stuart dean
Apr 01, 2008 May 30, 2012 33 2369
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Goldstein's Mid-Season Top 50
(Pay Content)
Kipnis at 15(!) "there is no weakness in his game" and Pomeranz at 20. Just a bit stronger than KLaw.
Sickels Top 20 Prospects in Review
I thought that this might be noted elsewhere but the fact that every single comment had a subject line made me think otherwise. Nothing here that Adam wouldn't cover in far greater depth but worth a drive-by. Though Sickels notes Barnes seasonal progression, he misses that for Graham.
Indians Coordinator Talks Pitching
Tony has some pretty good stuff in an interview of Minor League Pitching Coordinator Dave Miller. There is also a fun "where are they now section" of former Tribe farmhands. Some interesting takes:
Hagadone "has some walks this year, but they are not bad walks"
Trey Haley "probably has the best arm in the organization"
T.J. McFarland's sinker "is probably the best in the organization"
Austin Adams "throws 93-96 MPH consistently"
Carrasco on STO tonight at 6:30
Under the heading of LGT PSA. Should be a welcome respite from the Parent Club...
Kipnis Finding A Second Home
Nothing new here at all but it works as a nice side dish...
Quite The Turnaround
Baseball America subscription content on The Chiz.
"When Lonnie Chisenhall was dismissed from the South Carolina baseball team for theft, his career could have been over before it ever got started. But the Indians prospect has turned his life around since that fateful mistake."
There is also a side piece on a teammate whose post-incident fortunes have not been quite as fortunate.
Baseball America names Akron "Minor League Team Of The Year"
Akron dominates Eastern League with prospect-laden club
"There was no more dominant hitter in the Eastern League than league MVP Carlos Santana..."
""They're not just solid professional baseball players; we're talking all major league core prospects who are very young and have a lot of upside.'" -RAtkins
Gives me goosebumps though the story was poorly edited with some paragraphs in there twice...
Money talks, but baseball won't listen
Subtitled "The high-payroll Yankees won again, but that's no reason for a baseball salary cap"
Here is a guy that really needs to read Posnanski...
Yes but he's still a Schmuck
Nothing groundbreaking here but at least we're not alone in decrying the current horrible state of Basonomics...
Marte Running Out of Time to Prove Himself
Methinks that Castro is trotting out a little irony here in his intro to tonight's game up on MLB. With his usage patterns, Marte can only be running out of time to prove himself at Dominos...
What the heart makes cloudy, the head makes very clear.
by stuart dean on Sep 23, 2009 1:06 PM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Yes I know, I reversed the lyric…
I was a Browns fan from ~ 1970 through 1994. While living in NYC from 1984-1994 I watched almost every game. This required spending a lot of time in the Sporting Club on Hudson Street and other sports bars with many like-minded folk. This took a lot of time and money (bar bills). I stopped being a Brown’s fan after the ’94 season for reasons of pure calculation. I knew the Modells and performed a cost benefit analysis weighing the amount of time and energy that I was investing in the Browns versus the odds of Art or especially David ever producing a winner. Though proven incorrect when the Modell-led Ravens won the Super Bowl, I still believe that the decision itself was soundly made. When the Browns left Cleveland a year later, I was thus insulated from the blow. I did, however, make the decision then to never come back. I haven’t gone back and you know something? I don’t miss it one little bit. I enjoy having 3-5 hours available to me on a Sunday that I otherwise would not have. I have friends that ask me to go all the time but I won’t until or unless a customer asks.
You might ask where am I going with this and why am I babbling on about it on an Indians’ blog? I am giving you this history because there is a faint wisp of an argument just now starting to percolate between my brain and my heart. The heart is kicking butt right now but the head has legitimacy on its side. The head is whispering that though I know and immensely respect the Dolans and Marc Shapiro, the system itself is too rigged for me to waste my time continuing to follow the team. Maybe I should spend that time doing charity work or learn how to basket weave because being a fan of a small market team in MLB’s current system is a fool’s errand. In order for the Indians to win a World Series, everything has to come together at the very same precise instant and then they will have to tear the team apart because they can’t afford to keep it together. Hell, Paul Dolan thinks that within the current framework that the 2004-2007 "era" was a success and he’s probably right. Am I completely wasting my time?
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Meloan DFA'd again?!
Per Jenifer Langosch of MLB.com. He's now played in the minors for the Pirates, Indians and Rays this year. They are going to have to rename it DFM...
Sheldon Ocker - Why do I bother?
Maybe a fanpost but I didn't want to give it too much weight. I made the mistake of reading Ocker tonight. Instead of otherwise enjoying my evening, I got all bent out of shape and fired off the letter to him below=>
Sheldon,
I stopped reading your stuff years ago because besides not really adding much value, you’re kind of bitter and well, mean. I caught a headline out of the corner of my eye on Ohio.com today and unfortunately got sucked in. The headline said "Garko finds few fans in front office". Now this I had to see because, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out who it was that loved this guy so damn much and kept playing him. Ryan Garko is and was a very, very average major league baseball player who was just about to get expensive. As far as first baseman go, he was okay at getting on base, was below average as a power hitter and was a complete butcher with a glove. He was the poster boy for a replaceable asset. In spite of this Wedgie kept trotting him out there and even tried him in the outfield; an unmitigated disaster. Playing Ryan Garko for 7 of the first 12 starts of fly-ball prone rookie pitcher David Huff alone should have been grounds for Eric’s dismissal. So your argument was that he should have played more? What?! Are you watching the same player and why are you getting paid to do so? That was stupefying enough but you went beyond that and used the ultimate idiot stat - RBI’s to justify it. Sheldon, if you put enough people in base in front of a blind monkey, RBI's result. I’m not even sure why I am even trying to explain this to you so I will just use one prime exhibit. Joe Carter hit .232 in 1990 with a .290 OBP and a .391 SLG average. Add the OBP and the SLG. as I’m sure Pluto will explain to you, leads to a .681 OPS. Admittedly ignoring historical context is, this mark is roughly over a hundred points below what Jamey Carrol (Jamey Carrol!) is producing for the Indians today. In that year of 1990, Joe drove in 115 runs and therefore probably got your MVP vote. Here’s the rub Shellie, Jamey Carrol might have driven more runs that year if he would have replaced Joe and he would have gotten your MVP vote. Why? Plain and simple - because he had a surfeit of runners on when he came to the plate. Hitting ahead of him that year with there OBP’s were Bip Roberts .375, Roberto Alomar .340 and Tony Gwynn .357. Joe was the proverbial blind squirrel who found the nut but you would have been lauding him.
Shellie, if you are not going to know anything about the game that you are paid to know something about, please just go home and yell at the neighborhood kids and please stay there.
PS Good point about Marte playing out of position but you miss the bigger point which is why is Marte playing every other game? If you want to find out if he’s real, do you do so by sitting him and playing Giminez ad-absurdum?
Why Wedge Must Go
by stuart dean on Aug 7, 2009 12:00 PM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
I have been a defender and am not one to hasten to blame the manager but believe that it is now time to turn the page. Playing Garko in the outfield during Huff’s starts started the final souring process for me and the love affair with Giminez referenced here at the expense of finding out if Andy Marte is Agent M or well, Marte finished it. Beyond logic and reason, I will admit that I’m kind of tired of his whole act and also believe that the team needs to do something from a PR standpoint to register at least some organizational displeasure. The purpose of this post is to centrally compile the arguments for his departure. I will start it off and look forward to the comments…
- We need to hire Pythagoras of Samos. Wedge has consistently underperformed his Pythagorean win expectancy. While some of this can be explained by lousy bullpens, this dog has to have some hunt.
- Brandon Phillips. While Shapiro pulled the trigger, we all know that it was Wedges’s gun and bullets. This was a classic ego-clash and even if Phillips hadn’t turned in to a star it still would have infuriated me.
- His love for, and overexposure of, under-performing role players. This has been beat to death elsewhere…
- Garko in the outfield. “Hey let’s bring up a rookie pitcher with fly-ball tendencies and give him the best possible platform to succeed”. In David Huff’s first twelve starts, Garko logged significant time in the outfield in seven of them. In addition, DeRosa was in right for three of them and Francisco in center for six… This positional absurdity continued with Giminez at first for Laffey’s last outing.
- He is not a motivator of players who actually need motivation. It has been said that his teams don’t quit on him. As I believe Jay mentioned, the players who don’t quit on him are the ones who wouldn’t dare quit on themselves…
Poll : Wedge's next man crush
by stuart dean on Aug 4, 2009 12:22 PM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
If nothing else about our Wedgie is true, he does develop man crushes.on role-player grinders that he then overplays ad-absurdum. While none rise to the level of Casey "I can’t quit you" Blake, we have seen Francisco, Garko, Trot, Michaels and Carrol in this role. Who is the next one going to be? While my money is on Giminez, who is not a bad role player, there are other worthy pretenders to the throne.
Chisenhall moved out of bullpen
by stuart dean on May 19, 2009 2:10 PM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Role change (again): Third baseman Lonnie Chisenhall is returning to Class A Kinston's every day lineup Wednesday. The Indians moved Chisenhall to the bullpen for two appearances because they felt they may need his help in Cleveland. Chisenhall, hitting .326/390/528 as a third baseman, had trouble adjusting to the pen. He still could hit his way to Cleveland this season because outside of Asdrubal Cabrera, nobody seems to be able to catch and hit at the same time.
This is an update from prior story.
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Chisenhall moved to bullpen
by stuart dean on May 14, 2009 8:25 AM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Commentary from Ross Atkins:
The thinking [with a move to the bullpen] is he has a very impressive arm and is someone who we feel can get major league outs. He showed that in junior high and he should continue to show this in Single-A; the ability to do that. Travis Fryman told us that his mechanics are perfect and sees him as having the potential to be a high upside bullpen arm now. We do have some needs throughout the system for bullpen depth, so we are taking a look at Lonnie in that role to see if he could potentially help our major league team on the short term. He is not really intimidated by anybody or anything and should attack guys and come right after them with his fastball. However, we clearly view Lonnie as having the ability to one day be a corner bat. This is happening because he is more prepared to potentially help in the bullpen now then our other candidates Abner Abreu and Kelvin Diaz, so we are just taking a look at him in that capacity.
Full story here.
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Sheffield released by Tigers
by stuart dean on Mar 31, 2009 10:23 AM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Another Cleveland.com-wanted move that Shapiro thankfully didn't make...
DETROIT -- The Detroit Tigers have released nine-time All-Star Gary Sheffield, who is one home run away from 500 for his career.
Detroit parted ways with the designated hitter Tuesday after a disappointing stay with the Tigers. The team was hopeful the 40-year-old Sheffield would be a powerful presence at the plate in the final season of the $28 million, two-year contract extension it gave him after acquiring him from the New York Yankees for prospects.
But he failed to deliver in large part because he often was injured.
The move comes a day after the Tigers acquired outfielder Josh Anderson from Atlanta, forcing the team to make some tough decisions about its roster a week ahead of opening the season in Toronto.
Sheffield hit .178 in 18 games this spring.
Imaginary FO Conversation
by stuart dean on Aug 1, 2008 9:47 AM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Intern answers Colletti’s call
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Indians game re-runs
by stuart dean on Feb 15, 2008 9:17 AM EST
on Let's Go Tribe
Is there something wrong with me?
Three thoughts
by stuart dean on Oct 5, 2007 9:57 AM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Two things that bode well and Jeter
On Defense
by stuart dean on Sep 17, 2007 2:17 PM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Things not in the box score and Kenny
Atkins Q&A with Stephanie Storm
by stuart dean on Aug 26, 2007 9:44 AM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Free Stephanie Storm!
Akron 07.26.07
by stuart dean on Jul 27, 2007 9:46 AM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
I counted 12 scouts in the stands.
When I Knew I Belonged Part II
by stuart dean on Jul 26, 2007 1:28 PM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Ron Swoboda
What I Did On My Spring Vacation
by stuart dean on Jul 21, 2007 1:20 PM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
These are my untouched-since-then notes taken during Spring Training 2003. They are kinda fun to look back on...
When I Knew I Belonged
by stuart dean on Jul 20, 2007 8:20 AM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
"The guy who I once stood in line to get his autograph was waiting to shake my hand". For notes - please see the bottom...
Outfielder Dave Gallagher played 9 years in Major League Baseball with seven different teams. Known primarily for his defense, Dave had a lifetime fielding percentage of .994 and managed eight assists for the 1991 Angels in only 87 games. His most productive season came in 1988 on the South side of Chicago when he recorded 228 putouts without a single error while hitting .303 with 15 doubles and scoring 59 runs in 347 at-bats for the White Sox. Before debuting with the Cleveland Indians in 1987, he spent nine long years in the minors awaiting his chance. Dave remains involved with the game to this day as he is the owner and operator of the "Dave Gallagher Baseball Academy" outside of Trenton New Jersey.
Growing up in the 70's in Trenton, Dave was a Philadelphia Phillies fan, especially of their dominating pitcher Steve Carlton. In those years before Hall of Famer Carlton became surrounded by the other vital pieces of the perennially contending Philadelphia team of the late seventies and early eighties, he shined on some pretty lousy teams. In 1972 for example he won 27 games for a team that won only thirty-two more games without him. That season came in a career that included 329 victories and 4136 strikeouts. It was in that summer of 1972 that 12 year-old Dave Gallagher waited in line at Kenney's shoes to get an autographed ball from his favorite player.
Dave met Steve Carlton again at Spring Training in 1987 when both were invitees of the Cleveland Indians. Dave was competing with Otis Nixon for a fifth outfield spot and the 42 year old Carlton was hanging to his career quite literally by his fingernails as he had added a knuckleball to his repertoire. Unapologetic about his refusal to retire Steve had vowed to pitch until "they ripped the jersey off his back". Acutely aware of his waning physical tools, the normally stoic Steve`s remark to Dave when told of their meeting fifteen years before was "Thanks, now you've made me feel really old..."
Dave wasn't able to join Steve for the trip North but was soon summoned when starting centerfielder Brett Butler injured his hand. He made his major league debut on April 14 1987 in front of family and friends at frigid Yankee Stadium lining up in centerfield behind another future Hall of Famer Phil Niekro. "Because it was so numbingly cold and the pre-game included various Disney characters traipsing around the stands, there were no warm-ups. I had a horrible case of butterflies and couldn't get `em out of my system with a little batting practice." Possibly due to the weather, the 48 year-old Niekro didn't fare very well and with one out in the second inning the call went out to the bullpen for the more "youthful" Carlton. It was two innings later when Steve ran out of gas. After getting two quick outs, another future Hall of Famer Dave Winfield drew a walk. The next hitter Mike Pagliarulo promptly lashed a shot in to the gap - and Winfield was off on contact as he clearly had every intention of going first to home with those long strides of his. Although still shaking off butterflies, Gallagher had other ideas. "I remember running flat-out to try and cut the ball off in the gap and seeing Winfield heading to third with that helmet flying off - he used to wear a flapless helmet on the bases and it always flew off when he was running which was probably why he did it. I just reached the ball, spun and threw blind; a perfect throw and Winfield had to throw on the brakes and hot-foot back to third." When the inning ended, the surprised Gallagher looked up to see his boyhood idol, future hall of famer Steve Carlton waiting for him on the top step of the dugout. Although he gave him only a hand shake and a terse "nice play", the moment had a lasting effect on the no longer cold rookie outfielder. "The guy who I once stood in line to get his autograph was waiting to shake my hand". Even though the run that he "saved" eventually scored due to Yankee catcher Joel Skinner's only career grand slam, the classy Carlton wouldn't let Dave's effort go unrecognized.
Although Gallagher didn't play enough that year to lose his rookie status's, not playing a full season until the next year, a subtle gesture of appreciation for a fine play from an ageing star was the moment "When I Knew I Belonged"
Notes: I was very temporarily hired by the HOF web site back in 2003 until they found out they were prohibited from posting work(s) of non-employees. The idea for the series was to collect stories from ex-players on when they figured out that they really could be major leaguers. I had notes for many but only wound up completing two of them of them before I was fired-before-I-was-hired and when I moved back here, the Game Face people were not interested. Before I throw them out, I hope that you enjoy them.
[editor's note, by Ryan]: Promoted to the front page.
Aubrey sighting
by stuart dean on May 22, 2007 9:21 AM EDT
on Let's Go Tribe
Last night at Kinston 5 3 2 1 with a bb, 2b and a jack playing first. Someone told me that in ST he reminded them of the post-injury Mattingly where he couldn't cut loose the way he used to but hope springs eternal... Anyone else notice that Jensen Lewis' K rate has exploded lately in the pen at Akron?
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