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If only statcast had the technology to measure the launch angle and exit velocity of yankee balls that have been hit off of your chin.

Goo Punch
Goo Punch
Hank Chinaski
Hank Chinaski

Good fucking riddance. 

TornACL

TornACL 7698

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13 hours ago, Goo Punch said:

So ESPN Sunday nights are held hostage by ratings. is there anything at all that ESPN could do to say, "We appreciate and value our fans, and we're going to be committed from now on to giving you the best, most important matchups on Sunday nights"? And if the numbers hit is too large to do that, is there anything creative they could to to facilitate it? Could they maybe get a couple of lucrative ad deals with a elect few sponsors by promising them to air the living fuck out of their product/service during their most watched shows? Make a few new "official sponsors" of certain programs? Anything?

Anybody got the ratings #s for ESPN Sunday Night Baseball?

I could see a time when national broadcasts go away entirely. They are a fucking beating, if you're used to local coverage of your team. There's so much down time, and for whatever reason, the network consultants have insisted that announcers fill every second of down time with chatter. Talk about the big issues of the day, talk about this, talk about that, talk about everything but the game that is unfolding on the field. It's so forced. I don't give a fuck about whether or not Bryce Harper should be traded by the Nats, especially when I'm watching two teams that are not the Nats.

This is not only an ESPN issue. The big Fox crews do the exact same shit.

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54211

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1 hour ago, TornACL said:

Anybody got the ratings #s for ESPN Sunday Night Baseball?

I could see a time when national broadcasts go away entirely. They are a fucking beating, if you're used to local coverage of your team. There's so much down time, and for whatever reason, the network consultants have insisted that announcers fill every second of down time with chatter. Talk about the big issues of the day, talk about this, talk about that, talk about everything but the game that is unfolding on the field. It's so forced. I don't give a fuck about whether or not Bryce Harper should be traded by the Nats, especially when I'm watching two teams that are not the Nats.

This is not only an ESPN issue. The big Fox crews do the exact same shit.

This is exactly why I think it's mind-bottling to see people bitch about their teams not being selected for national broadcasts.  

Having said that, I would rather listen to just about anyone provide color commentary than CJ Nitkowski.  Even Geoff Blum.  (OK, maybe not.  But whoever substituted for Blum last night on the Astros broadcast was waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than both of those guys.)

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WBT

WBT 20561

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5 hours ago, Scraps said:

Stanton is a dork. Blum is a douche. Eschenfelder is a midget tard. Hard choice.

Blum is miles better than Stanton 

3 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

I see you, and raise you Nitkowski, Grieve, and Rhaids.  And I still haven't even played Renner.

Fold

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texifornia

texifornia 56917

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4 hours ago, UTexasFight said:


Good game, good effort A’s.
You’ll always have June and July 2018... and that no-hitter Manaea threw back in April

We'll find another random pitcher you either haven't heard of or threw on the scrap pile and still snake the divison despite the lowest payroll in the league... it's the A's way ;)

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9431

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On the topic of the TV network discussion earlier today, thought this was timely.
That Cubs negotiation should be interesting to watch

How to Build a Perfect Regional Sports Network

If you’re a sports franchise in 2018, you’re staring down an uncompromising reality: that you’re only as good as your TV deal. As live TV audiences are dwindling, live sports might be the last great battleground. If you need proof that television rights contracts have become the primary needle-mover in the business of sports, look no further than FIFA’s World Cup pact with Comcast and Fox or the NBA’s current deal with Turner and ESPN.

Both contracts included such earth-shattering figures that their conditions changed the entire structure of the sports involved. For world soccer, FIFA’s massive deal coincided with plans to progressively increase the World Cup field. (The deal also more than likely had something to do with North America getting handed the World Cup in 2026). For pro basketball, the flood of television money spilling into the league — which jumped from $930 million annually to $2.6 billion annually as a result of their rights deal with Turner and ESPN — was so drastic that it led to a record-breaking, league-altering spending spree as soon as the NBA’s old TV deal expired in 2016.

Next up in the revolution? Major League Baseball. And all eyes are on one franchise in particular — the Chicago Cubs, who, as reported yesterday, will be ending their agreement with NBC Sports as soon as it expires in 2019 to build their own network.

Since the advent of Regional Sports Networks — or “RSNs” — many of baseball’s richest teams haven’t stayed on top solely by fielding a pennant-contending product or installing European beer halls into their state-of-the-art stadiums. They’ve added financial value to their franchises by investing in media companies and building a distribution pipeline together.

Generally speaking, MLB teams take one of two paths. Many are content to sell their broadcast rights for a fixed fee and let the network — like Fox or NBC — supply all of the network’s production, marketing and distribution resources. However, teams in major baseball markets like Boston and New York have opted to invest in their own networks (NESN and YES Network) and hold that equity themselves instead of getting a flat, fixed fee annually. These networks have become behemoths: In two transactions in 2012 and 2014, Fox bought 80% of YES Network, a company now valued at $3.8 billion. (The Yankees now reportedly plan to buy it back, according to Forbes.)

While building your own network is a lot more work, and while, depending on the market, the equity piece could still be less valuable than a fixed fee, when a team owns their own distribution, ownership is in much more direct control of monetizing and marketing their team.

However, this is exactly what makes the business of RSNs going forward a complicated issue. Putting together an RSN takes resources and a media partner, and a team going forward with this strategy absorbs the risk. Teams may be content to use the threat of building their own RSN as leverage — take, for instance, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Fox deal, where the team negotiated a minority stake — and negotiating for the highest rights fee possible from an already established national network.

There’s lots of money out there. But it’s up to the teams themselves to capitalize on the best possible situation.

In his engrossing 2007 baseball economics book Diamond Dollars, MLB consultant and NYU Tisch Institute for Sports Management dean Vince Gennaro wrote:

“Depending on the size of the market and popularity of the team, the Fox Sports-type arrangement would net a team a steady revenue stream of anywhere from $5 million to $50 million in straight rights fees. With an RSN, a team has a variable revenue flow that is more closely linked to their on-field performance and popularity, an asset that can be worth anywhere from $100 million (for the newest as well as upstart RSNs) to nearly $2 billion (for mega RSNs like YES Network).”

Keep in mind that Major League Baseball is a much more lucrative business now than it was when Gennaro’s book came out. League revenues have increased rapidly even though attendance has decreased. Every new TV deal struck by a team seems to break the record set by the previous broadcast deal, with the Dodgers’ 2013 $8.35 billion, 25-year pact with Time Warner being the latest example of a negotiation in a large market. (A TV deal that just so happens to ice out more than half of the population of Los Angeles).

Now that Disney-Fox is planning to auction off the RSNs in order to comply with anti-monopoly restrictions, the Chicago Cubs had wondered aloud about the value of their own partnership with NBC Sports Chicago, a distribution network that also holds rights to White Sox, Blackhawks and Bulls broadcasts. That deal expires after next season, and while the Cubs — whose single World Series championship is still fairly fresh and demand for the team’s programming near its peak — could have certainly commanded a record rights fee, the prospect of building an RSN and potentially increasing the franchise value by hundreds of millions appears to have been irresistible.

“The value of RSNs is stronger than ever,” wrote Bill Bridgen, the current President of NBC Sports’ regional networks, in an email to The Athletic. “Live sports is one of the most coveted properties in all media. The success of the Cubs on NBC Sports Chicago and how we are optimizing their popularity on a daily basis via our linear, digital, and social outlets continues to be a focal point for us.”

Writing to me a few weeks ago, Bridgen seemed to anticipate the Cubs’ decision. In a league with no salary cap restriction, and the revenue-sharing concept of the luxury tax becoming an increasingly minor financial concern for baseball’s richest teams — any luxury tax concern is easily offset by revenue the network generates — there’s never been more incentive for teams like the Cubs to take the wheel themselves, partner with a media company, and build a network together.

But there’s also never been more pressure to stick the landing.

Crane Kenney, the Cubs’ president of business operations, hasn’t commented on the matter recently, though he did speak to reporters about it back in January, saying at the time that “we have a big passion for controlling our own destiny… I’d say [bulls/White Sox chairman] Jerry [Reinsdorf] has been a great and amazing partner, as has Comcast. It’s been a very successful thing. If it made the ultimate sense to stay together, we would. But I’d say at the moment, we’re probably 80 percent inclined to do it on our own.”

“It’s a great time to be us,” he added.

While a successful venture is easy to visualize for the Cubs, not every market has the leverage of media markets like Chicago, where cable companies are more likely to pay an RSN’s subscription fee due to demand. Building an RSN is a resource-intensive process — if demand were to plummet, so do subscriptions from cable companies and ad revenue. This is why some teams are content to come to a fixed rights agreement, and then let the network do the hard work.

Still, building an RSN from the ground up can also represent an irresistible opportunity.

“The RSN business has been a great business for decades,” Bridgen wrote.

If building an in-house network is sound philosophy, it does not always work out in execution. In 2003, the Kansas City Royals launched their own RSN, Royals Sports and Television Network (RSTN), with a local cable company called Metro Sports. Distributors balked. Regional cable providers decided the fees weren’t the upside, and satellite companies refused to pick up the station at all. What seemed to be a savvy move in theory turned out to be a bust.

Riding an improvement in the team’s on-field success in 2007, RSTN was able to broker a deal with Fox to redistribute Royals games on Fox’s network. By the conclusion of the 2007 season, RSTN was closed for good. Now, the Royals’ deal with Fox, who pays the team $20 million a year for broadcast rights, is estimated to be about $30-$50 million less than what they could be getting in a straight fixed rights deal.

Another element complicating every television contract going forward is the changing dynamic of how people watch the game. Viewing habits have shifted to more on-the-go streaming, and any contract worth its salt must continue to prioritize mobile viewing. Some but not all RSNs currently in place offer the ability to stream games on your phone.

“Our job right now is to look beyond the way RSNs have traditionally delivered their content to fans and the digital space is key for us on many fronts,” wrote Bridgen. “The delivery of our networks on streaming services, such as YouTube TV, DIRECTV Now, and other virtual or over-the-top operators, has certainly helped combat cord-cutters by offering an alternative viewing option for consumers on a different delivery platform.”

“I would also add that the introduction of legalized sports wagering will be a significant boost to viewership and fan affinity,” Bridgen added.

Any good agreement also needs to include flexibility for technology on the verge. By 2020, 5G bandwidth will likely be available nationwide. Augmented reality and virtual reality, too, will likely find firmer footing.

Gennero, who still actively consults with MLB franchises, believes that new media like VR and AR might level the playing field, as opposed to further distancing the haves from the have-nots.

“I wonder if it’s a potential neutralizer,” Gennero says. “I wonder if a team like Royals could innovate on how they take the game to the public on their terms. I think you have to put the pedal to the floor on monetizing the digital transmissions of the games and the way that you portray them.”

And while live attendance is down, league revenues are way, way up, which makes the forthcoming Cubs TV negotiation a fascinating sports business event, one that will likely set the market for years to come.

A franchise’s valuation doesn’t necessarily have a clean trickle-down to an account like team payroll, but it’s not hard to imagine the teams with their own RSNs more easily justifying payroll tabs in the mid-to-high $200 million range. If you’re a fan rooting for your favorite team’s best interests, the team’s next TV contract needs to be on your radar. Your interest is in whatever deal delivers the highest annual rights fee possible, with a distribution plan that lets you watch the games however you want to watch them.

Anything else is likely to be an anchor the team will be dragging around for years.

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huge

huge 3793

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10 hours ago, youdunnf'dup said:

It’s just crazy how automatic he’s been after being so average to below average for the majority of his career. 

well throwing a 98mph cutter that moves a foot will get anyone above average I'd say

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54211

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8 hours ago, Goo Punch said:

lol, what did you do to schmitty man? dude is obsessed.

I negged him for smarting off when someone told him to quit being an asshole on surly because he has zero ties to Texas, and he responded by negging a random post of mine.  So I've just been negging every one of his posts now, and he's been doing the same to me. 

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 54211

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Gotdam, this is good (and sad):

Quote

n the middle of it all, the entire, emotional ordeal that would come to define his career, in the midst of the literal storm that was drenching the Eastern Seaboard on the afternoon of Sept. 5, 2006, and the perfect, figurative one that was conspiring at that moment to make him the victim of the cruelest bit of circumstance the inherently cruel game of baseball could possibly produce — in the middle of all that, Brian Mazone, anxious, restless, bored, headed to the dugout to see the skies for himself.

Out of the Philadelphia Phillies’ clubhouse at Citizens Bank Park he strode, past the coaches’ offices and the video room, down the steps, through the dugout tunnel, clad in team-issued, home-white game pants and a T-shirt. It was perhaps 21/2 hours before the first pitch of a game that, judging from a radar full of giant yellow and orange blobs, appeared doomed. He was 30 years old, with eight years in the minors, and that evening, weather permitting, he would be making his big league debut.

He heard the rain before he saw it, loud splatters of dream-piercing liquid darts. The dugout was flooded beneath several inches of it. It was pooling in various corners of the field. Mazone had rarely known rain like this; the nearly 21/2 inches that fell in Philadelphia that day, the biggest day of his professional life, were roughly half the total rainfall for all of 2006 in his native San Diego.

 

But the climb up those last few steps, from the dugout to the field of a big league stadium, was a moment he had envisioned for a quarter of a century, and now, unsure whether he would get the chance again — later that evening or ever — he braced himself against the downpour and ascended.

As long as he lives, he will never forget that rain.

Twelve years later, he doesn’t recall exactly when he first became aware of the rain and the mortal threat it posed to the fulfillment of his lifelong dream. But he had seen it out his Philadelphia hotel window when he awoke that morning, having been summoned by the Phillies the night before from Rochester, N.Y. — where his Class AAA Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons were preparing for the International League playoffs, and where Mazone broke down in heaving sobs as he heard the words, “You’re going to Philly.”

AP_080221066428.jpg&w=1484mazone_500-crop.jpg&w=1484
LEFT: Brian Mazone in 2008. (Keith Srakocic/Associated Press). RIGHT: Mazone was joined on the field by sons Braden, left, and Blake after a game in Korea in 2007. (Family photo)

“I remember standing at the window, the drapes open, just watching,” he recalled of that morning in the hotel. “When you see that kind of rain, you know you’re in trouble.”

His wife, Amber, having stayed behind with their two young children while Brian hustled to the airport to catch the next flight, got up the next morning and headed south to join him. The rain began mere minutes into her five-hour drive, and it never stopped.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is not good,’ ” she said. “He had so many ups and downs in baseball, it was like, ‘Of course this would happen.’ ”

It was raining when Brian got to the stadium at around 1:30 p.m., some 51/2  hours before the scheduled first pitch against the Houston Astros, walking in the home clubhouse to find his uniform — red-on-white, No. 49 — hanging at the locker he had been assigned.

And now, as he stood by the dugout railing, the ground beneath him drenched, the stands empty, the rain began to pick up in intensity. And Mazone, in the empty stadium, took the full brunt of it, squinting through streaks of rain cut with tears at a field-level view that, in the mind of someone who had been picturing it since age 5, was akin to the one from the top of Everest.

“I couldn’t even see much,” he recalled. “But at that point I really didn’t care.”

Finally, he walked off the field, drenched. Down the stairs to the flooded dugout. Through the tunnel. Up the stairs to the clubhouse. Through the doorway. To his locker.

There hung his uniform. He looked at it again. He took it down, slipped his arms into the sleeves, buttoned it up. He took a seat. And that’s where he still sat a little while later, when they came to tell him they needed to see him in the manager’s office.

BrianMazone__013.jpg&w=988Brian Mazone shows his Phillies jersey at his home in Encinitas, Calif. (Sandy Huffaker/The Washington Post)

A pain few know

Why Brian Mazone? Why, when there have been more than 19,000 players to appear in the major leagues, 750 of them on active rosters at this very instant, tell the story of one of the millions who never did?

Because maybe you remembered the news story from September 2006 — “Rainout kills major debut for 30-year-old rookie,” one headline read — and felt a long pang of sympathy.

Because maybe, years later, you went back and checked to see if he ever made it back to the majors — and he didn’t. Because maybe you thought that summed up something about baseball and life and regret and the awful randomness of it all, and you needed to explore what that something is.

Because maybe, now 12 years later, the story still hadn’t left you, and you wondered how the guy, after all this time, processed his cruel fate without letting it crush him, and so you called him up, and Brian Mazone, now 42, graying and working in medical-supplies sales, answered.

“Every now and then, sitting on the couch, watching MLB Network, I always have that — not regret exactly, not any sort of animosity,” he said. “It’s more like, ‘Dang, what if I did get in that game, and what if I’d put up six [scoreless innings]?’ Just what-if, I guess.”

 

And because, as you would learn, those who were there that day, who saw Mazone walk into the manager’s office, then emerge, pack his belongings and walk out with two duffel bags — one containing his Phillies home and road jerseys, which a clubhouse attendant handed him as keepsakes — still fall into a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God silence at the memory.

“I’ll never forget it,” said pitcher Randy Wolf, whose spot in the Phillies’ rotation Mazone was to have taken that night, after back-to-back doubleheaders over the weekend had overtaxed the team’s rotation. The rainout meant Wolf had ample rest to start the next night and Mazone was no longer needed. “I remember seeing him and saying, ‘Congrats and good luck,’ and then it just seemed like the rain wasn’t going away. It’s brutal. You have this moment you’ve worked your entire career for, and it literally gets washed away. It’s tragic.”

“You’re there, in the clubhouse,” said reliever Clay Condrey, whose locker was next to Mazone’s, “and then suddenly you’re not. God gives you one life to live, and you’re doing everything you can to get where you want to go. That elevator just wouldn’t go to the penthouse for some reason.”

Why Mazone? Because baseball finds room to celebrate the proverbial “cups of coffee” — players whose big league careers last for one measly game, or less. Moonlight Graham, who played an inning in right field for the 1905 New York Giants but didn’t get to bat, is a folk hero thanks to “Field of Dreams.”

But few remember the ones who came agonizingly close, such as pitcher Larry Yount, brother of Hall of Famer Robin Yount, who, in 1971, hurt his arm warming up in the bullpen before what was to have been his debut. Called into the game, he went to the mound to continue warming but couldn’t go. He walked off the mound and never made it back.

It’s brutal. You have this moment you’ve worked your entire career for, and it literally gets washed away. It’s tragic.
Randy Wolf, the pitcher whose place Mazone would have taken for the night

Once, in 2004, Wayne Lydon, a speedy outfielder in the New York Mets’ farm system, was summoned to Queens when it appeared veteran Cliff Floyd was going on the disabled list. Lydon dressed and took batting practice, but Floyd remained on the roster, and Lydon, having not been officially activated, was sent back to the minors, never heard from again.

“People don’t understand,” Lydon, now 37 and retired from baseball, said. “Since I was 5, that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, and you finally get up there 20 years later, and it passes you by. It haunts me a little bit. I’ve always had this recurring dream: I’m going somewhere, but I can’t get my socks on. I’m late. I’m stuck somewhere. And it’s funny how it kind of happened like that: I was there, I was so close, but I couldn’t get on the field.”

But it’s safe to say no fate was worse than Brian Mazone’s, his defining moment washed away by the most universal, unsparing and unpredictable of forces. For the rest of his life, he will never see another rainstorm — and living now in Encinitas, Calif., outside of San Diego, he rarely has to — without thinking of that day.

“I hate the rain,” he said.

Why Mazone? Because in his journey, and in his tears, there are universal truths.

Within the journey, from the lowest rung of baseball to the cusp of the highest, is a trajectory familiar to all who started at the absolute bottom of their profession and, through sheer effort, will and an obsessive single-mindedness, worked their way to the top.

And in the tears, deep-rooted, brought to the surface only because someone was asking uncontemplated questions — “Obviously, this is still hard for me,” he said haltingly in his living room — there is a pain familiar to those whose biggest moment was yanked away when it was nearly in their grasp.

When the hardest part, the getting there, was over.

When you already had the uniform on.

BrianMazone__002.jpg&w=988Brian Mazone helps 14-year-old son Braden with his batting stance as 12-year-old son Blake approaches at the Ecke YMCA in Encinitas. (Sandy Huffaker/The Washington Post)

Path to nowhere

The journey, in the barest terms — a list of Brian Mazone’s professional stops — went something like this: Eugene, Ore., to St. George, Utah, to Joliet, Ill., to Adelanto, Calif., to Norwich, Conn., to Fresno, Calif., to Reading, Pa., to Scranton, Pa., to Magallanes, Venezuela, to Ottawa to Daegu, South Korea, to Allentown, Pa., to Ciudad Obregon, Mexico, to Albuquerque to Mexicali, Mexico.

Nine minor league outposts of five big league organizations, not counting a spring spent in Boston Red Sox camp, plus two independent leagues, winter ball in two Latin countries and a season in Korea, all of it coming in a 13-year stretch, the prime years of Mazone’s life.

But even that raw accounting can’t do justice to the lengths he went to chase the dream: the $3,000 monthly salaries at the lowest rungs, the winters spent selling sporting goods and cleaning pools, the extra months away from home in later offseasons to chase a payday playing winter ball, the untold damage inflicted by the thousands of painkillers he took over the years just to be able to throw, the shoulder surgery that cost him 18 months and the 15-game suspension in 2005 for performance-enhancing drugs — when, according to Mazone, he bought an over-the-counter bodybuilding supplement at a strip-mall GNC that, he found out later, contained a banned substance.

And it’s not to mention the accumulated mental toll of all the times someone told Mazone, a left-hander whose fastball sat mostly at 85 to 88 mph, that he wasn’t good enough — a source of motivation for years that, by the end, only embittered him. He was undrafted out of San Dieguito High, undrafted again out of the University of San Diego, nearly released in spring training by the independent Zion (Utah) Pioneerzz, picked up and discarded by one organization after another.

GettyImages-85404185.jpg&w=640Brian Mazone pitched for the Dodgers during a spring training game in 2009. (Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images)

“I was never handed the golden ticket,” he said. “Even in high school, I was never the hardest thrower. I just got things done. I was never the guy you’d go, ‘Holy crap, look at that guy.’ But it’d be the seventh inning, and we’re up 3-0.”

At the moment he got the fateful phone call of his promotion to Philadelphia — around 8 p.m. that Monday, standing outside the P.F. Chang’s in Rochester — a thin ribbon of that hard-earned bitterness tinged what was otherwise a beautiful high.

“I had that thought that everything I’d done had been validated: all those hours, all that time away from home, the sweat, the blood, the tears — it was validated to myself, to my wife and kids,” he said. “And I could stick my middle finger up at everyone who told me ‘no’ along the way.”

The tears began with that phone call, Mazone bawling outside the restaurant, the kind of tears you don’t even care if everyone sees, then walking past tables full of concerned faces until he reached Amber and the boys — Braden and Blake, ages 3 years and 6 months at the time. She thought someone had died, but soon she was crying tears of joy, and Braden started to cry because he thought something was wrong.

“No, son,” Brian said, “these are happy tears.”

There were tears on the phone, Brian calling his parents, Keith and Theresa. “He’d worked so hard,’ ” Keith Mazone recalled, anguished tears now chasing the happy ones. “It was like, ‘Son of a bitch, he finally did it.’ ”

BrianMazone__019-new.jpg&w=1484AP_070308030769.jpg&w=1484
LEFT: Mazone's unused Phillies jersey from his lone call-up is mounted in a shadow box at his house. (Sandy Huffaker/The Washington Post). RIGHT: Mazone pitched for the Phillies in spring training in 2007. (Paul Sancya/Associated Press)

Amber called her own parents, more tears, and then everyone got on the phone to the airlines. They were all heading to Philly.

It was around 5:30 the next afternoon, Tuesday, when Mazone was called into the manager’s office — the rain falling, the game called off and rescheduled for three weeks down the road, the Phillies telling Mazone they needed him back in Rochester for the International League playoffs, some of his extended family already en route — that the next wave of tears began, the kind you try your best to hide from the world.

“The hardest one of those [conversations] I’ve ever had to do,” said Ruben Amaro Jr., the Phillies’ assistant general manager at the time, himself a former fringe big league outfielder who lived in constant fear of another demotion. “I remember being really emotional about it. You’re basically changing someone’s life.”

The Phillies let the Mazones stay overnight at the hotel before heading back north. That night, at the same window where he saw the wet skies in the morning and felt a sinking feeling, Brian stood again and waited for the rain to stop. That would have been the ultimate kick in the teeth — having the game called off, then finding out it actually would have been playable.

But it kept raining and raining, and finally he crawled into bed and went to sleep, the only sound the steady patter of raindrops pelting the window.

BrianMazone__018.jpg&w=988Brian Mazone, with sons Blake and Braden and wife Amber, said of a 2007 contract with South Koreas Samsung Lions,“It paid for our house and everything in it.

A dream dies

Baseball is supposed to be the purest of meritocracies: You’ll make it if you deserve to. You’ll go as far as your performance dictates. But in reality, it is far from fair, with personnel decisions influenced by everything from pedigree to politics to contract status to roster flexibility.

Mazone was 13-3 with a 2.03 ERA that season for Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, by all measures the sort of season that should have earned a promotion to the majors — if not that day, then certainly after the International League playoffs. In September, by rule, big league rosters expand from 25 players to a maximum of 40. When Mazone walked out of the clubhouse in Philadelphia that evening, he fully expected to be back in a matter of days.

But because Mazone was not on their 40-man roster of protected players, and because that roster was full, the Phillies, in the heat of a playoff race, would have had to risk losing another player to make room.

 

Back in Rochester two days after his big league debut was rained out, Mazone took the mound for the Red Barons in the playoffs and got hammered, his season’s worst start. The season over, the coaches pulled aside the players the Phillies had decided to bring to the big leagues. Mazone wasn’t among them. Instead, he pointed his rental car west, to home.

“For me, that was harder than not pitching that [rained-out] game,” he said, his voice pausing, halting, failing. “Obviously I felt like I deserved it. But I also thought they might throw me a bone — call me up, maybe let me throw an inning here or there when it’s 10-0. It just didn’t happen.”

Two-hundred-twenty players made their big league debuts in 2006 — ranging alphabetically from Reggie Abercrombie to Joel Zumaya, and in age from Adam Jones, 20, to Takashi Saito, 36 — but none of them was Brian Mazone.

He would have two more close brushes with the big leagues before he’d had enough.

In May 2007, a rash of injuries left the Phillies scrambling for a starter, and it almost certainly would have been Mazone, who was back at Class AAA — except days earlier he had signed a contract with South Korea’s Samsung Lions, a difficult decision that ultimately was little more than a cold cash-grab. The $300,000 salary was roughly four times what he was making in Class AAA. He left the following week.

It just wasn’t meant to be, I guess.
Brian Mazone

“It paid for our house,” he said, “and everything in it.”

And in late March 2009, back in the states, he was one cut away from making the Los Angeles Dodgers’ roster out of spring training and was preparing to head west with them for a final exhibition game at Dodger Stadium — when he was diagnosed with a staph infection in his leg, which required six weeks of rest and agonizing, twice-daily flushing of the open wound. He stayed back in Arizona as the team flew to L.A.

“It just wasn’t meant to be, I guess,” he said softly.

He lasted until the spring of 2011 before grim reality and the tug of home finally extinguished the dream. He landed a real job, coached his boys through their Little League years, settled into a new daily rhythm free of buses and bullpens.

“I wish I’d sucked earlier,” he said, “because it would have been easier to walk away. If I’d gotten my face pounded in, I would’ve [said], ‘Look, you’re 29, 30 years old, maybe you don’t have it anymore.’ But every year I’d turn around in September and I’d be top two or three in every category. I knew, at 34, I’d worked as hard as I could, dedicated myself for one thing — to get to the big leagues, the thing you’ve wanted since you were 5.”

For about 22 hours in 2006 — from the phone call in Rochester on Monday night to the manager’s office in Philly on Tuesday — Mazone was, if not officially at least in his heart, a major league ballplayer. He will always have that phone call. He will always have the jersey, mounted in a shadow box. But he has nothing else. Larry Yount is in the record book, credited with one game in the majors in 1971, because he had been announced as the new pitcher. Mazone? He may as well have never existed.

 

In the darkened living room of his family’s home, the blinds holding back the brilliant light of another sunny day, Mazone was asked if he believes he was a big leaguer. Seconds went by, 10, 20, 30. He was struggling. Finally, haltingly, he recalled a friend pulling him aside recently and saying, “In our eyes, you’re a big leaguer.” He cried then. He was crying again now.

“Just to know that people knew the story and knew how hard it was . . . ,” he started. “That means more than actually throwing that game.”

He rose from the couch, flipped his sunglasses down over his eyes and walked to the door, stepping out into another perfect, cloudless Southern California day. The sun baked the land and turned the green hills to brown. He’d be taking Blake to baseball practice soon. By evening, the air would be crisp and cool.

No, Mazone said, come to think of it, he couldn’t remember the last time it had rained.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/sports/wp/2018/08/30/feature/he-spent-his-whole-life-working-toward-one-goal-the-big-leagues-then-it-rained/?utm_term=.375cc3428a7f

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Monster

Monster 219

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Posted (edited)

Watched Brewers vs Reds yesterday.  Brewers batter got hit in the FACE with a pitch and the Brewer's announcer remarked that was only a slider.  "Just think if that would have been a fastball."   It was an 85 mph slider....why don't you go stand down there and take an 85 mph slider off the face, asshole.  

They were literally spraying a chemical in the batter's box where he'd left blood behind, and the Brewer's announcer just keeps repeating how it was 'only a slider'.   He must have said it 4 or 5 times.  

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9431

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Posted
Watched Brewers vs Reds yesterday.  Brewers batter got hit in the FACE with a pitch and the Brewer's announcer remarked that was only a slider.  "Just think if that would have been a fastball."   It was an 85 mph slider....why don't you go stand down there and take an 85 mph slider off the face, asshole.  
They were literally spraying a chemical in the batter's box where he'd left blood behind, and the Brewer's announcer just keeps repeating how it was 'only a slider'.   He must have said it 4 or 5 times.  

Counterpoint:

It was only a slider
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