Good for Nomar

I don't follow baseball too closely but it's hard to ignore in baseball crazy SoCal. Even so, it was hard to understand why Nomar Garciaparra wasn't going to the all star game. I was really glad to hear that he's in now.

I read a few feeds (Dodger Thoughts, more recently Dodgers Insider and of course the Dodgers feed from Yahoo which has easily accessed results and the AP story) that help keep up. Garciaparra (and the rookies) have made the Dodgers quite stimulating to follow this year.

Not only did Nomar come back home, but he'd been struggling the last three years and he was asked to change positions along the way. The Dodgers have a recent history of this not working out well for either the player or the team. Since I can't really include Eddie Murray, we'll say it started with Darryl Strawberry and ended with Shawn Green.

It has worked out amazingly well. His skills as a short stop (he got dinged a bit about his fielding at short) have translated to first in a way that seemed unlikely a few months ago (I'm not sure why... the job is mostly fielding throws by teammates in a relatively stationary position, which is a lot easier than shagging line drives in the middle infield) and he's just been flat out smacking the heck out of the ball. A few weeks before the voting finished, he finally qualified for the league leaders list (being hurt early in the season kept him off from the start) where he's still leading in average.

I blame it on Albert Pujols, as the runaway National League MVP also plays first base. You had to be in a coma not to vote for him. The votes for other players were a fan effect caused by a need for fans to vote for everything. I could vote competently on only two positions this year (I'll always be a catcher) I can't pick and choose (the league claims that people randomly pushing buttons better represents the view of the fan) so I don't vote.

I did vote for the final player and it really annoyed me. Monster, the 'final vote' partner (sponsor, people in charge) wanted certain things that enhance their ability to put people together (email, zip and birthdate). That's far too much useful information to be handing out (along with everything else they could already determine) but there it is (along with a captcha).

So I lied. I really hope everyone did.