Walking Papers (Cane Optional)

The fuel gauge shows you’ve got a little high-test left in the fuel tank. But the odometer’s telling anyone who’ll listen that the good stuff’s been significantly gunked up by years of engine crud. For every spurt, there’s an equal and opposite sputter.


All you see is the spurt: I still got it!


To everyone else, that short, sweet preseason swing that launches a home run (as it did a few days ago against the Reds) might as well have been Luke Appling vs. Warren Spahn in 1982. (The 75-year-old Appling famously took fellow codger Spahn deep in an old-timers’ game one fine summer day that year. He did not still have it.)

Raul Ibanez is So Ugly, Even Ted Danson Wouldn’t Date Him

This may be the most meaningless post I’ve ever published Cheap nfl jersey (which is saying a lot, I know). But I can’t help myself. In watching the Yankees decimate the Red Sox this past weekend, I couldn’t help noticing that Raul Ibanez looks like a trash bin from behind a questionable Chinese takeout.


A few years back, I busted his chops for wearing an Ed mlb jerseys shop Hardy shirt, which was bad enough. But time, sun exposure and three years in Philly have since made him look like he ran a 100-yard dash in a 90-yard gym.


I’m pretty ugly myself, so I shouldn’t be MiamiHerald talking, but Raul is greasier than the last 15 minutes of “Goodfellas,” and makes me uncomfortable to watch.

Little League Baseball Practice Plans – Use of Practice Time

Time is one of the biggest assets a coach has, but it has to be used appropriately. This is especially true when setting up little league baseball practice plans.
When a coach arrives to practice unprepared or overwhelmed, athletes will immediately pick up on that and follow suit.  Pretty soon, you have endured a frustrating, useless baseball practice.  Everyone leaves in a bad mood, realizing that nothing was accomplished and blaming someone else.

Little League Baseball Players – Conflicts

Being a coach means handling far more than baseball drills nike jersey and plays. Your little league baseball players will often have conflicts. You deal cheap mlb jerseys with the immediate problem but then you need to look at what causes it.

Coaches often feel that their job is to put out fires. This is one style of management that is effective, but it is not the only one, nor the best one. When two of your players get in a fight, amazon.com you must put out the fire and break up the fight. However, a good coach will not just leave the situation and assume that the problem is resolved. Every issue that you deal with comes from some larger, underlying problem that you may not have recognized yet. It is your job to discover those tensions and resolve them before they surface in other ways, such as a fight.need to look at what causes it.

I Hate Baseball's Wild Card

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig is planning to expand the Playoffs in 2012, allowing more teams to contend in the post-season, but his solution is to add yet another Wild Card team to the mix.  I love Major League Baseball, but I despise the Wild Card.

I don't want to tell Mr. Selig how to do his job (if he chooses, he is free to read my previous essay outlining my ideas if I were commissioner, which I posted a while ago), but the Wild Card hurts the integrity of the regular season and offers teams no incentive to finish first in their division.

Springtime for keeping score: baseball’s back

It’s finally April, nike jersey and nothing excites me more than the beginning of baseball season. The trope about baseball and spring is true: it is the time of the year for unencumbered optimism. For me, it’s always been the time of year with the most possibilities.


While growing up, I wanted to be a professional baseball cheap mlb jerseys player. This dream was not hindered by a critical, yet at the time overlooked, road block on the path toward fulfilling this dream: I was a terrible baseball player. Sure, I was pretty good while playing in extremely uncompetitive parks and recreation leagues, where the equivalent of a tryout was the ability to pay the marginal entrance fee; a fee that returned a tee-shirt and a team name, which would in turn require a new baseball hat, which explains why I still own a Houston Astros cap.youtube.com

Jason Bay could be platooning for the Mets

Jason Bay had an awful 2011 and his spring has thus far been pretty awful too.  That has some people suggesting to Mike Puma of the New York Post that Bay may soon be a $16 million platoon guy:

    Though the idea has not yet reached the discussion stage among team executives, a club official yesterday floated the possibility that if Bay is struggling six or seven weeks into the season, the Mets could explore other options, including a platoon in left.

    Bay is hitting .195 with no RBIs this spring after going 0-for-3 in the Mets’ 9-2 exhibition loss to the Tigers yesterday.

It sounds more like bored, end-of-spring-training speculation more than an actual idea anyone in power has. But that’s how these sorts of things start, right? Someone gets the idea and then it gets floated?

Anyway, if Bay picks up in 2012 like he played in 2011, there will be a lot of people talking about what to do with him, and platooning could be one option.

Joey Votto Reportedly Signs Massive Contract Extension with Cincinnati Reds

Cincinnati Reds slugger Joey Votto just became a 2012 nike nfl jerseys very rich man. If the below reported details of his contract are true, Votto joined Prince Fielder, Albert Pujols and Alex Rodriguez as the only players in MLB history to ink a contract worth more than $200 million.