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chasfh

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Everything posted by chasfh

  1. chasfh
    Next thing you know these red hat yahoos are going to be throwing Beatles records into the flames because of that bimbo backwards masking business. (Remember that one?)
  2. chasfh
    I prefer faster, snappier baseball over less baseball, thank you.
  3. chasfh
    We always think of big lumbering behemoth DHs roaming the baseball earth, like Giancarlo Stanton and JD Martinez and Nelson Cruz, but taking a cursory glance at the 15 AL teams this year, I think most teams already distribute DH at bats among maybe 8 or 10 or 12 guys during the season, with the #1 guy getting fewer than half of all those at bats on several teams. Even Miggy, our own resident big lumbering behemoth DH, had only 53% of all Tiger DH plate trips. So the limitation regulation might be an answer to no real problem.
  4. chasfh
    My buddy is a Mets fan and an NL diehard, and I swear to you that his go-to data point for keeping pitchers hitting is the Bartolo Colon homer, every time. Whenever implementing the DH for the NL is discussed, he texts me a video of that homer yet again. He would gladly scorch the baseball earth with negative wRC+s and dishonest at bats to maintain the possibility of that one outlier event.
  5. chasfh
    I think Players would argue that the increase in arb pool is offset by the proposed reduction of year 2 players going to arb from 100% to 80%. But yes, you’re right, this proposal was not meaningful movement toward Baseball, any more than any of Baseball’s proposals were meaningful movement toward Players.
  6. chasfh
    I like your idea of lumping together the west coast teams, and I think you might be able to add Arizona and a Vegas expansion team to that. That’s eight Pacific time teams you could put into two divisions, maybe within a time-zoned conference. Maybe SEA, OAK, SFG, LAA in one division and LAD, SDP, LAV, ARI. That would leave the other 24 teams back east, including an expansion team in Nashville, with all but one in the Eastern and Central time zones. If they were interested in evening travel out, something I’m guessing is low on their radar, I was wondering whether there’s a way to set up divisions for the 24 teams that would create as close to equitable travel as possible. Putting NYY and BOS in a division is a no brained, I agree, but putting NYM there too would create far too easy a travel situation for those teams. I’m thinking a way to even that out is to put Central and Eastern teams in a division together. For example, maybe: NYY, BOS, CHW, MIN NYM, PHI, DET, CHC BAL, PIT, CIN, MIL MIA, TBR, ATL, NSH TOR, WAS, STL, CLE COL, KCR, HOU, TEX I didn’t think the configuration here through for more than a few minutes or measure distance, but as an example, if Baseball wanted to even out the travel more equitably, this might be a way to approach that. Nothing can be done about all the miles out they have to travel out west, especially Seattle, unless maybe they put a team in Portland instead of Vegas, which, lol.
  7. chasfh
    Is that ban enforceable, or is this one of those outlawing abortion laws on the books just waiting for Obergefell to be overturned?
  8. chasfh
    Welcome abroad! 🎉🎈🎆✨
  9. chasfh
    I want to like this unreservedly, but I've been alive and aware for the last six years. I'll be impressed only once they do show up and have to field questions live. Hopefully on TV. Wouldn't that be a gas!
  10. chasfh
    All your points about catchers being a specialized position, versus the seven other positions, are valid. Catcher is a specialized position versus position players, such that the need for good offense from the position is the least of all eight positions. Even so, it's not closer to pitcher than it is to shortstop, or second base, or center field, or any other position. Here are the average wRC+s by position for 2021: 1B: 110 2B: 94 SS: 97 3B: 95 LF: 99 CF: 95 RF: 105 😄 89 Even though catcher wRC+ is the worst of the eight positions, it is not so much worse than the others that it warrants a special dispensation from hitting. Contrast thus with the wRC+ for pitchers in the 1972 AL, which was 6. Not, that's not a fat finger typo—it is the number six. I would be shocked if there were a serious push to use designated hitters for catchers.
  11. chasfh
    Absolutely. It is because the pitcher's skill set is so intense, unique, and necessary that they never work on hitting, so they evolve into terrible enough hitters that it makes sense to DH for them. These days, kids who are identified as pitchers gifted enough to seriously consider a professional career stop basically working on their hitting altogether.
  12. chasfh
    The same thing cannot be said about catchers, or shortstops. What can be said is that catchers and shortstops are important enough among position players that teams will give in on the need for great hitting from those positions if they have superior defensive skills to make up for them. The same cannot be said of first basemen or left fielders. This is a key basis for the concept of the defensive spectrum.
  13. chasfh
    Yes, non-zero, meaning not zero possibility, meaning yes it's possible. I'm just wondering whether they will take a hack at trying to even out the problem on tremendously unequal miles traveled among teams, or whether they're gonna lump that whole issue so they can have the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, and Phillies in the same division for the benefit of that corridor.
  14. chasfh
    Since the geographic realignment of the leagues has become a non-zero possibility, I've been wondering they could do it in such a way as to be fair about it to as many teams as possible. If you wanted to even out the miles traveled as much as possible, I don't think they could simply create eight divisions of four teams all of which are the closest to one another, because that would give the best teams clustered around New York and Chicago a big advantage on travel, since they wouldn't have to travel nearly as much as teams in out west would have to. As it is, today, the Cubs and White Sox travel only half the miles the west coast teams do. I'd be interested in seeing how they can balance fairness in miles traveled with time zone management, or whether they'd be like, eff it, just cluster them and be done with it.
  15. chasfh
    I remember they said that thing about speeding up negotiations, too, but since Baseball waited something like six weeks to provide its first proposal after implementing the lockout, I don't take that too seriously. I actually haven't seen any polling about how the public regards who's at fault here, but I could see people siding with the players if they've been following closely how the process has been going.
  16. chasfh
  17. chasfh
    I’m guessing the owners initiated the lockout because they reason that if there is a work stoppage, the players will get the blame. That is working to some extent.
  18. chasfh
    The burning of police stations. Try to keep up. 😏
  19. chasfh
    It occurs to me that the false flag idea of Ukraine precipitating the war through aggressive action is designed to convince the Russian people and who cares who else.
  20. chasfh
    Soto may simply not want to commit to Washington at the moment. He may not like the direction they’re going there, at least yet.
  21. chasfh
  22. chasfh
    Looks like the CDC is finally catching up with us.
  23. chasfh
    I just googled "occupy wall street burning down police station" and I'm coming up empty on that one. But I did run across this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/in-day-of-protests-occupy-wall-street-faces-police-violence/
  24. chasfh
    Yes, all this, and also, a key difference is that there is a clearly defined chain of authority that occurs at the college and professional levels in which abuse of officials is redressed in some form of sanctions for the abusers, which by extension also means that the very threat of sanctions usually acts as a check on abuse before it even happens. I don't know for sure whether that exists at the Little League level, but it sure didn't when I was trying my hand at umping.
  25. chasfh
    My impression of promotion/relegation is that it works best in a table-type league, where all 20 or 22 or whatever teams all play each other twice. Maybe p/r could work a division-oriented league if you move teams among divisions as other teams come and go, but in a country as geographically vast as the United States, they might get a little hairy. The English soccer pyramid goes something like 20 levels deep, and it’s technically possible for a team to rise all the way from the bottom of that pyramid to the top in any many years as it take to leapfrog levels. An American baseball equivalent might be some town team in Battle Creek eventually working its way up from many levels down to the major leagues in the space of a few decades. I believe that might be technically possible in England even today.
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