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Minklewitz?

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Minklewitz?

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Minklewitz?

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LOL...there was only one year that I felt compelled to even try and remember how to spell his name properly.

I'll go out on a limb and say we're both glad that year's over.

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With all of the old men on your team somebody will drop

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With all of the old men on your team somebody will drop

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Take a look at our roster there bud... Decidedly younger this year

Until they sign Roger

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Right. Now instead of being as old as me, this year they are as old as oldcoot.

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With all of the old men on your team somebody will drop

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Take a look at our roster there bud... Decidedly younger this year

Until they sign Roger

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Right. Now instead of being as old as me, this year they are as old as oldcoot.

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LMAO.

But no.

Only "old" player in Starting Lineup is Damon, and I think he is 35.
Not excactly ready for Geritol.
yet

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How old is Giambi? Posada? Minklewitz?

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See??? AARP members

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If they are younger then me.... they are spring chickens

With Randy gone, every Yankee is younger then me

Damn youngsters

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I think Don Zimmer is younger than you.

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Julio Franco 08/23/58

Nuff said

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8/23/58? That was the date of his first game in MLB.


He can still hit better than most guys.

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Don't forget Moises Alou.

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Column: Baseball's Plan: Contract Fans
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 4:16 PM EST
The Associated Press
By JIM LITKE

It's a funny business that shuts the doors when customers eager to hand over $179 are still lined up around the block. But that's baseball for you. Every time people try and make nice, it pokes a stick in their eye. Remember contraction? Well, it's back. Only this time, it's fans instead of franchises that baseball is thinking about whacking.

Last season, a half-million of the game's most loyal followers paid $179 to their satellite or cable provider for Major League Baseball's "Extra Innings" package, which entitled subscribers to 60 out-of-market games every week of the season.

Some were New Yorkers retired to condos in Florida who still followed the Mets, others die-hard Dodger fans resettled in Las Vegas and one, apparently, was a very powerful, very angry Massachusetts resident who works part of the year in Washington, D.C.

Come next season, almost half of them probably won't be back.

In a deal that could be announced soon, Major League Baseball is proposing to put "Extra Innings" exclusively on DirecTV, where a majority of its subscribers, about 270,000, already reside. That leaves the 180,000 customers who bought "Extra Innings" on cable and the 50,000 on satellite rival Dish Network with only a few options.

Switch to DirecTV.

Buy "Extra Inning" from baseball's Web site, mlb.com, for $79 and try to follow games featuring players the size of matchsticks.

Watch reruns.

Or make a federal case out of it, something Sen. John Kerry is threatening to do.

"A Red Sox fan," the Massachusetts Democrat said recently, "ought to be able to watch their team without having to switch to DirecTV."

Or not.

Bloggers have started a brushfire of complaints across the Internet and Kerry has asked Federal Communications Commissioner Chairman Kevin Martin to investigate the proposed deal, which neither party has discussed in public thus far. But neither the grass-roots campaign backed by petitions with a few thousand signatures, nor Kerry, even with support from plenty of people in Congress, is likely to stop the deal.

At this point you might ask yourself why MLB would go to so much trouble to kiss off almost a quarter-million fans, especially since the seven-year, $700-million deal with DirecTV is anywhere between $250 million to $300 million less than it might have secured had "Extra Innings" stayed put.

And you might answer that baseball is always making bad decisions, something that was apparent when it sacrificed half the 1994 season and the entire postseason to a labor dispute, or shifted the World Series games to night so kids wouldn't see them, or even when the late Edward Bennett Williams welcomed former commissioner Peter Ueberroth to his first owners meeting with the greeting, "Welcome to the den of the village idiots."

But this time, commissioner Bud Selig & Co. think they're on to something. Though a consortium of cable companies offered similar money, DirecTV sealed the deal by promising to save a spot in its basic programming tier for a 24/7 channel MLB plans to launch by 2009. The cable companies were willing to offer the baseball network as a premium on the sports tier, meaning people who wanted it would have to pay extra.

Nobody has said much about the inspiration for the move, but it wouldn't be surprising to find out it was the NFL. Both leagues air local and national games in a number of cities , but the NFL cut an exclusive deal to put its out-of-market package of games, called "Sunday Ticket," on DirecTV in 1994.

It's faced some legal challenges and threats from Congress since, but the $700 million "Sunday Ticket" brings in annually buys a lot of lawyers. And besides, the heat from disgruntled fans has been minimal. Those who wanted out-of-market NFL games were forced to migrate to DirecTV from the beginning. Unlike their baseball counterparts, they're not losing something they already had.

Nobody knows whether baseball has outsmarted itself yet again, but there's more than the 230,000 fans at stake. Assume the deal with to DirecTV gets done, the MLB channel launches in 2009 and the demand for baseball, including out-of-market games, ramps up. Then what?

Instead of the 75 million homes that could have ordered "Extra Innings" through cable, Dish Network and DirecTV, only the 15 million on DirecTV will even have the option. So we'll spare the people at MLB headquarters the usual headaches coming up with a slogan for the rollout on the new ad campaign.

"Baseball: Love it AND leave it."

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<bump>

The Sox said they do not plan to offer Schilling a contract extension before the end of spring training as he requested, and he says he'll file for free agency. This is a good thing IMO...at his age the team has to play it safe, and having to play for a contract (whether with Boston or someone else) may help put a little more pop on his fastball this season.

If nothing else, the Matsuzaka era is going to be very entertaining. In addition to the usual throng of Boston media, the guy has over 100 Japanese reporters following his every move and attending his daily press conferences. At this point he seems to handle it all with ease, and even seems to have a sense of humor and personality that other Japanese players have really shown much of...will be interesting to see what happens during the season especially if he doesn't win right away. The Boston media is also having fun speculating that Matsuzaka could lure Icharo to Boston next year...

The news that Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, frustrated by years of losing in Seattle, may explore free agency after the season has not been lost on Daisuke Matsuzaka. Matsuzaka was asked about Ichiro leaving Seattle, and whether as a friend he could entice the former American League batting champion into coming to Boston.

"I had the opportunity to play on the same team with Ichiro for the first time ever in the World Baseball Classic," Matsuzaka said yesterday through interpreter Sachiyo Sekiguchi. "By being on the same team with Ichiro-san, I felt his greatness and his ability and also his reliability. I felt his greatness through that experience.

"If I could be on the same team with him, there would be nobody I could count on more."


[Edited on 2/23/2007 by gondicar]

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