MLB 2018 regular season thread

deGrom’s xFIP is almost a run higher than his ERA. So the key is to assume he should have allowed tons more dingers and penalize him for that.

I'm going with Patrick Corbin. He gives up way more home runs, but if he didn't, he'd be awesome!

 

Only three years and $87 million to go

Albert Pujols Undergoes Knee Surgery

 

You ever have one of those weird moments where you stumble across a guy you'd never heard of before, and then suddenly wonder how he's not in the Hall of Fame?
An internet rabbit hole led me to reading up on the 1915-19 A's teams, and there was a guy on the 1915 team named Stuffy McInnis. Funny name, so I clicked on his Wiki link, and it turns out the guy was kind of a stud. Had a .307 career average, 2,405 hits, is regarded as one of the best defensive first basemen of all time, and was on four World Series champions (with three different teams) and a couple of pennant winners in a 19-year career. Only 20 home runs, but he played in the Dead Ball Era and hit a bunch of doubles and triples.
Never heard of him before tonight, and now I'm kind of a fan.
He never got more than 5 percent of the Hall of Fame vote when he was eligible. Any of our resident baseball historians know if this guy ever got any serious consideration through the veterans committee?

 

Bullshit Stuffy McInnis isn't a porn star

 

He's no Bullet Joe Bush, that's for sure.

 

For that era, he's always in the second tier in just about everything -- like the back end of the 10-20 range in hitting categories. So he never truly stands out and gets passed over, even though voting was really screwy at that time. When he hit the ballot he was probably about a 20th range all-time first baseman and I don't think you have a shot when compared to the guys who had gotten in at that point.

 

Those aren’t hall numbers.

 

True. He also didn't have friends on the veterans committee, because home runs are basically the only difference between him and High Pockets Kelly

 

Not by modern standards. By Dead Ball standards, and by veterans committee standards, who knows? Especially when there's a lot of seemingly random guys who sneak into the Hall that way.

 

McInnis was a member of the A's $100,000 infield in the first half of the 1910s, probably the third best behind Hall of Famers Eddie Collins and Home Run Baker. Three pitchers on the 1914 A's also made the Hall, so it's not like the voters were overlooking his teams. There were MVP (Chalmers) awards his first four years as a regular, which look like his four best years. In an eight-team league, so about 64 position players, he finished 22nd, 21st, 7th, and 7th in the voting, suggesting that the voters at the time considered him good but not great. Both years he finished 7th, his teammates Collins & Baker were ahead of him. He wasn't quite as good the next several years, and by the time MVP awards resumed in 1922, he was a below-average hitter and didn't get any votes. Seems like it would be a stretch to put him in the Hall, but I suppose he's better than some of the Veterans Committee's honorees.

In The Glory of Our Times, Paul Waner talks about how McInnis, who was a backup in his last year at Pittsburgh when Waner was a rookie, taught him how to play first base practicing with a pillow in their hotel room. Said that "even at that age (35), he was just a flow of motion out there on the field, just everywhere at once and making everything look so easy."

 

The random old-time guys are the ones who got in via vet committees and cronyism and don't belong / are usually the worst selections that have been made

 

McCutchen to Yankees.

He's spectacularly ordinary at this point. I guess that's better than the Yankees' other options though.