Odds and Ends so far this season.

You know verbal mess ups, mispronunciations, and unusual sayings by announcers are always fodder for being repeated over and over again. Some have become legendary like one by a particularly departed Cubs announce "hey Steve, Did you know that Piazza spelled backwards is pronounced AZAP." This is not a new phenomenon, and Dizzy Dean was famous for it for years. Cardinals announcer Mike Shannon is building his own senile reputation for saying some incredibly silly things. One man however, which you don't here much about is Tim McCarver, which is weird, because one would think that he has a plethora of malpropisms, as he can tend to be redundant at best and downright idiotic at worst. My personal favorite ingame flub was by this man when he was going a Yankee's/White Sox game some years ago. I believe this was during Marcus Thames rookie season for the Yankees. Thames name is actually the same as the river in England and is pronounced "Tim's." Joe Buck was calling with him then as well calls Thames by the appropriate pronounciation, and McCarver interrupts with his great wisdom and says your saying his name wrong its Thames (he says it with the TH like the way it looks) and then says "just like the river in Eurupe." Both making himself looking silly by mispronouncing both and then looking even sillier by trying to correct Buck who was, in fact, correct.

Alex Rodriguez is not my favorite player. Ok, if i were to make a list of every Major League player and organize it from favorite to least favorite he would probably be in the bottom two. However, even I will say that he seems to be getting a raw deal by Yankees manager Joe Girardi. For the first time in his career he is getting the chance to play Major League baseball in his hometown of Miami this weekend. He had given out nearly one hundred tickets to friends and family including his mother, who still lives in Miami. However, apparently Girardi decided to bench Rodriguez for the first two games in the series due to fatigue. It is true that Rodriguez is struggily mightily, but given his reaction it seems that perhaps Arod himself didn't know he was having fatigue problems. When you do have a superstar of the caliber of Arod (once again, not a huge fan) even if he is struggling and recovering from an injury its not really fair to him to bench him when he is coming home to play for the very first time. He has done enough in his career to get a little bit of a pass on starting slow and why bench him right now? Why not next week? Let him play at home, especially when the replacement is going to be Angel Berroa. Pretty busch league stunt by Girardi, most managers wouldn't do it, not this series anyway.

NEWSFLASH Albert Pujols is good. He isn't quite getting the Bonds treatment, but I truthfully I don't think Major League pitchers will ever embarrass themselves to the point they did with Bonds again. It is true that his average is down a little bit, for him anyway, .320 would be good for most people. Even it wasn't for him the Cardinals wouldn't be anywhere near where they are right now. With the All-Star game in St. Louis I guess its hard to hope that he won't enter the home run derby. The Cardinals will really suffer if he loses his swing for even a little bit while trying to put on a show for the home town Cardinals fans, or even worse, if he injures himself like Jim Edmonds did when he was in the Home Run Derby.

The Skip Schumaker move to 2nd hasn't been as big a problem as I thought it would be. He might not be a gold glover, but he doesn't seem to be a glaring weakness either. What he lacks in nimbeness turning the double play at second he makes up for by having a seriously plus arm for a second sacker.

Dave Duncan is a very good coach, maybe the best ever as far a pitching coaches go. A question I have been thinking about is does he deserve to be a Hall of Famer. I am not for certain if he does, but there aren't any coaches in the Hall of Fame. Tony LaRussa is going to be a Hall of Famer, and perhaps Duncan deserves to be, since he has been with TLR every bit of his Hall of Fame managerial career.

Is anxiety in Major League Baseball an epidemic? I am not one for belittling issues, but Joey Votto (he was slugging when he went on the DL not struggling like the other guys) Khalil Green (he does look like a guy who has never had fun on the DL) Zack Grienke, and Dontrelle Willis. Is it just that guys are using this as a way of working through slumps without getting dumped? Or are Major League teams just more sensitive to problems like this.

Speaking of Khalil Green, the Cardinals have been playing him at third, partially because they have a hole there, are partly because they think it will help with the anxiety. They think that its a less cerebral position, and that at third he will do more reacting and less thinking about the play. Interesting take, and we shall see how he responds to bunt coverages.