Results tagged “mlb”

When he came up with the A's, he grew into a genial homespun hero.

Then he left, and became a steroided diminishing-returns disgrace.

Now he's back in Oakland?

What-th'-hell for?

Couldn't he have signed with LAD or LAA?

Get you gone, prodigal douche.

The ever cost/value-parsing Oakland A's have traded for All-Star outfielder Matt Holliday, one of the finest young offensive players in baseball.

Wait, what?!

Uh... uhm... should lay down down... feelin' confused and distressed...

Major League Baseball played its 79th All-Star Game last night, a 15-inning, long hard slog eventually won by the American League, 4-3. Your hometown team players had a couple cameos and made a few notable contributions in the evening’s proceedings…

Here's a roundup of sports news

Here's todays sports news

SFist inteviews Lyrics Born who is headlining the Fillmore tonight

This morning, ESPN's Len Pasquarelli is reporting that "sources" say that the 49ers' prized offensive coordinator Norv Turner will be the new coach of the San Diego Chargers, to which we say noooooo.

You heard it hear first-- it'll be an old school, Colts/Bears Superbowl -The analysis of Mully's big trade is still going on but the new guys are ready to roll. We have to say one thing for this trade-- it's one of the few times the Warriors have ever made all the ESPN gabfests.

You know, we're having trouble rooting for the Saints mainly because it gives an excuse for too many sportswriters and broadcasters to make lazy comparisons between the football team and the city. So everybody feels happy that New Orleans is doing so well and coming back when the reality is far different.

The New York Daily News is reporting that Barry Bonds tested positive last year for taking amphetamines. As part of the recent steroid testing measure MLB took up last year, amphetamines were banned. What makes the story even worse for the Barry is that according to reports, he immediately blamed somebody else, mainly teammate Mark Sweeney and said whatever it was he tested positive for was something he got when he ate something from Sweeney's locker.

-Baron Davis leads the way to another Warriors road win, this time against the Orlando Magic. Davis had thirty-eight points and nine assists as the Warriors held off a furious Magic rally to win.

Well, Barry's ho'ing it up in front of other teams and having a little macking session with the Cards paid off-- Barry signed with the Giants or will according to MLB.com. The deal is one year for $16 million which we think pretty much empties the old Giants bank account for the year. Goodbye Barry Zito. Your 2007 Giants are like the 2006 Giants except worse.

Yesterday it was announced that this year's big free agent catch, Alfonso Soriano, signed a whopping long deal with the Chicago Cubs, for eight years. It was also announced that Nomah is staying with the Dodgers where he'll be joined by the highly sought after Juan Pierre. Which begs the question what the hell are the Giants going to do?

So let's take a look at the news in yesterday's M&R that the A's are about to announce a huge plan to build a stadium near Fremont. Basically, they want to build a privately financed, 36,000 seat, baseball stadium near the former Baylands Racetrack on land owned by Cisco. The reasons for Fremont are obvious and well-known but for sh--- and giggles, we'll go over them again.

Quick note on todays ALCS game-- the game is scheduled to start around 1:30 PST. The reason MLB is giving is because it's supposed to, yes, snow late Friday night and they'd like to get the game in before winter hits. The not quite said reason is because the Mets/Cardinals have to make up their rained out Game 1 and Fox would rather show the Mets/Cardinals game in prime time than the A's/Tigers game.

Now here's something we haven't written in awhile-- the Giants won a game, beating the Nats 8-6. Thus endeth the nine game losing streak. Like most fans of the Black and Orange, we started off this losing streak watching our high hopes quickly sink into all sorts of despair and hair-pulling angst, then found ourselves achieving some sort of melancholy resignation about the whole thing, finally settling on bemused detachment by the start of today's game.

We raced out of a meeting at work and ran to our desk to listen to the start of tonight's Giants' game on MLB audio. Down 2-1 and at the top of the fifth, we hopped into our car and listened as the Giants took the lead and somehow managed to escape an inning in which the first two Nats hitters got on base and were then bunted into scoring position (something which almost caused us to crash our car as we were too busy slamming our fist on the dash board in celebration to notice all the traffic around us.) Finally, we got to the gym just in time for the bottom of the ninth, hopped onto a machine right in front of the TV, cranked "Freebird" on the trusty iPod, and then watched in horror as ARMANDO BENITEZ BLEW YET ANOTHER SAVE.

Now, we should take this all with a grain of salt and maybe a few more grains after that and possibly some pepper for good measure, but according to the always credible NY Daily News, an indictment could come next week against the Barry. Or more like it could possibly, maybe, you never know, why not? come soon. The main reason for the thinking is that the grand jury's term is about to expire in a few weeks and usually, whoever is trying to get some sort of indictment thingy tries to get it before the grand jury expires. You wouldn't want to have to go through the whole rigmarole of working a court case all over again would you?

SFist commeters pose for before and aftershocks when the mayor commemorates a 1906 earthquake...at 4:30 in the morning. A hot tip on the Chronicle vending machines comes in and the SFist war correspondent risks life and limb to post this dispatch from the frontlines.

After an unproductive week at the MLB winter meetings, the A's heated up the winter stove again: they traded minor league OF Andre Ethier to the Dodgers for major league OF Milton "Insert Game-Based Nickname Here" Bradley and major league IF Antonio Perez. That is: they traded a bird in the bush for two in the hand. Ethier was the AA Texas League player of the year--Bradley, the prize for the A's in this deal is 27 years old, and he hit .290/.350/.484 for the Dodgers last season. As is often the case when the A's acquire a player, Billy Beane is rumored to have coveted him for quite some time.

We have to admit that we love the idea of the baseball World Cup. It could turn into something awesome, like the soccer World Cup, except with more scoring and less David Beckham. Which doesn't mean that MLB won't somehow screw it up, but it has potential. The biggest thing the thing needs is legitimacy from its star players. Well, it just got one of its biggest stars to compete, maybe the biggest of the big, one Barry Lamar Bonds.

And with that, we bid adieu to the Giants' season as baseball has moved to the playoffs and everyone's favorite drama, Waiting For the Sox/Yanks. Which means it's time for Your San Francisco Giants Season Replay, a season which we think can be summed up thusly: you know, it could have been worse.

Well, we'd been waiting for some actual baseball news to report, but in the meantime wacky San Jose mayor Ron Gonzalez is at it again.  This time, he went all the way to Phoenix, where he held a news conference outside Municipal Stadium and discussed his plan to bring a major league baseball team to San Jose.  Guess who plays Cactus League games at Phoenix Municipal?  The Bay Area, Mayor Gonzalez says, can't support three major league teams, and the Giants aren't going anywhere—he seems a little less wacky and a little more wack-ass now, as he sets his sights on your Oakland Athletics.

For all those people wishing somebody, anybody, would get to the bottom of this whole steroid mess, have no worries, congress is here! This week, members of the House Government Reform Committee, having finished reforming the government, have asked several ballplayers linked in the steroid scandal, several ball players not linked in the steroid scandal, MLB baseball officials, and union officials to testify next Thursday in front of the committee about steroid abuse. Those players, including Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Jason Giambi, have pretty much refused to testify. As have most MLB officials. And so, yesterday, congress sent out subpoenas. Noticeably absent from all this is one Barry Lamar Bonds. This despite the fact he has become the poster-boy of alleged steroid abuse and despite the fact he's about to break the most famous record in all of sports. Not to mention despite the fact some people think this whole BALCO thing is nothing more than an attempt to get Barry.

Spring is in the air -- can you smell it? It's that intoxicating mix of grass, red clay, pine tar and chaw. That's right -- pitchers and catchers report in just a few hours, and no, we're not talking about a party in Key West.

You know how in all this steroid hullabaloo, Tony LaRussa has been running around adamantly saying there was nothing going on, nothing happening, and nothing to see? Well, it turns out there was. Last night on the Wednesday night’s edition of 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes 2, Electric Boogaloo, LaRussa claimed that they knew Canseco was juiced all along. He’d even brag about it in front of everyone and joked around about how he didn’t need to work out anymore. And why didn’t he say anything? He wanted to but he didn’t think anything would come of it. Not that MLB would have done something about it, but MLB wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it because of the Players' Association (probably and most definitely true -- Donald Fehr is as much to blame in this whole mess as anyone). The fact that Canseco was having monster years during the heyday of the Bash Brothers and was the first player to hit 40 home runs with 40 stolen bases had nothing to do with it, of course. Sandy Alderson, then GM of the A’s and now Executive VP of baseball also admitted that they were aware of Canseco’s love of injecting things into his ass but as they had no concrete proof -- there was no testing back then -- they couldn’t confront him. Again, actually a fair claim as there is that whole issue with innocent until proven guilty and unless they followed Canseco into the men’s room everytime he went, they couldn’t really prove anything. Not that they would have, anyways (see 40 HRs and 40 sb in 1988).

SFist brings you yesterday's baseball madness in a nutshell or two: with only three games left this weekend to finish the season, the Giants, Dodgers and Athletics all won, the Angels lost, and the Astros didn't play, leaving the Giants, who are playing the dreaded Dodgers this weekend, three games back of Los Angeles in the NL West and tied with the Astros in the Wild Card race, and the A's, who are playing the abominable Angels this weekend, tied with Anaheim in the AL West. Can you imagine a more sickeningly exciting scenario for a Bay Area baseball fan? And about yesterday's games: young Jerome Williams was huge for the Giants and young Bobby Crosby was huge for the A's.