River Avenue Blues

MLB’s All Star Statues debuting today

by 9 Comments

Back in 2000, as part of a charity auction, cows decorated by people from all over adorned the streets of New York as part of the Cow Parade. This year, with the All Star Game in town, MLB is releasing its own version of the cow parade: baseball-themed replicas of the Statue of Liberty.

Throughout the city starting today, observant New Yorkers can find 42 different Statues celebrating the 30 teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and various other New York City baseball related designs.

I like this idea. While it’s clearly a bit gimmicky, it’s a nice way of honoring the city while marketing baseball, and if it’s one thing we’ve learned over the last few years, it’s that baseball needs to find a few feel-good marketing campaigns to run. Much like they did with the cows, fans will hunt down these statues for photo ops, and the casual person happening upon one of these statues will stop and notice it.

Per the press release, find the statues here, among other places:

STATUE LOCATION
All-Star Game MLB, 245 Park Avenue
American League Statue of Liberty
National League Ellis Island
Brooklyn Dodgers Topps, One Whitehall Street
New York Giants Toys “R” Us, Times Square,1514 Broadway
New York Mets Penn Station, 2 Penn Plaza
Yankee Stadium tribute Yankee Stadium
Atlanta Braves World Financial Center Plaza
Boston Red Sox Sports Museum of America, 26 Broadway
Chicago Cubs 20 Broad Street, near N.Y. Stock Exchange
Pittsburgh Pirates 888 7th Avenue, near Carnegie Hall
St. Louis Cardinals 1290 Ave. of the Americas, near Radio City
Tampa Bay Rays Champs, 5 Times Square

Of course, you can also buy replicas online as well. The one commemorating the last season in Yankee Stadium is pretty neat.

Free ticket for Volquez vs. Mussina

by

We’ve got a free extra to tonight’s game. Seats are in the bleachers. First person who wants the ticket to leave a comment in this thread with a valid e-mail address in the e-mail field (where it will stay private) gets it. Please be in New York and able to go the game tonight. Ready, set, go.

Remembering 50 years of baseball in LA

by 2 Comments

While old-timer Brooklynites will still grouse about Walter O’Malley and the Dodgers’ flight to LA 50 years ago, on the other coast, fans are celebrating five decades of baseball in sunny California. Variety, the entertainment industry’s leading trade publication, published its Los Angeles Dodgers 50th Anniversary issue this week. Organized by Dodger Thoughts writer Jon Weisman, the Hollywood-centric baseball special contained two pieces by Alex Belth, one on the top ten baseball movies and one on ten movies that used baseball as a plot device. And for the nostalgic Bums among us, check out Weisman’s piece on what Brooklyn’s long lost team now means to LA.

What about Jason in ’09?

by 95 Comments

Is it too early to think about 2009? It seems as though, in Yankee-land, it is not.

Toward the end of Jayson Stark’s latest (and voluminous) Rumblings & Grumblings, the ESPN columnist drops in a note about Jason Giambi and the Yankees:

Price of the Giambino: Two months ago, we would have set the odds of Jason Giambi’s returning to the Bronx next year at approximately, well, zero. But we’re hearing the Yankees have sent signals to Giambi that, assuming he stays healthy and reasonably productive, they would be amenable to bringing him back next year. There’s zilch chance they’ll pick up his $22 million option. But a modest one-year offer, on top of his $5 million buyout, apparently is no longer out of the question. Who’d have thunk it?

Who’d have thunk it? Well, outside of our own Jamal, approximately no one. We knew Giambi wasn’t going to be terrible all season; we didn’t realize he would start putting up MVP-caliber numbers over a significant stretch of the season.

Now, I don’t need to rehash Giambi’s numbers since he broke out of his slump. I’ve done that recently here and, in a more in-depth post here this week. Suffice it to say that Jason Giambi is having a stretch right now that ranks among his best in pinstripes.

So what are the Yankees to do next year and beyond? The Yanks hold a $20 million option or a $5 million buyout for Giambi. There’s almost no chance that the Yanks would opt to exercise that option. Stark’s sources speculate that the Yankees would be more inclined to exercise that buy out and sign Giambi to a much lower one-year deal.

There are of course a few factors involved in this decision. One of those factors lies with Jason Giambi. If Jason continues to mash this year, the odds are pretty good that he could land a deal longer than one year. He’ll have to decide if he wants to stick around New York or go for a longer contract. I highly doubt the Yanks would be willing to do more than a year-to-year situation with Giambi. Maybe they would give him a two-year deal with a lower salary but some high incentives.

The other factor, of course, lies with the Yankees. If Jason Giambi can be a productive offensive player, the Yankees will definitely look to bring him back. He hasn’t been terrible in the field this year, and he more than makes up for it at the plate. Furthermore, the Yanks seem to believe that Hideki Matsui is no longer as durable as he once was and are hoping to prolong Jorge Posada’s career by spelling him behind the plate as often as possible. Giambi could do a bit of 1B/DH platooning next year.

But if the Yankees want to go young — or younger — and take a long, hard look at Mark Teixeira in the off-season, they probably wouldn’t opt to retain Giambi and Matsui. Despite the age difference, I’d almost take Giambi over Matsui with that lineup. Of course, economics play into it too. If the Yanks are going to be paying Giambi $5 million not to renew his contract, they’ll probably want some of that money to go to on-field production and would thus be more willing to bring him back for the right price.

In the end, of course, despite Stark’s assertions, it’s way too early to be making this decision. We still have over half the season to go, and questions of frailty surround Jason Giambi. It’s interesting to think about it, and if Giambi stays healthy and keeps producing, the Yanks will have to make a decision this October that probably doesn’t have a right or wrong answer.