Not a bad example there. Is he great? No. But the difference between the typical AL DH and him is less of an advantage for the AL than iot is when the AL DH sits down for some games and the pitcher hits.

I was addressing the offense. I clearly pointed out Beane has been fully capable of finding pitchers.

We weren’t trading good prospects to get those competitive teams. There has not been an impact bat in the farm system in years. The best player to come out of it during Beane’s tenure has probably been Swisher. That is not saying much. Thats why the team used to be affected so badly by injuries.

:)

this one goes a little deeper, but when i coached an 11U baseball team this summer, there was a team called TABU. this stood for “try and beat us”, which is grammatically incorrect. it should be “try to beat us”.

maybe i should be an Englishmajor. ;)

But that’s like saying we all have bellybuttons or eardrums.

Some blind spots are more stark than others, and your comment above struck me as an extreme example. I mean, you’ve got to be kidding, right? Like half your posts drip with dismissive disdain.

That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy your contributions. I do. But you taking the community to task over tone is laughable.

You can easily make your own points without resorting to the same type of stuff you’re complaining about others doing, and I don’t need you telling me what should or shouldn’t be moved past by now just because you don’t like the response YOU’RE getting.

As it is, it seems this place has been getting a lot of people lately who make new accounts just to post stupid crap, and some people here are getting tired of it. I don’t think it’s out of line to be annoyed with stuff like that.

3-0, 4-0, 4-1 between relatively evenly matched teams. These apparently come up a lot more than random chance would predict. The lack of explanation for this phenomenon leads people to guess the reason—momentum, guts, clutchiness…

Between this post and the one above, you’ve succeeded in really hurting my feelings.

I am genuinely sorry to have hurt your feelings, but I’m somewhat confused: What in the post directly above was hurtful?

I expressed contrition for my overzealous conclusion to the prior post, and took pains to (again) reiterate that I don’t at all consider the behavior I described to be problematic. And while I’d agree that the final sentence of my original post was unnecessarily caustic, I’m not sure what makes the rest of it so terrible.

So while I am happy to apologize (mea culpa), I think you are perhaps plumbing depths of pain not really in proportion to the offense.

As to this:

There’s an immense difference between saying "I’m smart and witty and well-informed and willing to dance," and saying "I’m smart and witty and well-informed and willing to dance and I’m significantly better at it than you. Here, let me tell you why."

Sure. But a) that’s a different formulation than what you articulated above, and b) I think you overstate the distinction. My point is that the cliquism and exclusivity that result from the former are not much different in practice than the latter, and in fact there is a way of embodying the former that manifestly implies the latter, and – in my view – is every bit the “look at me” spectacle.

Again, to avoid misperception: I think all of that is just fine, and I don’t exempt myself from any of it. I simply think your distinction can be taken too far, and is often used (not by you, necessarily) to mendaciously conflate smart, well-informed, effectively argued perspectives with assholishness in order to evade, you know, the argument itself.

As to the rest of it:

I think you are saying that all opinions are equally correct/valid/worthwhile, that they are only differentiated out there in the universe of blog discourse and pub discussion by virtue of each person’s ability to articulate them. Therefore debate amounts to not much more than a empty rhetorical fencing match.

I don’t really know what to say about that. I really, really (really!) disagree.

You seem to be (consciously or not) misconstruing my original point, which addressed the relative value of opinions, not artful sentence construction or debate agility. Some contributors to this site know (a lot) more about baseball than others. Their opinions carry more weight, because they’ve thought them through, and are able to call upon a large reservoir of knowledge and context to support their arguments. As I said above, I’ve no doubt Goldzone is a good guy, and I endorse his right to submit this fanpost. But I’m not going to pretend his opinions are equivalent to andeux’s or PT’s or [pick your poster], because that would be silly, and quite obviously false. They’re not. No amount of verbal parrying acumen is going to make up for that. And you know, it’s not the end of the world! I sure as hell don’t know half as much about baseball as 40-50 regular AN posters. But I also try to make a point of reserving my stridency for areas where I feel I’m on solid ground.

The larger point concerning tone is certainly valid, and one I’ve expressed many times, but I think it is critical to avoid framing vigorous disagreement and respectfulness as mutually exclusive. We should be careful not to suggest that we can only respect each other by not ever telling anyone that they’re wrong.

I understand that a lot of people come here for game thread repartee, picture post reverie, and casual chats in the DLD, and I think that’s great. Please don’t misunderstand: I enjoy that stuff as well. However, AN would become instantly boring if no arguments ever broke out about anything. I don’t know about you, but I learn a lot when astute posters spar about prospects, stats, roster construction, game decisions, and so on. Those threads vet perspectives for me, as a comparatively un-schooled reader, such that (again, repeating myself from above) I gain a better understanding of the issue at hand. And I worry that if AN were to adopt your views regarding opinions and argumentation, much of what I really value about the site would be lost.

or I’ll make you wish it was PT beating you senseless. Lower case “g” unless you’re using my name at the start of a freakin’ sentence you newbie scum!

(Exhales)

All better now.

One thing that was very noticeable as I was skimming through the 2002-2006 draft classes for half a dozen teams, is that all of them have seen more pitchers make it to the bigs than hitters.

I’ll let someone else speculate on why. Maybe pitchers develop sooner, or are typically drafted later. Maybe there’s just been a lousy class of hitters since 2002. Maybe all the hitters get grabbed by the NL. (I was looking only at AL teams.)

I don’t know why, but I definitely noticed that, out of players drafted since 2002, about three times as many pitchers as hitters have reached the bigs. And that’s true for all teams I looked at. The A’s are not an exception in this regard.

Scouting and developing pitching is the strength of the organization. It was one of the things that swayed uber-prospect Inoa to sign with the A’s. And I’ve always believed that of you’ve got a bounty of young pitching you can trade for any hitter you want.

As for the hitting, I don’t consider a guy like Buck to be mediocre. Yeah, he’s had a rough 2008. But everything he did in 2006 and 2007 shouldn’t be discounted. Buck never had the ceiling of a star, but if he had continued to hit like he had prior to this season he would have been a solid outfielder and a guy you pencil into the line-up every day.

Once you quit drafting 1st rounders the numbers say you’ve got (at best) a 6% chance at landing a big league player via the draft. And how many of those success strories were guys with 1st round talent but carried bonus demands that dropped them down the draft? How many of those guys were draft and follows who would have been 1st rounders if they had re-entered the draft?

You always remember your first time.

I listed every non-pitcher that was drafted by the team who has since been in the major leagues and played more than a handful of games. I did not include draft picks who were not originally signed by the team; I did include draft picks who were traded while still in the minors and reached the bigs with another team. I didn’t set an exact bar for how many games count as a “handful”, but I think it was probably somewhere around 30. It was pretty easy to tell intuitively who was up to stay and who was just getting a cup of coffee.

I can’t guarantee I caught everyone, but I did not omit anyone intentionally. I posted my findings for every team I looked at (including my additions to the other poster’s list for Oakland), but I only looked at those eight AL teams and none in the NL.

My primary procedure was to skim through the draft lists on Baseball Cube, and then if I wasn’t familiar with a player I’d take a look at his numbers on Baseball Reference. Baseball Cube’s draft lists put a player’s name in bold if he’s reached the bigs, and I relied on that a lot to speed up the process. If they neglected to bold someone, that would make me likely to miss him. (Evan Longoria was not in bold, but that one I caught.)