Putz to be ready for opening day, plus drugs and gambling
Times notebook says Putz will be ready for the start of the season.
The PI has a whole article on lottery tickets with the M’s logo.
The new ticket, which costs $5, has more than $1.4 million in $25 and $50 prizes and a top prize of $50,000. The game also has a feature for non-winning tickets. They can be entered to win several prizes, including Mariners paraphernalia, a trip for two to spring training next year or a pair of 2008 lower-box season tickets.
You can’t, however, bet on sports in this state (though the PI relates this season’s odds and provides a handy pointer to bodog). Or play poker online. Or… but I digress.
Proceeds from the lottery go “largely toward construction projects for the state’s K-12 schools” where they’re not doing a good enough job educating kids that they stop playing the lottery.
Baker makes a huge leap while trying to make a point about the evils of major league steroid use, going from minor leaguer Chris Minaker’s sociology paper on what influences college players to use supplements (teammates and coaches, who tout performance gain) to Minaker’s acknowledgement that
“The supplement culture has become completely intertwined with the culture of collegiate sports, just as it had before with professional sports. There has been a trickle-down effect from professional sports right on down to the ranks of all athletic levels.”
to Baker’s assertion that
The last thing Major League Baseball wants is a minor-leaguer writing that college-level players are, at best, being influenced by their perceptions about big-leaguers or, at worst, copying them
Except that there’s really no Minaker evidence that either of those are true – they’re being influenced by their peers and coaches. As a whole, he argues collegiate sports are influenced by weight lifting and supplement use, which took off for baseball in the late 1980s. There’s no assertion here that players are being influenced by their perceptions about big-leaguers, much less copying them in the way implied here (“Player X is on steroids, I should too!”)
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16 Responses to “Putz to be ready for opening day, plus drugs and gambling”
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Derek,
If you are posting at 2 in the morning you need think about priorities. I may be reading but it is 6:12 PM here in Taiwan. Get some sleep.
David
All I have to say is that Chris Minaker sounds like one smart son of a bitch. If he never makes it in the majors, you should get him to come blog.
Or get him to blog now. Athletics Nation has an MiLBer blogging for them, why can’t USSM be more like AN? 🙂
Re: Putz. I hope he’s okay, or the M’s will be in trouble. I wonder if Putz goes down, will Hargrove say to himself: “Hey, let me see if this Morrow kid can be a closer!”
Baker addresses the Morrow to pen story in his blog, McGrath talks to Jamie Burke.
oh, and the Post’s Joel Sherman is bored with Spring, and so projects the upcoming season, including the firing of Hargrove and July Ichiro! buzzzz … and the promotion of Andrew Miller mid-year to Indians closer 🙂
Ugh. I hate the lottery.
you’re just bitter because you’ve never won the lottery.
#5. Thanks for the linky-dinky to the Baker blog. Sounds like Morrow is going to be the closer for the start of the season.
um, huh?
I’ve got to assume louder meant to write Putz there instead of Morrow.
Athletics Nation has an MiLBer blogging for them, why can’t USSM be more like AN?
Because AN is devoted to following a team that consistently makes smart decisions and wins division titles. USSM… isn’t.
I beleive he was referring to the Baker Blog which suggests that while Putz may be ready to start the season, he isn’t ready to close out games and won’t be until around the time his velocity fully returns.
“Do you think anyone wants J.J. Putz out there protecting a one-run lead in the ninth next Tuesday?”
Yes, I’d like to see that, Geoff. I’d also like to see Morrow coming along as a starter which is more valuable than a closer regardless of the year.
Derek,
I just wanted to drop a line saying my copy of The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball just got delivered to my door, and I can’t wait to crack it open, and then drop a review onto amazon. Many thanks for what I’m sure will be a good read.
You know I had a teacher one year that all the students disliked. We gave them hell until they up and quit. I wonder, if everyone who had bad things to say about Hargrove, said them to him, he’d quit.
Minaker is definitely a smart kid. Great guy too.
Yeah, Minaker is a great guy. I have a friend that plays for his father’s baseball team here in Seattle, and he says that Chris stops by to help the guys and just talk to them too. He’s the kind of guy you really hope makes the Majors.
Yep, sounds like him. I used to play tennis with him back in high school. One of those crazy natural athletes who picked up a racquet and just started winning with no instruction or anything.