Chipper Jones playing like he’s in his prime

Braves 19-year veteran Chipper Jones is having a hot start to his final season in the big leagues.

LIVINGSTONE: It was unclear after the last couple seasons if Chipper Jones would ever return to a hitter remotely as good as he was in the prime of his 19-year career. Plagued by injuries and surgeries to repair his beaten up knees, Jones hasn’t hit near .300 since 2008 when he hit .364 (in 2007 he hit .337). From 2009 to 2011, he hit well below his career average and his numbers dipped across the board, particularly in 2010 when he hit 10 HR and drove in 46 in 95 games while hitting below .250, 57 points under his carer average of .307.

The last week of baseball involving Jones has been a return to the years when the solid third baseman was hitting well above .300 and driving the ball out of the park on a regular basis – all while coming through in the clutch.

In seven days Jones’ stats have looked like this:

9-for-21, 2 HR, 9 RBI, 7 Runs and a sizzling .429 average.

While it’s only over seven days, it sets his season stats at .318, 5 HR, 21 RBI, 7 K, 2 2B, .946 OPS in only 18 games. While many of his hits account for singles, he’s putting up solid numbers for a guy approaching 40 years of age.

Jones had an incredible two games where he hit the game-winning two-run home run against the Phillies in a wild extra-innings game that ended up 15-13 in favour of Hot’lanta. Jones then put up five runs for the Braves in a 13-9 clobbering of the Rockies at Coors Field (note: Atlanta scored a total of 34 runs in the three-game sweep of the Rockies over the weekend). He’s playing great baseball right now and knowing this is going to be his last season as a member of the Braves, it’s exciting to watch a first-ballot hall of famer put up such an impressive curtain call season.

Yes, first ballot. He’s amassed more than 2,600 hits in his career, over 450 HR and is nearing 1,600 RBI. His career OBP (.402) and OPS (.935) are hall worthy – and his run of finishing in the top 11 of the MVP race from 1995-2002 is indicative of his talent and foundational role in the Braves line up (he won the MVP in 1999 with a 45 HR-110 RBI-.319 AVG).

Let’s hope Jones can continue the hot start to his season through to September and maybe even into October. One last kick at the World Series championship would end one remarkable career on the highest of notes.

Jose Canseco: Baseball’s newest sage – and worst speller

Jose Canseco's Twitter account is equally as embarrassing as his book - and his spelling could use some serious fine tuning.

McGILLIGAN: Stand and fight for the truth.

Don’t let any person or group of people take advantage of you.

Fight the liars and hypocrites. Good and honest people suffer too much.

This sounds like the musings of a slightly unpopular high school student who just started a blog. They are not.

Those earnest ramblings come from the mind and thus twitter account of my childhood baseball hero: Jose Canseco.

Time, no baseball and no inner filter from thought to keyboard has produced one of the oddest and most strangely fascinating twitter accounts in recent memory.

He’s part terrible sage, educator, quiz master and well, who knows what else. What I do know is this isn’t the man I idolized growing up, but then again I was basing most of that on the cover of a Topps baseball sticker album and his 40-40 season of 1988.

In order to try and understand the hero of my youth, I decided to decipher some of his tweets from the past 24 hours. The spelling and punctuation are all Jose. (This experiment began at 7:50 ET, April 19, 2012)

19 hours ago – Class in session ,I complete you ,slap a hoe wait I mean hater

Analysis: It obviously isn’t an English class as his commas are in the wrong place. I like that he quickly corrected himself and asked his followers (almost 450,000, how scary is that) to hit a hater rather than a gardening tool.

19 hours ago – Three rusty rabbits ran rather fast

Analysis: Perhaps this is the poetry section of that class he was referring to.

19 hours ago – So if people who tell the truth go to jail that only means one thing. If you havnt been to jail or prison you’re a liar ,right.

Analysis: Grammar is still atrocious. This tweet was in response to a person (@eduardo1garcia) who referred to him as a snitch. The person called him this because Jose asked why our prisons and jails are overpopulated. Got to side with Jose on this one, his being a snitch on baseball’s steroid era has nothing to do with prison overcrowding. Barry Bonds and Rafael Palmeiro are still free men. Well done @eduardo1garcia, you’ve made Jose look logical, not an easy task.

19 hours ago

@JoseCanseco: Come on somebody say something really mean and original

@thematthinrichs: Your balls are literally the size of the marbles they use in Hungry Hungry Hippos

@JoseCanseco: lol,that’s funny but they are not that big guess again

Analysis: Jose shows he doesn’t mind being the brunt of a good joke and has a sense of humour. Not bad for someone who seems totally unhinged. @thematthinrichs does not respond to Jose’s obvious attempt to steer the conversation towards his genitals

19 hours ago – If you shot a bullet and dropt a nickel which one would hit the ground first

Analysis: This is what I like to call Professor Jose, he’s dropping knowledge in the form of questions. My favourite response is the guy who asks if the gun is parallel to the ground and Jose says it is. He then goes on to say he’s shocked that no one got the answer. I have to agree with Jose, its an easy answer because if the gun is parallel to the ground then the nickel would hit the ground first as the bullet would travel quite a ways before losing momentum and falling to the ground. Wait, someone got it….

18 hours ago – Gary root got it ,the answer is at the same time big hug for Gary.

Analysis: Sorry, there will be no hug for Gary. His answer was completely incorrect and the fact Jose thinks its right and couldn’t believe no one got the answer before Gary is awesome.

(Note: Jose’s twitter photo is of him in a Red Sox uniform. Out of all the things on his twitter account, this is the oddest to me.)

On a side note, there’s a lot of racist remarks thrown out by Jose’s twitter followers.

6 hours ago – Yes I know brain of a soft shell turtle

Analysis: I have no idea, this isn’t in response to anything or anyone as far as I can tell.

4 hours ago – Alcoholics,murderes,rapist,drug addicts,child molesters.that makes up 33% of our population

Analysis: This fact is not attributed to anything and anyone. According to Jose’s logic that means every third person you see is capable of doing something unbelievably evil or has a severe drug and/or alcohol dependency. It must be terrifying to live in Jose’s neighbourhood. Apparently it’s filled with alcoholics, murderers (I’m assuming this is what he meant to write), rapists, drug addicts and child molesters. You know who doesn’t live in Jose’s neighbourhood? An elementary school grammar teacher.

Fantasy update: nothing makes sense right now

Jason Kipnis is off to a slow start - along with much of my under-performing fantasy team, known as Team Beast. Not really a beast right now...

LIVINGSTONE: I made a promise to myself not to spend a lot of my space on this blog writing about fantasy baseball. It’s a big part of my season, wheeling and dealing, looking for sleepers, the whole bit. My wife usually hates it by the middle of the season, especially when I’m trying to move guys into my starting line-up when we’re out on the town.

However, I have to air my frustrations. It’s only a dozen games into the season for most teams and as expected, things are wonky. Wait – not wonky – turned completely upside down. Yeah, that’s more like it.

In one of my first posts on here, I wrote about missing the first 15 rounds of my draft – in a league where I’m the commissioner no less – and how, in the end, I felt my pitching staff would allow me to stay competitive, while I’d have to work to keep a quality line-up of hitters on the field.

If the first 12 games are any indication of what I’m in store for – I might as well give up now. My staff is in utter shambles. I’ve managed to amass four wins all season, two of which came from my bullpen (Tyler Clippard and Johnny Venters), the other two come from Verlander (who really should be 3-0 after two ninth inning meltdowns in his first two starts) and Ubaldo Jimenez (he gave up seven runs in the game, but the Indians put up more than a dozen).

I’m second last or in the basement in five of six categories for pitchers (CG I’m first, but hell, that’s a gimme category), my closers aren’t closing out games. That said though, the guy I expected to pick up saves (Angels’ Walden) isn’t getting the opportunities because his team is under-performing and my other big closer – Drew Storen – is out until at least mid-season. On top, my frankenstein bullpen of Brad Lidge and Hector Santiago aren’t closing games either.

Starters? Oh, well, Lincecum is looking sub-par, I dumped Josh Johnson for a more, seemingly effective Wandy Rodriguez, and picked up sleeper Chris Sale from the White Sox with hopes of bolstering a decent start from Jordan Zimmerman. I also picked up Trevor Cahill with hopes he can bring down my ERA a bit (thanks Johnson, Mat Latos and Lincecum for the 4.50+ ERA).

My bats? Hmmm, started strong, but aren’t staying strong. Cards’ David Freese and Yadier Molina have been hot, along with Giants’ Pablo Sandoval and as of late, Buster Posey. Rockies OF Michael Cuddyer has been a huge hit also. However, Everything else has been a moment in time. Jason Kipnis and Nick Markakis have been under-performing in Cleveland and Baltimore. And losing Michael Morse to the DL is a tough loss after he had a visit with the ‘your season isn’t looking good’ from Dr. James Andrews.

Sigh – I’m ranting now. Hopefully, my team picks it up and gets it going. The thing is, it’s early, it’s baseball, and things can turned around very quickly. It’s what we love about this game, the unpredictability.

Timelessness and Jamie Moyer

Creeping closer to seniors discounts at local restaurants, Jamie Moyer became the oldest pitcher to win a game in the bigs, a 5-3 victory over the San Diego Padres. Cheers Jamie!

LIVINGSTONE: I’m beginning to look into my future a little bit more these days, especially when it comes to baseball. It coincides with life, maturity, professional desires, life, family, etc. It’s normal, I suppose, so it’s carried over into the ‘what-ifs’ of my sports passions. Will Ben Roethlisberger make it to another Super Bowl? Will The Flyers win a Stanley Cup in the next five years? Will the Leafs ever win one in my lifetime (or my hypothetical child…and their kids.)?

The question that popped into my head last night came on the heals of a new baseball record, now enshrined in the Hall of Fame: Will Jamie Moyer ever retire?

Moyer, at the young age of forty-nine, became the oldest pitcher in history to win a baseball game. Pitching now for the Colorado Rockies, after pitching for almost every team in baseball (that’s not true, but it seems like it, he’s only pitched for eight) he kept the San Diego Padres’ hitters at bay with his lightning-fast 79 mph fastball and his nasty cutter. The Rockies won 5-3.

Moyer, 49 years, 150 days old to be exact, takes the record held by Jack Quinn of the Brooklyn Dodgers, who was 49 years, 70 days old when he set the record.

Wait, the Brooklyn Dodgers? Yep, the record was set on Sept. 13, 1932 when a bottle of Coke was five cents and the Second World War was yet to happen.

It’s an incredible feat. To be able to pitch for 25 years, for eight clubs, play with Ryne Sandberg, Ken Griffey Jr., and Carlos Gonzalez (in three different decades mind you) amass 268 wins and over 2,400 Ks – it’s unreal. Moyer is the third oldest pitcher ever to play in a regular season game (behind Quinn and Satchel Paige who was, get this, 59(!!) when he played in 1965) and is tied for sixth on the oldest player, pitcher or position, to play (he’s tied with the likes of Julio Franco (2007) and Hughie Jennings (1918), among others).

It speaks a lot to not only the longevity of his ability to play – but to the fact he has been able to continue pitching, after 25 years and more than 4,000 innings, without his body, or love for the game, saying that’s enough.

Sure, he gets a paycheck, and a pretty decent one in the grand scheme of life, but at this point in his career, he just seems to want to keep playing the game he loves so dearly.

It’s beautiful.