Does Ichiro's 3,000 Count?

[Jason Moyer]

Things in this thread that have me scratching my head:

a.) OPS+ being used as an indicator of hall of fame worthiness when it isn't even a good indicator of a player's offensive abilities
b.) the implication that a 12 team league would have better pitching than a 30-team league, which makes me think that there's some rural 5 team little league somewhere with the best pitching in the world

[Syd Thrift]

Where did you see the 12 team league comment? Also, what do the relative sizes of the leagues have to do with anything? A theoretical 16 team MLB operating in 2008 would undoubtedly have an overall higher level of talent and of pitching than the real-life current MLB. The argument (at least the good argument) against the Japanese League itself has to do with the number of people who live in Japan, not the number of teams in its baseball league (and of course, sheer population isn't the end-all either; that needs to be mitigated somewhat by the fact that Japan doesn't have other major sports that draw potential athletes out of its pool of baseball players... but it's still a better argument than "OMG MLB HAS MOAR TEAMS THEREFORE TEHY R GUD!!!").

[Jason Moyer]

Post 22.

[Prodigal Son]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Having a better player in front of you is still lack of skill. When an NBA team cuts a guy, they don't get to renege on his salary because they have a better player starting in front of him (the parallel is because the NBA makes teams pay their players' salaries if they are cut due to lack of ability).

In your analogy, that would be like putting Ben Wallace in the NBA "D" league because you have Tim Duncan. It would be odd to say it's because Ben Wallace's lack of skill that he's in the D-league.

[Syd Thrift]

You'd put Ben Wallace in the D-league just because you had Tim Duncan above him? You wouldn't, um, try him at the 4 (or move Duncan to the 4 for a few years a la what the Spurs did with him and the Admiral)?

[Prodigal Son]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

You'd put Ben Wallace in the D-league just because you had Tim Duncan above him? You wouldn't, um, try him at the 4 (or move Duncan to the 4 for a few years a la what the Spurs did with him and the Admiral)?

The questions you asked are kind of the idea. It would be ridiculous to put Ben Wallace in the D league, so you'd be asking if you could get him on the court somehow, otherwise you'd want to trade someone if you had the five best post men in the game and couldn't get them all on the court, or else they'd be demanding trades. Well, Howard didn't really have that recourse because of the MLB salary structure, so the Phillies didn't care about getting him on the field or trading him or Thome. They just cared about not starting his clock until Thome was gone. On a talent level, having Howard in AAA would be like having Wallace in the D-league. MLB's salary structure makes it possible, but that doesn't make it less ridiculous. Howard was more than good enough to be starting in MLB is the point, and he was putting up big numbers at a high level of baseball. So those numbers should count if Ichiro's count.