DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum AL Central - Indians and others

Expanded story and more photos here:

http://www.cleveland.com/tribe/index.ssf/2012/02/albert_belle_pays_tribe_a_visi.html

Yea Albert at one point was the best slugger in the game. It was a crying shame the media screwed him out of winning the mvp in 95. The guy murdered mo vaughn in every category there was. Not too many guys will ever have 50 homers and 50 doubles again.

My favorite moment with Belle, is when he hit that grand slam off Lee Smith in the bottom of the 9th in 95. You're right that guy was as clutch as they come.

Pretty much every story I've heard on a personal level about Belle has been a good one. He's was a great tipper, a nice guy if you talked to him, etc. I remember Christy Brinkley once talking about how she was trying to take a photo of him, and all the media types were telling her how impossible it was to get him to agree to anything. She asked if she could get a picture of him with her kid, and he agreed. She said once she brought her kid out, he was the nicest guy she's ever seen.

Here's the pic too:



But most the main-stream stories we've heard of Belle are from when he's snapped, and took it out on heckling fans or kids egging his house.

I have a feeling that most athletes are alot nicer to women who look like Christy Brinkley than they are to the normal media types.

He lived near Euclid during his days with the Tribe, so I have heard a lot about him, all good. Local pizza place said he would come in and was extremely polite. I know he was a regular at Muldoon's on 185th (which is an awesome place) loved their chili.

I just think he had preconceived thoughts about the media and how they portrayed athletes, and never really gave them a chance.

God, he was good though. Absolutely lethal. I think that guy thrived off pressure.

Frank Thomas was bigger, but no player was more intimidating at the plate. For a brief moment in the history of MLB, there was no player more feared than Belle.

Seeing Belle lookin' like that really makes me feel old. I SWEAR it was just yesterday that me and my buddies were hanging out and talking about just how insane the Indians talent level was.

The truth is that was 18 years ago.

It'll sound like sour grapes, but the strike zone the umps gave Glavine and Maddux in that Series was ridiculous. I remember Belle turning on an ump after they called a strike that was 6-8 inches off the plate. He couldn't have hit it with a 4-ft bat.

I wish Spring Training was still down here in Winter Haven.

I'm ready for spring but I'm not ready for baseball. I suppose it's still only March 1st.....but I'm just not emotionally ready to invest myself into a new season.

Maybe that will change after going through March Madness and I'll be overly saturated with basketball. Speaking of....I gotta ask off for one of those first round days.

J/C ... back to Sizemore; he's out 8-12 weeks following back surgery ... something called micro-discectomy ... 8-12 weeks sounds overly optimistic.

http://www.cleveland.com/tribe/index.ssf/2012/03/grady_sizemore.html

I'll be surprised if he plays 8-12 total weeks of the season. Heck, 8-12 games might be a good over/under bet.

yeah, he'll come back from this and hurt his groin again. or his elbow. or his knee.

does that mean he can't have kids too?

As long as it's not his groin that he tears, he'll be able to propagate his oft-injured DNA.

I had one of those done.

Basically, they they go in with an arthroscopic tool and take a piece out of the middle of a herniated disk to reduce the size of the disk, and pull it off of the nerve. If it works, recovery is supposed to be pretty simple.

Unfortunately, mine didn't work.

Somewhere, Courtney Brown is reading this news and shaking his head.

I love it when I either pick near the top of a draft or near the bottom and pluck two top closers say in round 4-5...it creates panic and people start scrambling to get closers, leaving some nice players when it rebounds to me.

Yeah it's like the TE in football drafts, people usually freak out once that 2nd elite one goes and you see a huge run on them.

Interesting strategy though, even though I'm not one to panic I'll keep that in mind when we draft big d's league

Was thinking the same thing... you bozo's are giving me your draft strategy.

web page

Reds’ Rolen, Tribe’s Huff sparkle in spring opener

Scott Rolen’s shoulder looked just fine. Mike Leake appeared to be a little rusty.

Rolen went 2 for 2 in his return from the shoulder surgery that caused him to miss the final two months of the 2011 season, and the Cincinnati Reds and Cleveland Indians played a 6-6, nine-inning tie yesterday in Goodyear, Ariz., in their spring training opener.

Rolen is a seven-time All-Star, including 2010 and 2011. But he didn’t play after July 20 last year and had arthroscopic surgery Aug. 3 to remove bone spurs and fragments from a joint in his left shoulder.

Leake, competing for a spot in the Reds’ rotation, started and allowed two runs — one earned — and four hits in two innings.

“Leake wasn’t as sharp as he usually is,” Reds manager Dusty Baker said. “I don’t worry about Leakie. His pitches weren’t up, but they were down the middle.”

David Huff, among four candidates for the fifth slot in the Indians’ rotation, started and allowed three hits in two scoreless innings.

“I’m not thinking about fifth spot. I’m just thinking about attacking the hitter and making good pitches,” Huff said.

Michael Brantley, expected to move from left field to center to fill in for injured Grady Sizemore (back surgery), led off the game with a double for Cleveland and also singled. Cleveland built a 4-0 lead in the first three innings against Leake and Ron Mahay, but the Reds tied the score with four runs in the fourth off Frank Herrman.

Neftali Soto homered in the fifth against Robinson Tejeda for a 5-4 Reds lead. Cleveland went ahead in the ninth on Juan Diaz’s single and an error by shortstop Paul Janish. The Reds’ Todd Frazier hit a solo homer with one out in the bottom half against Chen Lee to make it 6-6.

The teams will play each other again today and Monday

Indians' (and Reds') playoff chances just got better ...

MLB expands playoff format from 8 teams to 10

By BEN WALKER, AP Baseball Writer
Mar 2, 2012
AP

NEW YORK (AP)—With less than a month to go before opening day, baseball at last decided who’s in and who’s out come October.

Now, even a third-place team can win the World Series.

Major League Baseball made it official Friday, expanding the playoff format to 10 teams by adding a wild-card club to each league.

“I hope we get that extra spot,” said new Houston Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, whose team is coming off a 56-106 finish that was the worst in the majors. “I think it’s great any time you have more markets involved.”

Who knows, maybe a rookie such as Bryce Harper will get that shot this year.

“Cool,” the 19-year-old Washington sensation said after a game against college kids. “It’s great. Hopefully, we’re that playoff team.”

Boston and Atlanta sure could’ve used this setup last year. They went through awful collapses in September that eventually cost them playoff spots on the final day of the season.

“I think the more, the merrier,” new Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine said. “I think for the fans, the players, the energy at the end of the season, I don’t mind. What would it be, a third of the teams? I think it’ll be good.”

This is the first switch in MLB’s postseason format since the 1995 season, when wild cards were first added. The move creates a new one-game, wild-card round in the AL and NL between the teams with the best records who are not division winners.

“It’s a good thing for baseball. That seems to be what the people want,” Detroit manager Jim Leyland said.

“There are a lot of mixed emotions but as long as the playoffs don’t get watered down, it’s fine, but that won’t happen in baseball,” he said.

The additions mean 10 of the 30 MLB teams will get into the playoffs. That’s still fewer than in the other pro leagues—12 of 32 make it in the NFL, and 16 of 30 advance in the NBA and NHL.

The long-expected decision was announced less than an hour before Seattle and Oakland started the exhibition season. On March 28, the Mariners and Athletics will play the big league opener in Tokyo.

“This change increases the rewards of a division championship and allows two additional markets to experience playoff baseball each year,” Commissioner Bud Selig said in a statement.

Also, a tweak: For the 2012 postseason, the five-game division series will begin with two home games for lower seeds, followed by home games for the higher seed. After that, it will return to the 2-2-1 format previously used.

MLB said that with schedules already drawn for this season, the postseason had to be compressed to fit in the extra games. Hence, fewer off-days for travel.

“I don’t think it really changes the way you look at this season. You really have to fight to win your division,” New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “It is kind of strange to start on the road. That doesn’t quite seem right, but it’s a one-year thing. I understand why they’re doing it.”

If the World Series goes to Game 7 this year—as it did last season, when the wild-card St. Louis Cardinals won the championship—it would be played Nov. 1.

“I like the extra playoff spot. I like the one-game playoff because it really gives the advantages to the division winner,” Los Angeles Dodgers manager Don Mattingly said this week.

As in, it’ll be real dicey for the wild-card contenders to immediately jump into a winner-take-all game, then quickly turn around to start the division series.

Starting this year, too, there’s no restriction on teams from the same division meeting in that best-of-five division series.

Baseball players’ union head Michael Weiner said there had been internal discussions way back about possibly having six playoff teams from each league. He said that once bargaining began with owners on a new labor deal, it was clear MLB only wanted five.

“The players were in favor of expanding the playoffs,” Weiner said.

In particular, he said, the players wanted to put more emphasis on winning a division, especially when MLB goes to a pair of 15-team leagues next year with three divisions each. The Astros are switching from the NL to the AL to make that possible.

A portion of the money generated by the one-game playoffs will go in the players’ pool that is split among the postseason participants.

In 1999, Valentine and the New York Mets won a one-game tiebreaker for the NL wild-card spot.

“I didn’t think that entering the playoffs in ’99 when I had to play a one-game playoff against Cincinnati that the next round was cheapened,” he said.

AP Sports Writer Jimmy Golen and AP freelance writers Mark Didtler, Carl Kotalo, Maureen Mullen and Jeff Berlinicke contributed to this report.

http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=ap-expandedplayoffs

Get ready for Yankees and the Red Sox in the playoffs every year for the next 50 years.

I like it just fine. What I don't like is seasons ending in Nov.

Somehow figure a way to compress the season by a couple of weeks to finish up the Series by mid Oct.

It's bad enough playing cold weather games in early April. It sucks when you are playing the World Series and have snow on the ground.

I like it. It actually gives a disadvantage to winning the wild card instead of the division. Makes division races and wild card races more interesting. That is only good.

and the Yankees and Red Sox are not the only high payroll teams in the AL anymore. the Tigers and Angels are right behind them. the Rangers, White Sox, and Mariners are not that far off either and each will be getting new local TV deals in the near future that will help boost them up more.

it comes down to how you build your team though. the Rays sure don't spend money and it took them years of high draft picks to get where they are in the farm system, but they got there. Minnesota used to be in the same boat (but have drafted poorly recently) and KC is possibly the new TB.

I hope the Indians recent drafting (all highly rated) develop as anticipated. most of our high-profile guys are in A-ball right now, but that just means by the end of the current cycle (next 3 yrs or so) that they should be in the high minors.

they are still working on the tiebreaker part. that is why they have delayed the full announcement on all of it. they want to make sure they get it right the first time because they will be killed by the cynical baseball media if they have to change it again.

and knowing Bug Selig, they'll still manage to get it wrong the first time.

An issue ( season length ) that should have addressed some time ago ! All about revenue , game be dammed ... Ridiculous ..

jc...

Who's still upset that the Tribe got rid of Alex "-treme DUI" White?

http://cnnsi.com/2012/writers/tom_verduc...mp;sct=hp_wr_a1

basically summed up as following

Quote:

---

Interestingly, Clemens had almost identical BABIP numbers to those of Verlander: .286 career and .238 in his Cy/MVP season. Clemens pitched another 21 seasons and his BABIP never again was as low as it was in 1986.

A low BABIP is often written off to the vagaries of luck -- one of those seasons where an inordinately large number of balls in play found fielders' gloves rather than not. The thinking is that a pitcher cannot control what happens once a ball is put in play.

---

By the way, Michael Brantley left yesterday's game with the Dodgers after feeling a "twinge" in his hamstring. He's listed as "day-to-day", so for now we're down to one major league outfielder (Choo). I hate it when teams use terms like "twinge" or "tweak" to describe (and minimize) injuries, because inevitably it leads to a guy being out 2-3 weeks.

On the bright side Jeanmar Gomez pitched 4 scoreless yesterday against the Dodgers, and the Featherheads beat Clay Kershaw. Gomez has to be in the rotation, imo.