Rainy Day Thoughts

Out here in Seattle, and you may not believe this, we have received a significant amount of rain. I have lived here nearly a year and there definitely have been several lengthy rainy streaks. That being said, the reputation Seattle has as being a super rainy place to live is a bit overrated. I have read that NY and Miami get more annual rainfall than Seattle, and I can attest, being from NY, that it really can rain pretty aggressively there too. Many locals have even admitted to me the rainy reputation is purposely overblown to try to keep people from moving here. But I digress ............


In another thing that may surprise you, Hank Steinbrenner has offered more thoughts publicly on the Yankees personnel strategy. I suppose you could view his comments one of two ways. You could say that his announcement that the Yankees are out the running (well Hank said the offer is being rescinded,but after A-ROD do we really believe that) for Santana would pressure the Twins to hurry up and accept the offer because it's not going to get any better. Alternatively publicly announcing you are no longer in the bidding for Santana makes it better for the Red Sox because they no longer have to play their hand against the Yankees. I think we all know what the Yankees "baseball people" wish Hank would do ...... However I must admit if my Daddy just handed me the reigns to a billion dollar baseball team, I would probably say some pretty crazy things to.


EDIT: Just as I was about to finish up this post, I came across a flip flop by Haughty Hank once again. It's really hard to know what to believe at this point. While I am a HUGE Yankees fan, I do think Hank's constant desire to be in the news getting to be a little old. But I might as well get used to it, and it could be worse. At least he wants to win (more than I can say for the owner of this team). I just wish he would let the people who best know how to build a winning ball club do all the heavy lifting.


I simply thought this article made Tiger's GM Dave Dombrowski look like a "pretty good guy". I always think it is interesting to read about how GM's handle the people side of baseball operations; baseball players aren't just an excel sheet of statistics (I am a sabermetrics guy but I don't think the soft stuff can totally be ignored). His stance of trying to accommodate Inge to a trade as long as they can help the team is pretty classy. However caring about the soft stuff too much,like picking up the option on a player because he is important for "chemistry" or a huge fan favorite, can really hurt you. Especially when that fan favorite cost you 13 million and he is a 35 year old catcher who hasn't had an OPS+ above 100 since 2004. I may be overlooking something, but to me this is one of the silliest moves of the off season. Dombrowski has forgotten more about baseball than I will probably ever know, but I can't still can't think of any reason why he thought it was a good idea to pick up Pudge's option for that much money.

The Indians will now be playing at Progressive Field; albeit with the same regressive mascot.