FJM has gone dark for the foreseeable future. Sorry folks. We may post once in a while, but it's pretty much over.
You can still e-mail dak,Ken Tremendous,Junior,Matthew Murbles, or Coach.
and flip over to Baseball Tonight for some amazing baseball highlights.
Just kidding! What you would have seen is the miraculously-named John Pizzarelli ("The wonder of it all," Foxwoods, etc.) performing a jazzified rendition of "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" as the first of the nine-(9!)-part Battle of the Bands series on Baseball Tonight.
You know. Battle of the Bands. Baseball. Pizza. The wonder of it all. Jazz. Analysis. This guy.
Next week: Dannii Minogue and Lou Bega collaborate on a 44-minute cover of "Whoomp! There It Is." No baseball footage. Just bands battling on and on and on. If you're setting your DVR, remember to tack a couple of hours of extra time on, because this battle might go into EXTRA INNINGS.
It's Baseball Tonight Bold Prediction Time! You may recall Krukie's brilliant "Randy Johnson will win 30 games" prophecy in 2005. (I certainly do, fondly.) I love that the producers force these already mentally-taxed guys to make increasingly outlandish, totally baseless guesses just so the graphic beneath them can say they're "bold." The on-air guys are doing poorly enough on their own. Now you're basically holding a gun to their head until they crack and say that Jason Schmidt will record 400 strikeouts.
You're up, Orestes Destrade:
All right, you want bold? I'll give you bold.
He says this in a totally unconvincing tone of voice.
Ichiro Suzuki will be the first guy to hit .400 since Ted Williams. How about that?
He clearly doesn't believe this. Why are you making him say this thing? This is great.
If he can walk more and strike out less, this guy has the opportunity to do that.
Ichiro has walked more than 49 times once in his career. As a point of reference, the year Ted Williams hit .406, he walked 147 times. It was only the fourth-highest walk total of his career.
And by the way, he's a free agent. 20% spike. They have done a survey and it's quantifiable. 20% spike. Guys that are in their survey year.
What? What "survey" is he talking about? Can anyone produce this for us? Also, it's solid gold that he ends this insane rant by mumbling "Guys that are in their survey year," a nonsense phrase that got stuck in his brain because he just said the word "survey" (and used that incorrectly).
Steve Phillips goes with the following retarded nonsense: Alex Rodriguez is going to be the MVP of the All-Star Game, the 2007 season, he's going to be the MVP of the World Series.
Who the fuck cares about the All-Star Game? This prediction made me laugh out loud.
He's going to finally become a Yankee,
This actually happened February 17, 2004. Unless you left out the word "True."
and he's going to opt out of his contract for next year.
So Steve Phillips understood the request "make a bold prediction" as "make five predictions and combine them together in an awkward list."
This segment has proved that in the context of the Baseball Tonight Bold Prediction, bold = crazy = pointless. Great TV, gentlemen.
Peter Gammons goes with "Grady Sizemore is going to be the MVP" and follows it up with some numbers or some shit. WRONG. Too defensible. Too uncrazy. Totally unpointless.
Just as a reminder, there was a chapter in Baseball Prospectus's "Baseball Between the Numbers" that showed something like a 10% boost in walk-year performance.
Baseball Prospectus used WARP to compare the walk years of 212 "prominent" free agents ('76 to '00) with their immediate pre- and post-walk years. Dayn Perry found that players experience a 9.4% spike in their WARP. Further, the average age of these FAs was 31, so the spike is probably not age-related. Perry also found that players played/pitched in more games in their walk years, by a margin of 6.3 pre-walk and 4.8 post-walk.
They signed Brett Myers to a long-term deal. That makes him a happy person. And I think the maturity that he has gained from the incident that happened last year in Boston is gonna propel him to stand up and be the ace of this staff.
You heard it first from Kruk, folks. Hitting your wife in the face in front of Fenway Park improves your pitching ability.
Karl Ravech is killing it out there. Take this exchange with Steve Phillips:
SP: Jeff Kent in the walk year of his contract, motivated to put up big numbers. They lacked power last year. They lacked Jason Kent's production -- er, Jeff Kent's production. I think they are a very well balanced team with great pitching.
KR: (skeptical) Is there tangible evidence that in a walk year, players produce better numbers?
SP: I don't think there's any question about it. Motivation -- particularly Jeff Kent. He's always put up huge numbers in that last year.
KR: (Tired, so very tired of all of this even though the year has only just begun. Seriously, he asked this question in a hilariously weary-sounding voice. This question was basically an eight-word-long verbal sigh.) What motivates you, Peter, in the NL West?
On the Padres: I think this guy right here, Marcus Giles, is going to make a big difference also. He's a gritty, gutty player, and when you talk about the San Diego Padres, gritty and gutty sometimes don't always go in the same sentence.
Krukie, around here gritty and gutty always go in the same sentence. That sentence is "Fuck gritty and gutty."
Let's hope gritty and gutty Marcus Giles can bounce back from his gritty .259 EqA and gutty .387 slugging percentage from last year. The guy's had a couple of great years in the past, when he wasn't so g and g.
Karl Ravech: Team to watch in the American League East? John Kruk: To me it is the Yankees, Karl, because I think that now they're embarrassed. They haven't won a World Championship in how many years, so they are embarrassed.
My team to watch in this division is the Minnesota Twins ... we're not sure about their pitching right now. Brad Radke retired. Nelson Liriano injured, who knows when he's coming back?
He'll be back this year, and he'll pitch better than any 43-year-old retired utility infielder ever has before.
