80 thoughts on “December 11, 2017: His lawn, Enshrined”

  2. A while back I mentioned that my great-nephew qualified for the Junior National Finals Rodeo. He had a successful ride yesterday and qualified for the short go today. I think he's probably too far back to win, but just getting this far is a tremendous accomplishment. It would be anyway, but he's a ten-year-old competing in the 10-13 age division, so he's competing against lots of kids who are older than he is. We're very proud of him.

  3. The "Off-Season's Greetings" that should have been published yesterday is up now. My plan is to get caught up later this morning, but of course plans can change.

  4. I find I care more about who isn't in the hall of fame then who is. I'd rather explain to my son why Jack made it than why Trammel didn't. So, net win for me.

    Now I just need to mute all games Jack does this year

      1. no, I don't. Because I can just say why Jack (or Catfish Hunter) shouldn't be. That takes care of explaining why every hall-of-very-good pitcher shouldn't be.

        1. Why he shouldn't or why he hasn't? LA vs. Minnesota plays a factor, but I think Koufax being in a smaller league gave him more black ink, which makes his peak seem better relative to Santana's than it was.

          Honestly, if I was drafting the HOF from scratch, I'm not sure Koufax would make it. His 46.1 7-year peak WAR is impressive relative to mere mortals, but is actually lower than the 7-year peak WAR for the HOF average. Seems like you should need to score above-average in peak value by a pretty good margin to make up for a shorter career.

          1. Mostly why he shouldn’t, since he hasn’t been eligible in previous elections. Exceptionalist hype about all cultural things having better in the Sixties aside, I don’t see a tremendous amount of daylight between them when you consider the differences in quality of competition, changes in pitcher useage (Santana was slightly more valuable despite throwing 300 fewer innings than Koufax), and stuff like mound height that I’m not sure stats can fully adjust away even when accounting for the cratering of runs per game.

            1. Objectively, they had very similar careers. I totally agree that Santana should get similar consideration to Koufax.

              While some argue that expansion causes a dilution in talent, I think it's more complicated than that. Given that he was acquired by the Twins as a Rule 5 pick, it's not clear to me that Santana would have really gotten a shot in a 20-team league. More teams means more opportunities for players to prove scouts wrong, and I think it means you wind up with more exceptional players along with, yes, some more dregs at the bottom along the way. But since Santana did get a shot, it was arguably harder to win the CYA with the bigger field of teams in play. And I think the big awards still drive a lot of voters' perception about who the right players are for the HOF.

        2. Reason #1 is Colon winning the Cy over Johan. Winning 3 Cy Youngs is rarefied air and I doubt there would be much resistance to Johan going into the Hall with that on his resume. Also, when Johan went to the Mets, he led the league in ERA and innings pitched, so you could make a case that he should have 4 Cy Youngs.

            1. That, too. In some alternate universe, Santana propelled the Twins to a couple of WS appearances (or wins), going through the Yankees along the way, and drastically increased his perceived value.

              1. Can this universe also include Liriano not getting hurt? Because that is an awesome sounding universe.

                1. It also includes no concussions for the M&M boys or Koskie, who stays in Minnesota to destroy furniture provide clubhouse leadership. And Nick Punto punches i-i.

            2. True. Of course, the only 2 playoff wins the Twins have had since '02 were started by Johan in Yankee Stadium. He left early in '03 with a muscle cramp in his pitching arm, but he got the win in '04.

  5. Eh, getting in through the Veterans Committee is a nice second chance for some players, but it's also just another way for off-field charisma/networking to matter more than your actual on-field performance.

    I know this is excessive, but I decided to look through the list. Pitchers who finished their career after Morris (1994)--or are still pitching--and have a higher JAWS (38.4).

    Bartolo Colon - 40.4 (and counting?)
    Brad Radke - 40.9
    Javier Vazquez - 41.1
    Jamie Moyer - 41.8
    Carlos Zambrano - 41.8
    Cliff Lee - 42.5
    David Wells - 42.5
    Jimmy Key - 43.3 (honestly I don't think I've ever heard of him before)
    Kenny Rogers - 43.5
    Max Scherzer - 43.7
    Frank Viola - 44.4
    Roy Oswalt - 45.1
    Felix Hernandez - 45.4
    Dwight Gooden - 46.1
    Cole Hamels - 46.2
    Mark Langston - 46.3
    Mark Buerhle - 47.1
    Andy Pettitte - 47.5
    Johan Santana - 48.1
    Tim Hudson - 48.5
    Orel Hershiser - 48.6
    Chuck Finley - 49.1
    Kevin Appier - 49.1
    Justin Verlander - 50.0
    CC Sabathia - 51.0
    Bret Saberhagen - 51.3
    David Cone - 53.0
    Zack Grienke - 53.4
    Clayton Kershaw - 54.1
    [Above 54 JAWS or so, most of the pitchers are in the HOF]
    John Smoltz - 54.2 (HOF)
    Kevin Brown - 56.9
    Roy Halladay - 57.6, RIP
    Tom Glavine - 62.9 (HOF)
    62.2 -- average SP HOF
    Mike Mussina - 63.8 (43% on last ballot, up 18%)
    Curt Schilling - 64.5 (52% on last ballot, up 13%)
    Pedro Martinez - 71.1 (HOF)
    Greg Maddux - 81.6 (HOF)
    Randy Johnson - 82.0 (HOF)
    Roger Clemens - 103.3 (45% on last ballot, up 7%)

    39 pitchers, wow.

    Partly, I think you can blame Clemens/Johnson/Maddux/Pedro for some of their contemporaries not getting a fair shake. No one really deserves to be compared to those guys. And Clemens is so far ahead of the rest it's ridiculous.

    Also, I think one of the good reasons to induct guys like Bonds and Clemens is that you can't go back and re-award things like Cy Young and MVP--you can't give the "Fame" back to the players who might not have been on steroids. So you wind up just denying an era even existed, when it was knowingly supported by the (supposedly HOF) commissioner for decades.

      1. for funsies, I looked up Jimmy's splits against the Twins. 24 career starts appearances (17 starts), 9-3 record, 111 2/3 innings, 2.58 ERA, 74:17 K:BB, 635 OOPS.

      3. I was roughly 12 during his best season and it happened during the strike year. Played most of his career in Canada (might as well be Siberia) and was only voted an All-Star four times. Not surprised I don't remember ever hearing about him.

    2. I don't read Schoenfield all that often, but his take on the Morris & Trammell selection is solid. I immediately thought of your comment about "off-field charisma/networking" comment when I read this:

      It’s not surprising that Morris and Trammell made it this time. Five of the six former players on the 16-person committee were American League contemporaries: George Brett, Robin Yount, Dave Winfield, Rod Carew and Dennis Eckersley. (Don Sutton was the other Hall of Fame player on the committee.) One of the executives was Paul Beeston, the president of the Blue Jays when they won two World Series with Morris on the staff. Our former ESPN colleague Jayson Stark was on the committee for the first time, and Jayson has always been a big Hall voter. It was a perfect storm to get Morris and Trammell elected.

        1. Agreed. Even so, he'd have to pick up 6 more votes from non-players on the committee. From teh Repository:

          On July 11, 2008, the Boston Globe portrayed Miller as disdainful of the realignment of the Hall's Veterans Committee, and as uninterested in the chances of his own enshrinement. From the article, Miller was quoted:

          "I find myself unwilling to contemplate one more rigged Veterans Committee whose members are handpicked to reach a particular outcome while offering a pretense of a democratic vote. It is an insult to baseball fans, historians, sportswriters, and especially to those baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century. At the age of 91, I can do without farce."

  7. Also, I was out over the weekend, but damn that Stanton trade is the worst. I feel bad for Marlins fans. I understand that they weren't going to get much back for him in a trade, but when you have a super-duper-star, you should keep him. He's 28, not 38. Yes, it's expensive to keep him, but they have the new stadium and if you're going to go through a rebuild you might as well give the fans 4-5 PA per game to feel good about. Coming off a near 7-win season, projected for a 6-win season, and they figure he's the guy to get rid of. Just the worst.

    1. I’ll give you one guess on which team acquired the last reigning MVP to be traded.

      MLB’s leadership should be roundly excoriated for allowing this cycle to repeat in Florida yet again.

      1. Crazy to think that the other two clubs supposedly willing to trade for Stanton were the Giants & Cardinals, so Yankees, Giants & Cardinals ... with a combined 13 WS appearances since the '94 strike. I mean, he had a no-trade clause and supposedly said he didn't want to rebuild with FL and specified that he wanted to go to a winner, but man.

        1. I think if he's going to play hardball about not wanting to rebuild with FL, you play hardball back and make him waive his NTC before trade discussions. Had he waived his NTC before trade discussions begin, they could potentially have gotten value for him and he would have explicitly given up on the team.

  8. Hearkening back to the discussion about office holiday parties, we had three women (and their +1's) over to our place on Saturday evening. They're all younger than us (anywhere from 3-years to 12), but were very nice. We had a very good time, though there were two stumbles:

    First - During a conversation about Millennials* and the kinds of things that they'll later regret their parents getting rid of after they'd moved out, garage-sale style, only one of the guests (boyfriend of the youngest of my wife's direct report, so maybe 25?) knew who Roger Maris was when I related that my grandmother had gotten rid of my dad's baseball cards when he went to college ... I mean ... what the hell?!

    Second - They were talking 'self-scoring bowling' and I spaced on the name of the restaurant with really good burgers and low-tech bowling in the basement, describing the place in St. Paul near Cretin and serving great Juicy Lucy's. These people had never heard of The Nook. All I got were Matt's, The 5-8 Club and The Blue Door Pub** and then blank stares when I pointed out that those didn't have bowling alleys and were in Mpls.

    *which apparently are made up of an older group of people than I'd believed ...
    **admittedly, at least it was a burger joint actually in St. Paul...

    1. I miss self-scoring for bowling. There's something really satisfying about filling in a strike with a golf pencil.

      1. Ayup. Though if I'm being honest, I did have to look up the scoring online the last time I did it, it had been that long.

    2. *which apparently are made up of an older group of people than I'd believed ...

      Indeed. I came to that realization this past summer when I found out the definition of millenials puts me at about the very beginning of the generation.

      2. I think in theory someone's definition might put me at the beginning as well…but most definitions I see put me just at the end of Gen X.

        I just tried to watch a Jenna Marbles video and can confirm that I'm not a millennial.

      3. I’m not a sociologist, but I really can’t see how the concept of generations as twenty year spans of humanity* continues to hold water, even in popular circulation. At best they’re middling fodder for convenient comedic stereotypes; at worst they’re seriously misguided ways of talking about groups of people with largely disparate life experience somehow lumped into a arbitrarily-defined group. It’s (one of) the social science equivalents of “Jack Morris was the winningest pitcher of the Eighties!!!11!!”

        1. Yeah, I have no use for any arguments about Millenials this or Baby Boomers that. Someone set down some arbitrary boundaries and attempts at generalization follow. Fat lot of good that's done for us.

          1. Co-sign on the bogusness of "generations" pontification. It is a really lazy intellectual approach. Case in point: the "Baby-boomer" "generation" was born over a roughly 20-year period. I was born in 1963 and have very little connection to even Minnesotans born in the early 1950s or late-40s.

              1. I'm also not a sociologist, so I certainly may be wrong here, but I always assumed actual sociologists doing real research don't really use those terms in the way the general public does. Millennials this and Babyboomers that seems like a way to write a pop sociology article, not a scholarly one.

                1. I suspect academic sociologists might take issue with Strauss-Howe generational theory. Both men have been described as a “pop sociologist”; Strauss’ advanced degrees were a J.D. & a master’s in public policy, while Howe is an economist & historian who ought to know better. Their work seems to be based on Karl Mannheim, a sociologist whose work was near seventy years out of date by the time Strauss & Howe published Generations.

            2. I think they're not fine enough. I've noticed an similarity in experience with those born in the 4th quarter of 1977 (Spooky, bjhess) that I don't share with those born after the change in calendar (my wife), or earlier in 1977. I could maybe include those born as early as August 1 or as late as January 31 of the next year as I don't really have the data points.
              I call it "The Meco Micro-generation" as the #1 single in the US on Oct 1, 1977 was the disco take on the Star Wars music (though really, Debbie Boone's "You Light Up My Life" covered most of the weeks we were being born).

    3. I've been to The Nook, once, and wasn't aware there was a bowling alley in the basement. I probably wouldn't have been able to guess it either because it's been quite a while since we've been there.

      1. I mean, my description at least produced ‘arguably equivalent’ spots. But, you did know that you were eating at a burger joint in St. Paul, right?

        1. Yes. Going to Minneapolis would have been much too far. The Nook was ~five minutes away then. I probably would have gotten it after a few minutes because there was only one St. Paul burger place we went to ever.

          1. Not sure if it's still there but there was a classic, wooden bowling alley in Falcon Heights (north of St. Paul) that returned the balls above-ground to the ball-return-area. Self-scoring and Schmidt beer.

    3. Happy for him and all that, but are the Phillies good enough to be throwing $16 million at the Pat Nesheks of the world?

      Alternatively: is throwing $16 million at the Pat Nesheks of the world the reason the Phillies aren't very good?

        1. Worked well for them last year. They flipped him to the Rockies only to sign him again. This time he gets a $500,000 bonus if traded.

  10. Drake up 4 at the barn. Do the Gophers realize that Drake has one starter over 6'3"? Mason and MacBrayer keep launching 3s.

  11. Anyone else here feel a little guilty when they don't cook the "best" way?

    For example, I made slow cooker pot roast today. But did not sear the meat and subsequently deglaze the pan. That method is absolutely going to produce better results, but I didn't have the time this morning, so we ended up with good but not as-good roast. My veggie selection/prep was as basic as can be too, leaving me feeling like I kind of wasted a pot roast. Still good, but...

    This has been happening a lot lately. Just don't have the time I once had.

    1. I’m often heard saying to dr. Chop, “life is too short to eat okay food”. So yeah, I get this.

    2. re: scrupulosity
      You shouldn't feel the least bit guilty about anything having to do with feeding proper food to your family.
      Some of us feel like we've been doing a lot of rat-racing lately...and losing, mostly.

      I suppose everything is relative.

    3. Dude. Not every meal has to be Instagram-able. Sometimes you just gotta feed the family.

      But I draw a line with bad beer.

    4. I feel ya.

      Over the past few years I got so obsessed with: great tasting food, complete meals, making food the "right" way with the "right" tools, and organization of it all. My wife had been handling most of these things and I did the thing you might do with a child. The "here, let me do it" thing.

      So, of course, it was a _help_ because I was doing significantly more work around the house than I had been. And it was work she doesn't enjoy. I'm also certain I said and did some things that were insulting along the way. For most of the whole time, she thanked me profusely. That just shows what an amazing person she is.

      Anyway, a few months ago work hit me _hard_ and I had to give it all up full stop. Looking back, well, I appreciated the food we ate, the things I learned, and how organized it was at the time. But I could have done it a lot more calmly and I could have been less obsessed with it all. So when you find a moment, try to step back, take a breath, and put it in context. The fact that you know there is a "best" way and can follow it from time to time is a wonderful thing!

      (However, we have just hit our 40s and I'm eating quite a bit less vegetables and quite a bit more "middle of the store" snacks than I was 6 months ago. This is a problem and it will probably draw me back in if work ever calms again.)

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