The Schrug » Baseball http://davidschrag.com/schrug David Schrag examines his navel and the world around it Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:11:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Waiting for the Sox to wilt http://davidschrag.com/schrug/2008/08/12/waiting-for-the-sox-to-wilt/ http://davidschrag.com/schrug/2008/08/12/waiting-for-the-sox-to-wilt/#comments Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:37:03 +0000 david http://davidschrag.com/schrug/2008/08/12/waiting-for-the-sox-to-wilt/ A college buddy and I have been razzing each other about which team is more likely to collapse this month, the Yankees or the Red Sox. He predicted a Yankees meltdown before the Democratic Party convention, and I pointed out that the Red Sox were the team that typically has a problem in August. Then he has to go and rub my face in the fact that the Red Sox have won two World Series titles since 2000, whereas the Yankees have only two AL championships in that timeframe (2001 and 2003), and no World Series wins. But Dan, that wasn’t my point. I was only talking about August. So let’s look at the stats, provided by Baseball Almanac.

  Sox Record
on 7/31		 Sox Record
on 8/31		 Total for August Yankees Record
on 7/31		 Yankees Record
on 8/31		 Total for August
2001 60-45 71-62 11-17 64-42 79-56 15-14
2002 63-43 75-58 12-15 67-39 84-50 17-11
2003 63-44 78-58 15-14 66-40 83-52 17-12
2004 56-46 77-53 21-7 65-38 81-50 16-12
2005 59-45 77-54 18-9 56-47 75-57 19-10
2006 63-41 72-62 9-21 61-41 79-53 18-12
2007 64-42 80-55 16-13 57-49 75-60 18-11
Combined
August
Records		     102-96     120-82

 

So you see, Dan, over the last seven years the Yankees are 38 games over .500 in August, whereas the Red Sox are a mere 6 games over .500. I admit this year is looking a bit grim for the Bombers, but history is on our side.

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]]> http://davidschrag.com/schrug/2008/08/12/waiting-for-the-sox-to-wilt/feed/ 0 How to spoil a Yankees – Red Sox game http://davidschrag.com/schrug/2007/09/17/how-to-spoil-a-yankees-red-sox-game/ http://davidschrag.com/schrug/2007/09/17/how-to-spoil-a-yankees-red-sox-game/#comments Mon, 17 Sep 2007 13:57:33 +0000 david http://davidschrag.com/schrug/2007/09/17/how-to-spoil-a-yankees-red-sox-game/ Sox-Yanks is about as close to nirvana as you can get in sports. But watching last night’s game was something akin to having your yoga class led by Richard Simmons. The role of “Guy you want to hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat” was played by Joe Morgan. Here is a transcript of Morgan’s 63-second description of a collision the previous day between Eric Hinske and Jorge Posada. It was accompanied by some slo-mo replays and telustrations which I can’t reproduce here, but believe me, they did not make Morgan’s analysis any less excruciating.

I want to show you something about that collision, Jon, because Posada got caught in an awkward position. There was no place for Hinske to go. There’s no place for Hinske to go, so he had to hit him. There was no – there was no plate. You know, catchers usually give you some part of the plate to slide towards. There’s no plate. The plate’s back here. So what is Hinske gonna do other than try to bowl him over, you see what I mean? You know, he had no choice but to run into Posada. I don’t think it was a — it wasn’t a bad play, you know, there was no place for him to go. See where the plate is? Now how’s he gonna get to this plate? You can’t slide. There’s no place to slide. Posada’s got it blocked. The only place you can go is try to run over him. And that’s what he did, so I don’t want, you know,  the Yankee fans to think that was a dirty play because there was no place for him to slide, there was no place to go. Posada usually will give you — the catcher will give you someplace to slide, but he got caught in a bad position, and there was no place for Posada to go and no place for Hinske to go.

I’m sending this one off to the “Fire Joe Morgan” blogsters. It’s a classic.

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