Wednesday, December 12, 2012
2013 Results: Bonds, Clemens, Piazza and Biggio are elected to the Hall of Merit!
(bbtf)
Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mike Piazza and Craig Biggio have been elected to the Hall of Merit!
The timing for our first year electing 4 candidates could not have worked out better, since class of 2013 is the strongest in terms of electees that we’ve ever had. The top of the 1934 ballot included Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Eddie Collins, Pop Lloyd, Smokey Joe Williams and Cristobal Torriente, but only 2 were elected.
Bonds and Clemens were each unanimous at 1 and 2. I believe that’s the first ...
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1 2 3 4 5 6 >Over the past half-century of Major League Baseball, the 67-year-old has been the game’s best manager, best innovator, best thinker, and best strategist.
I have tremendous respect for Tony, but talk about hype and exaggeration. I suppose this is true if you ignore Davey Johnson, Earl Weaver, Whitey Herzog and so on ever existed. I know Buzz made a few bucks off of Tony, but jeez. Maybe Tony is the best of the best, but you can appreciate baseball and disagree that Tony LaRussa strides over the game like a colossal genius whom no one else can even approach.
Sure, but he also unlucked out in 88 and 90 by that same shot crap philosophy. Still leaves him with three titles.
A couple of his vintage Card teams were pretty damn great, too.
There's no question he got outsized contributions from his bench and back-end every year. Every year there was an Allen Craig or a Craig Paquette or a Tony Philips or whoever stepping forward.
And man, do I loathe the "playoffs are meaningless crapshoots" meme. There is luck involved, they are hard to predict, but most of the outcomes come from very small mistakes or successes by the individuals who are playing and managing the games.
I'm an A's fan, but they didn't lose those four straight division series because of "luck". They lost because they ###### up royally in key moments, again and again.
This is an awful sentence in so many ways.
Winning as many games as the Cards did in September and October of this year does not cry out "crapshoot" nor "undeserved" to me.
A 90-win team going 11-7 over 18 games, even against good competition, is nothing more than random chance. Means absolutely nothing.
His team this year did not deserve to be in the playoffs -- wild-card.
Every year there was an Allen Craig or a Craig Paquette or a Tony Philips or whoever stepping forward.
Well, that ... or there's Tiger pitchers throwing wet, bunted balls with cold hands all over Busch Stadium (2006), or there's a foot of height making the final out hit the wall rather than Nelson Cruz's glove (2011).
edit: And they scored 19 more runs than they allowed in those 54 games.
What does that have to do with the productivity of benches under Larussa?
Tony LaRussa is 3rd all-time in wins by a manager.
He's still bitter about 2006, when his undeserving Tigers lost to the flag-winning Cards. The rest is just lashing out.
That's a good way to put it.
I dislike when people reference "luck" in playoff series as though a magical die was rolled and generated a certain outcome.
The tigers pitchers through away the balls because they ###### up. If you replayed the game ten more times it might not happen, but that doesn't mean it was "luck".
It means you're the World Champions, baby!
You're free to assign meaning to whatever you choose, but for 99 percent of baseball fans (and 100 percent of baseball players), winning the World Series has great meaning. If you think it's more important to sort out in your own mind who some mythical, ultimately unknowable "best team" is, have at it. You and Ray can draw up a little certificate to give to them. I'm sure they'll be very impressed.
Why am I being dragged into this? I love playoff baseball, and try to watch every game, whether the Red Sox are in it or not. I love watching good teams and great players compete at the highest level in the urgency of a short series with everything on the line.
I grant you I don't think it means very much who wins and loses, and that players/fans/media laughably think that it does. I understand, while most people don't, that "champion" does not necessarily mean that one team was better. I understand, while most people don't, that the "champions" don't have more toughness or character or heart or confidence than the other team. They just got bleeping lucky and won. You can play the same postseason over and over again under the same conditions and the results will look different every time.
I'm not sure of the identity of 2011's best team. I know it wasn't the St. Louis Cardinals.
Baseball playoffs that spit out the 8th (or so) best team as the "World Champions" are inherently flawed.
Well, SBB left out September, which I specifically mentioned, and you added August, which I didn't. Why?
I fail to see the relevance of September. The season isn't 30 games long.
Using McCoy's numbers, they were the 8th best team in baseball record-wise in August and September. I'm utterly perplexed as to what that's supposed to prove, other than they weren't one of baseball's elite teams.
But we already knew that.
Because you say things like this:
It's "laughable" that it means a lot to the players who wins? And then you say things like this:
"Most people" think that the Cardinals' victory establishes them as better than the Rangers? I'd love to see some examples of this.
I'm skeptical they were even the 8th best team. They played in a weak division and had just 88 Pythagorean wins.
But the wildcard gives us these kinds of teams more often than the previous setup.
Me, too.
I was being charitable.
I apparently read your post wrong. I thought it said August and September.
But I'm not sure what one month of the regular season plus the playoffs is going to prove. I mean if that is proof of something then what does March, April, May, June, July, and August prove?
TLR: 70-57 in games, 16-11 in series
Cox: 67-69 in games, 12-15 in series
Torre: 85-58 in games, 19-11 in series
in Torre's case that breaks down to 57-25/14-3 through 2001, 28-33/5-8 after 2001
I'm at work and can't check, but didn't the Cards destroy everyone the first two or three months of the season as well? I just think the endless carping on how they were a crappy team that got lucky is becoming hallucinatory. They did what other teams, however good they were, were unable to do, both over the season and through the playoffs. If people feel it counts for nothing, they do, but I can't figure out why they're watching or what they are expecting, I guess.
Which was luck.
It was bad luck, to be sure, but it was luck all the same.
By the same token, didn't he luck out in 1983, 1988, 1990, 2004, and 2005?
Perhaps but is different than getting lucky to get into the playoffs which is what I think is meant when people say he was lucky in 2006 and 2011.
Well, why are you focusing on September and October? Did they not hold major league contests from April to August?
The man's won two titles with meh teams (though this team is clearly a step above the '06 team, and played as well as anybody in the last three months) but he's had more than his fair share of unlucky losers as well.
I don't really see how anybody can look at his teams and come up with three World Series champs and five pennants - they'd just switch the winners around a bit.
He just doesn't deserve them for winning the "World Series" in 2006 and 2011.
The 1988 and 1990 A's were famously upset by inferior clubs.
There's no legitimate basis to conclude that the '88 Dodgers and '90 Reds were inferior clubs. They played entirely different teams and schedules than their A's counterparts -- and won 4-1 and 4-0, respectively, head-to-head.
That isn't to say they might not have been inferior, just that it's baseless to say affirmatively that they were.
The loss of this ability to sensibly suspend disbelief during the postseason is the worst part of Comm. Tru-Coat's "One Moment in Time" postseason tournament matching teams that have already played common opponents, if not each other.
#28
No, it was luck.
Although that's not really what we mean when we say "The postseason is luck." Plays like the Byrnes play are part of that, but the term refers more to the idea that players and teams can have good weeks and bad weeks, good months and bad months. When these things happen in June nobody notices. But they happen in October and all of a sudden OMIGAWD It's A Big Deal.
So are we going to divvy up months like they are games in a series?
April-16-11, ended month in first place by 2 games
May-17-12, , ended month in first place by 2.5 games
June-11-15, ended month tied for first place
July-13-13, ended month in second place by 2.5 games
August-15-13, ended month in second place by 8.5 games
September-18-8, ended month in second place by 6 games.
If we swap some wins in September for wins in June and July then what is the argument for the Cards? Why is an 18-8 September proof of something? Would a 15-11 September and a 14-12 June mean the same thing?
If, in the biggest speech of the year, I make a mistake and leave out a key fact, was that luck and not reflective of my true talent level? or did I #### up?
EDIT: it is bad luck that I ###### up an important moment, perhaps. But I still ###### up.
But guess what? We can add these things up, and when we do, it comes out of the wash as 90 actual wins and 88 pythag wins. In a weak division. In a weak league.
Meh.
My argument is solely that the Cardinals were a deserviing World Series team and winner. The September is part of the whole, and does count not on its own but as part of the entire reason why they are deserving. Again, recalling #28, WTF are people expecting when watching baseball, exactly?
Also, maybe I'm not even in opposition to you, I have no idea.
Even if pythag wins mattered in the slightest (Hint: They don't), the Cardinals tied for the third-best pythagorean record in the NL. In other words, if we chose playoff teams by pythag records, the Cards would have deservedly been in the postseason.
I agree they were "deserving," by definition, since they qualified under the structure in place. But that's not very interesting to me.
Were they one of the few best teams in baseball? No.
----
Weak division, weak league has been noted, Tom.
I think they were lucky to get into the playoffs. But I don't think they were abnormally lucky to win it all once they got into the playoffs. Once you are in you are in.
Isn't that the point -- over what time are we measuring? Over eight weeks in September and October, the Cards were the best in the league. Over the entire season, they were eighth. Over the past 135 years, they are tied for fourth. Now, you can say that the second of those is more important than the first or the last, but it's all arbitrary.
It's not arbitrary; they were awarded the title of "World Champions" for 2011, not a subset of 2011.
Nor were the eligible teams for the tournament that "determined" the "World Champion" based on records of a subset of 2011, but for the entire 2011 regular season.
Not that your point isn't intriguing -- a postseason involving first and second half champions with everyone reset to 0-0 after 81 games would be, in many respects, superior to the current system.
this tired meme again? so what about the 100-win teams from 2004 and 2005? shouldn't they have just been handed the WS trophy? they were arguably the best team in the majors both years.
yeah, i remember how they cranked up the heat and dried off the field between innings before calling the st. louis players out of their personal barometric rejuvenating pods. dirty cheaters.
Then who "deserves" to win the World Series, if not the team that actually wins it? The team with the best Pythagorean record?
Well, that's completely fine, I haven't one problem with that.
But if you, SBB, and McCoy (and Hutcheson, in absentia) are arguing that it isn't interesting - or correct - empirically, that is what I am disagreeing with.
So if it was a 26-team tournament won by the Royals, you'd deem them unequivocally and without deconstruction, the deserving "World Champions" of the 2011 baseball season?
So if it was a 26-team tournament won by the Royals, you'd deem them unequivocally and without deconstruction, the deserving "World Champions" of the 2011 baseball season?
-blows whistle-
"Answering a question with a question."
-red flag thrown-
Ref goes to replay.
"Call stands."
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