John_Havok

I clink on them every once in a while just to help out the guy who maintains the site. No big deal, but i dont click on all the asian porn ones. No idea where they come from.

Didnt they just try this with Dickerson?

I really hope there is no lockout, but the way things have looked between MLB and the PA the last two shortened years, I fear the worst. Hell there's a grievance right now by the MLBPA against the MLB accusing them of not negotiating in good faith about the 60 game season last year and that could actually drag out long enough that it's still going on when the CBA negotiations start - which is just a s***** place to even start. using a highly technical, unexplainable mathematical equation based in string theory and just my own raw pessimism, I put the chances of a lockout at a solid 75%.

But, like I said, it's not impossible, just improbable. I just looked at Walter johnsons 1914 season as an example. He pitched 51 games that year, mostly pitching 1 day, getting 2 days off, then pitching again. Some starts he threw, had only 1 day off then threw again. THere were a few instances of having 4 days rest, but they were not the regular situations, those were few and far between. So ... does it seem likely that a guy in 1914 threw nearly 400 innings of baseball over 51 games, throwing 100mph and not needing regular rest of at least 4 days? I'm leaning towards no. Then keep asking that question with the velocity dropping until it makes sense and you'll likely arrive at the conclusion that pitchers back then didn't even come close to the velocity of todays starting pitchers. Nolan Ryan's biggest workload year was 1974, 41 starts, and he had minimum 3 or 4 days rest between starts. I didn't look close enough to see if 3 days or 4 happened more often.

Ryan didn't pitch every game.' We were talking about Walter Johnson in 1907 vs today. Comparing the late 70s to today is far closer. And Ryan was the unicorn, he is not representative of the average pitcher of the 70s or 80s.

Everything you say is true, except that it ignores several key concepts, and I'll focus on pitching in my example. Today's pitchers, you can see most of them are max effort to get the velocity they get. Even watching old footage of games you can tell the pitchers then were not. Then you also have to take into account that IF Walter Johnson was throwing 100mph consistently as Jim suggests, he would have been doing so every game from start to finish? There wasn't 5 man rotations back then. His arm just didn't need to recuperate after throwing that hard for the entire game day after day? That is HIGHLY unlikely, therefore it's reasonable to assume that he was not, in fact, throwing 100 mph in his games and his in game velocity was quite likely much lower, or his arm would have fallen off. Could he have thrown 100mph outside of a game max effort? Sure, I can't say it's impossible, but I can make reason based judgements that the way pitching worked back then it was highly unlikely that he was doing so in games. second, what did they actually do for training? Almost nothing in fact. There was no studying pitching mechanics, no weighted ball programs, no real understanding of kinesiology (which only began being truly studied in the 60's), these guys literally just showed up at the ball park and tried to hit the catchers mitt. Repetition was their only real training.

Funny thing, when i view your comment, the ad beneath it is to get vaccinated. LOL

True, that's just a guess based on avg velocity increases that have been reliably obvserved from the 60's onward. Yes Feller was clocked that hard outside of games, never in a game and was clocked using a Lumiline Chronograph, which was developed in WW2 to measure the speeds of anti-tank rounds. How accurate was the Lumiline Chronograph? Nobody really knew. It was just the best guesses they had based on the tech of the time. Its not like they really need to measure anti-tank round velocities down to the 10ths of a MPH, or even to a whole MPH number. I've researched this stuff to death, there was NO way to reliably clock pitching speeds with any degree of accuracy. Even early radar in the mid 50's had huge swings in their numbers because the tech was still so new at being used for that kind of thing.

And if you believe either of those... I've got some oceanfront property in Alberta you really need to get a look at. Old timey stuff like that was 100% exaggerated at every opportunity to sensationalize. There were few ways to even reliably clock speeds that high back then. There's also a difference in how hard they could throw max effort off the field vs what they did in games. Didn't you know? Satchel Paige threw 105 mph with pinpoint command according to the legends.

It's not a fair comparison though. Grichuk strikes out when pitchers are throwing 90-100 MPH. Almost nobody struck out in Ruth's era, because pitchers threw maybe 75mph tops? For a hitter from today, facing 75mph on a daily basis is batting practice. Any hitter from today would likely hit 200 HRs a season if they were just sent back in time to the 20s. Thats why its not fair to compare "talent" from era to era. Giancarlo Stanton would hit a HR nearly every AB facing 75mph.

Best hitter compared to the peers of his era, no doubt. He was just on another planet, but as well know, when the pool of talent is low, outliers are more likely to show up. Him hitting that many HR's so early in the game's history, there's really no fair way to compare that to today. He was light years ahead of his peers. That type of dominance will never be seen again in any sport.

There's no way to compare it fairly. wRC+ and stats like that that rate where you are compared to league average do a decent job as a starting point, but even then, when you consider that a replacement level player now is light years better than a replacement level player in the 50's, it's still not really all that discussion worthy. The game is so different today from back then. Pitching differences especially.

Not really in the same spirit of the article though, nobody made the playoffs that season.

I find these types of arguments futile for the most part. The simple facts are that every great hitter today would annihilate any great hitter of the past, simply because today's hitters play in the deepest pool of talent there has ever been and the game evolves. It's the same in any sport. The only debate really is whether or not the hitters today are more dominant in their era than those of the past, and even then it's not really apples to apples given the talent pool differences.

Both are not really all that unlikely to happen, but...I'd probably lean towards Vlad walking more as pitchers just pitch around him more, plus really good hitters tend to improve their walk rates over time anyways.

I know this is a broken record lately, but again the top 3 missed calls in terms of changing run expectancy went against the Jays.

It’s also a dump and smells like stale urine pretty much throughout the place. It should be imploded.

This argument doesn’t hold water when it’s very clear that Jansen set up on the far outside of the plate- very far from his arm side. Of course I can’t blame Borucki for saying that since he can’t go out and admit throwing at him, but still, make it sound better.

And the perfect replacement is already in house. John Schneider would be the perfect choice.

There's a time and a place for smiling. There's a time and place for losing your mind and throwing s***. Charlie hasn't found the latter yet and it's a problem.

That would make my year if that happened.

Does Buck even know why the HBP happened?

LOL, the entire world knew that HBP was coming

I'm trying to imagine a Bo Bichette that has a 10% walk rate.... and i pass out from blood rushing into my naughty bits.

They're scared of Vlad even in a 6 run game. Wild.