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10 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

JoePos with an epic look back at the 1988 Orioles' 0-21 start.

https://www.mlb.com/news/orioles-lost-first-21-games-in-1988/c-275038244

 

Hits close to home -- I grew up way out in the country, and a guy who lived a couple of houses away was a scout for the Phillies whose claim to fame was signing Jeff Stone.

Meanwhile on the Astros thread, you’d think most posters feel the 2018 Astros squad is worse than that ‘88 O’s squuad 

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8 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

Meanwhile on the Astros thread, you’d think most posters feel the 2018 Astros squad is worse than that ‘88 O’s squuad 

I haven't visited lately, and will probably even stay away during the AZ series, but I assume that utgrad97 still wants to fire Hinch like he did DURING the playoffs last season?

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5 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

I haven't visited lately, and will probably even stay away during the AZ series, but I assume that utgrad97 still wants to fire Hinch like he did DURING the playoffs last season?

utgrad97 hasn’t appeared in the thread (or is very cleverly disguised).

expectations, man. We think we should win every game.

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9 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

I haven't visited lately, and will probably even stay away during the AZ series, but I assume that utgrad97 still wants to fire Hinch like he did DURING the playoffs last season?

About half the overreactors on the thread want to fire him it seems like 

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12 hours ago, UTexasFight said:

Meanwhile on the Astros thread, you’d think most posters feel the 2018 Astros squad is worse than that ‘88 O’s squuad 

Well, to be fair, for a lot of them this is the first time they've ever actually watched baseball in May.

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Who would be in your “Hall of Game”?

 

from JoePos in the athletic:

Every now and again, my friend Bob Kendrick has a moment of inspiration. Bob is the president of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, and the challenges there are monumental. It’s tough keeping a museum going anywhere in America these days. Try doing it with a museum dedicated to a long-defunct baseball league made necessary because of shameless and seemingly unbreakable segregation in Major League Baseball.

Bob believes — as I do — that the story of the Negro Leagues is an indispensable American story, a complicated story but one filled with more joy than sadness, more laughter than anger, more triumph than defeat. These men and women of the Negro Leagues helped change this country. They built the bridge, as Buck O’Neil used to say, that Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby and others walked across.

That’s why Bob constantly thinks about ways to tell that story to a new generation. Some of his ideas are good. Some — and he’d be the first to tell you this — don’t work. And every now and again, he has this moment of inspiration.

He will come up with something like the Hall of Game.

I spend roughly 67 percent of my waking hours thinking about the Baseball Hall of Fame. I can’t tell you exactly what it is that fascinates me about it — probably it’s that I just like remembering. There’s a wonderful moment in the Barry Levinson movie Avalon, where the family was trying to remember if the family patriarch came to America in 1925 or 1926, and one of the grandsons asked, “Come on… what difference does it make?”

And his father said, “If you stop remembering, you forget.”

So I like that the Baseball Hall of Fame never stops remembering. It matters to me who does and does not get into the Hall of Fame because we are remembering baseball and, in a small way, shaping how baseball will be remembered for the future.

But there’s a catch. The plaque room of the Hall of Fame celebrates players who achieved irreproachable greatness. That’s the whole point. To get in, a player needs a 75 percent approval rating. These are the best of the best, the top one percent, as the Hall often reminds us.

But baseball — and our experiences in baseball — revolves around so much more than just the top one percent. Was your favorite player growing up a Hall of Famer? Maybe he was. Probably he wasn’t. Think about the Al Oliver or Dale Murphy or Dwight Evans or Bret Saberhagen poster on your wall. My favorite player was Duane Kuiper. There were no posters of him available. I made one of newspaper photos.

What about these amazing players who will never get into the Hall of Fame but were no less successful at exploding the imagination? You have probably heard about the Hall of Very Good and other projects like it. They celebrate those great players who were not quite Hall of Famers.

Well, Bob came up with his own slightly different idea. He came up with the Negro Leagues Museum’s Hall of Game, which is simply this: A celebration of Major League players who “competed with the same passion, determination, skill and flair exhibited by the heroes of the Negro Leagues.” This year’s inductees will be honored June 9 at the Gem Theater in Kansas City, right across from the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum.

For Bob, it is of course a new avenue to share the stories of Negro Leagues Baseball. But for the rest of us, this is something else. It is a whole other way to remember players.

Look: It’s only the fifth year of the award, but already you can see an extraordinary opportunity to look at baseball history in an entirely different way. There have been numerous Hall of Famers inducted — Lou Brock, Roberto Clemente, Joe Morgan, Dave Winfield, Rickey Henderson, Fergie Jenkins, Ozzie Smith, Orlando Cepeda, Tony Perez, Eddie Murray — but those aren’t the ones I find fascinating.

Maury Wills is one I find interesting. He was inducted into the Hall of Game last year. There have been many, many, many debates about Wills’ Hall of Fame case. He was an MVP, a five-time All-Star, a Gold Glove winner and he brought the stolen base back into the game in a huge way. He also had a lifetime .331 slugging percentage and his 39.7 lifetime Wins Above Replacement is well shy of the Hall of Fame standard.

But there is no argument about his Hall of Game bonafides. This is because the Hall of Game is more about howamazing players played the game. That’s the brilliance of it.

This year, J.R. Richard will be inducted. He is not a Hall of Famer. J.R. Richard is one of baseball’s saddest stories. He was a high school phenom, a 6-foot-8 force of nature who once hit four homers in a game and, as a pitcher, did not allow a single run his senior season. Once he harnessed his talent, he was an extraordinary pitcher. He is one of only five pitchers (Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan, Curt Schilling and Sandy Koufax are the other four) to strike out 300 batters in consecutive seasons. He was on his way to the Hall of Fame.

And he was having his best year in 1980 when he had a stroke and collapsed in the outfield; he never pitched in the Major Leagues again.

You can’t really put J.R. Richard in the Hall of Fame. But you absolutely can and should put him in the Hall of Game.

Same with Mudcat Grant. He won 145 games and was the first African American pitcher in the American League to win 20 games in a season. But really he was the epitome of cool. He was so cool that after he got his nickname Mudcat because some minor leaguer thought he was from Mississippi (he was from Florida), he was not offended. He embraced that nickname, made it into something awesome. He became lead singer for a band called “Mudcat and the Kittens.”

GettyImages-488272569-1024x679.jpg

Mudcat Grant isn’t going to the Hall of Fame. But in 1965, he won 21 games with a league-leading six shutouts, led the Minnesota Twins to an unlikely World Series where he twice beat the Dodgers, particularly in Game 6 where he pitched a complete game and hit a home run. Mudcat Grant played the game with flair and joy, and he should be remembered.

Now, he’s in the Hall of Game. And he will be remembered.

Let’s mention two more inductees this year: Dick Allen and Kenny Lofton. Dick Allen, like Maury Wills, has had his Hall of Fame case debated endlessly. Allen was an extraordinary hitter and a controversial figure. We don’t need to go into all that now, but suffice it to say that Allen put up great numbers and won an MVP award… and yet he never got even 20 percent of the Hall of Fame vote.

That’s the Hall of Fame. The Hall of Game concerns itself with how someone played the game. Allen’s hitting power — and the legendary stories told about some of his home runs — reminds of those remarkable Negro Leagues hitters like Mule Suttles or Josh Gibson. And if Allen wasn’t always an easy guy to get along with, well, the Negro Leagues are filled with stories of legends who would sooner fight you than shake your hand.

In other words, the Hall of Game lets us remember and celebrate Allen in all his splendor and storminess even if (so far) he has fallen short of the Cooperstown.

Lofton was never really a candidate for Cooperstown. He fell off the Hall of Fame ballot after one year when he got just 18 votes. He was, in many ways, a victim of circumstance; he was on an impossibly loaded ballot that had as many as a dozen future Hall of Famers on it, depending on how the whole PED thing plays out.

Lofton has a persuasive Hall of Fame case because he did so many things well on a field. He was an elite defender, a great base stealer, a .300 hitter (well, he fell four hits shy of .300 over his career) and so on. Then, there’s a persuasive case that Lofton was not quite a Hall of Fame. You could argue either way and have strong points.

But the Hall of Game doesn’t walk that well-worn path. Was Lofton an electrifying player? Absolutely. He specifically reminded Buck O’Neil of Negro Leagues icon Cool Papa Bell. He played baseball aggressively, joyfully, he’s the last American Leaguer to steal 75 bases in a season, he made the game jump and move. He’s a Hall of Gamer.

The exciting thing about the Hall of Game, to me, is where it goes from here. I keep throwing names at Bob. Dwight Gooden should be in. Eric Davis should be in. Fred McGriff should be in.

Vince Coleman … Bobby Bonds … Bo Jackson … Kirk Gibson … Dusty Baker … Jimmy Wynn … Darryl Strawberry … Fernando Valenzuela … Lonnie Smith … Hideo Nomo … What about Pete Rose?

The possibilities are not endless but they are wonderful. Think of those players who are your favorites and your kids’ favorites. Think of Chicago’s Javy Báez, for instance, perhaps the most fun player in baseball. I don’t know if Javy Báez will end up in the Hall of Fame. But I can tell you right now that he belongs in the Hall of Game.

 

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23 minutes ago, spystud13 said:

 

 

11 is fucking impressive. 

I know one dude who's not impressed.

Casper Wells had a -10 wRC+ in 2013.

He was somehow on 4 different ML rosters that season.  I guess because he was gritty and gutty.

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3 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

I know one dude who's not impressed.

Casper Wells had a -10 wRC+ in 2013.

He was somehow on 4 different ML rosters that season.  I guess because he was gritty and gutty.

 

2 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

Tony Pena had a -8 in 235 PA in 2008.

help me understand how wRC+ can go negative, i thought it was a percentage of runs created vis a vis the average which is 100.

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9 hours ago, gsoda3 said:

 

help me understand how wRC+ can go negative, i thought it was a percentage of runs created vis a vis the average which is 100.

It takes wOBA (which can't be negative) and then subtracts a league average weighting factor out of it, which can make it negative if your wOBA is putrid enough.  (Same kind of thing can happen with OPS+.)

A lot of pitchers have wRC+ < 0.

 

Edited by Beau Vine
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Pujols is having a Michael Jordan-like decline. You can look at him and tell that he’s aged, but the numbers are still surprisingly good. Without looking, guess his average yearly HR and RBI since joining the Angels.

 

 

28 HR, 98 RBI. That’s one helluva decline.

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4 hours ago, Goo Punch said:

Pujols is having a Michael Jordan-like decline. You can look at him and tell that he’s aged, but the numbers are still surprisingly good. Without looking, guess his average yearly HR and RBI since joining the Angels.

 

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28 HR, 98 RBI. That’s one helluva decline.

 

4 hours ago, Helobious said:

Homers & RBI's... by far the most important stats needed to value a hitter. 

Jesus, I can't believe someone actually knows less about baseball than Helobious.

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