1) I almost signed out of high school as a 3rd basemen. I ‘luckily’ had my arm broken by a ‘friend’ after being HBP. I ended up at Yavapai JC for 1 year instead.

2) Shonda and I have moved over 40 times, I have moved over 50, since my career started.

3) The 1 year I spent at Yavapai JC was one of my top 5 teams of all time. Definitely one of the funnest years of my life.

4) My top teammates (not all inclusive) list would start with a few names: Doug Mirabelli, Craig Counsell, Gabe Kapler, David West, Kevin Jordan, Pete Harnish, Bob Milacki, Ben McDonald, Brady Anderson, Todd Pratt, Jason Varitek, Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, Mike Lowell, David Ortiz, Bill Mueller, Dustin Pedroia, Jeff Bagwell, Ken Caminiti, Greg Swindell, Dan Plesac, Brandon Webb, Todd Stottlemyre, Greg Colbrunn, Tony Womack, Mickey Morandini, Lenny Dykstra, Dave Hollins. Many more but that’s where it would start

5) Most incredible win I’ve ever been a part of? Elimination game to go to the JC World Series. Brian Deak hit a 2 run HR with 2 outs, bottom of the ninth, down 1 vs. Pima CC.

Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS-Knowing that game was over from about the 3rd inning on and that I was part of a team that had done something that no other team in baseball history had accomplished

Game 7 of the 2001 World Series. From World Series Goat to World Champion in about 3 minutes…

6) Most heart wrenching loss? PV East LL Championship game to go to LL World Series. 2 outs, bottom of the 7th, up 1, bases loaded. Ground ball to me, throw home for first out, throw to first is overthrown when runner slides into Mike Niles, our catcher, ball sails into Right Field and Dan Hale, the opposing pitcher, scores all the way from first to eliminate us…

Losing 5-4 to the Mets, in 1998 I think, after entering the 9th with a 4 hit shutout. I gave up ALL 5 RUNS in the bottom of the night to lose the game. Jon Olerud came up with 2 outs, bases loaded, Lieberthal comes out, asks me what I want to throw, I reply “I have nothing to make him swing and miss, so I don’t care, I’ll throw what you put down”, a fast ball away later, game over. First pitcher in like 50 years to blow that sort of lead on my own… So proud!

Game 5 of the 2001 World Series. Just couldn’t believe BK could have that happen 2 nights in a row.

7) Most dominating offensive player I ever played with? Manny Ramirez, not even a close second

Most dominating offensive Season I ever watched in person? Either Luis Gonzales in 2001 or David in 2004. Luis’ April was the most dominating month I have ever seen. David had a year that will be hard to match as far as clutch goes.

9) Most dominating pitcher and season? Same guy. RJ in 2001 and 2002 outlined HOF to me. Every 5th day I was on the edge of my seat not able to comprehend what I might see. His 20k night was incredible, made more incredible by him getting a No-Decision. Made worse by the fact I had to go out and try and top whatever he did the next day.

9a) Most dominating post season by a pitcher? Keith Foulke in 2004. I still think it’s the most underrated performance in history. He was the MVP of every single series in our minds, hands down. Took the ball every night and did it as well as humanly possible.

10) Best “Team” I ever played on? 1993 Phillies or the 2004 Sox. Both teams came to the park and knew we were going to win. The 93 team had more swagger than any team I was ever part of. The 04 team took on an “Us against the world” mentality and honestly used it for the entire season.

11) Hitters I hated to face: Mark Lemke, Delino Deshields, Lance Berkman, Todd Helton

12) Hitters I didn’t mind seeing at the plate: Andres Galaragga, Todd Hollandsworth, Craig Biggio, Jeff Bagwell, Gonzo, Sosa, McGwire, Bonds

13) Players I want my sons to emulate: Scott Rolen, Jason Varitek, Bill Mueller, Craig Counsell, David Eckstein

14) Favorite Coaches: Brian Butterfield (all time favorite) Johnny Podres, Robin Yount, Jim Presley, Dale Sveum, Terry Francona, Dave Wallace, Mark Connor, Bob Welch, John Vuckovich (my 2nd dad), Art Howe, Bob Cluck, Demarlo Hale, Dave Magadan, Bob Melvin, Chuck Cottier, Dave Dangler, Mike McQuaid, Walt Mcconnell, Dick Bosman, Bill Lemoncelli, Dick Beradino. There’s more but all I can name right now (And HOLY CRAP! I left off one that would no doubt be in my all time top 5, hands down! John Farrell!! Sorry Shre…. Err John!)….

15) I started carrying a laptop in the early 90s, before it was ‘in’, and got no shortage of stares from Macho Row.

16) I left for the ballpark exactly 6 hours before the first pitch of any game I pitched. I started pre-game warm ups/stretching exactly 2 hours and 30 minutes before the first pitch. Dugout 55 minutes before. Bullpen 38 minutes before. Sprints 25 minutes before and first toss at 20 minutes before every game I started the past 15 years.

17) I have never been more focused or locked in than the 2001 post season.

18) The Cards/Dbacks NLDS is, imo, one of the most overlooked and underrated post season series ever.

19) After 216 wins, 11 more in October, the game I for some reason am most proud of is the 2007 start in Oakland. After all the hub-bub over losing the no-no with 2 outs in the ninth I didn’t care. I’d started a game on the heels of a 4 game losing streak, and thrown a shut out. That was far more important to me than anything. I think it had to do with how hard that entire year was, how hard each start was to just get to the mound.

20) My most memorable inning? Two really. 1) The ninth inning of game 1 of the NLDS, having to get three outs in game 1 to win 1-0. Watching Edmonds ground out to Gracie and squeezing the life out of him. 2) Bottom of the 5th inning, I think it was 1997. Facing Kevin Brown in Philadelphia. My first ‘tie my shoes’ moment. I walked the bases loaded on about 11 strikes thanks to Gary Darling going temporarily blind. I stepped off the mound and bent over to tie my shoes. I said to myself “Self, you have two options, throw in the towel and piss this one away (because Brown was just filthy that year) or nut up, focus and empty the tank right here, right now.” I went 3-0 on the next three hitters, K’d Hundley, K’d Hollandsworth and Beltre grounded out to end the inning. We scored 6 in the top of the next inning to rout them. I started using ‘tie my shoe’ moments from that day on to compose myself.

You don’t think you ’should’ be a role model? You don’t think you ‘owe’ anything to anyone? You don’t think you ’should’ or ‘have to’ give back?

Really?

Hey, pro, don’t want to be a role model? It’s not your choice.
by Rick Reilly

This is a story I want to tell ALL athletes who think that what they do, how they act, the little kindnesses they give or withhold from fans don’t matter.

It’ll take only a minute. …

To read the entire story, click here.

People get upset when I re-post stuff I receive. Sometimes though I like the stuff too much not to post it. Such is the case with this one, and I am pretty sure not many can disagree with the message …

545 PEOPLE
By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.
Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY
do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we
have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The President does. You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does. You and I don’t write the tax
code, Congress does. You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does. You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president, and nine Supreme Court justices 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the
Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a
federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority.
They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a president to do one cotton-picking
thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to
accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to
determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their
fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal
human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The president can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of
the House? The leader of the majority party. He/She and fellow House members, not the president,
can approve any budget they want. If the president vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they
agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million can not replace 545 people who stand
convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single
domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain
truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what
exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in IRAQ , it’s because they want them in IRAQ.

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people,
it’s because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can
abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the
power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into
the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like ‘the economy,’ ‘inflation,’ or ‘politics’
that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses

Charlie Reese is a former columnist of the Orlando Sentinel Newspaper.

What you do with this article now that you have read it is up to you, though you appear to have
several choices.
1. You can send this to everyone in your address book, and hope’ they’ do something about it.
2. You can agree to ‘vote against’ everyone that is currently in office, knowing that the process
will take several years.
3. You can decide to ‘run for office’ yourself and agree to do the job properly.
4. Lastly, you can sit back and do nothing, or re-elect the current bunch.

Peter Gammons and a few other sports writers have dug up an old SI article, written almost 40 years ago, that hopefully sheds some light on our ‘new phenomenon’ known as PED usage. This absolves no one, no one, and doesn’t make excuses for anything, but I think it also sheds some light on things we’d all like to believe aren’t true.

This is not a new issue or one our generation has created. It’s been a part of our culture and our society far longer than many would like to believe.

You can read it here…

Important note!!! I wanted to post this link for anyone wanting to help raise money for a very cool charity here in Massachusetts. Thanks in advance to anyone that donates or participates.

When you see a signing like this you can’t help but think where the game must be economically.

Not that we don’t already know it’s just a staggeringly bad time for this country but a signing like this, on this date, is a clear indication of how far things have gone.

Brian Butterfield, in addition to being a dear friend and one of my favorite coaches of all time, knows baseball. When Orlando was first in Toronto I asked Butter about most of their players, often more than once. Over the course of the season Orlando was a guy Butter thought highly of, and as the season went on, that opinion rose.

Described as a defensive ‘game changer’ Orlando brought a swagger and a chatterbox to the field not many young players did. As a pitcher I won’t lie, it was annoying, but the kid played, played hard, and was damn good to boot.

This, and there will be a few others, signing is one that won’t get the ink it should, but could have a very significant impact on the NL West this season. A division that is already very tight can swing with the signing of just one player, especially one of Orlando’s caliber.

In 2000, I was playing in Arizona with the Diamondbacks. Around those parts it’s no mystery that one Pedro Gomez and I didn’t really like each other. I thought very little of a man who so calmly, and happily, wrote articles that could only be labeled character assassinations.

I cannot seem to find the archived article, but here is a link to a story in the LA Times that referenced one example, this one about my manager at the time, Buck Showalter.

I took issue with the piece due to the immense number of flat-out lies in it. First off, we weren’t required to wear our socks with the “A” showing. We did fraternize with opposing players before games. Buck didn’t do much of the stuff Pedro claimed at the time the article was written. The article alleged some off-the-field personal conduct issues that Pedro had ‘heard’ about. This made him, in my mind, one of the worst forms of life in the media, someone who used his pen to settle a personal score. After the article was written, I vividly remember walking out of the clubhouse and seeing Buck’s daughter in tears after that game.

So I ‘talked’ to him about it and we agreed we just didn’t like each other. Much like CHB, he made reference to the fact that he’d written ‘nice things’ about me when I was traded to Arizona, as if that made it all OK, and that he should be able to slander teammates and coaches I played with because of it.

Now Buck was no saint. He’ll admit that, and all that goes with that. But I loved playing for him. He was always prepared and never out-managed in a game.

I bring all this up to make sure people understand that Pedro and I have never been real friends.

Why write this now? Here’s why. I am reading ESPN tonight and I happen to see that he’s actually written something someone there deems worthy of print. It’s on A-Rod (surprise), and deep in the article is this comment…. Read the rest of this entry »

A Friend of mine, one educated and versed in finance, someone who appears regularly on investment programs across many channels, forwarded me this. It’s not to flame or incite a riot, but to continue discussions on both perspectives of this Stimulus bill that has polarized so many.

So Much For Hope Over Fear

By Charles Krauthammer
“A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.”
– President Obama, Feb. 4.

WASHINGTON — Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared “we have chosen hope over fear.” Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn’t understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He’d been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he’s not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don’t get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.

At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal’s private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he’d come to Washington to upend.

And yet more damaging to Obama’s image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama’s name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’ own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new — a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the “fierce urgency of now” includes $150 million for livestock insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports The Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting “planted” for “ready to market” would mean a windfall garnered from a new “bonus depreciation” incentive.

After Obama’s miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell — and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

Published in the NYT in 2006. For those not aware, the NYT is purportedly a ‘left wing’ mouthpiece that has never had issues reporting ‘facts’ that aren’t, as facts. That’s my take on what I’ve read and heard, as I’ve never been an avid reader of the paper simply because I know the ’sports’ news it prints is generally made up of 2% fact, and 98% opinion.

Bogus Bush Bashing

I found this an interesting take from someone living in another country. Agree or disagree it’s a different perspective on this nation and our new President.

The night we waved goodbye to America. . . our last best hope on Earth
London Daily Mail
Peter Hitchens
10 November 2008

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernize Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilization. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

It already has all the signs of such a thing. The newspapers which recorded Obama’s victory have become valuable relics. You may buy Obama picture books and Obama calendars and if there isn’t yet a children’s picture version of his story, there soon will be.

Proper books, recording his sordid associates, his cowardly voting record, his astonishingly militant commitment to unrestricted abortion and his blundering trip to Africa, are little-read and hard to find.

If you can believe that this undistinguished and conventionally Left-wing machine politician is a sort of secular saviour, then you can believe anything. He plainly doesn’t believe it himself. His cliche-stuffed, PC clunker of an acceptance speech suffered badly from nerves. It was what you would expect from someone who knew he’d promised too much and that from now on the easy bit was over.

He needn’t worry too much. From now on, the rough boys and girls of America’s Democratic Party apparatus, many recycled from Bill Clinton’s stained and crumpled entourage, will crowd round him, to collect the rich spoils of his victory and also tell him what to do, which is what he is used to.

Just look at his sermon by the shores of Lake Michigan. He really did talk about a ‘new dawn’, and a ‘timeless creed’ (which was ‘yes, we can’). He proclaimed that ‘change has come’. He revealed that, despite having edited the Harvard Law Review, he doesn’t know what ‘enormity’ means. He reached depths of oratorical drivel never even plumbed by our own Mr Blair, burbling about putting our hands on the arc of history (or was it the ark of history?) and bending it once more toward the hope of a better day (Don’t try this at home).

I am not making this up. No wonder that awful old hack Jesse Jackson sobbed as he watched. How he must wish he, too, could get away with this sort of stuff.

And it was interesting how the President-elect failed to lift his admiring audience by repeated – but rather hesitant – invocations of the brainless slogan he was forced by his minders to adopt against his will – ‘Yes, we can’. They were supposed to thunder ‘Yes, we can!’ back at him, but they just wouldn’t join in. No wonder. Yes we can what exactly? Go home and keep a close eye on the tax rate, is my advice. He’d have been better off bursting into ‘I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony’ which contains roughly the same message and might have attracted some valuable commercial sponsorship.

Perhaps, being a Chicago crowd, they knew some of the things that 52.5 per cent of America prefers not to know. They know Obama is the obedient servant of one of the most squalid and unshakeable political machines in America. They know that one of his alarmingly close associates, a state-subsidised slum landlord called Tony Rezko, has been convicted on fraud and corruption charges.

They also know the US is just as segregated as it was before Martin Luther King – in schools, streets, neighbourhoods, holidays, even in its TV-watching habits and its choice of fast-food joint. The difference is that it is now done by unspoken agreement rather than by law.

If Mr Obama’s election had threatened any of that, his feel-good white supporters would have scuttled off and voted for John McCain, or practically anyone. But it doesn’t. Mr Obama, thanks mainly to the now-departed grandmother he alternately praised as a saint and denounced as a racial bigot, has the huge advantages of an expensive private education. He did not have to grow up in the badlands of useless schools, shattered families and gangs which are the lot of so many young black men of his generation.

If the nonsensical claims made for this election were true, then every positive discrimination programme aimed at helping black people into jobs they otherwise wouldn’t get should be abandoned forthwith. Nothing of the kind will happen. On the contrary, there will probably be more of them.

And if those who voted for Obama were all proving their anti-racist nobility, that presumably means that those many millions who didn’t vote for him were proving themselves to be hopeless bigots. This is obviously untrue.
barack obama

Yes we can what?: Barack Obama ran on the ticket of change

I was in Washington DC the night of the election. America’s beautiful capital has a sad secret. It is perhaps the most racially divided city in the world, with 15th Street – which runs due north from the White House – the unofficial frontier between black and white. But, like so much of America, it also now has a new division, and one which is in many ways much more important. I had attended an election-night party in a smart and liberal white area, but was staying the night less than a mile away on the edge of a suburb where Spanish is spoken as much as English, plus a smattering of tongues from such places as Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan.

As I walked, I crossed another of Washington’s secret frontiers. There had been a few white people blowing car horns and shouting, as the result became clear. But among the Mexicans, Salvadorans and the other Third World nationalities, there was something like ecstasy.

They grasped the real significance of this moment. They knew it meant that America had finally switched sides in a global cultural war. Forget the Cold War, or even the Iraq War. The United States, having for the most part a deeply conservative people, had until now just about stood out against many of the mistakes which have ruined so much of the rest of the world.

Suspicious of welfare addiction, feeble justice and high taxes, totally committed to preserving its own national sovereignty, unabashedly Christian in a world part secular and part Muslim, suspicious of the Great Global Warming panic, it was unique.

These strengths had been fading for some time, mainly due to poorly controlled mass immigration and to the march of political correctness. They had also been weakened by the failure of America’s conservative party – the Republicans – to fight on the cultural and moral fronts.

They preferred to posture on the world stage. Scared of confronting Left-wing teachers and sexual revolutionaries at home, they could order soldiers to be brave on their behalf in far-off deserts. And now the US, like Britain before it, has begun the long slow descent into the Third World. How sad. Where now is our last best hope on Earth?

I was also forwarded a quote I found a bit more than disturbing.

“Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism”
Karl Marx from “Das Kapital”
1867

He sure as hell wasn’t apologizing my way, or even considering my opinion, but I sincerely appreciate that Alex, unlike so many others, stood up and held himself accountable for his actions.

It doesn’t make him any less guilty, any less accountable or any less of a Yankee (subtle Yankee jab) but it’s refreshing as hell to see someone say “I f’d up, I made a mistake and I’ll have to deal with it”. He’s fricking human, he made a horrible choice and he’ll have to deal with it.

Do whatever you want, speculate on whatever you want but the guy ‘manned up’, admitted his mistake, that’s enough for me. Nothing we can do about it at this point but move on as fans and players.

I still believe the names of all the positives should be released. That the media chose to only ‘out’ him is a crime in and of itself.

I also believe someone, or many someone’s at the MLBPA should be fired , right now, today, for failure to follow the protocols and procedures outlined in the testing agreement. Same for the MLB offices.

And if it is true, and someone or more than someone at the MLBPA was giving advance notice to players of testing, that in and of itself should cost them their jobs.

This whole situation stinks to high heaven but it’s completely wrong that one guy is being held out there for everyone to pencil whip, flat out wrong.