Jimmy Mancusi Dot Com

That picture must seem like an eternity ego for Willie Randolph. If you haven't heard by now, the Mets fired Willie Randolph late Monday night after the Mets beat the Angels 9 to 6 in the first game of a west coast road trip.

Personally I think the Mets handled this entire thing horribly. It is a sad reality in sports that when a team isn't performing up to expectations the coach or manager takes the brunt of the blame. This is the reality because in most cases players make much more than coaches and there are obviously more of them. So in order to make some kind of change to hopefully spark your team, the coach is really the only easily changed position. I completely understand why the Mets fired Willie, even if I don't agree with it, but the way they did it is just despicable.

The Yankees are on fire right now. They have reeled off 7 in a row, and are now only 3 games out of the wild card. Ever since Alex Rodriguez and Jorge Posada rejoined the line up, the entire offense has picked things up and played much better, but another reason that can't be over looked has been solid starting pitching. The Yanks went on a stretch of 24 unanswered runs, and that doesn't happen unless your team is firing on all cylinders.

Both Amanda and I have been to a couple of Yankees games this year, but we hadn't been to one together until today. Before today's game, when I was in attendance the Yanks were 0-2, and when Amanda has been there they are 2-0, and sadly the record did not improve today. I am now 0-3 this year and really can't remember the last time I was at the stadium and they won. I am pretty sure they won at least 1 game I went to last year, but it's starting to get depressing, and my mother in law is threatening not to invite me to any more games.

Anyway, on to a recap of the game.

Dan Giese made his first start in the major after a long grind in the minor leagues. Giese is 31 years old and before his time this year with the Yankees only pitched in a 8 games with the San Fransico Giants in 2007. I wanted to find out more information about him so I headed over to baseball-reference.com, a fantastic site for baseball stats, and they don't even have an entry for him yet. The reason he finally got an opportunity to make a start on the big league stage is because of the recent injury to Chien-Ming Wang, and I am happy to say he took full advantage of it. Giese may have ended up with the lose, but it certainly wasn't his fault. Giese went 6 and 2/3 scoreless innings before running into trouble in the 7th. Giese had 2 outs when he committed a throwing error which extended the inning and eventually lead to a 2 run double which ended his day. He ended up being charged for 3 runs, none of them earned. I am pretty sure that I can speak for all Yankees fans when I say, sign me up for that any day of the week. Any time you can get 6 or more innings of quality pitching from your starter you are in great position to win, and that's all you can really ask for. I am very happy for Dan Giese, his work ethic and perseverance paid off and he got his chance on the big stage, and I was among the fans that gave him a standing ovation as he left the field.

Over a year ago now I put up a site for the lacrosse team I play for every summer, Juiced Moose. The team was started almost 10 years ago now and I have played in the Glastonbury CT summer tournament every year. When I put up the site, I did so very quickly with intentions of making things prettier and more functional as I went along, but life has been so hectic lately that I really haven't had much time to do anything with it. Well finally I took the first step toward making it the site I want it to be. Thanks to Mabe, our fantastic designer at RustyBrick, the site got a much needed make over. If you had seen the site before you know it was UGLY. Now it actually looks like a real website.

I even left out a few of the touches that Mabe added, so as soon as I can add those the site will look even better. I wanted to get the information out there since the tournament is at the end of this month, so I had to rush a bit. I also have plans to redo the entire picture section (which I left out for this rush launch) and add a content management system so that I am not the only one with the ability to update the website.

Hopefully these changes will come over the next couple of weeks but between RustyBrick and a few side projects I am working on including JuicedMooseLax and a site I am building for the Edison Cares charity, I certainly do have my hands full.