Boooo Thome!

Kids, take a tip from the master. If all of your predictions happen in some seemingly soon but actually somewhat far-off future, everyone will forget and you can go on saying whatever you want with authority.

I rec’d it too, but it has to be the first time anyone has made a connection between CC and Mini-me.

Posts only get starred if there’s a subject, I think.

Maybe there should be a page that collects green’d items from around SBN? Like, it’ll automatically promote the item to a common page for all of the different SBN-MLB sites that gives it some extra significance… it seems to me that the above post is the kind of thing that fans of other teams might find funny. It could encourage interaction across the different home-sites.
I guess an admin would have to approve everything so that people don’t become whores for their own inside jokes.

Probably means Grady.

droooooooobs

and he’s a 1st baseman, too. but yeah, he’s had major league success and lofgren hasn’t and probably never will at this rate.

That 102 OPS+ from a defensively average 1B — and that is charitable — adds up to a below-average major leaguer. If he were a CF or a 3B with a 102 OPS+ bat, we could call him average, but not at 1B.

Look at this way, he’s slugging .360, and the league average is .426. Among all qualifying major league 1B and DH, he is the second-worst hitter.

The EqA stat, which is more accurate than OPS, has him at .249 this season, while the league average is .260.

Now check out his month-by-month OPS:

2006 – 969, 724
2007 – 710, 1064, 573, 1149, 697, 808
2008 – 700, 661, 654, 680, 770, 507

August is the only month this season where he has an OPS over 700.

I don’t know that I ever realized how streaky Garko before this season — he was bad-to-terrible in four of his first eight months as a player, decent one month, though excellent-to-brilliant in three others. He has, so far, never been just plain “good” for a whole calendar month — he jumps straight from 808 to 969.

I also don’t remember noticing how bad he was down the stretch last year, but it makes the trends more distinct. Garko had a 915 OPS in his first 134 career games, including 119 starts through July 24 of last year. In his next 181 games, he’s had a 704 OPS. That is a massive, massive drop-off.

Garko last season generated 4.2 RC/G en route to 83 RC total. He was expected this season to keep that rate up while getting perhaps 20% more PA — nobody would have been surprised to see him top 100 RC easily. Instead, he’s on pace for about 57, in part because of reduced playing time — my point is that we pay the price for both the reduced productivity and the reduced playing time.

I’d say that Garko’s struggles alone have us nearly 40 runs, or solidly four whole wins, shy of where we thought we’d be. Among the healthy Indians, he stands second only to Betancourt in blowing this season for us.