with a friend, tis her birthday!!!
We’ll be in 591 row 11 aka pretty close to the party deck…
Ill try to grab kaz if i can. Is the bar close to the stadium, because i ride the metro over since i live on the IL side, and really dont want to walk a million feet.

he still should be traded. It is good for the Cardinals and it is good for Chris. He needs to go to a team where he can play in a more natural position (1B or DH) and stop costing the Cardinals runs in the OF.

But I think the contingent of fans who think Duncan MUST GO NOW is pretty small. Let him start hitting again, the trade deadline is a long ways away. However, he DOES need to be traded, for the reasons that are obvious and stated a few hundred times a day—terrible defense, overcrowded OF, valuable lefty power bat, make room for Rasmus, and the whole bit.

If Duncan really does go back to his previous levels of production, he is a very valuable player; I think his value is greatly underestimated at times. He has a .944 OPS against RHP in 536 AB….that kind of production considerable.

You will get no argument from me about his fielding; it is awful. If a suitable trade could be found where we get a piece of real value for Duncan, say a good young SS or 2B from an AL team, that would be fine. I just get tired of the hearing that we should basically dump him for pennies on the dollar.

we’ve all seen him fall down after catching the ball, and we’ve seen the wacky “run to a nice green spot and then at the last second jump 3 feet in the air to catch a ball he misjudged” plays, and of course we all saw the game last week where he lost the popup in the lights and gave up a double (and an insurance run). The whole world saw him miss 2 or 3 balls in one game in the frigging world series. And the whole “close my eyes and catch it one-handed” thing is incredibly nerve-wracking. Anecdotally, he has seemed really bad on defense.

And by every analytical system out there, he was gawdawful in ‘06 and ‘07. Worse than Barry Bonds, by PMR, IIRC.

However, this year, so far, he hasn’t been that bad when looking at the various systems. by THT’s RZR, he’s been middle-of-the-pack; at .923 (36 of 39) w/9 ooz catches, he’s right up there with holliday and ethier and Bay (and ludwick?), and well above Schumaker (!!!). By the Bill James Online / Fielding Bible stats, he’s 45 for 45. By the more primitive B-R range factor per nine innings (RF9) stat, he’s well above average for a LF (2.44 for duncan vs 1.86 for the league). And by BP’s davenport translations, which have a bad rap but are at least one more data point, he’s been worth 2 fielding runs above average in LF.

Fellow geeks- is there anything I’m missing?

he had a groin injury last year, which may have made him look a lot worse than he was, and he’s been having a crisis of confidence, which makes him look really bad on TV. but it does seem like he catches the darn ball an awful lot of the time. At what point do we start ignoring our lying eyes, and reconsider our opinions about how bad Duncan is on defense? especially after all the extra bases the, ahem, guys who are in as defensive replacements seem to be giving up lately?

The problem Duncan has is that when he is bad, he is VERY BAD. In addition, he tends to make routine plays look VERY SCARY. This taints the perception of his defense. It is frustrating to watch him not shake off an error and put it behind him. His errors tend to come in bunches.

Truthfully, he doesn’t miss that many balls. He has better speed than you think because his legs are 8 ft long. It helps him get to balls other guys probably don’t. He seldom makes any catch look easy, so when he makes a diving catch you tend to write it off as a bad route to the ball. I think, objectively, the numbers are probably right. His positioning and routes are really bad; and, as you said, the “close-your-eyes-and-stick-up-the-glove” approach is really disconcerting. That said, it usually ends up in the glove.

(w/o having the time to check the #’s) that his HR/FB is considerably lower than it’s been in the past? This could be attibutable to bad luck or possibly an injury that’s keeping his fly balls from flying as far. I’ve seen nothing to indicate injury so maybe his relative lack of power this year is resulting from simple bad luck.

That said, he also sees the most P/PA of anyone on the roster. Either Ricky Horton or Al the other day made the point that he seems to be taking a lot of good pitches to hit. If this is true, could it be plausible that he’s taking good pitches to hit and become a better 2 strike hitter than in the past? He’s trying harder not to strike out and, in doing so, has forgone some power? If true, I think we’d be better off w/ more HR’s and more K’s than a singles hitter who can’t play LF. Duncan only has value if he’s hitting for power.

can do some really weird things at times though, for instance in yesterday’s game on the HR that Bay hit against Izzy, Chris got back to the wall in plenty of time, only he was about 10 feet over from where the ball was. He tried to recover, stumbling along the wall, trying to get to the ball. Had he tracked the ball well, he possibly would have caught that ball because it seemed to just barely cleared the wall.

two very positive traits. But in the very good discussion above about his poor routes and his vertigo-esque body control, I don’t think anyone mentioned his arm.
Perhaps that was out of kindness.
No whip or power in his arm at all. Even for a left-fielder, he has a very weak wing. Adam Dunn may be as bad, or even a little worse, but I can’t think of anyone else who is {Bonds now ‘retired’}.

Lastly, his aforementioned hustle and caring stood out somewhat in ‘06 and ‘07, but this ‘08 bunch has THAT going for it across the board. And Dunc is not the fresh rookie anymore.

I like the kid, but for his sake and ours I hope he is traded.

He’s a DH or 1B. People keep waiting for his offense to make up for his errors, but errors demoralize your team and the pitcher and at the same time jump start the other team. Errors have a physiological impact far beyond the initial unearned run and go a long way to losing a ballgame, you’d have to hit an awful lot to make up for that.

This is probably due to the fact that Duncan basically can only pull the ball so it’s pretty easy set up your defense to defend him. What you see is what you are going to get I think, we are coming up on the 1 year anniversary since he was good and people still have faith in him.

Don’t bring up error totals and tell me he isn’t one of (if not the worst) outfielders in the NL, I watch enough games to know that about every 5 games hes starts he does something dumb in the field that may or may not be counted as an error.

Remember when he dived for a ball and didn’t get within 5 feet of it? Beautiful.

Another classic example of why Duncan isn’t a real Ofer in spite of what you read from his numbers.