Author: Media Goon @mediagoon

From the LAtimes.com

Greg Goossen, a former six-figure bonus baby of the Dodgers who played for Casey Stengel and the New York Mets, dabbled as a boxing trainer with his brother and was a stand-in for actor Gene Hackman in more than a dozen films, was found dead Saturday at his home in Sherman Oaks. He was 65.

Goossen was scheduled to be inducted into the Notre Dame High School Hall of Fame on Saturday night. When he did not arrive for a photo session, a family member went to his nearby home and found him. A cause of death has yet to be determined.

Born on Dec. 14, 1945, in Los Angeles, Goossen was the fourth member of a family of eight brothers and two sisters. He was a standout football and basketball player at Notre Dame, where he graduated in 1964. He was a catcher in baseball, and the Dodgers drafted him and signed him for a six-figure bonus.

The Mets picked him up the following year on a waiver from the Dodgers. Stengel, the legendary manager of the Mets, said, “This is Greg Goossen. He’s 19 years old, and in 10 years he’s got a chance to be 29.”

He played for the Mets, Seattle Pilots, Milwaukee Brewers and Washington Senators before his baseball career ended in 1970.

You can read more here.

From Cnn.com

Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers Hall of Fame center fielder Donald “Duke” Snider died Sunday at a convalescent hospital in Escondido, California. He was 84, according to team officials.

Snider’s career with the Dodgers spanned 16 seasons and included a half-dozen World Series appearances. Among them was the 1955 series, which the Brooklyn Dodgers won, as well as the 1959 series title, which Snider’s team captured after moving to California.

You can read more here.

 

It wouldn’t be a road trip for Shannon if Mets news didn’t break. He was just packing last night and couldn’t pay attention to twitter and it happened. Now he is down at PSL taking pics of the Mets first Spring Training game of the year, and this comes over the twitter wire from @espnnewyork.

The executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association said he has “every confidence” that the New York Mets will meet all their financial obligations to their players in light of published reports that the team needed a $25 million loan from the league to deal with cash shortfalls caused by ownership’s involvement with convicted swindler Bernard Madoff.

“I rely upon both the assurances we received from the commissioner’s office as well as the documents that we are entitled to under the basic agreement,” Michael Weiner said after briefing players in the New York Yankees clubhouse on the upcoming negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.”

This is a fun quote:

Weiner said he was not surprised by news that, in spite of the denials by Mets co-owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz that the Madoff affair had any adverse affect on the team’s finances, they needed the intervention of commissioner Bud Selig in November to maintain operations.

The rest of the article can be read here.

Hopefully you guys are all enjoying Shannon and my reversal of roles and his reports(and pics) from PSL. I will be monitoring all news up here in the north.I can be reached at [email protected] and @mediagoon on twitter,  if you guys need to get in contact with me.