Fred McGriff and the Hall of Fame

I congratulate Tim "Rock" Raines, Ivan "Pudge" Rodriguez and Jeff Bagwell on their election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. A well deserved honor in each case. My issue is how Fred McGriff has been snubbed by the same voters. No "clean" player has been hurt more by comparison to PED contemporaries than McGriff. This isn't a new issue for me.

In 2004 I compared McGriff to now Hall of Famer Wade Boggs with the Crime Dog coming off very favorable in comparison.

In 2006 I compared McGriff to Bagwell. Are you aware that McGriff has more career HR, RBI and total bases than Bagwell? Yet McGriff is on the outside of the HoF looking in.

In 2011 I made a case of how steroids using players were hurting the HoF chances of clean players. Probably the only time I can recall really disagreeing with Joe Posnanski.

Fred McGriff deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

Don't want to comment on DeflateGate or listen to the pablum on sports talk radio. It all makes me ill.. Heh heh... The reason pay phones still exist is so people can use them to call people they don't like in the middle of the night just to wake them up anonymously... Classy move by the Reds... Another year and once again People Magazine has passed me by as their pick as The Sexiest Man Alive. One day they will learn the error of their ways... 10 things you might not know about Life Savers... If the Patriots don't pick a QB in the draft as insurance for Brady's 4-game suspension - I wouldn't be surprised if they brought Tim Tebow into camp. No - I am not kidding about this... Interesting - did the legendary embrace of Jackie Robinson by Pee Wee Reese ever actually happen?... So Mark Cuban says that Russell Westbrook is not a "superstar". Didn't he say the same thing about Steve Nash? How did that work out for Cuban?... Cool technology - replace your electrical outlets with a dual USB charger...

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

When I hear Edward Norton narrating those DraftKings commercials - I always expect him to say, "I'm Jack's gambling habit"... Good to see some reporters learning from how the NFL blatantly used the press in Deflategate. Some others like Chris Mortensen and Peter King seem resigned to remaining NFL lapdogs... When are we going to see the "Hi I'm Peyton Manning and I'm Noodle Arm Peyton Manning and I have cable" DirecTV commercial?... Touching story from Joe Posnanski... If DraftKings spliced in quick-flash images of Tyler Durdin in their Edward Norton narrated commercials - then I would think about playing... The NFL's Pink October is just a scam.... Billion Dollar Babies by Alice Cooper is a very under-rated rock song...

Linky Links

Stuff i found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- Beginning to think words "Wells Report" and "integrity" should never appear in same sentence.

- Tom Curran has one of best takes I've seen yet on DeflateGate. If the max punishment is really $25,000 then this really is a crock of shit.

- The hero of Garland

- Heh heh

- Joe Posnanski also has great perspective on DeflateGate

- A nice explanation on Tesla's Powerwall and what it really means for power generation

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- Libya is an absolute mess

- Heh heh - "Profanity Pop" art

- How Harry Potter shaped a generation

- Joe Posnanski has a nice story of the first time he met Tom Glavine

- As far as I'm concerned Israel has nothing to apologize for

- Such an awesome photo

- Gotham looks like a good TV show (too bad I cancelled cable)

- Impressed by how well read Bill Hader is

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

I've long held that the original purpose of the White House Correspondent's Dinner has long since been perverted beyond recognition. If I were President canceling my appearance at the dinner would be one of the first things I'd do... Tom Brady and Aaron Rogers at the Kentucky Derby... I hope Boston fans realize how lucky we are to get to watch Zdeno Charra... I agree 100% with Joe Posnaski with who the real villain was in A Few Good Men...  Look for many "Now It Can Be Told" books to come out from MSM types once President Obama leaves office... Classic - Emo Philips interviews himself... A friend listened to all of the secretly recorded Donald Sterling tapes and he says it boils down to Sterling asking his "girlfriend" not to sleep with Magic Johnson and to get him some soup... Oh how I would love to have Larry Ellison scale money... Red Auerbach won just a single NBA Coach of the Year and it was the season for which the Celtics were to win their 8th championship in 9 years....

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- Heh heh - seems about right

- Awesome - Christopher Walken dancing

- Very cool - Black Death (Hollaback Girl by Gwen Stephani) - ooh fleas on rats, ooh fleas on rats!

- Incredible correction from the Washington Post

- Joe Posnanski on Louis Sockalexis. Worth the read.

- Heh heh - 20 Best Ted Talks

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting and thought I'd share.

- Happy Presidents Day (still say Washington and Lincoln should each get their own day). Here's a view of the Washington Monument that you don't see every day.

- Fantastic and comprehensive review of the film career of Bill Murray

- Joe Posnanski memorializes Augusta National's the Eisenhower tree - which sadly is no more

- Thinking of Abba as Tea Party pioneers in outrageous outfits is strangely amusing

-  Joe Strummer's 1979 handwritten lyrics to London Calling

- The unbelievable but true story of Mitchell Paige - American hero and the real life face of the GI Joe doll. Where do we find such men?

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- The Fig-Thing Irish may be one of the great fantasy football names of all-time

- Tom Brady consoles Tim Tebow after learning he was cut - cruel but I laughed

- Very interesting - NASA finds Grand Canyon sized canyon in Greenland.

- Interesting look at Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout and WAR by Joe Posnanski

- Tough not to like Justin Verlander

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting and thought I'd share.

I hope this idea works. Dad tries to get son a job by offering free beer incentive.

Glenn Beck made $80 million last year while Keith Olbermann can't find a job. That's certainly one way to look at it.

Heh heh - If Aaron Sorkin wrote for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Ken Levine is one funny guy.

Ken Tremendous has a good appreciation of Kevin Youkilis' time in Boston.

Joe Posnanski also has a good take on Youk.

One final take on Kevin Youkilis. I agree 100% that the Red Sox got much more out of Youkilis than he got out of them.

Wow - as Chris Lindsay points out Coke makes so many products that if you drank one every day it would take over 9 years to try them all.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

Happy 49th birthday to Mad Men star and Red Sox fan John Slattery. I can't wait until the new season of Mad men actually airs... What Does a Poet Laureate Actually Do?... Joe Posnanski mentions a very interesting stat. During Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, he hit .408 while Ted Williams hit .414 over that exact same period... The razor commercial of divers shaving in a shark cage is stupid. Now a tampon commercial in a shark cage would make more sense... Who knew? The Cookie Monster's first name is Sid...

The Barry Bonds Trial

Joe Posnanski has a good piece on his feelings regarding the Barry Bonds trial.

Like Joe, I am also numb to it by now but unlike Joe I want this to be a circus and while Joe doesn't want either side to win - I want both sides to lose. I also disagree with Joe about this:

I often compared him [Barry Bonds] in his younger days to Ted Williams, who was also a genius of a hitter and also widely despised.

Ted Williams was despised by who? Not his teammates. His friendships with teammates was so strong it was immortalized by David Halberstam. The average fan? Kids with cancer who were being helped by the Jimmy Fund? Men who wore the uniform of the US Marine Corps like Williams? Or is Posnanski talking about those paragons of virtue the sportwiters?

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

Ted Gundy is now my favorite sniper. Seriously cool. Good for him... Someone should redo the Rolling Stones classic Sympathy for the Devil with new lyrics making it Sympathy for Charlie... I may have missed it but have the Wisconsin union protesters or the missing State Senators offered any solutions of their own to the Wisconsin debt problem? Or are they just for the status quo? Unbelievable... RIP, Henry Africa, creator of the 1st fern bar. Very cool story. He also had a bar named after Eddie Rickenbacker - very cool indeed... Another good song remake for Charlie Sheen would be Robert Palmer's Addicted to Love which easily could be changed Addicted to Charlie. Bonus is you could have the "goddesses" in the background just like the original music video... The Joe Posnanski story on the dying Nick Charles is must reading. Very sad but it seems like Nick Charles has led a very full life... Charlie was the beloved unicorn who went to candy mountain and got his kidney stolen. That's not winning... The Minty Goodness of the Shamrock Shake is back! Yay green poop!... Does Charlie surf? I was told he does not... Jimmy Fallon's Charlie Sheen is truly great. Funny but I can't remember Fallon doing any impressions on SNL but his Neil Young and now Charlie Sheen impressions have been spot on...

Joe Posnanski

The always interesting Joe Posnanski has a post up looking at Hall of Fame pitchers through the prism of which year they were born. It is a great read but I do have one nit to pick with the article.

He started off by talking about the round numbers that normally denote a Hall of Famer. For pitchers he notes 300 wins and 3,000 strikeouts. He then says the following:

And the players coming with 300 wins or 3,000 Ks will all sail into the Hall of Fame with the possible exceptions of Clemens (and any other pitcher deemed to be PED stained) and Schilling (who has 3,000 Ks but only 216 wins which makes him borderline).

Emphasis added because I thought only people like Joe Morgan not people like Joe Posnanski thought that wins and losses were the measuring stick for a pitcher's greatness.

The seeming hypocrisy regarding Curt Schilling pops up later in Posnanski's post in the advocacy of Billy Pierce:

He [Billy Pierce] only won 211 games in his career, and his 3.27 ERA, while good on its own, doesn’t really do him justice (his 119 ERA+ is better than Steve Carlton or Nolan Ryan).

Wait - Schilling has that supposedly magic number of 3,116 strikeouts but is borderline because he has just 216 wins. That's 5 more wins than Billy Pierce in a similar number of innings pitched (3,261 for Schilling vs 3,306 for Pierce). And if you want to talk about ERA+ then Schilling's 128 is better than Pierce, Steve Carlton and Nolan Ryan along with Jim Palmer, John Smoltz, Juan Marichal, Bob Feller and Don Drysdale among others.

EDIT: Per Joe - he is on record as supporting Curt Schilling when he comes up for election. I was probably just reading too much into things (as usual)

Steroids

I need to get this off my chest. With the Hall of Fame ballot results to be announced this week - many writers have been discussing their selections and with their votes how they feel about steroids.

What has gotten me worked up most is the attitudes of normally bright and logical people like Joe Posnanski who becomes illogical and hypocritical when it comes to steroids.

In discussing Jeff Bagwell - Posnanski opines:

I think my e-migo Craig Calcaterra has made this point on Twitter, but I’d like to also make it as strongly as I can: I’d rather a hundred steroid users were mistakenly voted into the Hall of Fame over keeping one non-user out.

He doesn't see that this thinking leads to the exact opposite results. You let in 100 steroid users and their numbers keep clean players from getting proper consideration. You let in a Mark McGwire and you make it harder for a Fred McGriff or Don Mattingly. Posnanski makes a case for Kevin Brown without once mentioning Brown was named in the Mitchell Report for taking human growth hormone and Deca-Durabolin. At the same time he takes shots at Jack Morris. I guess if Jack Morris had improved his numbers by taking steroids then he'd have a better shot in Joe's book.

The hypocrisy drips from his choices.

Fred McGriff and Mark McGwire - he votes No on McGriff but he votes Yes on Mark McGwire! Even if you think McGwire just used steroids for the last 3 seasons of his career (yeah right) then that's 3 seasons in which McGwire made $30 million and hit 126 HR. If for the last 3-seasons of his career McGriff used steroids to hit just half of those HR that McGwire got over his final 3 years then McGriff has well over 500 for his career and is probably in the Hall. Even more insidious though is the fact that McGwire used steroids to secure contracts bigger then what McGriff ever came close to making. The $11 million McGwire made for his final season was 34% more than McGriff ever made in any one season in his career. So not only did McGwire cheat to get paid - his cheating now screws clean players like McGriff's chances at the Hall of Fame as well. That's too much to swallow.

To take it one step further - if you buy what McGwire is trying to sell Posnanski about using steroids just to heal from injuries then what about a player like Don Mattingly? What if Mattingly had used steroids to extend his career? Would that have made him a Hall of Famer? I know you can't play this what if game but at the same time you can't reward a player like McGwire for cheating to get what was denied to a Donnie Baseball. Put another way - Posnanski's thinking on steroids is 0% logic and 100% bullshit.

Rafael Palmeiro - Posnanski has the balls to compare Palmeiro to McGriff:

McGriff: .284/.377/.511
Palmeiro: .287/.369/.510

You know what this comes down to - clean player who will be kept out of the Hall of Fame versus dirty player who would have been in Hall of Fame if he didn't get greedy and come back for one last season. Boo-freakin-hoo for Joe Posnanski who feels bad that he has to vote No on Palmeiro.

I am slightly surprised that Posnanski didn't go full-jackwagon when it comes to steroids and make the case for Jose Canseco.

One argument that really bugs me is the "he was a Hall of Famer before he started using steroids" argument. This is normally used to defend Barry Bonds. Well what about a player like Dale Murphy? He was a Hall of Famer in his prime - what if he started taking steroids at the same time as Bonds? Is he a Hall of Famer now? What if Bonds never took steroids? Does he break down like Murphy?

Two discussions on Twitter really set me over the edge on the subject of steroids.

A number of baseball writers were doing an echo-chamber re-Tweet-athon about how fans don't care about steroids and the Hall of Fame and that it was just the writers making a big deal of this. They have a point but they miss the forest for the trees. People are stopping to care about the Hall of Fame but it is precisely because of steroids.

The other Twitter discussion which pissed me off was the uber-smug King Kaufman knocking Jim Rice as not being Hall of Fame worthy but granting he was at least not a mediocre player. Jim Rice is the poster child for players whose accomplishments have been harmed by comparison to steroid cheats. It was nice of King Kaufman to say at least Rice wasn't mediocre. I'd like to return the favor. King I don't think your writing comes close to being worthy of Sports Illustrated good but I think at least you could hold your own at the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

Joe Posnanski explains his Hall of Fame choices better than any writer today... Tom Brady got voted in but is not playing in the Pro Bowl. Take that to the bank. He'll either be in Super Bowl or chilling with Giselle having begged off the game with some sort of injury. My guess is Super Bowl... How great would this be for a summer home? Not sure if I'd want to live there year around but that home is wicked cool... Of the 21 players with 300 saves only 3 are lefties - John Franco, Billy Wagner and Randy Myers. I can't think of a major lefty closer playing today. Why is that? Is it because good lefties are always made into starters?... Every time I go skiing I think about this happening. I'm surprised more people weren't hurt... I've made this point before but if in his prime the Yankees offered a Don Mattingly for Wade Boggs swap - the Red Sox make that trade 7 days a week. If it was reversed - if the Red Sox offered Boggs the Yankees turn the trade down 7 days a week.... How Does an Etch A Sketch Work? Etch A Sketch is one of the few toys generations have used and is still cool today... FWIW - Todd Helton's career road OPS is higher (.873 to .857) than George Brett's overall career OPS

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting and thought I'd share.

- The best and worst NBA court designs

- Heh Heh

- Joe Posnanski has a poll on who should gets Hall of Fame votes. Good stuff.

- Before you vote - make sure you check out this graph

- Boston Red Sox Top 20 Prospects for 2011

- Holy crap! Average stagehand at NYC's Lincoln Center makes $290K a year

Dads and Baseball

Much news in the world of baseball today. We grieve over the loss of American icon Bob Feller and in Boston we wonder if the Red Sox have just righted the ship as far as their bullpen is concerned. An article on each subject seemed to overlap and seemed worthy of note.

There have been many touching tributes to Bob Feller but the best I've read was done by Joe Posnanski. Bob Feller would often say that the best man he ever knew was his dad. An Iowa farmer who carved out a baseball field for his son because he wanted nothing but the best for Rapid Robert. Feller understood what his dad had done for him which was underscored by his questioning of Posnanski:

And then Bob Feller asked me about my father. Direct questions. Did he play catch with me when I was young? I said yes. Did he take me to baseball games? I said yes. Did he believe in me deeply? I said yes.

If asked I am guessing that new Red Sox reliever - Bobby Jenks - would answer "No" if Rapid Robert had asked him those questions.

I say that because of an old Bob Nightengale article that was reposted on Boston.com (with permission?). The article tells of a different Iowa boy with a firebolt for an arm but whose father wasn't quite so caring as Bill Feller. The juxtaposition of the two stories just struck me. In particular it seemed strange that two Iowa fireballers would be making the news in the same day. But the message of the two pitchers may be lost on most. The message is to be grateful for loving parents if you have them, be a loving parent if you have kids and if you weren't so lucky - don't give up on your dreams.

For the record - I like the signing of Jenks. It doesn't cost a lot in terms of money (2-years / $12 million) and best of all since Jenks was non-tendered by the White Sox - it doesn't even cost the Red Sox a draft pick.

The Promise

One of the best written and most heartfelt tributes you'll read this year. Joe Posnanski reminisces about Bruce Springsteen's song The Promise and how it related to his dad and his summer job when he was 18.

Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting and thought I'd share.

- Joe Posnanski's great piece on LeBron James and Dan Gilbert

- Tomorrow, Watch the Largest Asteroid Flyby Ever, Live

- The best players never to make an All-Star team. I was surprised by Kirk Gibson's name on the list.

- A Chart of Unemployment Since 1995. Cause and effect.

- 10 Things You Might Not Know About Indian Reservation Gambling

- Great movie insults (NSFW)