smitty wrote:Wwry wasn't around then.

Building a team based on starting pitching is dicey. It works sometimes. But it fails a lot too (If you consider not winning the WFS a failure). FFS they won the WFS with a pretty dicey staff. Then they went starting pitching mad and returned to the WFS and had a record winning season.

Amaro was pretty awesome for a short period. But once Oswalt and Halladay went down, he became completely clueless.

Completely clueless is a pretty bad quality in a GM.

The Phils really need Kim.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/hoekstra/kim_ng.jpg

hmmm, why starting pitching is killer during the regular season but not necessarily during the playoffs, by Anne Elephant


ptichers, like hitters, have bad days. But when your starting pitcher has a bad day, that almost always means the team will have a bad day. You don't get a whole lot of latitude for bad days in the playoffs. One the other hand, 2 or 3 of your hitters can have bad days at any point, and there's till 5 or 6 other guys to pick up the slack.

that is my theory, by me, Anne Elephant.

It's a great theory Bucky. Look at 2008. We won because Werth, Utley, Rolllins, Howard, Burrell, Victorino all had huge hits all season long. Greg DOBBS! was great. Chris Coste had a nice year. Even Geoff Jenkins and Pedro Feliz had some clutch hits in huge spots. Guess what. Carlos Ruiz had a 1.188 OPS in the WFS. Holy crap.

There's an article on Grantland right now hailing the Cubs for focusing their rebuild around offense. The main point, which definitely has occurred to me (more with respect to minor league development than the bigs), is that pitchers just carry so much higher injury risk. The Mets keep trying to do it this way; it worked thirty years ago, blew up in their faces twenty years ago, and it's too soon to tell this time.

Admittedly the Cubs approach worked for the Big Red Machine; everybody knows Morgan, Rose, Perez, Bench et al, but nobody can name any of their pitchers.

TOM BROWNING

um, i mean JACK BILLINGHAM!!!


guess you're right then

Don Gullett!

dajafi wrote:There's an article on Grantland right now hailing the Cubs for focusing their rebuild around offense. The main point, which definitely has occurred to me (more with respect to minor league development than the bigs), is that pitchers just carry so much higher injury risk. The Mets keep trying to do it this way; it worked thirty years ago, blew up in their faces twenty years ago, and it's too soon to tell this time.

Admittedly the Cubs approach worked for the Big Red Machine; everybody knows Morgan, Rose, Perez, Bench et al, but nobody can name any of their pitchers.

Great post.

The Reds had a great bullpen in 1975. They needed their starters to go six and give up 3 or 4 and they'd win. So,they got guys like long Jack Billingham and Don Gullett and Dan Norman and Pat Darcy and told them to do their best. They had 4 awesome reliefers who threw more that 400 innings to a tune of an average ERA plus of around 130. One of my favorite players of that era was Pedro Borbon. He was great but the best thing was his name.

But you are correct. The offense drove the train. They also had great defense. Morgan, Concepcion, Griffy, Bench, Geronimo were outstanding. What a club.

The damn offense was all .800 plus OPS guys except for Joe Morgan who was at .974!!!!! The two exceptions were traditional glove men the SS and CFer.

bleh wrote:If Montgomery retires, who replaces him? I see David Buck is at the top of the front office list after Amaro. Is that one of the owner's sons? Anyone know anything about him?

I would imagine it would be Middleton. He's the only other person I've seen be remotely public.

Charlie just chose all three of our announcers and Steaks for the ice bucket challenge. YES

NPR's (?) Fresh Air interview today w/Grandpa Moyer. A puff piece, but kind of entertaining. He's telling the interviewer how he would revise pitch location via baring his teeth to his catcher ("learned it from Nolan Ryan")

wow, i remember him doing that. no idea it meant anything.

drsmooth wrote:NPR's (?) Fresh Air interview today w/Grandpa Moyer. A puff piece, but kind of entertaining. He's telling the interviewer how he would revise pitch location via baring his teeth to his catcher ("learned it from Nolan Ryan")

That Bulldog attitude.

So if we treat 33 of Revere's singles as doubles since he took an extra base, then his slugging would be .443 and his OPS .768.

that doesn't seem so bad.

Is that with turning singles + CS into outs, too?

Warszawa wrote:

So if we treat 33 of Revere's singles as doubles since he took an extra base, then his slugging would be .443 and his OPS .768.

that doesn't seem so bad.

Except a single and a SB is half a double. It doesn't have the run-plating value that a real double does. Whatever. Revere's awesome.

You'd have to compare that with everyone else's OPS after it's inflated by SB. The average CF probably gets like 15+ SB.

Warszawa wrote:

So if we treat 33 of Revere's singles as doubles since he took an extra base, then his slugging would be .443 and his OPS .768.

that doesn't seem so bad.

Are we also subtracting hits after CS?

Warszawa wrote:

So if we treat 33 of Revere's singles as doubles since he took an extra base, then his slugging would be .443 and his OPS .768.

that doesn't seem so bad.

Yup. Best base runner in all of baseball.

If he were an outstanding defensive CFer he'd be pretty valuable.

Shore wrote:

Warszawa wrote:

So if we treat 33 of Revere's singles as doubles since he took an extra base, then his slugging would be .443 and his OPS .768.

that doesn't seem so bad.

Except a single and a SB is half a double. It doesn't have the run-plating value that a real double does. Whatever. Revere's awesome.

Except when you include advancing on hits and outs, Revere is the best baserunner in MLB. And that is a good thing. GGSA.

Dee Gordon is better.