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Posted

John McHale and Randy Smith were highly qualified.  After all, their dads were famous baseball executives.  Smith was quoted as saying the park was designed for a team to play more of a "National League style", lots of bunting and triples and stuff.  Makes sense, in a city whose teams had been defined by power hitting for decades.

Randy Smith tucks his shirt into his underpants.

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Posted (edited)
4 minutes ago, Jim Cowan said:

John McHale and Randy Smith were highly qualified.  After all, their dads were famous baseball executives.  Smith was quoted as saying the park was designed for a team to play more of a "National League style", lots of bunting and triples and stuff.  Makes sense, in a city whose teams had been defined by power hitting for decades.

Randy Smith tucks his shirt into his underpants.

Randy Smith couldn't sell girl scout cookies if they were laced with heroin to an narcanon meeting.

Edited by romad1
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Posted
1 minute ago, romad1 said:

Randy Smith couldn't sell girl scout cookies if they were laced with heroin to an narcanon meeting.

I was about to say that Randy Smith was unsuited for any occupation but then I thought:  no...macarena instructor.

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Posted
50 minutes ago, romad1 said:

Randy Smith couldn't sell girl scout cookies if they were laced with heroin to an narcanon meeting.

I'd give him a chance if the meetings were in San Diego or Houston.

Posted (edited)
7 hours ago, IdahoBert said:

No one will probably read this because the game threads are not well visited lately, but I was able to discern who’s responsible for Comerica Park being abnormally large even though it has shrunk in recent years. Everyone else may well be aware of this, but I find the casually considered logic behind this reasoning to be stupendously inane. 395 feet to the left-field power alley?

“As we were suffering through some years of pitching that wasn’t very good, all of us realized that very few ballparks penalize bad pitching as much as Tiger Stadium does,” then-Tigers president John McHale told the Detroit Free Press just before the ballpark opened in 2000. “So we thought it might be interesting to design a park where there was a dimension that would allow a pitcher -- if he threw it in the appropriate place and could induce the batter to hit it -- to be reasonably sure of a long, relatively harmless fly ball.”

https://www.mlb.com/news/comerica-park-dimensions-history

Yup - I do remember the idea at the time was if a pitcher could keep the hitter in CF he deserved a chance to get him out even if he hit it hard. I believe the other aspect as to why bigger in left than right, was because once the field was rotated to view the skyline, the 3rd base line ended up pointing SW, and the prevailing summer wind in MI is westerly - so it was possible LF was going to play smaller than it was built. In the end, the big scoreboard and Ford Field going up across the street meant that didn't happen, at least not enough to matter, though there are still days with strong westerlies when the ball flies out to left ridiculously easily.

Edited by gehringer_2
Posted (edited)
6 hours ago, romad1 said:

Chafin seems really shopworn. 

Chafin came to this invite without his FB, which is probably the main reason it was only a NRI and why he's not going to make the team.

Jobe: Stuff is universally praised, results don't match as often as the former would imply should be the case.

Edited by gehringer_2
Posted
1 hour ago, gehringer_2 said:

I believe the other aspect as to why bigger in left than right, was because once the field was rotated to view the skyline, the 3rd base line ended up pointing SW, and the prevailing summer wind in MI is westerly - so it was possible LF was going to play smaller than it was built. In the end, the big scoreboard and Ford Field going up across the street meant that didn't happen

This is really fascinating thank you it makes it seem a little less dubious. 

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