has been driving the truck for 29 years.
  • Check out the photo archive of Sports Illustrated vet Hy Peskin, thanks to the link passed along by Mike Scioscia’s Tragic Illness.
  • Loved this video of Landry Fields working at a New York sporting goods store and trying in vain to sell his own jersey.
  • Nice story on ex-Chatsworth High ballplayer Matt Cassel by Eric Sondheimer of the Times.
  • Tweet of the day:”@jeffthiessen: Went to my local batting cage today and JAY GIBBONS of the #dodgers was hitting in my cage.. He said I have a nice swing!!”

The Michael Young debate: It’s always something, isn’t it?

Same planet, different worlds.

On the one side you have the people who are crying for Michael Young and catcalling the Dodgers for being too cheap to get him, and on the other side you have the people who are thankful for the financial hurdles that should keep Young from wearing Dodger blue.

Notes before sunset

“Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening — or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, mid-evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid-afternoon, or perhaps the late-mid-afternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning. …  But never at dusk! Never at dusk. I would never do that.”
— Steve Martin

* * *

  • I liked this piece by Bethany Heck at Notgraphs, identifying the types of grass at all the major-league parks.
  • Michael Arkush of Yahoo! Sports catches up with Maury Wills in this feature.
  • Ernest Reyes of Blue Heaven is hunting down recordings by Brooklyn Dodger organist Gladys Goodding.
  • Eric Chavez could earn up to $5.5 million counting incentives from the Yankees. Details from Aaron Gleeman at Hardball Talk.
  • Former Jacksonville Suns play-by-play man Joe Block will join Josh Suchon as co-host of KABC AM 790 DodgerTalk, succeeding Ken Levine, who still might contribute from time to time when he’s not doing Seattle Mariners games.
  • In other radio news, a Portland, Oregon FM radio station will broadcast 75 to 90 Dodger games this season, writes Andy Giegerich of the Portland Business Journal (link via Rob Neyer).

    When pressed as to how the station decided to seek Dodger broadcasts, (programming director Brian) Jennings confessed.

    “I grew up a Dodgers fan,” he said. “I grew up in Spokane when the Indians were the (Dodgers) Triple-A team. I saw everyone from Koufax to Maury Wills to the Davises, Tommy and Willie, come through there.”

  • Ken Arneson wrote. That’s all you need to know to click.

Valenzuela to be inducted into Latino Baseball Hall of Fame

Former Dodger great Fernando Valenzuela is being inducted into the Latino Baseball Hall of Fame and is flying to the Dominican Republic for the ceremony Saturday.

Valenzuela is part of the LBHoF’s second class, and will be joined by Luis Tiant, Dennis Martinez, Manny Sanguillen, Edgar Martinez, Rico Carty and Andres Galarraga. Dodger broadcaster Jaime Jarrin was part of the inaugural class, while longtime Dodger scout Ralph Avila helped found the LBHoF.

Two days earlier, on Thursday, Dodger prospects from the team’s Campo Las Palmas training facility will play Yankees prospects in the Latino Baseball Hall of Fame Cup in La Romana. A statue of Valenzuela will be unveiled in La Romana on Friday as part of the “Paseo de los Inmortales del Salón de la Fama del Béisbol Latino.”

“I’m happy to make my first trip to the Dominican Republic, a country that has a long history with the Dodgers and where the club has placed a lot of importance in baseball development through Campo Las Palmas,” Valenzuela said in a statement. “I’m even more pleased that I’m here for such a grand occasion. It’s an honor to represent the Dodgers in the Latino Baseball Hall of Fame.”

The Steinbrenner family is receiving the Tommy Lasorda Award, an honor given by the LBHoF to non-Latinos that advance Latin-American interests in the game.

Dominican Republic president Dr. Leonel Fernandez Reyna will preside over the ceremony in La Romana.

Preposterous headline of the day

L.A. Dodgers try to make amends with throwback uniforms, but there’s no love lost in Brooklyn

Guess what, folks. We’re proud of the team’s history and want to celebrate it. We appreciate you were a part of it and we can feel your pain, but if it makes you feel any better, in the year 2011, no one’s trying to make amends with you.

Owner moaners

In case you ain’t heard, the New York Mets are having a wee bit of an ownership crisis of their own.  At MLB Trade Rumors, Howard Megdal offers a primer on what’s going on.

Around the horn …

  • Don Mattingly talked about the outfield situation with Ken Gurnick of MLB.com:

    … We’ll look at the matchups, because Marcus might be better against certain right-handers and Gibbons showed he hits lefties good,” said Mattingly.He said he will insist on better defense throughout the club, particularly Kemp and Ethier. Before Thames was acquired, there was talk of putting Gwynn in center, moving Kemp to right and Ethier to left, all because management was disappointed in the outfield play of Kemp and Ethier last year. Gwynn now figures to be primarily a late-inning defender in left field, unless his offense improves.

    “We want to put our best defense out there,” said Mattingly. “I’ve talked to Matt and Andre. For the most part, I don’t like moving everybody around. If everybody is playing defense the way they’re supposed to play, they’ll stay in their spots. But the defense has got to get better in the outfield. Not just Matt, but Andre also. Better positioning on counts, better jumps, paying better attention to the situations and the tendencies of the runners. We’ve got to get better defensively.”…

  • Albuquerque will host the Triple-A championship in 2011, writes Matt Eddy of Baseball America.
  • Get your first look at the post-Monster Truck, oh-so-sweet Dodger Stadium grass, thanks to Ernest Reyes of Blue Heaven.

‘Moneyball’ readies for its close-up

My second post today at ESPN.com’s Sweet Spot takes a trip to the cinema:

What do this month’s Oscars have to do with a baseball movie that is months away from even hitting theaters? Let’s answer by first taking a short trip back in time. …

Baby, why you gotta treat me this way?

As Russell Martin remains on his “Even though I said I was trying the past two years, I really wasn’t — but now that I’m gone, I really am” tour … some notes:

Eric Chavez heads to Yankees

Eric Chavez won’t be the uncertain solution to the Dodgers’ uncertain third-base situation. The oft-injured vet is headed to the New York Yankees on a minor-league deal, as is former Dodger Ronnie Belliard.

* * *

Fairly safe to say that the most scrutinized 2011 Dodger heading into the season will be Matt Kemp.  Here’s more detailed analysis, from True Blue L.A. newbie Chad Moriyama,

Throwback throwdown

The Dodgers will wear throwback uniforms at six 12:10 p.m., half-price-on-food-and-drink weekday games this season. You can vote on your pick at the Dodgers’ website.

The choices:

The first of the three uniform options was worn by the Dodgers exactly 100 years ago. The 1911 road uniform features fine narrow pinstripes and the BROOKLYN name displayed vertically in small capital letters down the button panel. Known as the “Superbas,” the Brooklyn team wearing this uniform played its second-to-last season in 1911 at Washington Park.

The second option is the 1931 road uniform, which was the only variety of the 1930s uniform designs to sport a block capital “B” on the front of the jersey.

The third option is the 1940s “Satin” road uniform, which is blue and features the trim and DODGERS script in white. With the advent of night baseball at Ebbets Field in the 1940s, the original uniform used a highly reflective satin fabric to be more visible under the lights.

Mike Scioscia’s Tragic Illness has a photo of the satin uniform.

Which do you like?

Feel-good Friday

Health is this morning’s lead topic …

  • Injury prevention continues to offer potential as the next Moneyball (i.e., exploiting the undervalued) frontier. Will Carroll writes about the topic for SI.com (link via new SB Nation national baseball editor Rob Neyer, who has his own comment).
  • Neyer also links to Corey Hawkins’ new Baseball Injury Tool, a website that I suspect a lot of us will soon find indispensable.
  • Jim McLennan of AZ Snakepit studies the importance of starting pitching depth, noting among other things that even the most stable rotation in the National League, San Francisco’s, needed 19 starts outside of its main five pitchers.
  • Tom Hoffarth of the Daily News has completed his massive project, “The Tao of Vin Scully”: 21 sportscasters discussing what makes the Dodger legend great.
  • Before we leave the Daily News, I have to pass along Kevin Modesti’s “Where Are They Now” story on “Family Affair” boy Johnny Whitaker.
  • The ups and downs of James Loney’s professional career, dating back to draft day in 2002 (goodness), are reviewed by John Sickels at Minor League Ball.
  • David Young and I have had All-Something fever lately.  His latest at True Blue L.A.: The Los Angeles Dodgers All-Short Stuff Team.
  • Here’s a retrospective of the Dodgers’ Burt Shotton era, courtesy of Steven Booth and the Hardball Times.
  • The inimitable player/author/speaker Dirk Hayhurst offers his “Ten Commandments of Social Networking as a professional athlete” (via David Pinto’s Baseball Musings).
  • Baseball co-blogger David Newhan is lacin’ ’em up again, signing a minor-league deal with the San Diego Padres.
  • If I could have had just half of Dee Gordon’s Thursday, I’d have been happy: “I swear I just had the best nap ever! My body is feeling it from these intense workouts!”
  • Update: Tony Jackson of ESPNLosAngeles.com looks at the Dodger infield heading into the coming season.

Merkin 9 to 5: Valdez to toil in Dodger minor leagues

The  Dodgers have signed former San Francisco Giants and Toronto Blue Jays reliever Merkin Valdez to a minor-league contract, though without giving him an invitation to big-league camp at Spring Training. (Matt Eddy of Baseball America first reported the signing.)

Valdez is looking to rebuild his career. The 29-year-old righthander pitched 67 games for the Giants from 2004-2008 with a 5.24 ERA, allowing 115 baserunners in 67 innings while striking out 53. Last year, he allowed three runs in 1 1/3 innings for Toronto while spending most of the season with Triple-A Las Vegas, where he had a 7.91 ERA in 58 innings.

A native of the Dominican Republic, Valdez was originally signed by the Atlanta Braves in 1999, then came to the Giants in 2002 (with Damian Moss) in a trade for … Russ Ortiz.

Best of luck, Rob Neyer

The big news for us writers and fans of baseball writing is that Rob Neyer’s leaving ESPN.com after 15 years, destination to be announced. Tributes have come across the Internet fast and heartfelt, because Neyer was a pioneer in online baseball writing, open-minded, intelligent and fun, and always welcoming to new points of view (including mine in the earliest days of Dodger Thoughts). All my best to him for the future.

It’s funny — coincidentally, my first anniversary with ESPNLosAngeles.com is Tuesday, and I really wanted to thank Eric Neel, Becky Hudson and the whole crew for how well they’ve treated me.  Hopefully, it’s a relationship that will continue for a long time.

Elsewhere …

  • This year’s Dodgertown Classic at Dodger Stadium will take place on March 13 and feature USC and UCLA at 2:30 p.m., preceded by Georgia-St. Mary’s at 10 a.m. Tickets are $7 in advance, $12 on game day, with half-price concessions and free parking. Tony Jackson of ESPNLosAngeles.com notes something different about this year’s event.

    … Last year’s Classic was staged for the benefit of the Dodgers Dream Foundation. While this year’s Classic will instead be a revenue-producing event for the Dodgers, a club spokesman said that change has nothing to do with the fact the Dodgers Dream Foundation, the team’s official, non-profit charitable organization, is presently under investigation by the California attorney general’s office.

    That investigation centers on questions surrounding compensation to the foundation’s former chief executive, Howard Sunkin, who now is employed by the club in a different role heading up the community-relations department, according to multiple reports.

    “It essentially came down to complying with NCAA requirements that an event of this nature had to have a title sponsor attached to it,” said Josh Rawitch, the Dodgers’ vice president for communications. “We were fortunate enough to bring in the Automobile Club of Southern California in place of the Dodgers Dream Foundation.”

    The participating schools — USC, UCLA, the University of Georgia and St. Mary’s College from the Bay Area — won’t receive any of the revenue for the event, also in compliance with NCAA rules. The games will count on the schools’ regular-season records, but the USC-UCLA game won’t count in the Pacific-10 conference standings. …

    UCLA is ranked No. 1 in the USA Today/ESPN.com preseason college baseball poll.

  • David Young of True Blue L.A. offers this gem: the Los Angeles Dodgers All-Spelling-Bee Team.
  • If Jonah Keri and Dave Cameron of Fangraphs were in charge of drafting players for a major-league All-Star game, Clayton Kershaw and Hong-Chih Kuo would be the two Dodgers chosen.
  • Fun story by Evan Bladh, Sr. at Opinion of Kingman’s Performance about his unexpected connections with Roberto Baly of Vin Scully Is My Homeboy.

Will James Loney turn his doubles into home runs?


Gary A. Vasquez/US PresswireJames Loney hit 19 homers in his first 446 career at-bats. He hit 10 in 588 at-bats last season.

This excerpt from Tony Jackson’s piece for ESPNLosAngeles.com today on James Loney, Matt Kemp and Andre Ethier got me thinking about Loney:

The lefty-hitting first baseman has never hit more than 15 home runs in a season and hit only 10 of them in 2010, but he had a career-high 41 doubles and drove in 88 runs, his third season in a row with at least that many RBIs. Still, general manager Ned Colletti and manager Don Mattingly continue to insist that Loney is a potential power hitter, and they remain determined to get him to reach that potential.

But Loney has now spent five seasons in the majors, enough to make an outsider wonder if this is simply who Loney is: a gap-to-gap, line-drive, doubles hitter who manages to drive in a lot of runs and still be reasonably productive without going deep very often.

My initial reaction is that I’ve never really expected Loney to become much more than what Jackson describes in that last sentence. Mark Grace has often been cited as the best-case scenario for Loney, and Grace never hit more than 17 homers in a season — and that’s with playing half his games in Wrigley Field.

But for curiosity’s sake, I used Baseball-Reference.com to pull the list of 27-and-under players who, since 1990, have had at least 40 doubles in a season without hitting more than 15 home runs that same year. I then looked to see what their career highs in home runs were or are.

Here’s what I found — take it with several grains of salt as a mere conversation starter:

Read More

Mid-day dabblings


The clip above is brought to you by Celebuzz via Franklin Avenue.

  • The Dodgers rank 22nd among organizations in minor-league propsects, according to Keith Law of ESPN.com.
  • Tom Hawthorn of the Toronto Globe & Mail writes about Allan Simpson and the story of how Baseball America was founded.
  • True Blue L.A. offers a guide to visiting Camelback Ranch.
  • Teenage Angels outfielder Mike Trout was named the top minor-league prospect in baseball by MLB.com.
  • John Sickels looks back at the top 50 hitting prospects of 2006 at Minor League Ball. Shed a tear for Joel Guzman.
  • Pitcher and used-car salesman Brandon Webb will take that old clunker off your hands, he tells the Dallas Morning News (link via Baseball Musings).
  • Webb’s former Arizona teammate, Micah Owings, has returned to the Diamondbacks, who might use him as a true two-way player, according to Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic.
  • Rob Neyer of ESPN.com questions whether, after decades, he is still a Royals fan.

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