mcare89 wrote:

phdave wrote:

Brown has the profile of a potential star, while Ruf has the profile of a potential high school gym teacher. At some point, the Ruf-ites got tired of being told they were wrong and took up their derpy-looking white player like the aquila of a Roman legion, charging forward valiantly into the breech in the ongoing war on empirics and knowledge.

I've never seen people root for someone on their own team to fail more than Team Dom about Ruf. It's the strangest thing I've ever seen. Why does one have to succeed and the other have to fail? Why can't they both be good?

etched Chaos wrote:

mcare89 wrote:

phdave wrote:

Brown has the profile of a potential star, while Ruf has the profile of a potential high school gym teacher. At some point, the Ruf-ites got tired of being told they were wrong and took up their derpy-looking white player like the aquila of a Roman legion, charging forward valiantly into the breech in the ongoing war on empirics and knowledge.

I've never seen people root for someone on their own team to fail more than Team Dom about Ruf. It's the strangest thing I've ever seen. Why does one have to succeed and the other have to fail? Why can't they both be good?

I'm on Team Dom and I want Ruf to mash.

phdave wrote:I think some hipster baseball fans value opportunities to demonstrate their more highly attuned sensibilities for discerning baseball talent. The riffraff liking a player who they don't think is valuable is a perfect opportunity to demonstrate their superiority. I don't think they are rooting against the player as much as rooting against the fans of the player.

So what does it say when, on the aggregate, Delmon Young, or as I’ve taken to calling him, The Great Satan, is roughly the same offensive player and, when placed in a field of grass, resembles nothing so much as one of those bulb-shaped pig-creatures that frolicks in the meadow alongside Anakin and Padme on Naboo in Star Wars: Episode II?

That’s right, in only four years, Ruben Amaro, Jr.’s CV is so festooned with instances of preposterous folly that when he takes the No. 1 prospect in baseball and turns him into a guy who would have been better off sticking with football, it doesn’t necessarily make the front page.

phdave wrote:

That’s right, in only four years, Ruben Amaro, Jr.’s CV is so festooned with instances of preposterous folly that when he takes the No. 1 prospect in baseball and turns him into a guy who would have been better off sticking with football, it doesn’t necessarily make the front page.

The Phillies, under Ruben Amaro, are like Czarist Russia, a vast empire of tremendous power and blessed with incredible resources that’s so in love with the fashions and practices of 50 years prior that that power and those resources were, and will be, squandered in a massive blaze and at the cost of unimaginable human suffering. And the next people to take over will be a marginal improvement intellectually but little better practically. And we’ll spend the next 10 years in undignified retreat, watching our crops and oil fields burn because our leaders are too obsessed with superstitions and customs that the rest of the world laughed out of the culture as obsolete before we were even born

Domonic Brown could have been to the Phillies as Andruw Jones was to the late-90s Braves, the second-generation dynastic star who’s brought up as a complementary player and carries the team into the next plane of spiritual existence. But instead he was left to wither on the vine while a parade of older, more expensive, not-particularly-more-productive alternatives paraded by as the Phillies’ clubhouse turned into a Lexus dealership–a room full of old people with delusionally inflated self-importance and commodities that aren’t worth half what they were purchased for.

And the Phillies still won 102 games in 2011. So as Mephistopheles comes back to visit Ruben Amaro, it’ll take another couple years for the Phillies to bottom out, then another couple years for him to come to terms with the fact that you’re not going to win a lot of games by putting band-aids on traumatic wounds. Or, in Delmon Young’s case, filling traumatic wounds with biochemical waste. Then a few beyond that for him to try a rebuild, because the Phillies’ ownership, which seems to be, like the fans, under the mistaken impression that Amaro was the architect of the greatest set of teams in frachise history, will give him a chance to fail at that. Which he will.

phdave wrote:

Domonic Brown could have been to the Phillies as Andruw Jones was to the late-90s Braves, the second-generation dynastic star who’s brought up as a complementary player and carries the team into the next plane of spiritual existence. But instead he was left to wither on the vine while a parade of older, more expensive, not-particularly-more-productive alternatives paraded by as the Phillies’ clubhouse turned into a Lexus dealership–a room full of old people with delusionally inflated self-importance and commodities that aren’t worth half what they were purchased for.