I like Drew Thorpe. Give me a guy that already has a great K to Walk ratio and throws less hard over a guy that hits the velocity that everyone focuses so much on every time. There are plenty of MLB players with the velocity that are still not good pitchers, and over a large group, get hurt more because of the max effort. Is he a bit less likely to be a Verlander or Scherzer type at that velocity? Probably so. But is he perhaps more likely to become a reliable starter than some more lauded prospects with velocity? Yes.
I know nothing about Drew Thorpe but I always root for the guys who can't "throw a marshmallow through a brick wall" and have to actually pitch to get guys out.
Cooperstown undoubtedly has many F Robbie bats and other mementos, more than they can display. Way more than they can display. At the Negro Leagues Museum it will stand out as an example of both how slow and how far Black players traveled once the color line was broken.
I think prospect analysts have a lot of trouble with toolsy players whose skills may not translate to MLB results. Bo Jackson is a prime example here — hits the ball really hard, cannon of an arm, runs well, athletic enough to play in the NFL, competitive. But in the end, even before injuries ended his career, he struck out a ton, didn’t walk a lot given his power, and was merely an adequate defender. Never had an all-star level season much less being a star on the field.
Less famous are a bunch of guys with great hit tools or elite contact skills who lack power, don’t walk a lot and don’t play elite defense and thus the upside is solid starter not star.
Feels like a swing and a miss to talk about Paul Skenes potentially bringing back the starting pitcher mustache then talk about Spencer Strider in the next sentence, who is a starting pitcher with a fantastic mustache.
Your hero also may be the best player-turned-broadcaster ever.
About the Padres: During the 1960s, when the Dodgers had the likes of Koufax, Drysdale, and the too frequently ignored Osteen, Buzzie Bavasi was the GM and asked every team GM he spoke to whether they had any pitching he could get. Lindsey Nelson, one of the greatest sportscasters ever (and certainly the loudest dresser), said doing the 1969 Mets made him realize that pitching is only 120% of the game.
It's close. I should have thought of Uecker. Isn't it interesting that if he and Kuiper are the two best, neither got into the booth because of their, shall we say, prowess on the field?
And I should have remembered Waite Hoyt, HOF pitcher who was the radio voice of the Reds for over 20 years. So good that they made and sold record albums of him telling stories from his playing days during rain delays.
I should have as well! And two guys who each put in about 50 years behind the mike, Jerry Coleman and Ralph Kiner. I wasn't including other sports, but some come to mind there too!
My theory on prospects recently (last 15-20 years, which is recent in baseball terms) is that teams don't trade good prospects, so Thorpe getting traded twice is very telling, as is the Yankees refusal to trade Jones.
Tying Dylan Cease into the team previews -- which Joe will have to shuffle.
Looking at projections (I'm using FanGraph and Baseball Prospectus but it doesn't matter), the A's, Nationals, Rockies, and White Sox are dreadful. Teams that will be fortunate to win 70 games and effectively have 0% shot at the playoffs. Then the Pirates, Angels, Royals, and (spoiler) Tigers are pretty bad. FanGraphs is a lot more optimistic on these teams but they're still the next four worst.
And then everyone else is projected to win 79 or more games and there are a huge group between 79 and 83, more than half the National League. Adding a 3-win player like Cease improves your outlook a lot if you're in this bunch. So good on the Padres for doing something.
Will also be interesting to see how Joe ranks the next dozen teams. You could pretty much put 10-22 in any order, though I think you'd catch heck if the Diamondbacks and Rangers aren't near the top of the group (or above it).
As for Ovechkin, it's still inevitable, just that it will likely take 3 more seasons to get there. Father Time catches us all, but he'll get there. Caps are going nowhere, so they're happy to hold on until he breaks that hallowed record. Gretzky scored 199 goals after his age 30 season. Ovechkin has 315 and counting. Definitely one of the best "old" athletes in all of sports.
Who else? Lebron for sure. Randy Johnson. Nolan Ryan. Brady. Musial and Williams.
Well, the steroids guys: From age-35 to age-39 Barry Bonds was MVP's four times, and finished 2nd the other time. Clemens had four post age-30 Cy Youngs, and 2600 or so strikeouts. Maybe David Ortiz?
Ovechkin's underlying numbers have been bad for a few years and this seems to be the season it's finally catching up to his scoring stats. The Capitals will probably give him every chance to stick around and break Gretzky's record -- they're going to be very bad for a very long time, so might as well embrace the marketing potential of the chase -- but even if they orient literally everything they do around getting Ovi to 895, he just might not be able to keep Father Time off his back for long enough to make it happen.
Advanced stats have never liked Ovechkin, so his underlying numbers don't mean all that much. He is what he is: a high volume shooter. He's gone from #1 in shots to merely top 20, coupled with a stee drop in shooting percentage this year, which may or may not be permanent. Still seems a good bet to score 25 goals per year (he's on pace for roughl that this year, too), which would just get him there. And if he falls short by a handful of goals, the Caps will surely re-sign him. Short of a career-ending injury, he's still a very good bet to break the record.
And the Caps might not be as bad as you think for as long as you think. They are a fringe playoff contender now, in the anonymous middle of the league niether good nor terrible, and they're doing it with about $20 million in cap space tied behind their backs with Kuznetsov, Oshie, and Backstrom all unavailable. They all come off the books after next season, and the team has spent this year, and probably the next, graduating its prospects to the NHL. There's a real lack of top end talent, but at the end of next year, they should be a young, deep team with cap space to burn. Not the worst place to be, overall.
The part about Thorpe being traded twice in the same off-season reminded me of my pet theory that I have never officially researched: you should be very wary of prospects who have been traded twice before exhausting rookie eligibility.
Plenty of great players were traded as prospects, especially in deadline deals (Bagwell for Andersen, Smoltz for Alexander immediately come to mind). Sometimes a great young prospect is just the price for doing business. But when a guy gets traded twice, it means the new team got him and thought, "we should move this guy while his value is still high." A prospect that gets moved twice has some serious flaws. Is there a great or even really good player that was traded twice before he used up his rookie eligibility?
In the group of prospects that were traded that turned out to be great (like Smoltz&Bagwell)? Sure, close enough. But he wasn't traded twice during that time.
I'm a Brewers fan and Lewis Brinson is the guy that led to my pet theory. He went from Texas to Milwaukee as the centerpiece of the Lucroy/Jeffress trade. And then Milwaukee made him the centerpiece of the Yelich deal. Of course, he never panned out and has a career OPS+ of 55. Most Brewers fans, at the time, hated that we had to include Brinson to get Yelich. I tried to think of a young player who was traded twice as a prospect who become a big star and couldn't think of one.
I think Luis Castillo (the pitcher) might take the cake here. He was traded by the Giants to the Marlins for Casey McGehee, then the Marlins traded him twice! They first traded him to the Padres for Andrew Cashner and Colin Rea, but then they reacquired Castillo when Rea got hurt and they cried foul. Then the Marlins traded him to the Reds for Dan Straily. So that makes four trades before his major league debut, and he turned out pretty well!
Yeah, meant similar to Bagwell and Smoltz. Jeff Kent comes to mind as well. And although Langston pitched very well for the Expos, we knew it was a few month rental and Johnson, although very raw at the time, was talked about quite a bit as a strong prospect. In the end, that team had no offense and thinking a starting pitcher would make the difference was quite foolish.
Thank you for the shout out for Duane Kuiper, once a Giant, now a member of the radio broadcast team.
"a place that young Steinbrenner* clearly doesn’t like being"
Hal Steinbrenner is 54. Do we still call him "young" Steinbrenner?
"There appear to be no tears..." Have you checked with any Yankees fans lately?
I like Drew Thorpe. Give me a guy that already has a great K to Walk ratio and throws less hard over a guy that hits the velocity that everyone focuses so much on every time. There are plenty of MLB players with the velocity that are still not good pitchers, and over a large group, get hurt more because of the max effort. Is he a bit less likely to be a Verlander or Scherzer type at that velocity? Probably so. But is he perhaps more likely to become a reliable starter than some more lauded prospects with velocity? Yes.
I know nothing about Drew Thorpe but I always root for the guys who can't "throw a marshmallow through a brick wall" and have to actually pitch to get guys out.
No, he's not.
Frank Robinson didn’t play in the Negro Leagues. His bat belongs in Cooperstown!
Cooperstown undoubtedly has many F Robbie bats and other mementos, more than they can display. Way more than they can display. At the Negro Leagues Museum it will stand out as an example of both how slow and how far Black players traveled once the color line was broken.
Equating Yamamoto and Ohtani to Park Place and Boardwalk was a triumph. Are there highlight reels for writers? If so, let's include that.
I think prospect analysts have a lot of trouble with toolsy players whose skills may not translate to MLB results. Bo Jackson is a prime example here — hits the ball really hard, cannon of an arm, runs well, athletic enough to play in the NFL, competitive. But in the end, even before injuries ended his career, he struck out a ton, didn’t walk a lot given his power, and was merely an adequate defender. Never had an all-star level season much less being a star on the field.
Less famous are a bunch of guys with great hit tools or elite contact skills who lack power, don’t walk a lot and don’t play elite defense and thus the upside is solid starter not star.
Feels like a swing and a miss to talk about Paul Skenes potentially bringing back the starting pitcher mustache then talk about Spencer Strider in the next sentence, who is a starting pitcher with a fantastic mustache.
Or mention the starting pitcher in the photo leading this post.
Your hero also may be the best player-turned-broadcaster ever.
About the Padres: During the 1960s, when the Dodgers had the likes of Koufax, Drysdale, and the too frequently ignored Osteen, Buzzie Bavasi was the GM and asked every team GM he spoke to whether they had any pitching he could get. Lindsey Nelson, one of the greatest sportscasters ever (and certainly the loudest dresser), said doing the 1969 Mets made him realize that pitching is only 120% of the game.
"Your hero also may be the best player-turned-broadcaster ever."
Maybe, but with all due respect to Kuip, I'd have to vote for Bob Uecker there. Tim McCarver would also be in the photo.
Richie Ashburn.
It's close. I should have thought of Uecker. Isn't it interesting that if he and Kuiper are the two best, neither got into the booth because of their, shall we say, prowess on the field?
What, no love for Joe Margan?
Well, I was thinking in terms of play-by-play, and he did very little of that.
But beyond that, no, no love at all.
And I should have remembered Waite Hoyt, HOF pitcher who was the radio voice of the Reds for over 20 years. So good that they made and sold record albums of him telling stories from his playing days during rain delays.
I should have as well! And two guys who each put in about 50 years behind the mike, Jerry Coleman and Ralph Kiner. I wasn't including other sports, but some come to mind there too!
My theory on prospects recently (last 15-20 years, which is recent in baseball terms) is that teams don't trade good prospects, so Thorpe getting traded twice is very telling, as is the Yankees refusal to trade Jones.
Tying Dylan Cease into the team previews -- which Joe will have to shuffle.
Looking at projections (I'm using FanGraph and Baseball Prospectus but it doesn't matter), the A's, Nationals, Rockies, and White Sox are dreadful. Teams that will be fortunate to win 70 games and effectively have 0% shot at the playoffs. Then the Pirates, Angels, Royals, and (spoiler) Tigers are pretty bad. FanGraphs is a lot more optimistic on these teams but they're still the next four worst.
And then everyone else is projected to win 79 or more games and there are a huge group between 79 and 83, more than half the National League. Adding a 3-win player like Cease improves your outlook a lot if you're in this bunch. So good on the Padres for doing something.
Will also be interesting to see how Joe ranks the next dozen teams. You could pretty much put 10-22 in any order, though I think you'd catch heck if the Diamondbacks and Rangers aren't near the top of the group (or above it).
“you can watch Skenes face<line break>”
Layout on my iPhone 12 Mini FTW!
As for Ovechkin, it's still inevitable, just that it will likely take 3 more seasons to get there. Father Time catches us all, but he'll get there. Caps are going nowhere, so they're happy to hold on until he breaks that hallowed record. Gretzky scored 199 goals after his age 30 season. Ovechkin has 315 and counting. Definitely one of the best "old" athletes in all of sports.
Who else? Lebron for sure. Randy Johnson. Nolan Ryan. Brady. Musial and Williams.
Can't leave out Aaron.
Great point, the guy basically had no peak, 20 very similar seasons back to back. 30-39 were incredible.
Well, the steroids guys: From age-35 to age-39 Barry Bonds was MVP's four times, and finished 2nd the other time. Clemens had four post age-30 Cy Youngs, and 2600 or so strikeouts. Maybe David Ortiz?
Ovechkin's underlying numbers have been bad for a few years and this seems to be the season it's finally catching up to his scoring stats. The Capitals will probably give him every chance to stick around and break Gretzky's record -- they're going to be very bad for a very long time, so might as well embrace the marketing potential of the chase -- but even if they orient literally everything they do around getting Ovi to 895, he just might not be able to keep Father Time off his back for long enough to make it happen.
Advanced stats have never liked Ovechkin, so his underlying numbers don't mean all that much. He is what he is: a high volume shooter. He's gone from #1 in shots to merely top 20, coupled with a stee drop in shooting percentage this year, which may or may not be permanent. Still seems a good bet to score 25 goals per year (he's on pace for roughl that this year, too), which would just get him there. And if he falls short by a handful of goals, the Caps will surely re-sign him. Short of a career-ending injury, he's still a very good bet to break the record.
And the Caps might not be as bad as you think for as long as you think. They are a fringe playoff contender now, in the anonymous middle of the league niether good nor terrible, and they're doing it with about $20 million in cap space tied behind their backs with Kuznetsov, Oshie, and Backstrom all unavailable. They all come off the books after next season, and the team has spent this year, and probably the next, graduating its prospects to the NHL. There's a real lack of top end talent, but at the end of next year, they should be a young, deep team with cap space to burn. Not the worst place to be, overall.
I was typing mine and came back to read yours, great minds think alike.
the Padres got Crease, now my Giants need to pick up Snell and/or Montgomery...
Strider w/a curveball?!?!?!? (shudder) when he's on, he's already unhittable...
The part about Thorpe being traded twice in the same off-season reminded me of my pet theory that I have never officially researched: you should be very wary of prospects who have been traded twice before exhausting rookie eligibility.
Plenty of great players were traded as prospects, especially in deadline deals (Bagwell for Andersen, Smoltz for Alexander immediately come to mind). Sometimes a great young prospect is just the price for doing business. But when a guy gets traded twice, it means the new team got him and thought, "we should move this guy while his value is still high." A prospect that gets moved twice has some serious flaws. Is there a great or even really good player that was traded twice before he used up his rookie eligibility?
Randy Johnson had only pitched 55 innings for the big club before being traded for Langston. I would include him in that group.
In the group of prospects that were traded that turned out to be great (like Smoltz&Bagwell)? Sure, close enough. But he wasn't traded twice during that time.
I'm a Brewers fan and Lewis Brinson is the guy that led to my pet theory. He went from Texas to Milwaukee as the centerpiece of the Lucroy/Jeffress trade. And then Milwaukee made him the centerpiece of the Yelich deal. Of course, he never panned out and has a career OPS+ of 55. Most Brewers fans, at the time, hated that we had to include Brinson to get Yelich. I tried to think of a young player who was traded twice as a prospect who become a big star and couldn't think of one.
I think Luis Castillo (the pitcher) might take the cake here. He was traded by the Giants to the Marlins for Casey McGehee, then the Marlins traded him twice! They first traded him to the Padres for Andrew Cashner and Colin Rea, but then they reacquired Castillo when Rea got hurt and they cried foul. Then the Marlins traded him to the Reds for Dan Straily. So that makes four trades before his major league debut, and he turned out pretty well!
You could tell Brinson just wasn't going to make it. Incredibly athletic, but terrible at baseball.
Anthony Rizzo was traded twice as a prospect before he blossomed with the Cubs but I don’t know if he hadn’t exhausted his rookie eligibility by then.
Rizzo is probably the best example of a guy being traded twice as a young player in a "youth for vet" trade who turned out well.
Yeah, meant similar to Bagwell and Smoltz. Jeff Kent comes to mind as well. And although Langston pitched very well for the Expos, we knew it was a few month rental and Johnson, although very raw at the time, was talked about quite a bit as a strong prospect. In the end, that team had no offense and thinking a starting pitcher would make the difference was quite foolish.