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Hank Chinaski

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Everything posted by Hank Chinaski

  1. Anything we get from LM this year is bonus; he shouldn’t be counted on for anything.
  2. Guess it depends on what you mean by “good for the game.” It’s great for the owners. More teams have a chance to play in the postseason, which increases interest for a few more fan bases. Also, they are less incentivized to try to build great teams (and thus can get away with lower payrolls) since you get to the playoffs for being just pretty good. On the flip side, the more teams that get into the playoffs, the less likely it is that the actual best teams - proven over 162 games, not 7 - play in the WS.
  3. Do you understand why Dave Winfield is in the HOF and not Barry Bonds?
  4. Is there evidence that postseason pitching (in the wild card era) is actually better than regular season pitching, over a large enough sample? Genuine question - I don’t think I’ve seen any data on this. I understand the hypothesis, but don’t know how/if it has been studied. Anyway, Jeter played in 158 postseason games in his career - so, a full season’s worth. I would suspect that over 700+ postseason PAs, he faced a few great pitchers, some good pitchers, and many average-ish pitchers, etc. Given that we have a large sample there and a large sample for his career performance, and the results are nearly identical, then the most reasonable conclusion is that the quality of pitching he faced over each sample is basically the same.
  5. I thought it was solid. The last sentence made it.
  6. If they continue at this pace and go, say, 25-30 the rest of the way, they’ll be at 95 wins. It would take an absolutely shocking collapse for them to miss the playoffs.
  7. Again, the guy has a 113 wRC+ in the equivalent of a full season of PAs at the MLB level. He’s above 100 against lefties and righties. I agree, he should be playing most days at this point.
  8. Yeah, any 7-game series between good teams is going to be essentially a coin flip. The team with the better roster loses nearly half the time, because having a marginally better roster doesn’t mean much in a small handful of games. And it’s usually not due to managerial decisions. As much as Dusty drives me nuts with his lineups, that’s not why the team lost to ATL last year. And we can talk all day long about Hinch pulling Greinke in G7, but the truth is that Harris’s pitch that Kendrick poked down the RF line was a good pitch; Kendrick hit something like .130 on low/outside pitches that entire season. That he so improbably hit that pitch for a HR doesn’t mean that Hinch cost the Astros that game. It was bad luck.
  9. Mostly agree. He was both somewhat overrated and also a great player. Overrated in the sense that he wasn’t a particularly good defensive SS (but won a bunch of gold gloves) and had the incessant “postseason hero” narrative on a hugely successful NY team (he was the exact same hitter in the postseason as he was in the regular season, he didn’t have some “magic” that made him better in the postseason). But, that doesn’t change the fact that he was a very good player and was remarkably consistent for a very long time, a clear HOFer.
  10. Agree with the premise, but not sure that I agree with the notion that the Astros have that much surplus at SP, particularly after moving Odorizzi. McCullers may be back in ‘22, but how good will he be? How much work load will he be able to handle? Seems like a question mark to me.
  11. Pretty much describes me as well. The transfers, the player payments, the conference shifting, etc…it’s all good for the players, and I’m glad for them, but it makes the sport far less interesting to me. It doesn’t help that I’m getting older and that Texas has not only sucked for a decade, but been excruciatingly aggravating and boring too, but the money has kind of ruined the sport in a lot of ways. Not saying anyone should see it the same way, just my view.
  12. CSB: my father in law is a physician who practiced in Houston for almost his entire career. Some of his patients included guys in the Astros front office. One day, sometime in the 80s when the Dodgers were in town, one of his Astros patients asked if he could see Vin, who had some flu/cold symptoms. So there he was, in an exam room, as Scully was telling him his list of symptoms, in that iconic voice, and my FiL was having trouble concentrating because he just kept thinking about how surreal the whole thing was. RIP VS, that voice is synonymous with baseball.
  13. 1 run on 9 hits and 2 BB. That’s not easy to do.
  14. 1) yes, they’re “adding” him in the sense that he hasn’t played yet this year. 2) I said they’re “arguably” the two best. Thus they are arguably not the two best. But Soto is generally regarded as the best hitter in baseball and Tatis is second in position player WAR since he debuted in 2019…second to Soto. (From 2019-2021, since Tatis hasn’t played in 2022.)
  15. Reynolds would be the best you could do IMO. He’s got a few more years of control, he’s in his prime, etc. Because of that, he’s gonna cost you. But I think it’s mostly worth it. He’d be your CF for the next 3+ years.
  16. The Nationals were like that too until they had Soto. (And no, he wasn’t solely responsible for their WS win; teams are often said to be unable to get over the hump, until they do. That is typically more narrative than reality.) For any single team, of course the odds are that they won’t win the WS. And the Dodgers are probably still better (even if Tatis is playing). But SD will have Soto for 2 more years too. It’s a ballsy move, given what they had to give up, but cool to see them going all in.
  17. I mean, they’re 58-46 and are adding arguably the two best players in MLB to the team.
  18. Siri is 27 and has contact / strikeout issues that aren’t likely to go away. He’s got value as a defender and has speed, but he’s unlikely at this stage to become even an average MLB hitter.
  19. I like it. Mancini has a career 113 wRC+ and can play OF and 1B. Bell has a career wRC+ of 118 and can’t play in the OF, and would have cost considerably more (presumably). I like Bell more as a pure hitter but position flexibility has value and he was relatively cheap.
  20. Yes. And Bregman (125) currently has a higher wRC+ than Tucker (123).
  21. This is a reasonable expectation, but you have to keep in mind that Texas A&M’s institutional inferiority complex as it relates to the University of Texas often precludes rational action. This only became more pronounced in the Big 12 era. I know this sounds like hyperbole coming from a Texas grad, or like I’m talking about their fans/alums and not their administration…but I’m really not. They aren’t rational when it comes to UT. They are perpetually trying to get out of the UT shadow (not in athletics per se, just in general). They were going to sprint to any opportunity that ever came up to one-up UT - I can assure you of that. Again - this is a school that literally declined Texas’s offer to develop a network in partnership with them, then, when Texas did it themselves, identified the network as the “final straw” that forced their hand to leave. “Reasoning” with A&M, when you’re UT, really is easier said than done.
  22. His career is somewhat comparable to Don Mattingly’s in that he was one of the best players in the game for a short period of time early in his career (‘87-‘91) but had trouble staying healthy, which led to missed games and less power as he got older. As for being a prick, yeah, I’ve read stories that certainly indicate there’s truth to that. Also a bit of a racist, allegedly.
  23. Gotta hand it to Judge…I thought he was nuts for turning down that contract offer before the season started, given his age and injury history. Assuming he stays healthy the rest of the season, I was wrong; he’ll probably end up getting a better deal. His off-season could be fascinating. NYY will obviously have a ton of pressure to bring him back, and that’s what I’d expect to happen. But they’ll have to up the ante, and I wonder how much higher than the original offer they’re willing to go.
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