Hey, look another Nick Lowe group! I could do this all week folks.
(4 votes, average: 8.75 out of 10)
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Continue reading Off-Season’s Greetings: Games of January 24
Date: Monday, August 5.
Batting stars: Doug Mientkiewicz was 2-for-2 with a double. A. J. Pierzynski was 2-for-4 with a double. Cristian Guzman was 2-for-4.
Pitching star: Bob Wells pitched a scoreless inning.
Opposition stars: Carlos Febles was 4-for-5 with two doubles, scoring three runs. Neifi Perez was 3-for-5 with a double and three runs. Brent Mayne was 3-for-5 with a double and three runs.
The game: The Twins scored first, getting a run in the second on a Denny Hocking sacrifice fly. The Royals came back with two in the third, starting the inning with a Perez single, a Mayne double, and a Febles single to take a 2-1 lead. Kansas City added two more in the fifth on doubled by Perez and Febles and singles by Aaron Guiel and Luis Alicea. They put the game away in the sixth, getting five singles and a three-run homer by Alicea. That made the score 9-1. The Twins cut it to 9-4 after seven, but the Royals got the three runs back in the eighth.
WP: Shawn Sedlacek (2-2). LP: Joe Mays (1-3). S: None.
Notes: Hocking was at third base in place of Corey Koskie. He went 0-for-3 with a sacrifice fly.
Torii Hunter was 0-for-3 with a walk to drop his average to .314.
Bobby Kielty was 0-for-3 with a sacrifice fly to make his average .311.
Pierzynski raised his average to .310.
Twins starter Mays pitched 5.2 innings and was charged with eight runs on twelve hits and no walks, striking out one.
Kevin Frederick gave up three runs in 1.1 innings, raising his ERA from 2.70 to 5.63.
The bottom three batters in the Kansas City lineup went 10-for-15 with four doubles and scored nine runs.
Kansas City starter Sedlacek pitched 6.1 innings, giving up four runs on eight hits and five walks and striking out two.
After three frustrating one-run losses, two of them in extra innings, one assumes this game must have felt pretty good for the Royals.
This was the only season Shawn Sedlacek had in the major leagues. For some reason I remember him--maybe it's because I know some people named Sedlacek. He was born in Cedar Rapids, went to Iowa State, and was drafted by the Royals in the fourteenth round in 1998. He made fourteen starts. Four of the first six were fairly good, but the last of those was July 20. He would win one more game, on August 20 against the Blue Jays, and it was a game kind of like this one--not good, but not so awful that his team couldn't overcome it. He's the sort of pitcher that a bad team, which Kansas City was in 2002, tends to have--a guy who's decent at AAA (6-5, 3.70), and since the team has holes in its rotation, they decide to bring him up and see what he can do. Unfortunately, what he could do was not much, and 2002 was the only year he was even decent at AAA. His lifetime AAA numbers were 26-31, 5.19, 1.46 WHIP. He really wasn't even all that good at AA: 24-17, 4.05, 1.32 WHIP. He left the Royals after the 2003 season. He was in the Cubs and Mets organizations in 2004, with Baltimore, Colorado, and St. Louis in 2005, and also played in the Northern League in 2005. There was obviously something people liked about him, that so many teams gave him a shot, but I don't know what it might have been other than the fact that he didn't walk very many people. Maybe it's just that he's a good guy--he and his wife live in Overland Park, Kansas, and have done a lot of work with Royals Charities. He had his own baseball instructional company, Sed Sports, before joining with Matt Williams and ex-Twin Todd Sears to form Complete Game Baseball, which also gives baseball instruction as well as sponsoring teams and leagues.
Record: The Twins were 69-44, in first place, leading Chicago by sixteen games.
Just a little classic Senagalese reggae to jump start your morning.
(5 votes, average: 8.80 out of 10)Loading... It creeps up every year or so; I've had it for about a week. Help.
Danny Richardson (1863)
Les Nunamaker (1889)
Kenichi Zenimura (1900)
Ernie Harwell (1918)
Bill Lucas (1936)
Jake O’Donnell (1939)
Wally Bunker (1945)
Vern Ruhle (1951)
Kerry Taylor (1971)
Dan Serafini (1974)
Kenichi Zenimura was a long-time player and manager in Japan as well as an ambassador of the game of baseball. He helped organize Babe Ruth's tour of Japan in 1934 and is known as the Father of Japanese Baseball.
Ernie Harwell was a major league baseball broadcaster from 1948-1991 and 1993-2002, mostly for the Detroit Tigers.
Bill Lucas was the first African-American general manager, holding the position for the Atlanta Braves from 1976-1979.
Better known as an NBA referee, Jake O’Donnell was an American League umpire from 1969-1972. He is the only person to have officiated both an NBA all-star game and a major league baseball all-star game.
I’ve had a nagging case of Achilles tendonitis for some time. High impact activities like running were strongly discouraged at the initial diagnosis. However, I’ve been staying off of it for a long time now, and though I admittedly could do a better job of daily stretching, I feel like I could conceivably try some light jogging again.
I tried biking for a little while. It was all right, especially out on the trails, but I think I’d need a much higher priced piece of hardware to enjoy it properly. Seems cheaper to invest in some decent running shoes with better support*. Also, some good insoles. And compression socks. And ankle braces. Going to have to start suiting up for battle to get a little exercise.
*On that topic, I want to invest in some shoes with better arch support and the like. I had always just used whatever cheap running shoe they had at Costco, but that likely helped lead to the injury. Any recommendations? A couple different places recommended these, but I’m open to suggestion (more likely to be used for light trail running, but not exclusively). I’d even entertain the notion of a custom job if it isn’t ridiculously expensive.
RIP Ursula K. Le Guin
Maybe this is why some of you got snow and some of you didn't:
Razor's Edge: Incredibly sharp snowfall cutoff clearly visible from space via NASA MODIS Terra image. (corrected map labels) #mnwx pic.twitter.com/cwiKAOAgAv
— MPR Weather (@MPRweather) January 24, 2018
Date: Sunday, August 4.
Batting stars: Luis Rivas was 2-for-3 with a two-run homer, his third. Doug Mientkiewicz was 2-for-5. Torii Hunter was 2-for-5.
Pitching stars: LaTroy Hawkins pitched two shutout innings, giving up one hit. J. C. Romero pitched a scoreless inning, giving up one walk.
Opposition stars: Carlos Beltran was 3-for-5 with a home run (his nineteenth) and a stolen base (his twenty-seventh). Michael Tucker was 2-for-2 with a triple, a double, three walks, and a stolen base, his seventeenth. Aaron Guiel was 2-for-2 with a double and a hit-by-pitch.
The game: Beltran hit an inside-the-park home run in the first to give the Royals a 1-0 lead. The Twins took the lead 2-1 in the third on Rivas' two-run homer. Kansas City went back in front in the fourth when Joe Randa singled, Tucker tripled, and Chan Perry singled. Mientkiewicz delivered an RBI single in the bottom of the fourth to tie it 3-3. It stayed 3-3 until the seventh, when A. J. Hinch singled and scored from first on a Guiel double. In the bottom of the ninth Corey Koskie led off with a walk, but was thrown out trying to score from a first on a Rivas single to center. Rivas took second on the play, however, and scored on an infield single-plus-error by Jacque Jones to tie it 4-4. The Royals opened the tenth with two walks and drew another walk with two out to load the bases, but Guiel grounded out to end the inning. In the bottom of the tenth, Hunter and David Ortiz led off with singles and Dustan Mohr walked to load the bases with none out. Jason Grimsley came on to strike out Mientkiewicz, but Koskie grounded to first base. Perry tried to touch first and then throw home for the double play, but Hunter beat the throw for the winning run.
WP: Romero (7-1). LP: Scott Mullen (3-3). S: None.
Notes: Michael Cuddyer started at third in place of Koskie and went 0-for-3. Koskie came in as a pinch-hitter in the ninth.
Tom Prince started at catcher and went 1-for-2 with a walk. A. J. Pierzynski came in as a pinch-hitter in the ninth.
Hunter raised his average to .316.
Twins starter Kyle Lohse pitched six innings, giving up four runs on seven hits and three walks and striking out four.
Hawkins lowered his ERA to 1.49.
Romero lowered his ERA to 1.80.
Rivas hit his second home run in as many days. He had only one before these two games and would end the season with four.
What a frustrating series this had to be for the Royals. Swept in a three-game series with each game decided by one run and two of them in extra innings.
This was one of five games in which Chan Perry played in 2002. He had played thirteen for Cleveland in 2000. He was 1-for-14 in 2000 and 1-for-11 in 2002, making him 2-for-25 (.080) for his career. He had no extra base hits and did not draw any walks, so his career line is .080/.080/.080. His AAA numbers were decent but nothing special: .280/.326/.419. He was primarily a first baseman but played a fair number of games in the outfield and a handful at third base.
We hope to return with real player profiles in a couple of days.
Record: The Twins were 69-43, in first place, leading Chicago by seventeen games.
