DrungoHazewood

But was it a productive out at second? Agree that nobody wants a can of corn.

Were just there in September at Sherando Park, and then the next weekend in Front Royal. But not scheduled out that way the rest of the year. I'd never been downtown in Winchester before, but we ate outside a decent Mexican place in the pedestrian area. Wanted to go to Macados for the nostalgia (there is/was one in Blackburg, haven't been since college) but the line was out the door.

Two related but kind of random thoughts: 1) Just think what would happen if you combine the kids from the DR with the training facilities Ryan Mountcastle had. 2) None of this stuff existed, at least in modern form, 20, 30 years ago. More for the huge pile of evidence that baseball today is far higher quality than even when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. Pre WWII is like the Korean League, if that.

I think it is true that across almost all major sports that people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds succeed at higher rates than people who were better off. My kids' fallback if they don't become pro soccer players (and they won't) is to go to a four-year college and get a good degree and a good job. No such fallback plan in the DR.

My kids are playing full seasons of U14 and U13 soccer, including tournaments. And there's no money, no TV deals. Although I guess I've spent a fair amount at gas stations in Northern Virginia.

My off-the-cuff guess is that the impact of not having enough food to eat and the prospect of making enough money to be comfortable for the first time in your life is a bigger factor than knowing your launch angle before going back home to your McMansion to play four hours of Forza Horizon 4 on the Xbox.

Exactly. My kids are at a level where I hope they play a little in high school, although we're zoned for a school that's pretty good and you almost have to be a higher level travel player to make varsity. They really have no interest or probably ability to play on these teams that go to Florida and just the fees are many thousands of dollars a year. I have a coworker whose grandkid (5th grade) plays hockey, and has regular season games in New Jersey and Ohio. This is a structural problem with soccer (and probably other sports) in the US. Pay for play. There have to be countless kids from poor backgrounds who are spectacular players who just don't get a chance because their parents can't afford it. In Germany or the UK if you're really good you get picked up by some pro team's youth academy and they foot the bill. DC United's youth side costs like $20k a year, although I think that includes school and I think they're unusual among MLS sides in charging to play. Also, my kids' travel team coaches get paid, but it's like $1000 or $1500 a season to cover hotels and gas and stuff. It's not a job.

Sure, the higher end ones. I don't know much about baseball travel teams, but there are many tiers of soccer travel teams. There's teams in the NCSL like my kids' teams, they play around DC, a couple tournaments a season in Fredericksburg, or Columbia or Richmond. Then there's TRAVEL teams who're based around DC but go to Florida or Texas or whatever on a regular basis.

In Europe the systems are very different, but Lionel Messi and his dad moved from Argentina to Spain join the Barcelona youth academy when he was 13. Harry Kane joined the Arsenal youth academy when he was eight, was released after one season because he was "a little chubby and not very athletic", joined Tottenham, was promoted to the senior team as a teenager and has now led the EPL in scoring several times. And I complain a bit taking the boys to Winchester from Southern Maryland for a match...

When you turn on the TV and there's a game on, don't you naturally root for one team over the other? It's pretty rare that I can watch a game and truly not care, even in the moment, who wins. I'm not going out and buying a shirt and I won't care either way 10 minutes after the last game is over, but I'll be rooting for the Rays over the Dodgers.

Even the percentages there are very small. There's a soccer player my kids train with named Jereme Raley. He's played for University of Maryland, some lower level pro teams, and the Baltimore Blast indoor team. I'm pretty sure he's the most successful player in the 30+ year history of St. Mary's Soccer. At any given time there are probably 1500 or 2000 kids playing for the club, and I doubt one kid a year gets a D-1 scholarship. I'm good friends with a guy who now coaches a little on one of my kids' teams, he was waaaaaay better than I ever was or my kids are, and I think he got a partial ride to a small, lower-division school in Vermont. There's a lot of parental delusion going on thinking your kid is going to be the one in 2000.

I think it's pretty obvious that they got the expansion franchise at least in part due to the city's willingness to build a stadium in the 1980s without any guarantee of a team, and that gave MLB huge leverage to get stadiums built elsewhere. In the late 80s and early 90s every year you heard of a team threatening to move to Tampa in order to get a new stadium. Unfortunately it's like a 85% scale model of the Metrodome in a bad place in a city with little baseball history and lots of competing activities.

The percentage of parents who think little Timmy is going to be a professional is about 1000 times higher than the percentage of little Timmys who will actually go pro. That's probably a low estimate. But the parents will pay for that. When my kids were playing baseball the most common launch angles for their teams were -30 degrees, +25 degrees backwards, and (undefined - never made contact).

Nobody has really commented on what kind of player this guy is. This past year he finished 9th in the KBO in OPS at .940. He played on a Kiwoom team that scored/allowed about 5.00 runs a game. The KBO overall scored 5.17 runs/game and had a .273/.349/.410 slash line. As a comparison the majors had a .245/.322/.418 line and scored 4.65 runs/game , so a bit more power in the majors, but a much higher average in the KBO and a half a run more per game. If I had to guess I'd say the average talent level in the KBO is AA-ish, but with a wider spread in talent. Some A ball players, and a handful of pretty good MLB players. Our old friend Hyun-Soo Kim had a similar performance to this guy, hitting .337/.399/.530. He's 32, Ha-Seong Kim is 24. Mel Rojas was the best hitter in the league, OPSing 1.099 with 45 homers. He's never played in the majors, but his AA/AAA OPS is about .740. Preston Tucker OPS'd .684 in 651 PAs for the Braves, Astros, and Reds, and last year for the Kia Tigers hit .300/.394/.553/.947. Jose Miguel Fernandez had a .697 OPS in a brief trial with the Angels in '18, he had a .904 OPS for Doosan in '20. My guess is that Ha-Seong Kim would be about a .700 OPS hitter in the majors, with some growth potential because he's just 24.

One of the things I like about baseball (and soccer, too) is that you don't have to be some kind of genetic freak to play. Brian Roberts and Jose Altuve can be really good players at 5' 6" or 5' 8". In football you simply can't be a lineman without being nearly 300 pounds. There's a huge prejudice, probably justified, against any QB who isn't 6' or 6' 3". Even kickers are now mostly 6', 220. In basketball you basically have to be the best player who ever lived to be in the modern NBA if you're not 6' 3" or something. Recently DC United had a player named Luciano Acosta who is 5' 3" and he's awesome. Yes, I think if they had a standard strike zone it would likely hurt shorter players, and incentivize teams to acquire taller and taller players. Which would probably exacerbate the all power all the time problem the game has. It might also mean that the gap in offense from middle infielders and perhaps catchers to the other positions would widen.

I have relation by marriage who was a grandmother at 37 and her mom a great-grandma at maybe 54. But in my mind I still see grandparents as being about 70 and great-grandparents 80 or 90. Probably in part because I didn't have my first kid until 35. We need to get back to the important part here, that I look decades younger than Joe Altobelli, Cal Sr, or Wilfred Brimley at a comparable age. I could totally pass for, like, 37.

The AL President voided his contract apparently using the "best interests of baseball" excuse, and then made a new rule that all contracts had to be run through the league office prior to the player appearing in a game. IIRC. Today there'd probably be a disability discrimination lawsuit and he'd be reinstated. I've long advocated using a very short but athletic person as a DH who walks constantly.

I thought about this for a few minutes and can't really come up with any direct examples. There are sports like horse racing and maybe some types of car racing where you have to even out weight, by adding weights to make up for the driver/jockey being light. I think high jump and pole vault should be judged on height jumped as measured from the top of the competitor's heads. Nothing to do with me being 5' 7".

Joe Altobelli was 51 when the Orioles won the 1983 Series. I always assumed he was about 68 then. He looked like he could be someone's grandpa, which I guess you can be at 51. My grandparents were all in their 40s or early 50s when I was born. For whatever reason I think of grandpas as being around 70. So I was surprised today when I looked up Altobelli and found he's still alive. I'm not being vain or bragging here, I'm nothing great to look at, but I think I look at least 10, maybe 15 or more years younger than Joe Altobelli did in '83, and I'm 49. I know this is a weird aside, maybe because I just saw that meme where Paul Rudd is now about the same age as Wilfred Brimley was when they filmed The Natural and Cocoon. Maybe @Frobby can help us out here... is 50 the age where people diverge? Some look the same as they did at 30, some look like they're 80? I always thought Cal Sr. looked 78 when he was 43. Re-reading this post it sounds like a rambling, kind of nonsensical Grandpa Simpson rant, which is a reference that only the olds would make, so maybe I'm really 70. @#$^ kids!

So the Padres offered 12/400. Tatis' agent counters at, what... 15/600?

Eyeballing the list... Five HOFers died in 1948 (Tinker, Three-Finger Brown, Hack Wilson, Herb Pennock, Ruth). Spread from January to November. Six in 1972 (Zack Wheat, Dave Bancroft, Pie Traynor, Gabby Hartnett, Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente). Two in March, the others in October-December. Five in 1993 (Gehringer, Dickey, Mize, Campanella, Drysdale). Mize, Campanella and Drysdale died within a month of one another, the others spread out. Six so far this year. (Note: After running this query I realized that it's missing anyone who didn't go into the Hall strictly as a MLB player. I noticed Candy Cummings and Harry Wright were not included, dug a little deeper, and see that it's only players inducted as players, not pioneers, Negro Leaguers, executives, managers, etc. So the results may be slightly different including these other people.) So, approaching it from a different angle I got complete data. We can add: 1951, five. (Heilmann, Eddie Collins, Smokey Joe Williams, Pete Hill, and Bill Klem) 1954, five. (Bill McGowen, Oscar Charleston, Rabbit Maranville, Chief Bender, and Hugh Duffy) 1971, five. (Martin Dihigo, Heinie Manush, Goose Goslin, Will Harridge, and Elmer Flick) 1972 adds George Weiss who died in August. So August-December five HOFers died. 1978 five. (Gordon, Foster, Frick, Haines, McCarthy) 1984, five (Alston, Cronin, Hoyt, High Pockets Kelly, Coveleski) 1989, five (Gomez, Willie Wells, Judy Johnson, Jocko Conlan, Bill Terry) I should be doing work, so I'm not looking up exact dates of death for this last batch. But I'll just say that five in two months is unusual. And in case you're wondering, the HOFer who has been dead longest is William Hulbert, one of the organizers of the NL in 1876 and its 2nd president, who died in 1882. He also holds the record for most elapsed time between death and induction at 113 years. 42 HOFers died before the first HOF election in 1936. Sandy Koufax is still alive and was inducted in 1972, making him the person with the longest living tenure as a HOFer at 49 years. He just passed the late Bob Feller in the last year.

In related news, Joe Altobelli is only 88. When the O's decide to move on from Hyde as the rebuilding is finishing up...

It might be fun watching him lose his mind every time his coaches remind him of the three batter rule. I'm sure at 76 with a long history of doing his own thing he's well versed in the latest analytics. And completely rejects 80% of them. I'm always good with Oriole opponents making decisions less on logic and sense and more on nostalgia. As for his pioneering work in using 14 pitchers per four-hour game, the three batter rule mostly takes care of that, and I turn off the game by 10:00 anyway.

Could have just had Nick pitch the last six innings.