Our new weekly column, where we do our best to recap the teams we love and the stories that captivated us the most in this week of baseball.
1.
Bleacher Report: Guess who leads the NL in home runs. Yeah, that's right, it's Corey Hart, and over at
The Bleacher Report Jesse Motiff discusses if that's exactly the sort of thing that might move Corey out of Milwaukee. Regardless of whether his time with the Brewers is limited or not, this is good news for all those who long for "sunglasses at night" jokes to be relevant once more in baseball.
2.
ESPN Stats: The Toronto Blue Jays lead the majors in home runs as a team, with 105. The next team is Boston, with 93. The Blue Jays are doing this primarily through the performances of Jose Bautista, who has 18 HRs, and Vernon Wells, who has 16. However, even with all this power, the Blue Jays are still a fourth place team. In 2009, they were fifth in the majors, in home runs, and, yes, they finished fourth in the division race that year also.
3.
Talking Chop: Braves fans are now fully behind Troy Glaus. I know this because they're doing stupid photo shops of him as Godzilla, calling him the Glausosaur--they've even got t-shirts. Welcome to cult internet stardom, Troy.
4.
Big League Stew: The Pittsburgh Pirates are bad, so bad that we wouldn't be surprised if the next
Major League was based on them. That didn't stop them from giving their manager and general manager extensions in the midst of a twelve game losing streak. However one of the racing pierogies wasn't so lucky, after sharing his thoughts on the extension on Facebook 24 y/o Andrew Kurtz got canned from the $100 a month gig.
5.
LAist: Caleb Bacon caught up with Dodger VP of Communications, Josh Rawitch. In the interview they touch on a variety of subjects from what it's like to work at historic Dodger Stadium to how the Dodgers decided to credential bloggers. But the most interesting part of the conversation for was this piece of information about Rafael Furcal: " He started telling me about a lot of the stuff he does in his hometown -- Loma de Cabrera -- in the Dominican Republic and he wasn’t doing it to brag. He was saying how crazy life is down there. He’s the town financier -- anybody who goes into the hospital and can’t afford to pay their bills, Furcal pays the bill for them."
6.
Dodger Thoughts: Jon Weisman points out how fickle fans can be towards closers, forcing me to realize that I need to cut Broxton a little slack. After all it's not as if the best hitter's success rate can even compare to the worst closers, let alone one of the best.
7.
Bats Blog: Dave Waldstein breaks down the problems with managers basing strategy on the save rule, and closes the article with a save of his own: "This is backward thinking, not just by Manuel, but by most managers who allow the save statistic to dictate their thinking. The save statistic was intended to measure something that happened in a game. Instead, it is too often dictating what will happen."
8.
Seat Geek: Steven Strasburg struck out 10 while giving up just one run on Friday night in a no-decision, encouraging White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen to call him "
maybe the best pitcher in the national league." However, his impact isn't only being felt on the field as the guys at Seat Geek point out in their piece on "Baseball Jesus," finding that tickets on the secondary market are 10% higher than the Nationals season average.
9. Matt Capps' Girlfriend: In Washington right now, Stephen Strasburg dominates pretty much any baseball related headlines, but, still, one would think that there would be something more interesting on the web about Nats' closer Matt Capps than this
forum discussing his romantic life; after all, he does
lead the majors in saves this season, with 20.
