Edgar

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Got to wondering what baseball people talk about when baseball isn't being played.  ... no, seriously ... if you have any suggestions on what % of this winter's non-baseball shtick ought to be, lemme know?  We do about 10 articles a week; maybe you'd throw a few potatoes in the pot on, hm.  1 per week on the Seahawks, 1 per week on Konspiracy Korners, 1 per week on random Sports Is Life stuff we've been noodling on... or not.

Bill James writes on baseball and on crime; he recently said that he dreams about baseball almost every night (!!) but has never had a dream about crime.  If I've ever had a dream about baseball in any way, shape or form I don't remember it.  Usually I dream about problems; does that tell you anything?  

Back to the first sentence ... five years ago "today" the Dec. 2013 Hey Bills were massively tilted towards salaries and stuff about baseball history, like when Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige HOF movements started.  There was one on Edgar, though, that I hadn't remembered:

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Fire Scott Servais

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BUT FIRST ...

Check the "All" domain.  Dr. D accidentally filed his "Fatal Flaw?" piece under the All subdomain, so if you visit only the Baseball domain, you missed it.  Once there's a comment to an article, I can't reassign fer yer convenience.  Sorry.  

The gist was, opposing scouts and execs apparently think Jerry Dipoto shoulda known his 1-4 starters were too rissssky, Gollum, too risssssky.  This sounds dubious to Dr. D but is a fascinating systems-approach suggestion.

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Konspiracy Korner: Standing for the National Anthem

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In 2016, "America Sucks"* turned out to be a loser politically.  Big league.  As a completely separate issue, it's a false statement.  Compare the USA to the Sudan, or to Indonesia, or to anyplace, and you've got a rather larger line in than line out.

America has problems, huge, huge problems.  Relative to most or all other countries, America isn't a place where we should be ashamed of our flag, in my opinion.

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The party in power is praying, literally praying, that the party out of power will double and triple down on the concept that America Sucks.  They believe that if the party out of power triples down on the idea that America was never great for anybody who wasn't a white guy -- while they talk about economic populism -- that they will govern for the next two generations.

Maybe the party in power is wrong about that.  But one thing is for sure: they hope for as many of these America Sucks firefights as they can possibly get.  That is why Trump double-underlined the issue this weekend.  That is exactly where he wants the debate.

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Last winter, MTV ran a little video "2017 Resolutions for White Guys."  Did you see it?  It had a bunch of college kids nicely saying things like, "Try to understand that America was never Great :: finger air quotes :: for anybody who wasn't a white guy.  They pulled their ad after two days, with a YouTube thumbs-up thumbs-down ratio of about 187 to 31,000.  Seriously, on YouTube.  The ratio was really something like that.  Don't underestimate the current against America-bashing.

Not that I'm jingoistic.  I am not.  This is supposed to be analysis, admittedly from a center-right camera angle.

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Was This the Fatal Flaw of the M's 2017 Season?

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Bob Dutton wrote up a "view from the outside" as rival scouts "assessed" the Mariners.  I guess we can get into dictionary definitions of the word "assess" :- ) and mine runs more towards "assess or estimate the quality of."  But what the scouts had to say was this:  Jerry Dipoto shoulda known these lace-china starters were going to all get hurt.

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"Without question," one scout said. "No team loses that many starting pitchers without paying a price. The same thing happened to the Mets and the Angels. Even Houston, when (Dallas) Keuchel and others went down, struggled a lot.

"When you don’t have reliable starting pitching, everything is so much harder. Just ask Buck (Showalter, the Baltimore manager)."

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I guess they're going with "Ohtani"

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Larry Stone of the Times has a piece on "the most intriguing baseball player in the world" and an exhortation to Jerry Dipoto to get creative, though the closest we get to a Dipoto quote is a mention that Dipoto was at an Ohtani game.

Incredibly, Ohtani is going to pass up a $200-300M deal in order to take the league minimum ... or close to it, for three years.  Come to think of it, it's just that third year he's sacrificing, right, in comparison to staying in Japan for two more years.  MLB teams can cut international players their free agency after three years, if I'm not mistaken.

Stone points out a few concrete things going in the M's favor:

1.  They don't play in the NL (Ohtani likes to DH three* days, take a day off, then pitch).

2.  The Houston Astros are out of international pool money.  (Would this affect Ohtani?  Do he or the Ham Fighters even know what currency is?)

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Double Tap

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My Northwest is pretty much Dr. D's go-to webpage for stimulating Mariners thoughts.  Scott Servais may find the below Sept. 21 Dipoto quotes a little too stimulating:

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“But it has been a frustrating season from spring training with the onset of injury, through April and May when we at one point had 11 pitchers on the DL, to here in September when the Twins seemed to leave the back door open and we decided we didn’t want to walk through.”

“I’ve learned that we are largely inconsistent in our approach to the game, and I think a re-focus on fundamental baseball is important for us,” he said. “It’s the small things you do during the course of a game that over 162 games start to add up to big things. We just haven’t done them very well this year.

“The real story of our season, it was our inability to stay consistent. Some of that we can push off on the fact that our starting pitching from day to day was largely unpredictable because of those injuries, but some of it was just the lack of attention to detail on all of our parts. We’re gonna have to deal with that through the offseason and figure out how to solve that problem headed into next year, but I’m very confident in the talent level that we have on the team, at least the foundation to build with.”

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Post-Mortem

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So this last Friday, the Mariners had things clickin on all cylinders, as much as the 2017 Mariners were going to see, and they headed into Houston to see where they stood.  For the twentieth time this year, the time came to "take one and give one" and they went into potato-bug mode.

Usually Scott Servais pleads "It's hard to get a winning streak together when your rotation is bubble gum and baling wire."  Thaaaaaaat's a rather broad statement -- let's see you prove that winning streaks are associated with starting pitchers more than they are with slugging percentages -- but let us suppose that Servais was right, and that it is true.

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Great Players Teaching Good Players

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Dan has known how to troll me since he first got here, and he hasn't lost his touch:

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Hey Doc, this is completely random, but apologies as I don't have a way to reach out more directly :P

I wanted to see if you had come across this Gary Kasparaov Masterclass (very high production online course) about chess. No idea how great of a specific learning experience it would be, but based on what I know about you, the cost might be worth it solely for the entertainment value. Give a watch to the trailer at least. Here's the link: https://www.masterclass.com/classes/garry-kasparov-teaches-chess

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Very familiar with the approach, with the format which is popular in chess, and with Kasparov himself at least in terms of his reputation.  Like Mo Dawg would be familar with Lee Trevino, let's say.

Anybody who put the necessary time into this course would become a much better player.  Kasparov uses "the Russian training system" which methodically focuses on weaknesesses, not strengths.  It's a life lession; we get good at 18-foot side shots and so we practice those the rest of our lives, not crossover dribbles or boxing out.  A golfer gets good at his 1-wood and so spends 75% of his time on full shots off the driving mat, rather than sand shots.  Nobody is more guilty of this than Dr. D.  :- )  Any system which knocks us out of "studying what we're good at" is a good thing.

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Seahawk Korner: the Zebras

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A PUZZLEMENT

It's not that this annoys me; it doesn't.  It baffles me.  No matter how skilled a league is at fixing a sports event, the hardcore fans of that sport are even more skilled at denying any funny business.  Shrug.  If that's what Italian soccer fans want, it's okay by me.  I just can't RELATE to it.  When I suspect a game could be fixed, I lose interest in it.

You'd think some day some renegade referee would come out and write a book and tell all.  Oh, wait a minute - that happened, in the NBA.  The league makes a few noises about how the ref is a dubious character, and the fans practically thank them for it.

Shrug.  It's mystifying.

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