This, for me, was a rare opportunity to pick the brain of a qualified, professional assessor of baseball talent (no, it wasn’t Matthew Berry). As a fantasy baseball enthusiast, I was interested in the upside potential of certain Cuban players, and Kendry Morales was amongst them. The scout’s comments concerning Kendry Morales were less than flattering. In fact, the scout described Kendry Morales as being one the least (if not -the- least) intelligent baseball players he’d ever scouted. Apparently, aside from a mediocre skill set, Kendry Morales is intellectually challenged to the point where he can barely even process batting signs. His exact words to describe Morales: “grossly overrated”. It seems that Kendry Morales is the Derek Zoolander of baseball players, except he hasn’t retained Maury Ballstein as his agent and he doesn’t involve himself in gasoline fights.

Anyway, the story reminded me a bit of former Dodgers’ slugger Pedro Guerrero’s post-retirement struggles with the law http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/news/2000/06/06/roundup_ap/. The CliffsNotes version of the story is that, in 1999, Pedro Guerrero was arrested by the D.E.A. for conspiracy to traffic cocaine. At trial, his lawyer successfully argued that Guerrero’s I.Q. (70) was too low for him to comprehend the fact that he was involved in a drug deal. On a personal level, I’ve relied on the “ignorance” excuse many times in my dealings with my wife (thought the dishes were already clean, thought she was washing the bed sheets so I didn’t bother to make the bed, etc., etc.). As it turns out, the “idiot defense” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_defense can be employed to absolve us not only from irritating our spouses, but even felonious acts punishable by life in prison. Good to know, because I’m way too pretty to go to prison.

Anyway, the scout -did- sing the praises of Chicago White Sox prospect Dayan Viciedo, whom he’d been following since Viciedo was 16. Take this for whatever it’s worth, but he envisioned Viciedo as having the potential to mature into a 35+ home run hitter with plus batting average at the Major League level.

*I do. It’s from this riff Pedro Martinez did about Karim Garcia. I wish I could find it on Youtube. It’s classic.

Snap! Us Americans are ignorant!

I’m ranking in Sportsline for my AL-Only league. Sportsline has good functionality, but their projections are silly. In what world is Brandon Wood hitting 17 HRs? Fairy tale world? Is this draft happening in fairy tale world? I forget. I thought it was happening in the real world. I need to check this.

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s in the side that’s in goes out, and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When they are all out, the side that’s out comes in and the side thats been in goes out and tries to get those coming in, out. Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When a man goes out to go in, the men who are out try to get him out, and when he is out he goes in and the next man in goes out and goes in. There are two men called umpires who stay all out all the time and they decide when the men who are in are out. When both sides have been in and all the men have out, and both sides have been out twice after all the men have been in, including those who are not out, that is the end of the game!

So called because the batsman (batter) gets six ‘runs’ (points) for doing so.

To do what the guy in the clip did (to do it six times in such a short time) is very rare. Especially when he has very fast bowers bowling to him.

@BigFatHippo: That’s boxcars!

In our world, that’s double evil.

http://razzball.com/andrew-mccutchen-2009-fantasy-outlook/#comments

Did you check out the other clip? A famous day in New Zealand cricket. Not big in the general scheme of things, obviously, but you know what I mean.

“Wait, where’s the insects?”

EDIT: Typo. Word.

http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090318&content_id=4024744&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

For some classic big hitting check this out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABVP4zvpMFw

The fun starts at about 2:30

@BigFatHippo: Those are maple leafs.

The chick from Real World Hawaii was not cute. There was no redeeming quality to her other than her tats.