Posted in News, Columns on February 27th, 2007 No Comments »
I was watching Sportscenter this morning while I was still waking up, and I saw that Phillies have given a Friday deadline to either have him signed or extended.Personally for me, I think it seems a tad bit ’silly’ for such young players to be signing long term contracts so early in their career. Let’s take a look at Carlos Zambrano for instance. He’s never signed a long term deal since coming up with the Cubs. He played his first few seasons making slightly over league minimum, then in his third year he got a bigger boost up to $3 million. The following it doubled, and now in his fifth full year in the league, he’ll be eligible for free agency at the end of the year assuming he and the Cubs don’t make a long term deal. He’s really going to take it to the bank in this one. He will be making $12.4 million this season, assuming that doesn’t get re-written much like Derrek Lee’s salary last year.
You can look at this in two different ways. This includes the view of the team/owners/managers and in the eyes of the player. Last season David Wright and Jose Reyes signed…
Continue Reading »
Posted in Columns on February 25th, 2007 2 Comments »
This is probably the biggest spring training question floating around the league this year. The Boston Red Sox paid multi-millions of dollars to just to gain sole negation writes for the 26 year Japanese Pitcher. With the dreadful Scott Boras as his agent, they gain another $52 million on a six year contract. This will end up as the smartest thing or the stupidest thing the Red Sox have done. Either he’ll continue on his monstrous pitching performances, or he will dud out and fade into obscurity.
The last time that I remember this sort of media whirlwind was when Hideo Nomo was brought over to the majors by The Los Angeles Dodgers. After a sort stint in the minors, and the player strike, he was brought up to pitch in the big leagues. After an All Star and Rookie of the Year first season, he slowly declined and now is not on a major or minor league roster. I think a big deal of his success his rookie season was attributed to his “tornado” delivery. It was such a strange and unorthodox windup, that many players couldn’t figure it out. In the following seasons players “figured” him out and his…
Continue Reading »
Posted in Site Related on February 25th, 2007 No Comments »
Welcome back to BaseballWhammy after a long hiatus. With the start of spring training, I thought it would be nice to toss up a new front and back end of the website. I’ve upgraded the backend from Drupal to Wordpress. Wordpress is a lot better to customize your templates, and alter the code up a little bit. I found a decent start to a template, and then I edited it to my own liking. Since the new backend uses a new database, I had to backlog my entries. I have pulled over about 20 or so of them. If you want me to pull back some other specific ones, just drop me a line and I’ll pull it over.
With this CMS (Content Management System), I was better able to customize the layout and side menu items. I went ahead and added a donation link. If you really enjoy the site, and my writings drop me some spare change as it’s not free to run this website, unfortunately. Once I start getting some donations in, I wil be making a donation page, so I will contact every person that sent in a dontation, and I’ll ask if it’s ok for me…
Continue Reading »