River Avenue Blues

Prospect Profile: Ryan Pope

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Ryan Pope | RHP

Background
Born in Bradenton, FL, Pope was raised about 400 miles north in Savannah, GA. As you can probably guess, Pope grew up rooting for the Braves during the Maddux-Glavine-Smoltz Era, and surely cursed the Bombers in 1996 & 1999. Pope wasn’t much of a prospect in high school, barely topping out at 82, and receiving nothing more than a quick glance from Division I recruiters. Pope took his act to the Savannah College of Art & Design, a school better known for producing Grammy Award winner Indie Arie & various items for The Real World than baseball players.

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Top GCL Prospects

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Baseball America released the first of their top 20 lists for each league in organized baseball today, starting with the Rookie level Gulf Coast League. Two Yankee prospects made the list: Jesus Montero at number 2 (behind Michael Burgess of the Nats), and my newest prospect crush, Jairo Heredia comes in at number 15.

I can’t wait to see how many members of Trenton’s pitching staff makes the Eastern League Top 20.

Fan-on-the-Field Photo Caption Contest, Redux

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Ok, folks. Let’s try that again. This time with more answer choices. We screwed up last time. So we’ll do it right this time.

We’re going all-out here. We’ve selected 19 captions for you to vote on and we’ll keep this one open until Sunday night at 11:59 p.m. or until the Yankees move into first place, whichever comes first. As an added incentive, the top three winners who share a valid mailing address with us will all receive the Yankees World Series DVD box set. Again, you can only vote once per IP address per day.

The Fan-on-the-Field Photo Caption Contest
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The longest day of the season

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Today is going to be the longest day off of the season. When all we want is more baseball, when all we want is for the Yanks to keep on going with this miraculous run, the schedule throws an off-day our way.

The Yanks, sitting pretty just 1.5 games behind the Red Sox for the East and 5.5 games up in the Wild Card race, have a date with the dance in October all but sewn up. Yet, we have to wait today. We have to wait for a team that we shouldn’t underestimate, a team that just swept Boston and throws some seriously good pitchers at us this weekend, to come to town.

So as we while away the time with a caption contest that will return later this morning, let’s reset our favorite picture: The race for the AL East title. The Yanks are just one out game out in that ever-important loss column. What do they need to go to tie for the division lead which would technically hand them the division crown?

If the Red Sox go… then the Yanks have to go…
0-9 2-8
1-8 3-7
2-7 4-6
3-6 5-5
4-5 6-4
5-4 7-3
6-3 8-2
7-2 9-1
8-1 10-0

And this is what I call a pennant race.

Game 152: Nearly there

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The Yanks are nearly there on two fronts. With the Tigers’ losing again to the Indians this afternoon, the Yanks sport a nifty five-game lead in the Wild Card. If the Yanks go just 5-6 the rest of the way, the Tigers will have to go 9-0 just to tie. Meanwhile, the Yanks find themselves 2.5 games out of first, and we all know what the Bombers have to do to win the division.

Around Yankee-land today, the Internet held some interesting pieces for us to ponder. Joe Sheehan, in a subscribers-only piece, ponders the thought of getting the Yankees ready for the postseason. He wonders if the division really matters that much or if Joe Torre should rest the injured Yanks and prep the pitching for October.

For me, the division is a matter of pride, but at some point, if the Yanks can’t continue to close the gap, the Yanks should gear up for October. Considering their 21-29 start, it’s not like they’re settling for the Wild Card.

Meanwhile, the Yankees have set another attendance record. Their 4,262,761 tickets sold is a new franchise record. They join the Blue Jays as the only team to draw more than 4 million in three consecutive seasons. I think they’ll set the AL attendance mark before the season is out.

Meanwhile, because of complaints and a protest from my mother, we’re throwing out the current voting on the caption contest poll. We’ll put up more choices and allow the masses to rule the roost on this one. More details on that later tonight. On with the lineup:

Melky Cabrera CF – Still struggling.
Derek Jeter SS
Bobby Abreu RF
Alex Rodriguez 3B – A home run would be nice.
Jorge Posada C
Hideki Matsui LF
Robinson Cano 2B
Shelley Duncan DH
Doug Mientkiewicz 1B

Andy Pettitte P (13-8, 3.89)

The Red Sox fan-on-the-field caption contest vote

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Here we go, folks. After nearly 80 entries for captions, we’ve narrowed down the selection to our top five.

Your job now is to vote. The winner – or person with the most votes who sends us an address – gets to take home a pretty nifty DVD set. The photo and the poll follow. You can only vote once per IP address per day. The polls close at 2:10 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, September 21, 2007. Please, no hanging chads.

Vote in the Fan-on-the-Field Photo Caption Contest

EDIT: We hear your complaints, and we’re going to re-tool the poll. It will launch later tonight. We screwed that one up. Our bad.