Joe Sez

PUTIN AND MANFRED: DICTATORS SEPARATED AT BIRTH.

· Baseball Rules, Joe Sez, News · , , , , ,

Not unlike Russia’s Vlad Putin, who pretty much put the “dic” in “dictator”, here in the US-of-A we got ourselves Rob Manfred, who’s doing a bang up job of puttin’ the “dic” in “dictatorial.” In fact I think he’s tryin’ to slip a high hard one into to the sacred and holy game of baseball. One thing is for sure: these two guys are snipped outta the same blood stained cloth, my friend. It’s basically, stand back or take your friggin’ chances.

If you wanna get a feel for how high Manfred’s “Putin factor” is, cast your eyeballs on the statement (below) he made about the new pace-of-play rules he’s ramming down the throats of Major League Baseball. It’s right outta the Kremlin; autocratic totalitarianism veiled in diplomacy, but with spaces between the lines you could parallel park a mobile ICBM launcher in.

“I am pleased that we were able to reach an understanding with the Players Association to take concrete steps to address pace of play with the cooperation of the players,” Manfred said. “My strong preference is to continue to have ongoing dialogue with players on this topic to find mutually acceptable solutions.”

What does that mean in English?

It means that Manfred, in true Omega House fashion, would prefer it if ball players just winced out a “Thank you sir. May I have another?” with each of his Neidermeyer rules, delivered with a sting in the name of speedin’ up a game that’s never ever ever never been based on time. Baseball has a seventh inning stretch, for Chrissakes. It’s a game that unfolds, my friend. It ebbs and meanders. Occasionally it explodes, other times it languishes. Except for trades, though, it doesn’t have a deadline. No clock. No timekeeper. No buzzer. Time doesn’t run out on baseball, no matter how much Manfred and the Snap Chat, instant-gratification, short-attention-span millennials that call themselves “fans” would like it to.

As a result, Lord Manfred is in the midst of makin’ up rules to make baseball more like football — an inferior sport in every way, with the notable exception of cheerleaders. It started with Rule 7.13 and Rule 6.01, both of which take away the freedom of a runner to break up a close play. The reason for these rules, they say, is to protect players. This is a sport, mind you, where guys are throwin’ what basically is a rock about 97 miles an hour within inches of your location. And sometimes they can get a little Wild Thing on you. Follow Manfred’s “protection” logic and it’ll only be a matter of time before hard balls are outlawed and he places an 80 mph speed limit on fastballs. It’s kinda like the NFL and their sissy penalty for tripping. You got 300 lb guys tryin’ to rip each other’s heads off, but you also got a penalty for tripping? What?!

Tictoc, tictoc.

Hell bent on turnin’ baseball into a 30 second commercial, Manfred will see some of his clock management dictates implemented this season. There’s gonna be a timer for pitching changes, for example. Brilliant. What’s that gonna save…a few seconds for each one? It’s not the time it takes to change pitchers that’s too long, it’s how many friggin’ pitching changes are made in one game. If you got a couple of Mike Scioscia’s in the dugouts, you might not get home before your carriage turns back into a pumpkin.

But that’s not the clock that matters. Womanfred also wants to hamstring the drama between pitcher and hitter by instituting a 20-second countdown timer between pitches, and a between-batter clock, so hitters can’t screw with a pitcher’s rhythm. These are time honored traditions that are part of the game, not somethin’ you send to baseball Siberia on a personal whim. The good news is the trouser snake didn’t get either one. Not yet, anyway.

Manfreds misguided mandates.

What he did get was a win on mound visits, now limited to six non-pitching-change pow-wows per nine-inning game, with one added visit permitted (gee-wiz, thank you, your worship) in each extra inning. And I’m not just talkin’ managers and coaches trottin’ out to the bump, either. It means any player (including the catcher) leavin’ his position to chat with the pitcher counts as a visit.

It’s also considered a mound visit if the pitcher leaves the mound to confer with another player. Question: How the hell can it be a mound visit if it ain’t on the mound?! That’s like sayin’ a ball landing in foul territory is fair. Of course as long as you have CB Bucknor out there, that’s always a possibility. But I’m just sayin’.

There will be free trips to moundville to check on an injury, or after a new hitter is announced, or if there’s confusion between pitchers and catchers over signs. (I predict about 30-40% more confusion this season.)

Thankfully, the MLBPA ain’t exactly skippin’ to My Lou with Womanfred on this crap. In fact the Union hasn’t formally consented to anything. They’re goin’ along … for now. But as Player Association Chief, Tony Clark, put it, the players “remain concerned about rule changes that could alter the outcome of games and the fabric of the game itself.” Of course he might as well have been speaking Russian as far as the Commish is concerned.

I’ll point out here that Womanfred has the right to institute rules changes without an agreement from the Union with one year notice. Which means, next year, you can count on havin’ the pitch clock, two strikes and you’re out, games shortened to seven innings, and the death penalty for giving up more than three walks per nine innings.

The pièce de résistance.

The proof that Manfred and Putin are evil twins comes into sharp focus when you take a look at this year’s new extra innings rule in Minor League Baseball, which is really the rule testing ground for Major League Baseball. They already have the pitch clock, for instance.

This season, extra innings throughout the minor leagues will start with a runner at second base. CAN YOU FRIGGIN’ BELIEVE THAT?! That’s the kinda crap you did for your younger brothers when you played whiffle ball — a game whose ball looks exactly like Manfred’s brain. And just to make this pinheaded rule more convoluted, the runner who starts an extra inning at second will be counted as reaching on an error for purposes of determining earned runs, but no errors will be charged. How the F does that wash? The guy technically reaches second on a two base error, but nobody is charged with one?

How ’bout Manfred? Now THERE’S a guy that should be charged with an error. A fatal one. One that boots his communist ass back to Moscow where he and his long lost brother can reunite and lay plans to get that bozo in the White House re-elected. Or maybe shorten the Indy 500 to the Indy 200. Or perhaps mandate shorter winters, 20 hour days, and partial amputations for anyone over 5’6″.

Joe

PS. I leave you with a quote from the great philosopher, Stormy Daniels: Shorter may be easier to take, but it isn’t necessarily more fun.”

JOSE ALTUVE, THE SMALLEST GUY IN BASEBALL, PUTS UP ANOTHER GARGANTUAN NUMBER.

· 2018 Cubs, Joe Sez, News · , ,

Hey there, piggy banks. It’s time for a little pre-season math lesson, brought to you by the twin gods of baseball negotiations; Insanity and Yurshittinme.

Baseball is a numbers game, right?

Baseball men count everything — at bats, hits, runs, steals, earned runs, wild pitches…probably even how many times a guy adjusts his junk in an inter-league game with less than two outs and a man on third. It friggin’ ridiculous. They even make up things to count, like Value Over Replacement Player (VORP). This make-me-laugh stat zeroes in on how much batters and pitchers contribute to their teams compared to a fake position player or pitcher of league-average talent. Now that’s GOTTA be somethin’ created by agents. Anyway, baseball is a game that lives and dies on numbers — national debt-size ones when it comes to contracts.

So here’s a number for ya: 151,000,000.

That’s what the Stros’ are shellin’ out for their sawed-off second baseman, José Altuve, for the next five years. Not $150 million (cuz that woulda been an insult). One hundred and fifty-ONE million. Not bad for a guy who still has to travel with his Graco Nautilus booster car seat. Did the Tuve have a stack of other big numbers last year…especially during the playoffs? Totally. But holy craptoids!

Baseball is also a game of inches.

That means at 5’6″ (66 inches) José Altuve is now the highest paid player in baseball, based on height, and will be rakin’ in $454,545.46 per inch, each of the next five seasons. That would be 2,945,436,200,000 bolivars in Venezuela — where Altuve is from — according to the unofficial but often used exchange rate of dolartoday.com. Surprise, surprise…official Venezuelan government exchange rates are considered overvalued. Of course I could say the same thing about pint-size second basemen gettin’ paid 3 trillion bolivars a year. Nobody is worth that. Not even Scarlett Johansson.

Is America great or what?!

No matter how Lester Holt tries to paint it, America just ain’t that bad. And Little Joe’s contract extension illustrates that in 4K living color, my friend. Take Venezuela, for instance, where the latest increase in minimum wage to 97,531 bolivars a month — an amount equal to $12.53 in Houston, Texas, America — means that Altuve, all by himself, makes as much money as 200,851 of his countrymen. Pretty friggin’ incredible.

America: Land of the free, home of the highly overpaid. Especially if you pretend (act) or play baseball for a living. But hey…I say more power to Altuve. Right up until they meet the Cubs in the Series this year. (Not that the little bat swingin’ munchkin needs anymore power, with his obscene slash line and all.) As far as his contract goes, though…if I were in his size 3-1/2 shoes, I’d take every penny they wanted to bury me in. Includin’ that extra million.

Are you still with me?

I know I lost White Sox fans, Cards fans and probably Major League umpires — who can only count to four and require one of those umpire counter things to do it — the moment I mentioned “math.” But for the astute Cubs fan (and is there any other kind?) what all this means is that Altuve is gonna be a Stroh for a while, the Stros are likely to be contenders for a while, and the people of Venezuela are worse than dirt poor. Whatever is worse than dirt — which I don’t know what it would be — that’s it.

Saving the best for last.

As long as we’re talkin’ about mucho bolivaro, here’s a piece of good news for the rest of us: After gettin’ boystowned by the Ricketts family the last two seasons, Cubs tickets are stayin’ relatively flat, with 2018 prices gettin’ goosed by less than one percent. This means the average ticket will set you back 518,946 bolivars, or $66.67. Consider yourself lucky, pallie. A minimum wage Venezuelan has to work through June 10th to make that much scratch.

Joe

ARRIETA’S DEPARTURE FOR THE PHILLS HAS LEFT ME WITH A SCORCHING CASE OF GONORRHIETA.

· 2018 Cubs, Joe Sez, News, Trades · , , ,

Hey there, cheese steaks, Joe Schlombowski, here. Unlike you Arrieta groupies out there — and you know who you are, my friends — I seem to have developed some sorta rash. Yep, now that the bearded J is wearin’ that stupid friggin’ liberty bell on his head, I get what I’d call “free clinic” symptoms every time (enter name of sports media conglomerate here) mentions his name. Let’s call it Gonorrhieta.

Gonorrhieta is a baseball transmitted disease (BTD). No, White Sox fans, you can’t get it from bleacher seats. You get from having a baseball fan’s love affair with any major league pitcher named Jake Arrieta who decides to walk out on you (putting the “gone” in Gonorrhieta) even though management was willing to stuff $27.5 million down his jock strap each of the next four years. Some people call it “the clap.” And while there was plenty of well-deserved clappin’ going on when he donned Cubbie blue, Arrieta’s departure for redder pastures is definitely causin’ some pain in places too dark and waaaaayyyy too sensitive to mention in this august rag. Not because he’s gone, but because he definitely chose to be gone.

The Cubs 4-year, $100 million offer was one year longer and $35 million more than what he took from the Phillies. Now I don’t know about you, but I can feel that decision in a part of my anatomy that’s reserved for Dr Golberg and his latex glove.

I’m tempted to blame Scott Boras, cuz I friggin’ can’t stand what he and the other vermin that represent ballplayers have done to baseball. But like Steve Rosenbloom pointed out in the Trib today, Boras or not, it was up to “Arrieta to say deal or no deal, and when it came to the Cubs, Arrieta said no deal.”

After signing on the line which is dotted, Arrieta said, “This is a special situation for me. It’s a tremendous honor and I look forward to making this organization proud.” OH MY FRIGGIN’ GOD! The guy goes 22-6 and wins a Cy Young in 2015, then helps end the longest championship drought in the history of history when the Cubs win the ’16 Series…and now I’m supposed to believe that goin’ to a team with a 66-96 record last year is “special?!”

Bite me, Jake.

Straight up. I’m never gonna win a Fields Medal. But I know enough about math to know this: If Arrieta, or Phillies management or the drooling sub-creatures that fill Citizen’s Bank Park (Rolls off the tongue like peanut butter coated duct tape, don’t it?) think they’re gonna turn that 66 upside-down with the addition of said fireballer, they better break out their calculators cuz their missin’ a decimal point or two. Arrieta would have to win 33 games…and do it with a team that ranked 27th in offensive production last season. There’s a better chance of Scarlett Johansson scrubbin’ my backside in the shower tomorrow morning.

So I say good riddance to Jake the Snake, who apparently so badly wanted outta Chicago that he took a deal that two years ago he wouldn’t have pissed on. Especially if he had Gonorrhieta, cuz it burns like hell when you do that.

Joe

PS. Here’s hoping for a butt-load of bell ringin’ when Arrieta takes the mound against us, my friends.

ENOUGH WITH THE SLOPE STYE, TRIPLE LUTZ HALF PIPES. IN CHI-TOWN, IT’S TIME FOR SOME FRIGGIN’ BASEBALL.

· 2018 Cubs, Joe Sez · , , , , , , , , , ,

Hey there, toe loops. Joe Schlombowski comin’ at ya from PyeongChang via my Barcalounger, where I ask you: Is curling a sport? I’m still wrestling with that one. Speaking of wrestling — which IS a sport — I would totally like to see Sumo Slope Style introduced at the Winter Olympics — two 400 lb Michelin Men slidin’ down opposing snow covered hills in their diapers, then catapulted off the jump towards each other at 30 miles an hour, where they’d meet in mid air. KER-SPLAT! Whoever lands on his feet with his diaper intact wins. Friggin’ awesome!

Except for that dream I had the other night where that human popsicle, Scarlett Johansson, was my partner in Pairs Luge (another Olympic sport I’d like to see) Sumo Slope Style would definitely be my favorite new Olympic sport.

Anyway, I don’t know if curling is a sport.

Is bowling a sport? Cheerleading? Competitive eating, pool, frisbee golf? Regular golf? If those are sports then I guess you’d have to say, yes, curling is a real sport. If, however, you think curling is more like darts — a game played in bars by guys built like me — then, no, it’s not a sport. Oh, and if I alienated any golfers, just remember this: If you’re wearin’ slacks when you do it, it ain’t a sport.

Neither is any activity that has “twizzles” as a mandatory element. Real sports don’t have them. Hockey? No twizzles. Basketball? Nope. Baseball? Give me a friggin’ break, pal. Baseball has the hit-and-run, the suicide squeeze and stealing. Ice dancing, on the other hand, has twizzles … and stuffed animals thrown on the ice at the end. Baseball has Jon Miller. Ice dancing has Johnny Weir. (The “d” was omitted for obvious reasons.) And don’t even get me started on the uniforms. I mean … I have no friggin’ idea what the hell those ice dancer guys are wearin’, except to say that I’m pretty sure RuPaul has somethin’ to do with it. Then again, I could say the same thing about the D-backs uni’s.

After 2 weeks, I’m sort of all Olympic’d out.

It’s friggin’ endless. Like a Nancy Pelosi speech on snow. Don’t get me wrong, my friend. I think anyone goin’ 90 miles an hour on solid ice, head-first with nothin’ but their wits deserves a medal just for tryin’ it. And it oughta be made of brass to match the balls it takes to do something that insane. But holy craptoids! Enough with the twizzles and back-side McTwisted Salchows already! According to my commemorative Ernie Banks watch, the clock is about to strike baseball season. And that’s another thing. Baseball has a season — 162 games. And then the playoffs are bolted on to the end of that. The Olympics? A sissy 18 days. Keeee-ryste … I’ve taken dumps that have lasted longer than that.

NBC: The broadcast equivalent of yellow snow.

I’ve spent so much time yellin’ at my flat screen the past couple of weeks, I’m startin’ to think I’ve been possessed by Sam Kinison. Why? Cuz NBC’s Olympics coverage is a lot less about servin’ up the Games than it is about a diabolical experiment to figure how many commercials per hour humans can watch before they friggin’ explode. I lost count, but I think it’s about 600. Yeah, I know that’s impossible. But then so are Tara Lipinski’s chances of ever gettin’ her forehead to move again. If there was a gold medal for Botox, she’d own it, my friend. On the plus side, when the commentator thing dries up, she’s got a big career as a mannequin.

I just thank the good Lord that MLB, TBS and FOX bring us Major League Baseball. Are we’re stuck with that halfpipe, Joe Buck, for the playoffs? Yeah. But in a side-by-side comparison with NBC’s booth jockeys, he’s friggin’ Harry Caray. Which bring me to my favorite event — baseball.

So we missed a few gates last year. BFD.

Things got pretty ugly in La La Land last year, and not just for that triple lutz, Harvey Weinstein. The Cubs were like a bobsled team without a sled; a Lindsey without the Vonn; a curler without any stones! Any, hoooooo-boy … did we ever play like we had no stones. The Cubs swung the bats like Stephen friggin’ Hawking. If you combined that with Lance Barksdale’s East German judge-like strike zone, the Cubs’ minor league bullpen and baseball’s rule 7.13, you’d have an Olympics level “What Sucks the Most?” contest that a $5,000 hooker wouldn’t even qualify for! I give the gold to the bullpen.

Still, we did make it to the playoffs. Given the way we booted the ball around the diamond, and watched it sail by for much of the season, the fact that the Cubs ended up in the National League Championship Series (presented by Camping World) ranks right up there with walkin’ on water … and maybe some of that crap I’ve seen David Blaine do. For that, I lift a frosty, Winter Olympics Old Style to the Cubbies.

And … lest we forget our pre-2016 motto … this is “next year.” Hope springs eternal. Especially when the spring in question is followed by “training.”

Are we gonna make it to the podium this year?

Until 2016, I couldn’t give a Chicago style crapolla about that. Trouble is … now I know what it feels like to walk around with a virtual gold medal around my neck. So, yeah … I wanna hear the Star Spangled banner played in honor of the Cubs again. Is it gonna happen this year? Ask your Magic 8 Ball, pallie. Based on my prediction last season, that’ll work just as well. Besides, predictions are about as reliable as a Rahm Emanuel handshake. Ask Mikaela Shiffrin.

Right now I’d be tickled Cubbie blue just to put the Olympic torch to NBC’s coverage of the Winter Games — where in Gitmo-like fashion, they’ve forced us to watch 5 minutes of commercials for every 14 seconds of action. Since I can’t do that, I’ll settle for today’s Cubs-Brewers Spring Training opener.

Let the games begin, my friend.

Joe

THIS IS IT, BABY! GAME FIVE, WINNER TAKE ALL, THE WORKS.

· 2017 Cubs, Joe Sez, The Playoffs · , ,

Hey there, rum balls. Well…this is it. Tonight’s the night. Every single thing in the wide, wide world of sports (if you’re a Cubs fan) is ridin’ on tonight’s game. Except for Harvey Weinstein. He prefers helpless young actresses. But I digress.

Yep, tonight is for all the marbles, the whole shooting match, and the whole nine yards. The entire cheese-smothered carnitas enchilada is on the line tonight, not to mention (but I’m going to anyway) the entire ball of wax. By the way, who keeps a ball of wax, anyway? Has anyone ever actually seen one? What in the hell do you do with one, and why would anyone ever want the whole damn thing? No clue.

Game 5 is the full monty, baby, and tonight’s winner takes it all, lock, stock and barrel…or hook, line and sinker. In other words, the whole schemer, megillah or kit-and-caboodle. It is, in fact, for the whole shebang. (Pull your pants back up, Weinstein. That doesn’t mean what you think it does.)

My money — if I had any money — would be on Hendricks, my friend. And nothin’ — other than makin’ it back to THE Series itself — is gonna be more finger lickin’ good than pullin’ the rug out from under the obnoxious, bearded, bat-flippin’ Bryce Harper and the rest of those yay-hoos that represent that rat infested (read: politician) city — home to The Donald.

Fly the W, pallie!

Joe