I don't dislike Joey Gallo.  It started as a kind of an in joke with Mike Petriello, way back when Gallo was in the minor leagues.  Petriello always loved Joey Gallo, whereas I thought he would hit .190 in the majors, which he does, but I would say that I didn't really appreciate how much he could do with a .190 average.   Eventually I think I kept playing that line after the joke was worked out and it was just annoying Petriello, but anyway. . ..

 

There is an issue here that 1970s/1980s sabermetrics doesn't capture.  I developed the idea of Secondary Average to give appropriate credit to players like Joe Morgan, Gene Tenace, Mike Schmidt and others who had a low "base" of the batting average but a broad range of skills, and who thus were much better hitters than their batting average suggested.  Contemporary examples of that type would be like Juan Soto, Bryce Harper, Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Scwarber and Max Muncy.  Everybody knows that now, but the idea met a lot of resistance in the 1970s and 1980s.    A Matty Alou/Rod Carew type hitter is like a Pyramid shaped talent, with a .330 average at the base but very narrow skills on top of it.  The extreme types of that, like Alou and Carew, don't really exist anymore, but you still have players like that around, like Nicky Lopez and Jose Iglesias,   And then you have the George Brett/Stan Musial type of hitter, whose batting average is a fair representation of his overall offensive skills.  Contemporary examples of that group would be Kolten Wong, Trea Turner, Manuel Margot and Alex Bregman.  

 

So you could represent the Carew/Alou type hitter, of whom there used to be many, as a Pyramid Hitter, with a broad base and not much at the top. I suppose I should explain for younger readers that what Carew really did was just put the bat head on the ball and flip the ball over the infield.  He made it look simple, but he had no bat speed, but he handled a ball at the knees brilliantly by just getting the bat head out there quick enough to loft the ball onto the outfield grass.  The Brett/Bregman type hitter is like a square, and the Tenace/Morgan/Joey Gallo type of hitter is like an inverted pyramid.  

 

But there may be a problem with that type of hitter if you take that too far, or if you get too many of them.   The Houston Astros are the team that is ahead of the curve.  They don't want anything to do with that kind of player, the Joey Gallo type hitter.  But what they do so brilliantly is they balance the home run/walk skills with guys with the Rod Carew put-the-bat-head-on-the-ball type of skills.  They have a lot of "square" talents.  They're tough to beat.  

 Well, I would agree with the second part of that.  But I was just reading the Wade Boggs entry in Joe Posnanski's "The Baseball 100" yesterday, and it would appear to me that that was just Boggs; that was just the way he played the game.  I don't think it had much to do with Fenway Park.  

 I wouldn't say "unlock" quality of play analysis.   I think it could CONTRIBUTE to the discussion.  

 

But I would emphasize that if you are going to use it in this way, you need to be sure that the Franchise Strength Indicator ITSELF is refined and re-evaluated as a part of the process.  I have had this problem over the years, that sometimes people pick up my projects and use them for other purposes--which I am very glad that they do, and I am proud that they do--but they don't refine them over time, so that those parts of the system get stuck in time.   To give you a couple of for-instances (and I promise you there are quite a few more). . . but, for example, "Replacement Level" was my idea.  But when WAR was developed it used Replacement Level, but locked the concept in place at a fairly primitive level, which damages WAR.   A more sophisticated concept of replacement level would lead to a better WAR.   Or another example; similarity scores.  I am glad that the idea survived and is used and is useful for people, but they use a very primitive Similarity Score process.  It would be much more useful if it used a more nuanced version of Similarity Scores.  

 Thank you, sir.  I appreciate your research. 

 Can't say that I have thought about it that much.   Obviously negotiating with the umpire's union could be a significant problem.  I hope they do it the way I have been arguing for for the last 40 years, which is to have the umpire call the balls and strikes, but to have him get guidance from an electronic signal that will tell him whether the ball was in or out.  He can ignore the electronic signal if he wants to, but realistically, he's not going to want to very often.  

 I would think that would be a dangerous practice, to try to change what your doing for the park.  Hitting is really hard if you DON'T do stuff like that.  

 

I would guess that there are some veteran hitters who might be able to adapt their swing to the park, and I would guess that there are some hitters who, for example. . . a left-handed hitter might swat at an outside pitch in Fenway when he would let it go by in another park.  I don't think it is anything that you can do systematically or do as a team policy.  

 Thanks. 

 OK. 

 I don't know.  I didn't have anything to do with the cover art.  I just know that the cover designer found some guy who had a lot of baseball memorabilia and staged an array of it.  

 Thanks. 

 Not sure what the question was, but. . . Mookie is about as good a player as you are likely to see in one lifetime.  

 It's just your perception, yes.  Mookie Betts throws as well as Roberto Clemente.  Hunter Renfro has an absolutely fantastic arm.  Joey Gallo, Aaron Judge, Bryce Haper, Ronald Acuna. . .these guys have tremendous arms.  Just my perception, perhaps.  

 The chance they would have stayed in KC was 100%.  I don't see any relevance here to the Angels side story or speculation about the the Braves. 

 

There were other groups and other individuals who could have bought the A's after Arnold Johnson went to his grave.  Johnson's estate, naturally but not inevitably, was really just interested in getting as much money as they could.   Finley made the highest offer. 

 

 It was Charles Finley's personal choice to get out of Kansas City.  He was determined to do that, and he was talking about moving the team SOMEWHERE, anywhere, as soon as his initial efforts to be a Bill Veeck-type showman failed. In this, he was vigorously opposed by the American League, which repeatedly told him that he could not move the franchise.  At one point the American League voted to take the franchise away from him over this issue, but there was a court fight over that, and the American League lost.  

 

 

Finley was determined to move the team.  He disliked KC, and blamed KC city leaders and KC fans for failing to see his genius.  He never made any effort to work with the Kansas City community.  It's 100% his doing that the A's failed in KC, and Finley himself said later in lilfe that moving the team out of Kansas City was a huge mistake.  

 Right.  Steinbrenner always believed that short-season success should be a controllable event.  When he actually ENJOYED short-season success in his early years, he thought that that should be  a repeatable thing.  

 

To Steinbrenner--like Charley Finley--the success of his team was his image in the mirror.  If the team didn't win, he just couldn't stand it.  It's the same thing. . . and I don't mean this to be hateful, because there are positive things about personalities of this nature. . . .but Steinbrenner was a Trump-like personality.   He fired Howser for the exact same reasons that Trump could not accept defeat in the 2020 election.  That kind of personality often just cannot handle setbacks in a mature way.  In history, those kind of personalities have started many wars for the same reason.  

 Yes, such a player could hit 100 or more home runs if not pitched around.  

 

i believe that baseball would benefit from a rule that allows a manager to decline a walk on behalf of a player--any player, any time.   The manager can simply say  "No, I don't want the walk.  Pitch to him."   The count reverts to 0-0.  If you walk him again, a second time, it becomes a different type of event, either an "advance walk" if there is are runners on base (that is, the batter walks and all runners advance) or a two-base walk if there are no runners on (that is, the batter goes to second base.)  

 

The strategy of pitching/not pitching to a hitter becomes more interesting if the offensive team has a response available to them, rahter than being forced to comply with the pitching team's strategic choice.  

 

THe intention of the walk rule, obviously, was to allow the batting team to declare victory if the pitcher failed to make hittable pitches.   The intent of the rule is to force the pitcher to pitch to the batter.   If you don't throw him three hittable pitches, he wins; he gets to take his base. 

 

But this rule fails if the pitcher would CHOOSE the walk, rather than pitching to the hitter.  Thus, the offensive manager needs to be able to respond to the defensive manager's choice.