Sammy Sofa

I think OMC was saying he was just doing the math in his head which is immediately what I was doing. But could be wrong. Oh, I was just responding to the original post that was seemingly making it sound like it's really weird/nuts/whatever that Gooden could be a great-grandfather at 56.

I mean, if someone became a father at age 20...then became a grandfather at 40...and then a great-grandfather at 60...that doesn't seem really all that unbelievable at all? This isn't that far off from that.

I disagree, a ton of value was tied to his contract situation. He was making like $8-9 million on average for the next half decade (through age 30-31 IIRC) when they acquired him. Given his durability, contract, age, and production the trade made sense for a team that at the time had 3 guys they'd comfortably start over him in a playoff series but needed certainty and innings behind those guys. They gave up a pre-injured SP prospect drafted outside the first round out of HS and an oft-injured COF/DH prospect (not that Eloy can't and won't mash, just like fellow giants Soler or even Cruz to some extent it might take a while to both stay healthy and mash), it's not as if teams would be falling themselves to give up a potential rotation lead for those guys. The optics of that trade suck most because "top 5 prospect" is a phrase that carries alot of weight and counts as analysis these days Not that I'm not annoyed he didn't come in and deliver nearly 10-15 WAR his first 3 years like Lilly did, but the signs were all there that he was more towards that 3-4 starter than a Lester just as the signs were all there that Jimenez and Cease weren't going to light the world on fire immediately. Quintana's best years came during that little deadball era at the beginning of the 2010s, his numbers were climbing with the league's offense (still fine)...This guy was just supposed to be a part of the puzzle, same with Davies, with the offense and more tested guys on the pitching staff taking the lead Lotta words Honestly, this reads like a lot of damage control to try and paint it better than it worked out. Based on his track record to that point and what they gave up, there's basically no chance the Cubs weren't thinking/hoping they just made a move for a top of the rotation starter. The Theo years had a lot of bad pitching moves or ones that didn't pan out, and this falls into the latter. I don't fault them for it; almost everyone thought it was a great move at the time, myself included. But they most definitely were not trading for what they thought would just be some mid tier working slob-type. Lumping him in with the same intentions behind getting a reclamation project guy like Davies is pure revisionism.

Given Quintana's track record (in terms of both durability and pitching ability) to that point AND what the Cubs gave up for him, to try and dismiss those sorts of expectations/comparisons as absurd is, well, horsefeathering absurd.

..Voit returns today! Yeah, thanks; I saw it, too. I'll probably regret it, but I felt like he was gonna take a while to get going. Which means everyone should probably hop on the Voit train.

I mean, I definitely didn't enjoy the Curt Schilling Whines on National TV era. I'm always kinda stunned that John Rocker never emerged as some kind of pundit making the rounds on all the usual conservative media outlets. They're always so desperate for some kind of conservative celebrity to parade around, and that dude never shut the horsefeathers up about everyone was trying to silence his right to insult people.

And we get 3 transactions, right? If so... Drop Happ (-25) Add Castellano (+75)

I think my team budget is $950 So drop Voit (-75) Add Jose Abreu (+100) Drop Torres (-150) Add Semien (+100) Bench: Drop Lewis Add Stanton Thanks!

I would even settle for the public and (especially) sports world at large stop pretending we care about it for the triple crown races. Also why does Bob Baffert look like Justin Theroux's dad in that screenshot, it's unsettling and I don't like it I keep thinking he's from a new season of Eastbound & Down.

Man, that guy is really worked up about a failed bookstore chain.

[tweet] [/tweet]

Man, I gotta look up this team of weak nerds I apparently drafted.

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This rocketed up into the top 10 weirdest things posted here. Nah if you don't like this broadcast team or think it's just okay, you have objectively bad taste and I'm not sure if I want to be your friend Look, there's only so many Derwood or Cynosure or HCCF posts you can leapfrog, so pump the brakes a little.

yep the lukewarm responses by some have me judging people really hard. This rocketed up into the top 10 weirdest things posted here.

Let him hopefully go to a team that has an actual chance, you selfish bastards.

I'd like to think this is all the result of some maniac who is just screaming about how big a fan of California he is.

This is where I'm at; I never thought I'd be so burnt out on baseball just a few years of the Cubs winning the WS, but horsefeathers, I'm all for shaking it up. There's no going back with these sorts of changes, so just go all in, you cowards. Make it horsefeathering weird and interesting to offset the owners and front offices that have made it an overly analytical, penny-pinching slog.

No, baseball games ARE significantly longer, and it's mostly due to delays caused by pitching bull horsefeathers. I remember seeing several breakdowns comparing games from within the last 10 years to games from the 90's and 80's, and the commercial time difference was minimal. The biggest difference, by far, in terms of something they could actually (and pretty easily) do something about was the time taken by pitchers between pitches and batters. It often added something like an extra 20 minutes or more per game. Unleash the horsefeathering pitch clock. There’s no doubt games have gotten longer and pitch clock would make them faster to some degree, but does that matter/affect anything like viewership or games being more watchable? Is there some large group of people out there if games, on average, go down 6-20 min are suddenly going to start watching games or attending them in meaningful numbers? I don’t know the answer and would interested to see what info they have that it would matter or not matter. NFL games are long as horsefeathers and there’s literally 30-40 seconds of downtime before any action, baseball inherently is going to have down time between action and no action. MLB game length doesn’t really matter to me. A pitch clock could also bring injury risk in, potentially, obviously a study would have to be done. But forcing guys to throw when they aren’t ready or like in a 20+ inning within a set amount of time could have health/fatigue affects. In regards to the last part....tough horsefeathers. If a pitch clock is the difference between a pitcher staying healthy or not, then he's just not cut out to be a professional pitcher. As for the rest: it's just part of the larger problem of how baseball has had a long simmering problem of being terrible at attracting new fans, and just being a viable form of entertainment in the current landscape. If it was something someone was coming up with now it would be laughed out of every room, and rightly so. The games are too long and too slow, they eat up WAY too much programming time (which has lead to it being walled off via a TOTALLY SUSTAINABLE bubble of what essentially amounts to premium cable channels to watch the horsefeathering games; great model to hitch your wagon to, guys), there's way too horsefeathering many of them, the game itself has next to no bankable/recognizable faces or personalities, there's too many teams and too many of them are run like strip mall businesses that are willing to settle for cheap mediocrity in the hopes they stumble into penny-pinching competitive season or two each decade, and the action is too brief and goes through too many prolonged periods where it's dominated by pitching, which just exacerbates almost all of these issues to an unbearable degree. Comparing it to football is a non-starter: I despise football, but acting like they're comparable in terms of watchability and player recognition is laughable. Football is infinitely easier to market, watch, follow, blah-blah-blah. I'd take baseball a million times over football, but the bottom line is that's almost actively designed at this point to not draw in new fans. And I don't know what the answer is. Stuff like adding the DH or lowering the mound or shortening the season or expanding the playoffs or, IMO, all good ideas, but they're Band-Aids on a head wound. Baseball, as it stands, is not designed for long term sustainability (at its current level) with the way we (and especially younger audiences) consume media and sports.

No, baseball games ARE significantly longer, and it's mostly due to delays caused by pitching bull horsefeathers. I remember seeing several breakdowns comparing games from within the last 10 years to games from the 90's and 80's, and the commercial time difference was minimal. The biggest difference, by far, in terms of something they could actually (and pretty easily) do something about was the time taken by pitchers between pitches and batters. It often added something like an extra 20 minutes or more per game. Unleash the horsefeathering pitch clock. I’m down with a pitch clock. But announcers were bitching about slow pitching back in the 90’s And it's just gotten even slower since.

They’re mostly too long to people who don’t actually like baseball. It’s like saying that soccer games are too low scoring; that’s part of the game. The only REAL way to shorten games would be fewer commercial breaks, but that’s never going to happen No, baseball games ARE significantly longer, and it's mostly due to delays caused by pitching bull horsefeathers. I remember seeing several breakdowns comparing games from within the last 10 years to games from the 90's and 80's, and the commercial time difference was minimal. The biggest difference, by far, in terms of something they could actually (and pretty easily) do something about was the time taken by pitchers between pitches and batters. It often added something like an extra 20 minutes or more per game. Unleash the horsefeathering pitch clock.

Baseball games being too horsefeathering long is definitely a problem, but this isn't really a fix for that. But it's fine whatever...until they get a horsefeathering pitch clock, they won't actually fix horsefeathers.