Rico Brogna for hitting coach? Really?

By Craig CalcaterraNov 12, 2013, 5:33 PM EDT
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And now your weird rumor of the day:

 

This is not weird simply because Brogna was a pretty bad hitter with a pretty bad approach to hitting for much of his career. I mean, there are a lot of hitting coaches who weren’t themselves good hitters. It’s more about communication and identification of others’ flaws. By the same token, just because you could hit doesn’t mean you’d make a good hitting coach. You want Manny Ramirez to coach your hitters? Does he even know why he murdered baseballs so effectively? Not gonna bet a lot on it!

But it is weird in that Brogna has spent almost his entire post-playing career coaching high school football and basketball and stuff. He spent a year managing in minor league baseball, but for the most part he’s been a multi-sport journeyman coach, making tons of stops. The lack of obvious hitting coach bona fides and the fact that he’s been mostly away from the game for a decade plus is what makes this weird.

But hey, it’s just the assistant hitting coach’s job. And that’s a job that didn’t really exist a couple of years ago, so let us not get too hung up about it.

Umpire admits he blew the call that got Joe Maddon ejected last night

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By Craig CalcaterraOct 19, 2017, 12:16 PM EDT
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Last night in the top of the eighth inning of the Dodgers-Cubs game, Curtis Granderson struck out. Or, at the very least, he should’ve. After the game, the umpire who said he didn’t admitted he screwed up.

While trying to squelch a Dodgers comeback, Wade Davis got Granderson into a 2-2 count. Davis threw his pitch, Granderson whiffed on it, it hit the dirt, and Willson Contreras applied the tag for the out. End of the inning, right? Wrong: Granderson argued to home plate umpire Jim Wolf that he made slight contact with the ball, Wolf, after conferring with the other umps agreed, and Granderson lived to see another pitch.

Before he’d see that pitch, Joe Maddon came out to argue the call and got so agitated about it all he was ejected for the second time in this series. He was right to argue:

It all ended up not mattering, of course, because Granderson struck out eventually anyway.

Normally such things end there, but after the game a reporter got to Wolf and Wolf did something umpires don’t often do: he admitted he blew the call:

It’s good that the bad call ended up not affecting anything. But the part of me who likes to stir up crap and watch chaos rule in baseball really kinda wishes that Granderson had hit a series-clinching homer right after that. At least as long as it didn’t result in Cubs fans burning Chicago to the ground.