DODGERS AROUND the MLB Thread

Discussion in 'Los Angeles DODGERS' started by irish, Feb 9, 2014.

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  1. Doughty8

    Doughty8 DSP Legend

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    The players are way too sensitive but on the other hand watching that guy play close-up would be infuriating.
     
  2. Bluezoo

    Bluezoo Among the Pantheon

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    I don't find the apparent disregard for BB tradition, nor light punishment a surprise at all; the team is the Brewers, and since scumbag Commissioner Bud's family has some stock in them, I expect a downplay at least on the scale of the smug, lying douchebag, Ryan "Eva" Braun MVP incident.
    The MVP should have been taken away, and instead of all of the huge credit he got for FINALLY doing something about 'roid use, after all these years, that would have been something of value to strip the cheater.
    But just like no overturn of a bad call and blown perfect game which made the umpire who did it cry, stand behind a cheater who is part of a classless organization and let him reap a coveted award. Proving nothing but gross ignorance by doing so, or rather, not doing so.
    To be a Brewer... this is Gomez' good fortune, and more of Selig's cowardice.
    Gomez needs medication. Or a very serious beating.
    Maybe both.
     
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  3. Doughty8

    Doughty8 DSP Legend

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    Josh Johnson of the Padres to undergo 2nd TJ surgery tomorrow. Rough few years for that guy.
     
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  4. Doughty8

    Doughty8 DSP Legend

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    Brothers gave up the lead in Coors. 7 - 6 hated ones bottom 7th.
     
  5. Doughty8

    Doughty8 DSP Legend

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    7 - 7 and Matt Cain 7 earned. Cubbies gave it up in the 9th 7 - 5 DBags. Ruggiano pulls something trying to catch triple. Happy birthday Wrigley!!! Bastids!
     
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  6. Doughty8

    Doughty8 DSP Legend

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    Trumbo stress fracture in his foot. Going extras in Coors, use those staffs up guys!!!
     
  7. carolinabluedodger

    carolinabluedodger DSP Legend

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    I agree with everything you say in this post, but (and I'm sure you know this) Major League Baseball and Bud Selig do not have the power to strip Braun of the award because it is bestowed by the BBWA.
     
  8. lastatman

    lastatman DSP Legend Staff Member Moderator

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    Wait a second... Aaron Harang leads the NL in ERA?!?

    WTF? And more importantly... how?
     
  9. irish

    irish DSP Staff Member Administrator

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    big gangly ugly inbred squirrels occasionally find acorns too
     
  10. Bluezoo

    Bluezoo Among the Pantheon

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    Actually I forgot that, so I really didn't know it at post time.
     
  11. Bluezoo

    Bluezoo Among the Pantheon

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    He's one of those guys who actually has good stuff, but not often enough to put him in that special bracket.
    I used to cringe over Tomko on the bump, but it sometimes amazed me at how this guy's ball moved... and he had fairly good velocity.
    But Tomko is LAD legendary for his douchebaggery on the mound.
    I was watching Cabbage Patch Cahill the other night, pitching out of the AZ BP...he was lights out. Unbelievable. Untouchable.
    Sometimes there no ryhme or reason.
    I don't think Harang-utan will be in this rarified air at season's end, but you just never know. Maybe he scares them.
    I honestly don't know how Baumgarden is so good...it looks like pretty much the same pitch all the time; but he is. Who knows?
     
  12. Doughty8

    Doughty8 DSP Legend

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    Roger McDowell.
     
  13. Bluezoo

    Bluezoo Among the Pantheon

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    Wow...squirrel insult of the highest.
     
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  14. irish

    irish DSP Staff Member Administrator

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    yeah, and i'm sure they're not happy about it
    it's one thing to be a bubonic plague carrying rodent
    but quite another to be compared to an undead shambling ghoul...

    [​IMG]
     
  15. Bluezoo

    Bluezoo Among the Pantheon

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    ...undead shambling ghoul...you just don't hear that phrase much any more. What happened to those good old days?
    "Steaming pile of shit" was one of my favorites; gone the way of groovy.
     
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  16. irish

    irish DSP Staff Member Administrator

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    league fit that description until recently
    now we're all quiet, cautiously optimistic he won't revert back into a gas can
    seems we always have one of those guys on our staff
    terry mulholland, tom martin, league... :shit: :garbage:
     
  17. CapnTreee

    CapnTreee Guest

    laughing out loud... they Angels scored 13 on the damned Yankees !!
     
  18. LASports96

    LASports96 DSP Legend

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    against Kuroda no less
     
  19. CapnTreee

    CapnTreee Guest

    would have been even sweeter against Tanaka but he's having a pretty good year so far... 7ER over 4 starts

    but any day the damned Yankees lose is a good day
     
  20. CapnTreee

    CapnTreee Guest

    102.9 mph and rising? Royals' Yordano Ventura brings heat like no other starting pitcher

    The hardest-throwing starting pitcher ever stands 6-foot on a really tall day, weighs 180 pounds if he's got a Costanza wallet in his back pocket and remembers vividly the first time he threw a baseball 100 mph. It was only 1 mph more than the 99 mph his arm generated hundreds of times before, but in that 1 mph a pitcher crosses the baseball Rubicon. For those who reach triple digits never, ever want to come back.

    "It was in Arizona, my first time throwing 100," Yordano Ventura said. He's working on his English these days, getting better and better, and talking about that magical binary number extracts the best in him. "No scoreboard. Radar gun only. One of my teammates hold it. He told me, 'Hey. You throw 100 today.' "
    Ventura was 19. Two years earlier, Kansas City Royals scouts and executives looked past his slight frame and at his right arm, which birthed some of the smoothest, easiest fastballs any of them had seen. They offered him $28,000 to sign, a small bonus even by the deflated standards in the Dominican Republic. He accepted. They saw his potential. His fastball leaped from the mid-80s to mid-90s within months. They marveled. He crept up to 98, 99. They refined his mechanics. He hit 100. They pushed him. He went to 101, then 102. They gave him a rotation spot. And in his first start this season, Ventura threw the fastest fastball ever clocked from a starter, 102.9 mph, a number that boggles the mind because it's only April, and almost every pitcher throws harder as the season progresses.

    With 14 fastballs at 100-plus mph already this season, Ventura owns the record for triple-digit heaters from a starter in April, according to calculations from the invaluable Dan Brooks, who uses PITCHf/x data to give the greatest insight yet into the fascinating speeds at which pitchers today throw. It's not just Ventura, now 22, either. Since 2008, when Brooks began running his website brooksbaseball.net, 77 pitchers have thrown 4,354 pitches at 100 mph or more.
    The King of 100 is, not surprisingly, Cincinnati closer Aroldis Chapman, generally regarded as the hardest thrower in baseball history. He owns the two biggest 100-mph-pitch seasons with 356 last year and 332 the year before, and his 998 triple-digit pitches account for nearly 23 percent of the 100-plus pitches in the major leagues since 2008.

    After a horrific line drive to the skull sidelined Chapman for the first month, Ventura ascended to the throne for the time being, accounting for nearly half of the 31 triple-digit pitches thrown by 11 pitchers this season. His average fastball sizzles at 97.8 mph. He's among the league leaders in swings and misses on fastballs. And as he makes his fourth start Friday night in Baltimore, the Camden Yards scoreboard will get to flex a muscle it rarely does. Even Tommy Hunter, the hard-throwing Orioles closer, has hit 100 just once this season.

    Reaching 100 isn't the chore it used to be, not with the shoulder-strengthening exercises required of pitchers today helping generate excess velocity. Ryan Tucker, Tom Wilhelmsen, Al Alburquerque, Wily Peralta and Jake McGee all have touched 100 exactly once in their careers. Doing so consistently takes far more work. Just 31 players have hit 100 at least 10 times in one season. Just six have gotten to triple digits with triple digits. Ventura looks like a safe bet to beat the record for a starter: 61, by Justin Verlander in 2012.

    The limited history of PITCHf/x does not allow the inclusion of Nolan Ryan, who hit 100-plus on radar guns, and Bob Feller, who used military equipment to register a fastball at 98.6 mph and swore he threw harder. It does ensure never again will we need to guess whether one pitcher threw harder than another. The cameras in the system will tell us, and scientists can do with the data what they please. Brooks, for example, sets his release point at 55 feet (more realistic than PITCHf/x's 50) and adjusts the numbers by park, because the system does have noticeable errors in certain stadiums.
    Unquestionable is the power of the 100-mph fastball, the lore that comes with it and the number of pitchers who do everything they can in hopes some day they, too, can trigger the third digit to flicker.

    "Mark McGwire used to always say, 'Anybody can throw double digits,' " Cardinals reliever Jason Motte said last spring, with 32 triple-digit notches on his belt. "What'd you hit? Ten? Ninety-nine? Still double digits. Only a few can throw three digits. So it's pretty cool if you can do that. Might as well try to do it every now and again."

    Next to him sat Trevor Rosenthal, who took over as St. Louis closer after Motte blew out his right elbow. The previous fall, as the Cardinals romped to a World Series title, Rosenthal lit up radar guns, sitting in the high 90s and tickling 100 with scary regularity.

    "I don't think God reached down and put a lightning bolt in my right arm … " Rosenthal said, trailing off, incapable of explaining why he can throw so much harder than most. Though he's onto something. It is a gift. Even as 90 mph is a necessity and 95 something of a requisite and 100 increasingly common, velocity remains romanticized by pitchers and executives alike.

    Velocity with control, which Ventura flashed in his first two starts, is the sign of a star and the reason that after years of inapt comparisons to Pedro Martinez – Ramon Ortiz, Edinson Volquez, Jose Dominguez – Ventura might be the most reasonable facsimile yet. His changeup isn't Pedro quality yet, even though it decelerates through the strike zone at 90 mph. His breaking ball isn't as crisp, though it has better tilt than Pedro's hammer curveball.

    While Ventura's secondary pitches will make him a star, his fastball is his meal ticket into the conversation, a legitimate game changer. The first time Royals center fielder Jarrod Dyson saw it, during an instructional-league intrasquad game, he couldn't fathom how someone so slight propelled a projectile with such force.
    "He was about my size," said the 5-foot-9, 160-pound Dyson. "I was not expecting 100. The first fastball kind of jumped at me, and I'm like, OK, we got a gunslinger in here."

    Now comes the toughest part: steadying the gun. Ventura's biggest issue, catcher Salvador Perez said, is that "he gets too excited and tries to throw 200 miles an hour." Which, if it were anatomically possible, Ventura might do. Being that 106 mph or so is a generally accepted ceiling before an arm goes kablooey, he does have room left to add a couple miles and challenge Chapman's record 105.1-mph pitch.

    "I'd rather throw strikes and keep the ball down than throw 100," Ventura said.

    Which is only partially true. Throwing strikes is nice. It helps. He will win lots of games because of it. But come on. No pitcher wants to be Jonathan Papelbon, hitting 100 mph three times in 2009 and sometimes struggling to crack 90 this year. Shoving a baseball at 100 mph connotes strength and power and animalism, the sort of thing that defines a pitcher.

    "Sometimes you throw easy and it's 100," Ventura said. "I'd rather throw easy."

    That's more like it. That's a man embracing who he is: the hardest-throwing starting pitcher ever, the one who crossed the Rubicon three years ago, hasn't come back since and has no plans to do so anytime soon.
     
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