singapore sox fan: the red sox from half the world away

More on Ex-Sox: Millar as Catcher

Apparently, Kevin Millar is going to be the emergency catcher for the Orioles (he was the Marlins' emergency catcher from 1998-2002, but never played the position). Which fits in nicely with his image of the role:

"It was kind of a circus," Millar said [of Doug Mirabelli]. "Backup catchers like to talk a lot."

Been trying to figure out who the emergency catcher for the Sox was last year, and who it is this year. Fire Brand of the AL has it as Mark Bellhorn.

Tavarez goes bonkers

Y'know, it's funny - I think of Manny as Mr Zen, sometimes in a world of his own, but never really seeming flustered. But apparently good pal Julian Tavarez occasionally likes to go cuckoobananas. This is worrying.

Tavarez v Gathright

Sox claim Hee Seop Choi

This is awesome - big Choi fan. Dan Wheeler will attest to his sweet swing. Perhaps not a good swing for Chavez Ravine, but it should work for the lefty at Fenway. That, and he has a good eye. Man, I like the thought of Choi at first more than Youks or Snow.

Cousins

Was reading Jayson Stark's piece on Ryan Zimmerman being the first major leaguer in years (since Pete ~~In-a-gadda-da-vida~~ Incaviglia) to become a regular starter the season after he was drafted. (Well, barring injury, of course.) Which made me think of John Olerud, and how until he played for the PawSox last year he'd never played in the minors. So I looked him up, and found that Olerud is Dale Sveum's cousin. Hmm. Random trivia I never knew.

Arroyo for Pena

I've always been happy to see Bronson Arroyo on the Sox, for complete non-baseball reasons. For one, he shares my birthday. For another, he's fond of playing 90s alt-rock songs on the guitar, and one of the first songs I learnt to play on the guitar was the Stone Temple Pilots' "Plush".

Musical interlude: And I feel and I feel when the dogs begin to smell her... Will she smell alone?

So, I welcome Wily Mo Pena, former teenage baseball prodigy, young, and a possible big bat. But I'll have to admit I'm sentimental about seeing Arroyo go.

Japan wins the World Baseball Classic

Congrats to Japan on winning the WBC. Rules need to be adjusted, methinks: would've been nicer for Japan to play the DR and Korea to play Cuba in the semis - what was the point of winning the pool only to stay within the pool. And it seems weird that a team that lost 3 times (albeit once on a dubious biased call) won the whole thing.

That's where we wanna go

Off the Florida Keys, a guy puts on a hitting show...

Coco Crisp went 0 for 3 but is hitting .500 (8 for 16). In his first at-bat he took a huge cut and came up empty, with his feet well out of the box, a la Ichiro Suzuki. ''It wasn't no Ichiro," Crisp said. ''It was a Cocomo."

I'm not sure what to think about "Cocomo" taking off as a term. But boy, thinking about the Florida Keys does take me back.

Insert "Tom Cruise from Cocktail" pic, since we're randomly riffing on "Kokomo":

Transplanted

I am not, as it turns out, in New York. For the last couple of days I've been sitting inside a hospital waiting room, hoping for the best as my mother gets a kidney transplant. (The link's to the more complete story in my main blog.)

I'll be posting on and off on Singapore Sox Fan when I need a mental break - sometimes all one wants to do is scan the WBC results (a no-hitter - how 'bout that!), spring training progress - though of course sometimes the real world re-intrudes in news such as Cliff Floyd undergoing kidney tests.

Meantime, y'all be good and stay healthy.

Canada 8, USA 6

That Adam Stern inside-the-parker was amazing. As was the Tek grand slam. And as someone on SoSH points out, the Sox players' (Ortiz, Tek, Stern) total line in the World Baseball Classic: .750 / .786 / 2.667 for an incredible 3.452 OPS. Funniest shot was when they cut to Stern a few minutes later and he still looked breathless. And then on the MLB.tv feed they kept the studio sound on in between innings, and the announcers were talking about the mercy rule ("well, they haven't got the 10 runs")

I think this upset is good for the WBC - I doubt the US gets eliminated, unless it totally chokes against South Africa, and it's great to see that the supposed 'easy' route to the next round is being challenged. And if the goal of the WBC is boosting support for the competition outside the US, there's no better way than to see a favourite getting seriously challenged...

Start spreadin' the news

Anyway, Singapore Sox Fan will decamp to New York for the whole of next week, catching up with old friends from college, that sort of thing - so service will be intermittent. Y'all be good now.

Barry Bonds, Buried?

Barry Bonds would've been a Hall of Famer if he even had average seasons post-1998. And now... the Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams story does look damning, I must say.

Apparently Bonds was one of those people who had roid rage even before he (allegedly) had roids:

If Bonds told you to do something, you had to drop everything and do it. If you were slow to comply or if you tried to explain why it wasn't such a good idea, Bonds would get right up in your face, snarling, calling you a "punk bitch," repeating what he wanted and saying, "Did I f------ stutter?" You had to suck it up and take the abuse and the humiliation -- everyone did.

Pedro Martinez, Married Man

Meanwhile, Pedro got married? I missed that too. I remember when Pedro first moved to the Mets, the NY Times had an article describing his life in the Dominican Republic (I wrote about it way back then), and it mentioned his girlfriend, and I was surprised - as Sam notes, it was strange to even think of Pedro as being anything but self-contained.

A baseball great passes

RIP Kirby. Off the field, he had his skeletons, but on the field - what a player. Here's the family statement.

The Man Who Came To Dinner

(Many, many dinners, by the looks of it.) So David Wells is staying. As Jimmy Durante once asked, Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay? Start to go / change your mind / start to go again / change your mind again... Did you ever have the feeling that you wanted to go, and still have the feeling that you wanted to stay? Do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do - I go... I staaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy...

(Sorry, got caught up in the moment. And in putting on an atrocious Durante accent. And yes, the Clash would have been too obvious.)

Still too early to say whether Wells is really staying, or whether this is yet another point in the bargaining. There will be time yet for a hundred indecisions... or for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

South Korea 3, Japan 2, in Haiku

So you are ashamed
After the loss, Ichiro?
Next time shut up first.

U Can't Touch This

Random baseball-related links - MC Hammer comments on the Yankees:

Confidence is not a negative. Over confidence is. A-Rod is confident (another MVP year) based upon what he sees in his team and what he doesn't see in other teams. It sets the table for a more intriguing season now that Alex Rodriguez is confident (good for baseball) and he's talking (bad for us) and the rest of us are waiting, watching and hoping we will beat the Yankees and close his mouth! Go A's! (Link)

Not the greatest of analysis, I just thought it was funny.

Random non-baseball-related trivia: the first concert I ever watched without my parents was Hammer on his 2 Legit 2 Quit world tour. Yes, Hammer - he had dropped the "MC" part at that point.

Have Bat Will Travel, or following one's dreams

I thought I'd highlight Have Bat Will Travel, the blog of Ev, a fellow SoSH member who's quit his job as an investment banker so that he can try to play professional baseball in Europe. It's just for a season, apparently - he'll go to business school after that. But I still always find it cool when someone follows his bliss. From the FAQ:

Q: Is [your ceiling as a baseball player] going to be good enough?

A: Maybe. Possibly- even probably- not. I’d put my odds at about 25%, maybe. But in that sense this isn’t even about baseball. It’s about being able to recognize when you have only one opportunity to do something that will make you happy, when you have your mid-20s strength, speed, and stamina, no job, no wife, and no mortgage to tie you down, and having either the courage or the foolishness (or enough of both) to take a shot at it. To be able to die knowing that at the very least, you took a shot when you had the chance.

Cue stirring strings. And good luck, Ev.

Japan vs China in the World Baseball Classic

Just watched Japan thrash China 18-2 in the World Baseball Classic. I was thinking "isn't there a mercy rule?" Apparently, there is, but Japan wasn't leading by 10 after seven innings (it was 11-2 at the top of the 8th), so the mercy rule only kicked in after the 8th inning.

My thinking on the World Baseball Classic is that, despite all the pullouts, it's a great first step: yes, it's not the full all-out competition that other World Cups are, but then if you ever read any account of the first football (okay, okay, since most of the readers here are American I'll say soccer) World Cup, the 1930 tournament in Uruguay wasn't that well-represented either: the traditional European powers couldn't be arsed to make the trip across the Atlantic, there were disputes over silly things such as who would provide the ball for the final (they ended up playing with a ball from Uruguay for one half, and one from Argentina in the second) - and yet, come 2006, this is the best-watched sporting event in the world bar none. So I think, or at least hope, it will be with the WBC: players are going to kick themselves for not having taken part in the first one. Or at least - the non-American ones will. (Alan Schwarz has a good preview of what to look out for.)

Against that hope is the sense that sports that were invented in America tend not to have as heated world tournaments - the soccer, rugby, and cricket World Cups all seem much more passionate spectacles than the basketball world championships...

Manny Reports to Camp

So Manny returns to camp and all is (sort of) well:

The saga of Manny Ramirez always seems to end the same way. No matter what happens, Ramirez shows up for work — eventually — and hits better than almost anyone alive

...

"I get paid to play baseball," Ramirez said, "and everywhere I go and play, I've still got to go and perform, even if I like it or not."

I didn't really care when it was Pedro showing up late, and I don't really care that Manny's showing up late. Just as long as when they play the games that matter, they do what they're capable of. Hart Brachen nailed it in his Soxaholix strip on Damon and how 'fun' is overrated:

And this explains why even a guy as goofy as Manny is respected by the fans. No matter how many trades he demands or how many times his grandmothah dies, fact is, when the dude is at the plate there isn't a motherfuckah on the entiah plaent more intense and locked-in than Manny.

The strip also reminded me of my second-favourite Damon memory after the Game 7 grand slam, that of him being carried off in a stretcher with his fist in the air)

Cereal Killer

A great visual pun of a photo from this Sports Illustrated interview with Coco Crisp, even if it means an unfamiliar reader has no clue what Coco Crisp looks like. I quite like this random bit of trivia about his inheritance of speed:

My grandfather [Milton Newton] actually invented the style of starting blocks used in the Olympics. He's in the Masters Hall of Fame for track and field.

So he has a grandfather with the name of two Massachusetts towns? Hey, that one-ups Tim Wakefield and Bob Tewksbury. Crisp isn't kidding about the HoF bit either.

Keith Foulke Gets Shot(s)

Keith Foulke getting injections worries me. Stop posing with the ladies (via On the DL, a great guilty pleasure) and start getting better!

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