Jump to content
The Official Site of the Vancouver Canucks
Canucks Community

The MLB Thread- 2014 Season


gmen81

Recommended Posts

You mean, you dont want a #1 or #2 as your 5th starter? How terrible of AA!

The Jays have proven that they can keep up with the big boys' bats the last 3 years. Pitching on the other hand has been shat for however long.

Heh, in a totally unrelated stat, over the last 4 seasons guess who was 2nd in overall innings pitched in a Jays uniform. Romero is an easy #1. Morrow was a very close 3rd. But 2nd? None other than Brett Cecil. That totally made me do a double take.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm not gonna get into a debate on mental health and suicide, but Freel kills himself three days before Xmas, leaving behind his wife and three daughters? Hard to feel for that.

So how exactly can you pass judgment on this case while skirting the issues of mental health and suicide? The trend of guys with a history of serious brain injuries committing suicide is becoming tragically strong, and there are so many things we don't know about concussions and how they affect mood. Macleans did a piece interviewing a number of former hockey players (Lindros, Beukeboom, etc) and dug out a lot of stories of depression and other psychological problems in the wake of acute trauma (link). So I think it's a little harsh to be judging Freel without knowing the circumstances under which he decided to kill himself. And really, before we vilify him too much, let's not forget that some of these ex-athletes with scrambled brains take other people with them when they take the "selfish/easy" way out, either accidentally (eg: drunk driving) or deliberately (eg: Chris Benoit), so while it's very sad for his family to go on without him, he was obviously unselfish enough not to victimize others for his own personal demons.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Again, not gonna debate it. You make great points but I just feel really awful for the family.

No one said you shouldn't, I'm just pointing out that there's also room for sympathy for someone who was so tormented by whatever that he thought the only way out was suicide. All the more because he apparently loved and had the love of his family and it still couldn't keep him from this. The motivation for something like this will never really make sense to a clear-minded person, but I just think it's a little cold to castigate him when we know so little about how mental illness might have affected his thoughts and actions.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Jason Fraser finally leaves the Jays after signing a deal in Texas.

He was a great yeoman for the team and worked off of 6 one year contracts. He was a great clubhouse guy and steady out if the pen but the Jays have been adding harder throwers in Delabar, Lincoln, Rogers and Santos so that appears to be the organizational focus.

I wish Fraser all the best in his new digs.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

http://www.tsn.ca/mlb/story/?id=412772

REPORT: JAYS' OLIVER DEMANDING HIGHER SALARY TO PLAY IN '13

funny when 3million isnt enough to consider leaving home for. must be nice.

No kidding.

However, this puts the jays in a bit of a tough spot. The easy answer is to say "no" to Oliver's demand and let him retire. The problem with that is that the Jays will then have to find another arm to replace him with.

The question is: Can they find someone who can post similar numbers for the amount of money that he is asking for. (It wasn't clear to me whether he wanted the 4.5 mil he made last year, or closer to the 6 mil that Affeldt got)

If they do renegotiate with him, I see the increased payroll as less of a problem that the precedent it sets. How many other guys are going to decide they're "underpaid" and threaten to retire?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

No kidding.

However, this puts the jays in a bit of a tough spot. The easy answer is to say "no" to Oliver's demand and let him retire. The problem with that is that the Jays will then have to find another arm to replace him with.

The question is: Can they find someone who can post similar numbers for the amount of money that he is asking for. (It wasn't clear to me whether he wanted the 4.5 mil he made last year, or closer to the 6 mil that Affeldt got)

If they do renegotiate with him, I see the increased payroll as less of a problem that the precedent it sets. How many other guys are going to decide they're "underpaid" and threaten to retire?

I say let him retire. Although he's nice to have as a lefty out of the pen, there is no guarantee that he can replicate what he did last year. Must bullpen arms are quite fickle you never know what you're going to get from one year to the next, with exceptions. Oliver is not one of those exceptions. Granted I don't think his ERA will balloon above 5 or something like that, but I don't think you can expect him to be as lights as he was this past year.

And, like you said, it sets a dangerous precedence. At his age last year, the Jays gave him the security of that option year. He didn't have to agree to that then. He could have signed just a plain one year deal and gone looking for more after that year was up. But he didn't.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I say let him retire. Although he's nice to have as a lefty out of the pen, there is no guarantee that he can replicate what he did last year. Must bullpen arms are quite fickle you never know what you're going to get from one year to the next, with exceptions. Oliver is not one of those exceptions. Granted I don't think his ERA will balloon above 5 or something like that, but I don't think you can expect him to be as lights as he was this past year.

And, like you said, it sets a dangerous precedence. At his age last year, the Jays gave him the security of that option year. He didn't have to agree to that then. He could have signed just a plain one year deal and gone looking for more after that year was up. But he didn't.

Indeed. I am sympathetic to players in situations without guaranteed contracts when they wish to renegotiate after good performance. In the NFL, for instance, players that are being "underpaid" often hold out, and with good reason: they are one injury away from the end of their career, for one thing, and they are also at the mercy of their team's roster or salary cap whims. Not to mention that their careers are relatively short. Get cut, get nothing, so when you earn a raise during a contract, make the team give it to you then and there. However, the situation is different in baseball. No matter how badly a player plays, the team must still pay him every cent of his contract. Oliver got a pretty decent contract for 2012, and tacked onto it was a club option which he signed of his own free will, that said the Jays could retain his right if they chose to. He should honour that contract. I think the Jays should basically tell him that if he wants to get paid to play baseball in 2013, it will be for them and for $3 million, otherwise he's welcome to retire. Hopefully he realizes that at his age, retirement is permanent, he's not Michael Jordan for Christ's sake.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

If Barry Bonds doesn't get into the Hall of Fame it will be the biggest joke in MLB history.

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic. If you're not, then we completely disagree. One of the most obvious cheaters in the history of the game has absolutely no place in the hall. Neither do McGwire, Sosa, Clemens, etc etc.....

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can't tell if you're being sarcastic. If you're not, then we completely disagree. One of the most obvious cheaters in the history of the game has absolutely no place in the hall. Neither do McGwire, Sosa, Clemens, etc etc.....

I am absolutely serious. And I think that Pete Rose belongs in too. It's silly to try and pretend that certain players never played and that things never happened as they did. Obviously this is a very hyperbolic comparison, but you wouldn't write a 20th Century history book without the second world war because Hitler is a bad guy. Bonds hold the all time home run record, and was one of the best players in the history of the game. The Hall should acknowledge that and let people make their own judgments. The guys back in the 60's were playing amped up on amphetamines too, cheating's been around as long as sports have been played, but only now do voters decide it's their noble duty to try and revise history for moral reasons.

However, that's not the biggest reason why I hate the exclusion. The reason is this: baseball knew perfectly well that all these guys were on steroids. If they didn't, that'd be what you call willful blindness. However, the league had just come out of the 1994 player strike and world series cancellation, and the fans were pissed. The brand was hurting. The home run chases re-invigorated it, brought the fans and the ad revenue back, and lined the pockets of the owners and vindicated the commissioner. So, they all just looked the other way while they were getting rich off the backs of these guys. Convenient that only after the sport had climbed back out of the abyss, and the owners no longer needed these rapidly aging megasluggers, that they all push to clean up the game, when they were perfectly complicit in the cheating while the value of their businesses was ballooning. To me, that hypocrisy is more galling than anything the players were doing. And yet this is just another example of the rules being different for the bigwigs than they are for the working guys (term used loosely, but still valid). So I say allow the Hall of Fame to be a museum of baseball, through its good and bad years, and let them display the facts as they are known and let people judge for themselves, instead of going about imposing a morally censored, biased fairy tale of the game's history.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I am absolutely serious. And I think that Pete Rose belongs in too. It's silly to try and pretend that certain players never played and that things never happened as they did. Obviously this is a very hyperbolic comparison, but you wouldn't write a 20th Century history book without the second world war because Hitler is a bad guy. Bonds hold the all time home run record, and was one of the best players in the history of the game. The Hall should acknowledge that and let people make their own judgments. The guys back in the 60's were playing amped up on amphetamines too, cheating's been around as long as sports have been played, but only now do voters decide it's their noble duty to try and revise history for moral reasons.

However, that's not the biggest reason why I hate the exclusion. The reason is this: baseball knew perfectly well that all these guys were on steroids. If they didn't, that'd be what you call willful blindness. However, the league had just come out of the 1994 player strike and world series cancellation, and the fans were pissed. The brand was hurting. The home run chases re-invigorated it, brought the fans and the ad revenue back, and lined the pockets of the owners and vindicated the commissioner. So, they all just looked the other way while they were getting rich off the backs of these guys. Convenient that only after the sport had climbed back out of the abyss, and the owners no longer needed these rapidly aging megasluggers, that they all push to clean up the game, when they were perfectly complicit in the cheating while the value of their businesses was ballooning. To me, that hypocrisy is more galling than anything the players were doing. And yet this is just another example of the rules being different for the bigwigs than they are for the working guys (term used loosely, but still valid). So I say allow the Hall of Fame to be a museum of baseball, through its good and bad years, and let them display the facts as they are known and let people judge for themselves, instead of going about imposing a morally censored, biased fairy tale of the game's history.

Amen to that.

However, Bonds? He's a triple threat. Cheater, liar, and a complete a-hole.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Amen to that.

However, Bonds? He's a triple threat. Cheater, liar, and a complete a-hole.

He's no saint, agreed. Living in San Francisco you can't get away from how much people here love the guy, still. Personally I think they're deluding themselves. But as odious as he is, he's hardly unique in many of those respects. Don Drysdale was easily a bigger jerk than Bonds, and Bob Gibson wasn't far behind. Half the current Hall probably used greenies at some point. I just don't see the point in rewriting history to pretend that certain things didn't happen. There's an attitude to see the Hall as some kind of reward for good behaviour. Being that it's already full of a-holes and cheaters, that seems to me a lost cause. I think it should really be viewed more as a museum of the history of the game and its most significant players, of which Bonds is unquestionably one.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Wow, ARod tops yet another list of alleged PED cheaters in baseball. While I've been pretty open about how much I blame the owners as much as the players for the rampant cheating in the sport, if I didn't hate the Yankees so much I could almost feel sorry for them. They might have to put up with that lemon for the next 5 years at elite level pay.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...