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Hank Chinaski

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Everything posted by Hank Chinaski

  1. Complicated guy. Obviously amazing athlete, important civil rights figure, did a lot of great work with youth and gangs, also probably beat up some women. But yes, maybe the greatest football player to ever live, relative to his era.
  2. I mean, his current situation does not involve A&M or college station, so he wins this round with his course-correction. But yeah…
  3. If Brantley ever makes it back, he’ll probably get some time at 1B. But I doubt they’ll acquire a 1B in 2023. Maybe a defensively versatile guy who can play 1B some, like Diaz could last couple seasons, but I’m not even sure who fits that description. We’re stuck with Abreu for a while. It would be nice if he could just be an average hitter.
  4. I think they’re a 85-90 win team, but they’re certainly not “doomed” to it.
  5. 100%. It’s great that he’s overperformed while Altuve has been out. But he’s not maintaining that BABIP, because only guys who hit the ball really hard can do that (and even they usually don’t). Again, he’s a good guy to have on the roster, but shouldn’t be playing every day (or even every-other day) on a good team.
  6. Yeah, he fills the utility role, like Diaz the last couple of seasons. He’s a valuable player if he can be a league-average hitter (he probably isn’t but has been thus far in 2023) due to the versatility. By no means should Dusty go out of his way to fit him into the lineup every day though.
  7. I thought more along the lines of your podcast co-host, “Andrew”, and thought Josh Bell should have been the target. Cleveland got him for 2 years / $33mm and he’s only 30. Andrew seems really smart.
  8. Eh…we all thought Abreu would be an upgrade over the 2022 version of Yuli. We didn’t all think it was a great contract/signing, precisely because of Father Time. Three years was always too much for him.
  9. I mean, Dusty makes all kinds of asinine decisions, but this actually seems reasonable.
  10. Don’t be such a goddamned pessimist. They're going 85-77.
  11. Reminder that Crane decided it was a good idea to not have a GM this past off-season and he Jerry Jonsed his way to singing Abreu, Brantley and Montero.
  12. I assumed this was a joke, but the few here who have reviewed his other takes (I’ll abstain) indicate that it probably isn’t. Imagine thinking that Tom Herman had this program “set for a NC run” when he left his successor with a roster that had a total of zero players drafted. None. If one can genuinely believe this, I imagine that his thoughts about politics or anything else in life are equally asinine.
  13. I guess I don’t see it as pessimism? I’m saying that, objectively, half the lineup is made up of sub-average hitters and the rotation is two good starters, a promising rookie, and quad-A guys. That’s what mediocre teams look like. That’s reality, not pessimism. For example - I have zero doubt that Alex Bregman is still good and will end up with a good season, because the data tell me that he’s been the same guy so far in 2023 that he’s always been. The results are likely to follow. On the other hand, the data tell us that Jose Abreu is not the same guy he’s always been, and thus I expect him to have a poor season, in line with what the data suggest he is now. There’s reason to believe that Yordan and Tucker will be even better than they’ve been. There’s no reason to believe that Meyers or Maldanado or Dubon or Bielak will. None of these forecasts are optimistic or pessimistic; they’re simply the most likely outcomes.
  14. I don’t understand how anyone has been seeing anything other than a wholly mediocre, .500-ish team when you look at this roster. Jose Altuve alone isn’t fixing this. And there aren’t going to be any moves to be made at the deadline that are going to fix this, because the Astros don’t have much prospect capital and they’re more than a few patches away from being any kind of real contender. It didn’t have to go this way, but the owner wanted to play GM over the winter. Would Lunhow have signed Abreu to that deal? Montero? Is that how he would have allocated resources? Hell, would Click? Of course not. It was a negligent off-season coming off of a WS title. Hubris. This is what the owner deserves, frankly.
  15. The idea that there will ever be a world in which they won’t notice “every little thing that’s said about the sips”…
  16. Yup, the sample size isn’t that small anymore. He’s past the count of PAs and batted-ball event at which the K rate, BB rate and contact quality tend to stabilize and accurately describe who he is. These aren’t necessarily predictive per se, but they are real indicators. He’s a disaster and is unlikely to even come close to justifying the contract that Crane gave him.
  17. I didn’t love it. I thought it was one year and several million dollars too much. I don’t think I was the only one. That said, I did think Abreu would be better offensively than Yuli was in 2022, so I did expect that it would be an upgrade, even if it was too much money. But beyond what fans think, the problem is that there was reason to believe that Abreu’s ability was declining. A national writer said as much at the time - that his bat speed was slowing and his 2022 season showed it. This is the kind of stuff analytically-inclined front offices would be likely to detect. But the owner decided that we didn’t need anyone leading a coherent front office this past off-season. That’s the problem.
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