gehringer_2

would appear so.

absolutely. It goes back to my point about 'fame' being a less precisely defined concept than statistical performance. If HOF voters had seen a lot more of Lou making high-light reel plays it certainly would have raised his standing. And it's almost ironic that it's only the most modern of our tools - Statcast, which can now tell us that just because a play has an acrobatic circus ending, that doesn't mean it was a better overall play than a player with better anticipation, first step, and quickness (i.e. a Whitaker) could have made without the drama. 😉 To be clear, I have nothing against a dive to make a play, but some that you see in the majors today would be unnecessary if the fielder had better -- or at least alternate, techniques in his toolbox.

He and Austin Jackson, two of the last great glove men who didn't dive to cover ground.

something seems weird. Maybe Ivey was one of those guys who was doomed to outgrow his pre-adult quickness when he got to his twenties, because a broken fibula is not an injury that should create that kind of deficit - unless there was more to it.

Well that's the thing, you can't expect a guy to quit just because he's not as good as he used to be, at least if he is still being reasonably productive. So that's going to be the story for most good players who aren't forced to quit early by injury. That said, it is getting to be more extreme with teams having given out so many contracts that run well past when the player has any real chance to still be productive. The team is then reluctant to release the non-productive player because they don't want to pay him to play out the string somewhere else, or they are still hoping for a little reprise performance season like Murray had at age 39 (2.4 WAR), or sometimes it's marketing the star chasing milestones (Cabrera), and sometimes it's just dumb all together.

But that is why the criteria for the Hall are soft. I think there is a certain value to the game in guys that have really long careers. It puts a larger body of fans into a common experience of having seen that player play - and I think that has a sort of intangible value beyond counting stats. And there has always been a certain tension around guys who are totally dominant but flame out and guys that very good for a very long time. Koufax only has 53 WAR, but he was best most people that saw him had ever seen. 11 of Ryan's 27 seasons were at less than 2 WAR, so he built his total on a lot of mediocre seasons, but he was part of the fabric of the game for 27 freaking years. I don't think there is a need for hard choices on those questions. It is after all, the Hall of 'Fame', not the Hall of 'Stat'. Coming back to Ryan, there were relatively few seasons when he was actually among the best pitchers in baseball, but he was certainly the most famous pitcher in baseball for most of his era.

I could have seen him play maybe that year or a couple more because there was still a chance he might find a way to get healthy - the batting eye was still there. But the last two years were certainly terrible. Part of that was probably the Tigers also - they should have given him his money and put him on disability but they wanted to milk 3000 hits etc.

I don't even remember Cash as being a particularly poor fielder at 1B for that era - certainly was pretty fair on foul pop-ups. Granted - If he'd been playing today he'd have been DH'ing in his over 35 yrs.

interesting thing with Casey is that since he came back from his TJ he has learned to be effective against LHB, who hammered him early in his career. He has a slightly inverse OPS platoon split - but managers continue to send LHB to face him - he faced more LHB than RHB in total last season.

Both RB saw their success rate fall by about the same % - which goes right to the OL. But Gibbs rushes per game were about the same as last season. A chunk of the shift was that Montgomery lost rushing attempts to not to more runs by Gibbs but pass targets to Gibbs.

what is the opposite of a 'virtuous circle'? A 'veering of vice' maybe? The problem here is the problem for these owners is not the players, it's their fellow owners, and the way out the mess is revenue sharing, not a salary cap, but the old boy ownership club ties apparently being thicker than water - if not fully 'blood' - they won't explicitly go after their fellow owners. So instead of a solution, they'll get a strike, which will cost everybody money. And in the end the settlement won't really settle anything because the root problem will still be there waiting to rear its ugly head when the next contract expires.

they seem persuaded that Anderson is going to hold his own. I don't know if there are enough comps of guys coming to the MLB from Korea to have that kind of confidence that a 2.25 ERA there is enough to translate into success here, but they seem to think so.

I believe that conclusion was reached here a while a ago.

I think this has a pretty fair probability. Even without McGongle, if McKinstry and Javy are both 'not terrible' with the bat and Parker is, which is another not unlikely combination - javy is also going to spend time in CF.

Boston needed one more call than they got tonight.

Great take on DeBrincat from McLellan in the post game "He drags a lot of his teammates into the game, every night".

I don't care about the money, it's not that big an increment, the only question is whether he can turn his career around away from Vancouver. The team was clearly banking on that happening when they moved Miller, so that argues no. OTOH, that locker room may have been so polarized by the time they moved Miller that it wasn't going to make any real difference to his alienation from the team. McLellan seems to be a pretty good coach, but if you're are going to turn around EP you probably need a Scotty Bowman. This team is close enough I don't think you need to take such a big risk of lousing things up. I'd pass based on knowing the little amount we do, but the front office does get paid to know more about the sub rosa than we do.

two comments on that: Weather is local, changes from year to year, and is what drives some of the park effect anomalies you see. The year Target opened we were in MnStP, everyone was paranoid by August that the park was playing way too huge. It was just a really weird year in Mineapolis - lots and lots of cool nights in a place where summer is usually really hot. It's never played that big again. I agree there does seem to be something to a team effect on park factors. COPA definitely seems to play big when the Tigers are bad, more average when the team is average to good. I'd guess that when the home team is lousy, visitors with a lead just feel less pressure to score more so I believe in some cases you do get a certain amount of cross correlation that you don't want to be there.

I suppose if they wanted to make things more transparent, they could publish how the park factor correction was for each player. They can be pretty big, esp for pitchers.

That aspect doesn't worry me so much. Even if he is disconnecting mentally from a *future* with Detroit, if he is angling for a record setting deal, he is going to be driven to perform in the '26 *present* to get it.

If it's true that Skubal/Boras didn't even make a pre-arb counter offer to the Tigers, to me that means they already look at any contractural relationship with the. Tigers as being in the rear view mirror.

yeah - Pretty good when your old management takes Brady, then a generation later it turns over and your new management picks Maye, another big drop back passer who is already at top of the stat sheets in his 2nd yr.

One of Elmer's stronger games tonight - not only mixing up a little to defend his mates, but a good number of take-aways. Reimer not going to keep his new gig very long if he keeps dropping low enough for guys to shoot over his shoulder like the Wings did.

Right. The actual comparison is 6-7 War from Skubal in '26 plus whatever the comp pick turns into in the future, vs the value of 2 or 3 other prospects, which in total still have an excellent chance of giving you less than 6-7 total over any future. If you were a bad team where 6-7 isn't going to get you anything in '26, then take future, but if you are a good enough team that the 6-7 wins gets you to the playoffs and thus a shot at the WS, take the wins and the pick and let the future further out sort itself out.

I don't know how I could trust it for things when about which I didn't already have a feel for whether it was right or wrong. One thing I have to get used to is that it seems to assume people don't ask questions accurately, because even when you give specific multiple criteria with conjunction ('and'), it seems to ignore that on the first pass and you have go back and repeat, that you want do want a list of things with X AND Y properties, not a list of things with X OR Y properties.