Misc Yankee News

Some good stuff about King in this article about new SWB manager Jay Bell.

timestribuneblogs.com/railriders/the-thing-that-really-made-mike-king-like-jay-bell/

First thing you should know about King: he’s a student of the game. The 23-year-old righty out of Boston College loves scouting reports and video and stats and carefully stitching together a gameplan before he takes the mound every start. Each pitch he throws has a purpose. It’s part of the reason he put up an 11-5 record with a 1.79 ERA across three levels of the minors last season.
King figures this happened around his fifth or so start with Trenton. There was a lefty hitter in the lineup — he can’t remember who it was exactly — who loved to pull the ball and the Thunder would typically throw on an overshift.
“He wanted the ball in, but I felt like I could expose him in-in, like a little bit too far in where I could get him hacking in there,” said King, who has grown to love breaking a two-seam fastball across lefty hitters’ front hips.
That much played into the scouting report.

King had a plan, though, that went a bit against the grain. The guy’s first at-bat, King wanted to pound him away and try to get him to hit it to the left side. He told pitching coach Tim Norton that he wanted the hitter to think this was the plan to get him out, to get him focused the outer part of the plate. Then in his second and third at-bats, he’d pound him inside. Norton liked the plan, too. Just had to make sure the defense was aligned properly behind him to make it work.
”I want to attack him away by throwing five, six, seven, however many it takes, fastballs away in his first at-bat,” King said. “We executed perfectly. He hit a weak chopper to shortstop.
“And nobody was there because of the shift.”
King wasn’t happy and he made that abundantly clear — “I, being the young person that I am, showed some emotion on the mound,” he said — and Bell wasn’t happy about that. When King got back to the dugout, he got an earful from Bell. King said he deserved it, too.
“He’s yelling at me like, ‘You cannot show us up. Show all that privately. (Can’t) show us up in terms of that,’” King said. “I still was in my aggressive mood, so I told him why (I was mad).”
King told him about the plan he and Norton worked out, and Norton stepped in to confirm to it to Bell. Norton said something got lost in translation, and it was never communicated to Bell and the defense.
”And he was like, ‘OK. That makes a lot more sense. From now on, I want to be able to share with you the shifts that we have and if you want to modify anything,” King said Bell told him. “So he then put trust in me and faith in me to execute my gameplan. It made me like him so much more, even though I already did like him.”
Bell let him have input on the defensive shifts for his games. If King wanted something changed, Bell heard him out. It became part of King’s pregame routine. Rather than just meeting with the pitching coach and catcher ahead of his start, Bell would sit in, too.
“I’d be able to tell him like, ‘I’d like to shift him in this at-bat, or later in the game I’d rather shift him a little bit more or play him straight up, whatever it was, and he was great with it,” King said.
Not long after that game, Bell started to teach King about all the stats the organization had access to. Things like how a shortstop playing a hitter 15 feet to his left increased their chances by, King suggests, 85 percent to get to a ball.

I guess it turns to ice pack at some point...I've never been to Vermont, I bet I've really missed some of the best of the east coast's beauty...The closest I've been is Providence, Rhode Island, and the Finger Lakes/Niagara Falls. Upstate NY was very nice...

I suspect this is a groundless rumor but some are saying the Giants are considering making a salary swap with Ellsbury and maybe Cueto. Don't know if there is anything to this or the details and it obviously won't influence this year for us one way or the other.

sports.yahoo.com/mlb-rumors-giants-discussed-trading-190500120.html

It was less than that I think on the deal I signed yesterday.

From the article - “Most recently, the Yankees’ blend of scouting and analytics led them to target their most impactful offensive addition before the trade deadline. They noticed favorable quality of contact data and an opposite-field approach that would work well at Yankee Stadium. So, Luke Voit wound up going from the Cardinals to the Yankees. He has since supplanted Greg Bird at first base by hitting 14 homers with a 1.095 OPS.”

When does Ellsbury's contract end?

True. But the memories and the pain will be felt for much, much longer. It will be felt for generations, over several dimensions. On different time planes, and in our hearts and souls. Somewhere, after some 20,000 light years this pain shall strike a far away universe in a cosmic fart the proportions of which none today can imagine. It will strike there just as surely as the era of Carl Pavano shall strike there first...