FJM has gone dark for the foreseeable future. Sorry folks. We may post once in a while, but it's pretty much over.
You can still e-mail dak,Ken Tremendous,Junior,Matthew Murbles, or Coach.
Albert Pujols Was Not A Good Enough Pitcher To Win The MVP
I for one can't wait for the deluge of Ryan Howard-for-MVP columns from older dudes wearing RBI Glasses™. RBI Glasses™: Available at ShittyLensCrafters all across the country. Hey, here's the first one, from Bob Klapisch.
Me: Bob Klapisch, you're writing a column about your awards picks. What are you going to call it?
Bob Klapisch (stopping to think for exactly 0.00038 seconds): The Klappie Awards! I'm on break.
Bob Klapisch's Klappie Awards
MOST VALUABLE PLAYER, NL: Ryan Howard, Phillies.
Nope. Wrong. So so so so so so so wrong. You should be criticized on some sort of hypercritical baseball blog for that opinion.
We’re prepared to face the firing squad on this one, having passed over Albert Pujols.
Klapisch is talking about a literal firing squad. He has written his farewell notes to his wife and kids. But he's doing this because he's a man. A man taking a stand. A man choosing another man who is ranked 30th in his league in VORP for MVP. These are the kinds of causes for which a man like Bob Klapisch is willing to stare death in the face.
Mark DeRosa and Cristian Guzman had higher VORPs than Ryan Howard. VORP is not the final word by any means; it obviously has deficiencies. But hey, also: Ryan Howard was 6th on his team in OBP. Think about that.
But as unthinkably dangerous as the Cardinals’ slugger was, he couldn’t get his team to the postseason. Howard did.
You're right. Albert Pujols did not nearly pitch well enough, or for enough innings (Can you believe zero innings? What a bum!) for the Cardinals to to make the playoffs. (The Phillies had a team ERA of 3.88; the Cardinals 4.19. Albert Pujols? More like Albert Not A Very Good Pitching Coach!)
Pujols should have lobbied to have St. Louis the city moved to Oregon, where his Cardinals would have won the NL West by two games and he would be lauded as a clutch MVP baseball superhero with quality intangibles and a leader with the uncanny ability to come through when it counts. But unfortunately, Pujols has never been good at getting entire cities to spontaneously change their geographical locations.
Ryan Howard batted .168 in April. Albert Pujols' batting averages, by month (and I know batting average doesn't matter. Here they are anyway): .365, .373, .302, .347, .398, .321. Bob Klapisch, do you think for some reason that games played in April don't count in the standings? Ryan Howard batted .213 in August.
But Howard was in another reality in September, when impact players make their mark.
But "Hole in the Wall" and one very funny moment where a guy couldn't fit through the hole in the wall, and that is the kind of impact that impact TV shows make when it counts.
While the Phillies were catching and passing the Mets (again), Howard batted .352 and hit 11 home runs — one every eight at-bats.
While the Cardinals were playing baseball, Albert Pujols batted .357.
Ryan Howard hit behind Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley. If Albert Pujols hit behind Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley, he would have had 493 RBI. Do the math. It checks out.
He finished the season with a mediocre .251 average, but otherwise led the majors with 48 HR and 146 RBI.
Sure, he hit by far the most home runs. RBI are bullshit. Here are things he didn't lead the majors in:
EqA VORP WARP1 WARP2 WARP3 OBP OPS SLG WPA BB BA R Literally any defensive statistic. Any of them. Just pick one.
You know who led or was damn close to the lead in a shitload of those statistics? Albert Pujols. The 2008 NL MVP.
You're Ryan Howard. You won the Rookie of the Year in 2005. You won the MVP in 2006. You hit 47 home runs and batted in 136 despite missing 18 games last year.
And now, after 196 mediocre at bats, you're cat vomit, according to Gerry Fraley.
Dish: Phillies wise not to meet Howard's demands
Philadelphia Phillies general manager Pat Gillick plans to move on when his contract expires after this season. He will leave his successor, probably assistant GM Ruben Amaro Jr., with a difficult call: Should the Phillies keep first baseman Ryan Howard?
Unless you absolutely can't afford to pay anyone, why are we having this conversation? Throughout his career Ryan Howard has been one of the better hitters in baseball. He's still in his twenties, he gets on base, he hits a home run once every 11.5874126 at bats. That's good stuff. These are the players you want.
Oh wait, no. You're the Phillies. What you want is to pay Adam Eaton $8.125 million.
The safe answer is yes.
"Logic" and "reason" and "numbers" would say yes. But I ask you this: Volvo makes the world's safest cars, and does Volvo use "numbers" to test their cars? No. King Wilhelm VII hand-sculpts each car out of the indigenous Swedish Metal Trees. So you see, sometimes the unsafest choice is the safest.
The bold answer, the one that could do more for the club, is no.
I am fine with this contrarianism if you want to make a rational argument based on MORP or aging curves or some analysis of the current free agent market. That's what, you're going to do, right, Gerry Fraley?
Howard is increasingly becoming a Dave Kingman-esque, one-note player.
Oh boy. Dave Kingman's career OBP was .302. Ryan Howard's is .387. (Kingman's career-high OBP was .343!)
And for those raring to point out that Howard's current slash stats of .209/.316/.469 look like a bad Kingman year, I refer you to Howard's current BABIP, which stands at a shockingly low .252. Howard's career BABIP? .341. So yeah, that batting average is going up. Way up. Because Ryan Howard hits the ball hard and he is a baseball monster who you want to pay to keep on your team unless you're the Pirates or some shit. He began Wednesday's game against the Colorado Rockies tied for fifth in the National League with 14 home runs and tied for seventh with 38 RBIs.
That sounds wonderful. GET THIS ASSHOLE OFF MY TEAM.
But Howard was hitting only .209 with a sickly .785 on-base plus slugging percentage and was on pace for a ridiculous 225 strikeouts, 26 more than his record-setting total of last season.
BABIP. See above. And wow, those strikeouts absolutely killed him last year to the tune of a .392 OBP and the third most home runs in major league baseball.
Ryan Howard is a human-shaped anchor who will drag your team all the way to the bottom of the standings. He has never won a baseball game and never will, until he moves to China, where the fewest runs scored wins the game and the women have sideways vaginas and vertical smiles. But Howard has been going in the wrong direction for more than a year.
He followed up his 2005 rookie-of-the-year performance by hitting .313 with 58 homers and 149 RBIs with a 1.084 OPS in 2006. Then, he dropped to .268 with 47 homers, 136 RBIs and a .976 OPS last season.
A .976 OPS!!! How dare he (multiple interrobangs)?!!??! This was only good enough for 7th in the National League, tied with that other loser, Chase Utley, who I've been meaning to kick off the team as well.
Jimmy Rollins should go. Cole Hamels is dead weight. Give me Pedro Feliz, the ghost of Jim Thome and the corpse of Kris Benson and I'll give you a pennant and a roller-coaster ride of a season!
Howard's chase-everything approach has continued this season. He has been increasingly vulnerable against lefthanders, with 36 strikeouts in his first 84 at-bats against them.
This is a troubling trend. Of course, the possibility exists that Howard is already in the midst of a Hafnerian decline phase, in which case it looks even worse that the Phillies waited until he was like 39 to call him up from Triple A. But Fraley's not talking about denying him a $200 million, 8-year deal. He's saying just cut him loose after this year.
The Phillies are paying $10 million for those strikeouts. With Howard eligible for salary arbitration annually through 2010, that number will continue to rise.
If you can get him year by year until 2010, of course you do it. Of course. I'd sign almost anyone to a one-year deal. I mean, shit, you signed Tom Gordon to a three-year deal worth almost $20 million, and he was a retired 53-year-old jazz saxophonist at the time.
And enough with the "$10 million for those strikeouts" bullshit. Strikeouts are only very very slightly more damaging than regular outs.
If Howard's pattern continues, the Phillies should not continue to meet his price. The next GM will have to make that call. Will he be bold enough to trade Howard and get the offense-choking strikeouts out of the lineup?
If Ryan Howard hits precisely .200 for the rest of the year, sure. But pardon me if I don't have absolute faith in Mr. Fraley's clairvoyance. In fact, in a hypothetical league filled with baseball teams general managed with men like Fraley, I would happily snatch up the following hitters for my team, all of whom finished in the top ten in the major league in strikeouts:
Ryan Howard Adam Dunn Grady Sizemore Dan Uggla B.J. Upton Carlos Pena
The sky would turn black like at the end of 300, except with home run balls instead of arrows. My K-Men would be the most exciting, most infuriating team in baseball. Other teams would start putting infielders in the outfield and outfielders in the first few rows of the crowd. Daisuke Matsuzaka would commit ritualistic seppuku after getting bombed for 14 home runs. Then I would sell the team to Mark Cuban and purchase the lives of the scientists who taught monkeys to control robot arms with their thoughts. Not because I'm angry at them, but because I want them to teach robots to control monkey arms with their thoughts, and then have the monkey-thought-powered robot arms to fight the robot-thought-powered monkey arms.
Have you ever woken up in the morning and thought to yourself: "The hitter who hits third in the line-up ... Must. Look. And hit. And act. A certain way." No, you have not, because you are a normal human being. Repeat offender Bill Conlin is not like you. He's titled his latest column:
Bill Conlin: Utley perfect in 3-hole, so naturally...
The man is angry. Why? Because Chase Utley has been dropped one spot in the lineup for another guy who is also pretty good at hitting, Ryan Howard. But Howard isn't "perfect" like Utley.
I'll let him try to explain this because I cannot:
When I'm King of the World...
A luxury wing will be built at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown to honor the game's most special breed of batsman: The No. 3 hitter . . . It will pay homage to the great athletes who hit with power and for high average. A majority of them also were above-average runners and defenders. They represent the highest evolution of the baseball art. Their names are the stuff of legend.
Already, Bill, dude: you have a weird number three hitter fetish. Relax. It doesn't matter that much if your third hitter has a really high average if his OBP is high, and it certainly doesn't matter if your third hitter plays good defense. Would you accept David Ortiz as your third hitter? Probably not. When you're king of the world, all designated hitters will be sentenced to death by firing squad.
Visit the Ritz Carlton Three Hole Resort and you will have answered the question: "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?"
The Ritz Carlton Three Hole Resort sounds like something a frat guy would call a hot rich girl.
"Dude, I totally spent the night at the Ritz Carlton Three Hole Resort, if you get what I mean!!! I mean I fucked a girl."
Beer, high fives, exeunt.
Joe will be flanked by Babe Ruth (who could flat fly when he was young, before becoming addicted to lager and hot dogs) and Willie Mays.
Babe Ruth: 123 career SB, 117 career CS. Yeah, he tied the Yankee team record for single-season steals in 1921 (with a whopping 17), but he "could flat fly"? Let me ask you, Bill: honestly, who is more similar to Babe Ruth, Ryan Howard or Chase Utley?
Chase Utley is as pure a No. 3 hitter as the Phillies have ever had - average, power, speed. Now Ryan Howard, born for cleanup duty, bats No. 3 in front of Utley. He will steal triples and runs batted in from Utley with his station-to-station gait.
Wrong. Just flat-out wrong. Your claim: that Ryan Howard will steal runs batted in from Chase Utley. Last year, Shane Victorino ended the year batting in front of Utley.
A comparison:
Ryan Howard 2006 OBP: .425 Shane Victorino 2006 OBP: .346
That's 79 points of OBP. 79! A 79-point differential in batting average would have Bill Conlin-types frothing from the mouth. It would turn Pat Burrell from a pariah into a hero. The point is: Ryan Howard will be on base more than Shane Victorino this year, and Utley's RBI opportunities will not be stolen from him.
As for triples, Utley has 13 of 'em -- in his career. He had 4 last year. So yeah, if you want to turn two of those into doubles because you insist on batting fucking shitty-ass Ryan Howard third in the lineup, good luck with that, Charlie Manuel.
I'll be over here in my front yard carving this oak tree into a perfect life-size three-hole hitter. Hopefully, lightning will strike it and it will come to life, and it sure as hell won't be slow on the basepaths. That's what my stone-carved cleanup hitter is for.
You guys are reaching S.I./Madden cover potential.
Ryan Howard was on first base when Utley hit a double into the gap. Howard got tossed out at home.
The point? Howard definitely took away an RBI from Utley (since we all know guys like Howard are made out of stone) and theoretically, he took away an opportunity for a triple.
The front page of ESPN.com, at least right now, poses a terrible question: "So, how did Ryan Howard go from 151 Ks in 2003 to 58 HRs in 2006?"
The answer? By striking out even more. Howard struck out 181 times last year. And was awesome.
Strikeouts are not bad. One hundred and fifty one strikeouts are not bad. That same year (2003, in the minors), Howard also put up an OBP of 374 and slugged 514. He wasn't exactly crapping his pants at the plate.
Sky (The Roc, NY): Buster, I enjoy everything you write and listening to you on the radio. But I have to call your use of Howard's 2003 strikeout total as evidence of a hole in his swing and then neglecting to mention his 2006 strikeout total...
Buster Olney: Sky -- In two years, with the adjustments, he made in his swing, he went from a Class AA question mark to NL MVP, hitting .355 in the second half, with a .751 slugging percentage and a .509 OBP. If you want to shoot holes in that with his strikeout total, that's your call.
Now I'm really confused. He didn't answer the question, right? (Or the statement, or whatever.)
Hard to pin this whole thing on Buster. Who knows who writes those frontpage teasers?
You Would Think That If He Mentioned Something So Specific, He Would Have Looked It Up To Make Sure He Was Right
John Kruk, BBTN 9/3/06
Re: Ryan Howard.
"And, and, 133 RBI's like [Steve Phillips] mentioned. And at the start of the season, the first, what, month / month and a half he was hitting seventh in the line-up for Charlie Manuel." (emphasis not mine)
Ryan Howard, this year, batting 7th in the line-up: Two games played. Seven at bats.
What a month.
Also worth noting that following Kruk's piece of misinformation, Phillips chimed in with a quick, off-camera, "that's right!"
