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Tuesday, August 02, 2022
Joey Gallo sums up Yankees fans, feeling ‘like a piece of s**t’ on eve of new start
Q: What’s it been like for you when Yankees fans notice you on the streets? Are they rough on you away from the ballpark, too?
Gallo: I don’t go out in the streets.
Q: That’s sad.
Gallo: Yeah. I really don’t want to show my face too much around here.
Q: Do you spend a lot of time harping over struggling so much? It is as simple as you never got really hot for the Yankees? You always hit home runs in bunches in Texas. We just saw Aaron Judge hit 11 homers in 12 games. You did the same thing last year before the trade. You had other home run binges for Texas, but never got really hot for the Yankees.
Gallo: I never was able to go off like that. It’s just weird. In Texas I was playing every day, so it was a little easier to get on a streak. It’s a little tougher not playing every day trying to get that streak going, as well.
Q: Is there anything that you learned about yourself during your time with the Yankees?
Gallo: I went through a lot of adversity and I really had to question myself a lot. My confidence suffered. I would say I hit rock bottom for the big leagues. So for me, I just was trying to remember to be a good teammate, play the game the right way, play the game hard and not do something stupid that I’d regret. I learned a lot about myself, I guess. Baseball is a tough game. But it definitely made me stronger because not many people have gone through what I’ve gone through.
RoyalsRetro (AG#1F)
Posted: August 02, 2022 at 09:46 AM | 84 comment(s)
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1. Nasty Nate Posted: August 02, 2022 at 11:02 AM (#6089404)This is the one part that doesn't really pass the smell test though. He came over last season and played 58 games with over 200 PA the last two months of the season...and the results we below average. He was the starter in left field out of the gate this year, and the ideal for the Yankees was him in Left, a healthy Hicks in center, and Judge in RF, with Stanton DH'ing. He only started losing time because he didn't hit, Hicks, Judge and Stanton have stayed healthy (and Stanton has been able to handle RF about half the time). Then add in Carpenter's surge and its not hard to see that Gallo was going to lose time...Benintendi was just the final nail in the coffin.
Gallo looks like a guy who would be able to take advantage of Yankee Stadium, but while he hit an almost-tolerable .178/.312/.407 on the road this year, he was a pathetic .139/.250/.270 in the Bronx. That certainly accords with the idea of a guy succumbing to pressure.
Man hope he gets away and finds himself.
Joey Gallo has virtually mastered baseball's "base on balls" cheat code. Other than that, he's a ####### terrible baseball player.
It's not necessarily his "fault" that baseball has reached a nadir where it sorts personnel in his favor, but it's not necessarily a matter of fault anyway. It is, though, highly strange that there are significant factions of fans and observers who actually celebrate (*) the sorting process which gave us clods like him.
(*) LOL.
Man hope he gets away and finds himself.
There's been some really interesting studies out recently about depression, severely questioning the whole serotonim/chemical imbalance hypothesis.
You might be talking about the same recent NYT story I saw regarding the testimonials of people now regretting taking Prozac for so many years and the like.
Whatever one makes of its merits, there's zero doubt -- none -- that Big Pharma has been talking its own book with respect to Prozac and other antidepressants. As with many other prescription drugs. Start with opioids and go from there. You can't even be an informed health care consumer without understanding this.
Yes, and the medical community and the FDA have done nothing to control them.
It's even stranger when people would like to change the rules to make hitting easier for clods like him.
Well ... ya gotta admit that some of us aren't terribly surprised that when at least the smallest amount of attention was paid to this uber-oaf, he wilted.
Joey Gallo has virtually mastered baseball's "base on balls" cheat code. Other than that, he's a ####### terrible baseball player.
This is a bit unfair to Gallo. He is certainly a TTO hitter, but he's not Adam Dunn out there. He's won two straight Gold Gloves, and seems like a competent baserunner. He just strikes out way too much.
Good defender. Good baserunner. Decent power. Great walk rate. NY has taken enough hitters from one level to the next—just the last few years: Voit, Hicks, Trevino, Carpenter, Urshela, Gregorious—that it's more surprising they missed (well, whiffed) with Gallo.
This is a bit unfair to Dunn, or at least young Dunn who could run a bit. Dunn would also hit some doubles, which is something Gallo (only once above 20) hasn't. I suppose it's a sign of the times but it's a little strange to see someone with Gallo's speed have so few XBHs and SB attempts.
For someone named "Clayton Beeter", who strikes out lots of dudes, but also looks like he enjoys walking batters. Still, not turning my nose up at a Dodger prospect named "Clayton."
This is a bit unfair to Dunn, or at least young Dunn who could run a bit.
True. He was truly oafish at the end, but I always forget that Dunn had some athleticism early in his career. He was recruited to play QB at Texas although I think he was going to be a backup and never actually played.
Bonds -- 285 career BABIP (lg 294) but more balanced, >1/2 of his XBH and >1/4 of his hits were HRs
If I still had stathead, I'd generate the short list of guys whose BA>BABIP. It's an interesting list (Gallo's not on it).
Decent power.
He's got a 272 career ISO, 286 before NY. Stanton's is 274, Trout 281, Soto just 247. He's had seasons where his average EV was 95+ (Judge/Stanton/Alvarez territory) and hh% near 60. Before this season, his HR/FB was 24% (higher than Thome & Mac, close to Thome's peak). He's one of the most powerful hitters we've seen in our lifetimes. (Maybe you just meant during his Yanks tenure when his ISO has been just 209.) He doesn't hit it often but when he does ... well, until recently. One of the troubling signs is that his avg EV has fallen by 5 MPH since 2019.
(*) To make the analogy with the clod perfect, driving range dude has a bizarre, quasi-savant-ish side skill like being able to read greens really well and so might be able to get at least marginally steady work as a looper.
I've been following the Yankees for 71 years, and I've never seen a worse hitter in pinstripes.
According to this it would be 3rd worst of all time, though it appears they have a 3000 PA cutoff. Even CY Young was better :)
Try .159 in a Yankees uniform, and without a single late and close clutch hit that anyone can remember.
He was awful for New York. This means that he has some short-term issues, or lost his skills fast, or wasn’t a True Yankee. But till that trade, his was an oddly configured but pretty good baseball talent.
Gallo's first game back at Yankee Stadium, he counters the boos 3 times with moon shots that land somewhere in various Bronx neighborhoods - spearheading the eventual Dodgers title.
who says no?
Of course you have. In fact, there's one still on the team. Gallo had an 85 OPS+ with the Yankees; Kyle Higashioka is at 64. Others worse- Jerry Coleman, Gary Ward, Stephen Drew, Austin Romine, etc.
That's probably just barely enough for the Yankees to retire his number.
sure, he also lost 37 and pitched to a league-average ERA. but talk about eating innings !
It overrates the ability to draw walks, underrates the ability to hit a baseball effectively, and in Gallo's case overrates both his fielding and baserunning. His Gold Gloves are inexplicable -- not quite in Jeterian proportions, but still.
Guys that can't hit a baseball tend not to try to hit a baseball. To be sure, he's got a bit of an idiot savant (*) relationship to whether the pitches he takes a pass on are balls or strikes but as I've argued numerous times, it's baseball's fault that things like that and "framing" haven't been whittled down to size or eliminated entirely.
When he does deign to take a stab at hitting a baseball, he does indeed look like a flailing oaf. Quintessentially so.
He's always been awful; it's just that no one really paid attention to anything but the spreadsheets when he was playing meaningless games in a relatively unimportant market.
He's simply a terrible baseball player.
(*) To be brutally honest, he sort of across the board carries himself as and has the mien of an idiot savant. Maybe it's the weird haircut and/or the Yankee eradication of the hirsute face, or the apparently sewn-open eyelids, but he just looks perpetually perplexed by it all.
Terrible for the Yankees, no argument there. But Kole Calhoun has been terrible for the Rangers this year, and I don’t therefore claim that Calhoun was terrible back when he was a 3-WAR player for the Angels. It doesn’t work that way.
Come on Andy. He’s a better hitter than Jim Bouton.
He can't hit. I hope that's not a controversial proposition.(*) He can, I suppose, generate a passable degree of offensive "value," but then again Rain Man was good at counting cards.
Joey Gallo is the price we all pay for the sins of the crusty, dusty baseball rulebook and its interaction with the explosion in computing power over the last 30 years. The drafters of the rulebook way back when had no inkling that their play balance would eventually lead to Joey Gallo. If they had, there is zero question they would have tinkered significantly with their handiwork.
(*) And he looks foolish while trying to hit, but there could be at least some room for subjective opinion and difference in that proposition.
His OPS+ is boosted massively by his flukish (*) walks. That's generating some degree of offensive "value." It's not hitting. A guy with a career batting average of .201 "can't hit." Axiomatic. No need for caveats or apologies. He can't hit.
The thing about the modern spreadsheet, oafishly flail strategy is that at its outlier endpoints, it's always going to reside on the cusp of complete mission fail. And so it was.
(*) Here's how to look at all this. Imagine a modern Olympic sport -- the "modern triathlon." Three events. Equally weighted: First, a 26 mile run. Second, a 3 mile swim. Third, a taste test wherein the contestant guesses the parts-per-thousand of ground thyme in a random variety of Masterchef-prepared baked casseroles. Joey Gallo's the guy who can't really swim or run, but somehow manages to bumble through by scoring 100 on the taste test every time.
He hit .160 as a Yankee. Career average .201. He can't hit. (*)
He's an accident of the rulebook and the spreadsheet and the fact that games had to be done by sundown in the early days of the sport. You had to incentivize the pitcher to throw the ball over the plate and you had a limited time window to get the game in and so, presto, the unavoidable rules that would one day result in Gallo were kind of slap-dabbed in place.
And even then, granting every four-ball walked hitter first base was a compromise or accident.(**) If it took six balls or seven balls to make a walk, or if only the second walked guy in a row got to go to first base, or if a walked player had been by rule simply passed in the order so that the game could keep moving without a lollygagger standing there all day scratching his package rather than swinging, Joey'd be bagging groceries somewhere.
(*) If we want to put this on a slightly more exact and sophisticated plane, "not making an out" is not "hitting."
(**) If they'd given it even the slightest of thought, they'd have realized that awarding a guy the same thing for standing effectively at the plate as the guy who hits a rocket line drive between the infielders and outfielders was kind of senseless, and they likely would have gone in a different direction.
He's 28, and looks to be still be a very good athlete. Maybe he has lost that critical bit of bat speed and collapsed because his margin of error is just much smaller than other hitters with his all or nothing approach. His exit velocity is significantly lower the last three years and dropped to league average this year, so maybe that's the evidence. But he was hitting as well as he ever did in Texas last year, so seems like a very weird decline. Did someone kneecap him when he got off the plane in NY?
During his career in Texas he hit better than .211/.336/.497/833 for 116 OPS+ (better than because I don't know how to include that partial 2021 year where his OPS+ was 138 in Texas).
And this includes his first two partial seasons starting in at age 21 where he only hit .173/.281/368/.649 for 73 OPS+. His OPS+ was 120 from 2017 to 2019.
So he's been close to 20% more valuable than the average batter for his entire Texas career. I'd say he can hit. If you think he can't explain why he gets walked so much, if his bat was useless why would they ever throw him a ball?
This year his OPS was .719 on the road, .520 at home. I think it was either the Yankee stadium background or too much great NY pasta, and I'll bet he hits the snot out of the ball next year for someone.
Because even major league pitchers can't throw a strike on command. (*)
A .211 hitter "can't hit," either.
His "value" has already been conceded, albeit grudgingly, as well as explained. But I'm not talking about "value," I'm talking about whether he can hit. And he can't.
(*) We really have no idea how many walks are "drawn" as opposed to simply being "given up." We do know, as to the walks that were virtually certainly 100% "given up," that NL pitchers in 2021 walked 162 times in 3850 PAs, and had an OBP roughly 30% higher than their batting average. Which means that even awful, non-threatening, horrific, pathetic, cosmically useless hitters can still walk in over 4% of their plate appearances. (**) Even major league pitchers can't throw a strike on command.
(**) Thereby adding utterly fake and illusory offensive "value."
You don't have to. It's already included (though he hit .211, not .216).
NYC may not have been a good fit for Joey Gallo, for reasons.
I must admit at times, the Hosmer approach is more pleasing as he puts the ball in play fairly often, but I can only watch a guy ground out to 2B so often.
Yankee Twitter was wild over this interview. A number of team forums and outlets were almost literally begging for their fandoms to not be toxic about Gallo, and they were buried under an avalanche of "he hit .160, he's a piece of ####." It was rough.
Pure silliness.
In 2021 NL pitchers walked 162 timees in 4447 PA. That's a 3.6% rate. That's the "it's hard to throw strikes rate".
Gallo walks 15% of the time. That skill/fear of his power.
That oaf? Ha.
Again, people, nice things, why we can't have, etc.
Function significantly of his inability to hit the ball. If he could actually hit the ball, he'd walk way less.
I don't consider the ability to tell a ball from a strike -- more precisely, what an umpire will call a ball or strike -- as really an athletic skill. For a more expansive outline of the idea, I'd refer back to the "modern triathlon" hypothetical upthread.
I'd prefer that we don't have Joey Gallo in major league baseball, to be entirely honest, and I'd like to see MLB reform itself so that the Joey Gallos of the world start to get sorted back out again, as they were in better baseball times. That clod being deployed in the cleanup position in a playoff game batting order, properly viewed, is one of the lower points in modern baseball history.
Show business is a tough gig sometimes. The world needs ditch diggers, too.
Because I want sports to involve and reward athleticism -- not random, frivolous esoterica.
Only because of the accident of the rulebook -- and maybe not even then. As far as we know, umpires somehow get "confused" by Gallo -- for whatever reason -- in much the same way they get confused by the best pitch framers. If a catcher can systemically trick an umpire, no reason to think the way a hitter moves around and the like couldn't either.
Or I could just stick with baseball and ridicule its worst parts and worst manifestations when they show themselves to be worthy of ridicule.
I think I'll pick that option.
Thanks for the feedback.
EDIT: I should temper 62 by noting that if Joey Gallo wanted to play more under control and less like a clod, maybe he WOULD be able to hit and then MLB would be perfectly fine with him in it. It's not the essential him per se that's the problem.
Mickey Mantle walked 17.5% of the time, Babe Ruth 19.4%, Ted Williams, 20.6%. Could they not hit either?
You don't ... right?
Yes, exactly.
And with that, my work here is done.
Your work here was to make a statement and then have others prove that you were wrong? That it kind of odd, but since I don't kink shame, go for it.
I don't know that anyone would confuse late-career Tony Gwynn or Kirby Puckett with sculpted athletic physiques, but they were still darned good at the random, frivolous esoterica of putting the bat on the ball.
So he's been close to 20% more valuable than the average batter for his entire Texas career. I'd say he can hit. If you think he can't explain why he gets walked so much, if his bat was useless why would they ever throw him a ball?
Just from a mathematical standpoint, this isn't how OPS+ works. 116 means he was roughly 8% better than league average, although in Gallo's case it's 9%. His OBP was 2% better than average and his SLG was 14% better than average, so you get a 116 OPS+.
Anyway, this whole argument is stupid. SBB is trolling with an extreme position, but he's not completely wrong, and I have no idea why people are taking the bait.
Nobody dreams of being a .211 hitter in MLB, regardless of whether they do the other things well. All the rankings that had Gallo as a top 10 prospect in baseball must have been expecting him to hit better than this. If you have a guy like Joey Gallo on your team, you hope he can become a more complete hitter and maybe turn into Pete Alonso at the plate. And you probably tear your hair out every time he whiffs with RISP and less than 2 outs (he has 2 SFs in his career? Jeez.)
That being said, if you have a guy like Gallo on your team and he's hitting .211 with 40 HR, decent fielding* and baserunning, putting up 3 WAR per season, you should appreciate him for what he does well, rather than gratuitously call him an oaf or falsely claim that he's a bad player.
* Regardless of whether the Gold Gloves were fully deserved, none of the advanced or traditional defensive metrics show him to be a bad fielder -- and some of them rank him quite highly.
plus Joey, about the 1970s mobster Joey Gallo
At least Joey has stayed away from Umberto's Clam House.
There could have been some good tie-in merch, w/Crazy Joe t-shirts
Maybe at his next stop.
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