Eric Gagne has given up a run every day since Wednesday. Is it time to panic?
Two left-handers are the front-runners for the AL Cy Young Award. Only one should be. Joe Sheehan praises the pitcher who slapped down his team in Prospectus Today.
The Astros have been the dominant team in 11-year history of the NL Central. Their collapse this season, however, is the final blow to an aging roster that needs to be rehauled. Joe Sheehan examines what went wrong in ’04.
The wild-card races have reached a boiling point, but there’s something being lost in the steam. Joe Sheehan points out the missing elements in today’s column.
On Thursday, five pitchers who couldn’t do anything right last season put Ws next to their names. What does this say about hurlers as a species? Joe Sheehan throws up his hands in today’s column.
In a year of surprising contenders, perhaps the best story is happening in Cleveland, where the Indians are just three games back with under 50 games to go. How did it happen, and can they stay with the Twins?
Noah Lowry, with a 2.43 ERA in four starts, is trying to follow in the footsteps of a number of rookie starters who’ve helped their teams get to the playoffs. Here are the most recent ones.
Larry Walker finally accepted a trade, in another Walt Jocketty Summertime Special. The Blue Jays also made a deal, giving up on The Last BP Cover Boy. It was a player who’s never been traded, though, who owned the weekend.
The insider set ranted and raved over the weekend about how Hee Seop Choi was a guy who couldn’t handle good pitching. How much truth is in that statement? Joe Sheehan and Keith Woolner present some information.
With no trades and just two games yesterday, Joe Sheehan pauses to catch up on some things. Notes on the Rangers, Barry Bonds and Terry Ryan inside.
In a wild weekend of trades, a number of contending teams sat on their hands. Why, and what might change for them in August, in Joe Sheehan’s Monday morning column.
One young-gun GM made his team better this weekend by focusing on what matters. Another made his team worse by losing sight of the same. Those two teams’ deals, and all the rest of the trades, inside.
The Dodgers made big headlines and the Mets made big mistakes, but the real winners on Friday were two teams you’d never expect. Joe Sheehan covers a busy day of trades.
Do you think Jack McKeon gives Larry Bowa his ass back after the Marlins play
the Phillies, or do you think he just keeps it all the time?
Maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to get the same sense about this year’s
trade deadline that I used to get at parties in college around 12:30 or so.
The night would start with such great anticipation, thinking there’d be some
good hooking up, what with all the talent in the room. As the night wore on,
though, it would became clear that nothing was going to happen, and
anticipation would slowly become frustration and then desperation. Eventually,
I’d just go home, feeling like I’d wasted an awful lot of energy for nothing.
(I’d extend the analogy by comparing, say, Brian Cashman and some girl I
wanted to know better back in 1993, but you just know her husband would be
reading this and I’d get sued.)
So why is this July turning into a bad re-creation of my college days? Blame
it on everyone and everything…
Maybe it’s never going to end.
Maybe, in the winter of 1990, in the back room of a bar just outside of the
city limits, Bobby Cox and John Schuerholz sat down and made a deal, never
quite noticing that their co-conspirator had a tail and lit their cigars by
snapping his fingers. (“Ultra-small lighter from Japan,” he
claimed.)
Maybe the Atlanta Braves are going to make every postseason from now until the
Rapture.
I wrote the Braves off this season, figuring that the cumulative talent drain
since the end of 2002, coupled with the improvement by the Phillies, was
finally going to be too much. It was an amazing run, winning a division title
in 12 straight completed seasons, but all good things had to come to an end.
They’d turned over an entire rotation in two years, never really solved the
corner infield problems that had plagued them since moving Chipper
Jones to the outfield, and watched two of the five best players in
the NL last year move to the AL East. Their corporate ownership continued to
Wal-Mart the payroll, and the farm system wasn’t nearly as productive as it
had been in the 1990s.
I was working with incomplete information. I didn’t know about the 1990
meeting, and a contract signed with an all-too-warm pen, and the eventual
destination of two souls.