MLB Thread 2019

[ex-powderbroker]

Here is a very detailed article about the case of Steve Garvey:

https://tht.fangraphs.com/steve-garvey-gets-no-respect/

[Woodsy]

what 10 year period is that? Because Keith Hernandez would like a word with you.

wanted to add that Keith Hernandez and I had a lot of words on day a few years back in a pub on 43rd street next to GCT that isnt there anymore. Garvey didnt come up.

He was at the bar having lunch/drinks. Buddy of mine and I sit down for same.

Knew he looked familiar but couldnt place him. We chatted with him for a while, mostly about gentrification & living in New York. Guess he was into Wiliamsburg real estate real early and did very well from it. Seemed to actually love the place too. Sounds like he had a place there for quite a while

After he leaves, says good bye and nice to meet you the bartender walks over and says " do yo know who that was?" and tells us. light bulb goes off for us both.

oh yeah...
( Buddy is a Yankee Fan and neither of us are watching Keith on TV)

Bartender had him sign a $100 for his friend who was a big Met fan He owed it to him and knew he would never spend it.

[Viva]

Garvey had the hottest qife in baseball during the 70s. Too bad bitch was such a basket case.

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[buttahflake]

Steve Garvey had the biggest forearms ever, I remember as a kid thinking he could tear telephone books in half with those arms. I loved that era of baseball, and the Dodgers were one of my favorite teams.

[irul&ublo]

Steve Garvey had the biggest forearms ever, I remember as a kid thinking he could tear telephone books in half with those arms. I loved that era of baseball, and the Dodgers were one of my favorite teams.

probably from wacking off cuz Cindy wouldn't do him

[Viva]

Nope, other way around. And I can't blame him.

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[BmillsSkier]

Garvey had the hottest qife in baseball during the 70s. Too bad bitch was such a basket case.

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Chuck Finley wins the hot crazy wife contest every. single. time.

Tawny Kitaen.

[SkiBall]

There are players I just know have to be in the HOF, and others I definitely have to look up first. But being that they are one of the players that I remember and consider to have left a good mark on the game (for their play) is enough for me.
Unless they were one of my faves, I really don't care. But I'll argue it if in the mood for shits n gigs.

[Viva]

Chuck Finley wins the hot crazy wife contest every. single. time.

Tawny Kitaen.

Heh, yeah the krazy was certainly strong with that one.

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[joetron]

Don’t fuck with Steve Garvey

https://twitter.com/Super70sSports/s...755725824?s=20


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[Woodsy]

I just don't think he was nearly as good as his reputation, and I think that the 5 year period before you're eligible worked perfectly here, it gave voters the time to better evaluate him with some distance from his playing days.

Going to be curious how this impacts Jeter's chances of getting in

[ex-powderbroker]

Did that last article I posted change your opinion at all, Woodsy?

... and are you saying that Jeter and Garvey are comparable? That is laughable. I'm a Jeter homer but even a die hard Sox fan can tell the difference between a guy who will get in on his second ballot and another guy teetering with the veterans committee.

[Danno]

Going to be curious how this impacts Jeter's chances of getting in

I am a die-hard Yankees hater, my second favorite team in baseball is whoever is playing the Yankees. And Jeter most certainly was WAY over-rated. That said, even I would vote him in on the first ballot. I wouldn't put him in the pantheon of greatest ever or anything, but absolutely a lock HoFer.

[ex-powderbroker]

If Garvey gets in there is no reason to keep way better players like Berkman, Walker, Helton, etc out. Even Giambi. Those guys were awesome.

Steve Garvey: Hall of Good

[Danno]

The case for Dwight Evans. Kind of has me convinced. https://theathletic.com/1355829/2019...-dwight-evans/

Since it's paywalled I'll quote it.

July 3, 1980. It was 101 degrees in Baltimore, humid enough to boil crabs in the dugout. I had arrived at Memorial Stadium at 12:30 p.m., to run and shag and hopefully play pepper or whatever players were doing on a sauna-day afternoon. Red Sox hitting coach Walt Hriniak said, “I don’t think anyone’s coming out until BP (at 5 p.m.), except Dwight. Could you hold up shagging for a while?”

Of course. Hriniak pulled the cart with the baseballs out to the mound. Carl Yastrzemski came out in shorts and a t-shirt and leaned against the cage. Dwight Evans walked out of the visitors dugout, stopping for words with Yastrzemski, his close friend.

These were hard times for Evans. Once considered one of the sport’s rising stars, he was nearing the All-Star Break with a .192/.282/.345 slash line, platooning with Tom Poquette, with media speculation that he could be traded to whoever would give the Red Sox a mid-rotation starter.

The concern was that he seemed to bail on hard-throwing right-handers, or pitchers with late-breaking curveballs and sliders. “Afraid” was whispered or written, spoken in the press box and in the scouts’ section.

Evans was 28 when he reached this crossroads, a quiet, complex person who was devoted to his son, born with a genetic disorder, who he and his wife Susan raised with fierce dignity and privacy. What was left somewhere in the back rooms of many people’s memories was the fact that in 1973 and 1978 Evans suffered severe beanings while facing Mike Paul of the Rangers and Mike Parrott of the Mariners.

“In those days, they didn’t have the concussion awareness we have today,” says Evans. “No one really knew what I was going through.”

In the famed 1978 race where the Red Sox lost a 14-game lead, after Evans returned to the lineup, in September he uncharacteristically missed two fly balls in a loss at that same Memorial Stadium. After the game, I asked him if he was still having headache or vision issues from the beaning. “I don’t know why you’re going there,” he responded, clearly annoyed by my question. He denied. That’s just the way it was back then.

A year and a half later, he got into the batting cage to hit off Hriniak, his trusted mentor, with the advice of his friend, Yastrzemski, whom he knew genuinely cared about him, and, as we learned years later, clearly understood the Camus nightmare Evans was living.

It seemed as if the session lasted for an hour. Evans hit only a dozen or so balls hard into the outfield. He hit ground balls and soft contact balls, and when Hriniak signaled the session was over, the job was to gather up the balls that had been thrown back into the infield and put them in the cart.

“I hate watching Dwight go through this,” I said.

“There’s progress,” Hriniak replied. “I think he’s headed in the right direction.”

Coach talk.

Yastrzemski walked out from behind the cage. “You’ll remember this day the rest of your life,” he said. “Today, he got his career back on track. He found balance. That’s what he was working on for an hour. Balance. He’s got it. It’ll take a few games for him to get his confidence back to where it was when he came up. A few games, and he’ll realize balance means he doesn’t have to worry about getting hit.”

It did take a few days. But after the All-Star break, the following week, when the Red Sox got back to Fenway, Evans got four hits. Before the break, his OPS was .613. After, it was 1.001. The next season, which was carved by the first major strike in baseball history, he tied for the American League home run title.

Consider these facts:

During the 1980s, Evans led all major leaguers in extra-base hits and ranked second to Rickey Henderson in times on base, with 2,447. For the decade, he ranked second in Weighted Runs Above Average to Wade Boggs, HOF. He led the league in Weighted Runs Created. He led the American League in homers (256) and was second in RBI (900), total bases (2,657), and walks (919). Eddie Murray had more RBI, Robin Yount had more total bases, Rickey Henderson reached base more often, all en route to Cooperstown.

He was the only player in the ’80s with 900 RBI and 900 walks; that hadn’t been accomplished in a decade since the 1930s. He won five Gold Gloves in those years, eight for his career.

For his career, he reached base 3890 times, 25th in history among righthanded batters — at the time he retired, he was 11th on the list. Career extra-base hits? Thirteenth when he retired, and still twenty-ninth, above Joe DiMaggio. When he left the game, he ranked in the top 25 outfielders in walks, homers, times on base, doubles and RBIs.

For the span of his career, from 1972-1991, he was first in the AL in walks, second in homers, third in RBI, second in runs scored, third in doubles.

He played in two World Series for Boston, in which he hit .300/.397/.580/.977, with 15 hits and 14 RBIs in 14 games.

In this current analytic era, the on-base and power numbers would have made him a hero. Evans developed a remarkable ability to go to the plate and think zone, looking until two strikes for a particular pitch in a particular area. Ralph Houk called him “the best 3-0 hitter I’ve ever seen, because he only swings when he gets the right pitch in the right area.” I remember a grand slam off Oakland pitcher Tom Underwood that won a game on a 3-0 pitch that resembled the sun coming up over Campobello Island.

These are the offensive data points, but, at least in part because of the concussions, he spent almost the entire first half of his career as a defensive offensive player and an offensive defensive player. He wasn’t just a good outfielder, he was great, playing in a Fenway Park right field that might have been the toughest in the sport.

I remember his style when shagging balls in the outfield. On every ball off the bat, he busted to get to position, catch the ball as if he were in the middle of a pitching windup and get rid of the ball with velocity and carry, without taking a walk-up step. He was a master of getting to the foul line, planting his back foot and firing to second base as if he were an infielder.

When I worked with the great Joe Morgan, we used to debate Evans’ catch on Morgan in 1975 World Series Game 6, an 11th-inning rocket directly over Evans’ head; it saved the tie, and Evans turned it into a double play. From right field, he couldn’t see the catcher’s sign, the setup location, the swing path that helps a center fielder. Years later, Morgan admitted to me that his ’75 Reds teammates told him they thought it was the best ever. Of course, the next night Morgan’s hit won the series.

Dwight Evans won eight gold gloves; Ichiro Suzuki and Roberto Clemente won more as right fielders, while three of Al Kaline’s ten gold gloves were won as a center fielder.

Look, I agree with FanGraphs’ Jay Jaffe. Lou Whitaker belongs in the Hall; he and Evans have the highest career WAR numbers and JAWS numbers of the players on this year’s Veteran’s ERA ballots. I voted for Ted Simmons the one time he was on the ballot, never imagining he wasn’t a first-ballot HOFer. And Dale Murphy and Don Mattingly were great players — Mattingly’s career cut short because of a back issue — who left the game far better than they found it.

If the cutting-edge Boston University CTE Center had existed when Evans was first hit in the head in 1973, Evans might have already been in the Hall of Fame for more than 20 years. But it didn’t, and the man who became a New England icon called “Dewey” spent nearly half his career struggling. And overcame it.

Yaz was right. That July 3, 1980 afternoon I was hot, sweaty, exhausted and feeling blinded by the light, but forty years later I still remember what he told me: Balance, and the day that Dwight Evans turned the corner towards the New York Thruway and the road to Cooperstown.

[buttahflake]

Dewey, Yaz and Jim Ed are my favorite baseball players who ever lived.

[Viva]

Who were your favorite zombie players?

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[BmillsSkier]

Who were your favorite zombie players?

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Pete Rose.

[TNKen]

Polar Bear!!!!

[Woodsy]

Dirty cheating Astros, will they give World Series trophy back?
https://nypost.com/2019/11/12/former...signs-in-2017/

[Timberridge]

When the Patriots give theirs back?

[Supermoon]

Dirty cheating Astros, will they give World Series trophy back?
https://nypost.com/2019/11/12/former...signs-in-2017/

Has any team lost so much of the good will towards it in such a short timeframe?

[ex-powderbroker]

Aj Hinch with the Palmeiro finger wag at the end

[alias_rice]

Funny. I heard an interview with Bregman this year talking up the virtues of baseballs “unwritten rules”. Meanwhile he’s breaking the actual written rules.

[BmillsSkier]

Dirty cheating Astros, will they give World Series trophy back?
https://nypost.com/2019/11/12/former...signs-in-2017/

Where have I heard this story before? Oh, yeah, here:

https://www.cleveland.com/tribe/2018..._red_s_77.html