To Top of Page
Friday August 11th, 2006
12:01amRandom Baseball Tidbits
Haven't had any R.B.T.s in a while so I figured I'd toss a couple out there....
The first on my list is Craig Biggio. Biggio is a Hall of Famer who is on the steep slope of the back end of his career. His overall numbers might not seem bad but when you take him out of uber-friendly Minute Maid Park he is worse than Neifi Perez.
AB R H RBI HR XBH SO/BB BA OBP SLG Total 404 61 109 44 16 44 58/29 .270 .327 .458 ------------------------------------------------ Home 228 42 73 27 11 30 29/17 .320 .369 .548 Road 172 19 35 17 5 13 28/12 .203 .271 .337Yeah, he's hitting 117 points lower on the road (and yes that is a total of 35 hits outside of MMP).
This isn't just a 2006 thing....this transformation has been taking place over the last several years.
Home/Road HRs BA OBP SLG H R H R H R H R ================================================ 2005 19 7 .291 .235 .350 .296 .540 .386 2004 13 11 .291 .270 .343 .331 .488 .450 2003 6 9 .254 .274 .342 .358 .376 .448We've done a full 180 from his overall terrible 2003 season.
I haven't done a very good job updating the My Boys section of the sight but I wanted to mention Matt Murton once again. The last time we talked about him he was slumping fairly hard. Well, I'm pleased to say that he has recovered quite nicely.
Career Games AB BA OBP SLG G1-G52 145 .331 .396 .545 G52-G114 200 .255 .324 .345 G115-G148 88 .375 .440 .545The turnaround actually started the game after my last post on the subject. Here is a look at his monthly splits since he broke into the league last July:
AB BA OBP SLG ==================== 2005 Jul 34 .441 .524 .559 Aug 26 .192 .222 .308 Sep 73 .315 .383 .603 Oct 7 .286 .250 .286 2006 Apr 77 .286 .368 .442 May 84 .286 .358 .393 Jun 66 .212 .257 .227 Jul 50 .360 .421 .440 Aug 20 .450 .522 .950Take out his month of June and the kid is a career .317 hitter (he is still a career .301 hitter with June factored in there).
Finally, I wanted to mention one of my favorite players, Steve Stanley. I have to admit, somewhat embarrassingly, that I haven't really been keeping up with any of the minor leaguers I like to follow so this is somewhat belated. I went to look at how Steve was doing this year and saw he hadn't played a game since May. So I googled him and found out that he had chosen to retire. While part of me is saddened to find this out, I'm glad he took his priorities in life to heart. I wish him the best of luck in his future and want to again thank him, not only for the excitement he brought to the field, but for being one of the greatest players I've ever dealt with as a fan. There just aren't enough Steve Stanleys out there.
Monday August 7th, 2006
7:28pmTexAgs.com Getting Some Love
I completely forgot to mention yesterday that on TexAgs.com (where I spend way too much of my time) there was a thread back in January that made mention of the whole Bomar situation.
aggiegrant06 started this thread and was ridiculed for making stuff up.
He reported the following:
1/30/06 1:30am: My girlfriend works in the office of a large dealership where we live. She has only been there about a month, and she was dealing with handing out payroll checks. She didn't recognize several of the names, and asked her boss. Her boos told her that she would take care of them, and that it was no big deal. She thought it was fishy and asked me....the checks were made out to football players of the local University, and even though they had never actually been to work there, they were recieving HUGE!!!! pay checks. On top of this a player was in buying a car recently, and when she say the finance stuff, he had only paid about 1/100th of the sticker price. Is this legal?...
1/30/06 1:57am: To clarify, she had heard the names but did not recognize them. She asked me if I had ever heard of them, and I told her they were football players.
...
1/30/06 2:37am: I am not lying, and I am not bull****ting. The school is OU, and the specific player is Bomar.
After the thread resurfaced last week it has gained internet fame and there is now even an article on Sports Illustrated.com written about it.
Sheer craziness.
Sunday August 6th, 2006
7:18pmRandom College Football News
Tomorrow kicks off fall camp for our Ags so I thought it would be a good time to make some CFB notes. It's been a fairly exciting week (or two) in terms of NCAA football news. I'll start with the Aggie news....
Jordan Chambless has decided to focus solely on baseball therefore giving up his football scholarship. While Jordan missed a lot of time with his torn ACL last year it does leave us with less experience at safety. Melvin Bullitt & Japhus Brown are our most experienced safeties but neither has played at an All-Conference level yet. I'm actually really excited about Devin Gregg back there.
We also lost DT Will Morrisey who will not play in 2006 due to personal reasons.
Morrisey was ranked as the #3 defensive tackle recruit in the nation in 2004 and red shirted that fall. He played in 6 games last year before breaking his foot before Iowa State."He's going to take some time off for personal reasons, not football," William Morrisey Sr. said. "That's all we have to say."The elder Morrisey said no decision has been made if his son would attend college this fall or not, or even if it would be A&M if he does.
Now that Morrisey is gone, of our eight 4
recruits from the 2004 class only QB Stephen McGee, & DL Chris Smith are still on our roster (our JUCO guys -- Lee Foliaki & DeQwan Mobley -- have both graduated). I have yet to mention our unusual situation at the kicker spot. A&M Consolidated place-kicker/punter, Matt Szymanski, graduated a full year early and enrolled for fall classes at A&M. According to Rivals.com he is only the second player in the NCAA to do so (John David Booty at USC is the other).
Here are the interesting things I found on him (from various sources:
It's been written that he could come in and quickly contribute both with kickoffs and FGs. We're set at punter with Justin Brantly coming off his superb freshman campaign.
- He wasn't even alive during the Jackie Sherrill era
- He kicked without a tee to help prepare him for NCAA
- Soccer-style kicker
- Last season (his Jr year) was his first as a kicker
- He was 19-of-26 on FGs
- Those 19 FGs set the all-time Texas 5A record (the national record is 22)
- He was 33-of-33 on PAT
- Five of his 7 misses were from between 45 & 60 yards
- Had 65 kickoffs....90% went into end zone & less than 20% were returned
- Hit a 61 yard FG in the state semifinals (5th longest in Texas HS history). It is believed to be the longest ever HS kick w/o a tee
- Averaged 39 yards per punt including 13 inside the 20
- Longest punt return against him was 9 yards
- He won kicking camps at LSU, Ohio St., Nebraska, UNC, Tennessee, Illinois, Cal, Purdue, MSU, & A&M
I'm certainly excited that Szymanski is solid but as my father-in-law mentioned to me over the weekend, we heard similar things about Richie Bean and to this point haven't seen the hype translate into Mike Nugent-esque kicking. You also have to be somewhat concerned about what is essentially a high school senior kicking for a Big 12 school. Then again, Fran probably wouldn't have wanted him to join us if he wasn't going to be better than our other options. In the last two seasons we have had only 43 touchbacks in 133 kickoffs (32%).
That's it for A&M football but of course I wanted to pile on the whole Rhett Bomar ordeal at OU. Long story short, Bomar was paid a lot of money for hours he did not work at Big Red Sports and Imports, one of the largest car dealerships in Oklahoma. This is the same Big Red Sports and Imports that allowed Adrian Peterson to buy a Lexus, drive it around for several weeks and then return it. They also claimed that was standard practice.
McRae said the dealership regularly allowed customers who signed contracts to drive the cars for a period of time before financing had been secured."We didn't do anything wrong," McRae said. "Is it standard operating business practice? Yes, it's standard operating business practice."
Somehow Peterson was cleared of wrongdoing and the story kinda fell out of the spotlight until this past week. Coach Stoops immediately kicked Bomar and OLman J.D. Quinn off the team for the recent incident in what was some serious damage control. It'll be interesting to see how the NCAA comes down on the Sooners....I have a feeling it won't be all that bad.
While I'm talking about the Bomar incident I figure I can mention this asinine quote I read from OU's senior LBer, Larry Birdine:
Can you imagine the media scrutiny this would be getting if a white player said something similar about a black player? Scoop Jackson would have broken his keyboard typing so fast."A lot of people thought he was the great white hype and whatnot," Birdine said Friday at OU's media day. "Yeah, he was a great athlete. But football is more than just one player."Just thought that was interesting.