Many of the Major League teams started with their first round of cuts from their major league camp. A lot of players were reassigned to their perspective Minor League camps, with a few being assigned to their perspective Minor League Clubs. Unfortunately, with these first round of cuts, teams do release players. The biggest name to get the axe yesterday was Colorado’s Javy Lopez.

The team has publicly said that they wanted to release him early enough in Spring Training to where he could get on with another team. Javy in return has publicly said that he prefers not to become a DH for an American League Team.

Unfortunately, I think that’s all he’s going to be able to get. It’s very doubtful he’ll be able to find a starting catching job at this point in his career. Ever since his two career years in Atlanta, where he was able to sign the big money contract with Baltimore, his catching numbers has continually gone down each year. He’s throwing out less batters, and he’s allowing quite a few pass balls for what innings he plays. His playing time has gone way down over the past few years, too. Baltimore picked up Ramon…

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According to Ron Washington, the new first year coach of the Texas Rangers, Sammy Sosa will have no problem making the team has a DH and a backup outfielder barring a complete turn around in his play. This makes me happy to see Sosa taking his “comeback” really seriously. From reports that I’ve read he’s in the best shape of his life, and he’s cut down a lot of weight. At the time of this entry he is currently has five hits in 12 at-bats, of which two are home runs. This gives him a .416 batting average. This isn’t too bad for “shaking off the cobwebs” for not playing for 19 months in the majors. His batting is only going to be getting better. I haven’t heard how is fielding has been, or if he has even been on the field in a game situation yet.

While it still remains to be unseen if he was actually a ‘roid user during the big home run race between him and Mark McGwire back in 1998. I am a firm believer that “Big Mac” is/was a steroid user, I’m still not quite sure if Sosa is/was one at the time. I think…

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Last season Marlin rookie pitching standout Josh Johnson found out the other day that he will be missing the first two months of the season with an irritated ulnar nerve in his elbow. He and the team are thankful that it isn’t more serious and he’ll only be a few months behind.

This is a bad start for new Marlin manager Fredi Gonzalez. You never want to have one of your start pitchers hurt at the beginning of the season, although it’s better than having your pitcher hurt during the playoff race. The Marlins have a good set of young arms that will be able to fill in for the hurt pitcher. Wes Obermueller, Sergio Mitre, and Chris George have the most experience of the group of hopefuls to take his spot, but with different teams. Obermueller has made almost 40 starts from 2003-2005 with the Brewers. Mitre was up and down with the Cubs the same years mostly working in long relief but has made about 20 starts over the years. Finally, George with the Royals has had a 14-20 record with an ERA over 6 from 2001-2004, but has not been on a major league roster the last two…

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Jon Lester pitched his first inning of baseball since being diagnosised with anaplastic large cell lymphoma last in the season last year. Lester as a bright spot in the Sox’s rotation last year after being called up last June. This man finished up his last cancer treatment only two weeks ago. He went through six sessions of chemotherapy. After his fifth treatment, a cat scan showed there was no cancer left in him. He begun throwing shortly there after. He even reported to training camp two weeks even before pitchers and catchers were to report.

To me this show what Jon Lester is really made of. To comeback and pitch in a “real game” situation so soon after going through cancer treatments, is a major achievement in somebodies life, as well as show just how much character they are made of.

This may only have been a ‘B’ game, but Lester cruised through his inning, just needing 8 pitches to retire his three batters, all with ground outs. The good thing for Lester, is the rotation is pretty much set with the addition of Matsusaka, a healthy Schilling, and Papelbon moving into the rotation. This means he will not need to be rushed…

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I got to check out my first Spring Training game yesterday afternoon, albeit on television. The Cubs were playing the White Sox in Mesa, Arizona in HoHoKam Park. In front of a sellout crowd of about 13,000 people, there were a few brights spots in the Cubs team even though loosing 13-2. The White Sox are showing that they’re continuing to mash the ball much as they did last season. They pitched really well to. It looks like the White Sox are going to be right in the thick of things again in the AL Central.

Rich Hill pitched really well yesterday for his first time on the hill this spring. He only made the one mistake to Paul Konerko (Happy Birthday Paul today by the way) that got mashed over the left field wall. He struck out 3 in his two innings of work, including the first two batters that he saw. Hopefully Hill can continue his great pitching from the end of last season.

Alfonso Soriano, who is starting his 8 year $136 million contract with the Cubs this season, ended up the day 3 for 3 with one of the Cubs two RBIs. Derrek Lee had the other with…

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I was reading an article this morning where Terry Francona, the manager of the Boston Red Sox, bet Larry Lucchino, President and CEO of the same team, that he could quit his tobacco habit. The loser of the bet will donate $20,000 to Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Hopefully the coach wins, and quits his bad tobacco habit. I would be a good start to showing other in the league that smokeless tobacco isn’t need to be a Major League Baseball Player or coach.

It’s just a small step in the right direction, but the real winner here is the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

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…

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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…

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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…

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Alright! Looks like Hendry has started off the offseason on a good note. Hopefully he keeps going in the right direction.