Wednesday, March 03, 2004
MARINER MISHMASH
Bret Boone. Prankster. Husband. Heavy hitter. Hall-of-Famer?
Larry LaRue put a half-fluff, half-info article into the Tribune today. Paul Molitor observes that Boone is somewhat of a leader. Boone himself talks a little about his pa (not the best of managers) and his grandpa's playing careers. LaRue compares some of Boone's numbers to Ryne Sandberg's. Boone talks about other great two-baggers like Joe Morgan and Rogers Hornsby and mentions contemporaries like Jeff Kent and Rob Alomar. Bret also talks about the weight program that helped turn his career around, and he answers the obligatory steroid question.
In the Wayback Machine, here's the second post (dated 13 Nov) I ever made at Sports and B's that contained the word "Ibanez." After I make some disparaging remarks about Mike Cameron (hindsight, everyone), I said the following about the possibility of Raul Ibanez signing as a Mariner...
As for bringing back Ibanez for a second cup of coffee (small last time, large this time, or in the terms of Fourbucks coffee, "tall" and "venti"), this will go one of three horribly obvious ways. The first and best one is they bring back Ibanez and he's great (like Bret Boone the second time around). The second is they bring him back and he's just okay (can't think of one right now, I'll think of one later). The third is that they bring Ibanez back and he stinks it up (John Mabry). I think Raul's more likely to be one of the last two. Call me pessimistic, but that's just what I think. With the Mariners' luck with this kind of stuff, he'll probably have something end up playing mind games with him and he'll fall 50 points off his average off the last couple years, maybe drop off by 15 bombs a year, who knows. Just got a feeling, that's all.
Of course, this is well before I had looked at any hard numbers or basic stats about Ibanez or realized Kauffman Stadium was a blatant hitters' park. Also, in only my second post referring to Ibanez, I already had a bad feeling about it.
The Ibanez signing hit the wire on the night of the 18th. Here was my reaction. This is where I asked the question of why no Mariners could have gone to a Vlad Guerrero party and convinced him to Seattle.
Here's another past post where I make another somewhat disparaging Cameron remark, but the main premise was that I had kind of seen the writing on the wall on 15 Nov that Cameron was as good as gone. The funny thing about the post is that I said Cameron wouldn't get anywhere close to $7M/yr and he is getting nearly that much from the Mets.
I've got ESPN2 on right now and they're playing that World Series of Poker, and I swear to God, they've played a certain Las Vegas tourism commercial a million times...the one where the girls in the back seat of a limo are laughing incessantly at the cross-dressing guy toward the front. I swear they ran it like 4939409 times in one hour. Amazing.
Larry LaRue put a half-fluff, half-info article into the Tribune today. Paul Molitor observes that Boone is somewhat of a leader. Boone himself talks a little about his pa (not the best of managers) and his grandpa's playing careers. LaRue compares some of Boone's numbers to Ryne Sandberg's. Boone talks about other great two-baggers like Joe Morgan and Rogers Hornsby and mentions contemporaries like Jeff Kent and Rob Alomar. Bret also talks about the weight program that helped turn his career around, and he answers the obligatory steroid question.
In the Wayback Machine, here's the second post (dated 13 Nov) I ever made at Sports and B's that contained the word "Ibanez." After I make some disparaging remarks about Mike Cameron (hindsight, everyone), I said the following about the possibility of Raul Ibanez signing as a Mariner...
As for bringing back Ibanez for a second cup of coffee (small last time, large this time, or in the terms of Fourbucks coffee, "tall" and "venti"), this will go one of three horribly obvious ways. The first and best one is they bring back Ibanez and he's great (like Bret Boone the second time around). The second is they bring him back and he's just okay (can't think of one right now, I'll think of one later). The third is that they bring Ibanez back and he stinks it up (John Mabry). I think Raul's more likely to be one of the last two. Call me pessimistic, but that's just what I think. With the Mariners' luck with this kind of stuff, he'll probably have something end up playing mind games with him and he'll fall 50 points off his average off the last couple years, maybe drop off by 15 bombs a year, who knows. Just got a feeling, that's all.
Of course, this is well before I had looked at any hard numbers or basic stats about Ibanez or realized Kauffman Stadium was a blatant hitters' park. Also, in only my second post referring to Ibanez, I already had a bad feeling about it.
The Ibanez signing hit the wire on the night of the 18th. Here was my reaction. This is where I asked the question of why no Mariners could have gone to a Vlad Guerrero party and convinced him to Seattle.
Here's another past post where I make another somewhat disparaging Cameron remark, but the main premise was that I had kind of seen the writing on the wall on 15 Nov that Cameron was as good as gone. The funny thing about the post is that I said Cameron wouldn't get anywhere close to $7M/yr and he is getting nearly that much from the Mets.
I've got ESPN2 on right now and they're playing that World Series of Poker, and I swear to God, they've played a certain Las Vegas tourism commercial a million times...the one where the girls in the back seat of a limo are laughing incessantly at the cross-dressing guy toward the front. I swear they ran it like 4939409 times in one hour. Amazing.
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