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ashbury

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Everything posted by ashbury

  1. ashbury
    An investigation probably will reveal that Thad Levine leaked the story to the press in order to get his boss fired, so that he can swoop in and take over. I never take this kind of stuff marked Satire seriously anyway.
  2. ashbury
    The marketing guy who decided to do this is no doubt long-dead. But he sits now at the Right Hand of God.
  3. ashbury
    Runs Will Haunt. http://www.hipsterpig.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/walks-will-haunt-shirt-669x272.jpg
  4. ashbury
    I never saw that before. Great payoff at the end.
  5. ashbury
    Moderator's note: This is getting awfully personal again. Mike's reply happened to be gracious. I would hope that's the norm by now, but please don't push it.
  6. ashbury
    I never had particularly strong hopes, and particularly by that point in the off-season, yeah, Perez was unexpected to me.
  7. ashbury
    I don't recall seeing this tidbit before now. If so, I wonder whether the Twins' unexpectedly signing Perez has any connection with it.
  8. ashbury
    He was never ranked this highly on the mlb.com rankings when with the Diamondbacks - #20 in 2017, not in the top 30 in 2016 or 2018; their 2019 team rankings don't come out for a couple more weeks. This ranking seems aggressive and a little premature to me.
  9. ashbury
    Change the rule on foul balls so that it's four strikes and you're out. That would have sped up at least one game:
  10. ashbury
    Does he get an unusual number of called strikes?
  11. ashbury
    I agree, every change in this vein needs to be even-handed. Players, pitcher and batter alike, do this intentionally, although not with the purpose of hurting the game for the fans. They do it to try to maximize their focus, and give the best performance possible. "The game at this level moves so fast and will eat you up if you let it"... "slow the game down"... this is what coaches tell their young players, and with great wisdom most likely. Three runs in and nobody out, and you don't even know how it happened... it's an 0-2 count and it seems like you just stepped up to the plate... adrenaline does funny things to your perceptions. So, yes, speed it up, the dead time I mean - but make sure both sides feel it constrains them equally. "No strolling around on the mound between pitches... no adjusting your batting glove strap when all you did was look at a pitch outside... OK, 15 seconds, collect yourself... let's go." I think it can be done.
  12. ashbury
    The union is being indirect, by focusing on draft picks. Their concern is, or should be, that tanking teams don't spend. So address that instead. Minimum payroll has been discussed before - if a team chooses not to pay its players, at the end of the season the unmet minimum goes into a pool shared by the team's players, or by the league's players as a whole. You're a big league team, spend $100M on payroll either directly or at the end. I'm not sure of the unintended consequences (a free agent might sign with a bad team, in hopes of that year-end bonus distributed to the roster, and then gets mad when they do sign a big-ticket contract), but I can't think of any that are dire or that work uniformly against the players.
  13. ashbury
    I don't like the 3-batter minimum. Too arbitrary, and too many unintended consequences would arise. Don't take more strategy out of the game, nor add incentives for subterfuge ("hey Meat, tell the ump, your shoulder hurts"). The complaint isn't that it's a different pitcher, but that the pitching change takes time. So, address that. Make the relief pitcher come to the dugout on his own time (maybe some logistics need to be worked out, given where bullpens sit in some ballparks), so that it's a short stroll from dugout to mound. Soccer and basketball require substitutes to wait at a designated spot, after all. And then when he takes the mound, he just starts pitching - he spent all that time warming up, right? The guy he replaced didn't throw warmup pitches between batters, the new guy shouldn't either. Warmup patterns in the bullpen may need to change, but they'll figure it out.
  14. ashbury
    I asked Ron Gant. He was less sanguine about this principle.
  15. ashbury
    Yogi Berra said that all pitchers are liars or crybabies, so since Kimbrel's clearly not a crybaby I'm going to choose to disregard his assurances.
  16. ashbury
    Our family had a running joke about Hal Reniff. Because, my brother and I seemed to always get his card one year, and we palmed them off on our little sister, probably age 5, who was happy to add to her collection. My brother gave her a framed Hal Reniff for her 40th birthday or thereabout. Elston Howard probably was about the first major card I remember getting. The back of a cereal box. Golden age.
  17. ashbury
    Who do you believe is doing that?
  18. ashbury
    GCL was in 2017, but yes his 2018 was a tale of two halves: April 9 to June 23: 4.43 ERA, .804 OPS built on .352 BABIP June 29 to August 29: 2.36 ERA, .671 OPS built on .287 BABIP If Batting Average on Balls In Play is taken as one measure of "luck" during a season, then maybe his first half wasn't quite as rough as the results would suggest. A more normal .300 BABIP would put his OPS closer to .700 and his ERA somewhere in the mid-3's, as a rough guess. (I don't know whether minor league BABIP has the same rules of thumb as for the majors.) OTOH as I review the game log, his manager/coach did pull him from the rotation briefly, for a couple of relief outings, around where his seasonal turnaround occurred, so quite possibly they did tinker with something. Looking at stats in the minors is a pretty crude tool.
  19. ashbury
    That weird 'W' or vulture stance before he goes into the set position is to help some balky body part not flare up, if I remember correctly. I always have viewed him as someone who will decline quickly or maybe catastrophically. Obviously it hasn't happened yet, but I'm in favor of a multi-year contract only if the team is willing to go over-budget on a future year's payroll to replace him if need be. And we all know what the odds of that would be. I pass.
  20. ashbury
    CB Bucknor could also have his moments. I think this was him ringing up Mauer for no earthly reason:
  21. ashbury
    In case of injury or bad performance by one of the position players.... you still have to fill the DH slot every game. I'd prefer that batter to have all his value tied up in his bat, than leave some glove value "on the table" every game. Of course that bat needs to be appreciably better than that of the more well-rounded player he replaces - say projected OPS .100 higher - or else I'm with you. And those are not common. Nelson Cruz is a risk in that regard, due to age. So if he contracts Logan Morrison Disease, I'm also with you, on pulling the plug somehow. If our anticipated DH was Ryan Doumit or Robbie Grossman or (*shudder*) Jason Tyner, then different story, as well.
  22. ashbury
    It isn't realistic to want the front office to sign someone with a better track record than what they already have? That's a pretty easy grading curve.
  23. ashbury
    Who?
  24. ashbury
    I thought maybe you were going for a Monty Python Spanish Inquisition take - "the two... no, let me start again, the THREE worst things...".
  25. ashbury
    No, I understood your meaning, which is why I threw in the "in any sense", though maybe that was too cryptic. But a bad year at 19 or 18 can send a prospect shooting downward in the prospect ranks too. Moreover, say Baddoo has a bad year at 20 and drops out of sight in anybody's rankings. He repeats high-A at 21, kicks butt, gets promoted to AA in July and kicks butt there too, and guess what? At 22, he's back on the prospect rankings, possibly higher in the rankings since he's then closer to MLB-ready. A bad 2019 would be, well, bad of course. I just thought the terminology was a little dire at this age.
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