Author: lleonardbw

by Michael Duca

OAKLAND–San Francisco Giants pitcher Ryan Vogelsong has not looked like his command where it needs to be in the spring. The Giants pitchers none the less have no worries and at least that’s manager Bruce Bochy’s feel on things, if you give up three or four runs in a Major League game you have a rock solid chance of winning the game.

The Giants have made it crystal clear of the fact that they only got 700 runs scorable in that line up and Giants manager Bruce Bochy won’t have to worry about his starting pitching staff coming into the season. Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum got hit square on a nerve when the come backer hit him in the leg on Friday night at AT&T.

Lincecum is looking good for Thursday night’s start basically he got a stinger on his knee from the A’s Daric Barton’s shot and that’s why Lincecum needed help off the field and he couldn’t feel it to walk on it by the time he got to the Giants dugout it was already improving.

The thing you had to worry about with that kind of injury and soaking wet Lincecum weighs 159 pounds so he got bruised up real good and it maybe a little worse than some other people but the injury happened on his plant leg. You want to be absolutely certain especially with somebody who’s fought mechanics in the past.

The team wants to be absolutely certain that when he lands he is landing exactly as he did before the injury so that he’s not altering his motion because that’s a good way to trash the shoulder. So Lincecum wants to be especially careful.The Giants may end up having Lincecum skipping a start if they do they can go with a four man rotation through April 19th the way the schedule works out.

The Giants Brandon Belt may have his breakout season and nobody is paying attention but he actually did last year if you look at Belt’s second half season last year his on base percentage was around 500 and an OBS of 500 would put Belt in the top ten in the National League.

Oakland A’s update: The Oakland A’s rotation is exceedingly in flux because they traded away Brett Anderson, they lost Jarrod Parker, their going to be in a little bit of flux but Scott Kazmir is a classic Billy Beane grab. Here’s a guy whose been out of baseball for nearly a year and was in the Independent League which takes a tremendous amount of fortitude for a player that has had $5-6 million a year and more.

He was the top prospect at Tampa Bay and from what I saw the other night and they spotted Kazmir’s fastball at 98 MPH and was just befuddling the Giants hitters. Kazmir is going to be an absolutely great additon to the roster and when you have the massive amounts of foul territory in a tough ball park and the number of outs he’s going to create there he’s going to have something close to career year with Oakland.

Michael Duca does commentary on the A’s and Giants each week for Sportstlak radio

by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

ANAHEIM–I do not understand why the fractions in baseball, when we are talking about this type of money, why not make it

$145 million, what is another half million on this contract anyway? For Mike Trout, it doesn’t matter, he has a contagious enthusiasm, and plays the game with great joy and commitment. Today he is becoming the face of baseball.

The last few seasons as I have been covering the LA Angels games for Fox Sports TV in Anaheim doing the play by play in Spanish with José Mota doing commentary, I have seen this kid play, (he’s still a kid at 22) growing into a sensational player.

His first year when the Angels visited Detroit, Al Kaline said Trout reminded him a lot of Mickey Mantle. If you ever saw Mantle play(I did when I was 22 and lived in New York for two years), that is quite a compliment, coming from the great Kaline.

I have interviewed Trout for our pregame show, no he doesn’t speak Spanish but I would talk to him get a couple of minutes, then I go up write the translation and a voice over so when we show it minutes before first pitch, and our audience can understand what he said.

He still single, born in the southern New Jersey, during the past two season in many Angels road trips his mother and father would travel to see him play.

Today in a press conference in Anaheim his new contract, largest ever for a player with two years of service, Rookie of the Year in 2012, plus last two seasons could have won consecutive MVP, but only Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers could better him.

Today, Mike Trout is more of a complete player than Cabrera, but Cabrera (who also just signed a monster deal-extension)has done it for over a decade.

Mike Trout is one of four players all-time to bat .320 with 50 home runs and 200 runs in first two full seasons, the others are his teammate Albert Pujols, and then Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. Is that good company or what?

Amaury Pi-González, is the Spanish play by play announcer for 75 home games this season of the LA Angels of Anaheim for Fox Sports West, and also will call 40 of the 70 games on the Oakland A’s Spanish radio network this season. A contributor to sports radio service,. http://www.sportsradioservice.com’

by Amaury Pi Gonzalez

PHOENIX–The season opened last week in Sydney Australia with the L.A. Dodgers and the Arizona Diamondbacks and the other 28 teams will open the season on March 31st so the show is ready to go. Under this Commissioner Bud Selig he would like to continue opening up the season overseas because it’s big money internationally.

Soccer is the most international sport there is but baseball has made great strides they opened outside of the U.S. starting in 1999 in Puerto Rico, they opened in Tokyo, Mexico City, and now they opened in Sydney. This is a good thing that their trying to do. The only thing I disagree with is that they should not open the season outside the United States.

Baseball is truly an American sport, not to dicriminate and I’m very sure of this, I remember when the first game of the season was opened up in Cincinnati because the Cincinnati Red Legs were the oldest team in professional baseball. I agree with playing abroad but opening night or opening day should be in the U.S.

However nobody has a say in that except the commissioner of baseball, so there you are MLB opened in Sydney and the Dodgers love Australia and they swept the Diamondbacks in two games. The strange thing about this is nobody saw this game in the L.A. market and your talking about 12-13 million fans between L.A. County and San Bernardino and all those communities there.

It’s ridiculous the game was played between 1:00 AM in the morning and four in the morning in the middle of the night. Nobody in the nation’s second largest market for television watched the season opener live. Its sad for TV ratings but it’s a couple of days for the two game series.

They can live with it but still but you won’t be able to see the game in this country when you put a game on in the middle of the night. I can understand if it was the FIFA World Cup and they’re playing in Rio in Brazil at 1PM and in San Francisco it’s 6PM. That’s the World Cup and that happens every four years but were talking about MLB the real league schedule.

There’s 162 games with 30 teams from April to September in a regular season schedule for a season and you have more consideration for the fan because in the end it’s the fans who watch TV and watch the sponsors and it’s the fans who go to the park. To open the season when most people are sleeping and most people go to work in the morning what can I say it’s stupid.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish TV voice for Angels baseball and does News and Commentary for Sportstalk radio

by Michael Duca

SCOTTSDALE AZ–26 year old Cincinnati Reds starting pitcher Aroldis Chapman who had surgery for a ball hitting him above the left eye and nose by Royals catcher Salvador Perez, was declared by doctors as a very lucky young man. This is a very hard thing for me to talk about because I was there in that ball park when it happened that night.

What was about to happen some how was so crystal clear to me that I screamed out “Oh my God” in the pressbox just before Chapman went down which was before he was hit by the ball. Pitchers today tend to throw a little bit sideways and fall off to the side, they don’t land in the kneeling position or finish the throw with the glove in front of their faces.

To look at the old baseball cards from the 50s and 60s and the pitchers posed the way that they threw and you actually saw the pitcher winding up with the glove actually in front of their face there was a reason for that. The sound that was made in the stadium was unbelievable and the fact that was the last sound heard in that stadium until the ambulance drove up 12 minutes later was even more amazing.

There were 7,000 in the park and there was dead silence the entire time, Chapman is a very lucky guy and if the ball had struck him maybe as little as a quarter of an inch to one side to the other instead of hitting the heavy bone above his left eye and hit directly over the bone that supports your nose and gripped into his sinuses which could be fatal.

This is a terrible thing and this is a risk that players take and this is more than they take out on the field, personally I would like to see pitchers grilled in youth baseball on their mechanics and you finish up square and you give yourself a fighting chance to deflect something like that with a glove.

You also have to feel for Perez this is a young 23 year old rising star catcher a solid defensive player a great hitter for an up and comning Kansas City team and the first thing you have to do is work on how this and how this is going to effect him and tell him he was just doing his job. Chapman was all over the place in that inning he had already walked four hitters in that inning.

Chapman had loaded the bases and then reloaded the bases again and I haven’t heard of anyone talking to Perez, the press or the players. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Kansas City PR Director Mike Swanson about how Perez was taking it. It’s a hard, hard thing for him to know that he caused a career threatening or life threatening injury to someone else.

The news was good about Chapman on Friday they were able to insert the titanium plate to help stablize his eye socket and he could be able to throw as little as 14 days and he could be back on the mound as little as two months.

Michael Duca is covering the Cactus League in Arizona for Sportstalk radio