Ah, spring training, season of news
Newcomer Vidro in for tough assignment
The team’s bringing in all kinds of people to talk to Vidro. Including Edgar! Sort of!
What horrors await Vidro as DH?
“It’s something where Jose is going to have to find what works for him,” Mariners manager Mike Hargrove said. “You see some guys who sit on a bench, other guys who ride the bike the whole time and then they’re too tired when they have to go hit.”
But Hargrove quickly added: “Jose has been a good hitter for a number of years, and cream rises to the top.”
So Jose Vidro is a congealed dairy product. Awesome.
Have I mentioned lately how awesome it is, as an angry M’s fan, to have Hargrove regularly quoted in news stories? I don’t even have to write a joke there. Hargove statements are self-contained jokes-with-punchline. All you have to do is laugh.
I do have a question, though, related to that.
If cream rises to the top, how come you’re possibly the worst active manager and you haven’t been displaced by someone better?
Anyway, yeah yeah yeah, he used to hit, he was injured, everyone thinks he’ll be awesome. We’ll see, obviously. We hope for success.
Baker, 2: Ichiro passed his physical! And Mike Hargrove’s pondering what he’ll say to the team next Tuesday!
“We did a lot right all year except for 11 days,” he said, referring to an 11-game losing streak that sank Seattle’s hopes in August. “A lot of good things happened here last year that obviously were overshadowed by 11 days we spent on that road trip.
“But last year was a good season for us.”
Bwahahahhahahahahaha. Ooooh, Mike, you kidder.
Believe me, the guy on the mound isn’t running through his K/AB ratio or his VORP at a time like that. And it’s that type of psychological edge that doesn’t show up on paper. I agree that Sexson is too inconsistent at times and strikes out in some key situations. But every successful team needs his fear factor in the lineup. Try to replace it with a platoon of less-feared guys and chances are the other hitters in the lineup would suffer.
Soooooooo…. I can’t let that go by.
You know what teams need? Tall guys. Tall guys give the team an intimidating appearance, and pitchers can’t look down on them. It rattles them. I agree that talent’s important, but teams need to be tall. Try and replace tall guys with shorter guys, and production drops. Maybe not in any way you can measure, and it might even go up, but the tallness factor is there, and it’s real.
And hard-to-pronounce names. If a batter’s name is too hard to pronounce in the prep meetings, a lot of teams just skip them. It’s why some of the best hitters have strange names. Teams need to make sure that they have a couple of guys in the lineup with crazy names to force the other team to expend more effort. Now, I know you’re thinking “You’re just saying that because your last name is Zumsteg” or “I’ve looked at this, and that’s just not true,” but while it may not show up in the statistics, or win column, or production, there it is.
Also, sunglasses. The sunglasses a lineup wear have to be balanced. You want at least two, three guys in full wraparounds, and two or more without any sunglasses at all. You need to mix it up, but keep the intimidation. On average, you want one lens per batter, which is tough with nine in the lineup. And you can’t have guys with monocles up there, don’t talk crazy.
The PI writes about Brandon Morrow. You may remember Morrow from the hilarious “AP writes story about Morrow not pitching, we post story, he immediately throws two innings” post back on 7/28. Ahh, memories.
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Cream rises to the top of milk, but decaying gas-bloated pigeon carcasses rise to the top of cream. The author of the original cliche’ assumed that people were smart enough to remove the dead pigeons from their drinks. Oh, if only he were alive to see us now.
Bill Stoneman is on KOMO right now