Dec 15th 2008 4:53PM by Matt Watson (author feed)
The Angels joined the Nationals and Orioles as teams that have officially made an offer to Mark Teixeira, setting the bar at eight years for $160 million. The Red Sox are expected to join the fray with an offer of their own any day now, but what that offer will be is subject to much debate.

George King of the says the Sox are “wary of eight years but aren’t shy of six for $150,” which means Teixeira would average $25 million a season. Michael Silverman of the expects an eight-year deal worth anywhere between $145 million and $175 million, while Dan Patrick suggested on his radio show this morning that he’s heard the Sox will go as far as six years for $200 million.

In other words, no one really knows, but everbody is throwing out random numbers now so they can say they claim they were close later. (It sounds like fun, so let me try: eight years, $180 million! Just watch, I’ll be a genius!)

Interestingly enough, King also claims the Yankees are still interested in Teixeira, though after investing nearly a quarter of a billion dollars (and counting) in pitching this winter, they may have to pass on Teixeira and “settle” on a shorter contract for Manny Ramirez, which sounds like a hell of a consolation prize to me.

Dec 14th 2008 7:20PM by Josh Alper (author feed)
Most of the baseball world was in Las Vegas this week for the winter meetings, but not Hideki Okajima. The Red Sox reliever was in Hawaii so that he could run in the Honolulu Marathon. Okajima finished in just over six hours, almost four hours behind the winners, but a hearty congratulations from all of us to Okajima for his accomplishment.

Just note that “all of us” does not include any members of the Red Sox organization. The team was unaware that Okajima was going to participate in the marathon until Friday and a team official told the that they would have encouraged him not to run if they had known.

The Red Sox have every right to be cheesed off about Okajima’s choice. Standard player contracts include clauses forbidding all sorts of activities that could lead to injuries. Motorcycling (remember Jeff Kent’s, ahem, car-washing injury?), skydiving, lion dentistry … that sort of thing.

Marathon running may not seem like quite as dangerous a pursuit, but there’s certainly a high risk of injury from the run as well as the training process. There was rain in Honolulu and the slick roads could have led to a fall that would’ve cost the Red Sox dearly. It seems like Okajima’s fine, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see marathons added to the prohibited list in future Boston contracts.

Dec 11th 2008 7:30PM by Will Brinson (author feed)
The Red Sox are unveiling a brand new logo. Well, kind of — they’re actually rolling back the clock to create a different look than most fans are used to. The problems is that new uniforms and new logos are always nice in principle, but can oftentimes fail miserably (hellloooooo, Minnesota Timberwolves).

However, based simply on what I’ve heard and read around the webs, this Sox uni change sounds pretty cool.
The club will also go with the “Hanging Sox” as the new primary logo, and it will be displayed on new caps that the Red Sox will wear with their alternate jerseys at home and on the road.

For long-time fans, the new road jersey will be a trip down memory lane, in that it will resemble the road grays worn in the 1980s during the days of Jim Rice, Dwight Evans and Bob Stanley.

The “retro roadies,” as the Red Sox referred to them in a press release, will feature the word “BOSTON” in blue lettering across the chest.
I’m all about classy throwbacks, and when a team decides to incorporate such a uniform on a full or part-time basis, I’m throwing thumbs in the air, even if it is the BoSox. I do, however, think it’s kind of amusing that as we look around and see teams running out of mascots to use (the Winston-Salem, NC minor league team just switched from “Warthogs” to “The Dash”) that we’ve got one of baseball’s oldest team reminding us how tough a pair of socks are in the face of a 99 mph fastball.

Dec 10th 2008 3:53PM by Matt Watson (author feed)
No matter how you look at it, the Nationals are a bad team. A really bad team. They have holes in their lineup, holes in their rotation and holes in their bullpen. They are not “one player away” from contending for anything, certainly not in the NL East. where they finished dead last in 2008, more than a dozen games behind fourth place.

And yet, for whatever reason, the Nationals are making a serious push for Mark Teixeira, the most coveted slugger on the free agent market. Jose Mota of Yahoo! reports the Nationals have made a seven-year, $150 million offer, while Mike DiGiovanna of the cites “a source from a team that is involved in negotiations” that the Nationals are willing to match Teixeira’s demand for a 10-year, $200 million deal.

It’s one thing to make an offer just to get the team’s name in the paper so the front office can turn around and tell their fans, “well, we tried,” but it’s another altogether to open the doors to the vault and dare Teixeira to help himself to whatever he wants. I’m not completely convinced DiGiovanna’s source has the story right, but if the Nationals are going to break the bank on anyone, they may as well do it on a guy who grew up within driving distance of D.C.

The bidding war is hardly over — the Angels, for one, have yet to make their offer — but what looked like a two-horse race between the Angels and Red Sox (especially with the Yankees determined to fix their rotation first and lineup second) certainly got a little more interesting.

Dec 9th 2008 3:12PM by Matt Snyder (author feed)
Yankees/Red Sox is the best rivalry in sports, in my opinion, so it’s always shocking to see players on both sides of it. Of course, it’s not exactly a rare occurrence. From Babe Ruth through Johnny Damon, there’s player movement between the two teams just like any other two teams.

Still, wouldn’t it be incredibly odd to see Andy Pettitte in a Red Sox uniform? The thought isn’t near as weird as Derek Jeter or Mariano Rivera switching sides, for example, but it’s close.

Pettitte has started 30 games against the Red Sox in the regular season, and three more in the postseason — including two games in the 2003 stomach punch ALCS where the alleged curse continued.

And now, the Boston Red Sox are interested in the lefty, just like they were in 2004. Given their current starting rotation, he’d fit as a nice fourth behind Josh Beckett, Daisuke Matsuzaka, and Jon Lester. He’d also provide a veteran presence with significant postseason experience, as opposed to them heading into the season with both Justin Masterson and Clay Buchholz in the rotation.

Dec 9th 2008 4:30PM by Andrew Johnson (author feed)

Angels center fielder Torii Hunter was here at the Bellagio to talk about his latest charity endeavor, the Torii Hunter Project. He was even cracking jokes. “People are going to start thinking I’m a good guy,” he said. “I’m a bad guy on the field … I’ll eat your children.”

Will any “bad men” be joining or (re-joining) Hunter in Anaheim? The Angels appear poised to make a big run at either CC Sabathia or Mark Teixeira in the coming weeks and Hunter talked about both players.Continue Reading

Dec 8th 2008 11:20PM by Andrew Johnson (author feed)

Three managers of AL East teams spoke with the media this afternoon/evening (for a more extended look at the Rays, try this), and with very little happening on the first day in Las Vegas, it’s a good time to look at baseball’s most imposing division.

The standard for excellence in the other divisions in baseball is roughly 90-92 wins. That’s not the case in the East, where 95 wins are almost always required to guarantee a spot in the postseason.

For a team like the Orioles, that can be awfully intimidating. While the Yankees have their hand in virtually every free-agent pie, Baltimore is relegated to building slowly, to nurturing the farm system and hoping its young players pay off big in the near future.

“It’s a great time to be an up and coming prospect in our organization,” said manager Dave Trembley. But even with a collection of impressive young talent — names like Matt Wieters, Brian Matusz, Chris Tillman, Nolan Reimold — the O’s are facing long odds and Trembley has no pie-in-the-sky aspirations, merely repeating the mantra “we have to get better.”

Well, yeah, but the rub is just how much better they actually have to get.Continue Reading

Dec 4th 2008 12:07PM by Tom Fornelli (author feed)
Let’s go on a trip back in time to the year 2002. It was the month of October and while people all over the country were falling in love with Good Charlotte’s “Young and the Restless” and flocking to local theaters to see “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” there were new cultural phenomenons taking place in southern California. The Los Angeles Angels were on their way to winning the World Series, and introducing us all to the Rally Monkey and the Thunderstick in the process.

In my entire life as a baseball fan I have never seen fans do anything more annoying than bang those two inflated sticks together repeatedly for hours. Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver included. It was a plague that had been unleashed on the sport — in 2005 they were handing them out at White Sox playoff games — and thankfully they’ve since died out. For one man in Los Angeles, though, they didn’t die out soon enough.

Back in 2004 when the Angels and Red Sox were facing each other in the playoffs, then 29-year old Daniel Slama was in attendance at a game rooting for his Angels. He also took the time to make sure he chanted “Boston sucks” repeatedly, which is fine, but he then made a fatal mistake. He hit a Red Sox fan in the head with a thunderstick.Continue Reading

Dec 4th 2008 12:55PM by Tom Fornelli (author feed)
In case you weren’t already aware, you only have 20 shopping days left until Christmas, so if you haven’t gotten your shopping/Wal-Mart killing spree started yet, you should probably get started on that already. Of course, some people are really hard to shop for which is where gift cards come in handy, but there are some people in your life where gift cards are just too impersonal.

I remember when I was a kid it was easy. I would just buy my mom some crappy piece of jewelry they sold at Santa’s Workshop day at school, and I would get my dad some underwear. Well these days it’s a bit tougher, and it’s too bad my old man isn’t a Yankees or a Red Sox fan because if he was I’d be able to keep the underwear tradition alive.Got a Yankees fan on your Christmas list? Or maybe a Red Sox groupie you want to aggravate? Well, why just buy them an A-Rod shirt when you can get Alex Rodriguez’s authentic game-used underwear????

Now there’s a gift that keeps on giving!

Phil Castinetti of SportsWorld in Saugus has gotten his mitts on some All-Star undies - A-Rod’s, Kevin Youkilis’ and Josh Beckett’s - and he’s selling them on eBay starting today.And in case you were wondering — and I know you were — they are in fact game used. As for how Phil got his hands on them, he’s not saying and frankly I’m not sure I want to know. The bidding starts at $9.99, and though Castinetti said he’d put them up for auction today, as of this very moment there are no listings. I guess he wants to build suspense.

Dec 4th 2008 8:20PM by Will Brinson (author feed)
Alex Rodriguez caught a lot of flak for his inability to decide what country to play for — the United States or his “home” Dominican Republic — in the original World Baseball Classic. And , because he’s such a choker (duh), Team USA failed to win anything, much less even make it to the finals.

Now, according to David Ortiz, A-Rod has decided he will play for the Dominican in the WBC next year.
Ortiz is hosting a charity golf tournament in the Dominican city of Punta Cana this weekend. He said Rodriguez, who is playing in the tournament, is expected to announce his decision at the function. Rodriguez and Ortiz are close friends.
“He wants to play for the Dominican team,” Ortiz said by telephone Thursday. “We’ll talk about it now after he gets here, and he’ll probably announce it here.”

Ortiz said he has not spoken recently with Rodriguez about his intentions, but that as far back as the All-Star Game last July in New York, he said A-Rod had expressed a desire to play for the Dominican Republic.
Well, this shouldn’t generate any questions in the media at all. A-Rod is already considered to be kind of a scapegoat for teams that can’t seem to make it to a championship, so it’s really almost guaranteed at this point that people question his loyalty and willingness to win (or something stupid like that), America wins the WBC, and then Rodriguez gets labeled a choker again. In other words, just your standard offseason for A-Rod in the mainstream media.Continue Reading