My thoughts are: you are not the first person to wonder about Dusty.
Here he is, in 2006, displaying his baseball acumen:
Yeah, you wouldn’t want to clog up those bases. God forbid someone get a hit while the bases are all clogged up; you never know what might happen.
Dusty Baker has the reputation of a manager who can take a team from not-so-good to pretty good, but not all the way to great. That made him kind of a curious hire for the Nats as a team that was already pretty good.
I had gone to bed in the 8th but was still following the game via ESPN Gameday on my phone. With Moreland up and 2 strikes against him the app says “Moreland strikes out swinging” and I turn my phone off and go to sleep.
:smack:
I thought the offense was specifically not allowed to appeal a checked swing with a base umpire. Did the Indians do so with the ball at the backstop?
The appeal came from the home plate umpire to the third base umpire instantly as soon as the ball got by Indians’ catcher Yan Gomes. The batter was already headed to first and Gomes was already chasing the ball.
Cody Bellinger just tied the National League rookie record for left-handed batters (:dubious:) with his 30th home run. Dodgers up early over the Braves in an effort to get their third 10-game winning streak of the season.
I have officially decided to no longer follow the Indians after their latest debacle last night. *
I am now awaiting The Cleveland Browns opening kickoff. **
*I am weak and will probably relent when they quit playing like an AAA/AA team.
**This is not to be taken seriously. I have my pride.
Is this a good time or not a good time to tell you about Andrew Miller hitting the DL?
Dusty also has a reputation for ruining young pitchers. Mark Prior, Kerry Wood, and Carlos Zambrano all threw over 210 innings in 2003. He had Wood throw 141 pitches in a 7 inning start.
He doesn’t (or didn’t) believe in pitch counts. Whether there’s a correlation between pitch counts and arm damage, I can’t say, but it seems reasonable. Likewise, Baker may not actually ruin arms, but he’s got a reputation for doing it. And his wake includes a lot of arm surgeries.
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Nats don’t look like they’re even trying tonight. Down 7-0 in the 8th with only two hits, both runners erased on DPs hit into by Bryce Harper, who also misjudged a fly ball and looked barely interested in running to 1st base on one of the DPs.
Announcer FP Santangelo holding forth that, oh well, they’ll play better over the weekend when they face the Cubs, and how hard it is to hold your interest when you’re up by 13 games in August. Believe me, I remember the '78 Red Sox, a 13-game lead ain’t doodly-squat.
Sorry for the rant but this team I love drives me up the freakin’ wall…
For those tearing their hair out because their playoff-hopeful teams weren’t aggressive enough in getting help before the trade deadline:
Another report (in yesterday’s Wall St. Journal) calculated that most such trades did not even get teams a single extra win (by whatever exotic calculations are used) in the season the new player(s) were acquired.
You would never know this by the usual run of articles describing “winners and losers” at the trade deadline. Sportswriters have a habit of being very liberal with teams’ spending and not understanding why they didn’t plunder their farm systems* to get decent but not overwhelming talent cough Sonny Gray cough.
*wonder whatever happened to that Bagwell guy the Red Sox traded to get Larry Andersen?
Did that article distinguish between winning *this *year and winning *maybe *in some *future *years? They aren’t the same, and that isn’t the calculation teams make.
There’s no plausible argument that the Yankees aren’t better *now *with Sonny Gray than without him, or the Dodgers with Yu Darvish, and that they both haven’t improved their chances of getting a big trophy this coming October. The minor leaguers they traded? Hey, tomorrow never comes. Farm system talent is a commodity.
As specified, the study looked at the year the player was acquired.
As for future years, that often doesn’t work out so well either. Excluding the Jeff Bagwell deal, do Red Sox fans remember when Jeff Suppan was going to save the day in 2003? All the Red Sox gave up to Oakland were a couple of prospects.
*"Suppan had a 3.57 ERA through 141 innings at the time, so he did look like the cure for what ailed the Red Sox. But he fell flat in Boston. He managed just a 5.57 ERA in 11 regular-season appearances and was kept on the sidelines during the club’s ill-fated postseason run.
Going the other way to Pittsburgh was second base prospect Freddy Sanchez and minor league lefty Mike Gonzalez. Both would make the Red Sox rue the day they thought Suppan would fix everything.
Gonzalez turned into one of the sport’s best lefty relievers, posting a 2.37 ERA in four years with the Pirates.
Sanchez won the National League batting crown in 2006 and was an All-Star in '06, '07 and '09. He left Pittsburgh in a July 2009 trade, but not before he’d accumulated a .301 average in a Pirates uniform."*
Sonny Gray is an OK pitcher who might help the Yankees down the stretch. Despite the hype, I doubt he’s the second coming of Curt Schilling (whose acquisition by the Diamondbacks to complement Randy Johnson was a big factor in their success).
Not my money on the line; guessing is fun. 
Hindsight is wonderful, isn’t it? Unless your point is that no team should ever trade prospects for established talent, you have to concede that information can be lacking and people can be undervalued and young talent can develop in different ways than expected andr that injuries can occur that can’t be fully recovered from and that players used to looking good in undemanding markets on bad teams can buckle under actual playoff-run pressure. Like Suppan.
Bagwell keeps coming up, but the people doing it rarely mention that he was stuck at 3B in AA ball behind both Wade Boggs and future All-Star Scott Cooper, and looked promising but youneverknow. They can’t point to any predictions at the time that he’d roid up (oh, come on now, just look at him), switch to 1B, and become a great slugger. Sure, there was a little handwringing that the Sox could have gotten someone better than Andersen for him, but Andersen did contribute more to the team that year than Bagwell was going to.
Most trade-deadline “prospects” never get seen again, right?
Well, Hellickson made me eat some crow last night, pitching 7 shutout innings that gave the Birds a 6-0 win over the Royals. I’d be very happy for him to continue proving me wrong.
At the basic mathematical level, this makes sense.
The trade deadline comes with about one-third of the season left to play. In a full season, a very good player (All-Star caliber) will get you around 6 Wins Above Replacement. A true MVP candidate, of which there are not usually many available for trade in late July, will get you 8-10 WAR for the season.
This means that, even under the best of circumstances, adding an All-Star will only get you about two extra wins in the two-month period of August and September, and adding an MVP will get you about three. And plenty of the guys traded before the deadline are not going to have WARs of 6 or more this year.
Remember, also, that the R in WAR refers to a replacement-level player, someone you can just pick up for next to nothing off the waiver wire, or a good AAA/AAAA player. But some of the guys gained in trades end up replacing not “replacement-level” players, but solid Major Leaguers who, themselves, might have a positive WAR value. It makes sense that such additions might not have a huge impact in one-third of a season.
Look at Yu Darvish. Plenty of commentators are saying that the Dodgers came out one of the big winners at the trade deadline, and quite a few of them see Darvish as central to this success. Darvish has a WAR, for the first 4 months of the season, of somewhere between 2.4 (Fangraphs) and 3.0 (Baseball Reference). Even at the top end of that, this means that we can expect him to create about 1.5 WAR in the two months that he’s with the Dodgers.
But, as folks have pointed out before, WAR is a funny stat. If you look at WAR on a bigger scale, it often doesn’t properly add up. For example, as i believe RickJay has noted in our baseball discussions before, it’s possible for a pitcher to pitch like a demon, giving up almost no runs, and still lose games. That pitcher will still be assessed a good WAR, but if his team didn’t win the games he pitched in, it’s a bit hard to say that he created Wins, right?
But on the other hand, especially with a starting pitcher, it might only take a few standout performances in the eight weeks after the trade to make a difference for the team. Look at the Orioles. If Hellickson can, against all my expectations, come out and pitch as well as he did last night on four or five more occasions over his remaining starts, he could well help the Orioles win three or four games that they might not have otherwise won. His calculated WAR for that period probably won’t be 3.0 or 4.0, but his presence might be a significant difference in those wins, and clawing back 4 games against the competition would, as of right now, put Baltimore in the second WC spot.
The Dodgers have a 14 game lead. They didn’t get Darvish for the WAR he racks up in August and September. They got him for October.
Sonny Gray isn’t a saviour. The Yankees aren’t a championship calibre team, although they have a chance to make some hay in the playoffs. Gray is in his prime, and he makes the rotation better through 2019. Solid trade.
I understand that. But it doesn’t change a single word of what i wrote, nor the substance of my argument.
That wasn’t my intention. My point and your point are great points. Some people say they are the best points they’ve ever seen.
I do have the greatest points. I got a phone call from Bill James the other day telling me that no-one had ever made better points than me.
I haven’t paid any attention to the Giants this year. They’ve been really good in recent time, very good last season. I didn’t realize that this year they were awful, worst in MLB awful, almost historically bad for their organization. They still might get the worst record ever for that team.
It’s like a carton of milk that’s fine one day and then needs to be tossed the next day.