bobk
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Sure pitching wins... but should a team with the lowest payroll in the majors really try to build around pitching? OTOH, there's a theory that if you play in a pitchers' park, you should build the team for hitting... the fact that it's a pitchers' park tends to equalize the difference between good and bad pitchers, so the advantage goes to the team with better hitting. In any event, one should not focus so much on the outfield as on the foul territory, which has as much to do with pitching vs. hitting as the outfield does. Large foul area turns strikes into outs, while a large outfield just turns homers into doubles and triples.
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Is that the actual stadium, or a mall that they're planning to build next door? I dunno. You don't need walls in SoFla, just some rain/sun cover. The Rays got it right. This design seems pretty 1990's, to me, and will look really foolish in 10-15 years. Somewhere between retro and Star Wars, there must be a happy medium.
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Hey, slow down that bandwagon so I can hop on.... I probably have the only car with California plates mounted in a Marlins frame. Moved to the west coast at the end of last season; after the winter's changes I figured there would be nothing newsworthy coming from the fish this season. Wrong! Saw them whup the Giants last week (BTW, somebody needs to tell these west coast crowds that it's okay to cheer for your team occasionally; I swear, 10K people at The Pro are louder than any 40K on the west coast). This team is going to be scary good in a couple of years if the pitching continues to develop. Finishing at .500 may be out of reach, but anything over 75 wins after last year's rebuilding would be spectacular.
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ESPN Hot Stove: Dontrelle Willis Should Be Traded
bobk replied to RockyMountainMarlin's topic in Miami Marlins
Selig would never approve it, but I could almost envision a deal in which we traded Willis and Cabrerra to the Yankees, who in turn would build us a stadium. Better yet, get them to give us the pieces of Yankee Stadium when they replace it, and we'll move it down here like they did when they moved London Bridge to Arizona. Plop it down on a lot in Boca, and season ticket sales would skyrocket. Probably never happen, I'm just trying to think outside the box. :mischief2 -
Y'know, the MLBPA wouldn't let it happen, but you could probably sell a couple roster spots to wealthy wannabes. Or use it as a promotion, a certain lucky ticket gets to pinch-hit for the pitcher. Maybe I shouldn't give 'em any ideas. :mischief2
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Going to games next year? Shucks, the way it's looking, I might get to play. Either way, I'll be wearing my Marlins cap.
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Two years later, the Marlins remain the last National League team to have won a World Series game.
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Rather than say it again, I'll just post a link to my earlier comments. http://www.marlinbaseball.com/forums/index...ndpost&p=883050 Unfortunately, since I posted that on August 1, the Marlins became a very frustrating team to root for, and the Sox' bandwagon came to a screeching halt. And I moved to the west coast. I'm now "19 minutes from a box seat" at PacBell/SBC, and I will NOT become a Giants fan, thank you... sheesh, what a freak show. And this year they didn't even have the freak. I went to a few A's games, but the crowd is half asleep, even when they're winning. And the A's stadium is truly atrocious... $14 parking, cramped concourses, few TV's, and terrible, terrible seating. I'm really gonna miss going to the Marlins' games; it has to be one of the most underrated experiences in all of sports.
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Bellhorn is a guy you can't help but like, especially if you know enough about the game to realize that the K's didn't matter, as long as the OBP was there. Great attitude, and he was always a sleeper in the Sox lineup, and a much better fielder than he looked. Arguably should have gotten the Series MVP over Manny.
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With the thin-handled bats that everybody's using, it seems there are an awful lot of broken bat pieces flying around. Most of them fly around the field, of course. But there are a LOT of broken bats these days, and some cause injuries. Thankfully, most have been minor, but it's a danger that the game doesn't need. Bill James has advocated a minimum diameter for bat handles, and I'm starting to think it's a very good idea. With all that's going on in the game, I guess a proliferation of broken bats isn't going to keep Bud Selig awake at night. But It seems like an easy fix. The batters don't get much of an edge from the thin handles, it wouldn't hurt to use a 1" bat instead of a 3/4" bat.
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If you really could sign Burnett for 4/40, it would probably be a great deal, even for a small-budget team. Indications are that the market for starting pitchers will be much stronger. Shucks, Derek Lowe got 4/40, and this winter looks to be even more of a seller's market. As for Kevin Brown.... I'd rather see him pitching to us than pitching for us at this point.
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I don't claim to be an expert on this stuff, but I gave myself a one-day intro at Google University and learned more than you'll learn from talk radio. Part of what's going on is that there's some ambiguity as to what consitutes a "steroid." This is especially so in the case of so-called "designer" steroids, which are known to trainers and athletes before they're known to the authorities. The most famous case seems to have been a substance known as THG, which was in wide use but unknown to authorities until a track coach submitted them a sample. Voila, a whole bunch of people got caught using something that hadn't been explicitly banned when they were using it. As a result, a trainer can give can athlete a substance, and he can swear up and down that it's not a steroid, and he can be telling the truth, or at least can rationalize that he's telling the truth. A player can deny that he's used steroids or banned substances, and rationalize that he's not lying. But what seems to be common to all these "designer substances" is that even if they're not classified as steroids, they have the same effect, that of increasing testerone levels. If I understand correctly, most of the "steroid" tests not only look for traces of banned substances, but they also measure the ratio of testosterone to other hormones, in order to determine whether the testosterone was naturally produced. The trainers seem to use substances in combinations that keep the relevant ratios in line, to avoid triggering a positive test. At any rate, there's a lot of ambiguity in the whole process, and there are a lot of ways a player or trainer can claim that they were truthful to the letter, if not to the spirit of the rules. Unfortunately, that also makes it very difficult to write and enforce explicit rules.
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Just remembered one my better clueless Fenway fan stories... unfortunately, I was the enabler in this particular instance. In the early 80's I had access to some front row box seats through business, and one day I brought an engineer friend and his wife to a game. They weren't baseball fans (as you'll soon learn), but they really enjoyed it, feeling special about getting good seats and all that. Anyway, the Sox were ahead, and after the visitors made the third out in the top of the ninth, I stood up to leave. My guests just sat there. Finally I said, "Are you ready to go?", and they said, "Sure, if you are. We thought you'd want to watch the rest of the inning." They didn't know the game was over.
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Red Sox fans aren't scared of the Yankees any more, and Marlins fans never were.
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Sox fan by birth, Marlins fan by residence. Both teams are hot, I'm lovin' it. And I have to say, I've been to plenty of games at Fenway, had great seats for many years... but I LOVE going to games at The Pro/Do. Fenway has it beat for aesthetics, but that's about all. Parking, comfort, weather, you name it. The seating is really pretty good, I like the steep slope at The Pro/Do, it puts you a lot closer to the field than most parks. Fenway has about 5,000-7,000 great seats and the rest are garbage. Even the crowd is better here. Sox fans are noted for being passionate and all, and it's true... when the Red Sox are in the playoffs, it's the only news in town... bombings, murders, elections, wars all take a back seat. Unfortunately, since the Sox are so popular, a lot of people at the games are there simply because it's trendy and they had connections to get tickets. So the people around you are often totally clueless, and the better your seats are, the worse it is. At Marlins' games, everybody is there becasue they wanted to go to a ballgame. Even if they just want to ogle Miggy, at least they're having fun. Everybody is in a good mood, even the drunks. Fenway it's all so damned serious. Every time I go to a Marlins game, I think about the reaction in Fenway if they ever had mermaids dancing on the dugouts between innings. Yipes. And the whole city went into crisis last week when... Manny sat out of a Tampa game that they won easily. If they both make the Series this year, I'll probably be a Sox rooter, but the longer I'm here, the less it's so.