Mid-week news bonanza, feed reminder
First, a straight repeat reminder:
Come on out to sunny Peoria and meet two major league GMs March 3rd. Seattle Mariners GM Bill Bavasi and San Diego Padres GM Kevin Towers will talk and take questions from fans for a good 45 minutes, before seeing the two interleague rivals face off in a fierce spring training game at the Peoria Sports Complex. Afterwards, you can buy a signed copy of the newly updated, paperback version of Baseball Prospectus’ Baseball Between the Numbers
and chat with editor/co-author Jonah Keri or receive some kind of The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball promotional item from USSM author Derek Zumsteg. Game time is 1:05 p.m., and guests should plan to arrive NO LATER than 11:30 a.m. for pre-game festivities, to be held in the section where we’ll be sitting.
Cost is $21, which includes your ticket to the game and the money we have to pay TicketMaster to mail them to us so we can distribute them early.
RSVP by emailing to seattlefeed@yahoo.com. Please specify your full name and how many tickets you need. To ensure that we can secure/order a group of tickets all together, deadline to RSVP and pay for tickets will be Friday, Feb. 9. Once we’ve confirmed your RSVP by email, you can PayPal the funds, by no later than Friday, Feb. 9, to: derek@ussmariner.com
What else?
Lew Burdette passed away at 80. In The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, I wrote
Lew Burdette was the greatest spitballer of the 1950s. He debuted in 1950 but didn’t start pitching regularly until 1952 at the age of 23. Everyone accused Burdette of throwing the spitball because of the dramatic downward break he could get on a pitch, but he always denied it. When he hung up the spikes in 1967, he had won 203 games, gone to two All-Star games in 1957 and 1959, and in 1958 finished third in Cy Young voting.
Burdette would get good hitters to come up to the plate and stare at him, waiting for the spitball, watching strike after strike go past them, right over the plate, and then they’d go sit down, angry they hadn’t seen a spitter.
Burdette, like other great cheaters, helped force a rule change that prohibited pitchers from going to their mouth while on the mound. Burdette, like some of the other great trick pitchers, eventually did admit he’d been putting something on the ball, but not what he was accused of: “I wet my fingers by bringing them to my mouth once in a while like a lot of other pitchers do. It’s a nervous habit. But I go to my eyebrows a lot more, and that’s when my fingers get real wet. I’m a pretty good perspirer, one of the best, and the sweat runs down my forehead and soaks my eyebrows.â€
Aaron Harang signed a four-year, $36.5m deal with the Reds, avoiding arbitration.
Eric Byrnes got a one-year deal.
John D in comments pointed out that “What about some love for ex-M FELIX FERMIN? He just managed the DR to his 3rd Caribbean title.” Nice.
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14 Responses to “Mid-week news bonanza, feed reminder”
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Nobody rocked a baseball cap like Felix.
I’ll be flying into AZ that Saturday but I will just be getting there just in time for the game. However, I will have my camera, a Johjima shirt on and will be close to the M’s dugout.
Wish I could get there for the meet and greet.
Clint Nageotte should of had a chat with Burdette.
Tom House’s oft repeated line, “If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”
Nice info on El Gato. I liked the guy but he still didn’t make us forget Omar.
# 3, Right on! Clint should be able to throw the mother of all spit-balls. (Watch for a career resurrection.)
I can’t be sure about this, but I believe I was an eyewitness to Lew Burdette’s final appearance in professional baseball — and it was in a Seattle uniform!
The Angels sent Lew to the Seattle Angels in 1967 and he made one start that I witnessed, at Sick’s Stadium. I can’t remember who the Angels were playing — I seem to remember that it was on a Sunday — but I do remember that Lew didn’t make it out of the first inning and might not have retired a batter.
They hit his fastball, they hit his curve. He dropped to sidearm and they hit that, too. I was close enough to see the absolute frustration on his face. AFAIK he never pitched again.
#5– must have been hard knowing you were essentially a place-holder.
letters, we get letters!
“How is the Mariners pitching going to be in the next season? They didn’t keep Gil Meche, one of their premier pitchers. How is that going to affect the team?”
Perhaps the saddest thing you can say about the 2006 Mariners is that Gil Meche was, in fact, “one of their premier pitchers”. He was 2nd on the starting staff in ERA, 2nd on the team in wins, and led the team in games started (yes, I know those numbers don’t mean all that much, but still…).
I love the Bavasi quote on Meche: “There’s probably some fuse missing in his fusebox that makes it work for him on a consistent basis.”
“How is the Mariners pitching going to be in the next season? They didn’t keep Gil Meche, one of their premier pitchers. How is that going to affect the team?â€
Damnit woman, please warn me before I spew my beverage all over my monitor.
If I were a Yankees fan, I would love to see him pitching for the M’s as well. For different reasons than Dylan, though.
Shannon Stewart goes to the A’s, and Billy Beane says he’s not going anywhere. Sadly.
oh, and apparently Mike Hampton is still pitching.