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Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Pickoff Moves, Bedtime Edition

Roster Moves

Confirmation On Gillick

ESPN reports the Dodgers have confirmed Pat Gillick is no longer a GM candidate. The team has not identified any alternates, and refuses to do so. All the rage over on Dodger Thoughts today are conflicting reports from XM Radio and ESPN 710 that Jim Bowden is within a heartbeat of the Dodgers' GM chair, or Theo Epstein will be signed by Friday. See what you get for your $20/month?

Gold Gloves Announced

Eric Chavez of the A's and Ichiro Suzuki won their fifth consecutive gold gloves at that position. Also, Derek Jeter got his second Gold Glove, which always makes me skeptical; he's improved his defense lately, which I imagine comes around to making fewer showboat plays. But just in case, here's the list of starting AL shortstops who had a higher Rate2 score than Jeter's 104:
Shortstop       Rate2
=====================
Jhonny Peralta   112
Bobby Crosby     110
Juan Uribe       107

Joe West Defends The Indefensible

Umpire Joe West defended the lousy officiating in the World Series:
"Instead of criticizing the umpires, the media should be thankful," he said in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "But sometimes I wonder if the media doesn't like the controversy because that gives you more to write about or talk about."
The phantom hit-by-pitch on Dye -- that I can understand. The catcher's interference on Steve Finley? Eddings' unclear call on Pierzynski's strike three? Umpires need to be upbraided for calls as bad as those, and it's clear they won't ever be held accountable, no matter how obvious those problems might be.

Comments:
I saw once where Bob Shepard, the legendary Yankee Stadium announcer, said his favorite name to say was "Shigetoshi Hasegawa".
 
This is actually Jeter's second Gold Glove. He won in 2004 too.
 
Man, and I was trying to put that out of my mind, too.
 
The only reason Jeter won in 2004 was because of that face plant he did into the seats of Yankee stadium against the Red Sox. It wasn't a great catch, but he kept running full speed and dove into the seats, making it look spectacular.

The sad thing is that that wasn't even the best play made by a shortstop in that game. Pokey Reese had to travel much farther to catch the ball and had to go into the seats to catch one. Of course, his name isn't Jeter and he didn't unnessecarily throw himself at the seats, so he didn't get much props for it.
 
At least Jeter has improved from his days of being the worst shortstop to ever keep his job.
 

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