Click here to read the transcript of this morning’s baseball chat, moderated by MLBTR’s Mark Polishuk
Headlines
- Blue Jays, Bo Bichette Agree To Three-Year Deal To Avoid Arbitration
- Royals Re-Sign Zack Greinke
- Dodgers Sign Miguel Rojas To Contract Extension
- Jake McGee Retires
- Orioles To Decline Five-Year Lease Extension At Camden Yards, Seeking Longer-Term Agreement With Maryland Stadium Authority
- Mariners, Dylan Moore Agree to Three-Year Extension
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Oh, DiPoto will make like 17 trades this offseason, he can’t help himself. Haniger, Seager, Murphy, Beckham, Vogelbach even Gonzalez are most likely goners, not to mention any of his top 10 prospects. The Mariners are condemned to failure as long as DiPoto, the absolute worst GM in decades, is running the show.
That Diaz/Cano trade was pretty sweet.
Agreed. Must be a bitter angels fan.
He’s just an angry person. Makes him feel better about himself
Dont talk about me in front of me you clown troll
Yeah you make 50 trades and one pans out that doesnt actually validate your extremely flawed and unprofessional method.
Feel better?
I’ve been visiting this site for 10 years and just this past month made a profile for the first time. And there are no other sites that make comments on. Therefore that does not constitute a troll, I think.
Stop bullying Jerry Dipoto to feel better about yourself.. 😉 j/k
Ouch!
Classy
Double
Ouch!
I mean…he did bring in haniger, Crawford, marco gonzales, kelenic, dunn, etc.
Seems pretty good to me
Last place sounds good to you
How’s your team going strike four? Have you pulled off
any big trades?
What deals has he made that really makes him so awful? I think he gets a bad rep just because of his Angels tenure, but I feel a lot of those were due to the owner meddling too much.
He’s been a GM for 10 years and has one playoff team to his name (and that team had Mike Trout, the greatest player of all time on it).
When he went to Angels, he made sure to make a big show of his “big splash” free agents Pujols, Wilson and Hamilton. Then in Seattle he makes all those ridiculous trades that showed absolutely no plan for the future, and once again, makes it all about himself. But he himself is 1-9 in putting a playoff team on the field, and he’s always had money to play with too. He is just terrible at what he does, period. Too much ego and flashiness, not enough results.
Trout is not the greatest player of all time. Babe Ruth, and it’s not close…
This is very true. When you consider the number of time Ruth lead the league in TEAM homeruns. As in he hit more home runs than all other teams. The only two guys who were close to his power production were Gehrig and Greenberg. Whole teams were hitting 20-30 homeruns while Babe, Lou, and Hank were hitting 45+ every year.
Ruth also never struck out 100 times in a season. Ever. Despite using a 54 oz hickory bat at one point, later a 36 inch/46oz monster on opening day in 1923 at Yankee Stadium to a more consistent 40 oz bat the year he hit 60 homeruns. To put that in perspective, most players use a -1, even, or +1 bat, meaning -1 is 1 oz less than the number of inches (i.e. 32inch and 31 oz.) And of course a +1 is 34 inch and 35 oz.for example. To use a +4 (36 inch/40 oz bat and be worth 10-14 WAR every year is insane, especially considering his contact numbers, walk numbers, and power numbers. Then add into it the fact he could’ve been the best pitcher in the history of baseball had he stsyed on the mound.
I hate the Yankees. That is to say, from bad to worse for me is measels, flaming dog crap on the porch, my car repoed, living on the streets, being shot with a gun, and Yankees win a championship is pretty much my hierarchy of bad to worse, yet I can definitively say Ruth is the best ever and Gehrig is top 5ish all-time.
Looks like next year your life will end as you now know it. The Yankees hired the female hitting instructor from the Astro’s and she’s going to teach the team about banging on garbage cans. Whoo Hooo!
Yankees don’t need to be taught to cheat, they have been doing that for decades!
Loved seeing him get a chance outside of New York. I wish him well
Who?
Hopefully Marte to Metropolitans works out.
I like sports.
Go sports!!
No Games, Just Sports.
Mr. Polishuk. Why should ANYONE vote a steroids user (thats cheating) into the hall of fame? If there are no rules there is no game.
You don’t think HOF’ers took amphetamines back in the 70’s and 80’s? If you’re going to keep Roid users out of the Hall, then you should first kick out the executives like Bud Selig who enabled them. Bonds and maybe Clements were HOF-worthy before they started using.
I wouldnt vote for Sammy Sosa because it was obvious roids turned him into a freak. Bonds and Clemens were freakishly good before steroids and would have made the HOF reagrdless if they never took them. The stats may be inflated, but they belong in the Hall. I’m hoping to see Bonds and/or Clemens enshrined just to witness if they admit they took them. I’d respect them for apologizing to the fans for being deceitful. If they were to do that, I could accept them as HOFers and be ok with it as a baseball naturalist.
Steroids were not “illegal” then…..
That’s true, they were not “illegal”, just illegal.
How’s the view from up there?
Because every player cheated or played against someone that cheated and though it is a cynical way to look at the world, if your opponent is cheating, your cheating only evens the playing field.
1) The spitball was banned for all but two players per team in 1919, So arbitrarily if you were on a team with two great spitball pitchers, you could not continue using that pitch in 1920. In 1920, the spitball was permanently banned from the sport with the exception of the players who were still using that pitch, who could use it for the remained of their careers,. Stan Coveleski (played until 1928), Red Faber (until 1933), and Burleigh Grimes (until 1934) all are in the HOF. Even Urban Shocker who used it until 1928 should be in the HOF had he not died at the age of 38 with probably nobody there to petition for his inclusion. His WAR and WAR/year are far better than Koufax despite playing only one more season. So you could say as many as 3-4 HOF caliber pitchers are or will be in the HOF despite cheating for the better part of 1/2 to 3/4 of their career.
2) Years later in the 1940s and 1950s players were encouraged to workout, some of the early adopters of weight training and working out were none other than Ruth (mid-1920s), Teddy Ballgame in the 1940s, and Stan The Man. Should we consider that cheating?
3) When Bonds and Clemens were using steroids, over half the league was using steroids, should we put everyone in the hall of fame who was just below the standard, but played clean? How about we grab guys like Jay Buhner, Paul O’Neill, Cecil Fielder, Frank Viola, and Al Leiter to name a few. Buhner and Fielder were around 20 WAR for their career, but had they played in the 50s, their numbers would’ve overshadowed Maris who finished closer to 40 WAR. Let’s not forget that Fielder also lost prime years in Japan. O’Neill, Leiter, and Viola all had around 40-45 WAR for their career, but how much better would all 5 of these players have been playing against not steroids users. If you aren’t going to put them in for having the character to not cheat and as a result fall short of the HOF, we shouldn’t penalize a player for doing what was necessary to stay level with the cheaters who looked to get into the HOF purely due to ‘roids. Take Bonds and Clemens as examples, should they have used? No. Are they great people? Probably not. But most importantly, even if you take steroids away and half their production, they are easy 1st ballot HOF caliber players.
4) Using steroids is not a slam dunk to get you better, you still have to workout in the gym to get a benefit from using them. It just allows for quicker recovery and no loss of muscle tone when grinding through a long season. It’s not like McGwire showed up at 6’5″ and 275 lbs. because he injected a shot in him. The reality is that Bonds and McGwire both were gym rats and used steroids to repair and stabilize the muscles due to their hard work in the gym. I haven’t and wouldn’t use steroids, but I’m not going to be so dismissive like there was no sweat equity involved in their careers.
5) At which point do you look at players who get LASIK surgery or who spend all night in the gym like Rickey Henderson and Carlton Fisk and say these guys are definitely cheating. Cheating is an unfair advantage by definition. But isn’t work ethic and diligence a form of unfair advantage and could then be construed as cheating? Players all have demons they deal with for being dishonest, too honest, for working too hard at the cost of their social life or for being too lazy and leaving something on the field when they walk away. It is impossible to fairly measure the life of a person, so I suggest we measure their stats without the bias of implied cheating or wrong doing, because we really don’t know how much that helped or hurt them.
6) If the Hall of Fame is the story of baseball and there is a place in there for announcers, owners, a woman’s league which had no connection to MLB (before you go PC Police on me, we don’t enshrine Sadaharu Oh despite a career average of .301 and 868 career homeruns in the Nippon league), coaches, umpires, mascots, vendors, and fans, I have to believe that story needs Bonds, Clemens, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Pete Rose, and all the greatest players and stories of baseball. If for no other reason than to share the cautionary tales of the sport as well.
Cheating is bad, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want my boys to go through Cooperstown and not know how Bonds changed the game for a couple seasons in the 2000s or to point at a picture of Clemens and tell my son how that is the intensity of a champion, cause it is and was despite the other sad elements to his career. How do talk about running everything out and hustling without using Pete Rose as an example? Can you really tell the story of the 1919 Black Sox team without talking about Joe Jackson? And how do you explain how good he was if there is nothing there to reference?
It’s the Hall of Fame, the enshrinement of baseballs greatest stories, Not the Hall of Honest or the enshrinement of good deeds.
These chats are disappointing, rarely cover Padres rumors or transactions, literally avoiding the Padres and Padres fans like the plague.
Yes, there is a passionate fan base here in San Diego.
Try having two NBA teams and an NFL depart and 0 championships, no playoff appearances for your lone professional team since 2010.
Yes, San Diegans, native San Diegans who if we are fortunate to live here, scrape by (born and raised here fortunately but heck I can’t afford to live where I have grown up).
Petco is overrun by transplants. San Diegans are told to suck it up and tip our caps. There are routinely more Dodgers fans than Padres fans at games, finally going to brown will at least let Padres fans stand out a little a Petco.
Why are San Diego Padres fans salty? see above.
Please humor us MLBTR and cover the Pads a little more.
Imagine a Padres parade down Broadway spilling into the Gaslamp district and ending up in Petco on a beautiful sun drenched day in SD.
How good would that be for MLB?
Wow! What a wild ride this was. First, MLBTR covers the Padres appropriately. Perhaps your qualm should be with your team for being a consistent irrelevancy instead of with the writers who provide ample content free of charge. If you want to blame someone for your franchises leaving, I’d look towards their respective ownerships.
Your personal slights by the world are frankly tired at this point. Cost of living is going up and people move to new cities. Welcome to 2019.
If you want your team to finally contend, perhaps the fans should force ownerships hand. Stop going to games. Stop watching them and tank the ratings. ….of course then they might just leave too
For what it’s worth, I would love to see the Padres be true contenders. I’ve grown tired of the Dodgers’ NL West dominance. San Diego is a beautiful city of wonderful people who deserve to win.
But for now…..at least you have Don Orsillo
Shame you missed the Jason Martinez chats. On average, about 58% of the questions were about the Padres.
If every claim that these writers are avoiding certain teams or hated this team or that team were true, then no team would ever be written about because they hate them all.
Re: Strasburg seen in So Cal so automatic he must be LA or SD bound…
Who was sitting next to him? Scott Boras, his agent. Who is from… where? Newport Beach, CA.
Could be a ton of things going on here, probably not a lot different given the holiday week and his family roots than any of the last number of seasons. Tell me when they put their DC home on the market.
How are cheaters like Bonds belonging in the HOF over Schilling according to Mark?