Originally posted by [email protected]
ElHalo,
But he was MORE than proficient at hitting and pitching, and "hitting a pitching are 95% of baseball.
Is it nice if somebody can do those things? Sure. Do you care if they can't do them if they hit .380 with fifty homers and 140 RBI? No, not a lick."
(Bill - That 95% figure is just so wrong. The 1930 Phillies were a bruising offensive team and came in last, due to lousy pitching & defense.
Get over your obsession with "hitting is 95% baseball", ElHalo. It's been disproved for over 140 yrs. of BB history. Both Bonds & A-Rod have been disproving your pet theory for 5 yrs. now. Superstars without the supporting cast don't win pennants.
Bill Burgess
ElHalo,
But he was MORE than proficient at hitting and pitching, and "hitting a pitching are 95% of baseball.
Is it nice if somebody can do those things? Sure. Do you care if they can't do them if they hit .380 with fifty homers and 140 RBI? No, not a lick."
(Bill - That 95% figure is just so wrong. The 1930 Phillies were a bruising offensive team and came in last, due to lousy pitching & defense.
Get over your obsession with "hitting is 95% baseball", ElHalo. It's been disproved for over 140 yrs. of BB history. Both Bonds & A-Rod have been disproving your pet theory for 5 yrs. now. Superstars without the supporting cast don't win pennants.
Bill Burgess
But pitchers really are responsible, in my opinion, for about 90% of how many runs a team gives up. If you think defense is really all that important, then let's see you put Walter Johnson up in front of a defense for 80 games, and then put, oh, I don't know, Jason Jennings up in front of that same defense for 80 games. If defense is so important, shouldn't they both give up about the same number of runs? But of course they won't. Because pitching is what determines how many runs a team gives up, for the most part. Not how rangy their right fielder is. That's certainly a part of it, but not a a huge part.
Those 1930 Phillies (while not really a bruising offensive team... they finished 4th in the NL in runs) did so poorly because they had awful pitchers on their team... a team ERA of 7.69. And would you believe this? 14 different pitchers started a game for those 1930 Phillies.... and exactly one of them, Grover Cleveland Alexander, had a career ERA less than league average. And his ERA that year was 9.14! I don't care if you've got Tris Speaker, Richie Ashburn, and Roger Maris in the outfield, with Ozzie Smith, Brooks Robinson, Bill Mazeroski, and Don Mattingly in the infield, and Johnny Bench at the plate... with pitchers like that, you're not going to win a lot of ballgames.
And can one guy win a pennant by himself? Of course not, and I never meant to imply that they can. I'm just saying that if Babe Ruth was hurting his team so much by not being able to, uh, bunt, then they wouldn't be winning so many games, would they? Because five times a game, when they really needed Babe to lay down a drag bunt, they just wouldn't be getting what they need.
Is hitting 90% of baseball? Of course not. But it's certainly 90% of offense. And is pitching 90% of baseball? No, but it's certainly 90% of defense. If you've got a team full of Walter Johnsons pitching, and a team full of Ted Williams's hitting, do you really think you're going to lose that many ballgames? If fielding and baserunning were really what won ballgames, then guys like Ray Ordonez and Tony Womack would be having their doors knocked down by major league GM's, instead of bouncing around the minors.
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