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Friday, March 18, 2005
Link-O-RamaWhy is it that upsets like UAB over LSU and Wisconsin-Milwaukee over Alabama become so obvious only after the fact? Both outcomes make complete sense now, but for some reason neither made sense when I was filling out my bracket. When it comes to NCAA Tournament pools each season, I end up saying "wait 'til next year" faster than the Devil Rays.Okay, enough complaining, let's hit the links ... In fact, I literally just got angry typing that paragraph. Seriously. I feel robbed for not being able to see the rest of what would have been a great, long-running series. Oh, and here's a little tidbit: Linda Cardellini (who, incidentally, I am completely ready to marry), was playing Lindsay Weir when she was 24 years old in real life. She turns 30 in June, which completely blows my mind. Go buy the DVD and then you too can be angry and depressed about a TV show. Wednesday, March 16, 2005People are really wonderful, aren't they? Today at The Hardball Times: - All Batted Ball Types, All The Time (by Tom Meagher) - Ten Things I Didn't Know Last Week (by Studes)     
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Twins NotesIn between getting angry e-mails from Notre Dame basketball fans yesterday, I somehow found some time to collect a whole bunch of Twins-related links and notes. Just for the record, yesterday's entry actually had very little to do with Notre Dame, other than the fact that they were the team Dick Vitale was going nuts about. The things that cause people to get upset enough to rip off an angry e-mail never cease to amaze me. With that said, Chris Thomas and his .346 shooting percentage are extraordinarily overrated. There, now you Golden Domers have something legitimate to e-mail me about today.Now, let's talk Twins ... At 5-11, 190 pounds, Rivas is the prototypical middle infielder and has the athletic skills to match. The comfort level he had with Guzman helped the pair form one of the best double-play combinations in all of baseball.There have been more articles like this written about Luis Rivas then you'd probably imagine, and each time I am reading one I fully expect to see Ashton Kutcher come running into the room with a camera crew. "He doesn't have the most aesthetically pleasing body, either," [Andy] Fox said. "That's just my opinion."I'm almost afraid to go see if Bat-Girl has covered this story yet. Grant Balfour, bothered by pain in his right forearm, won't throw for 10 days and will start the season on the disabled list, manager Ron Gardenhire said Tuesday.The Twins have enough power arms in the bullpen that this won't hurt much if he can get healthy eventually, but the more interesting thing is that this opens up a spot on the pitching staff for someone. The obvious answer to take Balfour's place in the bullpen is Rule 5 pick Ryan Rowland-Smith, but I actually don't think that's the case. Rowland-Smith has to be kept for the entire season if the Twins are to hold onto him, so the fact that there will be an open spot for a few weeks shouldn't really change much.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
The Calm Before The MadnessI was looking over my NCAA tournament picks yesterday afternoon and realized that my bracket will either be amazingly correct or an absolute mess. I made so many weirdo, out-of-nowhere picks that there's no way for me to finish in the middle of the pack in the various pools I entered. I'll either be in dead last or I'll win the whole thing. I spelled out all of my picks here Monday, so you can check back on them throughout the tournament to see just how stupid they were. The only thing I ask is that when Utah loses to UTEP in the first round, you try not to laugh too hard at me having Andrew Bogut and company in the Elite Eight.Speaking of laughing (how's that for a segue?), one of my favorite things each March is how guys like Dick Vitale are completely outraged when the tournament selection committee fails to pick a certain mediocre team for the final at-large spot. This year Vitale was up in arms about Notre Dame being left out of the tournament. He kept going on and on about what essentially boils down to the committee picking the 55th-best team in the country instead of the 52nd-best team in the country. And even that is giving Notre Dame far too much credit. If there is an argument for Notre Dame deserving to be in the tournament -- and clearly at least Vitale thinks there is -- it certainly isn't a strong enough one to get incredibly worked up about. The Irish's RPI ranking (73) was just the 19th-best among non-tourney teams. Yes, 19th. This isn't like complaining about baseball's All-Star teams, when a legitimately outstanding player can be snubbed in favor of someone like Ken Harvey. No, this is the equivalent of going nuts over Ken Harvey being left off the team in favor of Travis Lee. With all that said, there is only one thing funnier than watching Vitale get worked up about a mediocre team getting a raw deal, and that's watching a few nights later as that mediocre team loses in the first round of the NIT. Notre Dame played Holy Cross in the NIT's opening round last night, at home, and lost by five. It wasn't all that shocking since Holy Cross finished with a superior RPI ranking than Notre Dame, but that's exactly why Vitale's outrage was so laughable in the first place. Oh, and here's the kicker: Vitale has two daughters, both of whom went to Notre Dame on tennis scholarships and both of whom are married to fellow Notre Dame alums. Here's a quote from an old Vitale ESPN.com column about the birth of his granddaughter, Sydney: Notre Dame came into the picture early. Sydney's dad, Chris, placed an ND hat on her. She's a Golden Domer from day one; I received a phone call from Digger Phelps, who said it has already been worked out. That's right, in 2018 she'll be in South Bend.Now, there's something I could see people getting upset about. As for me, I am absolutely outraged that the mighty Minnesota Gophers, with their 10-6 record in what might be the fifth- or sixth-best conference in the country, didn't get a #1 seed. And I don't even have any daughters who went there, just me. On a somewhat related note, one of the pools I entered is the "First Annual NCAA Tournament Bloggers Bracket" contest over at Yoco: College Basketball. For those of you who are looking forward to tomorrow afternoon (and the weeks following) as much as I am, you should definitely check out Yoco's blog. It is like one-stop shopping for everything college hoops and the man behind the blog, Yoni Cohen, is now even writing for FOXSports.com (where my fantasy baseball columns appeared very briefly last year). Speaking of fantasy baseball columns (yet another brilliant segue), my first column of the season is up over at Rotoworld.com. I'm guessing most of you already make Rotoworld a part of your daily web surfing, but if not, go check it out.
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
The Great Debate: RevisitedBack in 2001, when the Minnesota Twins took Joe Mauer over Mark Prior with the first pick in the 2001 draft, I felt it was a mistake. A "mistake" in the same sense that marrying, say, Jessica Alba instead of Elisha Cuthbert is a mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. One option -- either marrying Cuthbert or drafting Prior -- represents an extraordinary choice, while the other option -- either marrying Alba or drafting Mauer -- represents a slightly less extraordinary choice. Or at least that's how I saw it at the time.In June of 2001, the Twins were right in the middle of what turned out to be their first winning season since 1992. They had a good, young nucleus of players in place and I thought adding a polished college pitcher like Prior, who was considered by many to be the greatest college pitcher of all-time, would be exactly the sort of thing that could make them an elite team in a hurry. And while Mauer was considered a pretty amazing talent himself, he was a high school catcher, which is perhaps the riskiest type of prospect, and his journey to the big leagues would be significantly longer than Prior's. Sure enough, Prior's major-league career got off to a quick start. While Mauer was hitting .302 at Single-A Quad Cities in 2002, Prior made 19 starts for the Cubs, posting a 3.32 ERA and 147-to-38 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 116.2 innings. The next year, while Mauer was spending the season between Single-A Fort Myers and Double-A New Britain, Prior went 18-6 with a 2.43 ERA for Chicago, finishing third in the National League Cy Young balloting while ranking among the top three in the league in ERA, wins, winning percentage, and strikeouts. Through the 2003 season, things with Mauer and Prior had played out exactly how I expected them to. Mauer was one of the best prospects in all of baseball, but was still a step or two away from even making his big-league debut. Meanwhile, Prior had already established himself as one of the elite pitchers in baseball and his outstanding 2003 season was a big part of why the Cubs made it all the way to the NLCS. They were both as good as advertised, but Prior was simply ready to be great sooner. The fact that he went 2-1 with a 2.31 ERA in three postseason starts for the Cubs in 2003, and not the Twins, was exactly why I thought passing on him in favor of Mauer was a mistake. Then a funny thing happened on the way to the Hall of Fame for both players. Injuries kept Prior from starting the 2004 season on time, and when the Twins traded A.J. Pierzynski to San Francisco and made Mauer their everyday catcher, it looked as if the kid from St. Paul might be set to close the gap on Prior. Instead, while Prior went 6-4 with a bloated 4.02 ERA in 21 starts, Mauer injured his knee in his second game, came back midway through the season, and then re-injured the same knee. He was great when he played, hitting .308/.369/.570 with outstanding defense, but he ended up playing just 35 games and major questions about his long-term ability to remain a catcher surfaced. Suddenly the debate over whether Mauer's Hall of Fame career is going to end up being better than Prior's Hall of Fame career centers on two injured players with some major question marks. Mauer is once again back to trying to show that his surgically repaired knee can withstand the rigors of catching on a regular basis. The early results from spring training are very mixed, as he was able to catch just seven innings before the knee started swelling up and giving him problems again. He took some time off and a few anti-inflammatory drugs, and was back behind the plate this weekend. While everyone involved is toeing an optimistic party line, Mauer remains almost perpetually stuck in the first phase of recovery, continuously taking one step forward only to take two steps back. But while Mauer is at least on the field, testing out the knee again and again, Prior is now completely out of commission. The Cubs announced yesterday that Prior is out indefinitely with an elbow problem that the team says is different from the one that sidelined him last season. I'm not sure whether or not having two types of elbow injuries sideline you within the same year is any better than having one injury re-occur, but like Alba versus Cuthbert, I'm pretty sure the options are close enough that it doesn't much matter. In the grand scheme of things, what has happened to Mauer and Prior since the Twins made their choice in June of 2001 doesn't change whether or not the team's decision was the correct one. Or even if there was a "correct one." Minnesota didn't know then that a pitcher who many said had perfect mechanics and the prototype pitching body would suffer the same fate that so many young pitchers have. And Minnesota didn't know then that the risky high school catcher would turn out to be every bit as good as they could possibly have imagined, only to have a freak injury derail his career anyway. More than any of that, the almost parallel stories of Mauer and Prior, both bursting with potential and plagued by injuries, serve as yet another example of something we had more than enough examples of in the first place: There is no such thing as a sure thing in baseball. No matter what the Twins did on draft day, whether they passed on the once-in-a-lifetime college ace with a big asking price or decided one of the greatest high school catching prospects in baseball history was still just a high school catching prospect, they'd be in the exact same place right now. Aside from getting a few hundred innings of dominant starting pitching, the only thing that would really have changed if they had gone with Prior is that the state of Minnesota would be breathlessly awaiting daily -- no, make that hourly -- updates on an elbow instead of a knee.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Tourney TimeLike every other living, breathing person in this country when the end of March rolls around, I suddenly have strong opinions about college basketball. Otherwise uninterested people spending money to put their predictive abilities to the test against other otherwise uninterested people is really an amazing yearly phenomena when you think about it. As for me, I am and always have been a big college basketball fan, but I haven't watched quite as many games or teams as I have in past years. That still leaves me having seen at least a few games a week, of course, which puts me way ahead of about 90% of the people who will be filling out brackets with great conviction in the next couple days.Heading into Championship Week, the team I really liked as sort of a semi-sleeper was Connecticut. I know it sounds weird to say that you like the defending national champs as a sleeper team, but they have been overlooked for most of the year after dropping an early non-conference game to a horrible Massachusetts team and then dropping another five games during the regular season. Still, they looked like a very dangerous team to me in the five or six times I got a chance to watch them. They have tournament experience, with no fewer than five players getting significant playing time for a team that won six games in the tournament last year. They can score, averaging 78.6 points per game. They can defend, with an NCAA-best 9.1 blocks per game and a scoring margin of nearly 12 points per game. They are deep, with nine guys averaging 10 or more minutes per game. They have a good playmaking point guard in Marcus Williams, who led college basketball with 8.1 assists per game. They have a ton of size, with skilled big men Josh Boone, Charlie Villanueva, and Rudy Gay. And they have a great, experienced coach in Jim Calhoun. Add all that up and they looked, to me at least, like a great example of a team that could be extremely dangerous come tournament time. And, of course, they proceeded to lay an egg in the Big East semi-final game against Syracuse. The final score (67-63) makes it look like a good game, but Connecticut was down 13 points at the half and as many as 21 points with 13 minutes to go in the game. I suppose you could say that they went on a 36-19 run to finish their final game before the tournament, but I'm not even close to being that much of an optimist. Turns out the selection committee must have seen the same things in Connecticut that I saw, as the Huskies, despite ranking 13th in RPI, and 12th and 14th in the top-25 polls, got a #2 seed. In other words, so much for being a sleeper. I mention all this to you because that is basically the extent of my March Madness analysis. I watch as many teams as I can during the year, try to pinpoint a few of the less-than-obvious teams (or so I thought) that I like and why I like them, and then pick accordingly. If someone in your office pool tells you their strategy goes beyond that and they don't have the college basketball package for DirecTV and aren't named Jerry Palm, they are probably lying. I mean, does the guy in the cubicle next to you really know anything about Old Dominion, Creighton, and Bucknell that he didn't read in the USA Today team capsules on the way to the office? Of course not, which is exactly why the following picks have as much chance of being good as anyone's ... First-Round Winners: Illinois Washington North Carolina DukeWay fewer upsets (Creighton, New Mexico, NC State) than a bracket should have in the first round, but I honestly just didn't see as many of the usual 4/13, 5/12, 6/11, 7/10 matchup possibilities being ripe for the picking. I do like a bunch of #9 seeds, but that barely counts as an upset. Helluva break for my poor Gophers, who somehow managed to win 21 games in a season when I had them left for dead in January. Their reward, should they beat Iowa State, is a matchup with the team everyone seems to think is the best and most talented in the country. I'd be shocked if North Carolina doesn't win by 30. Of course, I was shocked when the Gophers won their sixth Big Ten game. Sweet Sixteen: Illinois Washington North Carolina DukeHere's where my bracket starts to get a little goofy. I don't really like Alabama all that much, so much as I think Boston College is a good bet to get knocked out early. I like both Georgia Tech and Louisville, so I basically flipped a coin on that one. I like Texas Tech if they had another second-round matchup, but I think Gonzaga is for real this year. And I'd love to stick with Wisconsin, but Kansas is just too tough. My biggest second-round upset is Utah over Oklahoma. I'd feel a lot more comfortable with the pick if their point guard was healthy, so it's basically just an "Andrew Bogut is really, really good" pick. Elite Eight: Illinois Louisville North Carolina SyracuseMore goofiness. Like I said, I like both Louisville and Georgia Tech, so I think whoever wins that game will also knock off Washington. I'm taking Syracuse over Duke because Paul Katcher has been telling everyone how good the Orange were all season and Gerry McNamara is a great college point guard. Plus, I'm sick of Duke. And yes, I'm sticking with Bogut and the Utes to knock off Kentucky. Don't ask me why, because I really don't have a good reason. In fact, Utah isn't even a sure thing to win their round-one matchup with UTEP, yet I now have them in the Elite Eight. Final Four: Illinois Gonzaga Connecticut SyracuseHere's the funny thing: If you would have asked me to name the four best teams in the country before the seedings were announced, I would have said North Carolina, Illinois, Connecticut, and Kansas. The problem is that three of those four teams are somehow in the same 16-team region, which causes everything to go pretty nuts on my bracket. Championship Game: Connecticut 79, Illinois 75I actually think Illinois is overrated, mostly because of how bad the Big Ten was this year, yet no one on their side of the bracket strikes me as an elite team. How anyone can look at the top 3-4 seeds in each region and not think that the bracket is incredibly lopsided with power on the North Carolina/Duke side is beyond me. So there you have it. As usual, I will deny having predicted any of this starting sometime Thursday night. Today at The Hardball Times: - If Line Drives Could Speak (by Studes)
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 Official Fantasy Girl of AG.com OFGoAG.com Timeline: Heidi Klum (8/2002 - 12/2003) Jessica Alba (12/2003 - 10/2004) Elisha Cuthbert (10/2004 - 11/2006) Vacant (11/2006 - 6/2008) Keeley Hazell (6/2008 - Present) OFGoAG.com Candidates: Marisa Miller Jenna Fischer Kate Beckinsale Mila Kunis Elisha Cuthbert Top 40 Twins Prospects of 2010: 21. Alex Burnett, RP 22. Robert Delaney, RP 23. Luke Hughes, 3B 24. Ben Tootle, RP 25. Deolis Guerra, SP 26. Shooter Hunt, SP 27. Trevor Plouffe, SS 28. Michael McCardell, SP 29. Reggie Williams, 2B 30. Estarlin De Los Santos, SS 31. Derek McCallum, 2B 32. Jose Morales, C 33. Chris Herrmann, LF 34. Bobby Lanigan, SP 35. Danny Rams, C 36. Josmil Pinto, C 37. Steven Tolleson, 2B 38. Anderson Hidalgo, 3B 39. Loek Van Mil, RP 40. Joe Testa, RP |