Kuzul

At 36 years of age, David Ortiz is having the type of season that rivals his 2005, 2006 and 2007 seasons, at ages 29, 30 and 31 respectively.In each of those seasons, Ortiz finished second, third and fourth in the American League MVP voting consecutively.This season, he is absolutely raking for the Boston Red Sox. I must eat crow, I wanted him out of town during the winter and I was wrong.Not only is Ortiz leading the Red Sox in most offensive categories, he is at the top of the MLB leaderboards in most categories as well.I know it is hard to imagine anyone but the Texas Rangers Josh Hamilton winning the award right now, but think about it, Ortiz isn't all that far behind Hamilton in many categories.Ortiz is third in batting average at .353 behind only Derek Jeter and Hamilton. That being said, his career-high average came in ...

The Boston Red Sox have managed to string together five wins in a row.Over the course of the last several games, the team has only allowed eight runs, while scoring 34 of their own, showing that the offense is clearly clicking at the right time as well.While I think it would be a bit premature to say that the team is set to tear up the rest of baseball, there are still some positives that can be drawn from the performance of the pitching staff.The obvious positive is what we saw from Jon Lester. His complete game, one-run performance was impressive.The next obvious positive was seeing Josh Beckett come out and throw seven scoreless innings against the Seattle Mariners, striking out nine.The blemish on the record comes at the hands of Clay Buchholz. While he did not pitch poorly, and the Red Sox were able to win, he did give ...

Last week, I dove deep into the annals of Baseball-Reference.com and came up with a list of the top 10 all-time pitching performances by position players.It was a fun list, but I got the feeling afterwards that there was more to say about position-player pitching performances. They're few and far between and they're rarely pretty, but they're also quite awesome in their own way.So I went back to the records. This time, my goal was to uncover the most memorable position-player pitching performances of all time.I'm going with a pretty loose definition of the word "memorable" here. Some of the performances I came up with are memorable because of the player who was doing the pitching. A few others are memorable because they were so incredibly bad. It's a mixed bag, but definitely a fun one as well. Let's take a look.Note: Baseball-Reference.com has a complete list of pitching stats for ...

The handshake deal. The discussion about the performance of the Colorado Rockies in the 2012 season keeps reverting to the handshake deal between Dan O'Dowd and Jim Tracy. Was it a clever strategy to help Tracy relax and manage some wins, or did O'Dowd really think Jim Tracy had shown enough to warrant an extension? As the Rockies sit at 13-21, fourth in the NL West, the question arises: When does the franchise make a change? Dan O' Dowd made some interesting comments today in the Denver Post about how he doesn't intend to make any changes to the current staff. While the comments should anger fans, it should be no shock that this is the mind set in the front office.Keep in mind that this comes from a man who told the current manager, Jim Tracy, that he can indefinitely be with the organization. While fans and analysts have ...

Stephen Strasburg's day could have gone better. Perhaps a better performance on the mound and less Icy Hot on his testicles would have helped. Nobody is perfect. That includes Nationals' ace Stephen Strasburg and the alleged prankster that put something hot where it doesn't belong. Oh, I know that you must have a ton of questions after a statement like that. All in good time. The Nationals dropped a game to the Padres on Tuesday. Losing to San Diego is embarrassment enough, but the Nats found a new way to make headlines. Consider this tweet from the Washington Post's Adam Kilgore. An unusual postgame revelation: Davey volunteered that Strasburg got "hot stuff" in "the wrong place" and "I don't know how it got there."— Adam Kilgore (@AdamKilgoreWP) May 15, 2012  Thankfully, we have a few more details on the biggest mystery of the day. CSN Washington's Mark Zuckerman offers this in a tweet. The insinuation from Davey: Somebody put something like Icy-Hot ...

To channel Tim Kurkjian, one of the reasons we love watching baseball is because the game doesn't always turn out the way you expect.Case in point: Stephen Strasburg started for the Washington Nationals against the San Diego Padres on Tuesday afternoon. The Padres came into the game with the second-lowest team hit total in the NL at 269, as well as the second-lowest run total at 120.That had some people, such as MLB.com Nats beat writer Bill Ladson, thinking that this could be the day for Strasburg to throw a no-hitter. (Check out the responses to his Tweet, which are pretty funny.) Well, it didn't quite turn out that way for Strasburg and the Nats. For one thing, it was Padres starter Anthony Bass who had the no-hitter through three innings. But Strasburg wasn't sharp at all in the first inning, throwing 39 pitches while allowing three runs, three hits and two walks. At ...

The season is off to an extremely rough start for the Colorado Rockies, and there are questions everywhere in regard to the team. Let’s review the 2012 team...Begin Slideshow

Matt Snyder of CBSSports.com reports that the New York Yankees announced Tuesday afternoon that reliever David Robertson is being placed on the DL with a strained left oblique muscle.Right-hander Cody Eppley has been recalled, according to Mark Feinsand of the NY Daily News.This is just the latest item of bad news for the Yankees, who have been plagued by the injury bug for the past two weeks. Not only did it end the season of the greatest closer of all time, it delayed the return of speedy outfielder Brett Gardner (who suffered a setback in rehab last week) and forced an early end to Ivan Nova's outing Monday evening in Baltimore (due to a sprained ankle).David Phelps would be the likely choice to return to the rotation if Nova misses any starts, since he has been much better as a starter this year than Freddy Garcia.Robertson had ...

It's no secret the Miami Marlins were in heavy pursuit of free agent slugger Albert Pujols this past offseason and dangled nearly $200 million for 10 years to get him signed, sealed and delivered to sunny South Beach. Fast forward to May 15 and the front office should be breathing a sign of relief they missed out on him, but maybe kicking themselves that they didn't deal their own first baseman, Gaby Sanchez, after an All-Star season in 2011. Here is the tale of the tape on both Sanchez and Pujols this season (via ESPN): Sanchez, who had a 2.4 WAR (wins above replacement) in 2011, currently has a WAR of -0.8. And while Pujols is getting all the headlines—and with good reason after signing a massive contract with the Angels—Gaby's struggles have gone under the radar. A deeper look reveals Sanchez's struggles could be tied with an increased tendency to extend the strike ...

When Major League Baseball finalized its decision to incorporate a second wild card berth into the league's postseason format, everyone realized that things were going to be very different going forward.The second wild card is already starting to make its presence felt. We're still many weeks away from seeing teams lock up postseason berths, but we're really not that far off from MLB's trade deadline. The existence of the second wild card is going to make things even crazier than usual as we get closer to July 31.On the surface, the situation is pretty straightforward. With one more postseason berth up for grabs, there are more teams vying to make the playoffs than usual. Simple as that.Naturally, things get slightly more complicated once you go digging beneath the surface. Here's a look at five ways the extra wild card is shaking up the MLB trade market. Begin Slideshow