He was almost like Kareem Abdul Jabbar: most people remember Kareem from his shaved-dome days of trotting slowly down the court behind the other Showtime Lakers, but the prime-of-his-career Kareem (probably his first 4 seasons, when he was a 30+ppg, 16+ rpg 4+ apg dominator) was just an ungodly great player, so different from the lesser guy who was still good that more people saw and remember.

1999-2000 Pedro Martinez was definitely the best pitcher I’ve ever seen, and I go back to the late 1960’s.

5 and 6 were both here in Tulsa, and have been fixed, so they’d no longer be on that list.

All in all, though, it’s really not THAT hard to drive here. 5 or 10 years ago, when the roads changed from day to day, maybe it was.

But the Big Dig is finished now! And only $300 billion dollars over budget!

1. I don’t have a massive retort to every criticism of Wedge — many of which are my own crticisms.

2. Of course I’m disappointed to see Joe write something that any uneducated casual fan might write. He’s one of my favorite writers, and in particular writes an incredible stream of sharp and insightful things about baseball.

3. I never wrote anything insulting to the readers of LGT — who are, without a doubt, among the very smartest, funniest and observant readers of any sports blog, anywhere, including this one. The percentage of LGT posters who could be called “unsophisticated” in any sense is astonishingly low, particularly considering it’s a sports site. (The “unwashed” percentage possibly is a little higher, but that was a bit of literary license.) What I actually wrote was that what Joe wrote was comparable to something that THE MOST IGNORANT person at LGT might have written, not what a typical LGT regular would write at all.

This is important to me — nobody is a bigger fan of the reader/contributors at LGT than I am, and I consider it a serious slander to say otherwise.

Of course, that whole comparison was hyperbole anyway. Joe has never shown ignorance in anything I’ve read and is a very good writer on his very worst day. The “shock” is that there could be any resemblance at all in a point Joe would make.

4. I wrote: “One [would] hope the lineup is a little bit more about, for example, getting the best hitters the most trips to the plate than it is about the fans’ feelings.” (I left out a word.) Gogiggs viciously responds that “getting the best hitters to the plate the most often would be a goal only to the degree that it served the primary goal of scoring the most runs.” I say “viciously responds” only because that’s the style. In terms of content, he’s not contradicting my point, he’s amplifying it. I agree with him, so I’m only correcting the idea that I woudn’t agree with that.

Lots of fans gripe about where Grady is batting. They’ve been doing it for years. More knowledgable fans tend to understand that the point is unimportant at best and very possibly dead wrong. It is a tiresome subject for someone who writes about the Indians every day to a sophisticated audience. Sometimes I lapse into a condescending tone, intending it as mock-condescending, the kind of thing that might work out fine in person, but the “mock” part gets lost in the plain text. Something I should work on.

Uh Steve, he had a .387 OBP when Grady batted 3rd. How is that not getting on base?

And your small 4 game sample size included a game when Greinke held the Indians to one hit and then a lefty was brought in. It also included a game where Jurrjens held the Indians to one hit into the 7th.

You also conviently left out his 3 walks in those games.

“How many of his home runs have actually come leading off an inning?”
The better question is, how many HR were solos (16 of 22)? Since the Indians have poor hitters abtting 8-9, they are rarely on base for Grady.

9 of 22.