The batting stance guy

After Mannys pinch hit Grand Slam, I was talking a bit of trash on facebook.  My buddy Yosh had this link posted on his status update.  This dude is hilarious and very talented.  He can imitate any player in MLB history.  Get through the first two minutes of the video and you will enjoy.  A true master piece for any baseball lover….Check it out below….

Independence day for Manny

4th of July we celebrate or nation becoming independent and escaping the rule of the British.  July 3rd, well this will be Manny Ramirez’s Independence Day from suspension.  Fifty games ago Manny tested positive for a banned substance.  The Dodgers were in first place sitting on a 20-8 record after setting an MLB record for most consecutive home game wins to start off a season.

When Dodger nation woke and saw that their star they welcomed with open arms cheated, hearts of the people that bleed Dodger Blue sank.  How could this be?  Why did he do this?  How selfish.  After the initial shock wore off, we started to question the team.

The Dodgers were 20-8 when they lost Manny.  They were 6.5 games ahead of the Giants leading the NL West.  After the news of Manny the Dodgers blew a lead to the Nat’s and lost their first home game.  Dodger’s fans were truly going to see what their team was made of.  What impact did Manny have on this young team?  Could they deal with being in the spot light? Could their bats hold up?  Could they maintain the lead in the west for the next fifty?  Who was going to be the person to step up?

Well, our questions have been answered.  Over the next forty-seven games the Dodgers went 27 and 20.  Yes that does look like a big drop off from the first 30 but the Dodgers still have the best record in baseball and they are winning the West by seven games over the Giants.  While Manny was gone the man who clearly stepped up the most was Juan Pierre.

He is neither Hispanic nor French.....I wonder where he got his name?

Juan clearly played as though each game was his last.  He was going to make the best of his playing time and it pulled the Dodgers through these last fifty.  The rest of our young lineup each had their moments as well in tight games.  The Dodgers have a record of 24-3 in one run games.  Most importantly we had a manager in the clubhouse who has been through this time and time again.  I am sure he is one of the biggest factors in helping the boys in blue keep their mojo.

Truly this young Dodger team proved they could pull their own weight while their slugger was going through hard times.  This was also a reflection of what Manny has taught this young team.  They listened to him and their bats held up through these fifty games.  The runs the Dodgers scored were virtually similar to when Manny was in the line up.  The only difference was they were playing mostly small ball.  The number of home runs was down but hits were up.  If anything gave in these fifty games it was streaky pitching towards the end of games.

So Friday Manny does come back to the Dodgers and is expected to start in left.  This will send Juan Pierre to the bench, but give Joe Torre a hot hitting bat in tight games for pinch hit situations.  I have a feeling Torre will rotate the outfield with days off and we will probably see Pierre play two to three times a week.  Manny’s return could not come at a better time.  We are getting ready to head east to play the Mets.  To make things better the Dodgers bats have cooled off a bit.  In the last ten games the Dodgers are 5-5.  To have a bat like Manny in the line up will for sure help us.

What Manny did was wrong and it was cheating.  As a Dodger fan I was truly disappointed in him.  Yet I will still cheer him on and even more I still want him on my team.  He has been a Kobe Bryant figure to this young team.  Manny, like Kobe coaches his teammates.  He has taught them all his hitting tricks, how to set up pitchers, and what to look for if a pitcher tips his pitches off.  He has been Don Mattingly’s assistant.

I know Manny will never hear the end of this but in Los Angeles we will welcome him back.  We will welcome him and support him the same way San Fran supports Barry or the way New York supported Clemens, A-Rod, Petit, Giambi, among others.  If we can expect anything from Manny it is the unexpected.  On one final note, the Dodgers coaches that have been working with Ramirez over the last 50 games said he has returned to form and gotten in his grove.  That same grove in which he belted home run after home run, which thrusted the Dodgers to the NLCS.  It is time for Manny to shut everyone up and turn a new leaf.

THINK BLUE-

The Adventure of Kaliphornya in Wonder Land err Angel Stadium

This past weekend for fathers day I took a ball game in with my Dad and the rest of my family.  It was the first time I had ever been to Angels stadium and they were playing my favorite team the Dodgers.  Having the best record in baseball and our ace on the mound things were looking good to start the night.

As we found our seats, I felt like I was in Disney Land.  Now I know that Disney does own the Angels, but come on the stadium has a movie set feel to it, something fake.  The first thing that really jumps out at you in the stadium is how lame center field is.  They have this waterfall like fountain gushing from a big fake rock shaped in an A.

I thought splash mountain was at Disney Land

Directly to the right of the fountain is nothing.  I am guessing they were going to use this space to promote splash mountain but ran out of funds.  Could you imagine all the seats and coin the Angels franchise could make if they tore out their uber lame fountain and the great abyss?

Moving onward.  From the moment we arrived at the stadium vendors were still selling those damn rally monkeys.  I know the rally monkeys were cool when the Angels beat the Giants in the World Series but seriously that was like what, seven years ago?  Boy was I in for a surprise.

Thats super cool.....No realy it is....

Once game time rolled around the stadium started to fill up like any other sporting event in southern California.  Everyone was casually late.  My seats were up in the nosebleeds behind the home team dugout along the third base line.  Because the Dodgers were playing the Angels, there was a very mixed crowd of fans.  Going into the ball game, my pops and I had several beverages because we could not bring ourselves to pay eight dollars for a keg cup of beer.  Everyone else around us, well they did not have the same thought process as us.

Towards the end of the first inning, two rows in front of where me and my father were sitting, four women showed up.  These women were large, rude, and plain obnoxious.  Now I am not one to knock on peoples weight, but in the good nature of painting a picture for you the reader, I would have to say they all could easily have gone on the biggest loser scale and topped a thousand pounds, let alone be contestants for next season.  I will come back to these women later.

My seat was on the aisle, which you would think was great, but man did this suck.  I have never had to stand up and sit down at a ball game more in my life to let people out and in.  I was averaging four to eight squats every half inning.  What is the deal?  Can these people not hold their bladder?  It was armature hour in the ball park.

By the time the fifth or sixth inning rolled around the Angels blasted on the jumbo tron the same monkey that was in outbreak, and all of a sudden you hear the crowd go crazy.  It was dressed in an Angels uniform jumping up and down on a table, with the words rally monkey under it.  Honestly this looked like the most low budget video clip I have ever seen, yet all the Angels fans were loving it.  After every base hit they would flash this damn thing up on the screen.  I was curious if everyone was going to stand up and start flapping their arms as wings like in Angels in the Outfield.

Honestly if you could have seen they way these people reacted to the monkey you could not help but laugh at them.  I think there is a reason the broadcasters on television do not show this.  It is a little outdated.  While all of this was going on I was thinking why is this damn outbreak monkey still around?  Have they not got something new yet?  This would be similar to going to Dodger stadium ten years from now and looking out in left field and seeing Manny wigs everywhere, or in 2010 if Cavs fans are still throw up powder before tip off even though LeBron peaced out of there as fast as he could.  It is outdated.

It was a tight ball game going into the seventh inning stretch.  My attention was focused on the jumbo tron where Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous shower scene from Psycho was being played.  Being the video geek that I am, I was informing my father that for this 48 second scene he used 78 cuts which was truly Hitchcock at his best.  Once we got to the point where they were going to show the dude with the knife there it was, the fuckin rally monkey screamin.   This crowd erupted as though their team just won the NBA finals, wait they did, but you get the picture.   Down with the Sickness was blasting as the fans were going bonkers.  I could not believe what I was seeing.  I thought I was in a wonder land or something.  A tiny ass outbreak monkey was the sole reason for pumping up this stadium.

Anyhow, that damn critter must have worked because the Dodgers went down by a run and eventually lost the game.  By the time the seventh inning was over, booze was talking left and right.  Time to get back to the grande chicks.  These chicks in front of us were Angels fans and they were wasted.  Every inning all four of them would get up and each would come back with two beers no joke.  That means each of these chicks has fourteen beers at ten bucks a piece (They had the big cups that light up).  That is an extra $140.00 they spent on beer plus the $40.00 dollars for tickets.  One of these biggins got into it with a dodger fan.  She was all up in this guys face with her middle finger less than an inch from this dudes nose.  I don’t know what he was saying but man I bet it was an easy target.  While she was acting all hood rat some fan from behind us threw a whole cup of beer at the row of dodger fans.  Instantly the Dodger fan turned around and threw his beer bottle at the group of Angel fans he had been talking trash with the whole game.

People started yelling and it was starting to look like the Palace of Auburn Hills with beer flying.  All we needed was Artest and Stephen Jackson in the crowd.  There really is nothing like watching a bunch of fat drunk baseball fans going at it and protecting their team as though it is their family.  They were more worried about who was louder and who had the last word than the damn game.  Luckily enough people jumped in and broke the opposing parties up before there were any ejections.  As the “big female crew” left all the way down they were yelling Dodger fans are pussies.  The whole way out they did this.  I felt like going up to them and saying hey, “you realize with that $140.00 of beer you just drank, you could have been sitting in the “diamond club” which are the seats directly behind home plate.”  I guess everyone has their priorities.

All in all this experience like Orange County and their boobs seemed fake.  Nothing wrong with that but like the teams name Los Angeles Angels, its time to get your own identity.  Get away from the Disney theme like the Ducks did, ask the city of Anaheim if they will allow you to return as the Anaheim angels opposed to the Los Angeles South team.  And for God sake, get a new them for your team other than the outbreak monkey.  If you could really just step back and look at how lame that guy is you would be embarrassed.  Ohh yeah and Kobe was cheering for the Dodgers.

More East Coast love for sports

Ridiculous, I just finished reading that FOX and the MLB plan to hold and start World Series games 45 min earlier.  The sole reason for this is so the East Coast does not have to watch these games until one and two in the morning.
My question to FOX and the MLB is, does everyone live on the East Coast?  Do you realize that moving a 5:10 game ahead 45 minutes earlier will mean that anyone living on the West Coast misses the first three innings due to the fact that we have work.  It is already a struggle to make it home by the end of the first inning with a 5:10 game.  Now you are making it

The last time I checked the average work day ended at five.  The average bed time?  Well I think that is a little more flexible.  This is a huge fail for the MLB, FOX, and the East Coast.  Sack up and go to bed that fourty-five minutes later.  I did not realize that the whole east coast was a huge elderly home?  Whats next, are you going to complain that the pre game show cuts into Bingo and dinner time?

The MLB is trying to increase their ratings by making these games earlier.  According to ESPN “Philadelphia’s five-game victory averaged an 8.4 rating, down 17 percent from the previous low, a 10.1 for the five-game St. Louis-Detroit series in 2006.

Are the people with the MLB serious?  Come on.  The reason the ratings were down 17 percent from the previous low was not because of the start and end time of the game.  It was the teams.  Who gives a shit about the Rays or Phillies other than Tampa Bay and Philidelphia.  I love watching Rain Delays, dont you?  You had no major market teams in the series, and what made it even worse was it was the most losing team in baseball history, and a team that celebrated its 20th birthday last year.  Woo Hoo drinking age this year…

I guarantee if the Dodgers and the Red Sox or Yanks made it to the series you could start a game at 7:00 PST and it would set a record for ratings.

MLB, FOX, East Coast……FAIL

Manny Ramirez strictly number

Do you remember the days of late winter when spring training was right around the corner?  Do you remember how no one was bidding on Manny except the Dodgers?  Do you remember how Ned Colletti kept saying he was not going to bid against himself?  Do you remember how Boras was nitpicking at a million here and a million there in Manny’s contract?

On March 5th, Manny took his physical and the deal was made.  Manny was going to be wearing Dodger blue at least one more season.  According to ESPN.com “Ramirez gets $10 million this year, and $15 million in deferred money with no interest. A plan the sides discussed would have it payable in $5 million installments each from 2010 through 2012. If it winds up as a two-year deal, the plan called for $10 million each season, with three payments of $8,333,333 each from 2011-13.”

One sixth of the way through the season everything is looking rosy in Dodgertown and the hammer was dropped.  Manny tested positive for a banned substance.  After soaking in this suspension one week later, I can’t help but laugh at Scott Boras.  He literally spent all of that time nit picking minor details in Manny’s contract to get paid that extra dollar, using the motto “The price of gas is up, so is the price of Manny.”  I do understand that Boras was trying to get the most for his player and in the end more money for himself, but his shenanigans dealing with the Dodgers this off-season were merely ridiculous.

Flash-forward to today and Manny is serving his eighth game suspension of fifty.  What happens to Mannys or should I say Boras’s precious contract?  Well for testing positive for a banned substance and being suspended for fifty games Manny now loses nearly eight million of his 25 million dollar contract.

That is nearly one third of his two-year contract.  After all the issues that have stemmed around Manny in the past years, it will be interesting to see who wants this guy.  If the boys in blue do rally around Ramirez and he feels that they don’t jump off the Manny ship, I bet it is fair to say we could see Manny stay in LA for that second and possible several more years to come at a discounted rate.

What it always comes down to is stuff you learn as a kid.  Cheaters never prosper, and Scott Boras is a huge Douche Bag.