Astros won a 15 inning marathon tonight to keep pace with the Cards. There is possible tie situation in the Central as well and if a playoff is needed they've already flipped the coin and Houston won. There is also an issue of a rained out game between the Giants and the Cards that may need to be played...it's complicated !!
8) Fido-on-the-Freeway II Dodgers beat the Rockies 19-11 behind the 9 RBI in-one-game performance of rookie James Loney. The kid hit a grand salami among other heroics in tying Gil Hodges team record set in 1950. The kid was replacing Nomar who was down hurting again and the kid did his best Willie McCovey imitation. Nomar had better watch his job. Loney is 21 years-old and this situation has Wally Pipp written all over it... The Dodgers are a half game behind the Pods in the West and one and-a-half games ahead of the Phillies in the Wildcard race with three games left. The Dodgers finish in San Francisco starting tomorrow night... re: Cards collapse Cards blown out again as the Stros have made up 8 1/2 games in the standings in the last nine days. This is now, officially the greatest collapse in baseball history and the Stros are en fuego... ..................DD
The Dodgers caught the Giants in the 9th inning on a bloop single by the Killer Tomato and a wild pitch brought home the game winner. The Padres lost and the Phillies won when the Marlins rolled over for them so... The Dodgers and Padres are tied for first place in the Nat West with two games to go. The Dodgers and Padres both have a two game lead on the Phillies with two to play, so the worst they can do is tie for the Wildcard... Dodger pitchers for the final two games will be Maddux and Lowe... ..........DD
The season is now all but 2 games over and the Dodgers are: 5-5 -- 10-10 5-5 -- 13-17 3-7 -4 20-20 7-3 -- 28-22 8-2 +6 33-27 5-5 +6 36-34 3-7 +2 41-39 5-5 +2 46-44 5-5 +2 47-53 1-9 -6 55-55 8-2 -- 64-56 9-1 +8 68-62 4-6 +6 74-66 6-4 +8 79-71 5-5 +8 86-74 7-3 +12 Last year at the 160 game mark the Dodgers were: 70-90 -20 Quite a difference! George in Ct.
Yeah Congrats to the Dodgers, Dodger Dog is in Hotdog Heaven!! : I'm currently trying to find me lucky charms for the Astros tomorrow!! We are throwing whoshe at the Braves, we need the Cards to take gas and for the Giants to give a rats ass about the make up game!!
The Dodgers and the Pods both win, so the Phillies are eliminated. Greg Maddux needed only 71 pitches in 7 innings to beat the Giants today and finish with a record of 15-14 at age 40. He also had a hit and stole a friggen base! Kudos to first year GM Ned Colletti who inherited a mess and basically rebuilt the franchise from the top down in one year. It was a remarkable achievement. The previous whiz-kid GM was a "numbers guy" who stacked the team with selfish whiners and psychotic grandstanders who looked good on paper. Colletti patiently replaced them all with gutsy, 100%ers ranging from college age kids to grizzled veterans who all had several things in common: courage, poise and a need to win every time they stepped on the field. It worked. But why should anyone be surprised? Its a lesson that we all keep learning and relearning in sports every season: the will to win is more important than talent. Courage, poise and effort are more important than brains or beauty. It was amazing to watch this all unfold. Washed up vets that others had given up on; like Nomar, Kenny Lofton, Jeff Kent, Aaron Sele and Maddux, along with kids too young to be prime-time players like Russell Martin, Andre Ethier, and Jonathon Broxton. They found their closer, 36 year-old Takashi Saito on the Japanese scrap heap! Meanwhile, 25 year-old Hong Chih Kuo has been so impressive in the final month, that he actually replaced Brad Penny in the rotation down the stretch! Whatever they're doing in the scouting department under Colletti is beyond science. Its almost as if he has a crystal ball. Consider next year's bullpen, if he signs everyone currently under contract: Gagne, Broxton and Saito are all closers, Brazoban will return as setup man, with Beimel, Tomko and Stultz as the early guys. That's seven quality relievers and obviously, the team can't use that many. Colletti will have tons of trade bait to obtain whatever he needs, along with a huge reservoir of open salary space in the budget and another stocked farm system at Las Vegas waiting to be brought up. Wow...and all he did was keep/obtain the winners and dump the losers, regardless of talent, reputation or age. A lesson relearned, a team rebuilt and some credibility restored. I don't know how far this year's team will get, but I know they'll try to go as far as they can and that's all a fan can ask for. The Dodgers are back... ..............DD PS. Tommy Lasorda was crying in the stands when the last out was made. This is his 50th year with the team.
The LA Times asked manager Grady Little what his plan was for the final game and he replied, "I'll drink a couple of bottles of champagne and then make out the lineup." It was a good plan. With all starters on the bench and Eric Stultz pitching the Dodgers abused the long-cold corpse of the Frisco Giants to finish in a tie for the Western Division flag. The tie means that the Dodgers, as the co-champ who lost the season series to the other co-champ San Diego, must play as the wildcard in the playoffs. This means that St. Louis travels to San Diego and the Dodgers open in New York against the Mets on Wednesday... re: Giants It was like beating someone who wouldn't/couldn't fight back. Barry Bonds left no doubt about his place in baseball history the previous day, when he took himself out of the lineup for a rest with one game to play. Today, when he was taken out for a pinch runner in what was probably his final game for the Giants, he refused a curtain call from the fans. Those same fans refused to offer curtain calls to manager Felipe Alou or his son or pitcher Jason Schmidt. Everybody is blowing town and glad the season is over. The Giants organization doesn't need a clean sweep; they need to put a tent over the whole town and start over... re: Final game of the season The last game of the season used to be more predictable in the good old days. Leo Durocher used to beg to be tossed out, so that he could begin his vacation early. It wasn't unusual for umpires who really hated him to keep him in the game regardless of his foul tirades just to make him even angrier... re: Mets vs. Lefties The rumors were right. The Dodgers plan to start lefthanded rookie Hong-Chih Kuo against the Mets instead of Brad Penny. The Mets have major problems with lefthanders and Kuo throws 97-99mph from the southpaw side... re: Vanishing starters The year 2006 marks the first time in baseball history (non-strike seasons) that there were ZERO 20-game winners in either league! In fact, the top winners in the National League were guys with only 16 wins, like Derek Lowe... ................DD
The Dodgers finish: 88-74 +14 and make the Playoffs. We start against the Mets. Last year we finished: 71-91 -20 George in Ct.
8) Dodgers-Mets @ Shea tomorrow. The Mets have now lost El Duque as well as Pedro. They'll probably have to start Glavine... The Dodgers rotation is set. At the point where Grag Maddux joined the team, they were floundering in dead last place and Derek Lowe was being knocked around. Since that point, the Dodgers finished 38-18 to share the title in the West and Derek Lowe finished 9-1... The Dodgers will start Lowe, then go with Maddux to get them back to LA for the final three. Looking for a split in NY... ..................DD
:roll: Sigh... Well it looks like my Dodgers blew the first one. I didn't get to see it either. When they play day games on the Least Coast we're still at work. I was only able to hear the final two innings on my truck radio during the drive home... One real bit of bad news was the freak injury to Joe Biemel when he cut his hand on a glass in his hotel room on the night before today's game. The Mets have had real problems with lefties, which is why we're throwing Hong-Chih Kuo tomorrow instead of Penny. Biemel has been nasty to lefthanded hitters all year, who're batting less than .200 against him, but now he's unavailable. This leaves the team with only one lefty reliever out of the pen and that's Hendrickson who came in today. We REALLY need Kuo to toss a hero's game tomorrow and get us back to LA for Maddux and Lowe... ...........DD
:roll: Oh well. We lost again and I can't really say that anything has surprised me. This is a patchwork/jigsaw/put-together team and the seams are showing. A shortstop playing 1st, another shortstop starting at 3rd, so nobody knows how to cover a bunt on either side of the infield. We have a shortstop in Chicago too, but the one we played against the Mets forgot how important it is to charge groundballs... When Nomar went down, they moved Kent to 1st...who is a 2nd baseman... The starting pitcher was a kid making only his 6th major league start... against a guy who's closing in on 300 wins... The Dodgers have a losing record on the road and are now officially out of pitching except for Maddux... All season long, it was at this point, where they looked as dead as old Marley's Ghost, that they've come back to life and destroyed everything in their path. We'll see if they have anything left when they get back to Los Angeles. If anyone could start the turn-around its Maddux... Looking for miracles now... ..................DD
Your pitcher looked good last night, especially considering he's had two Tommy John surgeries. Hopefully, he continues to show progress in the spring. I thought it was interesting that two kids from the same town (city?) in Taiwan are pitching in the same city in the playoffs (Wang, also).
8) re: Hong-Chih Kuo That Dodger farm system is amazing. Its not just that they select the right players in the draft, they develop those players too and Hong-Chih Kuo is a good example. He actually came up earlier in the year as a wild reliever and was sent back down. He resurfaced late in the season as a solid starting pitcher with good control. That's pretty good lower level coaching by somebody... The current farm system is again loaded with super prospects that may have a big impact next year. Watch out for James Loney to stick with the big team after batting .380 in the minors. He'll be replacing the injured Nomar in the playoffs tomorrow. Also watch for fireball starter Joel Hanrahan, power hitter Andy LaRoche and a kid-closer named Mark Alexander who had an incredible 0.96 ERA at double-A Jacksonville. All three could make the Dodgers out of Spring Training. Loney and Alexander were the Dodgers minor league players of the year... .............DD
:roll: BTW- We finally got the truth about the Joe Biemel situation. He's probably the single biggest reason why the Dodgers are losing to the Mets. He's the left-handed reliever who supposedly cut his hand on a hotel glass of water... He called GM Ned Colletti during yesterday's game and admitted that he actually cut his hand while drowning his sorrows in a bar... The idiot underwent plastic surgery this morning... :roll: :roll: :roll:
:roll: :cry: There is no joy in Muddville, my Dodgers have gone down the drain. This demise was about as unexpected as when my 103 year-old grandmother died. I was sad then too, but we all had a long time to prepare for it and a reasonable person could see it coming... This team went as far as it could go. It was a patchwork of older players and temporary fixes holding all the hot young rookies together with chewing gum and medical tape. THIS was the rebuilding year and it was a fabulous success. We Dodger Dogs have no complaints and for the first time since Tommy Lasorda left the dugout and the O'Malley's sold the team, we finish a season with the belief that the front office might actually know what they're doing. No more need for clubhouse voo-doo and ju-ju beads. We have detected signs of competence in what had been a barren wasteland of bloviating sales clowns and clueless whiz-kids masturbating their slide rules. What had once been baseball's best front office just might be making a comeback! The future looks incredibly brite, with the arrival of the "Jacksonville Five": Russell Martin, Jonathon Broxton, Matt Kemp, James Loney and Andre Ethier are all college age kids who're now Dodger starters. Starting pitcher Chad Billingsley is another 23 year-old rookie. Hong-Chih Kuo, Wilson Betemit and Jason Repko are 25. The "old vets" will be Rafael Furcal (29), Yhency Brazoban (26), Brad Penny (27) and Eric Gagne (30)... Perhaps even more important, is the team's payroll flexibility. All of these young players don't cost too much to put on the field. Most will be making less than $1 million per year on a team that can easily handle a regular budget of $100-$125 million per year and upwards of $145 million for half a season without breaking a sweat. This leads to some interesting speculations about next year's roster structure... Among the hottest rumors are that A-Rod might wind up here. I doubt that one, because the Dodgers are loaded at 3rd base, with super-kids Wilson Betemit and Andy LaRoche, while shortstop Rafael Furcal is signed for several more years. A trade for A-Rod would shake up the entire roster and starting lineup and I don't think they're looking to do that, but if King George was willing to pick up part of A-Rod's salary... Nomar may be out of here too. With James Loney looking like Willie McCovey at first base and the other super kids around the infield, he may wind up with the Angels... which is traditionally where old Dodgers go to die... (This year, it was the Mets!) With lots of salary room to play with, GM Ned Colletti will be looking for pitchers; especially starting pitchers. The rumor is that he wants Barry Zito of the A's bad enough to offer a long-term contract and he may go after other Bay Area pitchers who become available, such as Jason Schmidt of the Giants... Lots of money and prospects to trade, lots of current players locked up in multi-year deals and the possibility of resigning The Mighty Gagne himself. The future appears to be uncloudy for the first time in years... ......................DD
The Dodgers are swept 3-0 by the Mets and are eliminated from the playoffs. Lets hope that next year is better. George in Ct.
8) Postscript... I told you that I had spies at the game. When I got to school today, one of my students was very excited. He was the fan who caught Jeff Kent's HR ball! He also waited after the game and got Kent to autograph it for him! I held my tongue and didn't tell him how shocked I was to discover that Kent actually signed autographs...contrary to his reputation. ........DD