metsmarathon

there are still a few teams over the cap, with 9 days to go before the cut deadline. drop your jason bays fast!

also lance was good enough and smart enough (and goshdarnit people like him!) to not allow himself to get tested when he would have failed it.

maddux should sail right in, no? i've got the following JAWS+ ratings for the '14 ballot: bonds 226 clemens 171 maddux 135 bagwell 120 piazza 119 thomas 110 schilling 106 trammell 106 raines 106 mussina 104 ----- glavine 103 walker 102 palmiero 100 e.martinez 99 mcgwire 96 biggio 94 sosa 88 l.gonzalez 79 kent 79 mcgriff 79 ... and joe borowski 14 there are 13 players on next year's ballot who are at least as good as the average hall of famer at their nominal position. can we maybe elect some of them, please?

per bbref, lofton has the 7th most WAR for a player they have listed as a centerfielder, sitting just ever so slightly below the level of average among all hall of fame centerfielders. the only player better than him who is not in the hall is griffey. bernie williams is down at 27th best cf. looking at peak value of 7 best years, lofton is 10th best, with only griffey and andruw jones ahead of him among guys not in. again, he is just slightly below the average level of the 18 hall of fame centerfielders. bernie is 23rd. now, WAR includes offense and defense, so its easier to look at offense. and as a power hitter, and overall offensive player, williams takes hte slight edge, with a career 59.5 to 54.5 o(ffensive)WAR edge. fwiw, fangraphs has hte difference between the two players at a similar level, but rates williams more highly offenseive, and therefore more critically defensively. either method you use, it's not close when you look at total career.

lofton being one and done sure does cut down on some future hof-worthiness debates, doesn't it?

well, you'd take bagwell because he was far better a player than mcgwire. mac had the better age-23 rookie season, (5.4/4.4 fWAR, 4.8/4.5 bWAR) and then for every year until their age-32 season, bagwell had the higher WAR. fangraphs has bagwell at 13 WAR better than mac for his career, and bbref has bagewell at 18 WAR better for hte duration of their respective careers. carter/ piazza is at least a little more comparable, especially once you start them both at age 24 as i had done.

fwiw, bbref has carter as the #2 catcher in terms of bWAR and bJAWS. his bWAR7 is actually higher than bench's. fangraphs has bench as the clear leader, with 81.5 fWAR, and carter, pudge, pudge, yogi, and torre clumped between 70 and 75 fWAR. piazza trails at 67 fWAR. carlton fisk - man did he improve as he got older. put up his 4th best year of his career at age 40. nowadays, that kind of hting would sure get some whispers going...

bWAR and fWAR both give the career edge to carter over piazza. however, i'd rather have d'arnaud mirror piazza's career for one important reason, with perhaps a caveat. piazza's first six years were astounding, and in those six years, excluding the 21 games he played in '92, accumulated 40 fWAR. in carter's first six years, he accumulated 28.3 fWAR. i suppose, though, that the fair comparable would be to look at carter from age 24-30, as that's what i did for piazza. in that case, carter has 37.9 fWAR, which is fairly close to piazza's age 24-30 seasons. carter accumulated 11.3 fWAR prior to his age-24 season. and if we subtract that from his total, then he ends up with less career fWAR from age 24-onwards. since d'arnaud would be entering hte year at his age 24 season (i think, right?) it makes sense to use the carter and piazza careers from that point onward. i suppose the caveat, though, would be that though their careers would end up being very similar in terms of overall WAR-value, a carter-like production would likely be more affordable, though perhaps less of a game-changer. and so the carter prototype would perhaps be easier to retain long term, and would allow for a stronger team to be built around him as he gets more expensive in both arbitration and free agency years. and if we can retain him for his career, maybe the carter archetype is better. but if we're only gonna have him for the early part of ther careers, maybe the first six years and a few years of extension, piazza is the way to go. and then somebody else can overpay him from age 33 onward.

it also clearly helps that steroids made these guys ugly - bulbous, misshapen, over-inflated freaks with ominous veins burting forth from beneath their bad skin - and that the two leaders in teh steroidal clubhouse, bonds and clemens, are raging asshole fuckwads that nobody really likes.

baseball gave itself a black eye - it wasn't clemens or bonds or any player. clemens and bonds just helped wipe away what little concealer was left after the mac and sosa show. the only reason anyone cares is because home runs are sexy. if the doping in baseball only led to an explosion in stolen bases, nobody would give a shit. there are no other holy numbers in the american sporting scene beyond ruth's ruthian totals, not even aaron's aaronic sums. nobody gives a shit about any number ever generated by a football player, season, or career, beyond, i suppose, the over/under. nobody gives a shit about any number ever generated by a basketball player, season, or career, though i suppose wilt's 100-point game may come close. hockey? soccer? track and field? any fucking other sport out there? bonds and mac and sosa dared pass ruth - blow by him. and for that they are excoriated as putting black eye on baseball. baseball has suffered many a black eye, and the pugilists have often found ther way into the hall. ty cobb never gave baseball a black eye? and what of the black eye of segragation? the players and owners who supported and advocated and upheld that shit are in. drinking, womanizing, and self-destroying? hello, mickey mantle. amphetamines? if we must think of the kids who are forced to take steroids to compete, are we really all that cool with them taking fucking amphetamines just to stay in the game? please. put them in the hall. they reflect and record the state of baseball. they are a product of baseball and of the times. they should not be considered ineligible, but rather they should be considered contextually.

Edgy MD wrote: metsmarathon wrote: pud galvin. You've certainly got me there. Goat gonads. That's the sort of thing one wipes from one's memory.. i suppose it may also be the sort of thing that can get seaed indelibly into one's memory...

pud galvin. also, there's fairly strong speculation that both ruth and mantle each missed time as a result of a quackish injection of animal testosterone. sheep testosterone for the babe, and some funky steroid/amphetamine mix for the mick. people'd been using animal balls for a millenium or more, and testosterone was identified back in the late 1800s. nobody used it (or anything like it) in pro baseball until jose canseco? bullshit. the synthesis of testosterone earned some handy chemists a nobel prize back in '39. it was in use in us sports programs in the 60s, and wide use by the 70s. maybe galvin and ruth and mantle get a pass for not knowing what they were doing, or trying to do, but i find it impossible to conceive that they would be the only players to try it.

i've focused mostly on contact and speed. kanga/roo was tough, but rabbit was a picnic. owl's zigzag is a bitch to square up. best i can do is 11 of the required 19.

i thought this was something else entirely.

in order: 1. wreck-it ralph 2. skyfall 3. mib 3

in the short term, a more stable wilpon family is more conducive to winning than a less stable wilpon family, unless by less stable you mean so crushingly unstable that the cannot support tehir own weight, collapse into a superdense mass of fissile material and explode violently outwards, annihilating all within a 30 km radius, littering the landscape with scattered debris and fallout. in the case of the latter, well, yeah, i suppose that could bring about a turnaround too.

y'know, it'd be one thing if the anti-roider-voters were the new kids on the block, who weren't really in a position to take a stance against doping and other chemical enhancements while it either nascent or rampant. but its generally all the writers who were around the game at the time, who generally looked the other way or chose not to dig too deep, or were simply naiive and gullible, and were otherwise facilitating the tarnishing of the game's um, immaculate, historical legacy. its the new-fangled stats guys who seem better able to view the landscape with the cold light of reason, and consider the context of not only the performances of the steroid era, but also the environment of the steroid era which enabled and fostered and contributed to the inflation of those stats.

metirish wrote: From the Chass piece For some reason, the news media have not talked about the former catcher and steroids the way they have talked about Bonds, Clemens and Sosa. When I worked for The New York Times, I tried more than once to write about Piazza and steroids, but the baseball editor said I couldn�t because his name hadn�t been linked to steroids. I can link his name to steroids, I countered, but I had to wait until I started this Web site to talk about Piazza�s acne-covered back, a generally accepted telltale sign of steroids use. Piazza�s passionate fans ridiculed me for that assertion (and surely will again) and ignored the fact that Piazza�s back cleared up as soon as baseball began testing for steroids. jesus christ murray. if you're such a steroidal bacne savant, then the only reason there's no link between piazza and steroids is because you are not nor ever were a journalist. ya know what, you worked for the mother fucking times. the new york times. you don't think they would have wanted to be all over a biggish story like steroids in baseball? no, no, they're no news organization, i suppose...

well, somebody told chass that biggio was a roider. i guess that settles it then.

also, if you were truly dying for a metly correlation to stanton, why not darryl?

well, i mean of course they should call up and ask about stanton. maybe even swap around some potential trade packages. get a feel for what it would take. i don't expect it would come to any meaningful fruition, but, sure, why not, right? maybe call up the angels and ask about that trout kid too. what would it take, and what's a fair package? those are the really important questions to which marty has no answer.

so, no american league pitchers in the dh era either, then?

mcgriff... ok... i guess... if you just look at home runs. why, he's got as many as gehrig - he must be a hall of famer! and morris, well, he won a lot of games and did that postseason thing. so that must be awfully nice. and with mattingly, there was... um... well he had three really great years... and, um... i suppose if he never got hurt he might've... ah... didn't he play defense well? does that make up for any of it? ah... yeah... so... he was a yankee, so that's gotta count... right? ...right?

its nice to see someone adopting my JAWS+ metric.

Edgy MD wrote: It's an MLB TV show in which they're asked about their careers. I wouldn't call that whining. I don't think it reflects on them that a minor league ump appears. (Is a AAA ump, by and large, more prone to blowing calls than big league umps? I don't know.) If we want a higher standard of sub, train and pay more big league umps, and send them around with five man crews, with the extra guy rotating into the press box every fifth game and acting as official scorer and injury insurance. or hte spare guy could work the replay booth...