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 >It annoys me when writers do this. They didn't spend all that money at once. There's a chance they won't spend all that money when it's all said and done.
I think there's a certain $$$/WAR argument that boils down to elite FAs never being worth the money. But a team that operates under that principle essentially sets itself the limit of never having an elite player on its who is older than 27 or so. You can still win that way, and taking each potential signing on its own all the decisions might be the "right" ones. But you're limiting your avenues of approaching a championship.
*And the steroids...two..two...weapons! Mental problems, steroids, and a fanatical devotion to the pope. Damn!
I agree, always bugs me.
...well OBVIOUSLY the 2004 playoffs, the 2004 playoffs go without saying, but apart from the 2007 playoffs, the eleven straight all-star games, and the 2004 playoffs, what has Manny Ramirez ever done for us?
I do that all the time, and I've never regretted it, even if I sometimes wake up next to women who look like Albert Pujols.
edited for random capitilization
And drunk or not, if it's your last night on earth, why not spend?
I tend to be more likely to buy drinks for people when I'm drunk, or order more expensive drinks. Though it's all inter-related with the paying money to get drunk that you mention. I'm rarely in a time/place to spend much money when I'm drunk. Though I did order a baseball bat drunk a little while ago. To be fair I had planned on buying it while sober anyway.
I certainly do. There are four ways;
1. I'm not a big drinker so on a given night maybe I'll have one or two. Once I'm up to 4 or 5 then I'm likely to get to 8-10, those additional drinks after I'm drunk are additional spending.
2. Buying a pretty (or pretty at the moment) girl a drink in hopes of whatever (which for me works about as well as Vernon Wells' contract).
3. Overtipping, especially if the waitress shares attributes with the women mentioned in #2.
4. Buying friends drinks. I get a lot more generous in that regard when I'm liquored up.
Though oddly 2 or 3 are rarely problems for me. The drunker I get the more likely I am to try to impress women. But my attempts to impress women usually revolve around me making myself look as foolish as possible and/or hurting myself pretty badly. Which is usually a fairly cheap* endeavour (God bless universal healthcare!)
*Though to date confoundingly uneffective
This man has never been in a strip club.
Isn't the drunkenness equivalent of Wells' contract waking up and finding out that you got married to some random girl while drunk?
Excellent point of view, one I share. If BTF ran a team, the roster would be empty. We might sign a Brad Penny for $5 million or take a flyer on Carlos Pena in a 1 year $8 million deal, but my goodness, our roster would be filled with 1 year contracts, bounce back candidates and we would probably continuously trade any asset for 3 prospects.
I highly doubt the BTF team would win a WS.
Also if the BTF team played in a hitter-friendly park, we would never sign any pitchers - and if it was a pitcher-friendly park, we would never sign any hitters....
Very good point. Sure, we all know massive long term deals have the potential to create a payroll disaster and prevent a team from payroll and roster flexibility, but apparently people are unable to determine thresholds or when a contract is just a little bad, or a critically bad.
The ability to measure something accurately is where the value in analysis is at. Telling us that spending a crap load of money is "bad" is meaningless analysis.
That said, I think people need to seriously consider the possibility of massive US inflation in the next 10 years. Even 5 years. Our country has a zillion promises we can't keep and just about the only way to get out from under these overzealous commitments is to print money, or inflate the currency. If that happens, these contracts will be a steal.
Also, I spend like a fiend when I've been drinking.
I highly doubt the BTF team would win a WS.
But, we'd make a #### load of money.
At the end of the day, if we owned the team, we'd rather have profits than pennants.
Doubtful. Our BTF squad would have little roster continuity, we would have no face of the franchise and we would always be talking about the future. Our fans wouldn't be very entertained by that. I doubt we would win that much. If we ran the Dodgers, okay, yes we would make $$, but in general I don't think it would be a special franchise.
Yeah, but the team would win the Wins/$ spent every year.
I don't think so.
We'd spend a ton on scouting, drafting and development, and we'd sign our big prospects to Longoria/Moore type contracts like the Rays. We probably wouldn't have too many home-grown players past the age of 30-32, I agree. But, you'd still have 6-8 years of continuity on the home-grown guys.
We'd probably run a $80-100M payroll, and be reasonably successful. If you put us in a decent market, we'd make money. If we were in a shitty market, we'd run a $50M payroll, and get rich off revenue sharing, central fund revenue, and MLBAM.
Well, if the league's gonna give us $60M a year just for showing up, we might as well.
Love that shot. It's true about BTF, this is the be all end all measure for many. Snapper, I can see that scenario. Of course more teams are doing just that, harder to stand out. It's not easy to win. In the end, in this game, you need your scouts to be better than the next guy.
Hasn't stopped the Pirates from turning a profit.
Someone else touted profit. We wouldn't win. We wouldn't entertain.
Except for it to be a steal, the owners will have to raise ticket prices and people will have to keep going to the game. Advertisers will still have to advertise.
Imagining the worst, if the US turns into something like the Weimar republic, then, sure, Arte can pay off Pujols with a couple of $100,000,000 bills. But it won't be as if Arte is doing well. It's heads you win, tails I lose; Arte has set up a contract that only appears to strongly benefit* him in the event of societal and economic disaster.
* I see two ways for this to go: 1) the contract is fair and Pujols continues at an HOF level for 7 or 8 years with the Angels winning a couple/few championships; 2) the deal is a disaster for the Angels, with Pujols cratering.
I don't see a scenario, short of Lion's extremely pessimistic one, where the economy is truly catastrophically bad where the contract is a disaster for Pujols. And, like I say, the contract itself may be good, in that case, for Arte but everything else will have gone to ####.
But we'd make millions, as the post you quoted said. That's fun too.
And then the owners can take all the money they get from their long-term TV contract and buy themselves a nice steak dinner.
...a crapload of you will take Hanley if you have pick number 2....pick 3 and you'll take Ellsbury, and everyone will be wondering how long to wait before grabbing Crawford.
You only get records on the team dime if they're actually records, vinyl. If you want anything else, get a 14 y.o. to download it for you for free.
As for drinking, the team will only provide hard liquor; cuts down the lines at the bathroom in the owners' box. That's gonna be our biggest downfall. The owners' box will take up 500 prime seats.
how would we be build a ballpark? BTF can't accept public taxpayer money, can it?
I think the Astrodome is still available. Or RFK.
*The real BTF consensus is that no one needs a new ballpark. Build a winning team, market it, and people will come to whatever damn ballpark they play their games at.
If not for the Marlins talent evaluators, we'd have already had that in Loria.
Of the major contracts this offseason, BTF is not a fan of Pujols and Reyes, but likes Wilson and thinks Buehrle is fair.
People here dislike the majority of free agent contracts, but not all of them universally. And often the consensus is that it's "fair market value". A BTF-owned team would be perfectly happy to fill in with "fair market value" contracts around our young, cheap stars in order to make a playoff push.
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