6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: <i>Crank</i> Quickies

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Thursday, June 23, 2005

Crank Quickies

Some quick ones via The Baseball Crank:

The Autry/Steinbrenner Connection: You wouldn't know it looking at the outside in, but some observers in New York are likening the Boss in his apparent dotage to beloved Angels owner Gene Autry:
Around the Yankees, there are people to whom I've spoken over the last month who evoke the memory of Gene Autry, the old Angels owner, even if the Angels never won a World Series until Autry had passed away and Steinbrenner's Yankees have won six World Series in all and four between 1996 and 2000.
"He wants one more," one Yankee said. "Now, if he gets one more, he'll just want one more after that. But he's like a lot of men his age, and it's clear he sees his own mortality."
I dunno. How much sympathy can you have for a man whose team won -- let me see now -- six titles as owner? That's six more than at least half the owners out there. Breaking out the buckets of whitewash, pulling the camera back with a diffusion filter won't change the fact that he's been a colossal tyrant and the game's chief icon, its emblem of excess and success. That image will no doubt get some grafitti sprayed on it by the nation's scribblers after his death.
Here, Kitty, Kitty, Kitty: As Crank says, there's brave, and then there's brave. Damn.
Fred Phelps's Last Stand: Before he gets hauled off to whatever insane asylums exist in Kansas, the lunatic minister who has picketed the deaths of gay AIDS victims now busies himself protesting the funerals of Iraq veterans. Phelps seems to think the reason Americans are getting killed is the country has become immoral. Funny, I thought it was because they were in a war zone...
This Can't Really Be The Reason, Can It? Crank points out Junior Spivey's impressive career splits versus lefties, but isn't this just a simple case of general manager incompetence, or at best a junk-for-junk trade? You could argue that Ohka is a guy about to collapse -- and I'll buy that -- but even so, this reminds me too much of a dubious moment in Billy Beane's mostly brilliant career, namely the signing of former Dodger Eric Karros, which was touted at the time because of his splits against lefties, but his subsequent release suggests that right-handed batters who hit lefties extraordinarily well but hit righties poorly are doomed to regress to their righty-righty platoon abilities.