A couple non tenders and a couple non prospects. Great deal for both teams

That's like an OOTP trade... a nice haul of 4A players and reclamations for a MR.

I remember when Mike Soroka was going to be the best SP in baseball - and hey, that 2019 *was* stellar, especially for a 21 yo.

Maybe the ghost of Mike Sirotka can get Soroka healthy.

Mike Soroka is still in baseball. Good to see. Maybe he can return to decent form.

That was exactly my reaction, too, Zonk: It looks exactly like the trades I make in OOTP right before the Rule 5 draft. A list of Rule 5 eligible guys I don't have room on the 40-man for, for whoever is the best single player I can get for them.

(Married players are also considered.)

Nicky Lopez is currently in the books as having the greatest MLB career for a Naperville Central graduate in all three categories. Pitching, hitting, and fielding. He holds all the career and single season records for Naperville Central grads in all three of those categories.

Ha, must be so hard to go from being a high school and sometimes college star to being an afterthought. That's a tough mental adjustment.

It is barely an exaggeration to say that every player struggling to hit .200 or keep his ERA under 5.00 in A-ball was the hotshot multi-sport superstar in high school. Every one of them has to face that rude awakening of suddenly, for the first time in his life, being surrounded by players that are as good as he is, and a good many who are better than he is.

I remember the best athlete in my smallish high school class, a football and baseball superstar, by far the best player on either team. He wasn't drafted out of high school, and wasn't even recruited by a major college for either sport. He ended up taking a scholarship to a barely-division-1 school, where he was still the best baseball player at the school and one of the best football players--but after four years he once again went undrafted by MLB, much less the NFL. A couple teams offered him $1,000 or so just to fill out their short-season rosters (he was bilingual too which I think teams valued in roster-filler guys), which he declined in favor of getting on with a real career.

It is barely an exaggeration to say that every player struggling to hit .200 or keep his ERA under 5.00 in A-ball was the hotshot multi-sport superstar in high school.

Are they still, at least for US-born players? I thought contemporary players have typically been playing year-round travelball since elementary school with no real opportunity to play other school sports.

Every one of them has to face that rude awakening of suddenly, for the first time in his life, being surrounded by players that are as good as he is, and a good many who are better than he is.

The one I think about is the kid who grew up nextdoor to Mom and Dad and literally learned the game in their yard (when they owned the lot but hadn't started construction yet). Kid was named National HS Player of the Year by some orgs on the #1 nationally ranked team his senior year a few years ago. Pitched them to two state championships in the highest division in the state for a school that has sent a handful of players to MLB in recent years, although none of any note that I'm aware of, despite missing his Jr year to TJS. Had the kind of PlayStation numbers his senior year you see from the very top MLB prospects: sub-1.00 ERA, insane K/W, undefeated record, allowed 1 XBH on the season, pitched a couple of no-hitters. The world was his oyster.

The moral of the story is that he went away to a national name school in a power conference, pitched sparingly and very poorly amid online rumors there was friction with the pitching coach wanting to change his delivery, hit the transfer portal after one year, landed at a school with no national profile at a much lower level of competition, pitched sparingly and not quite as poorly but not all that great either, and last I checked is not listed on their roster for the coming season nor have I found any other mention of transfer activity.

Mentioned this before, but there was a time I thought I was a pretty good hockey goalie -- back in high school. Then I came up against a guy who had been offered a top level scholarship and he showed me the the difference between been good in high school and the next level.

Guy never got his scholarship. Blew his knee out playing football. So I have no idea whether I came up short against a future elite talent or somebody who never went further than college hockey.

that's sort of the opposite of how my ootp trades go - i tend to spin these 4a guys i can't protect off for raw guys to stick in the low minors. same basic idea, though.
--
it does sometimes go the other way, mind you. i knew a raw but interesting baseball player in high school (we platooned at power forward on a rec league basketball team) that went on to spend several years in the minors. at that time, i'd've presumed we each had zero chance of playing ball professionally.

I had a friend who was a big baseball player back in high school. I actually ran into him a while back, but as I remember it, our conversation was rather boring and focused on the past.

I played softball once against Rick Fox and Pete Chilcutt (after their final season at UNC, not sure if the draft had been held yet). Neither seemed to have been on a field in years. Chilcutt homereed. Fox badly played 1B but we decided not to end his nascent NBA career by trashing his foot which was right there in the middle of the f'ing base on every throw!

I guess a couple of kids I knew not at all well went on to play DI college basketball, solid but unspectacular. Other than that, nothing but a few successful poindexters.

Maybe a bit surprised Atl doesn't want Lopez around but I suppose they've got Grissom and, if somebody gets hurt, it's not that hard to find a competent bench IF somewhere (that's how they got Lopez). Hard to go wrong with any 5 for 1 deal for a reliever.

lopez - i think it's less that they don't want him and more that his salary is rising and they don't want that?

I had a friend who was a big baseball player back in high school. I actually ran into him a while back, but as I remember it, our conversation was rather boring and focused on the past.

Did this take place at a roadside bar? You were walking out, he was walking in?

Did this take place at a roadside bar? You were walking out, he was walking in?

Wait...how did you know that? Are you stalking me? Stop, creep.

Kid was named National HS Player of the Year

That's a helluva name to saddle a kid with, especially considering the pressure he had to have felt to live up to it. I hope his parents had him taken away.

It is barely an exaggeration to say that every player struggling to hit .200 or keep his ERA under 5.00 in A-ball was the hotshot multi-sport superstar in high school. Every one of them has to face that rude awakening of suddenly, for the first time in his life, being surrounded by players that are as good as he is, and a good many who are better than he is.

Just a reminder that Sugar (2008) is one of the best baseball movies ever made, for being half about this.

Wait...how did you know that? Are you stalking me? Stop, creep.

That shirt looks good on you.

We had a Midwest golden boy at our high school who played football and got a scholarship to play at Iowa. A lineman. Ended up being a center at Iowa I think. Would occasionally get an award and then it was all over. Have no idea how much his life changed as he went from a HS golden boy to just another player on a football team but I would imagine his life was pretty good in college.

The other talent at our HS was Anthony Parker (and his sister would arrive after we all graduated) who was basically living on another planet while he attended our HS. He didn't get heavily recruited out of HS and went to Bradley where he played well against nobody talent and got drafted in the first round.

We also had a kid a couple of years behind us that played QB and was the star pitcher. Cubs drafted him and Illinois recruited him to be their QB. He flamed out at both.

That was about it for talent at our school. Everyone else kind of knew they had no future in sports.


Just looked up the Golden Boy. He's in the college football hall of fame. Or maybe not. It's hard to tell.

I don't think anyone from my high school ever amounted to much athletically, with the closest thing being the 6-7 center (quite tall at the time, of course) in the mid-'40s who wound up at Kentucky his junior & senior years & helped hold down Adolph Rupp's bench, scoring a grand total of 30 points in his career.

The center for our state champion basketball team of '72-'73 made the all-state team & got a decent scholarship to my own future cow college one county over, but the guy was 6-2. Even at an NAIA school that wasn't going to cut it for someone whose game was playing with his back to the basket. (During my time on campus the center was, I'm pretty sure, 6-5.) I doubt he was there more than a semester & change.

His very modest dwelling was on the road our school bus drove down en route to the former Black school in the early '70s. Scandalously, his white live-in gf could occasionally be seen hanging out.

A year or two before that, his younger brother (of many -- his 12/18 obit lists 6 surviving brothers & sisters, in addition to 7 who preceded him in death) was one of the first couple of Black kids in little league.

When I was in high school we had a superstar running back that everyone was sure going to be a big college football star. He was recruited by LSU and we all sat back and waited for the stardom to come. At LSU, he was competing against future NFL players for carries, and ended up mostly playing on special teams. His big moment in the sun came when he recovered a muffed punt in a bowl game.

I saw him at a reunion a few years ago, and he seemed pretty happy, and loved talking about his time at LSU. You know, I bet recovering a muffed punt in a bowl game is pretty cool.

I was on the 8th grade basketball team at my middle school. We were pretty bad. I was pretty bad. I think we may have won a game or two, but that's it.

But our 7th grade team won every single game, generally by huge margins. Because they had Amon. Who generally outscored the other team by himself.

He moved to another city after his freshman year, and I didn't think about him again for quite awhile. But I eventually looked it up, and he in fact managed a decently long pro NFL career. The sad end to the story is that he was diagnosed with dementia in his 30s and is embroiled in a lawsuit against the league for failing to pay out his portion of that huge concussion settlement. Horrible stuff.

I earned my HS varsity athletic letter - in golf, lol.

I was about league average but my school had the deepest depth, so I was No. 9 on a 9-man team that started 6 players per match. Finished my illustrious career at 0-1 - got to play in the last match of the season, unfortunately against the next-deepest roster. I did not show up at the varsity awards dinner, out of respect for the real athletes.

No football story here - anyone else on BBTF attend both a HS and a college that each didn't have a football team? Maybe not.

8th grade in an 8-year grammar school, so it's time to pick either the local high school or four Catholic ones within reasonable distance.

star athlete was a great guy, no bullying at all. he counseled us that most of the options were boys-only HS, and we didn't want that. for sure.

in that era, while we didn't disagree, we didn't have that front of mind, either (yet).

so the majority of us 20 boys sign up for the same Catholic school. everyone gets accepted - except the star athlete, due to grades.

much confusion ensued. he told us, no worries, he'd transfer in as a sophomore. so we all stuck with the plan.

he never did transfer, lol, and neither did we.

he was an average-sized kid in grammar school; I was one of the shortest. He made it "cool" to wear those hideous two-toned boys heeled shoes of the time, for which I was grateful.

years later, star athlete never grew all that much - I wound up being about 6 inches taller than him. then he was in a terrible car accident that he somehow survived. no brain damage per se, but he wasn't at all the same. I ran into him once in a bookstore, with his wife. still a nice person, but he wound up being a tour guide at a state park. he knew he wasn't the same, which I found a bit poignant.

as for high school, the big star was a golfer who became the youngest ever to qualify for an LPGA Tour event. in my class, it was a 6-foot-tall point guard who played well in D-III. last I heard, he was a "lifer" still coaching at that level.

#glorydays

I worked at a restaurant where the bartender was like an assistant defensive coordinator for the local high school. They had a kid on the team they would rave about amd tell Bo Jackson/Herschel Walker like stories about. His name was Johnny Clay and he was an absolute beast on the field but struggled mightily off it. He ended up going to Wisconsin thiugh he struggled to get his scores up enough to be eligible. He had a pretty good career at Wisconsin but I think he got into some legal trouble and left early. Didn't get drafted. Picked by the Steelers and barely ever played.

My small high school won the state basketball championship a few years after I graduated. The two best players on the team were both first team All State but both had completely inconsequential college basketball careers. But I’m sure they both knew that would be the case. Both have gone on to professional success in the real world (one became an extremely successful entrepreneur) so I think it worked out all right for them.

There was a guy in my college dorm who had been drafted in the 2nd round of the NHL draft and was a great college player. I followed his career after college; he ended up playing 6 games in the NHL and that was it.

My school sports career consisted of making sure the 7th-grade basketball team's bench didn't float away into space. I might have played 10 minutes all season (maybe a dozen games, tops). Highlight of the year came during a practice scrimmage when I hit 4 straight outside shots from the left side of the court. Even 20ish years later, playing Sunday mornings in a park in Little Rock, I shot considerably better -- OK, considerably less horribly -- from roughly 3-point land (not that we observed it) than I did within the lane. Just no inside touch at all.

If I'm an example, not only can white men not jump, they also can't dribble worth a damn. Not sure I was a good defender, but I could foul with the best/worst of them. Highlight was somehow managing to scoop out a friend's contact lens without touching his eye. That's, like, GOAT stuff, surely.

Also once clothes-lined another friend, bigger than me, & somehow blew out both of my shoes' soles in the process.

Oh, yeah -- I should note that the 7th-grade team, most of whom were not only classmates but also good friends of mine, went on to make the state tournament (for the second-smallest classification of, I believe, 6) when we were seniors. Unfortunately, the best player on the earlier incarnation of the roster wound up moving to, I believe, LA after that school year & didn't return till 12th grade. He'd supposedly gotten into some sort of gang-related trouble & didn't go out for the team.

We wound up losing in probably the first round of the tournament to a team from lily-white(!) NW Arkansas led by a 6-5 center who wound up forging a decentish career (averaging 11.5 minutes a game) for the Razorbacks. Might've won if my aforementioned friend James Rodney had been on the team, but so it goes.

The school sent a bus from our deep corner of Arkansas to wherever the game was played, probably around 3 hours away, which for us was a pretty big deal. I went along in my capacity as the school paper's editor/sportswriter. Woohoo.

At ages 13-15 I made the traveling all-star team for the Babe Ruth league in our medium-sized Chicago suburb, but I was pretty clearly the second-best catcher all three years. My story ended in high school, but the guy who was the clear best catcher all three years was Sal Fasano. So even though all of my peers have long since retired from playing, at least I still have a brush with fame who has stuck around the game.

Y'all want to hear about my undefeated senior season on the chess team? No? Oh.....

Went to a small school, 60 people per class. Had some decent athletes in my grade, but one guy stood above the rest. Put it this way, he was the starting pitcher for the State Championship Game...as an 8th grader.

He eventually transferred out to a bigger school to play football, grew into a 275-pound beast, and ended up having a 10-year NFL career.

Kinda makes my Division III golf 'career' pale a bit.

No football story here - anyone else on BBTF attend both a HS and a college that each didn't have a football team?

My HS, college, and grad school did not have football teams.

I went to high school with the guy who serves as the source of my handle. He was a year ahead of me and we never hung out or anything, him being the coolest of the cool jocks dating the head cheerleader and me being me. Both his current and former wives are from my graduating class though, which must make class reunions pretty spicy.

It wasn't until some years after he died that I learned ECW's Johnny Grunge was ALSO a schoolmate of mine, although two years ahead of me. Had I known that at the time, I would have definitely been at the ECW Double Tables internet convention they did in 1995.

My high school -- about the same size as Mike A's, looks like -- didn't add baseball till my senior year. If I hadn't been so damned sick all year long (3 hospital stays, the first I think in late October, the last the week before graduation), I might have gone out for the team.

Probably wouldn't have been the best idea, given the fact that in 5 years of pee wee & then little league ball I had only 1 good season at the plate. Pretty good fielder, though, except for making Johnny Damon look like a world champion discus thrower.

I like to think I would've tried out as a knuckleballer on the mound (not that I ever threw a pitch in organized ball), but I think that's what they call a pipe dream.

I don't think high school baseball is a big deal in Arkansas, or at least it wasn't while I was paying the slightest bit of attention. American Legion seemed to be the focus.

My HS, college, and grad school did not have football teams.

I surrender my crown !

My best friend and baseball teammate from high school walked on with a school that had just moved up to D-I. He didn't pitch much until his junior season and then became the team's closer his senior year. He was almost criminally overused as the school made one of the most improbable runs in NCAA CWS history, coming up one game and run short of a trip to Omaha. He was a 17th-round pick by the Rangers and spent two seasons in A ball before washing out.

The star of my high school team got drafted late and washed out in a year. He was miles better than anyone else on my team. I played with Bernard Gilkey briefly in legion ball. He was two years younger than me and we were all in awe. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch him hit and throw. These guys who make the major leagues are freaks of nature.

I went to high school with the guy who serves as the source of my handle.

You wennt to hight school with Wonder Mike??

He was a little older than me but a guy who went to my high school hit the longest home run of all time at Wrigley field.

For one year Gerald Laird was my high school teammate. After his freshman year, he transferred to a school with a much better baseball program.

Laird was a complete dick.