Dodger Fans, Are You Ready For Opening Day?
Are you ready? I am!
This guy here is ready! It’s a new chapter for our new Los Angeles Dodgers manager Don Mattingly and I love this guy the more I hear about him.
I like the fact that he was a perfectionist, fiery, tough and puts Ketchup on (nearly) everything (I’m with you Don!).
He’s also a worker, tireless and at the same time he’s got a calmness and as they say, the personality of the manager rubs off on the players, especially the younger ones. Let’s just hope that Joe Torre didn’t have that much of an influence. While he got us to the NLCS, he was a cancer and he just stopped caring, so the players stopped caring, you just can’t do that as a manager, I wish he’d stepped down earlier when he realized he didn’t care anymore.
Well back to opening day. It’s the Giants, how much better can it get? Well other than the fact they won the World Series but hey, at least we can ruin it for them right? If the Dodgers beat the pants off them today, it’ll be the 2nd sweetest moment since we destroyed them 12-1 in the final game in 1993 at Dodger Stadium and prevented them from making the playoffs despite winning 103 games.
6 hours to go!
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Join Dodgers Central for Opening Day!
At 4:45 PM PST, I will be here at DodgersCentral.com conducting a live blog of opening day. There’s no software for you to install.
Just come back to Dodgers Cetnral or type in your e-mail so you can receive a reminder of when the event starts.
You’ll be able to chat with me live and publicly and just have a good time. Can’t wait to see you there!
Dodgers OF Andre Ethier Is Going No Where!
A lot of excitement kicked up yesterday after Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Andre Ethier made these comments after the 5-1 loss to the Anaheim Angeles (I refuse to call them the Los Angeles Angeles of Anaheim, just ridiculous):
“This is my sixth one, and who knows? It might be my last one here with the Dodgers. You never know. A lot of signs are pointing that way, so we’ll have to see,” Ethier said. “Six years for a Dodger is a long time, in the era that we’re living in. So I’m going to cherish every moment I can, enjoy the season and try to make it my best one.”
I personally took that as a guy uncertain about his future because of the financial situation of the Dodgers, but it seems the media decided to take it a different route:
Are we to believe that Ethier is so discombobulated by the McCourt divorce that he’s plotting his exit from Los Angeles 19 months before he has the ability to engineer it?
I’m wondering if somehow, something got lost in the translation, but otherwise, I think the most tranquil Dodger Spring Training in years might have just had its first rock thrown through the glass.
Seriously? It’s not that big of a deal, my guess at the time is he saw Billingsley get his pay day and he’s heard rumblings through the locker room about other players getting calls from their agents about extensions and he hadn’t heard anything yet but it seems even he felt he overreacted and decided to elaborate:
“My salary is increasing each year,” Ethier said. “I would say the likeliness of me being here beyond this year, it’s not just my decision. … I have been kind of lucky to be in one spot in baseball for as long as I have been, for six years now. That is a long time to be in one city playing for one team. There is no inclination now other than to go out and play this year and see what we’ve got.
“If I don’t play well, we have seen them non-tender guys here. If you do play well, sometimes they don’t offer those guys arbitration because their salaries are too high.”
…on the day the Dodgers finalized a three-year, $35 million contract extension for pitcher Chad Billingsley, Colletti did reveal that he had preliminary discussions during spring training with Nez Balelo, Ethier’s Los Angeles-based agent, on a possible extension for Ethier, but that those discussions died fairly quickly.
Ethier insisted he was unaware that those talks had even begun between Colletti and Balelo, so he couldn’t have been aware that they had been quickly abandoned.
“I guess they didn’t get far enough for it to get to me,” Ethier said. “I guess that shows you how serious they were.”
So, he’s still a little bummed but not as much as he was made out to be. It seems Russell Martin being non-tendered affected the team more than I thought but that was because Russell was hurt, was unproductive and didn’t want to go to arbitration. If they’d gone to arbitration Russell could’ve gotten up to $6 mil, a raise on the $5 mil he got in 2010. The Dodgers ended up offering $4.2 million plus incentives and Martin declined. He ended up taking $4 mil plus easier to obtain incentives with the Yankees, although he’s not guaranteed a starter spot in New York with Jorge Posada there, so why he did that makes no sense. It reminds me of the Los Angeles Lakers former point guard Jordan Farmar going to New Jersey who already had a starting point guard in Devin Harris after stating “I want to go to a team where I can play more” and now he’s sitting behind Deron Williams after he was traded from the Utah Jazz.
Back to Andre Either who then proceeds to rebuild the relationship wall with Dodger fans but decides to leave a crack in it as well:
Ethier now says he would like to remain with the Dodgers for a long time to come, but he also qualified that statement.”Yeah, as long as the organization is going in the right direction and is still committed to winning rather than things not going good for a year or two and then rebuilding or maybe going through a transition year,” he said. “You hear it all the time, coaches and players saying they don’t know how many opportunities you’re going to get to be in the playoffs or on a winning team. I want to be somewhere [that provides] my best shot to win and win on an everyday basis. It feels like we have that here and we’re moving that way, but that’s kind of a wait-and-see basis.”
So, he wants to be a Dodger for life, but only if the organization continues to put a good product on the field and stay competitive. Makes sense to me, I’m with you Dre but this is a bad time to put this out there and if you really wanted to be a Dodger for life, you’d have brought this to management first, who had no idea of your feelings, rather than going to the media, not a smart move.
Now, I really do not think that the Dodgers will allow Ethier to leave this winter because there is no other replacement. Yes there is Trayvon Robinson in the minors waiting for a spot and Jerry Sands but with those two, you’re more likely to see James Loney non-tenders than Andre Ethier. Sands can play the outfield and 1B and with his size, he’s more likely to be our future 1B than our future RF. Then Trayvon is a CF and since Ethier is better off playing LF than RF and Kemp is better off in RF than CF, you’ll see the Dodgers make that switch before letting Ethier go. Then again, it depends on how much money he wants. He’s making $9,250,000 in 2011 and has the potential of making over $13.5 mil in 2011. If he had another 290 20 hr season like he did in 2010, he’s not worth the money but we may not have a choice but at the same time, the Dodgers would be smart to pay up now for at least 3-4 years during his peak years (29-32) before he explodes in 2011 regaining his early 2010 form when he was a Triple Crown candidate.
So Andre Ethier is going no where, who would we replace him with?
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Dodgers Jonathan Broxton Fails Again
Former Los Angeles Dodgers closer Jonathan Broxton blew his first save opportunity of the spring last night.
At first this article was going to be all about how Broxton just doesn’t have it (which I don’t think he does) but, I’ll let him slide because Ivan DeJesus Jr. and Dee Gordon let him down last night, so I’ll also bash on the coaching.
Firstly, DeJesus should’ve gotten down farther on that ball, he was thinking throw before he got the ball that’s clear, it’s a classic rookie mistake. I also believe the ball hitting off Broxton’s glove messed him up a little so I can’t completely fault him, mental mistakes happen to even the best of vets as evidenced by Gabe Kapler, a very good outfielder, going so hard for a foul ball that would’ve clearly allowed the runner from third to score.
Secondly, Gordon on a ball that went to short-stop should’ve never been going towards the bag, he’s the short-stop and the batter was right handed, that should’ve been DeJesus, now whether or not Dee saw Ivan wasn’t going to cover or he took it of his own accord I don’t know but that’s something the coaches should ingrain in their young infielders.
Thirdly, why didn’t Hector Gimenez, the catcher at the time, ever call a fastball inside? Here’s a big dude that throws the ball 96-98 MPH on average and you’re making him throw his fastballs on the outside corner? It may be Broxton I don’t know but I saw Gimenez call a lot of balls to the outside of the plate to hitters. I first thought it was possible Broxton throws to that side of the plate better until I saw a slider and two fastballs called to the right side of the plate against a left-hander. Clearly Broxton or Gimenez believe that a bunch of scrubs can hit his inside fastball, but I’d like to have seem them try it once. When you have a rookie 0-2, you don’t give him a waist high fastball on the outside of the plate, you give him a chest high fastball on the inside.
Lastly, Broxton lost his cool. Yes he should’ve been out the inning on two separate ground balls but he also should’ve been able to settle down and blow some of those guys away as well. He had Mike Trout 0-2 with 1 out, pre All Star Broxton strikes him out, post All Star Broxton either walks him or allow him to get his bat on the ball. After that he just went wild, went away from the fastball and started throwing sliders outside of the strike zone and when he did throw the fastball it only went above 94 once and that was an overthrown ball nearly in the dirt.
If you watch on the close up you see Broxton sweating after only 20 or so pitches, he got nervous in an exhibition game, what more can you expect from the guy in the NLCS! So, I will apologize to some friends of mine who I called idiots for saying Broxton didn’t have it back in 2008 and 2009 against the Phillies, I felt that he’d done well up to then through the playoffs and that the Phillies just got to them but now I see that Broxton really can’t handle pressure and thus shouldn’t be allowed to close ball games anymore.
Does he have the stuff? Certainly but he just doesn’t have that moxy, that “I’m going to get you out no matter what,” attitude, he seems more afraid that the batter will hit him than the batter is of striking out and that didn’t used to be the case. So hopefully Donnie Baseball notices this and doesn’t make us watch Broxton struggle in the closer role to start the season, I just don’t think my heart can take it.
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Chad Billingsley to Receive 3 year/$30 Million Deal
Chad is about to get paid! I’d been worried that the Dodgers would allow some of their prized youth get away or wait until the very end of their contracts to resign or extend them, thus having to overpay for their services or be forced to trade but luckily it seems Colletti is doing something right by extending Billingsley for the next 3 years.
Billingsley is the first of the Dodgers young core to be signed past his free agency tenure and now that leaves Kershaw, Broxton, Ethier, Kemp, Loney, and Kuo as players the Dodgers need to make decisions about.
