Fire Dayton Moore (dot-blogspot-dot-com)

The essentials: Dayton is making crucial personel [sic] decisions that have more to do with religion and faith than baseball. 'Character' and 'leadership qualities' are code-words for commitment to born-again christianity.

What the hell?

Don't "flame" the blog. Just help me make sense of it.

The excellent Joe Posnanski writes from Japan

If you haven't been following Joe Posnanski's series of articles about the Japan Series -- and why not is the question -- here's how you can catch up:

1. Baseball in Japan is similar to U.S. game, only with dancing girls

Also, they have a halftime in the middle of the fifth inning, featuring dancing girls. Once, early in his time in Japan (this is his fifth season), Hillman was at a managers’ meeting, and a heated discussion began about how to speed up games. Hillman listened to the various ideas and then finally said: “You know, if we really want to shorten games, how about we get rid of halftime?”

The looks on the faces of the other managers told him immediately that he was tromping on sacred ground.

“We’ve been doing halftime here for a very long time,” he was told coldly.

“And that,” Hillman says now, “was the last time I spoke at a managers’ meeting.”

2. Japan Series: 'You have to see it to believe it'

“If the players do not try so hard as to vomit blood in practice, then they cannot hope to win games,” wrote Tobita.

3. They love Hillman in Japan

Tatsuro Hirooka was even more adamant about it. He was a baseball tyrant — sort of like Bear Bryant in his younger days — and according to the excellent “You Gotta Have Wa,” he once ran a 59-day training camp and demanded that every single day his batters take 600 swings and his pitcher throw 430 pitches.

When his team, Seibu, won the Japan Series, he said: “This year was a battle between me and the players. And I won.”

4. U.S. power hitters make it big in Japan

5. Nippon Ham Fighters drop second game (and other notes kind of thrown together)

One more excerpt:

Sunday night in Hillman’s Hangout, a whole group of Japanese people ate Texas food and watched the game on television. Waitresses wearing T-shirts with Hillman’s face on them scurried about. There wasn’t much for a Fighters fan to cheer, but when Hillman appeared on television, there was a smattering of applause. A woman at the next table asked me where I was from.

“Kansas City,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “I am Kansas City Royals fan.”

“Really?” I asked. “Since when?” She smiled and pointed at a photograph of Hillman and said, “Since him.”

So the Japanese people's American baseball allegiance is split between the Yankees, Red Sox, Mariners and Royals. Split evenly, as far as I can tell.

Trey Hillman, you're a good one. Just 108 days (give or take) till pitchers and catchers report.

Your 2007 World Series champion

Congratulations, Boston Red Sox. In the wake of your recent championship run -- the second in four years, if you've lost count -- you leave so many in a blaze of sadness that we're reminded (inadvertently) of California wildfires. We can't imagine how hard the Indians and Angels and Yankees and maybe four other American League teams are kicking themselves right now, thinking, That could have been us mauling those minor leaguers.

Red Sox Nation, we hope you can sleep at night knowing your team has left entire fan bases feeling wretched and deprived. Just look at Eric Wedge and Todd Helton. I mean, seriously...



Barry Chin/Boston Globe; Jonathan Daniel/Getty

Of course, you don't care, what between your beer goggles and Mass Street riots. But that's okay. Get drunk, New England. You won't have another chance to celebrate like this until February, when that other team of yours finishes disposing of chumps like the "Pittsburgh Steelers," "Indianapolis Colts" and "Dallas Cowboys."



Onward, Nation! More exclamation marks! Procreate and be merry!

A poor, rainy night

The lead from Denver Post's gamer:

Even before Jeff Francis threw his first pitch Wednesday night, the Rockies weren't having a good day. Todd Helton required four takes to read the lineup for the Fox telecast. An annoying rain arrived soon after the national anthem. Troy Tulowitzki's name was misspelled on his new bats, with an s instead of z.

Four takes? Geez.

13-1 Red Sox.

POSTSCRIPT: Feel I like gotta share this, from Dan Lamothe of Red Sox Monster.

Official World Series prediction

Rockies in 5.

Hillman's introductory press conference met with international approbation

What I can tell you is that I trust Dayton Moore.
--Tom Fornelli, FanHouse

After the progress Dayton Moore created this year, I'll trust him.
--Corban, Corby and the Royals

Of all the words that have been written and said, only these from The Man himself -- the namesake of this blog -- really matter:

Dayton Moore: This is a fun day, this is exciting for us.... We had a very thorough evaluation. We knew the type of individuals that we needed to speak with to lead our baseball team. And when I met with Trey, I knew right away that this guy was special. He has a passion to lead, he is a great person, somebody who gets it, respects the game in all the right ways and somebody who is regarded as one of the finest baseball men in the game today, and I can't tell you how proud I am to be associated with him and his trust in the Kansas City Royals. So without any further ado, I want to introduce our next manager, Mr. Trey Hillman.

And like so, to thunderous applause, the shrieks of women, full-throated serenades and a rainshower of bouquets, the new era began.

A few sound bites from Mr. Hillman, who spoke at length without the aid of a teleprompter or notes:

I hope you hear it in my voice, I hope you see it in my face through the jetlag, guys: my excitement and my passion for being named the Royals' new manager. I really couldn't be any happier today.

The Royals have graciously invited me into the fold for leadership on the field. And for someone I've never met before, until a week ago when we hit the interview process and Dayton Moore and Renee Francisco made the effort to come all the way to Japan and find if we had a relationship match, I've just been walking on cloud nine ever since. It's been wonderful. We do match up, I know that in my heart and my head, and this is something that I want from the standpoint of a brotherhood relationship with my general manager. I believe that's something that has to happen to build and maintain the integrity of championship-caliber baseball at the Major League level.

I'm a hungry guy. I do not like to lose. I like to start from the ground up and build, and build in such a way where it's going to be maintained for many years to come. I'm a long-haul guy too. I'm a loyal guy. I'm bleeding Royal blue already. And I'm thrilled. Thrilled to be here.

Question, "What did you know about the Royals a week ago, and what do you know more about them now?" I knew this one was going to come up. All I can do is be honest with you. I gotta tell ya, when I was playing college baseball in Arlington, Texas, for the University of Texas-Arlington, I took a job in the visiting team's clubhouse -- for no money -- picking up sweaty jocks and towels and hanging clothes up and unpacking bags and watching BP on the field and sneaking into the dugout at the end of the tunnel during the ballgame to be around big league players and to get as much atmosphere as I could at the Major League level. And it was wonderful being on the visiting side because I got to see the differences coming in and out of the old Arlington stadium. I grew up there because my father worked out there in the summers -- he was a coach and a junior high principal. I'd grown up at that ballpark. Now as a college player, when the Kansas City Royals came in town, I was down in a three-point stance. I couldn't wait. I'm unpacking Willie Wilson, U.L. Washington, George Brett's bag. I was more excited about unpacking the bags of the Kansas City Royals when they came into Arlington Stadium than any other opposing team in 1983 and 1984 when I worked down there.... And that's the simple truth, because of the interest in Kansas City Royal baseball. The success level, their attitude when they walked through the door -- they knew they were going to win. That was something that you sensed. I understand the master plan now and why I got excited about that when I did. It took a while to come full circle, but here we are. So this is, more so than I could ever express, a tremendous honor to be associated with this organization.

I've said this before and I'll say it again, the Royals have a legitimately good chance to duplicate the success of the 2007 Rockies in two years, and if you're not on board now, you may, like all these Rockies fans, get shut out in the cold when glory returns in the form winning baseball in Kansas City.

I'm all for this hire, especially if, as it seems, Trey and Dayton are spiritual kin. Joe, how do you feel?

Why do they love Hillman? Easy. They love his baseball intelligence; it’s apparent any time he talks about the game. They love his dedication to baseball. They love the way he relates to people of different backgrounds and brings players together.

Perhaps more than anything, they love his ability to adjust to any situation. Five years ago, he went to Japan, to a second-division organization — the Nippon Ham Fighters. Hillman did not know the language. He did not understand the culture. He was a certain kind of manager then; a big-inning, get-on-base, Moneyball kind of manager (the king of Moneyball himself, Billy Beane, has gushed over Hillman). Only that style didn’t work for him there. Japanese baseball is different. The team mostly lost for three seasons.

So what did Hillman do? He changed. He asked his players for input (they asked him to please make practices longer and harder; yeah, it’s different over there). He helped make the Fighters into an aggressive, attacking, bunting, scrapping team. And last year, the Fighters won the Japan Series. No team in the world, perhaps, played better fundamental baseball than Hillman’s Fighters. This year, the Fighters are in the Japan Series again, even though they are by most statistical accounts the country’s worst offensive team.

POSTSCRIPT: At any time this season -- especially since, oh, June 19 -- did you catch yourself wondering, "Hey, whatever happened to that KC Star-endorsed Royals blogger? You know, the one who lives in Atlanta?"? Or, "Why hasn't this KC Star-endorsed blogger written anything in four months?"?

Well, turns out he's just been really busy. Like, really, really busy -- "regular hate mail, work(my real job) work(my secondary job(freelance writer) or procrastination" -- you know, stuff none of us ever have to deal with whenever we feel like kicking back and enjoying our "two games a week."

Anyway, he's back. Just thought you should know.

The Rockies are still figuring this World Series thing out

The hottest ticket in town is not the Broncos, who are middling at 3-3 and completely uninteresting, but the baseball team, which has hoisted the city on its shoulders and taken it on a near-month-long ride that's completely unprecedented in the 100-plus-year history of the sport. No wonder Rangers Fan insists the Rockies are "the greatest story in baseball history."

How hot are those tickets pictured above? Well, those who logged onto the team's website today found out. After enduring hours of failed attempts, ticket buyers were met with this message:

This morning the Rockies' ticketing provider Paciolan experienced a system wide outage that is impacting all of their North American customers. They are working hard to resume service as soon as possible and apologize to their customers and all fans for this impact.

Why? Because apparently the website got 8.5 million hits within the first 90 minutes of the tickets going on sale. 8.5 million!

Then there's this (from the above link):

About 20 people lined up in near-freezing temperatures outside the Denver Public Library before it opened in hopes of using public-access computers to score tickets.

“If you can’t get tickets here, you’re going to have to pay $200, $300 above face value,” said Clayton McLeod, a 26-year-old heavy-machine operator who took the day off to try to get seats.

McLeod said he has Internet access from his apartment building but thought the library’s computers might be faster. His mother, father, uncle and girlfriend were trying to buy tickets from other computers, he said.

His boss, also a Rockies fan, agreed to give him the day off and asked McLeod to get tickets for him, too.

This bears repeating: these people lined up in near-freezing weather in front of the Denver Public Library. Ha ha!

Need more proof the Rockies are hotter than the Broncos right now?

Going head-to-head against a Steelers-Broncos game at Investco Field -- that was close throughout, mind you -- a baseball game on the opposite coast captured a 14.3 rating last night in Denver (compared to 18.3 for the football game). In a football town, this is rather incredible.

But it all ultimately goes back to the tickets... 8.5 million hits is an enormous number. For some perspective: this blog, since March, has gotten about 0.2 percent of what the Rockies' site got in an hour and a half.

The good news is, virtually all the tickets for Games 3-5 are still available. I imagine the above error message was received with more joy than any error message possibly should be.

UPDATE: Some pictures for you, from the Denver Post. Only because a couple of these could be screenshots from some future Geico commercial.

Cleveland postmortem

Steve Silva/Boston.com

In tones that can only be described as "exasperated," Dante asked, "Am I in the twilight zone?" With the Red Sox up 5-2 in the 8th, manager Terry Francona decided to leave Hideki Okajima in to start his third inning of work. Hmm... 5-2, 8th inning, pitcher being left in for too long in Game 7 of an ALCS... where have we seen this before?

Not this time, though. These Red Sox, unlike past kin, are unburdened by the pressure that comes from not winning a World Series in entire generations of fans' lifetimes. The score may not be indicative of how close the game was (did I not say the Red Sox would tack on a few runs late? Granted, I didn't expect so many...), but make no mistake, the Sox won definitively, and amid the dust clouds they kicked up a heartbroken city is left wondering, "Are we cursed?"

No, cursed isn't quite the right word, but the situation is unfortunate, certainly. (Imagine being Kenny Lofton, championship-less, having seen his team lose series 3-2, 4-3, 4-3 and 4-3 after being ahead 2-0 (with the Indians), 3-1 (Cubs), 3-0 (Yankees) and 3-1 (Indians again).) If it's any consolation -- and it isn't, I know -- a very deserving team won in one of the better Championship Series in recent memory.

Not much more to say at the moment, so I'll just leave off with this comment from "Yagur," which appears in the above link:

I'm also a Red Sox fan, and registered for this site just to say this to y'all:

Your city fielded a great team this year, and you supported them with heart and soul. Boston fans were taken aback by the spirit and noise and clamor we saw at the Jake, and wondered -- well, I wondered -- not only if we wouldn't be able to beat this team, but whether or not we deserved to. The 2007 Indians were the kind of team I love to root for -- young, over-performing, inventive, a team that found a dozen ways to beat you other than the dozen than you expected. Plus: Trot Nixon! For a while there, in comparison, our guys looked like a bunch of overpaid mercenaries who were getting distracted thinking about spending the winter in their mansions, and our fans seemed puzzled and dispirited by how your guys were just outclassing us between the lines...

Live blog: Game 7

Kevin Millar threw out the first pitch in Fenway, then read the Red Sox' starting lineup.

That's Kevin Millar, contract employee of the Baltimore Orioles.

8:37 p.m.: Youkilis grounder through the hole between short and third. The BABIP is alive and well, and will kill Jake Westbrook.

A friend just pointed out that the Red Sox win probability is now 70 percent.

8:47 p.m.: J.D. Drew just grounded into a double play with the bases loaded. Sox Nation screams, WHAT A BUM! WHAT HAS HE EVER DONE WITH THE BASES LOADED?

65%, down from 71% before the double play.

8:54 p.m.: Dice-K is well on his towards a complete game shutout. On pace for it, you might say.

Westbrook, on the other hand, is on pace to give up nine earned runs in nine innings.

See, we can do sabermetrics too...

WP: Red Sox, 69%; Indians, 31%

Too bad they can't calculate the win probability for when Josh Beckett makes his way from the dugout into the bullpen. I think the Indians are so freaked out that their WP just dipped to 19%.

9:05: Here're 14 letters to describe that Jacoby Ellsbury hit:

Murderous BABIP.

2-0 Boston.

9:22: The folk hero that is Youkilis just doubled, hitting a ball just past the outstretched glove of Casey Blake. All the Red Sox hits have been through the left side, so maybe the Indians should consider the reverse-Ortiz shift?

BAP... ah, screw it. If I don't stop now I'm going to be saying it all night, and I wouldn't want to upset Joe Morgan any more than I have.

9:27: Youkilis just scored on a sacrifice fly off the bat of Mike Lowell. Red Sox' magic number for clinching game down to 15 (WP=85%).

9:29: Drew hits it 303 feet, essentially flying out to "deep" left to end the inning. Did we mention Westbrook is on pace to give up nine runs in nine innings? Because he is.

9:42: Ryan Garko just had the at-bat of the night. No description here will do it justice, but let's just say he doubled off the center field wall -- a little more to the right and it would've been a two-run homer -- after fouling off some absolutely nasty stuff, and laying off a 1-2 fastball that was about an inch and a half off the outside corner.

3-1 Red Sox. WP down to 81%.

And a Fox graphic tells us the Indians have come back three times from four runs down. The great thing about Game 7s in baseball -- and you can't say this about any other sport -- is that as the contest progresses, one can feel, as sharply as a migraine, the vise of pressure tightening ever so gradually. It's not just one game that hangs in the balance... it's the weight of an entire season, 170+ games and those two months in spring training and, in the case of the Indians, the decades of failure (they have the longest World Series drought in the American League). It's like a countdown towards some doomsday...

9:50: Varitek hits a ball that rolls between short and third. Westbrook wears a look that says, "[expletive] you, baseball gods."

9:55: This is getting silly. Jacoby Ellsbury took off on a pitch, drawing Asdrubal Cabrera to cover the bag, and wouldn't you know it, Julio Lugo singled through the spot vacated by the second baseman. About as predictable an outcome as the law of averages could have drawn up.

Westbrook fell off the mound with slumped shoulders, looking crestfallen.

9:59: This, too, is BABIP at work: Lugo took off on a pitch, again drawing Cabrera, but this time, the batter hit it directly at the second baseman, who tagged out Lugo and threw to first to complete the inning-ending double play.

Had the run scored, the Indians' WP would have been down to 13%. As is, 17%.

10:11: It should be 3-3.

Grady Sizemore's sac fly made it 3-2, but it should be tied, since the second-base ump erroneously called Kenny Lofton out earlier in the inning. What was a leadoff double turned into an out (his left hand made it into the base before Pedroia's (Lugo's?) glove came around to swipe him in the chest). Two base hits followed.

10:15: Randy Marsh's tiny strike zone has given Cabrera second life. "Double off the wall," my friend just said.

10:16: Strikeout. Nasty pitch.

Okajima time when the 6th rolls around?

I'm going to watch the rest of this game with some diehard, hardcore Red Sox fans at a bar. This should be a pleasant, wholly enriching experience for me, possibly life-changing. Will correspond tomorrow.

Game prediction: Red Sox romp

Having been on the record as saying I was rooting for a Rockies-Indians World Series, this is tough for me to write, but here's what I think will happen:

The game will go scoreless for a few frames before the Sox break it open with four runs, knocking out Jake "BABIP Help Him" Westbrook. Dice-K Matsuzaka will pitch into the 7th, where he'll give up two cheap singles and a walk and get replaced by Mike Timlin. Timlin will allow two inherited runners to score but get out of the inning with no further damage.

The Red Sox will tack on another two or three runs in the late innings, and Okajima and the dancing wonder Papelbon will wrap it up to send Boston to the World Series. Final score, 7-2, give or take a couple.

POSTSCRIPT: The Rockies are in Time Magazine again, like they were in 1993. That's a long time between Time appearances.