These are bizarre and wonderful. I missed them the first time around; my favorites between both lists are: Pedro Florimon: Implode For Ron Darin Mastroianni: Indiana Rainstorm Pedro Hernandez: End Red Porn Haze
Fun stuff. Thank you ashburyjohn.
Quick comment on ex-Twins: Three OFs off to fast starts--Torii, Cuddy, and Gomez. AJ has been solid, Span and Jones have been pretty good. Ramos and Kubel are on the DL. Delmon Young and Frankie Liriano are close to making their debuts after being disabled. Pitching: Despite no wins, Kevin Slowey has been very good for the Marlins. RA Dickey hasn't had Cy Young form, but I don't think many expected him to do that. Alex Burnett has ended up on the Orioles roster and Luis Ayala was traded, but is still in the majors. Struggling: Philip Humber 0-5 with a near 8 ERA and JJ Hardy under the Mendoza line.
Make it five candidates for the rotation--I forgot De Vries.
I've played OOTP enough to love it, and eventually come to critique aspects of it that are too easy to exploit. One can put the setting to higher difficulty, of course, but that seems to make it unrealistic in a different extreme. Still, as an inveterate tinkerer, I found the game very very addictive for days at a time. I've played Strat-O-Matic only as the dice-game version, starting way back in the 70's or so, and again when my sons were old enough to enjoy it. (Never got my daughter into it - or my wife for that matter - go figure.) Before we discovered SOM, by brother and I devised our own randomized game based on our baseball cards' stats. Much cruder than the commercial products that we didn't know about yet, but for kids around 10 or 12 years old it wasn't bad. All this is basically to say: welcome to the crowd.
Ballplayers like Jason Tyner don't have a "prime".
I'm with Joe. Normally I don't like to cherry pick stats but, as I detailed in another thread, if you break down this early season into before April 14 and after, the K rate and BB rate are as though of two different players. There's good reason to suppose that this corresponded to an actual change in approach. And I went on to hypothesize that pitchers will soon change their approach to Hicks in response, and we will potentially see a third kind of stat line when he starts getting pitches to hit. I think the analytically minded are best served to wait at least another two weeks or so and see whether this past week was just SSS rearing its ugly head or the start of a genuine turnaround that at long last results in consistent base hits.
I think a better way to look at Hicks is to completely throw out the first part of the season, say, until he was moved down in the order. This I think would give us a more accurate picture of what type of hitter he will be.
3 Owners who should be stripped of there teams , Loria , Wilpons and the Pohlads, then Pud selig should be fired , he was never eligible to be The Commish , and is nothing but a snake oil slinging , used car saleman
In that view, the Pohlads already performed their act of charity simply by buying a team that no one else wanted and which would have become the Denver Rockies or the Tampa Bay Rays several seasons sooner than played out. Fine, the Pohlad's have done their civic duty and act of charity and then tried to profit from taking it all away. And this state doesn't have any Mark Cuban-types to come in and perform a much-needed round of civic duty and acts of charity- this market would wildly support a change in the staid, old, ridiculous, cry-poor philosophy of current management and ownership. BTW, Mark Cuban is still around, and he has made 3 attempts at buying a MLB team. The community would go positively ga-ga should Cuban take over controlling interest of the team. We already have 2 less-flashy, relatively new owners that have made a serious commitment to winning in Minnesota in Wilff and Leopold, why not a change for the Twins?
I put "batting average eating goblin" with the quotes into Google and it came back with 4 hits. So you're on your way to your goal. Of course, all 4 hits are of this article in various forms, but you gotta start somewhere. / edit: I'll save some wag the trouble of comparing this number of Google hits to the hits Aaron has collected so far - they are the same
Jason Tyner's only 36? I thought ballplayers were in their prime during their 30s.
My strong impression from watching the news as the Griffith family tried to sell the team is that Carl Pohlad had very little use for baseball itself. Sid Hartman used to joke about it being Carl's wife who had any interest. The Mark Cuban analogy doesn't even begin to hold. So, why *did* Carl buy the team? If my memories are correct, it was out of a sense of civic duty. He didn't want to see his Twin Cities becomes the "cold Omaha" that was predicted if MLB was lost to the region. In that view, the Pohlads already performed their act of charity simply by buying a team that no one else wanted and which would have become the Denver Rockies or the Tampa Bay Rays several seasons sooner than played out.
Admittedly, this is a sample size game--and a small one at that. People love to compare players and say, "well what if we had so-and-so." All I'm saying is the Twins really wouldn't be any better off as of April, 25 2013 with Ben Revere and for that matter I firmly believe they are better of with Hicks in the long run.
You made the mistake of linking to a Ben Revere "boyish grin" on a page that includes his career stats. I was reminded that Ben's weak batting line this year has caused his career batting average to plummet to .272, which is only 199 points higher than Hicks. I also accidentally saw that Revere has 1 triple this year which can either be viewed as 1 more extra base hit than Hicks, or infinity times the extra base hits that Hicks has produced. I don't want to compare them. I just want Hicks to start hitting and feeling good. I was hoping they'd open the season with Mastro in center and that Hicks would mash in AAA for a few weeks to get momentum before debuting, but that plan would not have worked with Mastro's injuries. For me, plan B is simple- Keep rooting for Hicks and (whenever that is tough to do) remember that Clete Thomas is probably next in line. Goooooooooooooooooooooooo Hicks!
One thing that us skeptics have yet to hear from the pro-FO crowd, is exactly what KC might have changed that would give cause to expect KC's future results to be better than his past results. Maybe this is something Parker could look at, if he reads this. I for one would be very interested. Certainly in his first few starts, I've been impressed with his command. With the exception of a handful of cutters, its been impeccable. But he's historically pitched best in March and April. Maybe as the weather gets muggy, he gets fatigued and starts leaving balls up. Maybe he goes through a dead-arm period every August where he drops his arm slot and gets wild. I'm certainly rooting for continued success from him but until someone shares a concrete observation about a permanent change to his approach, I'm not going to hold my breath.
First, I'll agree - the Twins are seriously hamstringing themselves if they don't learn to fill in gaps through the free agent market. But I'll veer off from the direction of the story in two important ways: 1) After this year, and certainly not this offseason, I don't think the problem was the Pohlads. I just don't know that Terry Ryan is wired such that he will go and spend big money on a free agent. His philosophy is to build from within, and it isn't wholely out of necessity. He wants to give young ballplayers a chance. The only way that changes is with a different GM - and then only maybe, since I expect much of the front office shares that sentiment. 2) But let's do some real charity work, let's improve some lives. Of, he could, you know, give $20 million or $50 million per year to something like AIDS research. That might improve some lives. I'm not a big fan of telling someone how they should spend their money. The Pohlads aren't going to treat the Twins like a toy - and truth be told, that has worked out pretty well for both them and for Minnesota Twins fans. Maybe responsible, long-term, fiscally conservative management is better for a team (and a fan base) than throwing a bunch of money around on a yearly basis. It's possible, at least.
