1/26/2007 2:20:38 PM by Mike Miliard | Comments [0] |  

RED SOX SIGN FREE AGENT OUTFIELDER J.D. DREW TO FIVE-YEAR CONTRACT

Boston, MA—The Boston Red Sox today announced that the team has signed free agent outfielder J.D. Drew to a five-year contract extending through the 2011 season. No further terms were disclosed.

The announcement was made by Executive Vice President/General Manager Theo Epstein.

Drew, 31, batted .283 with 20 homers and 100 RBI in 146 games for the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2006. The lefthanded batter ranked tenth in the National League with a .393 on-base percentage and was the league’s third toughest player to double up, grounding into just four double plays, an average of one every 123.5 at bats.

Drew led the Dodgers, the 2006 N.L. Wild Card team, in doubles (34), RBI, walks (89), and on-base percentage, tied for the team lead in home runs, and ranked second in games and at bats (494). He established career bests for games, doubles, and RBI, and his walk total was the highest by a Dodger player since 2002.

The righthanded thrower started 131 games in right field and four as the designated hitter. He was the Dodgers Player of the Month in April with a .306 average, four homers and 18 RBI while reaching base safely in all 22 games and finished the year with a .333 mark, six homers, and 23 RBI in his last 25 contests beginning September 2. Drew had a .983 fielding percentage in 135 games in right field, the second highest percentage among qualifying N.L. right fielders.

Drew spent the 2005 and 2006 seasons with the Dodgers after signing with the team as a free agent in December 2004. He was granted free agency after opting to exercise an out clause in the contract on November 11, 2006.

In a major league career that began in 1998, Drew has compiled a .286 average with 162 home runs and 509 RBI in 960 games with St. Louis (1998-2003), Atlanta (2004), and Los Angeles (2005-06). Over the last three seasons, he has an on-base percentage of .415, seventh best among all major leaguers with at least 1,000 plate appearances in that span. His .393 career OBP is 13^th highest among active players with at least 3,000 plate appearances. He is a career .295 hitter with runners in scoring position. 

Drew batted .295 with 18 home runs in his first full major league season with the Cardinals in 2000 and hit a career best .323 in 109 games the following season. He finished sixth in the National League MVP voting in his lone season with the Braves in 2004, ranking fourth in the league with 118 runs and a .436 on-base percentage and fifth with 118 walks while hitting a career best 31 home runs.

1/26/2007 2:15:52 PM by Mike Miliard | Comments [0] |  

1/19/2007 12:56:14 PM by Mike Miliard | Comments [2] |  

So you’ve Martin Luther King Day off? After you’ve given a little thought to the too-short life of the man himself, stop by the Friends Meeting Cambridge in Harvard Square between from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It’s time for the latest meeting of the Boston chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research.

The featured speaker will be Red Sox VP of Publications and Archives Dick Bresciani, fresh of his disappointing (once again) campaign to get Jim Ed Rice elected to the Hall of Fame where he belongs. Also on hand to speak will be Red Sox sports psychology coach Bob Tewksbury, former Baseball Writers' Association of America  president and official Fenway scorer Chaz Scoggins (who’s also the author of Game of my Life: Memorable Stories of Red Sox Baseball), 2006 Red Sox Minor League Offensive Player of the Year Jeff Natale, and bullpen arm Craig Breslow, who, if you’re lucky, may teach you something about the molecular biophysics he studied at Yale.

For driving directions to FMC, check out their website. Parking is off street and at garages in Harvard Square. For more information, contact Seamus Kearney at seamus@cs.umb.edu.

1/11/2007 3:48:10 PM by Mike Miliard | Comments [0] |  

Well, that surprised pretty much no one.

Welcome to the pantheon, Cal and Tony. 98.5% and 97.6% respectively. Methinks that’s as close to unanimous as anyone’s ever gonna get from this point on. (Well, maybe.)

Better luck next year — or never — Big Mac.

And in the mean time, we’ll keep pulling for you, Jim Ed. So will Dick Bresciani. And this guy.

A slight slippage, but still almost two thirds of voters want you in. Too bad you need three quarters.

Next year. I can feel it.

Just one thing I’m curious about: who the hell were the three guys who voted for Dante Bichette?

Aw fuckit. So what if the big man didn’t make it into the Hall. He was the Atlantic League Player of the Month for August 2004 — go Nashua Pride! — and they’ll never be able to take that away from him.

Anyway, over at Sons of Sam Horn, they’ve got another interesting debate going: Is Curt Schilling a Hall of Famer?

It’s an interesting question. I say yes. Eventually.

But this coming season (and post-season?) will obviously have a lot to say about how that question resolves itself.

Speaking of good-natured debate, I’ve signed on with several other bloggers for a new project, spearheaded by Brian Martin over at Friendly Fenway to help compile a list a comprehensive list of the 100 Greatest Red Sox Players. Brian wants as many bloggers and fans to contribute as possible, so if you’re game to pitch in, send him an e-mail.

It’s an interesting project. Just coming up with my own top 20 was hard enough (I reshuffled and second-guessed myself about a bazillion times) and I suspect coming up with numbers 80 to 100 will be a lot harder.

Here’s my upper echelon, based on criteria both empirical and emotional.

1. Ted Williams

2. Carl Yastrzemski

3. Cy Young

4. Dwight Evans

5. Bobby Doerr

6. Jim Rice

7. Carlton Fisk

8. Roger Clemens

9. Pedro Martinez

10. Wade Boggs

11. Jimmy Foxx

12. Smokey Joe Wood

13. Manny Ramirez

14. Luis Tiant

15. Rico Petrocelli

16. David Ortiz

17. Mel Parnell

18. Dom DiMaggio

19. Tim Wakefield

20. Bob Stanley

Obviously, this is a subjective and quite possibly contentious project. So we welcome your input. Who are your picks for the bottom four fifths of this illustrious list?

Etc.

Hot Stove Cool Music was a blast the other night. The best one yet. It was very wise to add some new names to the lineup card, and Eli “Paperboy” Reed, the Downbeat 5, the Figgs, 4Peace, and the Pernice Brothers did not disappoint.

One minor bummer: I guess all the players had gone to Saturday night’s mini concert instead. On Sunday it was Lenny DiNardo and Lenny DiNardo only.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. We’ve long been fans of Lenny D around these parts (perhaps more for his impeccable rock snob cred than for his lefty junkball). And indeed, as he took the stage with Peter Gammons — who looks and sounds GREAT — the commish confirmed that in his many decades covering this beautiful sport, he’d never met anyone who knew as much about music as DiNardo.

But is he gonna pitch this year?

If the baseball discussion was a bit simplistic — Why did we get rid of Loretta? Who says Lugo is better than A-Gon? Waaaaah! — the music was doozy all night, the covers coming fast and loose. Theo plugged in for a ripping take on Neil Young’s “Powderfinger.” Gammons powered his way through Zevon’s “Model Citizen” and Richard Thompson’s newly-relevant “Feel So Good (I'm Going To Break Somebody's Heart Tonight).”

And the all-star finale, where Epstein and Gammons were joined by DiNardo, Joe Pernice, Bill Janovitz, Mike Gent, JJ Rassler and host of others for a scintillating stab at the English Beat’s “Save it For Later” followed by Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From” (belted out by the Downbeat 5’s punk-pulchritudinous Jen D’Angora), was a dynamite way to send us back out into the not-quite-cold, to bide our time for six weeks until pitchers and catchers report.

Finally, while we’re on the subject of rock and roll and halls of fame, I would like to encourage you to support OTD’s initiative to get Gary Cherone the immortality he deserves. (Those dudes at the R&RHOF are real jerkfaces, no?)

There’s a hole in his heart that can only be filled by you! E-mail early and often!!!

1/9/2007 6:28:28 PM by Mike Miliard | Comments [3] |  

A final, grateful farewell to one closer.

And a hearty hello to a new one...maybe.

I’ll concede that the numbers don’t look good on Joel Pineiro.

In fact, they’ve gotten worse every year.

                        ERA                 WHIP

2001                 2.03                  0.942
2002                 3.24                  1.250
2003                 3.78                  1.266
2004                 4.67                  1.329
2005                 5.62                  1.481
2006                 6.36                  1.648

But this is all about scouting says Nick Cafardo. Who knows? Sometimes stats don’t tell the whole story, and I’m very interested to see how this story plays out.

Maybe, as a one inning guy, coursing with adrenaline, feeding off the energy of the fans, Pineiro can just go balls out and recapture what made him so good in his first few seasons. And if that happens, we will have caught lightning in a bottle in a very, very thin closers market. A gutsy move. Let’s see if it pays dividends.

And none other than our own Curt Schilling likes what he sees:

The only thing I know is that two years ago I thought this guy had as lively stuff as anyone I had seen in a long time.

He certainly did seem to tail off last year but during some of his games he showed the mid 90s electric stuff he had all the time a few years back.

I thought, from the first day I saw him, that he was built to be a reliever with an incredible arm on a Gordon sized body.
He'll gain a decent amount of velocity heading to the pen, if he can make the mental transition this guys a serious power arm on the back end.

His curveball, when he's fresh, is a strikeout pitch, his fastball certainly is as well, but it was his changeup that wow'd everyone. Tremendous arm action, ball died without looking like it was slowing down.

This, to me anyway, is a no lose signing. This kid gets in the right mix and environment and he ends up being that kid a few years from now people say "How the hell did we let him go?"

I know he tailed off the last two years but I see no downside to adding someone with this good of an arm and some experience under his belt.

Good enough for this fan.

See you at Hot Stove, Cool Music.

1/5/2007 12:26:59 PM by On the Download | Comments [1] |