I’m in the minority of baseball fans who thinks the Marlins’ absurd home-run art installation is going to be awesome, and I believe this post from Grant Brisbee supports my case. He’s got a bunch of pictures of the home-run thing under construction, and it is tremendous. Look at how it dwarfs that palm tree:
Via Toby Hyde.
Lincecum and Kershaw matched up four times in 2011, Kershaw winning all four contests, all four of them tremendous duels. In the four games Lincecum pitched 29 innings with a 1.24 ERA, but an 0-4 record. Kershaw was 4-0, pitched 30.1 innings with a 0.30 ERA.
So that’s pretty awesome. It’s cool when matchups between the best pitchers in the game play out like matchups between the best pitchers in the game. Poor Tim Lincecum pitches for a team with no offense to speak of.
I spoke too soon before when I said I “got one” new embarrassing photo of Cole Hamels. I stumbled my way to the website of photographer Sean Patrick Watters, who apparently did a photoshoot with ol’ Cole at some point. All four photos can reasonably be deemed embarrassing, but I’ll direct you to Watters’ site for all but this one:
Oof, the Pirates. It’s like the Mets’ 2010 Opening Day lineup, except with Boyz II Men as the best answer for David Wright.
Navin Vaswani at NotGraphs collected a bunch of solid anecdotes about Pascual Perez from the Internet. It’s worth reading, but it made me feel pretty old because about halfway through I realized it was pretty clear that Vaswani — as he later noted — never saw Perez pitch.
He was all those things and more, Navin. It was something to behold. He didn’t just wear the jheri curls, he lived them.
If I remember it right, Carlos actually proved the craziest of the pitching Perezes. The Wikipedia is blacked out and so is a good portion of my memory, so I can’t prove that now. But I remember him wildly signaling strikeouts from the mound and taking ridiculous home-run swings every time he came up to hit, and I remember aping both those things while playing stickball.
Melido, on the other hand, never did anything I can remember to distinguish himself as weird besides being Pascual’s brother, throwing a rain-shortened no-hitter against the Yankees then later joining the Yankees, and also having sweet jheri curls.
Via Steve Schreiber.
Do I really think Brewster’s Millions is the best baseball film ever made? No. It’s a really stupid movie. But it’s one of those awful movies that every time it pops up on one of my 15,000 DirecTV channels, I fall into some sort of drooling trance in which time stands still. I don’t know that I’ve ever watched the thing from start to finish, but I’ve probably seen it about 30 times in fits and starts. There are some things the film did well. First, it proved that you can stick John Candy and Richard Pryor in the same movie and not only render them completely unfunny, but you can in fact make them seem almost child-like. I mean, this is Richard freaking Pryor, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t use a single swear word in the entire film.
– Bradford Doolittle, Baseball Prospectus.
I was pretty excited to see Brewster’s Millions on Baseball Prospectus’ list of 10 favorite baseball movies, but then I read the accompanying blurb. “Awful”? “Unfunny”?
Get your head out of the spreadsheet, son. Brewster’s Millions is a classic, and this dude at work who went to film school agrees. The premise is outstanding and the Richard Pryor is Richard Pryor. And “None of the Above” remains the only political candidate to which I could ever give my wholehearted endorsement.
In short: No.
I mean, it depends on your definition of “disappointment,” of course, and what your expectations were for Pelfrey when he joined the Mets in 2006 — I know my own were certainly sky-high. But if you’re citing his draft position as evidence that he hasn’t lived up to his potential, I urge you to consider the following chart I spent my morning compiling.
I went back through all the drafts since 2001 and compared the career fangraphs WARs of every pitcher selected in the top 10 overall. That’s not the most comprehensive means of comparison, I know, but I figured it’s a good way to get a quick-and-dirty sense of a pitcher’s value. Then I eliminated the guys from the last three drafts, figuring it’s not anything like fair to compare them to established pitchers so early in their careers.
Then, with Moneyball in mind, I removed all the high-school pitchers from the list to try to make the comparison a little tougher on Big Pelf. There were 12 high-school pitchers drafted in the top 10 overall picks since 2001, four of whom (Gavin Floyd, Zack Greinke, John Danks and Clayton Kershaw) have since outproduced Pelfrey, three of whom never threw a big-league pitch.
So the following is the list of all college pitchers selected in the top 10 overall from 2001-2008, omitting both instances where a pitcher did not sign with the drafting club.
It’s 29 guys, and Pelfrey ranks eighth among them in fWAR. Certainly he’s not Justin Verlander or Tim Lincecum, but I’d hardly call a guy who has produced in the upper echelon of top-drafted pitchers “a disappointment.” Obviously teams drafting pitchers that high are hoping for aces, but there’s so much risk involved that landing a suitable innings-eater should be at least a satisfying outcome. Disappointments include the 10 guys on the list with zeros or negative numbers next to their names.
| Year | Pick | Pitcher | Team | Total fWAR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 2 | Mark Prior | Cubs | 15.8 |
| 2001 | 3 | Dewon Brazelton | Devil Rays | -0.6 |
| 2001 | 6 | Josh Karp | Expos | 0 |
| 2001 | 7 | Chris Smith | Orioles | 0 |
| 2001 | 8 | John Van Benschoten | Pirates | -0.8 |
| 2002 | 1 | Bryan Bullington | Pirates | -0.8 |
| 2002 | 9 | Jeff Francis | Rockies | 16.5 |
| 2003 | 3 | Kyle Sleeth | Tigers | 0 |
| 2003 | 4 | Tim Stauffer | Padres | 2.3 |
| 2003 | 8 | Paul Maholm | Pirates | 13.9 |
| 2004 | 2 | Justin Verlander | Tigers | 32.4 |
| 2004 | 3 | Philip Humber | Mets | 3.5 |
| 2004 | 4 | Jeff Niemann | Devil Rays | 5.3 |
| 2004 | 6 | Jeremy Sowers | Indians | 3.3 |
| 2004 | 10 | Thomas Diamond | Rangers | 0 |
| 2005 | 6 | Ricky Romero | Blue Jays | 9.8 |
| 2005 | 8 | Wade Townsend | Devil Rays | 0 |
| 2005 | 9 | Mike Pelfrey | Mets | 8.6 |
| 2006 | 1 | Luke Hochevar | Royals | 7.4 |
| 2006 | 2 | Greg Reynolds | Rockies | -0.6 |
| 2006 | 4 | Brad Lincoln | Pirates | 0.2 |
| 2006 | 5 | Brandon Morrow | Mariners | 8.3 |
| 2006 | 6 | Andrew Miller | Tigers | 2.8 |
| 2006 | 10 | Tim Lincecum | Giants | 27.9 |
| 2007 | 1 | David Price | Devil Rays | 10.4 |
| 2007 | 4 | Daniel Moskos | Pirates | 0.2 |
| 2007 | 6 | Ross Detwiler | Nationals | 1.5 |
| 2007 | 8 | Casey Weathers | Rockies | 0 |
| 2008 | 4 | Brian Matusz | Orioles | 2.6 |
And he also eschews the tomato. What a hero:
It’s awesome when my favorite former baseball players reveal that they understand just how awesome they were at baseball. Anyone remember in 2005 when Rickey Henderson pointed out — probably accurately — that he was almost certainly still better than Tony Womack?
Anyway, Pedro Martinez went on WEEI’s Big Show yesterday and said — accurately — that he was better in 1999 than Justin Verlander was in 2011 and better than Cy Young Award winner Barry Zito in 2002. He also revealed that he maintains a grudge against the two writers who left him off the MVP ballot in 1999, made some vague suggestions of racism, insisted that he never took steroids, and dropped some truly Rickey-esque bombs like this one:
Nowadays, 250 strikeouts is a big deal. For Pedro, it was a minor deal to have 250.
Probably worth reading the whole thing. I don’t agree with everything Pedro says, but he’s Pedro regardless.
Via Repoz.
Tedquarters 