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26 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

Stark/MLBCentral trivia question of the day:

“Ryan Howard once had 4 straight seasons of 45+ HR and 135+ RBIs. Only 2 active players have ever even had one season like that. Can you name them?”

 

pujols has to be one

miggy could be another

nope, chris davis has that one stupid year, it's him.

 

Edited by Goo Punch
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pujols has to be one
miggy could be another
nope, chris davis has that one stupid year, it's him.
 

Yeah pujols was the easy one.
I thought Stanton last year was the other but ended 3 RBIs short.
Correct on Chris Davis with a C: 2013 53 HR, 138 RBI

(For grins, Davis with a K would need 5 HRs and 29 RBIs over A’s final 21 games to join the list)
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it's also interesting to me how we have a decades-long history of going and getting guys from the far east who've spent their entire lives having no problems throwing insane numbers of pitches, including using all sorts of screw balls and breaking pitches, only to have our coaches drastically change their regimens, have them go away from what they've always done, to inevitably see them screw up their  elbows after arriving in america, time after time after time after time. 

 

 

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That’s terrible.
I kinda feel for Joe...and kinda wish MLB would institute a “term limit” on umpires.
This is his 42 year.
He broke in at the end of the season that would see the Big Red Machine win their 2nd straight World Series.
He was part of the crew that worked Nolan Ryan’s FIFTH no-hitter.
There have been 8 different presidents since he first worked a MLB game. Gerald Ford was in office when he debuted.

In summary, Joe is kinda old. Maybe he’s holding on for full social security. He’ll turn 66 the night of game 7, if necessary, of the World Series this year.

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Joe Pos:
This Jacob deGrom season is the most Mets thing ever.

All my life, my best friends have been New York Mets fans. It may say something about me that I am a Mets fan magnet … probably best not to think about it. But being around Mets fans continuously for 40 years has led me to one fairly obvious but still wonderful revelation.

This Jacob deGrom season is the most Mets thing ever.

If you look around, you find that many people are using deGrom’s extraordinary season as a referendum on the pitcher win stat. That’s fair. DeGrom is 8-8 with an insane 1.68 ERA and an MLB record of 24 consecutive games allowing three or fewer runs. So, yes, the mediocrity of his won-loss record in the face of such excellence does spotlight the limitations of pitcher wins and losses.

But who doesn’t know that already? The won-loss record still stands as a proud piece of American nostalgia — it has been too big a part of our lives as baseball fans to go away or be entirely ignored – but does anyone take it seriously? Would anyone take Shane Bieber or Yovani Gallardo or Zack Godley over deGrom because they have much better records?

It’s much more fun to talk about just how Mets-esque this deGrom season is.

“It is just like the Mets not to score any runs for him,” one of my Mets friends, Adam, says. “Really, this can happen to NO OTHER TEAM.”

There’s a special place in the sports universe for the Mets, a place not quite like any other. Mets fans live in purgatory. They are certainly not charmed like those fans who often get to celebrate, say, Yankees fans or Cardinals fans or, these days, Red Sox fans. But they are not quite jinxed the way Brewers or Mariners or Padres fans are. They live in the unsteady middle ground.

Only that’s not right either, because the Mets are rarely in the middle. They’re fortunate. Or they’re unfortunate. Or — and this is particularly a Mets trait — they’re both at exactly the same time. It’s like another of my Mets friends, Mike, says: “Being a Mets fan means always having to answer, karmically, for the two grandest miracles in baseball history.”

And that’s exactly it.

“The last miracle I did,” George Burns as God says in the movie “Oh God,” “was the 1969 Mets. Before that, I think you have to go back to the Red Sea.”

Somewhere in my huge stack of unfinished projects, there’s one called “Most satisfying sports seasons ever.” The idea was to find the seasons that made sports fans happiest on a 1 to 100 scale. I believe the 1969 Mets are No. 1 on the list*; every single thing about the Miracle Mets was surprising and wonderful and life-affirming. It was one of those seasons that was so fulfilling, you know at the end Mets fans shouted to the heavens, “I’m good. I can live on the joy of this one for the rest of my life.”

*The 2015 Royals, 2016 Cubs and 2017 Eagles would be very high on that list now.

And then the Mets had another of those years in 1986, when a cast of extraordinary characters — Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, on and on — played a season for the ages, found themselves on the brink of an all-time heartbreak, and then won the whole thing on a colossal series of good timing and lucky breaks.

Any Mets fan who lived through those two magical years has no right to complain about anything ever, even if the Mets lost 100 games every other season. But the Mets have not lost 100 games every other season. They have not lost 100 games in 25 seasons. They’ve been to two other World Series, made a bunch of playoffs, had a bunch of stars, etc.

On the other hand, 1986 is 32 years ago – many Mets fans didn’t get to enjoy either of those seasons. And for those fans, where’s the payoff? Yes, the Mets are occasionally good, but they are also comically bad, often at exactly the same time. They are forever New York’s second baseball team. There is a long series of Mets heartbreaks, from blowing a 7 ½ game lead in 2007, to their bullpen blowups in the 2015 World Series, to the long series of injuries that follow the team like a vengeful storm cloud.

“And yet,” Mike says, “how can you possibly blame dark fates after 1969? After 1986? Nobody wants to hear it, except other angst-ridden Mets fans.”

All of this is why deGrom’s season is so perfect. The New York Mets are 12-16 in deGrom’s 28 starts. How is this even possible? DeGrom has an outside chance of having baseball’s lowest ERA of the last 50 seasons, since Bob Gibson in the year of the pitcher. That mark was set by another Met, Gooden, in 1985, when he had a 1.53 ERA.

You know what the Mets’ record was in Gooden’s starts? Right: 28-7. Even those seven losses included a couple of absurdities, like the time he pitched nine shutout innings against the Cardinals and New York lost anyway because Cesar Cedeno homered off Jesse Orosco in the 10th.

Here we are with deGrom challenging Gooden’s ERA mark, and the Mets have found a way to lose 16 of deGrom’s starts. Even if you take away the game against Philadelphia when deGrom only pitched one inning before being taken out for precautionary reasons, this seems impossible. As you already know, he didn’t give up more than three runs in any of those starts; his ERA in the losses is 1.99.

DeGrom threw seven shutout innings against the Marlins; the Mets couldn’t score and the bullpen blew the game in the ninth. He was brilliant against the Cubs, allowing one run and striking out 13. The Mets lost that one in 14. He was brilliant again against the Cubs, going eight and allowing just one. The Mets lost that one in 11.

This is the entire baffling, troubling and wonderful New York Mets character wrapped into one season – utter brilliance and sheer incompetence blended together to create a big old pile of mediocrity. In this way, deGrom’s 8-8 won-loss record is perfect.

“I love this team,” Adam says. “I love baseball. But sometimes I hate this team. I hate baseball. DeGrom is the best pitcher in baseball this season. He deserves to win the Cy Young like I deserve to see the Mets win another World Series. It won’t happen … either of them.”

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Nobody position player on the Padres with more than 200 PA's this season is hitting better than .259.  And currently 5, but possibly as many as 7, position players are already over 100 strikeouts, or are on pace to be over 100Ks by season's end.  

I don't want to go back to the juice-era, but this is beyond bad.  I know there's more focus on WAR and OPS, but a strikeout in baseball is bad, mmkay?  Nobody gets to go anywhere when you strikeout.  And don't tell yourself, "yeah but, I'm racking up the starter's pitch count."  The guys stranded on 2nd and 3rd don't care about his pitch count.

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