Hi all. In a moment I’ll tell you how I see baseball on this Tuesday, November 8.

On this Election Day, please get out and vote, even if you vote for Howard the Duck, as I would if I knew how to do a write-in vote.

I don’t see why all the media outlets are talking about Bud Black being named manager of the Rockies. Nothing against Bud Black, but not John Mugsy McGraw nor Connie Mack nor Joe McCarthy could manage the Rockies out of baseball irrelevancy.
Walter Johnson would have a 6.0 ERA at Coors Canaveral, not that he would know what that term meant since Cape Canaveral wouldn’t see a launch until 15 years after Johnson’s death.
Bob Feller, Warren Spahn and Grover Cleveland Alexander would all have 5 or 6 ERA’s.
None of their hitters perform outside of Coors Canaveral which is why other teams don’t trust the Rockies’ hitting numbers when they’re looking at trades. If the city won’t dome Coors Canaveral or build a dome somewhere outside the city, the Rockies are doomed as they have been since they opened in 1993.
Bud Black is used to baseball Hell, as he managed the Padres for 8 years, ending in 2015.
A baseball man  wants a baseball job like a young man wants to marry.
Then you get what you hope is a good woman, and she turns out to be ugly as sin and has a tongue like a razor blade.
That’s managing the Padres and now the Rockies. Long-suffering Walt Weiss finally quit over disagreements he had with the front office.
The Rockies, along with the Padres, D-BacksMarlins, Rays, Reds and Brewers are 7 NL teams I would disassemble permanently if I were Commissioner for a Day.
Take them apart and you might have 24  talented players.
I would contract them because ownership in none of those cities have shown much interest in winning.
There’s a reason the National league has been pure garbage in the All-Star game and in the 2013 and 2015   World Series.
As for Harry Ralston “Bud” Black, he pitched with the 1985 Royals who won the World Series and coached for the 2002 Angels who took out the Giants in 7. Black, Tom Lasorda and Larry Dierker are 3 pitchers who went on to be Manager of the Year. It happened to Black in 2010 with the Padres.
The Indians’ Coco Crisp will now be a free agent. Why he wouldn’t stay with a team that came within a gnat’s eyelash of a World Series win is beyond me. The Rangers’ Derek Holland wants to try to get the hell out of Texas, although there’s an old song which says that’s impossible to do.
The Marlins’ Giancarlo Stanton is 27 today. Following his high school career he meant to play for Tulane until  The Fish reeled him in with their  second pick of the 2007 draft. Before 2012 he was just plain Mike Stanton, but he took the operatic name 4 years ago.  In 2008 he hit an insane 39 home runs at Greensboro in the South Atlantic League. I broadcast for 3 seasons with Charleston and That isn’t the easiest league to hit home runs in unless you play for Asheville. On joining the Marlins he hit a grand slam before turning 21. Only a few have done that in the last quarter century and he’s in fast company-Jose Reyes, Andruw Jones and Alex Rodriguez.    With the MLB Marlins, When he can play he hits .266 with over 200 home runs since 2010. The injury bug started to bite as early as 2011.  He has been an All-Star 3 times, though he was hurt in 2015 and lost most of the season, to say nothing of the All-Star game. He also skipped the 2012 AllStar game and home run derby due to injury. He was shelved for 2 months in 2013 with a hamstring problem. He was beaned in late 2014, ending his season.  Foolishly the Marlins inked him for 13 years, a contract up there with what the Phillies gave Ryan Howard.   Predictably  Stanton  was dead weight most of 2015.    He was also injured at a critical juncture of this season. So the phrase “When he can play” is more vital than it would be for a more durable man.
Dodgers’ catcher Yasmani Grandal is 28. The Reds drafted him in round 1 in 2010, but he never played in the Queen City. He broke in with the Padres and now bleeds Dodger Blue. He’s never hit much for average since being popped for PED’s after 2012. Similarly his health has never been the same since he served his penalty in 2013.
Bryan Shaw of the vaunted Indians bull pen is 29 today. Like most of the Indians, nobody knew his name until this postseason. The D-Backs took him in round 2 in 2008 from the Long Beach State 49ers. Shaw broke into the show in 2011 with the D-Backs. After 2 years there he went to Cleveland, another baseball backwater until this year. In both 2014 and 2016 he led the American League in appearances.

Darwin Barney of the Blue Jays is 31. With Oregon State he was on two College World Series winners in 2006 and 2007 before being drafted by the Cubs.   Since reaching the show with the Cubs, he’s also played for the Dodgers and Blue Jays. He pitched the 19th inning of a game and lost to the Indians on July 1, a Canadian holiday.

Former Mets’ infielder Edgardo Alfonzo is 43 today. We broadcast games of Edgardo in AA Binghamton and his older brother Edgar with the Bowie BaySox. Edgardo was with the Mets from 1995–2002, then bounced around until 2006 in the majors. He played independent ball here, in Mexico and Japan over the next few years.  He is now a coach for the Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ short season A-ball team.

Jeff Blauser, known for his role on the Braves of the 1990’s is  51 today. He was with the Braves for a decade, then spent two years with the Cubs. He was an All-Star twice. His home town of Los Gatos, CA is known, if it is known at all for an airplane crash which happened there in 1948. Woody Guthrie immortalized the crash in his song “Deportees.” Blauser was a Braves’ first-round pick in 1984 and made the show in just 3 years.

Both John Denny and Jerry Remy are 64 today. While never an All-Star John Denny led the league in wins and got the Cy Young award in 1983, when his Phillies lost to the Orioles in the World series. Remy was known as a second baseman for the Angels and Red Sox. He was an All-Star just once, in 1978 when only Bucky Dent stood between the Red Sox and a division championship. He has done Red Sox TV since 1988, only missing time due to illness and when his son was charged with murder, for which Jared is now a permanent guest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Both of his other adult children are known to the police.    Remy’s  health issue was lung cancer and depression that cost him time between 2008-09. Pneumonia also shelved him for a month in 2013.

An original Met, Ed Kranepool is 72 today.  I got a chance to meet him when he did an appearance at a shopping mall in 1972. Can you imagine David Ortiz doing that? I can’t. As a boy of 17 he made his Mets’ debut. He was 6 years younger than any other 1962 Met.  He played for no other team until turning it in after 1979. He was an All-Star in 1965 when the game was played at Metropolitan Stadium in Minnesota.  His Mets won the World Series in 1969 and barely lost 4 years later. In 1964 when doubleheaders were still the rule, he played all 18 innings of a AAA doubleheader in Buffalo on May 30, then was told to get to New York in time for the doubleheader the next day.

He played all 9 innings of game 1, then all 23 innings of game 2.  The game ended at 11:20 PM. He later said if they’d gone another 40 minutes he could say he played a game that started in May and ended in June. As it was, he played 50 innings in those two days, the equivalent of 5 full games and half of a sixth. He began wearing number 7 in 1965 and kept it the rest of his career. When team owner Joan Payson died after the 1975 season, her funeral was by invitation only. Just one Met got an invitation, and it was numbber 7 himself, Ed kranepool.

In a move made late today the Yankees claimed lefty reliever Joe Mantiply from the Tigers. He’ll be 26 when the season opens, and comes from the town made legendary in the song “Wreck of the Old 97,” Danville, Virginia. Other than that and his name, there’s not much else to recommend Mantiply.  The Yankees’ bull pen went from being the envy of the league to the disgrace of the game when their ownership made a criminally insane move sending Andrew Miller to Cleveland and Aroldis Chapman to Chicago.  Bowie Kuhn must have been rolling in his grave.  In his day he could and did stop trades that were not in the best interest of the game and those two certainly weren’t. While Chapman celebrated victory on michigan Avenue and Miller took comfort in a fat World Series share, the Yankees used AAA talent at best in their bull pen with only an overused Dellin Betances to keep them out of the basement.   That mix lost game after game.  Now Mantiply is another inadequate talent to add to a bull pen that is certain to cost the Yankees at least 30 games in 2017. He had no record but had a 16.88 ERA which can only get worse in the smallish dimensions of Yankee Stadium. He went to Virginia Tech rather than become a Met when the orange and blue were at their worst. The Phillies tried to get him out of college in 2012 but didn’t manage it.  As a senior he was taken in the 27th round by the Tigers.