Friday Briefs

That was a bore of a class, but not as bad as Contracts, imo.

a heckuva Faberge egg!

about him, what leads to the conclusion that he could be a closer? I like a good closer as much as anyone, but this dude sounds like a badass SP, which he ought to get every chance to become. What’s your thinking behind that?

that Prior threw without a lot of effort? And look what he is now. Are these scouts now looking at arm angles, inverted W, etc etc?

“A grenade? THROW IT BACK, THROW IT BACK, THROW IT—”

If Babe Ruth (Braves), Willie Mays (Mets), Yogi Berra (Mets), and Hank Aaron (Brewers) can end their careers with another team, then so can John Smoltz.

I feel like I just read a story, I think about the Smoltz trade, where they mentioned the number of HOFers that had played their whole career with one team, and it was surprisingly low – less than a couple dozen. But I can’t find that article.

i think the fact that he was a “tough-minded, grizzled veteran closer,” coming off 40 innings of 1.80 ERA, 8.10 K/9 and 0.85 WHIP performance, helped his case a bit.

I’m still mad that we didn’t offer percival arbitration, though.

I wonder how loudly Plaschke would have lauded such a move.

I can’t remember if we discussed it here, but no player has ever been unanimously elected to Cooperstown by the writers. Not Ruth, Musial, Mays, Gibson, Aaron, Ozzie, no one. Joe Posnanski had a very good post on this toward the end of last year. Further evidence of how silly the Hall of Fame election process is, and, all of the postseason awards, for that matter.

I think that they are to most of us who look at the game objectively, namely the type of people who read a blog like this one and not the trolls who post over at stltoday that just get all emotional over everything.

As far as the general public is concerned though, look at sports talk radio. The whole reason it exists is to drum up controversy about various things related to the sports world. It’s all editorial/opinion and very rarely about spreading information in a positive way or helping the casual fan understand the game better. As long you have an opinion and like to talk about it, you can be on sports talk radio. It’s pot-stirring on a much grander scale. The same can be said about sportswriting.

Most of us objective people will come to a blog site like this one or another place where you can talk about ideas in a positive manner and argue opinions with other people of your ilk. According to sportswriters, now they have to give opinion based on information they glean from “sources” because you can’t get that on a blog site. So they write more and more opinion columns and fewer and fewer “news” columns because their readers can get the news from hundreds of places. The problem is that most of them don’t want to do the work that goes into formulating opinions that are noteworthy, or they feel that they have to dumb it down to the general public so they don’t get lost in the shuffle. It’s what sites like FireJoeMorgan were created around — lazy and condescending sports journalism.

It goes back to the whole Buzz Bissinger rant last year. He hates the fact that anyone can get published in an easily available format in this day and age because it takes readership away from him, money out of his pocket, and that those people who post can post nonsense because they don’t have to site sources. On the last point I agree, credible sources need to cited, preferably more than one, if you’re breaking any type of news (Deadspin wasn’t about aggregating news, they just enjoy poking fun, and there’s a place for that too) His other two points really don’t apply to him: He still is able to sell books, which are his main source of income, and he still has readership because he’s good at his craft.

Guys like Corky Simpson pull stunts like that so they can get their readership up, make a name for themselves, and they really don’t care that it’s irresponsible journalism, they’re just trying to make a buck (I would call this the Murdoch Effect, related to the effect that Rupert Murdoch has had on the industry, but that’s a 20 page treatise that I don’t want to get into). These are the type of people that shoot holes in Bissinger’s argument, guys like Bill Plaschke, Dan Shaughnessy, and Jay Mariotti, because they’re irresponsible and feel they are bigger than the topics they write about — the “You should believe this because I’m writing about it” theory of journalism. What I like about guys like Olney and Gammons, even though they have their biases, is that you feel like you’re getting credible information from them when they report something, and they both know that the game will be there long after they are gone and that they are lucky to be a part of it while they are here. They feel they’re part of the game, not above it.

he’s “not a ricky guy”.

Seriously, that was his reason. He was going to vote for him next year, though.

Whoever doesn’t vote for him is m——-f—-ing insane.

…ran into the stands and beat up a handless man b/c the man called him half of a you-know-what. He said he would have done it even if the man had no feet. He nearly pistol whipped a black elevator operator to death because he was “insolent.” He may have killed a guy and may have thrown games…neither of which have been proven in a legal sense (but neither has McGwire/Bonds steroid use). But horrors…McGwire and Bonds may have used PED’s just like everyone else in baseball was at the time.

If they’re supposed to consider integrity and character and they’re going to rule out McGwire, a man who seems to be one of the most kind and decent men in recent baseball history, then Ty Cobb HAS to go. Period. I don’t see how using drugs to get an edge when everyone around you is doing so and getting away with it is worse than being a brutal, sadistic racist. If you wanna toss both out, sure…but to say with a straight face that integrity and character are important while allowing Ty Cobb to be in the HOF is utterly repulsive to me.

but the character clause is there in black and white.

So, where were those rules when Gaylord Perry, a cheater by his own admission, got into the Hall Of Fame. Ty Cobb is in the Hall of Fame despite being the biggest prick in recorded sports history, beating up fans, and being accused of killing someone. How about all of the guys who took amphetamines over the years to get through day-night doubleheaders and back to back night/day games? I’m sure there are a few HOF players from that era that had that kind of help. I know you said that it’s been downplayed and ignored, and it should stay that way to certain extent. Here’s the thing for me: McGwire has never been proven to use steroids, and you can cast a reasonable doubt as to whether he ever took steroids. I think that you have to wait for Bonds’ federal trial before you can say one way or the other — if he’s found guilty of perjury, then you have to assume that he knew that he was taking steroids. I still think he’s a Hall of Fame player based on his accomplishments prior to 2001.

Anyway I could see an argument maybe that Rickey’s personality rubbed Corky the wrong way.

I still fail to see how that makes any difference at all. When complete bastards like Ty Cobb are in, I think you could burn down an orphanage and still have a shot. Obviously nobody could charge into the stands and beat that shit out of fans in this day and age and keep his job (NBA players excluded), but I don’t see how anyone could look objectively and Rickey Henderson and say that his personality traits in any way would disqualify his on field traits. From what I’ve heard from teammates of his, he was a very good teammate and a likable guy, it’s just that very few people could understand what he was talking about half the time.