Both Moyer and Franco were Phillies. Franco played in 16 games as a rookie, but Moyer stuck around for a while and was 16-7 for our 2008 WS Champs (at age 45!).
How do I know this name? I didn't start paying attention to baseball until 1990, at the earliest, and yet I know this name.
EDIT: ADDENDUM - BRAD F**KING AUSMUS
Both Moyer and Franco were Phillies. Franco played in 16 games as a rookie, but Moyer stuck around for a while and was 16-7 for our 2008 WS Champs (at age 45!).
If we're doing people in glasses, I nominate Chris Sabo, who apparently had a way shorter career than I thought. Those glasses really stick out in my mind.
The Mariners were playing someone over the last few weeks (SD maybe?) and there was a player with glasses and when my daughter asked why I was laughing I explained that players used to wear ridiculous glasses, but you basically don't see any at all anymore.
Hrdina wrote:How do I know this name? I didn't start paying attention to baseball until 1990, at the earliest, and yet I know this name.
EDIT: ADDENDUM - BRAD F**KING AUSMUS
I'm pretty sure Dave Mlicki was a dominant player on the teams I used to build in the original Baseball Mogul game. Basically ~1 WAR/yr.
Also, for a guy who built a pretty long career on being a defense-first catcher, neither bbref nor fangraphs thinks too much of Ausmus.
Hrdina wrote:How do I know this name? I didn't start paying attention to baseball until 1990, at the earliest, and yet I know this name.
How many guys are there whose Baseball Reference entry lists one of his positions as "pinch hitter"? Both Gross and Del Unser show up in a lot of Phillies highlights in the late 70s and early 80s because they were clutch bats off the bench.
Just look at Gross's PA to GP ratio. It doesn't usually get above 2.
Another Julio Franco fan here, by way of a Mets-loving roommate. What a legend.
Even though Julio Franco spent 21 years of his career playing for some other team, I always think of him as a Met. Google might as well, when I search his name, 3 out of the 4 pictures that show up on the first results page show him in Mets gear.
I still can’t get over how my brokeass Orioles have the second most wins in all of baseball (6 games behind Tampa who’s doing it on $76m).
The fact that the Yankees have outspent us by $216 MILLION just makes it all the more delicious.
JT Realmuto hits for the cycle, but the Phils lose another pitchers' duel, 9-8 in Arizona.
I was surprised to see that this is the 17th time a catcher has hit for the cycle. Not a lot of catchers hit triples.
I was quite surprised to see that they had lost, as the MLB app gave me a popup saying that Kody Clemens had hit a 2-run HR in the top of the 9th, putting them up 10-9. Sigh.
How did I miss that Oakland has a 7 game winning streak? And they just beat the best team in the league. Just 31 more wins to get back to .500...
How did I miss that Oakland has a 7 game winning streak? And they just beat the best team in the league. Just 31 more wins to get back to .500...
Please sweep the Rays.
By winning percentage they've now caught the Royals, a team that is not trying to lose on purpose so that they can move the team.
Yanks won last night, and I can't even enjoy it because they (and the Mets) are just playing the ugliest baseball right now.
Both teams used SIX RELIEVERS last night.
Assuming Nevada's stupid enough to give that team $300 million-ish
Update: Yes, yes they are.
Also, Ruben Sierra.
So, MLB 23 was on sale on the Switch, so I buckled and grabbed it too.
And if nothing else, it has convinced me that the best way to enjoy sports games is to buy them every three to (ideally) five years. This is my first MLB: The Show game, so it's all new and fresh and amazing to me, and all of the gripes longtime players have with it don't mean a thing to me! It's great!
That said, as someone whose main interest is in playing casually, broadly, SMB >>>>> MLB.
On everything but the easiest difficulty level, MLB 23 is very clearly a game built to lean heavily simulation-y (I cannot recognize pitches for the life of me, and this is with a solid 100 ABs in RTTS so far), whereas SMB makes it much easier and is about mashin' dingers and bouncing liners off the pitcher's skull.
For me, it's really about what you're into. Do you really like using real players and want to get the vibe of playing actual baseball? Then it's MLB.
Do you love goofy shit, silly names, mashin' taters and are looking for a game that you can basically pick up from 0 and learn to play within 5 minutes without having to tweak any controls or look up guides online? Then it's SMB4.
Do you like being able to create players and having a player career mode? Then it's MLB.
Do you think having to look up a guide to figure out the "best batting stance" is stupid as shit? Then play SMB4.
Both are fine, they just aim for totally different niches. SMB's presentation isn't a patch on MLB's, but SMB is a game for anyone with surprising depth, while MLB very much feels like a game made with the hardcore in mind first.
Right now, I'm still playing MLB, because I'm really enjoying RTTS and you can blow through a bunch of games in 30 minutes, but I think SMB4 does a whole lot right, and I think it's the better choice for most casual players. Like, this may sound weird, but I think SMB4 is interested in fun, whereas MLB's fun is in its difficulty.
EDIT: Oh Christ, forgot.
Definitely not suspicious at all that he never hit more than 11 HRs in a season through age 30, and then had SIX 25+ HR seasons after that.
And yes, he was on the same Padres team as Ken Caminiti, and he did start hitting HRs the same season Ken won the MVP by suddenly hitting 40 HRs.
Rat Boy wrote:Assuming Nevada's stupid enough to give that team $300 million-ish
Update: Yes, yes they are.
Also, Ruben Sierra.
Going back a bit -- in my mind, Ruben Sierra and Julio Franco are linked as 1) Texas Rangers and 2) very similar players. But I'm way off on that second point. Sierra managed to maintain a 20-year career on < 1 bWAR per year. 1989 and 1991 really loomed large in people memories and he kept getting jobs (until 2006!) despite being done as an above-replacement-level player in 1992.
Franco, on the other hand, put together a really nice career. A solid hall-of-very-good player who had a better year at 45 than all but 5 of Sierra's seasons. His ~46 bWAR is inflated by him compiling a bunch of slightly-above-replacement seasons towards the end of his career, but I'm never gonna complain about a guy holding on for as long as possible.
Now, let's stick with that 1989 Rangers team, on which 19yo Juan Gonzalez got a handful of at-bats. Another guy who put together a decent, but surprisingly short career. Had you asked, I would have sworn he had more than a decade of getting consistent at-bats. But I'd have been wrong. He probably most stands out for being a 2-time MVP winner who should not have won either.
He probably most stands out for being a 2-time MVP winner who should not have won either.
Who would you have gone for instead? I think Griffey, Jr. in 96 and probably ARod in 98.
Also receiving MVP votes in 1996.... Terry Steinbach.
billt721 wrote:He probably most stands out for being a 2-time MVP winner who should not have won either.
Who would you have gone for instead? I think Griffey, Jr. in 96 and probably ARod in 98.
Also receiving MVP votes in 1996.... Terry Steinbach.
Yeah, that's probably right. Amazingly, ARod didn't get a single 1st place vote in 1998. There are also easy cases for ARod in 96 and Nomar in 98 (among others). Both his MVPs, but especially 98, seem to hinge on context-independent statistics (RBI, primarily, but also general offense ignoring ballpark factors) and ignoring defensive value. This isn't a case like with late-career Griffey where his defensive value was much worse than his reputation -- even at the time he was thought of as a terrible fielder.
A fantastic comment I saw in a reddit thread on the 96 award was something to the effect of 'me and Griffey put together averaged more WAR that season than Gonzalez had'.
Another guy who would have been a much better choice in 1996? Chuck Knoblauch. A season in which he finished 16th!
Yeah, that's totally a counting stats MVP. Gonzalez wasn't even top 10 in OPS+ (or literally any advanced stat, from what I can see.)
A night after the Giants top the Dodgers in extra innings on the much discussed Pride Night in LA, San Francisco hands Los Angeles its worse loss runs-wise since 2013
And apropos of nothing else, Yorvit Torrealba.
A night after the Giants top the Dodgers in extra innings on the much discussed Pride Night in LA, San Francisco hands Los Angeles its worse loss runs-wise since 2013
And apropos of nothing else, Yorvit Torrealba.
I can remember being intrigued when the Mariners acquired Torreabla, but oof. 12yrs, 5.4 bWAR. Backup catchers can really get by on reputation alone.
Yorvit Torrealba is the first baseball player I can recall specific fan-in-the-stands dialogue being recorded for him in a baseball video game (can't recall which one off the top of my head) and it was the fairly racist line "What kind of name is Yorvit?"
Just because I didn’t earlier, here’s Mike Cameron, who was on todays M’s broadcast and is an all-time favorite of mine even though he only spent 4 years with the Mariners. So much so that ‘Cameron’ was an early entry of mine when we were choosing names for our youngest and it ended up being what we went with.
Because you already named your first son Ichiro?
Because you already named your first son Ichiro?
If only. Too much white in my kids for Ichiro to work. Had I been thinking ahead I'd have married a woman who had some Japanese in her instead of Filipino.
lol. When the Brewers played the Mariners a few weeks ago I had to show my daughter a picture of Counsell's batting stance. Still maybe the weirdest I've ever seen.
That stance has Bobbie Tolan beat, but not by much.
Also, if you're not partaking in Foolish Baseball content, you are missing out and delightful Baseball Sickos nonsense.
He's been mentioned already in this thread, but Julio Franco's page is just a delight to look at. Dude batted .309 at forty-five!
It's unfair to him, but no name makes me remember when the Yankees used to stink out loud quite as much as Danny Tartabull does.
Which also reminds me, Jimmy Key!
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