One win, one heart-wrenching loss, and one more run-of-the-mill-we-got-our-asses-kicked-loss, in that order. I snapped this picture of Russ Mart getting blow down at right when I took a quick cross-country flight so I could watch Johan pitch yesterday. My camera is pretty tight obviously.
| WEST | W | L |
GB | STRK | L10 | |
| Arizona | 32 | 25 | - | W 2 | 4-6 | |
| LA Dodgers | 27 | 29 | 4.5 | L 2 | 2-8 | |
| San Francisco | 24 | 33 | 8 | W 1 | 6-4 | |
| San Diego | 23 | 35 | 9.5 | L 1 | 6-4 | |
| Colorado | 20 | 37 | 12 | L 7 | 2-8 |
The Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics tip off the NBA Finals Thursday in Boston (no Amy Lawrence, Game 3 isn’t being played at The Forum).
The Lakers and Celtics, who have been to the Finals 47 times and combined to win 30 titles, played just twice during the regular season with Boston taking both meetings.
The WCBias.com crew is again split on our predictions, just like in the Western Conference Finals where GSlim and Ryantific went with the Lakers. Here’s how we see the series in our convoluted crystal balls:
GSlim: Boston in 7. Ray Ray has got his swagger back, Pierce and KG have tons of heart, and the Celtics have the role players in Perkins, Posey, and Rondo to hang with the Lakers. Epic series but karma gets the best of Kobe in this one. Let’s not forget Laker fans, he cheated on his wife and kid, ran Shaq out of town, and is an all around (insert favorite expletive here).
Ryantific: Lakers in 7. Whoever gets the defensive assignment of Paul Pierce is gonna be the hero of this series. If the Lakers can stop him then they have a chance. Who is that hero going to be?
BG: Lakers in 4. L.A. in a clean sweep, Doc Rivers calls his own number and takes the floor at the 2 in game 4 and goes 1-3 from the field. How’s that for a specific prediicyion?
BSlim: Boston in 7. Home court. Home court. Home court. I’ve been screamin’ it since Day 1, so I guess I have to stick with it. The 2-3-2 format will benefit the Cs when it counts most (early and late). … Say all you want about the East, but Boston is 25-5 against the West and better defensively. KG, Allen and Pierce will do whatever it takes to get that first ring. Kobe’s already got three rings, and Mom of the Year Vanessa has a fourth worth $4.3 million. The Bryants don’t need no more bling.
Guest blogger, Beau-C: Since the WCBias.com staff was split on this one, we had to go to the tiebreaker, aka “The Wombat.” Beau-C, for those who don’t know, is a betting fool who knows the lines better than Doc Gooden. Wait, not those lines. Anywho, here’s his take on the Lakers-Celtics series: “Lakers in 6 at the Garden with Paul Pierce crying at half court. KG will get his, but Allen will fold under the pressure and Paul Pierce will run out of gas in the first quarter if he has the task of guarding Kobe. Kobe will show all that he doesn’t need a wannabe rent-a-cop to win a ring, just a little something to take some of the pressure off. Lakers in 6 at the Garden, Game 6 score being Lakers 101, Celtics 95.”
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If you are dead, you are probably wondering (and so I will tell you) how Jay Bruce followed up his first home run of his major league career and first ever walk-off homer in his life. He did alright (2-3, 2 rbi, 2 runs, solo jack). It took him roughly 15 hours to connect on his second major league round tripper and again prove to me that he can’t be human. When I got my first hole-in-one in golf, I promptly double bogeyed the next hole and went on to shoot a million because I just couldn’t handle it. It’s human nature to lose focus after you do something incredible. Christian Laettner after he went 10-10 from the field, 10-10 from the line, and hit the greatest college basketball shot of all time against Kentucky in the 1992 regional game, went into a complete funk the next 1.5 games. He was miserable against Indiana in the final four and it took a tongue lashing by Bobby Hurley at half time of the National Championship game vs. Michigan for him to wake up. It happens, we’re all human, well, except Jay Bruce. He is a machine. A baseball hitting machine. Just put him out there and he will rake, regardless of the past, present, or future. He clearly wasn’t fazed by all pre-call up hype frenzy, nor does he seem to be bothered by all the standing ovations, or by all the new expectations levied on him by everyone in baseball. He just continues to spray the ball all over the field. He hits at will.
I have decided to quit my life as I know it and design and run an “ILoveJayBruce.com” website……….o wait, what was that, what did you say, you’re kidding me, there are already 400,000 of those in Cincinnati. O well, I guess I will just make that 400,001 because if you can’t beat’em, join’em. I love Jay Bruce.
See this happy-go-lucky picture of Mark Prior in a San Diego Padres uniform? Yeah, take a long look at it, because it took me a half hour to find it and you probably won’t see this dude in a Padres jersey (let alone anybody’s MLB threads) any time soon.
In what turned out to be one heck of a day for the Padres, disabled list phenom Mark Prior — who has yet to pitch in a regular-season game for his hometown club — was shut down for the season to undergo season-sending surgery on his bum right shoulder.
Buddy Black announced the here-we-go-again decision prior to Sunday’s game in San Francisco, which Trevor Hoffman fitting blew in the 10th, coughing up a 3-1 lead and eventually falling to the Giants 4-3.
All’s well that ends well, I guess.
The 27-year-old Prior, for the record, hasn’t pitched since August 2006. The second pick in the 2001 draft out of USC was 1-6 with a 7.21 ERA in his final nine games for the Chicago Cubs.
Despite the shoulder, elbow, oblique and Achilles (are we leaving anything out?) problems, the Padres took a flier on him this year hoping the San Diego product could resurrect his career in his own back yard.
But that plan backfired and now his future with the franchise is in the air, having signed only a one-year, $1 million dollar deal in the offseason.
But at least he’s been a consistent pitcher in the Big Leagues, opening the year on the disabled list for the fifth straight season for a grand total of NINE trips to the DL in EIGHT years of professional baseball.
Well, I guess you will be seeing this photo of Prior again. Right next to the term “injury prone” in Webster’s 2009 edition.
Then again, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise, given that knucklehead Nate J. was able to take Prior deep back in the day. And yes, there’s even video proof here of Jaberjaw hitting the bomb against Prior, who he calls a “Hall of Fame Hopefull.” That’s South Carolina for ‘ya.
I am now 30 years old. I have been cheering for the Dodgers for probably 25 of those years. Some of my earliest memories were making my own Dodger posters out of construction paper and taping baseball cards onto my bedroom walls. Since then, not much has changed and I sometimes feel weird about that. Shouldn’t I care more about other things by now? I’m not exactly a kid, don’t I have better things to do than watch grown men chase a ball around a field?
I’m reading “Fever Pitch” by Nick Hornby, author of “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy” which is more or less 200 essays about how much he loves soccer (of course he calls it “football” because the English are silly) in general and Arsenal (the UK equivalent of the Red Sox) in particular. Looking back on his college years, he draws a similar parallel between his lack of emotional maturity and the role that sports plays.
“I used to believe that growing and growing up were analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can chose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently–during crisis in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere–and one can ignore them or seize them. At Cambridge I could have reinvented myself if I had been smart enough; I could have shed the little boy whose Arsenal fixation had helped him through a tricky patch in his childhood and early teens, and become somebody else completely, a swaggeringly competent and ambitious young man sure of his route through the world. But I didn’t. For some reason, I hung onto my boyhood self for dear life, and I let him guide me through my undergraduate years; and thus football, not for the first or last time, and through no fault of its own, served both as a backbone and a retardant.”
So at least I’m not alone. And if you’re reading this then you probably get that. You know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way.
In Major League Baseball there are really good hitters, some great hitters, even a few once in a lifetime type hitters who rarely get themselves out and pretty much are the reason fans show up for the games. And then there is JAY BRUCE. What he has been able to do in his first week of games doesn’t really even seem plausible.
Take for example his first game were he reached base safely 5 times and became only the 3rd player in history to do so. He also scored twice and drove in 2. He also stole a base just because he could.
He came back the next day and got a knock, scored a run, and o ya stole a base just because he could.
In his third game he went 0-3 because even Bath Ruth occasionally had an off day. However, he quickly made up for that with an epic 4-5 day to bring his season total to 8 hits in 16 tries. On this day he singled in the 10th and got himself home for the winning run because not only is this guy a great player, but he clearly seems to be able to handle the pressure. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any better for this youngster, he follows up that 4-5 game with a 3 for 5 effort and hit his first ever walk-off (in Japan they call it a SAYONARA HIT) jack to help the Reds win 8-7 over the Reds.
“That’s the first walk-off home run in my life, at any level,” Bruce said. “It’s crazy.”
As he rounded the bases, the crowd stood on its feet and chanted “Bruuuuuuuuuuuuuuce” like they were at a Bruce Springsteen concert. The town of Cincinnati has already fallen in love with this kid, never believing he can top what he did the day before only to be shocked that he can. The crowd rises to his feet nearly every time he comes to the plate. He gets a huge ovation every time he catches a routine fly in center field. Dusty Baker said: “What a remarkable story Jay Bruce is. I’ve never seen a better story. If he’s living a dream, I’d like to be in that dream.”
I have no idea what this kid has in store for us next, all I know is that I don’t want to miss it. Neither should you!
PS: I actually have no idea what Dusty Baker was talking about because if it is a dream, he is in it, he’s actually the manager of that dream.
The Stat Geek’s “Stat of the Week” goes well with BG’s previous post:
The Arizona Diamondbacks had lost 12 of their last 20 games going into Thursday’s game … and increased their National League West Worst lead by a half-game.
I relate what the Diamondbacks are doing to what we here are doing at WCBias.com. We’re all sucking at our “day jobs” because we spend half our days posting to this site, but we keep moving up the ladder somehow. I guess it pays to live out West.
One of my temps has the profound misfortune right now of being a Padre fan. After a wildly entertaining 2007 which saw the Pads and the Rockies tie for the NL Wild Card (with the D-Backs winning the division by a half-game!) things were really looking up for the NL West in 2008, especially when you considered the Dodgers were bringing in (cue sinister music) Andruw Jones Corpse. Yep, the ol’ NL West really looked like it was on the way up, maybe it didn’t boast the star power of the AL East but it projected as a four-horse race that wouldn’t be settled until the final week of the season.
And then they started playing. Nearly one-third of the way through the season it looks like the D-Backs are the class of the division but even they are only 5 games over the break-even mark and have struggled since their blistering start. The three West Coast teams have been a colossal disappointment, primarily from an offensive standpoint; below is your all-California team based on the highest VORP per position, courtesy of baseballprospectus.com.
C-Russell Martin (LA)
1B-Adrian Gonzalez (SD)
2B-Ray Durham (SF)
3B-Blake DeWitt (LA)
SS-Rafael Furcal (LA)* Currently on DL
LF- Brian Giles (SD)
CF-Aaron Rowand (SF)
RF-Matt Kemp (LA)
That’s not exactly Murder’s Row, is it? By way of comparison, the Philadelphia Phillies infield (plus Catcher) ALONE has more HRs. The West has had the well deserved rep as a pitcher’s league for the past 5 years and this year has been no different with Webb, Haren, Lincecum and Peavy all putting up excellent numbers but where are the sticks? The fact that Ray Durham is best second baseman of the bunch is flat out terrifying.
What East Coast Bias?
Good to see EastSidePN (and ABC for that matter) has made it clear who they’re rooting for in the NBA Finals this morning.
But I guess that isn’t much of a surprise considering the Western Conference Finals (TNT) took a backseat to the Eastern Conference Finals on ESPN this year.
To be fair, the few guys who actually know basketball at ESPN are going with the Lakers to win the series: Abbot says they’ll win in 5, Adande in 6, Broussard 7, Ford 6, Hollinger 6, Sheridan 6, Stein 5, Thorpe 6. What, do all these guys wanna become movie stars or something?
We’ll have our WCBias.com picks in a bit. Remember, this series is 2-3-2 with Boston holding home court, for now.
Speaking of the Finals, don’t miss our little history lesson of the Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers rivalry.
A little history lesson for you groms in the blogosphere who were still in diapers the last time the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics were in the NBA Finals together in 1987:
