fromthestretch

Frankly I find that to be a baseless assertion. People don't like to hear stats they don't understand mentioned on screen. Most of the people are not going to take the time to look it up either. Occasionally the common fan will let a stat like that slide (such as QB rating, where the common fan knows what is good and what is bad, but has no idea how to calculate it)-but most of the time, it turns people off to hear things that they don't get mentioned. I see it as very reasonable that if these more complicated stats are being heavily used in shows that the common fan watches (their teams telecasts and Baseball Tonight, for example) they will be turned off by the amount of material that they really don't understand, and they will just stop watching. I don't agree with that at all. Just like QB rating, someone doesn't need to know how to calculate a stat to understand its importance. As long as it's explained that a high number is good and a low number is bad and possibly show leaderboards to give some context, people will get used to it over time. Take OBP for example. It is becomming more widely accepted. It may be a relatively simple stat, but there are people who accept it - even on this forum - that couldn't tell you exactly how to calculate it. The important thing is how it's presented. If you start forcing new stats on people, it probably will turn a few people away. However, if you gradually ease some new stats in and explain their use, most people will begin to at least recognize their presence. You'll always have people that will resist change for one reason or another, and the traditional stats such as batting average, home runs, RBI, SB, etc. will always have their place. However, if some of the newer stats get more exposure, younger fans will grow up knowing these stats as part of the game.

No offense, while Bonds was a great player before he alledgely "juiced up", I would take Junior over Bonds everyday of the week, and thrice on Sunday. My biggest problem with Bonds, if they guy had speed (500+ SB, people forget about this stat, because of his "power") why did he settle for LF? Junior---in his prime---may have been one of the greatest CFers to play the game. I mean, Junior did things in CF, that Andruw Jones, but people don't remember that, because of Junior's injuries. Not to mention, Junior never played the game in the guise of jealousy (let's face Bonds was tremendously jealous of both Sosa and McGwire, and prolly a few others), and IMO, Junior was the premier baseball player (before Jeter/Eckstein) in the majors at the time. So while you may take Bonds, and his numbers are better (alledgely), I still take Junior, because I feel Junior was a better all-around player, and and even tho it isn't a stats, but being clear of consciencous during a time of turmoil in the sport, wins point with me. Bonds is a fraud, and time will prove that. His jealousy of other top players is beyond legendary. And it's a SHAME he is approaching a time honor record, and I hope Selig does NOT show up to Bonds games as he is nearing the record. Considering Bonds' defensive abilities through '98, which is the time period I'm referring to, Bonds was the better all-around player. Hit for better OPS, stole more bases and at a higher success rate, and played exceptional defense. And again, a lot of this is going along with the theory that he didn't start using until after '98, so the clear conscience thing is bogus. Who cares about his jealousy, especially when you have no idea what was ever going through his or Griffey's heads?

We assume Griffey was clean because he never showed a single one of the hallmark signs for steroid use -- extreme muscle increase, bigger head, acne , etc. Further, most "baseball people" tend to agree that Griffey has a textbook perfect swing for hitting HRs, meaning that he didn't rely on sheer muscle to hit the ball. Griffey's uses flexibility and quick reflexes to generate batspeed, not his triceps. One last thing, Griffey was injured all the time. Guys on the juice don't spend much time on the DL with injuries. Part of what steroids do is cause your body to heal at an extremely fast pace (keep in mind that your body healing itself after a workout is what actually builds muscle). Griffey just never fit the mold of a steroid user. i never saw any huge size difference in alex sanchez or rafael palmeiro. Sure, some guys don't show that many outward signs, but how long were they using before they were caught? Sanchez wasn't around long enough for anybody to know and, IIRC, the Palmeiro incident happened the year before it came out. Probably not enough time to make a huge physical difference in either case. Griffey was hitting HRs at a record pace from almost the minute he set foot in the majors as a skinny kid. If you wanna believe that he was juicing then, fine. It is very hard to believe, to put it mildly, that a guy could have been juicing for 17 years with no unnatural change in his appearance. It's not really all that hard to believe. If you're using in moderation, you can build strength without adding too much bulk. A lot of the guys caught at the major and minor league level have been pitchers, some of whom aren't all that bulky. A lot depends on how you're using and how you're working out.

I think you hit on what ticks me off about Bonds, though I realize you were trying to point out undue media disdain. You are correct that using steroids doesn't necessarily make one a great ballplayer. However, I firmly believe that the juice can make a player better for longer than he would have been without it. As such, I think steroids can take a guy who is somewhere among the 10 best players of his era and turn him into one of the 10 best players of all time. Of course, that's JMO. As to media disdain for Bonds: it sells. The sports media doesn't talk about Lawton, et al. because consumers don't care about those guys. They bash Bonds because that's what generates the most response right now. Yes, stories about Bonds sell because consumers don't care about the other guys. But I'd like to think the media could make more of an effort to get people to care about the other guys, helping them realize that the steroid problem runs deeper than Barry Bonds. I think it's a combination of lazy journalism and writing what sells. I can somewhat understand not writing about a guy like Palmeiro, since he's not playing anymore. But how about Sheffield? He's probably got another 2-3 years in him. If you looked at his numbers and took them at face value, the guy could be considered a Hall of Famer. Why isn't that a bigger story than it is? Hell, the whole Giambi thing seems like it was all swept under the rug compared to the Bonds stories. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, it's not dubbed the "steroid era" simply because of a handful of power hitters. It's called that because a lot of people were using them, and based on the number of people suspended at the major and minor league levels, more than half were pitchers.

I'd take Bonds everyday and twice on Sundays. If you believe he started juicing after '98, which is the widespread theory, Bonds was still better than Griffey before that. Bonds had seven seasons with an OPS of 1.000 or better through 1998, which spanned the first 13 years of his career. Griffey has had four such seasons in his entire career. Bonds was also a much bigger threat on the bases. I'm not trying to discount what Griffey accomplished, but Bonds was better.

fixed Indeed.

I hate articles like this because these writers never show this kind of disdain for Matt Lawton, Ryan Franklin, Rafael Betancourt, Felix Heredia, Alex Sanchez, etc., and those are the guys that actually got caught using. Even Sheffield, who was implicated along with Bonds in the whole BALCO thing, doesn't get all this attention. People write stuff like this about Bonds for two primary reasons: 1. He's put up incredible numbers 2. He's been a jerk to the media for a bulk of his career I'm not so sure that reason #1 is as much of a factor as reason #2. Let's face it, the guys that have been suspended for steroid use provide decent evidence that using steroids doesn't necessarily make you a great ballplayer. It would be one thing if anyone was reporting something new about Bonds and steroid use, but instead we get the same old "Bonds cheated" stuff over and over and over again.

The person I feel bad for is Manny Acta. I read his quotes in the local papers here, and the man is saying the right things. He talks about on-base percentage as being important, which is a good start. It sounds like he wants to play Church regularly, if healthy. But as it is now, this team has no hope of winning very often. They have some decent, young players to build around (Johnson, Zimmerman, Kearns, Lopez, and even Church). But their starting pitching is flat out terrible, especially if Patterson isn't healthy. They could have one of the worst rotations in baseball.

I'm not sure it's fair to say that Quinlan has really been blocking anyone. He split time between 1B, 3B, and the outfield. Nearly 60% of his at-bats came against lefties, and he's pretty good against left-handed pitching.

Has anyone affiliated with the team indicated anything like this? Rightly or wrongly, it seems like the club itself is feeling pretty good about having Izturis there. agreed. despite the feelings on this board to the contrary, very few if any winning teams have all star players at all 8 positions. if izturis can stay healthy, hit .250 and play excellent defense i think the cubs will be very happy with his production. with 4 potential .900 ops guys (5 if you include murton), i highly doubt a light hitting ss will keep this team from contending. Building a team based on players who wont "keep this team from contending" is hardly a solid approach to take. of course not. the cubs should just trade izturis to the yankees for arod & mariano and then they would be set. somehow the cards managed to win last year with a light hitting short stop just like the sox won with one in 2005. And the Yankees won with a very good offensive shortstop in '98, '99, and 2000. What's your point? If Izturis were to put up a .350 OBP like Eckstein did in '06 or get his slugging over .400 like Uribe in '05, while still providing good defense, I don't think you're going to hear too many people complain. Instead, the Cubs will be lucky to get an OBP better than .310 and a SLG% better than .340 out of Izturis.

That makes no sense. You can't "just go out and sign the #1 FA pitcher on the market next year". You are devaluing top notch pitchers by referring them as commodities. Of course you can. Why wouldn't you be able to? And it is not at all devaluing something by calling it a commodity. A Ferrari is a commodity, and it's pretty valuable. It just means that it is replaceable, and $17 million pitchers are. The pitcher might not want to sign with your team for personal reasons. Also, other teams will be competing with you to sign him. They may offer more money, a no-trade clause, etc. It's not like they can just assume that they'll be able to land the best, or even one of the top 2-3 pitchers on the market next offseason.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised to not see Brad Ausmus and Mike Matheny on the list. Those two are/were always talked about as being good defensive catchers (party because they couldn't hit). I'm curious to know how much consideration Charles Johnson got for the list. He had four Gold Gloves, a rocket arm, and he had a full season where he had no errors and only one passed ball.

"I've got a headache THIS big, and it's got Excedrin written all over it."

or the eddie murphy skit in "amazon women on the moon" where he gets home from work and then every possible disaster befalls him... obscure but extremely funny oops never mind it was arsenio hall "There ain't no Thelma here!"

Maybe there's a bias there, but I honestly think he's terrible. He's an obnoxious jerk who takes himself far too seriously, and he's just not good at describing the action, both in football and baseball. He's far more interested in being witty and cool than calling the game. I echo goony's sentiments on this one. I think Buck comes off as arrogant, and his bias is evident in some of his broadcasts. As I said earlier, the person sharing the booth with him certainly doesn't help matters. I just try to zone him out when watching a game that he's calling. I bolded the last sentence of goony's post for a reason. To me, that sentence perfectly describes Bob Costas these days. I used to think Costas did a great job whenever given play-by-play duties, regardless of sport. But these days, it's almost like he's trying too hard to make every single play seem dramatic.

We'll have to agree to disagree about the quality of Joe Buck's work. I'd place him as average-at-best, but you could make the argument that his broadcast partner drags him down a bit. However, I actually think Brenneman does a decent job. The problem with a lot of today's broadcasters, especially the guys that have started in the past 10-15 years, is they all sound the same: Chip Caray, Josh Lewin, and to a certain extent, Buck and Brenneman. Very few of them bring anything unique to the broadcast. The difficult part about getting to the top in broadcasting (besides nepotism) is the growing number of former athletes that are given opportunities. This probably isn't as big of an issue on the lower rungs of the ladder, but as you climb up, you'll probably have more and more former athletes blocking your way. The one good thing is that most of them end up doing color commentary rather than play-by-play, but you do see a few here and there calling the action. Another issue is that there are only a limited number of these jobs and a lot of guys tend to stay right where they're at once they get a job broadcasting big league games. And by the way, in the real world, companies don't promote nepotism. They call it a "referral program." :lol:

If your last name is Buck, Caray, or Brenneman, you just show up one day and they hand you a microphone.

That's where you're wrong, though. He is horrible. He has one skill. He's fast. His one skill doesn't provide him much benefit, though. He can't get on base enough to use it to steal bases, and he's not fast enough or skilled enough at stealing bases to have a SB% above 80%. He isn't a good defensive CF; his speed doesn't help him track down as many balls in the gap as it should, and that's not even factoring in his arm, which has all the strength of an 11 year old girl. He doesn't take walks, has no power at all, and excels at making outs-more outs than anyone in the league by a wide margin. He's a bad, bad baseball player. You could make a good argument that Cesar Izturis is the superior player based on his defense alone. completely agree, pierre is just a guy. someone once pointed out to me that pierre doesn't walk because pitchers generally go after him because they don't want him on base. well, if he could hit for any power whatsoever, maybe he could burn pitchers for throwing him meatballs. some of the pitches that were thrown to pierre last year, i could have hit out of the park, there's no excuse for beating them into the ground like he did. too many people learn all they need to know about baseball from the movie "Major League" and insist that fast players hit ground balls and try to leg out hits. if you're a major league player, you should be trying to drive the ball every single time up, no matter the situation, no matter your place in the order, no matter how much speed you have. when you aren't trying to drive the ball, you're cheating yourself and your team and ultimately driving down final production numbers. this is no more evident than in a player like juan pierre. I don't agree with that at all. So you're saying you should go to the plate with the mindset of pulling the ball every single time? That is a horrible approach to hitting. I dont know where, or who gave you that adivce, but that person probably never played baseball in his or her life. Certain situations in baseball need a certain type of approach at the plate. If you're going to the plate just trying to pull the ball everytime, there is a good chance you wont be playing baseball for most teams. Maybe I'm misreading, but I see nothing in his post about pulling the ball. It is possible to hit the ball hard the opposite way. I think what Sulley is saying is that the hitter's approach should be to get a pitch that he can hit hard and put a good swing on it. Even if you don't have the power to put up decent home run totals, you should still try to get a pitch that you can drive hard somewhere. A hard hit ball has a better chance of getting through than an average grounder. And to be honest, I think Pierre got him self into trouble by trying to pull the ball sometimes. He was rolling over on pitches he should have been lining the other way. Instead, he ends up grounding to second regularly.

And will likely help a team lose. The 2003 Florida Marlins might have something to say about that. There's a big difference between 2003 Pierre and the 2005/2006 version of Pierre, not to mention the quality of his teammates during those seasons.

That's where you're wrong, though. He is horrible. He has one skill. He's fast. His one skill doesn't provide him much benefit, though. He can't get on base enough to use it to steal bases, and he's not fast enough or skilled enough at stealing bases to have a SB% above 80%. He isn't a good defensive CF; his speed doesn't help him track down as many balls in the gap as it should, and that's not even factoring in his arm, which has all the strength of an 11 year old girl. He doesn't take walks, has no power at all, and excels at making outs-more outs than anyone in the league by a wide margin. He's a bad, bad baseball player. You could make a good argument that Cesar Izturis is the superior player based on his defense alone. completely agree, pierre is just a guy. someone once pointed out to me that pierre doesn't walk because pitchers generally go after him because they don't want him on base. well, if he could hit for any power whatsoever, maybe he could burn pitchers for throwing him meatballs. some of the pitches that were thrown to pierre last year, i could have hit out of the park, there's no excuse for beating them into the ground like he did. too many people learn all they need to know about baseball from the movie "Major League" and insist that fast players hit ground balls and try to leg out hits. if you're a major league player, you should be trying to drive the ball every single time up, no matter the situation, no matter your place in the order, no matter how much speed you have. when you aren't trying to drive the ball, you're cheating yourself and your team and ultimately driving down final production numbers. this is no more evident than in a player like juan pierre. i find this very amusing. do you really believe you can hit professional pitching at any level let alone the major leauges? http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/hyperbole

I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels this way. I'm sick of hearing that Barrett doesn't call a good game. And to echo what TT said, Cub catchers routinely look into the dugout for signs...not necessarily on every pitch, but it does happen often. On several occasions, I've seen Barrett glance over there prior to putting down a sign.

There are typically 3 results to a Juan Pierre at bat. Ground out to the 2b, ground out to the SS. Ball gets past one of the SS or the 2b. Ok I understand your logic now, but thats your opinion and not statistical evidence. also with your logic the 7 times out of 10 part, umm.... he would be batting .300 hundred which last time I checked was a decent avg. Actually, he's referring to on-base percentage, which is much more important, especially for a guy like Pierre whose job is to get on base. Besides, Pierre hit .292, which most would classify as a decent average. However, that led to a .330 OBP, which is lousy for a tablesetter. And while what BBB said may not be statistical evidence, I'd be willing to bet money that Pierre had more at-bats result in a ball hit to a middle infielder more than just about any other player in the majors in 2006.

He is overrated I dont think he sucks. I know he isnt ideal, but I mean honestly Pierre and Soriano would be spectacular. Thats why I wanted Lofton in the offseason. Nobody and Pierre could add up to spectacular. Not even ARod and Pierre, or Pujols and Pierre. He's really not that bad, seriously! I know he doesnt put up like spectacular numbers, but hes a pretty decent leadoff hitter how can you make a statement like that. Those are the two best players in baseball. The thing is, he hasn't been a pretty decent leadoff hitter since 2004. Besides, as someone else mentioned, leadoff isn't a position. Your best bet is to try to maximize production out of each position on the field without handicapping yourself too much defensively and build the lineup from there. The one issue with that method is that you have players like Soriano who request to bat leadoff and not giving them that spot might cause them to sign elsewhere. But I'd rather have that then try to sign someone just for the sake of batting leadoff. Yes, it would be great if the Cubs had a leadoff hitter that could get on base 40% of the time and steal 50+ bases without getting caught often, but those players are rare. On top of that, you have to hope he plays a position where you have a need.

I agree with most of that except going up there and taking 7-8 pitches late in the game. I think it's more valuable when your wearing out the starting pitcher then a reliever. Mainly because there's 5-6 left in the bullpen. I think it depends on the situation too. If Hill is up and a man is on second and two outs plus the pitchers spot is up next, I want him to drive the ball no matter what the amount of pitches are. Exactly. A walk doesn't do you much good in that situation. Neither does swinging at a pitch out of the strikezone when the pitcher won't give you anything to hit with the ninth spot in the order due up behind you. No one is saying to go up and look for a walk. But if you're not given a good pitch to hit, take your walk and let your teammate do his job.

Agreed-I think the key is that B. Hill might fit on our bench if the team didn't have anyone like him. Since the team already has Theriot though, and Hill can play only one position, he just doesn't become very valuable to this team whatsoever. He can actually play two positions: 3B and 2B.