Kansas City Royals manager Buddy Bell has announced that he will resign as manager of the club at the conclusion of the season.
Broadcast report courtesy of ESPN News
***UPDATED at 5:34 PM EDT***
The Kansas City Royals website has the information available. Bell, 55, will take on a new role for the organization: special assistant to the general manager Dayton Moore.
Mara: Giants won’t give Strahan more (AP/SI.com)
New York Giants co-owner John Mara stated today in so many words that the club will not be renegotiating holdout defensive end Michael Strahan’s contract.
“I don’t want to get into negotiating in the media,” co-owner John Mara said Wednesday as Strahan’s holdout entered its sixth day. “He is under contract and I think you all know what our position is on that. I don’t want to make any statements on that.”
In his gut, Mara said he feels that the 35-year-old Strahan would eventually decide to play, but he said the team was prepared to move on without him.
If this was leverage play for more money, Strahan’s bluff was just called.
Group trying to buy Predators plunks down $100 million (AP/ESPN)
A local ownership group interested in purchasing the Nashville Predators in Nashville, Tenn., have plunked down a $100 million deposit in an attempt to keep the club there.
The group of eight partners includes David Freeman, chief executive officer of 36 Venture Capital LLC, and Herb Fritch, CEO of HealthSpring Inc. The only partner from outside the Nashville area is William “Boots” Del Biaggio III, a California venture capitalist who is a part-owner of the San Jose Sharks.
Interesting to note that “Boots” is a part of the group to keep the club there since he was very active in trying to lure an NHL franchise to be a tenant at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Missouri.
An update on who may land Dan Patrick’s radio slot (The Big Lead)
It’s been awhile since we’ve discussed the topic but it appears there’s an update, courtesy of The Big Lead: Colin “Schrutebag” Cowherd appears to be the favorite in getting the nod for the gig.
Depending on how you like your sports talk radio, this news will either disturb you or thrill you: according to somebody at ESPN, everybody’s favorite Schrutebag, Colin Cowherd, is the clubhouse leader to fill Dan Patrick’s radio slot. Shudder. Our source isn’t saying he’s a lock, but the phrase, ‘if he wants it, he’ll likely get it’ was used.
TBL has a rundown on who else still might be in consideration for the gig. We like Brian Kenny, personally.
Belliard has a big bag of tricks (Mr. Irrelevant)
Stocky second baseman Ronnie Belliard of the Washington Nationals made one of the best plays you’ll ever see against the Cincinnati Redlegs last night.
In the visitor’s half of the sixth inning, Redlegs’ shortstop Jeff Keppinger whistled a ground ball off the leg of Nationals reliever Saul Rivera.
The rest is captured on video.
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Tip o’the cap to Mr. Irrelevant and Offwing opinion for the video goodness.
News and notes while Michael Strahan feels ‘betrayed’ by the Giants…
Report: Gambler long suspected Donaghy (ESPN News Services) Peter A. Ruggieri, who has been interviewed by the FBI in the case of Donaghy, noticed that two other gamblers were winning bets on NBA games officiated by Donaghy.
Brewers send Weeks to Triple-A Nashville (AP/Y! Sports) Struggling second baseman Rickie Weeks finally gets demoted. The club recalls Joe Dillon in his stead.
Insurance can help when a star gets hurt (USA Today) Some keys to fantasy baseball victory as you head down the stretch. If only Gardner wrote this earlier…
Quickie: KG, Johan, MLB trades, NFL camping, more! (danshanoff.com) News and notes from the prior days’ happenings in bullet-point style.
ESPN planning Super Bowl parties already (AwfulAnnouncing/Deadspin) Gotta get on the wagon earlier for some Scottsdale, Arizona fun!
Be careful what you say on TV, sports writers (The Big Lead) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter utters an idiotic statement regarding the Michael Vick situation.
Ron Mexico Speaks! (Kind of) (Deadspin) Speaking of Mike Vick, the troubled star talks with a local Atlanta radio station.
Where do we draw the line? (EpicCarnival) The folks at the great blog Epic Carnival ask the question: where are we supposed to draw the line with PEDs?
(From time to time, we’ll post a short blog entry regarding a current topic or something else that catches our fancy. It might be something trivial or something that really makes us wonder what the hell is going on.)
We’ve long had reservations about the anonymous hockey blogger known as “Eklund”.
White flags are always raised with us when people make claims about things they know that the public isn’t typically privy to gathering. The anonymity. The “sources”. The breaking news that he delivers. The contract negotiations. The rumors and speculation. All raise suspicion when perusing the Internets (ourselves included as we read his site occasionally to see what’s going on, but it’s mostly for entertainment purposes).
Hell, we wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t trust us with information that we’ve passed along because it’s the nature of the beast when posting information anonymously.
Somebody could reel in $1 million fish (USA Today)
Eighty anglers — or fisherman — from the U.S. and Japan will converge on Hot Springs, Ark., on Thursday in hopes of catching the Forrest L. Wood Cup (FLW), the main event of the FLW Tour series and its top cash prize of a cool million bucks.
How will they decide who gets the prize?
After two days, each angler will select five fish and weigh them at the Hot Springs Convention Center. The 10 anglers with the heaviest total weigh-ins will move on to the final round, to be held Saturday and Sunday.
Believe it or not, the event attracted 40,000 spectators in 2005, but we’ll just wait to catch the tournament on ESPN8 when it becomes available.
And they say TNT is the home for cable television drama.
Report: Mad Santana questions future with Twins (Star Tribune)
Upset with the club’s lack of impact acquisitions at the non-waiver trade deadline, Minnesota ace Johan Santana expressed exasperation and disappointment with the organization to the Minneapolis Star Tribune on Wednesday.
“It’s not just about hope. In a realistic world, you have to really make it happen and go for it.”
“You always talk about future, future. … But if you only worry about the future, then I guess a lot of us won’t be part of it,” Santana told the newspaper.
The line in bidding for Santana during this offseason’s trade market forms at the left.
Scully to play it by ear (Y! Sports)
Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports profiles legendary announcer Vin Scully of the Los Angeles Dodgers (of Los Angeles), who’s in his 58th year of announcing games for the organization.
As Passan writes, Scully, 79, might have the duty of calling Barry Bonds’ record tying — and maybe breaking — home runs, much like he did back in 1974 when the man that Bonds is pursuing, Henry Aaron, surpassed Babe Ruth with home run No. 715 off Los Angeles’ Al Dowling in Atlanta, Georgia.
And in usual Scully fashion, he treats each game like any other.
So Scully did what he always does. He arrived at Dodger Stadium about 3 p.m. and milled about the press box that bears his name. He walked down a long hallway to a dais made of baseball bats and hosted a short press conference. He went over his stack of notes to study up on the 24 Giants not named Bonds.
And he readied for the chance to intertwine himself with history once more, uncertain whether to relish or rue the occasion.
“If the moment comes, I’m going to call what I see,” he said. “The biggest thing to me will be the reaction of the crowd. That will be telling.”
For A-Rod, the downside of up (Y! Sports)
Yahoo! Sports’ Tim Brown profiles the recent struggles of New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez amid his quest for home run 500.
Writes Brown:
At stake here is a club of 21 members – Rodriguez will be the 22nd – to have hit 500 home runs. This being the home-run era, like it or not, we’ve seen Sammy Sosa pass 600, Ken Griffey Jr. approach 600 and Frank Thomas get 500 all in the same couple months, along with whatever it is Barry Bonds might be doing. Rodriguez will join Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle as players who have hit their 500th while wearing the Yankee uniform. He will do it at an earlier age than anyone (by almost a year), and he’ll reach 500 in fewer games than anyone but Mark McGwire and Ruth.
In New York, or parts of it, they’ve decided this prolonged layover at 499 further illustrates Rodriguez’s fear of the bright-lights moment.
So let’s get this straight: some of the ficklest sports fans in the world claim that he’s not closing in on 500 because he fears the attention? What a load of donkey dung. It is called pressing too hard to get it done, not the pressure of the bright lights.
It sounds like yet another way for New York fans to find something wrong with Rodriguez.
Trade deadline winners and losers (FOX Sports)
Ken Rosenthal of FOX Sports writes up the inevitable piece: winners and losers of the 2007 MLB trade deadline extravaganza!
The winners are Atlanta, Boston, Texas, the Yankees, Dodgers and Devil Rays; the losers: Pittsburgh, Washington, Angels, Seattle and the White Sox.
One thing that kind of annoys us about these sort of pieces: how can one pick who won or who lost, especially when it’s less than 24 hours having passed? Granted, first blush views of deals and their impacts on the clubs that made the deals is fun to discuss, but we like to think big picture here at The Buried Lead, especially when deals are made with a nice trove of prospects are involved like the Mark Teixeira deal.
It’s like being 10 again… (The Soul of Baseball)
Joe Posnanski of the Kansas City Star and the great blog The Soul of Baseball notes that he’s been lucky enough to interview and meet some of sports’ greatest stars: Michael Jordan, Jeff Gordon, Mickey Mantle and LeBron James to name a few.
But it didn’t dawn on Posnanski that he’s never encountered one of his childhood idols, former Cleveland Indians second baseman Duane Kuiper, either on the job as a reporter or by casual meeting. He wanted to play second base (like Kuiper), he dove for ground balls (like Kuiper) and he even slapped down bunts to get on base (just like…you guessed it — Kuiper).
Enter Barry Bonds’ quest for baseball immortality and Posnanski’s assignment to cover it.
Anyway, I was aware in a general way that Duane is now an announcer for the San Francisco Giants. But when I actually went to San Francisco to cover this Bonds chase, I never really put it together that I could meet my hero. It just didn’t occur to me. At some point, seven or eight days in, my friend Mike Vaccaro said, “You should go over to the booth and meet Duane Kuiper.”
And I thought: “Holy shmoly! [I often think using phrases like “Holy Shmoly!” and “Shazam!”] I really should.”
And then I got nervous. Crazy, right? But this guy was my hero. This wasn’t like going up to Johan Santana and asking him what pitch he threw in the seventh. That’s work. This was a whole different thing. This was about meeting a childhood hero (I had the same inhibition when I finally met Ozzie Newsome. I really couldn’t allow myself to feel that when Buddy Bell became manager of the Royals). Then I thought, “Hey, maybe I could do a column on Duane Kuiper. You know, here’s the opposite of Barry Bonds, the guy who hit only one home run. And he’s the one calling the games. That’s great. That’s how I’ll do this.”
So, of course, the next day Jayson Stark did that very column. So now I couldn’t do that.
Luckily for Posnanski, his idol got wind of his pursuit — or lack thereof — and gave him a surprise.
Wayne Gretzky and Joe Montana are you reading?
Deadline draft picks (The Hardball Times)
Jeff Sackmann of The Hardball Times writes about an interesting trend creeping into Major League Baseball general manager’s conducting trade business — sandwich picks.
If you aren’t aware, MLB free-agents-to-be are slotted into two different levels or types. We’ll let THT explain:
Exactly what draft picks you get depends on a multitude of factors, but the vast majority of such picks are in the first, supplemental first, or second round. Generally, a top 100 pick. The bounty can be even greater for a “Type A” free agent, now defined as a player among the top 20 percent of free agents at his position. That sounds like a tough standard, but there are more Type A’s then you may think.
Last year, Type A’s were defined as the top 30 percent, which included such luminaries as Kevin Millar, Frank Catalanotto, Ronnie Belliard, Mike Lieberthal, and my favorite, Aaron Fultz. Some of those guys wouldn’t make the cut this year, but I mention them to illustrate the standard.
Type B’s (also stricter this year, but again, only by 10 percent) are an even less impressive group, including the likes of Brian Meadows, Ramon Ortiz, Gregg Zaun, and—had he found a team to lure him out of retirement—Jeromy Burnitz. Teams that lost one of those players (if they offered him arbitration, anyway) got a supplemental first round pick out of the deal.
This piece is a must-read for those trying to learn about a strategy that’s becoming more and more prevalent in use by general managers. For a more thorough understanding of the CBA’s rules regarding compensation, check out Baseball America’s article with more indepth explanation.
The morning after a hectic day tracking rumors leading up to the non-waiver deadline…
Jose Contreras’ stumble continued, allowing seven earned runs in 2.2 innings; the post-Mark Teixeira-era in Texas begins with a victory; the Arizona Diamondbacks gain sole possession of the NL West and the Milwaukee Brewers gain a walk-off win from an old fan favorite.
O’s 5, Red Sox 3 — David Ortiz hit two homers, the 26th multihomer game of his career, but it was Erik Bedard who limited the Red Sox to two hits over six innings, picking up his seventh straight decision in Baltimore’s win 
over Boston 5-3.
White Sox 3, Yankees 16 — New York used the long ball for a club-record eight times to put up 16 runs on the White Sox in a huge 16-3 massacre at Comiskey II.
Royals 3, Twins 5 — Minnesota’s Carlos Silva cruised through eight innings with three K’s and no walks to lift the Twins to their fourth straight victory 5-3.
Rangers 3, Indians 1 — Texas scratched out a victory in Cleveland and starting pitcher Brandon McCarthy recorded his first victory in more than two months 3-1.
Angels 8, M’s 0 — Orlando Cabrera’s four RBI and Gary Matthews’ two home runs and three RBI helped pace the Los Angeles Angels to an 8-0 victory over second place Seattle. John Lackey of the Angels pitched a seven-hit, complete game shutout to gain the win.
News and notes while the much-ballyooed “Milestone Trifecta Tuesday” didn’t occur for any player involved — Bonds, Glavine and A-Rod…
Culpepper signs with Raiders (ESPN News Services) The Oakland Raiders, having failed to ink number one draft pick JaMarcus Russell, signed free agent quarterback Daunte Culpepper to a deal.
Bears sign newly-acquired Walker (AP/ESPN) Two days after trading for the holdout defensive tackle from the Buffalo Bills, the Chicago Bears signed Darwin Walker to a five-year, $25 million contract.
Police: Cocaine found at Beck’s home (AP/Y! Sports) Authorities investigating the death of former MLB closer Rod Beck found evidence of cocaine and drug paraphernalia in the player’s residence the day of his death. His wife, Stacey, released a statement soon after his death that her husband had a “debilitating, degenerative brain disease called addiction.”
Prosser remembered (AP/USA Today) Skip Prosser, who died suddenly last Thursday of an apparent heart attack, was remembered as an engaging, congenial coach who brought integrity to the sport and reignited the students’ passion for Wake Forest basketball by leading Paul’s final Demon Deacons team to the first No. 1 ranking in school history.
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