Blaine Newnham: Jacobsen Ready After Knee Surgery

Bucky Jacobsen seems to have the optimism cranked all the way to eleven during his interview with the Times' Blaine Newnham. In the same paragraph that asserts the need for Bucky to stay humble this season if he wants to be successful, Newnham has Bucky claiming that he could easily "hit 35-40 home runs this season as he says he can." I hope he gets the chance and is right. $300,000 makes for a pretty cheap slugger these days.

The best part of the article is at thew very end, though:

He and (wife) Jennifer recently bought a home at Snoqualmie Ridge.

I'm a bit torn. Yeah, one of the zanier Mariners characters in recent memory has moved to my hometown. But it was the Ridge, so it might as well have been Mukilteo as close as the Ridge is to my parents' house. At least he's in the 98065.

With apologies to Jeff, Trent, David, and Jeremy, whose respective web logs, Leone For Third and Sports and Bremertonians, changed URLs quite some time ago, I have finally updated my links on the right sidebar to the new URLs. I guess because it's the first day of a new semester I must have some kind of renewed sense of responsibility, or maybe dilligence, or maybe even some awesome synonym of responsibility that I've never even heard of.

EDIT, 1:19 PM:

In addition, I've added the following a few new Mariners links

• Marinomics


• M's vs. A's


• Evening Perambulations


• Mariners Revolution


• Mariners Morsels


• House that Edgar Built


• Just North of Wrigley Field


• The Fan (not the De Niro/Snipes flick)

some of which are long overdue. Please visit them all. New opinions and perspectives are what makes the blog world kick ass.

At least that's what Newsday says.

The first thought I have when the notion "Carlos Beltran" pops into my head is that I can't think of another player that people have described as a bona fide superstar, five-tool type who had at the time exactly one thirty-homer season under his belt. Seven years, $119 million. With the Pedro Martinez deal, the Mets have made one very high risk major deal (Martinez) and now add this huge contract to their books for the next seven years. I glad the Mariners decided not to get involved with Beltran. The Sexson and Beltre deals are looking pretty good right about now.

Bruce Sutter received more Hall of Fame votes this time around than Goose Gossage did. Talk to anyone who was a baseball fan in the 1970s and early 1980s (like my dad, for example), and they will say that that very idea is ridiculous. The main case for Sutter that I've seen is that Sutter "invented," "developed," or "created" the split-finger fastball and thus deserves a spot in Cooperstown as an innovator.

Here are the "Sutter Split Finger" defenses I found, with just a quick search:

Phil Pepe
Buster Olney
Tracy Ringolsby
Craig Muder
Jayson Stark

And that's only what I found before my limited Bruce Sutter patience ran too thin to continue.

Long-time readers (and by "long-time" I mean "for little over a year") might remember my December 27 and 29, 2003 posts regarding the origin and development of the forkball and split-finger fastball. It turns out that both Elroy Face and Sandy Koufax were mowing down hitters in the 1960s with the pitch. Yeah, Sutter tweaked the forkball a bit and gave it a new name, but to use Sutter's Baseball Pioneer status as a key argument in his HOF candidacy, one must also hold Elroy Face in the same regard. Face even held the career saves record for a while, with 188.

Face is obviously out, and Sutter should be too. Gossage is in on the "Has your father told you multiple stories about this guy?" criteria.

If the BBWAA isn't careful, there's a good chance that by, say, 2025, the Baseball Hall of Fame will be better described as the Baseball Hall of Quite a Bit Better than Average. Who wants to take their kids to see that?

How did I do?

Using the spreads, money lines, and over/unders quoted in my post and placing $5 bets as dictated by the fortune teller, I would have lost $15.56. Darn. Interesting to note, though, is that if Virginia Tech had managed to defeat Auburn, with a money line of +210, the teller could have come out with a virtual push (-$0.06, actually).

I promise to write about baseball soon. Seriously.