Sunday, May 19, 2013
Weiner: The Supreme Court Judge and the Curt Flood Case reenactment
(www.examiner.com)
Shades of Hairspray!...“It was a time of tradition, a time of values, and a time…to shake things up.”
Read More...For a journalist, chance encounters at a restaurant or a hair salon can become a major opportunity for advancing a story and in some instances the journalist is in the right place at the right time because he was with his wife. I had a very chance encounter with Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Saturday afternoon in lower Manhattan because my wife happened to have an appointment at a ...
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1. Didi Dodo Doodoo (1k5v3L)If he looks to be a bargain, somebody will swoop.
I hope somebody can convince him of that. This past season, he was turning on a fastball and blasting it deep into the seats occasionally. But it seemed like it would jink-up his swing for the next week or so as he tried to rip everything.
It's a little odd in that the CF market seems to have gone in reverse this offseason. It seems that usually the big name signs first and that sets the market for the other choices.
The Upton deal is interesting -- presumably the Braves much preferred Upton at 5/$75 rather than bring back Bourn at whatever Bourn was asking. Either Bourn was asking for a ton or the Braves don't like Bourn very much.
Bourn really does have a strange profile. He's a low power guy who also only hits 275 and doesn't walk a ton. In WAR terms, he's quite similar to Devon White but White had decent power. Still, for both of them, their value is almost entirely in Rbase, Rdp and Rfield. But a guy whose BA is only 275 in his 20s surely must be a bad bet to age well -- he loses 20-30 points off his BA and he's doing nothing offensively. But then that never happened to White.
A P-I search for expansion era, BA<280, ISO<110 through age 29 (2000+ PAs) and sorted by Rfield ... well, there is Bourn right at the top of the list. Gary Pettis and Ken "RFD" Berry are next and that's exactly what teams want to avoid. Brett Butler is the major success story here and Bill North might have been the best of the rest -- he was actually a bit above-average from 30-32 but (injury maybe?) lost his starting job at 33 and never played again. Del Unser was useless after age 30.
In fact, there are 22 players on this list in addition to Bourn. Butler, Juan Beniquez, Mookie Wilson and Tom Goodwin are the only ones to play a single game after age 34 -- Wilson and Goodwin lasting only 200 PA at age 35 and Beniquez being a sometimes useful bench player throughout his 30s. And one key to Butler's success was the he walked a ton which Bourn does not. He also went from a guy with a 277 BA through age 29 to one with a 299 BA from 30 to 38.
So a very scary comp list with only one success out of 22. Of course I'm not sure Upton's comp list would look more promising but it's easy to see why teams are shying away from Bourn.
EDIT: Oops, Mookie also aged decently with 10 WAR from 30-34 in just 2400 PA and he was never the defender that Bourn is. If Bourn's offense aged as well as Mookie's he'd put up 15 WAR probably. So 2 out of 22 success stories.
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