New home for Hacks with Haggs

For those that may still come to this site, thanks for coming by and the new site of my blog is www.hackswithhaggs.com

George Brett bats right-handed?

OK...so it looks like the www.hackswithhaggs.com site will be up this weekend, giving me at last the blog freedom I've been looking for all along.

Here's a couple of interesting tidbts about Detroit outfielder Curtis Granderson that fell to the cutting room floor when I was writing the story.

-- Apparently there is censorship of his blog, as the 26-year-old amatuer food critic wrote an entry in his espn.com blog about a restaurant he visited in Kansas City that offered up "Blue Balls" as an appetizer dish. Apparently the editors at espn.com felt that, despite its presence on a restaurant menu, that blue balls shouldn't be on the menu for the worldwide sports leader. No word on whether Granderson actually sampled the appetizer in question.
-- Granderson is also a big fan of the old RBI Baseball game (Dum dum dum da dum dum, dum dum dum da dum dum, dum dum!) for Nintendo, and used the same set of rules that I used to follow with my buddies in college. If you throw a ball outside of the strike zone and it's called a ball, then the next pitch had to be an A button meatball right down the middle. No velocity and no bottom-dropping-off change up.
"You could change speeds and whatnot with the change up, but you couldn't throw balls outside of the strike zone," said Granderson.
Granderson's favorite player in RBI Baseball: Cecil Fielder, who was actually in the RBI Baseball 2 game for Nintendo.
My favorite player? Definitely Tony Armas and his 43 home runs on the bench for the '86 Red Sox. He has hit a home run every single time I've put him in the lineup to pinch hit....it never fails.

For anyone who's wanted every question answered about RBI Baseball, or wanted to play an RBI baseball drinking game, here's a website from a guy that's spent way too much thinking about my favorite baseball video game... http://dee-nee.com/rbi/


So...that's all for now. The site will be up and going on Saturday or Sunday...I hope.

A pause while we fix....

We're having a bit of technical difficulties as I move over to the www.hackswithhaggs.com web site, so the posts may come a bit slower until we're up and running in a couple of days. But we've got some fun stuff in store when do make the switch over, so keep on the lookout...Post something a bit longer in a little bit.

Boo Boo and Beckett's picnic baskets

My reentry into the blogosphere was a rough one over the last couple of days, but here's a story running in today's Boston Metro GameDay about Dave "Boo" Ferriss' thoughts on Josh Beckett matching his Red Sox record of eight straight wins to start the season.

http://boston.metro.us/metro/sports/article/Rooting_interest/8515.html

Ferriss might have been one of the nicest men I've ever spoken with on the phone, as the 85-year-old was out cutting the grass and trimming bushes at his Mississippi home when I phoned him yesterday afternoon. A couple of amazing things about "Boo" prior to Beckett's attempt to win his eighth game in a row to begin the season:

-- the eight consecutive wins were actually the first 8 Major League starts of his career, an unprecedented start in the big leagues.
-- Ferris finished with 26 complete games during that 1945 rookie season.
-- Ferriss and Tex Hughson, according to Boo, still hold a Fenway Park record when they posted 13 consecutive home victories between the two pitchers during the 1946 season -- a campaign when both pitchers won 20 games. That was also the season that Ted Williams, Bobby Doerr, Johnny Pesky and Dom DiMaggio all returned to the Sox from active duty during WWII, and advanced all the way to the World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals.


Ferriss, Babe Ruth and Roger Moret should all get their just desserts for their amazing stretches of pitching during their careers, with Moret boasting the most bizarre backstory as he apparently went into a ninety minute catatonic state prior to a game at Arlington Stadium and was sent to a mental institution while pitching for the Texas Rangers in 1978. Here's the link to the SABR Basball Biography Project Web site : http://bioproj.sabr.org/bioproj.cfm?a=v&v=l&pid=9962&bid=1326 and here's the actual story:

However, the real story for Moret in 1978 was his hospitalization at a psychiatric facility after his bizarre behavior on April 12 at Arlington Stadium. After some odd pre-game behavior, Roger Moret went into what was described as a catatonic state in front of his locker that reportedly lasted 90 minutes. [16] His teammates first kidded with him but as time went on the gravity of his condition brought the team's medical staff. Attempts to awaken him failed. The Rangers staff sedated him and dispatched him to the Arlington Neuropsychiatric Center. By the 25th of April, Roger's condition had improved and he was scheduled for release within a week.

More in a bit while I attempt to avoid catatonic states, questions about Barry Bonds and the lethal bat of D'Angelo Ortiz, David's three-year-old young son, who is taking some unbelievably mad hacks at Kevin Youkilis' underhand offerings on the field prior to today's Mother's Day special...which also reminds me to throw a big Happy Mother's Day greeting out there to all the special moms out there...

The fast and furious Lugo

A quick note while I start working on my taxes next year, so as not to get on the bad side of any moral arbiters out there...

--Julio Lugo has nine stolen bases in 30 games so far this season, and is on a pace to steal 48 bases for the normally chained-to-the-bag Sox. The Red Sox single season high is 54 stolen bags by current Boston minor league instructor Tommy Harper in 1973. It's proof that the old adage "speed never goes into a slump" still holds true after all this time, and it's really added a different dimension to the top of Boston's lineup. Now if Lugo can manage to start getting on base more than 30 percent of the time, then the Boston offense should be cooking with kerosene.

BTW, don't you wish they still had cool nicknames for ballplayers like they did for nearly everyone in the early 20th century. Harry "The Hat" Hooper has a pretty cool ring to it...kind of like Eric "The Wisconsin Hammer" Hinske. OK, so maybe that wasn't so good. Perhaps the readers out there can come up with something better. The best suggestion for a Sox nickname will get a prize to be named later. You can email them to me at haggerty.joe@gmail.com

And finally, the top ten single season stolen base leaders courtesy of the good peeps at www.baseball-reference.com


1.
Tommy Harper 54
1973
2.
Tris Speaker 52
1912
3.
Tris Speaker 46
1913
4.
Otis Nixon 42
1994

Tris Speaker 42
1914
6.
Harry Hooper 40
1910

Billy Werber 40
1934
8.
Harry Hooper 38
1911
9.
Harry Lord 36
1909
10.
Patsy Dougherty 35
1903

Tris Speaker 35
1909

Tris Speaker 35
1910

More later...

What a long, strange negotiation it has been

Thanks for coming by the new “Taking Hacks with Haggs” blog…should be fun and things will be getting much bigger and better as we go along, but I wanted to get this up on the Web after watching it this morning. Read on.


Randy Hendricks, one-half of the brother duo that represents the Big Texan Roger Clemens, was on briefly with ESPN Radio’s Mike and Mike this morning, and had some interesting things to say about Boston’s negotiating style. Hendricks stopped just short of saying that the Sox front office “insulted” Clemens’ representation, but did characterize their reactionary offer as “strange” and seemingly chastised them for having regrets after the agent sought out a “no regrets” proposal from the Red Sox during last week's rendez-vous at Fenway Park. Make your own decision whether this is "after the fact" spin to keep the booing to a minimum after Fenway Park on June 1 when Clemens is set to toe the rubber against the Olde Towne Team, but it's interesting nontheless.

Randy Hendricks (Clemens agent)

How close did Roger get to becoming a Red Sox?
Hendricks: “Well I had already scheduled my trip to Fenway, so when Cash [Brian Cashman] sent me an email about the status of [negotiations] and we exchanged a few emails back and forth and ultimately I said ‘look I’m at Fenway Park and I’ll be back in Houston later this week’ so we emailed and said that we’d meet to talk in person on Thursday or Friday.”

If you could, between the money, the ability to do all the different things he gets including time with his family and things like that, the opportunity to win and location and everything else, can you take us through what you think made him ultimately decide to go with New York as the place to go [over Boston and Houston]?
Hendricks: I think you never underestimate the fact or feeling that you’re wanted. I told all three teams that he wanted to make a decision and come back around May 15 and that he was moving ahead with his schedule. The Astros and Red Sox said they wanted him to come back in late June or early July and their proposals were basically paycuts….the Astros said they hadn’t made a proposal but they did. The things about it is that he’s been in Houston for several years and if you go by what they said publicly then they hadn’t made an offer and to think about that, how long they’ve had him and they didn’t make an offer…that’s a very strange way to tell someone that you love them. They also want to win, and the reality is that in the Yankees situation it was very critical to their team and they wanted to move quickly. You just can’t ask somebody like Roger to get ready physically and mentally like he gets ready and then say to him ‘well now can you wait a month.” It just didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I told these teams to tell me what they’d like to do…I said ‘tell me what you’d like to do and tell me what you’d like to do with the knowledge that we’ll consider this and make a decision.’
I didn’t negotiation any offers with Boston and I didn’t negotiate an offer with Houston, the year before the only team I negotiated an offer with was Houston. I think everybody should have understood the parameters so when I say that Roger Clemens intends or prefers to come back in late May and the team says that we’d prefer to wait...think of that.
What they’re saying is that we don’t need you now and we’re not ready to move when you’re ready to move. I’m not going to say that it’s an insult, because it’s not an insult, but it’s a strange way to react to one of the greatest pitchers of all time.

Is that the reason he didn’t end up in Boston? If you look at Boston they seem to have the best team on paper and on the field and if winning was important to Roger then Boston would have seemed to be a pretty safe landing place for him. So is that what went wrong…the time schedules.
Hendricks: It was really more of the schedules because here’s the thing…you’re talking about winning being a variable, but it’s not the only variable. The timetables were a variable, the manager was a variable, there’s the players on the team [as a variable]. Let’s say we picked Boston, well then people would get on him and say you just picked Boston because it’s the best team and an easy ride to the World Series and you’re just looking for a cheap ride to get deep into the playoffs. If he takes New York people would say it’s about the money and if he chose Houston people would say that he doesn’t want to pitch in the AL East anymore because the NL is easy. I’ve heard all those arguments and they’re all arguments that people make to make a particular point. I told Boston to make a proposal with no regrets…make a no regrets proposal. So if they made a proposal and it wasn’t acceptable then they should have no regrets. I don’t understand the no regrets proposal that now seems to be full of regrets.

I’d be fascinated to know how much does he pay attention to or care about what people say?
Hendricks: I don’t want people to think he doesn’t care about his image or what people think because we’re all human beings, but the overriding thought would be like water off a duck’s back. It’s part of what makes him great. He doesn’t read a lot of what’s written because he realizes about half of it is going to very critical and it’s part of the process of the fans and the writers. He just focuses on the job that he has to do, and it’s part of his remarkable ability to keep concentration on what he needs to do and I have a lot of respect for that. I probably pay a lot more attention to it than he does to it, but I can’t do my job if I react to everything that people say. I have to focus on my job.