ashbury

http://www.securitiesdocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Smails.jpg

Unless there is more to this, won't a ranked list of pitchers be in the same order under either metric, except reversed? Isn't every start either quality or meltdown? Ted Williams led the league in outs-not-made with a .594 average in 1941.

I'm not overly fixated on in-season attendance change. Kick-start the rebuild with serious talent, and attendance will respond in its own usual manner. I dispute the wisdom of waiting until the team is winning and attendance is higher to match, to open the checkbook a bit more. You hold back only if you doubt your talent evaluation skills.

Ell Oh Ell. The smartest guy in the room keeps getting played, by one player after another.

Linked, but you went on to suggest the correlation could be in the opposite direction. Don't spend just to spend, but if you spend and acquire good players, the attendance would follow, creating a virtuous circle.

This is getting into bickering territory, and I suggest neither side take too absolute a stance on a topic that hasn't been settled going on 10+ years now. If there's nothing new to say, say it if you must but then move on.

For the Merry Month of May, he is batting a mediocre .233. Enough power to not call it an empty .233. But his OBP is... .233. So I will offer a friendly amendment to your motion: Turn the 0-15's with 0 BB's and 8 K's into 0-9's with 6 BB's and 2 K's because I bet pitchers have decided again not to throw him strikes and he's apparently been getting himself out again. Oh, and sure, your scratch single and a hustle double instead of the ofer is a good idea too. 2-9 with 6 BB will adjust those pitchers' attitudes nicely. If he's getting boocoo strikes thrown to him and not capitalizing, that's a very bad and different situation I have no advice for. The recent homer is a hopeful sign.

I agree. I think after a few seasons it boils down to this: if the batter gets "his" pitch, can he put it in the bleachers or in the gap, or just a lazy fly to the warning track? If the former, then it's still worth trying to teach him how to pick up that breaking ball destined toward the dirt. Can the pitcher get the occasional swing and miss from the better hitters in his league? If so, then keep working with him on his nearly non-existent command. No one has a formula for getting the player to internalize what is needed, in weeks instead of years. So you wait. At some point, the team's evaluators conclude from experience, "he's never gonna get it." Meanwhile, the player has gotten scratch singles on pitches he should have parked, and the pitcher gets strikeouts on ridiculous curveball swings or caught-lookings right down the middle, because the opponents are also works in progress, making the stats hard to interpret. And that's why it's often hard for fans to guess whom to follow and whom to give up on.

Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers offered the rule of thumb that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become world-class at any field. Counter-examples abound, of course - that's why it's just a rule of thumb. Since a full-time job is approximately 2,000 hours a year, it suggests 5 years - less, if you are capable of applying yourself productively at an overtime rate for months on end. A lot of what's being said here fits in that paradigm, if you take a loose definition of "deliberate" to mean that you get only the best training and strength of competitors in the professional minor leagues, and years of college count only as months or even weeks in the pros. Ballplayers work hard, but they don't put in 80-hour weeks. There's also a physical maturation going on ("man muscles" etc) that can't be rushed. So five years, give or take, and with the occasional ballpark prodigy/genius who takes only two or three seasons. You can tell who won't make it in less time than that, in a lot of cases, which is why most guys don't make it past single-A. But you can't really write off every washout until enough time has passed, and I've been on board with something like 5 years for a while now.

Do you know who's been working with him on this?

What is the point of even being President, if you can't ask the FBI Director to go easy on one of your accomplices?

So you thought you were thinking, but thought wrong, if I have this straight. This explains a lot, and I'm going to have to go back and re-evaluate a great number of posts. This will take some time. Good night. PS: I can't bear to watch this game anymore anyway.

I'd like to give credit, but we need confirmation from Mrs Chief first. She knows how you think, better than you do yourself.

Not to nitpick, but... well yeah, or to geek out, I guess. But, why would they aim for AA? There aren't any AA leagues within 1000 miles or thereabout. Same dilemma Reno had when they went AAA.

Plays weren't being made at third, in my limited observation during spring. So that would have been my guess anyway.

Oy. A well-played shaggy-dog story. Well played, well-player.

It was hard to keep in mind, while mulling over nuances of the unripe-fruit subplot, and the forced and repeated hilarity over a character's name considering one of the heroes is sometimes called freakin' Star-Lord.

Once in a very great while I also encounter an ad that presumes to use sound without permission. I don't know how to specify the circumstances - it's usually in another tab and by the time I locate it the ad has switched to something different that's not misbehaving. It's under the control of the ad agencies, so barking at Brock without any specifics seems pointless. Though, it would be helpful to be reminded of one or two simple diagnosis steps to take, such as right-clicking on the offending ad and choosing "copy link location" or whatever, to paste into a post here.

In a different thread, I disputed DaveW's assertion that Buxton was guilty of overthinking, but this article lays it out pretty plainly in Buxton's own words that he has been. Props to Dave.

I saw it yesterday at an IMAX in 3-D, with buttkicker seats for the explosion effects. Probably the preferred way to see an over-the-top spectacle like this one. I actually didn't like the first GoG, so I'm not a great one to review the new one. It's the sort of thing people will like, who like this sort of thing. I never really realized, before GoG, that I don't merely ignore comic books, I actually never enjoyed them. The Marvel movie franchise has been comic-book faithful, which limits their appeal to me. But this movie in particular bugs me in two major ways. 1) It takes a hip ironic nothing-is-serious view of things when it wants to, but then slams on the brakes to demand you take it very very seriously when it decides it has something important to say about feelings or whatever. They clue you in how to react through manipulative music and so forth, in more of a paint-by-numbers way than I want. 2) There is no sense of scale: without divulging spoilers, they battle in a life-and-death way with a very mundane garden-variety space alien baddie, then later run into an opponent 100X more powerful and they come up with a way to deal with that without getting squished, and then later they encounter an opponent 100X more powerful than that (I'm understating these multipliers, we're talking planetary levels of force) and they find ways to battle that to a draw. Naturally, by the end of the movie, not all these new-found powers remain in effect, so that things are back to normal for the start of the next sequel. By that point I'm not even overly bothered by an apparent rehash of Star Wars A New Hope's solution to the heroes' problem. The overtly Freudian approach to the interpersonal plot points didn't do a lot for me (one of the characters is named Ego, for criminy's sake), but that's what these movies do. The only character I found interesting and plausible was Nebula, who by no small coincidence is the one who burns hot rather than exhibit the lukewarmness that snark ultimately brings. Oh, and don't get me started on the "music of the era the movie's creators happened to grow up in will be revered either by future centuries or by nonhuman species" cliche. I didn't hate the movie. The creativity just to think up the special effects sequences is astonishing, and the execution/choreography via computer is spectacular. Go see it, just for that. I much much much preferred Deadpool, though. That one's snark and winking self-awareness was honest. It might be the comic for people who hate comics.

Sounds like his dad wouldn't have been comfortable with a rich spouse.

How about a list of TD Top 50 prospects who aren't claimed yet, to help us prioritize?

If it was reported elsewhere on the site, I missed it, but Tonkin cleared waivers and is reporting to Rochester. Looking forward to seeing some shutdown innings in AAA. https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2017/05/minor-mlb-transactions-51317.html

And now we have, at this writing, a flat .000 OPS for the past 3 games. What post-hoc argument shall we come up to explain this latest bump in the road? Torii was unavailable for consultation recently? My pre-hoc (or whatever the opposite is properly called) assumption is that Buxton is on the major league learning curve, and it will be two steps forward / one step back, for a while to come. Hopefully not the other way around for that ratio, I mean.

And just like that, Aaron turns it around and is riding tall in the saddle again. He earned TD Minor League Pitcher of the Day honors Saturday afternoon by throttling the Pawtucket Red Sox en route to a 3-1 win. The PawSox didn't register a hit until the 7th inning, but in the 8th a leadoff homer by Ryan Court followed by a one-out double from Dan Butler necessitated a call to the Red Wings bullpen. In summary, he went 7 and 1/3 innings, giving up the 3 hits plus 1 walk, registering 5 strikeouts. 67 of his 92 pitches were for strikes. He struck out the side in the third inning, all on swinging third strikes. This nice game lowered his season ERA to 4.50, and evened his win-loss record at 3-3.