Bobby Valentine Documentary Tonight

Former Dodger, Bobby Valentine, is in a new ESPN documentary about Bobby and the team he manages the Chiba Lotte Marines. It should be a fun show. It's on ESPN2 tonight at 6:00 PST (9:00 EST). Below is a promo video.


Video Link: ESPN:

An Unassisted Triple Play

Asdrubal Cabrera snags an unassisted triple play. It happened so fast it's easy to miss. Check out the video here from ESPN. ESPN then does a long analysis of the event below.



Video Link: ESPN:

UPDATE: I ran across an usual signed ball that is very pertinent to yesterdays unassisted triple play. Below is Seth Swirsky's signed Baseball featuring the signatures of all 13 players (not including Cabrera) to achieve an unassisted triple play. This has to be one of the rarest odd-ball signed Baseballs in existence. On top of that, he also has the glove Jimmy Cooney used to perform the unassisted triple play in 1927. Check it out here. Woops! I think I got this wrong. His ball has only the signatures of the 4 of the players: Furcal, Valentin, Tulowitzski and Valverde. It's still a great item nonetheless.Website Link: Seth.com:

Down Goes Furcal

Our team spark plug is down and out for at least another 8 days. Rafael Furcal has been placed on the DL retroactive to May 6. That means the earliest he can come back is May 21 against Cincinnati. This is the same type of injury that laid him out late last season. As some of us know a lower back injury has the ability to sap all the life out of you. Doing simple task like getting out of bed, using the bathroom and just walking can be difficult. Hopefully Furcal can bounce back after having a chance to rest his weary back.

As Jon of Dodger Thoughts points out, the last time we panicked over a middle infield injury we went after Julio Lugo. (We gave up highly touted prospect Joel Guzman and CSUF Alum Sergio Pedroza to get him.) Fortunately, neither of these guys have become Major League regulars yet so it hasn't hurt us, but it could easily become fodder for years to come. On the flip side, Lugo really didn't provide the kind of relief trading two perceived strong prospects would garner. The lesson we can learn here is not to panic. Don't start trading away our prospects for overpriced veterans. We still have a long way to go and I remain hopeful that within a couple of weeks Raffy will be back to his old self.

Blog Kiosk 5/11/08

"It was not our day, not our match and somehow we were due for a loss. Now the weight of the winning streak is off our shoulders." -Oliver Kahn

• A's photographer Michael Zagaris has his own blog and shares some behind the scenes pics. Hat Tip: TasteLikeDirt:
• Former Dodger GM and current Padre Special Assistant for Baseball Operations Paul DePodesta has just started a blog called "It Might Be Dangerous... You Go First." (Hat Tip: Gas Lamp Ball)
• Mario recalls a moment with a Baseball groupie.

  In no time this girl, no older than 21 was telling me things I didn’t know and could have not cared less about. Late night, alcohol-fueled parties, sexual encounters with ball players, and even dirt on my beloved Marlins like which one was the faithful one. Yes, I said the faithful one, not ones.

• I love the Antique Roadshow. There is something alluring about normal folks taking in their junk and finding out it's worth a fortune- or not. It's like a live lottery broadcast. Recently, they were in Louisville when a man brought in an autographed baseball of the World Championship 1919 Cincinnati Reds. See the video here. (Hat Tip: SCD:)
• Chile has been experiencing a massive volcanic explosion and Tillemann has pictures to prove it. Wow! (Hat Tip: Food In Mouth)
• The Jackie Robinson Court Martial file that I wrote about here is now up for auction through Memory Lane, Inc.
• If you read Beckett during the late 80's to early 90's then you have probably heard of Tommy Wheatley. He use to write a column, called "Kids Korner," in the magazine representing a voice of the teen Baseball card collector. Well, Hugging Harold Reynolds caught up with him a few months back and posted a 2 part interview with the kid many of us envied. Part 1, Part 2. (Hat Tip: Gem Mint Ten:)
• MSTI has started a campaign in favor of Dodgers AAA journeyman thirdbaseman Terry Tiffee. He's batting .475 with 118 at-bats so far this season.
• Doug Glanville writes about life and the curveball in the NYT.
  

  What I found was that your approach doesn’t have to be any different from the one you use when dealing with — indulge me for a second — any other curveball life throws at you. We spend so much time cruising along, looking to hit the straight and dependable fastball, that the audacity of something different can cause us to forget any and every tactic that once gave us comfort and success.
  In my 15 seasons of professional baseball, there were a lot of off-the-field curveballs to go with my game-time curveballs. On paper, a player’s ascension to the majors looks straightforward: you go from Single-A ball to Double-A ball to Triple-A ball to the big time. But in actuality, you can wake up and be traded away to another team at the drop of a hat, like I was once — two days before Christmas on the day my grandfather passed away.

• The Fleer Sticker Project introduces us to the cards of Lowell Palmer.

The Joe Torre Way

Tony Jackson wrote a great article about the Joe Torre method of Baseball. Sure, it means longer games, but who cares if your winning. More importantly, the Dodger players appear to be following the skipper all the way.

A hitter goes to the plate not to swing at just anything that might be in the strike zone but to swing only at those pitches in his own hot zone, at least early in the count. That usually means he's looking for a pitch in a specific quadrant of the strike zone.

By laying off anything outside that area, the hitter runs the risk of falling behind in the count. But he also greatly reduces the chance he will chase something that initially looks like a strike but ends up being far beyond the zone and far beyond hittable.

In an age when starting pitchers rarely are allowed to go much beyond 100 pitches, a frequent by-product of this approach to hitting is that opposing pitchers have to throw so many pitches to each batter that they reach their limits and must be lifted by the fifth or sixth inning. That gives the Dodgers a crack at hitting against what presumably is the weakest part of any team's staff - the middle relievers.

It's so simple and brilliant at the same time.

Lelands: Waner and Wheat

Lelands auction house just closed their April internet auction that had a couple of nice Dodger related items. They are both photos of Hall of Fame players wearing Dodger uniforms. Here is a pic of Paul "Big Poison" Waner taking a swing during Spring Training in 1943.

Paul Waner was elected into the Hall of Fame for collecting over 3,000 hits with 3 batting titles while batting a lifetime .333 for the Pittsburgh Pirates. By the time be came to the Dodgers he was in the twilight of his career. He played for us during parts of the 1941 season and from the 1943 to 1944. What he is most famous for, though, is not what you might expect.

(Waner was) famous for his ability to hit while hung over, when Waner gave up drinking in 1938 at management's request, he hit only .280 - the first of only two times that he failed to hit .300 as a Pirate. As Casey Stengel said in complimenting his base-running skills, "He had to be a very graceful player, because he could slide without breaking the bottle on his hip."

Waner was also nearsighted, a fact that Pirate management only learned late in his career when he remarked that he had difficulty reading the ads posted on the outfield walls. Fitting him with glasses, however, only interfered with his hitting, as Waner now had to contend with a small spinning projectile rather than the fuzzy grapefruit-sized object he had been hitting before.

Auction Link: Paul Waner press photo:

Below is a photograph of Dodger Hall of Famer Zach Wheat from 1912. What I like about the photo is the uniforms. This style was only used during the 1912 season and features a Baseball diamond surrounding the Brooklyn "B" emblem hat and a white pinstripe jersey. It sold for $362.09.

Auction Link: Zach Wheat photo: