Channeling the spirits of Joe Sheehan, Jackie Harvey, and Peter Gammons…
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Barry Bonds has a 290 point advantage in OPS over the #2 guy in MLB, Jim Thome. Dropping down another 290 points from Thome gets you to Tony Tarasco. Yeesh.
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Pitch Count of the night: Joe Kennedy, 123. Why did he go that far, at age 23 for a team that won't win 60 games? Probably because Lee Gardner followed him with 2/3 of an inning of 4-run ball for the loss. Managing the Devil Rays is something like competing on "Iron Chef", and having Chairman Kaga reveal a huge ziggurat of lint.
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Kit Pellow went yard. Pellow's logged seven years in the minors as a replacement level 3B/1B. It's a nice thing to see him hit a major league bomb. He's a comparable player, probably superior, to Vinny Castilla, and has been for a couple years. But hey, AOL Time Warner's flush with cash, right? For the record, the HR count for the year is Pellow 1, Gabe Kapler 0.
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A few quotes I love from the new edition of Weaver On Strategy:
"If you're carrying twelve pitchers, you're crowding your roster with relievers to face hitters that most teams don't have the space to carry any more."
"Don't play for one run unless you know that run will win a ballgame." (Weaver's sixth law)
"Your most precious possessions on offense are your twenty-seven outs."
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The Ouch Factor…
Player AB BA OBP SLG Vaughn, Greg 251 .163 .286 .315 Hernandez, Ramon 307 .235 .318 .336 Thomas, Frank 420 .231 .337 .433 Kapler, Gabe 223 .269 .300 .354 (In Arlington and Coors) Castilla, Vinny 434 .230 .265 .343 Hundley, Todd 215 .195 .278 .391 Shinjo, Tsuyoshi 320 .238 .295 .369 Izturis, Cesar 389 .229 .252 .296
For those of you who have some of these guys on your HACKING MASS teams, I salute you. (We're working on an update there.)
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Scale Balancing:
Choose Column A or B.
A B Segui, David Rodriguez, Alex Stottlemyre, Todd Wilson, Paul Surhoff, B.J. Kielty, Bobby Offerman, Jose Bellhorn, Mark
Before you choose, remember that column A is considerably more expensive than column B.
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