Hank Chinaski

Seems like I remember reading something last off-season about some S&C peers questioning what Yancy had the players doing - like actually being stunned. Add in the mass injuries from the past few years, and maybe if you squint you can connect some dots and conclude that there may be something to this “build from the foundation” approach to S&C under the new staff, emphasizing form, alignment, etc. On the other hand, it’s a 9.95 off-season report about S&C, so…

I was in college when they moved to TN and grad school when the Texans began. I guess it’s because I was an adult and didn’t live in Houston at the time, but I just couldn’t ever care that much about the Texans. It’s totally irrational, but if they had come back in 92 as the Oilers, I’d have been all the way back in. I guess we really do root for laundry. As inept as they’ve been, I wouldn’t care if only they were the Oilers. (But passing on VY would have been really hard to take.)

Yeah, I think this is a good summary of the situation. Disappointing situation because I thought Flores was doing a good job in Miami and seemed to be building something. I didn’t know he was at odds with the owner/front office. Hopefully something positive comes out of the suit for him and for the league.

I’d take 05 VY over 19 Burrow all day, every day. As talented as that Texas team was, Vince wasn’t exactly throwing to Chase and Jefferson. Nobody I’ve ever seen could consistently make something out of nothing like VY.

Getting back to the topic of “fuck Aaron Rodgers,” here’s another great example of how he’s such a douche. Deflecting to a topic that he knows will get him sympathy from lots of people. Hell, I’ve been wanting Aaron Rodgers to lose for almost 20 years, starting with the 2004 Holiday Bowl following his temper tantrum about Texas. And he hilariously did lose that game to a team Texas beat 51-21 in their home stadium. His idiotic preference for homeopathy is just another detail in the story of how much he sucks and should be hated. You know he’s the type of dumbass who expresses “skepticism” of “western medicine” (because he watched a YouTube video) while trying to sound smart (but he’s actually talking out of his ass). Come on, we all know someone like this.

He was already in the “pantheon of greatest ever,” he was actually just underrated in the second half of the 90s with the emergence of Griffey and Thomas and then the McGwire/Sosa thing. He should have won 3 more MVPs in the 90s and he was a first-ballot HOFer if he retired after the 1998 season. What happened from 01-04 was one of the great players of all time deciding “you know what, people want to see numbers, I’ll show you some fucking numbers.” In an era of widespread PED use in the late 90s, he was still the best player in the game. When he started using (leveling the playing field, you could say), he was the best hitter of all time. OPS+ measures how good he was relative to the league…from 01-04 he posted OPS+ of 259, 268, 231, 263. He was 150% better than league average - which accounts for lots and lots of PED users - over a 4-year span. Yes, PEDs boosted those totals. But relative to a league full of users, he was on a different planet altogether. I get that all this is beside the point to a lot of people - “he cheated” is all they care about. That’s fine and all, but I think you have to consider that MLB did absolutely nothing to enforce the “rules” back then, half his peers were doing it and being rewarded for it, and baseball itself benefitted from it. The climate was just different in that era. So fine, he used PEDs the last few years of his career, discount his production in those years by however much you want - 50%, 75%, hell 100%….he’s still a HOFer.

It wasn’t just that year either - it was 2001-2004. It was unreal.

These are the symptoms. You have to ask yourself, what sort of smug douchebag must he be just in general to keep doing things that he’s despised for? It’s not just that he acted like a bitch when he whined about Texas back in the day - it was the passive-aggressive “I won’t stoop to his level” bitchassedness which he followed up by getting outplayed by Sonny fucking Cumbie. It’s not that he didn’t get vaccinated, it’s that he decided to be a bitch about it and wouldn’t just come out and say that, instead saying he was “immunized” by some homeopathic bullshit artist. He thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room all the time and, like everyone who thinks this, he shows his ass repeatedly. He’s just a smug, arrogant cocksucker; nobody likes smug, arrogant cocksuckers, nor should they.

Yeah but the video makes up for it.

Yes. I am the final panel.

Oh, because in my fantasy their vote and accompanying rationale is evaluated by a panel which uses some objective rubric that requires the voters to apply consistent logic and sound statistical arguments, and if they fail to do so adequately, they lose their vote.

This is why I wish the voters were required to submit (and publish) a written explanation justifying their votes. Everyone knows that DS does (and always has done) shit like this strictly for attention. It would at least be entertaining to read his inane drivel about how Jeff Kent is the one player on this ballot who deserves HOF induction.

Yeah this seems dumb…I thought Flores was doing well. That franchise hasn’t won in a long time and it’s not like he’s had a a great QB to lean on. He should have no problem getting one of these open gigs.

I’d pick Sheffield. The excerpt below doesn’t strike me as strange or surprising at all - so much of the narrative around certain players are rooted more in perception than fact. I’m unmoved by “moments” when it comes to assessing the value of an entire career, I guess… It’s so strange, if you look at his career numbers, he wasn’t any better in high-leverage situation (.292/.388/.556) than he was in medium-leverage situations (.299/.388/.572). He wasn’t dramatically better with runners in scoring position (.296/.411/.531) than he was overall (.283/.380/.552).

I think we have really good statistical methods to assess player value at this point, and I do think this should be a somewhat automated component of induction. WAR and other advanced metrics will continue to evolve - particularly in the defensive side - but they aren’t going away and I’d guess that today’s value assessments will strongly correlate with those 20 years from now because I think that the general methodology is pretty sound, at least on the offensive side of things (pitching too, though it feels like there is probably a bit more adjustment coming there). Though I’m generally opposed to too much subjectivity, I do think that there are additional factors for consideration. Minoso is a good example. I’m glad he got in, but he may not have cleared a strictly statistical threshold. I think circumstances, such as his playing in the Negro Leagues and then being kept in the minors due to “color quotas” should be considered with his statistical case (since these directly affected his career totals), and his being the first Black Latin player in MLB should be considered from a “contributions to the game” perspective.

Yeah. I actually feel bad for Baines, because he was a good hitter but has no business being in the HOF, and he’s now associated with that instead of his career.

Yeah, all good points. And to be clear, I think they’re both certain HOFers. I guess I just meant that they both had long, 20+ year careers (which allowed them to hit HOF milestones) and neither was generally regarded as one of the game’s elite players for any significant amount of time (Thome had one top-5 MVP finish in his career), even though they both had a few elite seasons. And yeah, Beltre had a lot of defensive value and Thome had little, but Thome was also a much better offensive player (147 career OPS+), so those kind of offset. And, yeah, I think Biggio is sort of in that boat also. He had a relatively short, clear peak from ‘94-‘99 (he had two top-5 MVP finishes in that span) with some productive (but not elite) years on either side of it. If he doesn’t hang on for 20 years to compile 3,000 hits, he’s probably not in. I guess I just kind of think of these guys as players who were maybe a bit overlooked during most of their careers (always considered good players but not always thought of as great players) until they starting hitting career milestones in their last few seasons.

To me Beltre kind of falls into the same category as Thome. He’ll get in and he should, but he finished in the top 5 of MVP voting twice in 21 seasons (2nd in ‘04 and 3rd in ‘12). He was an all-star 4 times in 21 years, for whatever that’s worth. In the 5-year stretch that spanned his age 26-30 seasons, he posted OPS+ of 93, 105, 112, 109, and 83. For his career, it was 116. He was a very good defensive player and a deserving HOFer, but he was generally never really thought of as one of the elite players (kinda like Thome).

I agree with you, except for the “Bonds probably” part. Barry Bonds had over 100 fWAR by the end of the 1999 season. He was the best player of the 90s (yes, better than Griffey) and won 3 MVP awards (and should have won 6; he was the best player in the NL in ‘91, ‘95 and ‘96 by a wide margin). He was a first-ballot HOFer if he retired at the end of ‘99. Instead he did PEDs and went on the most dominant 4-year stretch in baseball history, which was incredible to watch but made people forget about his career from 86-99. (And, even with the PEDs, those 01-04 seasons were insane. I remember reading an article once that summarized how productive he was on pitches in the strike zone. I wish we had statcast stuff for those years. Basically, he almost never swung at balls. On the few occasions that pitchers threw him strikes, he almost never missed. It was incredible. Lots of guys were using back then and none of them were in the same galaxy as Barry Bonds. It’s disappointing that he used because he very likely would have had great seasons in those years anyway. PEDs took him from being best of his generation to best ever.)