By Marc Lawrence — The Athletic’s Jim Bowden is a former MLB general manager and is currently an ESPN analyst and insider. As a GM of the Cincinnati Reds and Washington Nationals, he had several players win the Comeback Payer of the Year award, including Ron Gant (1995) and Eric Davis (1996) in Cincinnati, and Dmitri Young in Washington (2007). He recently listed his five favorite players for the Comeback Award in 2020. He placed NY Yankees DH Giancarlo Stanton at the top of the list. He played in just 18 games last year, seeing just 72 plate appearances due to an array of injuries that included torn biceps, a calf strain and a pulled quad. While Yankees fans have been frustrated with Stanton, he did play in 159 games in 2017, leading the NL with 59 home runs and 132 runs batted in and played 158 games in his first season in pinstripes, belting 38 homers with 100 RBIs. If he can stay healthy and avoid a slump – and that’s a big if – he is a prime contender to win the award. The concern is when Stanton gets in a slump it’s sometimes hard for him to get out of it and negative crowd noise appears to at times become a factor. However, with no fans in the stands to start the season, that potential hiccup has been eradicated. To see a rundown of Bowden’s other four top candidates click here.
Trending Today
On the heels of demanding that certain major league sports teams change nicknames because they may refer to a racist slur, along comes the call for the Texas Rangers to join the crowd. Long known as brave and wholesome guardians of the Texas frontier, helping protect innocent settlers from violent Indians, the Royal Rangers were long looked upon as the Christian equivalent of the Boy Scouts. Now, though, those same Rangers are being called a cruel, racist force when it came to the nonwhites. To which I say give me a freaking break. It’s as if exploitation at all costs has taken center stage in this current BLM movement. It’s time to take a forward step forward to right injustices rather than reverting back to the past in hopes of eradicating them. A lot more gets accomplished by building on the positive rather than continually roiling the negative. You don’t remove malignance by re-naming it. You work on stopping it in its tracks by learning from from the past and preventing it moving forward.
Grinding Out The Profits
2020 PLAYBOOK Football Preview Guide magazine reports: Seattle head coach Pete Carroll has been like money in the bank in games in which the Seahawks are coming off a loss, going 31-16 SU and 34-18-5 ATS overall. He’s also 13-2 SU and 12-2-1 ATS when coming off consecutive losses. Don’t forget that.
