The winner of the 2010 Murray Chass award for combing writing ignorance with insolence goes to the BostonHerald.com’s Ron Borges! Mazel tov, Ron! His clinching quotes:

According to Epstein, the Red Sox will be competitive through the use of kung fu baseball, the art of winning without scoring. They will be so flawless in the field that opponents will simply forfeit, their inability to penetrate the Steel Curtain Defense so frustrating that the other side simply resigns. Sort of like playing Bobby Fischer in chess.

Not one to simply drop a doozy and let it be, Big Ron adds to his lead in the category:

While teams created by Ruben Amaro Jr. of the Phillies or Brian Cashman of the Yankees cling hopelessly to National League and American League pennants and a misplaced faith in the old order represented by stats like batting average, fielding average and RBI, teams of the new millennium like the Red Sox believe those are insignificant relics of a bygone era, the buggy whips of baseball.

They have been replaced by faith in OBP, OPS, UZR (I thought those were the initials of a former Russian state only to learn it means Ultimate Zone Rating), DRS (defensive runs saved) and PMR (probabilistic model of range). Based on crunching numbers into these new formulas, one expert in baseball metrics, John Dewan, has written that the addition of Adrian Beltre, Marco Scutaro and Mike Cameron in the field will add nine more victories to the Sox bottom line. Lo and behold, we just won the pennant! Who knew?

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The Yanks signed the No. 4 senior high school player in Taiwan, an infielder by the name of Fu-Lin Kuo. Who’s he, you ask? Well, according to a scouting report:

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We here at IIATMS are proud to announce the selection of Johnny Damon to the IIATMS Hall of Fame. His impressive credentials can be summarized below:

• After helping the RedSox embarrass the Yanks en route to winning their first World Series in 86 years, Damon bolts to the archrival Yanks. Rather than stay with a talented team for a reasonable offer, Damon jumped for the Yanks cash and instantly alienates himself for all of eternity in New England. Said Damon:

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Here are the answers to yesterday’s whopper posting about PED quotes in baseball. You’ll have to click through in case others still want to see if they can guess.

Surrrrrvey says…!

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Here are all of the answers from yesterday’s whopper of a post. You’ll have to click through in case others want to see the quotes without the answers…

Suuuuurrrrrevy SAYS…!

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OK, I’m not that excited about the Yanks signing Randy Winn. There, I said it. He’s a weak hitter, not much better than Gardner, Now, after looking at his defensive stats, I feel a bit better, but why do we need another “good glove, no bat” hitter:

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We’ve noted and suggested this quite a few times since Granderson’s acquisition:

Gardner may not even be the [center]fielder. The Yankees are at least toying with putting Granderson (fourth most homers, 30, by an AL outfielder last season) in left and employing the superior defense of Gardner in center.

Man, some of that stuff sounds exactly like what we’ve been saying here, doesn’t it?

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Was having a baseball discussion last night and we were talking about some of the dumber, embarassing, silly comments made during a player’s admission to PED use. My buddy gave me a few and I’ve added to that list below, expanding the list to include other people in the game of baseball, not just offending players. See if you can match the comment with the offending party:

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Time to start looking elsewhere as it’s not only the Yanks who are boosting payrolls with silly contracts:

@SI_JonHeyman sheets got $10 million plus performance bonuses. not bad after idle ’09

Hey, I love the idea of smaller market teams adding payroll and top players, but $10 million PLUS performance bonuses for a guy who hasn’t pitched in MLB in over a year is absurd.

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Guess it’s nostalgia day here at IIATMS. Here’s a great, little-known retell of a pre-Yankees Joe D facing an in-the-prime Satchel Paige:

DiMaggio was hitless in three appearances until the 10th, when he beat the setting sun to slap a single up the middle and off the glove of Paige, driving home the winning run in a 2-1 victory for the major leaguers. [...]

“DiMaggio was there grinning to beat all,” Paige was quoted as saying. “I didn’t hear all he said, but I did hear him saying something like, ‘Now I know I can make it with the Yankees. I finally got a hit off Ol’ Satch.’ “

DiMaggio later called Paige the greatest pitcher he ever faced.

A Yankees scout at the game reportedly sent a telegram back to the home office. “DiMaggio everything we’d hoped he’d be: Hit Satch one for four.”

Overall, he is a poor man’s version of Seattle Mariners 2B Yung-Chi Chen. He does not have the defensive ability of Los Angeles Dodgers SS Ching-Lung Hu nor the hitting/power potential of Boston Red Sox 2B Chih-Hsien Chiang.

So he’s got that going for him, which is nice. Though he’s got soft hands but a bum knee. Good luck with that.

I’m sure this won’t help this guy regain his confidence in the Yanks enough to repurchase his ticket plan, though.

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Seeing that old Rawlings ad sent me on a search for other old baseball glove ads… here’s a few that jumped out at me:

Company name is Nocona Leather Goods Co., but the glove line is spelled Nokona. Go figure that out.

Imagine trying to catch a ball with this today:

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Stumbled across this in the latest Uni-Watch blog and just loved it:

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As if the eternal conflict between RedSox fans and Yanks fans wasn’t enough, now the networks are going at it. This latest volley served by NESN, in response to this:

Two weeks ago YES Network announced that they were the most watched RSN in the country in 2009 by an average of 6,000 households per night. According to NESN, “Since the New York DMA has more than three times the number of homes than the Boston DMA (7.5 million vs. 2.4 million), YES Network has a considerable advantage over NESN when comparing the number of households watching each network.”

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