2013 MLB Regular Season running thread

It's a shame there's no spring training there, but it's not what teams are looking for in a spring ballpark. By contrast, that's what makes it by far the best place to watch FSL baseball. That it draws decent crowds helps; nothing like the soul-sucking thrill of sitting among 450 in an 8,000-seat park.

 

Gerrit Cole looks rather challenging to hit.

Hit 99 on third strike to first hitter. Also was throwing 87-mph slider from inside corner to 3 inches off the plate.

 

Eh, the Giants had four hits in the first eight batters. It isn't that much of a challenge right now.

Fun note from the radio, Cole's girlfriend is Brandon Crawford's sister.

 

Cole got out of a bases-loaded jam in top-2.

Pirates load the bases off Lincecum in bottom-2 but Belt helps out bigtime by reaching 3 rows into the stands to make an out on Martin. Cole steps to the bat for the first time in the majors. He was 0 for 9 in the minors. No hits as a professional baseball player.

Lincecum tries pinpointing for some unknown reason. Cole works it to a full count.

Then Cole rips one into right-center for a 2-run single. Lincecum can't stop tripping on his dick.

 

And Cole just drove in two runs at the plate.

 

The knock on Cole has never been his stuff (which is as good as anyone's outside of and maybe including Justin Verlander), but that he tends to overthrow at times. Rather than take a bit off his 4-seam fastball to get a ground ball, he tries to gun it up to 100 mph every time going for the K and it comes in straight as a string.

 

He looks like a white Bob Lanier.

 

Seems to be getting mostly ground ball outs so far.

 

http://espn.go.com/chicago/mlb/story/_/id/9366243/chicago-cubs-suspend-ian-stewart-twitter-rant-discussing-parting-ways

So the Cubs signed Ian Stewart to a non-guaranteed $2 million deal this offseason. They didn't have to pay him if they cut him before a certain date in ST, but he managed to milk a nagging injury until past the date (can't cut him for medical reasons, only baseball ones).

When he finally comes back, he's got sent to AAA for a rehab assignment. He was terrible and the Cubs' replacement 3b have been decent, so when the rehab assignment time limit hit, the Cubs sent him to the minors formally. He rubbed some people the wrong way by using taking advantage of the fact that a minor-league assignment gives him 72 hours to report. He took three days off despite the fact that he was already with the team at the time of his assignment.

He's tweeted a few times about how he wished the Cubs would release him so he could get on with another team (He could have gotten out of his contract by refusing his minor league assignment, but then the Cubs wouldn't owe him the rest of his salary).

Finally, last night, he went full-on Twitter attack, talking about how the manager hates him and that's keeping him back, and retweeting some people who called the Cubs a terrible organization and such, but he won't quit because that would be giving up a million dollars.

So now the Cubs have invoked the "loyalty" clause in his standard contract to suspend him without pay, and are in the process of negotiating with his agent to get some sort of discount buyout release.

Cubs president Theo Epstein said:

"He had the right to elect free agency and he chose not to. Currently, we have the second best production out of third base in the league. We are getting really good defense at third base, too. If that were to change and Ian would excel at the Triple-A level, we would consider calling him back up here. In the meantime, we are very happy with our production at third and Ian is working on trying to figure out Triple-A pitching."

Burn.

 

Boy, I may have to reassess my dislike of Epstein. That is tremendous.

 

Does this mean Justin Upton is going to be an airline pilot?

 

Same here. That is awesome.