Some Phillies Links For You, August 31, 2010: Punchless, Braves Extend, Minor Success

Why don’t you just sit the next one out, how about it? :)

Old boys network with baseball ownership and Selig does not want a Mark Cuban type owner who throws money around and makes the rest of the owners look cheap by busting slot, etc. (Yankees excepted, of course)

What are you hanging lawyers for?

They have absolutely no idea how to handle Kuroda. The only reason they beat him in the NLCS is because he was coming off of injury and he was totally ineffective.

Yes, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t care. I wish these arm chair psychologists types would buy a clue.

I was more arguing dates than anything else. Utley came back a the beginning of the San Francisco series, not after, and was reasonably effective during that series (maybe not up to his usual standards, but decent). I will agree that since that series, both Utley and Howard have been floundering, and that it is possible that Valdez and (to a lesser degree of certainty) Sweeney would have hit better.

I have no doubt that both are trying, and that they both really want to help this team- nowhere in any of this do I see a pair of players who do not care. In some ways I wonder if there may be signs of pressing or trying too hard from both of them. I also recognize that benching them is not really a working solution, as other than a rest day, they are not going to re-gain their hitting skills without doing it. Since the bell that brought them back up from rehab can not be unrung, that means working on it in the majors.

However, it is probably important to note that the two of them did not tank this offense by themselves. They are not the reason why the rss of the lineup has suddenly lost its ability to swing a bat. They may have the farthest to go on the road to recovery, but everyone has to get right.

Eric Bruntlett was paid $2.4 million dollars over the course of his career. I’d define him as a sub-median bench player. Your definition of “very much” might need to be recalibrated.

2 man deck crew, first carpentry gig in VA.
4-8 holes, 12in. in diameter by 24in deep, belled out at the bottom 18 in. No augur because it took less time to dig with post hole diggers (12 lbs) and digging bar (17lbs.) than it did to dig out the augur bit when it would inevitably get stuck in the red clay of VA’s soil.

Average pressure treated lumber haul from street to back of house [Add 10 to 15 lbs to given weights for water]

30 to 40 pieces of 2in x 6in x 10, 12, 14, or 16ft. weighing in lbs., a piece [32, 38, 44, 51].
15 to 25 pieces of 2 × 8 × 10, 12 @ [44,53] lbs.
6 to 10 pieces of 2×8×10,12,14, or 16 @ [55, 66, 77, 88] lbs.
4 to 8 pieces of 6inx6in x10ft @ [81 to 100] lbs.
2 pieces of 2×12×12 @ 79 lbs.
2 packets of 2×2×4ft pickets, 40 pickets a pack each @ 2.25 lbs = 100lbs
4 pieces of 2×4×10,12,14,16 @ [13, 16, 19, 21] lbs.

4 80lbs bags of conctrete per hole to be hauled from street to back of house = [1280 to 2560] lbs

This is all done by 1 person (i was an apprentice so that’d be me) in 1 to 1 1/2 days. In humid ass VA heat. Then there was the building the deck part.

Aww, I’m flattered. All yours if you want it.

It really is pretty silly that people moan and groan about pro athlete salaries. Pro athletes, like most entertainers, work pretty hard and make people’s lives better in the process. In the grand scheme of things, they look much better than your dilettantes with inherited wealth, or even the large chunk of MBAs on Wall Street who do nothing beneficial for society, all of whom are much richer than your average ballplayer.

I should say that I’m all for egalitarianism. But if you’re going to be egalitarian, you might as well aim your weapon at the right targets. Pro athletes ain’t it.

Philly is pretty blue collar. Open the a phone book in the DC Metropolitan area and look for machine shops. You probably find 4 and most of those are in Baltimore.By the time I left the area the one shop in Alexandria had closed. It all tech. and government. When I moved back to this area I opened In the phone book that covers the Warmister area and there are 66 machine shops listed. That ’s a pretty small area with a high percentage of machine shops relative to the population.

I’m getting pretty tired of him using Brown as the PSYCH!pinch hitter.

agree, hadn’t looked at it that way. Too used to Chollie ThotWavz.

I believe Philly’s rep as “worst fans in the world” is also unwarranted. Just because one or two fans in a group of 45k do stupid things doesn’t mean the whole fanbase should be blamed.

Again, as I said above, it’s an unfortunate rep that we have to live with, and you have an unwarranted one as well…although to be fair, no Phillies fan will ever understand not selling out playoff games. It’s just never gonna happen.

Actually, I don’t think Atlanta has a reputation of being the worst baseball town in America. Miami and Tampa certainly have far worse reputations, for instance. Pittsburgh. Washington. Probably others I’m forgetting.

When people say “The Braves have the worst fan base,” the intent is not for that statement to be taken literally. They’re saying “worst” in the same sense in which a person might say, “Man, the Filet-O-Fish at McDonald’s is the worst!” Not that it’s literally the worst food on earth, but just that it’s bad.

Also, trash talk is supposed to be hyperbolic. That’s sort of the point. It would be one thing if someone were to write an essay on Baseball Prospectus concluding that Atlanta had the worst fans based on statistical evidence. But you shouldn’t take it so personally or literally when some random commenter makes the same statement in an offhand fashion on a blog.

All that being said, you have to admit that Atlanta’s fan base for baseball is not particularly strong. Yes, you outdraw Cincinnati, but you also have a lot more people than Cincinnati does. You can’t just look at raw attendance, you also have to consider attendance per capita. The Braves really ought to be drawing many more people than they are right now, and I think it is understandable for fans of other teams to be appalled that they are not. If anything, I would think that “real” Braves fans such as yourself would join us in that sentiment all the more, rather than disputing it.

Only did during the WS, and I promise you I’ll never do it again. As a general rule, I find avoiding reading OTT (other team’s threads) is a good practice. It only serves to make you mad because EVERY fanbase has fans that only serve to trash the other teams and make ignorant statements.

aren’t all turds gutless?

I prefer turdless guts, because you know…they can go either way.