Doing Right By the Holiday and Other Bullets

american flagToday is Memorial Day, which will afford many folks the day off of work, and the opportunity to fire up the grill. But hopefully it also affords you a few moments to stop, and remember.

  • Yesterday’s big news happened before the Cubs lost to the Padres, and it was the hiring of Manny Ramirez to be a coach at AAA Iowa (and to play a little bit). I’ll have more thoughts on, and reactions to, the hiring tomorrow. That’s a product of both today’s holiday (we’re doing some driving) and of wanting a little more time to digest.
  • Jason Hammel’s hand apparently wasn’t feeling peaching keen yesterday in the 6th inning that knocked him out of the game. He was cruising for five dominant innings when he ran into trouble in the sixth and had to depart. That’s when he says he started feeling some “fatigue” in his hand, which was puffy after being hit five days earlier by a Brett Gardner comebacker, and he lost some of his command. (Cubs.com) His only walks of the game came in that sixth inning. Hopefully the discomfort/swelling/etc. in his hand recedes further over the coming days, because he’s putting together a hell of a season, and you’d had to see any part of it dampened, even slightly, by a fluke injury.
  • Junior Lake wasn’t too sure about his homer yesterday.
  • There is quite a behind-the-scenes battle going on to determine who will succeed Bud Selig as Commissioner when he retires in January. It was a fair assumption that MLB COO Rob Manfred would be taking the job (he’s been Selig’s number two for a long time now), but a group of owners – led by the White Sox’s Jerry Reinsdorf – are opposed to Manfred for a variety of mostly idiosyncratic reasons. (NY Daily News)
  • Bob Ryan wrote something really arrogant and insulting last week, to which a wide swath of the Internet community responded with understandable frustration, lamentable vitriol, and laudable discussion. Ryan, writing this weekend, ignores most of that in favor of playing the victim, and addresses none of the unnecessary you-just-don’t-like-or-understand-baseball-like-I-do attacks from his previous piece. In so doing, Ryan indicated an unfortunate preference for attention, at the expense of quality.
  • Well this, uh, doesn’t seem too safe. But it does seem kind of awesome:
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    Brett Taylor is the Lead Cubs Writer at Bleacher Nation, and you can find him on Twitter at @BleacherNation and on LinkedIn here. Brett is also the founder of Bleacher Nation, which opened up shop in 2008 as an independent blog about the Chicago Cubs. Later growing to incorporate coverage of other Chicago sports, Bleacher Nation is now one of the largest regional sports blogs on the web.

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