If this is true, Amaro and Arbuckle must be grinding their teeth or kicking their dogs or something.

Next is an article from dugoutcentral.com about the impact of strikeouts titled Hitter Strikeouts Are Part of Baseball’s Improvement. It’s an interesting take.

Baseball-reference.com, baseball-almanac.com, mlbtraderumors.com (for the word on the street), and now thebaseballcube.com (thanks Pete) are high on the list.  I’m sure you do the same with basketball, right?  Basketball-reference.com, 82games.com, and others.

Gotta keep up with all the intelligent posters on here.

Baseball-almanac.com is a great site.  Lots of fantastic info.  Definitely worth exploring.  If you’re curious, on the main page there are listings in white: History…Players…Leaders…Left Field…Help.  If you look in the History section there is a “team by team” subsection.  Click on that and you will find a big box with a link to each team’s individual page on the site.  Every team’s page gives a brief history of the club.  It also has numerous lists of team and player accomplishments.  Toward the bottom of the team page is a box listing every year the team played in the league.  If you click on any year, it will bring up a chronological record of that particular season.  If you click on any date in that season, it will take you to the box score for that game.  Plus, you can click on any player in the box score and get his season and career stats.

I’ve used it many times to “sharpen my memory”  when I’m pretty sure when something happened but I can’t get the exact date or whatever.  I think it’s a fantastic site.  Just in case you don’t care to explore, here’s the link for the game I was talking about earlier against the Cardinals.  It was on Sunday October 4th 1992. I have to admit that I was looking at the box score asking myself who some of the players were.

Kruk’s AB against Johnson in All-Star game didn’t exactly make his parents’ proud.  Can’t think of anything else off top of my head.  Am sure there’s tanking/spoofing moments littered throughout history, the game being played and managed by hairy humanoids.

In my mind, you are on the money in saying that as long as everyone you put on the field is playing to win, integrity is not a question. 

With this in mind, do you recall the garbage that the Cardinals pulled on us?  It was the last game of the 1992 season.  The Cards had a 3-run lead and a couple men on base in the bottom of the 8th.  Well, they wanted to give Lee Smith the opportunity for a save. (It must have been a meaningful one for him.  I don’t recall and I don’t care either.)  So, instead of playing it straight up, the next couple Cards hitters were just waving at pitches in the dirt and way out of the strike zone as well as watching others cut the plate in half.  I think there were two consecutive “hitters” that just flat out tanked and struck out.  The Cards enjoyed themselves very much.  There were several dugout shots of the Cards players laughing at their teammates deliberately flailing at the plate.  Needless to say they didn’t push any more runs across, Smith pitches the top of the 9th, and “earns” the save.

It was the most disgusting, disgraceful thing I have ever seen in all my years of following the game.  The images are still burned in my brain.  I was livid!  I was swearing at the television during the whole horse**** incident!  I’m getting worked up now just remembering it!  I’m sure there are numerous examples of this kind of crap being pulled by various teams over the years.  I’ve only seen this one, and it’s one more than I care to have seen.