IdahoBert

I was pretty much out of touch following this team from a distance from 1974-1984 so I actually missed Evansville as a AAA franchise. I no longer collected baseball cards nor read the sporting news. As a kid I remember Syracuse because that’s what it said on Willie Horton’s baseball card, and then heck it’s been Toledo for 35 years.

I think I’m supposed to feel bad for the Big 10 because of its CFB implications but I don’t.

That is one heck of a win for Illinois. Down 13 points. Two key turnovers. Last-second 39 yard field goal. Wow.

Reading a ball in the outfield and fielding it in a precise manner and immediately sizing up where you have to throw the ball on a skip to home plate over 400 feet within inches of the desired target is a preposterously absurd thing to expect anyone to do. Determining if a ball is worth swinging at in a fraction of a second by reading a pitcher’s motion, the spin of the ball, and the exact game context in which this pitch is taking place and one’s previous experience with the hurler is equally preposterous. I can barely wrap my head around what the pitcher needs to do But this is what is expected. When you put it into words it seems insane for a game like this to even be able to be played well at all. And the fact is that very few are able to do it.

Baseball is a tougher game of finesse, and learning all the little stuff takes time, and it takes even more time as you re-adjust to higher levels of play. Both football and basketball do not require the acute sorts of fine motor skills and mentality required for baseball. Baseball is always going to be a harder game to get good at. Ask Michael Jordan.

I like the idea that they would pay minor-league baseball players more. Right now it’s sort of a slave ship. And truth be told, there are a lot of unqualified players filling out these rosters just so you can field a team at various levels. But I feel bad for all the locations that would lose teams. The end of the Pioneer and Appalachian leagues is painful to contemplate.

Even in short season class a ball that I’ve been watching in Idaho for 25 years the ability level does not seem that acute. Just fielding the ball and throwing it on the button to first base is not something you can depend upon. Tracking fly balls in the outfield can be a real tossup. Gleyber Torres was one of the few players I can remember looking as good as a real major leaguer. He just sparkled in the infield, but even he didn’t show much power as a 17-year-old in the NWL. But hey, he was 17 years old and almost everybody else was 3 to 5 years older.

Another thing, in just the ordinary day to day of my life I’ve run into a number of former minor-league baseball players that never went anywhere. Our milkman when I was a kid had worked his way through the minors and had one season as a relief pitcher with the Cubs which was his last season in professional ball. Our mailman’s son was a AA catcher in the Tigers organization. The husband of one of my wife’s friends was a AA pitcher. A guy who went to my high school was a pitcher who blew out his arm in his first season of Rookie ball. The washout rate is huge. And most of the guys who make it don’t make much of a splash.

That’s a really good article. Frankly I thought the idea of 17 to 18% of players drafted making it to the major leagues was way too huge but when so few had any appreciable WAR that figure was placed in its proper perspective. Reading that article — Particularly the following — made me lament for the future of our Tigers. The Astros basically got rid of almost the entire player development staff and coaches. I don’t see that ever happening in this organization

MLB proposes major overhaul of minor league system, cutting of 40 teams Ever the cheapskates, it looks like MLB wants more independent leagues so they don’t have to pay those huge minor-league salaries. There’s already a vast network of self-supported baseball training services a player’s parents have to spend huge money on. It looks like this makes amateur baseball still more an expression of socioeconomic privilege than it already is. Look for US-based baseball to become even whiter and more middle class and above than it already is. My local newspaper says that our Boise Hawks NWL short-season A team will become a 140-game team at perhaps even a AA or AAA level. Apparently the Tacoma and Reno AAA franchises in the PCL are struggling. That would be cool for me. This is bad of course for 40 cities that will lose their teams. I’m not completely convinced that mine will not be among them. I wonder if they’re going to wipe out rookie league ball aside from obviously retaining stuff like the gulf coast league etc. I remember scanning the stats side of baseball cards as a kid and wondering what “Bluefield“ was like. What the Roswell ballpark was like. When Rickey Henderson played for the Boise Braves in his first professional season the games were held at the Borah High School ball park with almost no seating at all.

What is the origin of this difference?

I would like to second that.

I agree. A baseball franchise is not just another business. People go to sporting events to escape from the banality of the day-in-day-out reality of their lives. They don’t deeply identify with a team and spend money on it because it reminds them of a financial spreadsheet. Hollowing out this franchise to make it mean and lean for resale is just a different version of what corporate raiders do when they gut out a company and sell off the assets piecemeal. It’s the same motivation expressed in different ways. Undermining people’s sense of personal identification with the team to nothing more than “brand loyalty” is to completely misunderstand the nature of this “business.“

Far Left American Style. It reminds me of the skit on SNL many years ago when on their version of “Meet the Press” Robert McNamara represented “The Left.”

Send him to the Astros and he’ll be a Cy Young candidate.

I was with my very best friends in my own living room in Tucson, Arizona watching it on TV and all of us had a Detroit, Ann Arbor, or Tigers connection. Myself, my friend Jerry whose relatives from Michigan infected him, Kenny and Janet from Ann Arbor — Janet’s sister was married to one of the guys in the MC5 and Iggy Pop attended parties at Kenny’s house — and John The Hippie who grew up in Detroit as did his friend Ace who was mentally ill and on disability. It was a motley crew and God we loved this team. In one way or another we’d all grown up with the Tigers and Ernie. I had always been a solitary Tigers fan having been raised in Northeast Indiana where the ground is not drenched with Tigers blood. It was so great not to have to explain to uncomprehending fools why this was important. We knew it was important, we knew why, and all we did was relish it.

I’m glad he got something out of his short tenure in the major leagues.

Totally. I can’t say I enjoyed it but I’m glad I saw it. My son saw it for second time last night and he said you notice a lot more the second time through that you missed the first time. I don’t know if I’m up for seeing it a second time in all honesty. I feel the same way about Platoon.

You are a real Yankee fan and not some hick in the sticks in northeast Wyoming who just wants to root for a historically great team that wins a lot. You grew up with the Yankees just like I’ve grown up with the Tigers. I think you deserve a little happiness in your life. Also, I’m not man enough to watch Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander pitch against each other in a World Series that essentially means nothing to me. I find it galling and eviscerating. So I have both noble and less than noble reasons for negating my usual attitude toward baseball’s Great Satan. ?

I want to make @smr-nj happy. If I can’t be happy myself I want to make at least somebody else happy.

I want all four teams in the league championship series to lose. I don’t want the Yankees to win for obvious reasons. I don’t want the Nats to win because I can’t stand seeing Scherzer celebrate a World Series without me, which is petty I’ll admit. I don’t want the Astros to win again for equally petty reasons even though I love JV. And I hate the Cardinals for obvious reasons. GO YANKEES and may God have mercy on my soul. Their victory will be blared triumphally from every media outlet conceivable. NASA will probably find some way to get orbiting satellites to do a laser show that will spell out across the broad expanse of the sky in vibrant fireworks color YANKEES WIN! Remote cargo cults in the South Pacific will see the display, getting rid of the B-29’s they’ve revered for 75 years and find a new God to worship. YANKEES WIN!

We must be bored if we’re talking about this. There’s really no money at stake here at all.

Alex Avila is the cat with at least three lives?

Six years ago today I confidently posted this photo on this site looking forward to our advance to the World Series. Right now I’m basically glad that the cord to my hairdryer doesn’t stretch as far as the bathtub.