nerdbaseball.com » Tim Raines

My 2010 Hall of Fame Ballot

Nerdicus Finch — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:02:07 +0000

With the results of the 2010 Hall of Fame voting to be announced next week, I figured I’d try to get a discussion going here by posting my fictional ballot:

Yes: Bert Blyleven, Tim Raines, Roberto Alomar, Barry Larkin, Mark McGwire, Alan Trammell, Edgar Martinez

Close, but no: Fred McGriff, Dale Murphy, Andre Dawson, Lee Smith

Not as close as you’d think: Jack Morris, Don Mattingly, Dave Parker

Closer than you’d think: Ellis Burks, Andres Galarraga

“Funny” Cards, Volume 3: Hall of Fame Caliber Player Edition

Nerdicus Finch — Wed, 27 May 2009 02:40:14 +0000

Tim Raines should be in the Hall of Fame and, hopefully, he will be in the not-too-distant future. But making a case for Raines’s enshrinement is not the purpose of this post. Rather, this is the third entry in Nerd Baseball’s “funny” card series and it features Raines’s 1990 Topps card. Isn’t it strange how some baseball card companies used the player’s nickname, while others didn’t? I guess it was an editorial decision. Thankfully, Topps decided to use Raines’s nickname on its 1990 card, otherwise my ten-year-old self would not have been able to come up with yet another incredibly literal “funny” card.

A few notes on this “funny” card:

I’m surprised by how much the rocks actually look like rocks. Based on some of my other efforts, I’m going to have to assume that I had my sister make the rocks.
I obviously preferred Scotch tape to glue stick, although the glue stick might have been the better choice for presentation purposes.
I found this “funny” card in a box of old baseball cards at my parents’ summer home this past weekend. There were several others in the box as well, none of which are funny, and all of which I plan to feature on Nerd Baseball.

These Are Your Hall of Fame Voters…

Nerdicus Finch — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:04:08 +0000

I was watching “Yankees Hot Stove” on the YES Network today (I think it was a repeat from sometime this week) and the topic of the suprising continuing free agency of certain players came up. One of the panelists, George King, the Yankee beat writer from the New York Post a Yankee beat writer from one of the New York papers (I forget his name, but it wasn’t Jack Curry of the New York Times, who was also on the panel) spoke about Bobby Abreu. He expressed how shocked he was that a player of Abreu’s caliber could not get a job and finished his comments by saying (I am paraphrasing): “I’d rather have Abreu than Manny Ramirez.”

This statement was not qualified by any mention of the relative costs of the two players, so I am pretty sure that he meant, if he could choose either player, regardless of cost, that he would rather have Abreu on his team than Manny Ramirez. Both are horrible defenders, so the comparison should be based purely on the offensive value of the two players. And, as I Love Nerd York City noted in a recent post, Ramirez absolutely destroyed the ball in 2008, which was apparently also the season in which he gave up on his teammates and cemented his “bad teammate” reputation. Specifically, Ramirez posted a 1.031 OPS in 2008, as compared to Abreu’s respectable, but unspectacular, .842.

This is just another example of Ramirez’s “bad teammate” label making the mainstream sports media forget that they are talking about one of the greatest hitters of all time. And these are the people who vote for the Hall of Fame and MVP awards. No wonder they so often get it wrong (Jim Rice, Tim Raines, and the frightening number of votes for Jack Morris, to name a few).