Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Blog Kiosk: 1/24/2017 - Dodgers Links - Some Odds and Ends


The first day of the Dodgers Love L.A. Community Tour was on Monday, and to start things off was a brief visit by Justin Turner and Yasiel Puig to local area Coffee Bean's.  They greeted fans, served coffee and even posed for pictures.  Watch a couple videos featuring their visits via Dodger Blue (link here).

Today, Dodger Strength and Conditioning Coaches Brandon McDaniel, Travis Smith and Shaun Alexander will hold a fitness and health clinic 100 underserved young women from the New Village Girls Academy at Dodger Stadium.  Also, Trayce Thompson will host a movie night at the Dodger Lexus Dugout Club for Cedars-Sinai’s pediatric patients and their families.

Photo above of Justin Turner and the crew from Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in West Hollywood via Jon SooHoo/LA Dodgers 2017Go here to check out more pics by Jon and Jill Weisleder taken from Day 1 of the Dodgers community tour.  Below are more links to check out:
  • This Day in Dodger History:  In 1963 the Dodgers acquired Don Zimmer in a trade with the Reds for a minor leaguer.  This is Don's second stint with the team; having originally been signed by them as an amateur in 1949 and rising up their ranks.  In 2006 the Dodgers signed free agent reliever and soon-to-be legend Joe Beimel.  In 2014 the Dodgers signed free agent utilityman Chone Figgins. 
  • Happy Birthday, Neal Finn & Scott Kazmir!
  • Did the Dodgers get some value in the Forsythe trade?  Per Jeff Sullivan at FanGraphs; "Dodgers Trade for Brian Dozier, Basically."
And so, in the end, the Dodgers haven’t added Brian Dozier. Instead, they called up the Rays, and added basically Brian Dozier. The cost was De Leon, and nothing else.
...
Forsythe and Dozier just don’t look that different. Dozier has a slightly longer track record, and he provides maybe a little more on the bases. But you can see why the Dodgers settled here. If Forsythe is worse, he’s probably only a little bit worse, and that’s not worth adding another quality prospect. Giving up De Leon is already tough.
“I don’t think I’ve been around a player who has had the kind of impact that he has off the field and obviously we all got to see what he did on the field,” Dodger president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said this afternoon, in a conference call with reporters. “You can never say never with a guy like Chase, just because of the type of guy he is and the impact he has.”
“I want to be a starter again, whether it’s here or anywhere else,” Puig said through an interpreter at a Coffee Bean in Studio City, on the first day of the team’s annual community tour. “I’m going to continue working. I want to be a better person, in and out of the field, and I’m hoping I can work toward that.”
“Honestly, the impetus behind going to the development program was not about me becoming a professional scout,” Matthews recalled. “It was just about me learning more about evaluation, so I can better do those lists and rankings and be better informed talking about players when I was still working as a writer at Baseball America.”
Pennington was never shy about his white wife or his interracial children, said Valencia. He recalled that Pennington would drive them around the ballpark in a convertible with the top down. He was often the only black player on minor league clubs in rural American towns. As Valencia pointed out in our interview, baseball wasn't just integrated in big cities like New York and Cleveland by Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby. It was integrated slowly, often painfully, in small towns across the country.

* Please follow on twitter @ernestreyes *
* Dodgers Blue Heaven home page *

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...