Sports
Related: About this forumNew Cooperstown Baseball HoF inductees announced
Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens remain on the outside looking in for at least another year...
Jones and Thome were both elected in their first year of eligibility. This is the fourth time that the Baseball Writers' Association of America has elected four players in a year (1947, 1955, 2015).
The four will join veterans committee inductees Jack Morris and Alan Trammell in entering the Hall of Fame on July 29 in Cooperstown, New York.
http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/22202627/chipper-jones-vladimir-guerrero-jim-thome-trevor-hoffman-elected-baseball-hall-fame
Cattledog
(5,897 posts)Sandy Hook was a hoax.
http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2015/02/atlanta_braves_legend_chipper.html
Add former Atlanta Braves star Chipper Jones to the list of celebrities who said something dumb on Twitter.
Seems that Jones implied in a tweet Friday afternoon that the Sandy Hook shooting, in which 20 children and six staff members were killed at a Connecticut elementary school in 2012, never really happened.
Jones has deleted the tweet, but one fellow Twitter user preserved it with a screenshot:
Bleacher Creature
(11,235 posts)longship
(40,416 posts)Trammell was an awesome shortstop, Morris, a great pitcher.
ProfessorGAC
(64,413 posts)...on MLB Network were really good.
Thome and Guerrero were particularly good.
Bleacher Creature
(11,235 posts)There's been enough reporting for us to know the story by now, which is that he only started using PEDs after he became frustrated with all the attention McGwire and Sosa were getting in '98, despite him having a pretty remarkable season in his own right. But even if you discount or even ignore what he did from 1999 on, particularly the power surge and the 73 HR season, he's still one of the greatest players of all time and a first ballot lock.
You can probably make the same argument with Clemens, although he seemed to be in decline his last couple of seasons in Boston, before magically turning things around when he signed with Toronto.
ProfessorGAC
(64,413 posts). . .is that if bat speed went up with juice, we don't know how much bat speed would have slowed without juicing.
Then the career last fewer years, with some bad trail off years at the end, and then we look at the numbers and might so "close, but no cigar." The juicing clouds the whole issue, so to just assume that he would have done enough in those last 7 years is too big a leap for me.
Definitely so with Clemens, who was still relying on power pitching way past 30. If no juicing and his stuff weakens and velocity goes down, does he get to 300 games?
Until we actually see the career in totality, i don't think an assumption like that can be fairly made.
Bleacher Creature
(11,235 posts)Now that the game is supposedly clean, we're seeing more and more power pitchers (like Clemens) and five-tool players (like Bonds) fall off a cliff in their early 30s. As a Yankees fan, having to watch Jacoby Ellsbury hobble around at the cost of $21 million a year is a good reminder.
I'm just making a different point. I'm willing to assume that even if Bonds lost everything after 1998, he was already a Hall of Famer.
I pulled the following chart from this article. https://athlonsports.com/mlb/should-steroids-forever-keep-barry-bonds-and-roger-clemens-out-baseballs-hall-fame
I get that nobody can say for sure that Bonds was clean from 1986-98, but if that's an accurate statement, then Bonds' numbers during that period are still first ballot HOF stats. Three MVPs, 414 HRs, 445 SBs, and eight Gold Gloves are better numbers than players than Cal Ripken put up during his entire career.