…and fielding percentage.
:smack:
You forgot to list the teams, but Soriano and Uggla are in the NL not AL. Chone Figgins is fast but a very weak hitter, Iguchi was the one other player you listed that may have deserved it more. But please note, you are looking at stats now after Robby missed 6 weeks of baseball.
Loretta & Jose Lopez were picked over Iguchi, so probably not great candidates, the fans did not pick these players. Cano deserved to go. His numbers are very good for a 2B, especially if you remember he missed 6 weeks.
Jim
Gah. You’re right. Florida is in the NL. I am an idiot.
Again, Cano’s not a bad player, and I can see him getting better. I’m just not convinced he was pick-worthy.
Admitting it is the first step… or so they say. 
…My Bolding above…
But to say he’s not pick-worthy, you need to make an argument that there was someone else who should have been in his spot.
We’ve already eliminated Soriano and Uggla as being in the wrong league. Iguchi’s a candidate, and in my opinion Loretta and Roberts were also strong contenders. But they all had considerably lower averages than Cano, and none of them were so much better in any other category (homers, RBI, runs scored, etc.) that they stood out above him.
Also, if you are going to compare those categories like RBI, homers, etc., it’s hardly fair to do it now. You need to compare the figures for the end of June, when the All Star teams were chosen. If you compare the figures now, you do Cano a disservice by comparing his numbers against those of players who did not miss six weeks on the DL. Of course he’s going to have fewer homers and fewer RBI than someone who’s played every game.
I’m not saying Cano was the only possible choice—far from it—but i believe your characterization of him as “not an All star” is rather unfair. Among regular AL second basemen, he’s definitely been in the top three or four all year.
Well, I don’t technically have to provide a suitable replacement. The two I was trumpeting, in my idiocy, were from the wrong freaking league. All I can tell you is that (without the ballot in front of me) I don’t believe I’d have voted for Mr. Cano.
A strike and a half against him before he gets in the batters’ box is the fact that he’s a Yankee.
this last statement was said lightheartedly, although if I have to pick between two that are equally credentialled and one is a Yankee, the other gets the vote unless there’s an extenuating circumstance.
Back in '03, there was a brief, shining moment in time where the Red Sox and Cubs both led their respective League Championship Series by 3 games to 2. Freak storms of frogs and auto parts onto crop images of Elvis that glowed in the night were poised to begin as well.
Now THAT World Series would have had the entire nation watching.
Well, we’ve managed a split with the Mets, so that gives me a little hope for the playoffs. They aren’t as invincible as their record would indicate. Now if we can just sweep the Padres, we’ll be sitting pretty. Yeah, like that will happen. If the Dodgers make it this year, it’s going to be ugly. A down to the wire knife fight. Ah, September.
Indeed. Has everyone forgotten that Bush ran the Texas Rangers into the ground with his management style long before he was President? (Maybe all those Texas Rangers World Series Rings are being held in the same vault as all the intelligence on WMDs for national security reasons. And the press just refused to report those WS wins because they were the ‘Liberal Media’.) :rolleyes:
A Dodgers fan of all fans needed to be reminded of this? Rest assured that Mets fans, on the other side of the equation, have deep down in our bones never forgotten the way 1988 played out. (Though amazingly enough, many Yankee fans seem to have been able to more or less forget about the team’s unparalleled choke job of 2004, dismissing it as some kind of statistical sampling error??)
My Dodgers have figured out too many ways to fuck with me over the years for me to be hopeful. But I have to say that the new front office has made the right trades, and seems to be letting Little make his own decisions. This is a positive sign for the future.
(A little smile for the 2004 Yankees, who will forever be known as the Ultimate Choke-Artists, no matter what they do forever more. )
Selective memory assisted by More World Championship than any other team. 
Actually 2004 caused me to go on medication for severe heartburn that plagued me for months. It was made more horrible by the fact, that you know it was the dream of every Red Sox fan that even they did not expect to happen. They embarrassed the Yankee and then swept the Cards to win. It was truly a nightmare for me and all other Yankee Fans.
Jim {I hope that makes you fell better, I try not to think about 2004}
It heralded the birth of The Anti-Christ. There’s just no other explanation for such Evil triumping over Good…
Count, we have to hook sometime and talk sports and NJ. You should consider coming to the Dopefest.
Jim
What Exit:
I do NOT think the Glasses are good owners for the Royals. That said, I refuse to characterize Replacement Players are a horror, or as some sort of innovation beginning with the 1994 baseball strike. Scabs are (usually) part of any union vs management dispute. There’s a huge pool of passable baseball players who would be entertaining enough to watch if the union major leaguers sat it out. And it would have been nice to trim the power of the MLBPA; I don’t think the NFL’s and NBA’s salary-curbing measures have hurt their sports’s popularity much.
To each there own, I found the idea of replacement player to be a Horror. No baseball was better than replacement player baseball to me. The rest of your post makes perfect sense. I would be fine with both a Ceiling and a Floor for what teams can spend, as long as the Yanks are given some time to get under the ceiling or an escape clause like the Rangers got in Hockey. I think the Ceiling should probably be around $120 million and the floor should be $50 million. I am sure others will disagree. It will be hard for the Yanks to get back to $120 million and would probably mean some lean times for us Yankee Fans. I honestly do see it as being better for baseball. Jeter & A-Rod have 6 years left on their Contracts. I could see MLB letting the Yanks know after this season that they must be under $120 million in 6 years and that they must be under a certain amount each season on the way back down to $120 million.
This ceiling will only be minor inconvenience to the Mets and Red Sox and no other team is near it as far as I know.
Jim
Amazing what short memories people have. The “power of the MLBPA” emerged in direct response to the dictatorial powers of the owners and the awful reserve clause. The Players’ Association was a perfectly reasonable response to the owners’ selfishness.
I’d have no trouble with salary-curbing measures in sports if those measures actually reduced ticket prices and made the games easier for everyday people to afford. But the salary-curbing measures tend to do nothing but put more money in owners’ pockets. Those measures certainly haven’t made it cheap to attend an NFL or NBA game.
I’d go for a salary cap in a heartbeat, but mhendo has a point. Ticket prices do nothing but climb, because the owners have a captive market and minor-league play isn’t really any competition.
One more thing on my list of “Things To Do When I Own A Major League Team.”
mhendo:
My memory is not short, and this paragraph of yours is absolutely true. However, the pendulum had, in a relatively short time, swung totally in the other direction, to the point where Don Fehr’s definition of negotiation was saying no to anything the owners proposed. It takes capital as well as labor to run a business. While it’s not the union’s job to look out for capital’s interest, to completely disengage is damaging to the leagues as a whole, not merely to the league’s owners.
When was it ever cheap to attend an NFL game? At 8 home games per season per team, the limited number of tickets has always kept the price high, well before athletic salaries skyrocketed and before the owners responded with their salary cap.
As for basketball, there are plenty of cheap seats to be had in most (granted, not all) basketball arenas. In the past four years, I’ve brought my entire family to NBA games in Oakland, Los Angeles (Clippers) and Orlando for under $100, and one of those ticket packages included free sodas, chips and hot dogs (refused, sine I keep Kosher, but serves the point about ticket prices). Tickets closer to the action obviously cost more, but the same is true, if not more so, of baseball tickets.
We’ll have no talk of the NBA of NFL or NHL in this thread please start your own