Disgruntled Chris Perez an ongoing issue for Cleveland Indians: MLB Insider | cleveland.com
Hoynes provides some insight into the Indians' response to Chris Perez's comments in last week's foxsports.com article in which he criticized both the front office and ownership:
Several hours after Perez's comments to FoxSports.com hit the Internet, Antonetti talked to him over the phone. The conversation was heated, with Perez reportedly delivering a state of the franchise speech in which he critiqued teammates, the coaching staff and manager Manny Acta.
This is going to make the Milton Bradley trade look like an amicable parting of ways. Throwing the coaching staff and especially your teammates under the bus is burning the last possible bridge over the River Reconciliation, and you wonder how Perez can even co-exist with the rest of his teammates for the remaining three weeks of this season once this gets out.
The Indians apparently considered taking action in the wake of the foxsports.com comments, but it looks like nothing will happen for now:
The Indians hierarchy from Larry Dolan on down was not happy with Perez's comments. If he wanted to strike a nerve, he cut the plate in half with that delivery. When the news first broke, there was organizational talk about suspending or designating Perez for assignment. Things have cooled since.
It appears the Indians, for the time being, will ignore Perez's comments. They believe his feelings about ownership and the front office haven't spread to a majority of his teammates. They also don't want to give more credence to his comments with a heavy-handed response.
So they're worried that suspending (or even DFAing) Perez will reinforce what he said. I don't know, at this point, no matter what the Indians do with Perez, it will be seen as a response to his comments. So you might as well do what you feel is in the in the best interest of the team, whatever that is.
The DiaTribe: A Lazy Sunday on Folding "Aces"
Paul looks again at pitching, and the two pitchers that were supposed to carry this club.
Talk away about how Ubaldo was on the decline when the Indians acquired him from Colorado, but he was a 27-year-old with 137 starts under his belt with a career 3.77 ERA PLAYING FOR COLORADO when the Indians acquired him and what’s happened to him since that day more than 13 months ago pretty effectively mirrors how the Indians’ organization has done more than just fall on hard times.
It feels to me that this is more than just Ubaldo regressing. If it was just him, he'd be having the bad season and everyone else in the rotation would be closer to their norms, whether bad, good, or indifferent.
The (Subjective) Art Of Keeping Score "
A great piece on the personal nuances of keeping score at the park. The author (Cee Angi) compared her scorecard to the one kept by a man next to her:
I put our scorecards side by side looking for similarities, but observed mostly differences. We had how we documented walks and strikeouts in common, but little else matched. Where I used a line to show a base runner, he used dots. I used "1B" to acknowledge a single. He used a dash. In the third inning I marked a fly ball to centerfield as "F8," a small number one in the lower left corner to denote which out of the inning it had been. In his box was a giant number 8, with nothing else.
Read the entire thing.