Next Tuesday, between 11am - 1pm, Jamie Moyer will be signing the 2010 Moyer Foundation calendar at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. The calendars, which you can see here, cost $5 and benefit Hutch School for children whose lives have been affected by cancer. You may feel disinclined to spend $5 on a signed calendar somewhere else when you can spend $5 on a signed baseball card from eBay without leaving your seat, but if you buy a card instead of a calendar, you're basically ruining a child's life, and Jesus, man, that's sick, you're sick, I don't know how you live with yourself.

Seriously, $5 to help some kids and get a little face time with one of the most uniquely successful athletes in the history of professional sports. Plus, autograph! And I guess people still use calendars. If you have the money, time, and transportation, there's no reason not to go.

You'll notice that this is the exact same thing I posted a year ago. It's almost like there's a reason for that.

CONTEXT

The New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies will face each other in the 2009 World Series, which begins tonight. The Yankees have advanced this far by defeating the Minnesota Twins and the LAnaheim Angels. The Phillies have advanced this far by defeating the Colorado Rockies and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Both the Yankees and Phillies managed to defeat their opponents by outplaying them in a short series.

KEY PLAYERS

New York:

Roster

Philadelphia:

Roster

Both the Yankees and Phillies are filled to the brim with possible difference-makers. The 50 listed above will likely be the most important.

KEY QUESTIONS

Can the New York Yankees outscore the Philadelphia Phillies?

They can.

Can the Philadelphia Phillies outscore the New York Yankees?

They can.

Will one of the New York Yankees and Philadelphia Phillies outscore the other four times?

Most certainly yes!

X FACTOR

The Yankees will play a maximum of four games at home, while the Phillies will play a maximum of three games at home. The home crowds may or may not help. I imagine there are also intangibles somewhere.

CONCLUSION

Both the Yankees and the Phillies are good teams. The Yankees are better. If you re-played the World Series a million times, roughly 60-65% of the time the Yankees would be crowned as champions. This World Series will be played once. One of these teams will win four games. The other probably won't. The outcome will mean everything, and nothing.

We are down to about 40 spots left on the USSM/LL event August 8th, so if you want to attend and haven't purchased a ticket yet, you might want to consider doing it rather soon. Just to give you an idea of how soon, Dave's last update was about five days ago and at the time he estimated there was ~100 slots open. Availability might not make it through the July 4 weekend.

Original Entry

Dave's Last Update (also incl ordering info)

USSM has all of the details. Man, it's easy to publicize a get-together after somebody else has already written a post about it. Way to exert yourself, Dave. Donations are optional :wink: :wink: and in no way mandatory :wink: but I promise one free Graham smile* for everyone who chips in an additional $5 on top of the ticket fee to help facilitate both Dave and my flying in from out of town. Bloggers may be rich in women and richer in respect, but we're not rich in money, or in anything that could feasibly be exchanged for money. Except for the women, I guess, but a lot of people get all uppity over that sort of thing. 

M's/Rays, August 8th, and a pre-game chat with a bunch of really important and good-looking people. Pay up. You'll love it.

*may resemble a smirk

Continue reading this post »

Rumours abound today. Seattle's hold on Dustin Ackley at the #2 spot seems to have strengthened, mainly due to potential #2 Tyler Matzek going all crazy and coming out with an $7M+ signing bonus request. Matzek's not the only high schooler to be making surprising demands either, with Miller, Crow's also rumoured to be dropping low, but he's good enough that some team will pounce on him early, even if they're not linked to him.

With that in mind, here are my best, expected, and worst case scenarios (that aren't massively unrealistic) for our first and supplemental round picks this afternoon:

Continue reading this post »

Note: I'll be handling the draft coverage here tomorrow, so I figured I'd start from the beginning. To many of you, this will be old news, so feel free to ignore.

Every year come June there's a pretty big hoopla over the Major League Baseball Rule 4 Amateur draft. Baseball America talks about it non-stop for months, it's televised at primetime, and everyone and their grandmother throws up mock drafts all over the place. I even took the day off tomorrow so I can focus solely on the draft without that whole being fired business. But why do we care? A significant number of the names said tomorrow won't make the Major Leagues despite signing bonuses in the hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars. Not even those who make the bigs are guaranteed to have an impact. Look no further than our very own Jeff Clement, once billed as a power hitting lefthander who could be an elite bat at catcher and now mired in AAA pretending to be a first baseman. So why follow it at all?

Continue reading this post »

Monday! Monday! Monday!

It still strikes me as a little surprising how close Opening Day is. It's also a weird feeling that April 6th represents a pretty crucial deadline for me at work as well, so I've been looking to that day with a mixture of both giddy excitement and stress filled dread.

Anyways, we have word from the always awesome Larry Stone on the pitching match up. Felix Hernandez is opening up for the Ms as we have known for a while, but his expected opponent has changed from Scott Baker (now on the shelf with shoudler soreness) to Francisco Liriano.

Which means, YES!, Griffey facing one of the sickest left-handers in baseball on Opening Day! Remember when Raul Ibanez faced Brian Fuentes in 2006? How would you like to see that three times instead of just once? Well then, good news!

The subject says the important bits, now here's some details

Perma Link

Myself, Adam Morris (Lone Star Ball), Graham Goldbeck [not our Graham] (Oaktown A's), Jim Gardner (The Halo is Lit) and Eric Seidman (THT, FG, BP) will be chatting live at noon pactime on the AL West.

Come watch as I manage to acquire even more Angel fans as personal trolls and shock everyone not used to LL style jokes.