There's some baseball news today. Not necessarily real meaty stuff for fantasy purposes, but there could be some clues to mental states that could affect performance.
The Reds and LHP Aroldis Chapman agreed to avoid arbitration by splitting the difference between their requested salary figures with a $5-million contract for this season. The amicable settlement could do a lot more for the closer's pitching than the extra $400,000 he'll receive.
Some day the Drew brothers could become a case study for young athletes who've been told how good they are and had their butts kissed for so long that they believe they're better than they are and somehow above the fray of petty matters such as living a life. Of course, nobody ever listens to such cautionary tales.
Since J.D. Drew turned down a contract offer as a No. 1 overall draft pick and signed as the next year's No. 1, he and SS Stephen Drew have had a litany of issues in negotiations, scads of games missed because of injuries, travels from team to team and potentially shorter careers than expected. (For the purposes of this discussion, Tim Drew doesn't count because he was never very highly regarded or effective.)
On the other hand, the Drews and their agents got their money up front, so perhaps the brothers don't care that they had to go to work only for a few years.
The latest Stephen Drew news is that he still hasn't signed. MLB.com pointed out that the primary unsigned free agents such as Drew, OF Nelson Cruz, DH Kendrys Morales and RHPs Ubaldo Jimenez and Ervin Santana haven't signed because they would cost the team signing them a draft pick. The baseball draft is hardly an exact science, so second-round, supplementary and even first-round picks aren't a given. But all five players in this paragraph are flawed in their own ways.
1B Yuniesky Betancourt is off the free-agent market. He has signed a guaranteed one-year contract to play in Japan. That sounds like a definite winner, doesn't it? It's not as if he'll face a steady diet of off-speed pitches that he can't hit over there. Or will he?
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Basketball. My lead is down to 6-2 this week. I'm now behind in rebounds and assists. I could have as many as eight players in the lineup Wednesday to seven for my opponent. He appears to have a lot of rebounders in the lineup. Ricky Rubio should be able to help me in assists, and I hope that rebounder Joakim Noah has recovered from the illness that caused him to miss his last game.
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Hockey. Lost half a point in both power-play points and goalie wins. My only goalie in action Tuesday was Tim Thomas. His former team, the Bruins, roughed him up for six goals, dropping me even farther into last place in GAA and save percentage. For the record, Thomas didn't win either. It's a good thing I didn't use Jonas Gustavsson; he gave up five goals and lost.
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