2010 ALCS - Yanquis vs Rangers

Definitely rooting TX...what the hell, I think they can do it.

rooting Tex. expecting Evol Empire in 4.

Home team disadvantage?

Home teams are 4-11 in the playoffs so far.

yanks in 6 but really hope TX can pull this one off, would be great for baseball to avoid having another NYY-PHI world series and scaring off small-market fans everywhere

Shasta stop parroting Joe Sheehan

oswaltexpert w/ a black-and-white avatar of Shasta holding an Oswalt bobblehead

That's Will Carroll -- n/m

If the Yanks' starters pitch like they did against Minnesota, I don't see how Texax can win even if Cliff Lee puts the fear of '86 Mike Scott into NY. If the series gets to a sixth game, then I don't see how Texas can't pitch Lee on short rest (regardless of whether they're up or down 3-2).

yanks in 6 but really hope TX can pull this one off, would be great for baseball to avoid having another NYY-PHI world series and scaring off small-market fans everywhere

― ciderpress, Wednesday, October 13, 2010 9:30 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

poor ratings are great for baseball!

Think CJ Wilson is the most important player on the Rangers right now. If he blows his starts they doomed.

people taking cliff lee's infallibility for granted now yikes

Shasta stop parroting Joe Sheehan

― kind of shrill and very self-righteous (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, October 13, 2010 6:55 AM (3 hours ago)

LOLLLLL 80% of your posts on this board are some kind of BP staff/Neyer re-wank!

Honestly, while it's not the most groundbreaking stat that I've come to a conclusion about, I don't dare venture toward BP's twitterdom. *shudders*

"while it's not the most groundbreaking stat that I've come to a conclusion about"

What conclusion did you come to? Home field advantage isn't everything?

That it may in fact be a disadvantage!

baseball fan in ignoring sample size in the postseason shocka!

^^^OTM, fuck Joe Sheehan and all those other casual baseball pedestrian proles.^^^

hmm, thousands of historical baseball games bear out a ~5% advantage for the home team on average, but clearly this advantage has vanished in the postseason of 2010, based on the results of 15 games

i want to see a Josh Hamilton scale the wall into the crowd type defensive gem catch.. and then a beer gets dumped on him.

hahahaha

Hamilton must hear way too much sophisto patter from the cirrhotic Bleacher Things.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

so Coffee Joe is going w/ Hughes in Game 2 and saving Clutchy Pettitte to go vs Lee at home! Thoughts?

We should have a poll to see how many cheap ass homeruns get hit to RF in nu yankee stadium.

tim kurkjian suggested that it makes sense because hughes is better on the road.

rooting for Tejas but let's be real.

2006 ALDS New York Yankees vs. Detroit Tigers

haha *crosses fingers*

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Yankees, Rangers payroll disparity largest in playoff history

The difference between Alex Rodriguez (Yankees' highest-paid player) and Michael Young (Rangers' highest-paid) is Mark Teixeira.

The difference between the Yankees payroll and the Rangers payroll is the Cubs payroll. The Cubs have the third-highest payroll in baseball.

Cliff Lee, C.J. Wilson, Colby Lewis and Tommy Hunter (all of Texas' playoff starting rotation) combined make less than Mariano Rivera – the Yankees' closer.

The Rangers could triple every current player's salary, sign Mark Teixeira away from the Yankees, and still have a lower payroll.

baseball is fucked up

omg

I can't believe that Cristian Guzman and Jorge Cantu are making more money than Vladi Guerrero.

+ The Rangers signed A-Rod to the stupidest contract in history, that is until the Yanquis one-upped them.

I thought it was basically accepted now that the Rangers paid fair market value for ARod (putting aside the fact that they bid against themselves and jacked up his price). Their problem wasn't in giving too much money to one player, it was giving a lot of money to one guy and not spending enough on supporting players and spending money stupidly on the supporting players that they did sign. You can't give 25M to one player, cap the team payroll at 70M or whatever it was and expect to have enough talent to be competitive, and blow 10M/yr of your limited funds on Chan Ho Park.

Even aside from A-Rod, didn't Texas have one of the higher payrolls in baseball during the Palmeiro-Gonzalez-I-Rod days? Or when that oil guy ran the team in the early '90s; weren't they safely in the upper half then? I didn't realize they'd fallen so low.

i've got a better fun fact: Yankee payroll here for Berkman, Wood, and Kearns in 2010 is 64 times that of Rangers impact rookie Justin Smoak.

these garbage social media articles are link bait for retards.

MMMMKay, bitching:

http://espn.go.com/blog/dallas/texas-rangers/post/_/id/4856234/nyy-broadcaster-cliff-lees-cap-illegal

Mussina 2

if only he could pull a dibble/strasburg next year

am liking the low strikes

Y DON'T ANDRUS TRY HARD ALL THE TIME, RONNIE?

I think I will turn the volume down a notch

yesssss

looks like Josh is feelin bettah

holy shit

:)

!_!

that was quite an 0-2 waste pitch

BB Sabathia amirite

let's all have a drink everytime Smoltz says "reset" (3 and counting)

Fuckouer working on getting benched before NY

RESET!

xp: dude, Jason Schmidt.

clemenza, no one is saying that cliff lee is gonna have a 1.26 ERA over the next five or six regular seasons -- but he's clearly one of the five best pitchers in baseball

do you ppl realize lee is a lot closer to a glavine or a pettite than any power pitcher you might name?

he's not someone who is going to be harmed when he loses a few mph and he is quite solid in his mechanics and general health.

Jordan, what is your metric for pitcher evaluation?

Halladay, Lincecum, Felix, Santana...fair enough; I'd say he sits around fifth, with Sabathia and Wainwright and a few others. I agree with you; as I said, I can definitely see him being effective for 5-6 years.

cad, you made it sound like the choice was either give in to the "reality" of 7-year contracts or get fired.

well randy johnson's career era after age 32 was just a shade under 4.00 i think, and a shade higher than cliff lee's.

Lee's combined SEA+TEX '10 VORP ranks him (barely) in the top 20 in MLB.

santana is not going to be better than cliff lee going forward imo. maybe not lincecum, either. i think he's up there w/felix and halladay.

I guess this is the thread where people who have only been paying attn to baseball in the past 2 weeks post?

Kevin Brown is a good comp because he signed a 7-year deal for his age 34-40 seasons, and he was also the type of pitcher you'd expect to age fairly well (injury history aside). He was only good for four out of those seven years. Freakish exceptions like Randy Johnson and Roger Clemens aside, how many pitchers pitch at an elite level in their late 30's? Even Greg Maddux's last truly great season was in 1998 (or arguably 2000) when he was 32.

kevin brown is a terrible comp

Omar: in broad outline, I agree. But as someone else has pointed out, Lee and Johnson are just very different kinds of pitchers.

I just a quick look at (the slightly younger) Santana's stats. I'm not sure why you'd expect Lee to be better from here on out (unless Santana has arm trouble I'm not aware of...I don't do a good job keeping up with stuff like that).

maddux is kind of an interesting case but maybe partially his decline was due to having so much mileage on his arm at that point? though i would say his last great season was '02, maybe.

cliff lee led pitchers in WAR this year btw

the warning sign w/santana is his major decline in k/9IP. he's still really, really good, but he's not near his minnesota level.

cliff lee was second in the mlb in FIP

cliff lee led the mlb in whip

btw if you switch around some letters and subtract an "S" santana becomes tanana

just in case shasta was wondering

Santana's strikeouts have declined precipitously the past three years...good point.

i think it's pretty obv that santana, while still great, is on a slow decline, while cliff lee is on a plateau of being one of the best pitchers in baseball

Brown and Lee: good control, decent K rate, excellent K/BB, kicked it up to another level around age 30, reputation as a great postseason performer, feasted on the low corners of the plate, pitched for a bunch of teams before finally cashing in on a big FA deal, you're right Jordan, these guys have absolutely nothing in common

also: sketchy injury histories in their 20's

didnt santana just have pretty significant shoulder surgery?

yeah except kevin brown was roided out of his mind so a breakdown in his mid 30s was a long time coming

lee's agent to nyy: your money is still good here

"According to Cliff Lee's agent, Kristen Lee's poor experience at Yankee Stadium during the ALCS will have no affect on the left-hander's free agency."

also kevin brown was someone who relied on a lot of hard pitches, while cliff lee is not like that really at all

Santana is definitely fading from his video game/HGH era in Minnesota.

Back to Lee, I had no idea his WAR was so high, although I imagine that is due to the fact that he only pitched 28 games this season whereas most #1 pitchers are in the 33/34 game range, giving Lee the advantage of ample rest. Also noticed Lee compiled a losing record (4-6) while with Texas despite absurdly strong #s, something that might be of interest in the next few days.

as noted before brown also had that relatively violent and twisting delivery (he had back problems, right?) whereas lee's is smooth.

lee's agent to nyy: your money is still good here

"According to Cliff Lee's agent, Kristen Lee's poor experience at Yankee Stadium during the ALCS will have no affect on the left-hander's free agency."

And therefore no effect on other teams' counter offers.

"My wife will gladly be your spittoon and beer receptacle if the $$$ is right, let's make this work"

Lee's leading statistical comps at age 31 are Denny Neagle, Schoolboy Rowe and Chris Carpenter.

if there's one thing i'd say about lee it's that he gives up a lot of flyballs which probably won't help him whether he signs w/ the rangers or the yankees

xp: all three of those players spent the majority of age 32 on the DL.

Gotta head home...Lee's great. And, based on a pretty decent sample, he seems to thrive on postseason play. But I still see a guy who was 14-13 one year ago, with a good-not-great ERA and more hits than IP, and who was 12-9 this year, with a good-not-great ERA and good-not-great H/9. (SO/BB, fantastic.) Cliff Lee mania is at a peak right now. I think people are overdoing it. If I had 150 million to spend and you gave me a choice between Lee and Verlander, I'm pretty sure I'd take Verlander. (Which, I realize, is irrelevant to the question of whether or not you sign Lee.)

AJ Burnett's contract:

2009	32	New York Yankees	$16,500,000		
2010	33	New York Yankees	$16,500,000		
2011	34	New York Yankees	$16,500,000		
2012	35	New York Yankees	$16,500,000		
2013	36	New York Yankees	$16,500,000

(Just throwing that in there for a laugh.)

but realize... Zito makes more!

can you imagine modern-era Zito in the AL East?

that would be delightful

When Brown signed for 7/100, Neyer wrote a column along the lines of "nobody, including the Dodgers, really believe that Brown will be earning his contract when he's 40, this is just the cost of doing business if you want to sign a top FA pitcher". And I think that's still true. There's not really a sound performance-related reason to sign Lee for 8/160, but that's about what he'll get because that's the going rate for elite pitchers.

just to note, lee's career hits per 9IP rate is lower than barry zito, aj burnett, oliver perez, chan ho park, scott kazmir, randy wolf, and russ ortiz, which is to say if you give up hits while still remaining in total control of the strike zone you may in fact be all right in the long run.

sorry i meant to say "higher" than those dudes

Yeah but the Dodgers then traded Brown for future world series hero Jeff Weaver so that ended up well for them. And Robin Ventura? I think..

saying kevin brown had back problems is, uh, a healthy understatement iirc. but he did have one hell of a sinker.

so he remains a great comp for a lefty with great mechanics and a pretty unique combination of power and command who throws 4 or 5 pitches.

shasta otm

<3 to you brotha buzza

So how much has Lee's stock fallen with 7 ERs in a pitcher's park against a weak-hitting NL team? RIP CLee. Hope you get paid in fu$$ next year dawgglez.

The over/under was 5.5 btw... LOLLLLL