One thing is quite clear when listening to Matt Moore: he is very self-aware … now. Like most of us, however, that wasn’t necessarily always the case. When he spoke to the Rangers media for the first time since being traded from San Francisco on Friday, the obvious question came up pretty quickly: how about that […]
Furniture, Pete Incaviglia, and the Ohtani Splitter: the Incredible Odyssey of Chris Martin
December 11th, 2017: The MLB backdrop at the ballroom on the second floor of the Swan and Dolphin—hung this morning behind Alan Trammell and Jack Morris—has been taken down. In its place, a Yankees backdrop has been raised. Giancarlo Stanton is receiving his #27 jersey from the Yankees and taking questions from the media. Meanwhile, […]
Winter Meetings Day Five: Rule Five.
“I have forgotten the sun,” one team official texted yesterday from a secluded suite high above the sprawling central Florida complex “where dreams come true”. So have the rest of us—Florida has spent the Winter Meetings trying to freeze us into skepticism about its nickname. Now it is Thursday morning. Team officials and media and […]
Winter Meetings Day 4: On Being and Nothingness
If I properly understood the premise, Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that nothingness was not simply the absence of something, but a something unto itself. When you are aware of loss, it is more tangible than simply the acknowledgement that something or someone is no longer in your presence. The hole ripped in your being by their […]
The Zack Greinke Recon Mission
Approximately thirteen seconds after posting my article about yesterday’s comments by Chris Gimenez, the news cycle nodded politely and moved on to bigger things: Zack Greinke might be moving eastward. I spent the evening in the hotel lobby asking new friends what they were hearing. One guy with ties to the Diamondbacks front office told me […]
Winter Meetings Day 3: Chris Gimenez and the question of Clubhouse Culture
Chris Gimenez was Yu Darvish’s personal catcher for parts of two seasons in Texas. Thad Levine was the assistant GM in all but Darvish’s last year with the Rangers. And in an article by Mike Berardino of TwinCities.com, it seems like that tandem might be putting on the full-court press to lure Darvish to Minneapolis. […]