I was just watching his press conference, I didn’t know he had a partial knee replacement in Dec '19. Manny Machado totally screwed Pedey’s career. I will miss watching him play. He was fun to watch, so much energy, cocky, great quotes, great glove.
I was never a big Bosox fan, but I’ll miss Pedroia. He epitomized the essence of baseball: he always wanted to play, and he was the gritty, balls to the wall, Pete Rose-esque type of player. He was hardcore. A scrapper.
The Rockies got rid of Nolan because they conned him into believing they cared about winning. After proving they don’t care he kept reminding fans that the Rockies weren’t trying to win. They traded him so their apathy would fade from the fans attention.
Luckily, for the rockies ownership they will have only not had top 10 attendance once in the last 5 non Covid years. They’ve figured out a way to put terrible product on the field and get the fans not to care
Here in Miami we do it exactly the same, only different.
Marlins management has also figured out how to put a terrible product on the field and have the fans not care. The difference is in COL the public shows up in their teeming thousands and here in MIA they show up in their teeming dozens.
He would be a no brainer Hall of Famer if he had ever been able to stay healthy, which he wasn’t. Blamin Machado for it… well, Pedroia was in the habit of missing time to injury before that.
Don Mattingly is often held up as the example of “Great player but not for long enough for the Hall.” Dustin Pedroia played fewer games, but IMHO was clearly a greater player.
Dodgers get Trevor Bauer.
The Dodgers won the Trevor Bauer sweepstakes, as the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner agreed to a three-year, $102 million deal, a source told MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand. The club has not announced the deal, but Bauer revealed his decision on his YouTube channel.
Kershaw, Buhler, Bauer, Price…that is one heavy rotation.
Andrew Benintendi to the Royals in a 3 team deal
In the name of Jehovah, will the Mets stop trying to promote Tim Tebow to the big leagues?
He’s been invited to spring training with the real prospects and MLBers, in spite of hitting a whopping .151 in his previous such appearances, and all of .163 with Syracuse a couple of years ago.
He’s never going to be a viable big-leaguer. The Mets keep taking away a deserving player’s spot in order to sell a few extra spring training tickets, not that all that many fans will be in the stands.
Jesus Christ, are they STILL at this? What the fuck is happening?
Desperation for a name that generates buzz in the social media, not results on the field?
I wonder if soon we’ll see monetary tie ins with the fantasy leagues such that teams start vying to create media-popular players who get lots of profitable fantasy play rather than results-oriented players who put runs on the board.
Tim Tebow shouldn’t have been promoted to AAA in 2019. Hang on, Tebow shouldn’t have been promoted to AA in 2018. He should have washed out in the Rookie league and never made it to A ball, in fact.
Career to date in the minors: .223/.299/.332. Tim Tebow shouldn’t be playing professional baseball, period.
Tebow has been wasting the Mets’ time for years now. Is there any evidence the Mets, a team with a number of fine real ballplayers, get any seasons ticket sales out of this charade? Is there really a big market in… uhhh… Queens, NYC, for fundamentalist Christians who briefly played pro football?
If they were to promote him to the Mets, he’d easily be the worst player in the major leagues.
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said. All spot-on IMO.
Which leaves all of us, including me, scratching our collective heads about why the Mets are doing what they’re doing. They’re generally a fairly professional outfit as MLB managements go.
Is there some Xian fundie in player development? Tebow got the dirt on some Mets bigwig? Some sort of contract shenanigans where they overpaid to get him into their farm system with a big penalty clause and are now just playing CYA shell-games within the Mets bureaucracy to avoid responsibility for the poor decision to sign him in the first place? Hellifino.
But there’s got to be a “fix” of some kind in there somewhere to explain the apparently illogical behavior.
IMO. YMMV. No warrantees expressed or implied.
Justin Turner will stay in Dodger blue. The usual questions about his ability to stay healthy all year remain, however.
I don’t know what the Mets’ game is. I’m sure spring training tickets will sell regardless of Tebow. And, it’s been a long time since he was at UF. Why not bring among Josh Hamilton too?
And, keeping Tebow in the minors all this time is exhibit A for minor league contraction.
It’s odd that I can’t find any baseball writers willing to ask some hard questions abiout this, and the third article I read on it said “There may not be great baseball reasons for continuing the flirtation with Tebow, but there are very good business reasons. He attracts interest. He moves merchandise. And if he ever makes it to the MLB roster, he’ll sell tickets…”
I suppose it’s possible he does but I doubt it. For one thing, what sells tickets is WINNING, and Tim Tebow would make the Mets lose games, not win them. For another, even the freak value is very small and wouldn’t last more than a couple of weeks, if it happened at all.
I mean, if weird roster decisions like this sold tickets, why don’t more teams do it? I’m not taking about fun little PR stunts like giving Billy Crystal or Kevin Costner an at-bat or letting Garth Brooks have some at bats (he got a couple of hits.) Those guys weren’t playing regular season games and taking real roster spots from anyone, it was just for fun. I mean actually signing guys and letting them play MILB baseball. I’m sure if you asked some celebrity who was a huge baseball nerd if they wanted to actually play some AA ball, someone like Eddie Vedder or Paul Rudd (at least when they were a bit younger) they would have said “Please show me to my locker” and would sell tickets out of sheer curiosity. But teams don’t do that.
@RickJay - I would be fascinated to hear a compare/contrast between Tebow and Jordan vis-à-vis baseball. My recollection is that Jordan was initially seen as the same kind of stunt, but later seen as “yeah, he had a legilimate shot there and might could have made it if it he’d started younger and focused on baseball”.
Well, sure, he’d have had a legitimate shot had he started earlier, but that might also be true of Tim Tebow. (It is very difficult to guess what their odds would have been.)
It takes a long time to get good at baseball and it requires a great deal of repetition. The game cannot be overpowered. Tebow was allegedly a good player in high school but projecting from high school to the majors is very chancy.
The most important thing to know about a young player is his age. It’s THE statistic that frames everything else. A player who hits .273 with 14 homers in AA ball is a solid prospect if he’s 20, okay if he plays a key defensive position if he’s 24, and no prospect at all if he’s 27. As hard and as long as it takes to be an MLB hitter, the chronological clock is ticking because average peak age for a baseball hitter is 27, and while it varies from guy to guy, they rarely peak later than 29-30, and most players drop off VERY quickly at 30 if they make it that far.
So, Tim Tebow is WAY below that 27-year-old; his first year in minor league ball he was already 30 and hit .220 with little power in A ball, numbers he essentially did again in 2018 and 2019. The likelihood of such a player becoming an effective big leaguer is zero; you will be unable to find any example in modern baseball history of that happening. Class A teams will almost never even carry players that old, unless they’re big leaguers on rehab assignments.
I do not for an instant think anyone who works for the Mets thinks Tebow will ever help a major league team.
Michael Jordan, incidentally, was a terrible baseball player as baseball players go, but he didn’t humiliate himself - he had no power but he walked more than you’d expect and stole bases. (He was a disgraceful defensive outfielder, however.) If he’d put up AA numbers like that when he was 20, well, with his athleticism you would certainly have given him a few more years to see what happened. Sadly, he was 31.
MLB-TV has raised their single-team coverage from $92/season (for 2019) to $110/season, almost a 20% increase.