Sammy Sofa
-
Posts
98,224 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
208
Content Type
Profiles
Joomla Posts 1
Chicago Cubs Videos
Chicago Cubs Free Agent & Trade Rumors, Notes, & Tidbits
2026 Chicago Cubs Top Prospects Ranking
News
2023 Chicago Cubs Draft Picks
Guides & Resources
2024 Chicago Cubs Draft Picks
The Chicago Cubs Players Project
2025 Chicago Cubs Draft Pick Tracker
2026 Chicago Cubs Draft Tracker: Picks & Bonuses
Blogs
Events
Forums
Store
Gallery
Everything posted by Sammy Sofa
-
Yep. Dusty certainly didn't help, but didn't Wood already have one elbow surgery under his belt by the time DB showed up? Lots of people have surgeries under their belt and go on to have long careers. What doesn't typically happen is that a new manager comes in and rides that surgically repaired arm into the ground with 120 pitch count game after 120 pitch count game, staying in after long rain delays. I mean, Wood threw 140+ pitches early in the season that year. He threw 130 in terribly uncomfortable conditions in Miami. He didn't do anything like that the year before. Wood never would have been the picture of durability or have a sustained career of 200 IP seasons. But there's no way you can pretend he was doomed to have his career wind down as quickly as it did if he didn't have Dusty Freaking Baker stearing the ship. Of course I can. Wood had ridiculously destructive mechanics. People were predicting an abbreviated career for him even before he was drafted. Dusty was an idiot in how he managed him, but for me Prior is the obvious wouldacouldashoulda. Wood I was just waiting for to fall apart all throughout the aughts.
-
This was Bron-Bron's master plan.
-
I mean, a guy like Hawk sucks because he's just bad. I understand people not liking King because he's obnoxious, but to say there shouldn't ever be a goofy homer in a local radio or TV broadcast is just doom bonering for the sake of being miserable.
-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OosYFs3cyZ8
-
Ridiculous. Nobody was dumber than Ron Santo. And saying "homers have no place broadcasting" or whatever is even more ridiculous. The Comcast games are local broadcasts; why the [expletive] shouldn't there be a homer color commentator saying ridiculous things?
-
That's wonderful. If every player in MLB was suddenly a free agent, which reliever would receive the biggest contract? The best one, right? If every player in MLB was available in an expansion draft, which reliever would be selected first? The best one, right? If every manager in MLB was asked which reliever in the league he'd pick to pitch the 9th inning of game 7, which reliever would be named most? The best one, right? Anyone here think Sean Marshall would be the answer to any of those questions? Yes, but too many would say no because he's not a power pitcher. Think of the guys who the meatballs traditionally declare to be the "best relievers."
-
The case can easily be made.
-
Man, that was a lot of work. Don't force it, Kyle.
-
I'll be very surprised if Volstad and Wood "essentially waste a year." And yes, dave, Marshall was pretty [expletive] phenomenal last season.
-
Kerry Wood was doomed regardless of Dusty's presence (and it started before he even showed up).
-
Right, but Dempster's coming off of a bad year. Ideally you hope for him to rebound so you can maximize what value he has left. Yes, there's the incentive now that teams would be getting him for the whole year, but I think that they'd get more for him if he's decent from teams in contention looking at or desperate for starters as the deadline gets closer. I just don't see the "waste" in guys having to wait a few months before entering the rotation on a terrible team that's also likely going to be terrible next year, too.
-
For 2-3 months at most? How is that a downside. Those future decisions don't need to be made in May. Yeah, I'm baffled by the sense of urgency. It's not like they'd be banished to Iowa for the long run.
-
Do we even know what aggravates his wrist? Do simple things like shooting and dribbling also increase the pain? Either way, he shouldn't be playing more than 2 games a week until the playoff start, provided we can hold on to the #1 seed (which I think we can). According to the team and Deng him doing pretty much anything involving that wrist causes him pain. Apparently the injury itself can't get any worse, but it also can't get any better without surgery, so sitting him that much really doesn't do anything besides giving him a break in general.
-
This is beneath even you, Kyle.
-
Because what aggravates the pain most are things like him landing on it awkwardly or taking a shot to it and so on. Those are things that can happen if he plays 2 minutes or 40. Obviously playing less will decrease the chance of something like that, and he should be playing less even if the wrist wasn't an issue, but talking like simply playing less on its own somehow makes it better isn't accurate. I never defended playing Deng as much as he's been played. I countered the idea that these injuries are Thibs' fault. Thibs could sit Deng for the rest of the season and it would still be a game by game issue/decision when it came to the playoffs and Deng's wrist.
-
There's a difference between wanted him to take more advantage of when he can sit his best players (sane) and thinking most of the injuries are being caused by him "running the team into the ground" (insane). The team with the front office that was punching the last coach for potentially overplaying their best player isn't going to suddenly sit back and let Thibs kill everyone. Most of these injuries are the ones that just happen and it's shitty coincidence that they've piled up at so much of the same time. And Deng's wrist isn't going to get "better" by him sitting just like it isn't going to get worse by him playing. The pain is either manageable or it isn't regardless of the minutes he plays, and clearly it's not. He should have gotten the surgery ASAP as certain people in the organization wanted. They effectively left it up to him and he, being a typical stupid player, made a typically stupid player decision. But don't again foolishly construe this as me saying he should be played as much as he's been played; he should be playing less minutes against shitty teams whether he has the wrist pain or not.
-
Oh, FFS; he's not coaching a bunch of brittle old men (besides Rip), you loon.
-
But it's not like they're trapped in the minors. The other pitchers they ARE looking to move would have to be replaced, plus dealing with injuries and whatnot.
-
But they're not necessarily guys they're only looking to trade away.
-
Why are you so worried about them not being on the team to start the season?
-
I mean, the very first link was the one that came closest to pointing out something up and even that one is deeply flawed. Take this part: Really? They're using 140 years as a measuring stick? All 140 years of baseball? As if the diagnosis and recognition of these types of diseases were comparable over that time? Hey, you know what often causes medical diagnoses to seemingly skyrocket from one ear to the next? THAT THE DIAGNOSIS BECAME A THING IN THE FIRST PLACE. Comparing the baseball players between 1960 and 1980 with brain tumors to the ones between, say, 1890 and 1910 is ridiculous.
-
I'm not tossing it aside as a "conspiracy theory" because there's nobody is talking about any kind of conspiracy. I tossing it aside as coincidence because there's not enough correlation between the number of umpires and the number of players/coaches/managers/etc.. If an unusual amount of umpires were getting brain tumors from lead in AstroTurf or pesticides used at a certain stadium or several stadiums or whatever than you should expect to see a much more pronounced upswing in similar diagnoses in players/coaches/managers/groundskeepers/etc. who spent much, much more time at those locations than the umpires.
-
Week of 3/11-3/17 Spring Training Game Thread
Sammy Sofa replied to David's topic in Fred Hornkohl Game Thread Forum
On top of the usual "It's ST" caveat, Marmol is predominantly a breaking ball pitcher re-tooling his mechanics in the dry Arizona air. There are bound to be rough innings. Aramis Fan will not hear such things; Marmol in Arizona is not a new occurrence, it's been pointed out to AF before how being there can effect Marmol's pitching. -
Ugh, he's so [expletive] boring. Stop giving the meatballs boners, dammit.
-
Oh, yeah, I'm really bummed I didn't get on the "baseball stadiums are causing monstrous brain tumors" bandwagon. Both of those articles go out of their way to downplay the idea that it's actually something caused by or based out of their time on the field (though I do like how the Trib article goes out of it's way to replicate this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTxJ2QXyzSc). From the first article: Basically what you're looking at here is the baseball equivalent of the "suspicious deaths due to the JFK assassination" list. You're going to find variation all the time with these types of statistics with different random population groupings, and to make anything out of this someone has to expand the time-frame pretty dramatically and gloss over what type of cancer each person actually had. Trying to throw in umpires skews it even more since almost all of these projections are based on players/coaches/managers/groundskeepers, etc.. and not guys like umpires who didn't spend at least half the season at the same stadium.
