You May Not Believe This...
by Steve Holt on Aug 21, 2008 11:37 AM EDT
36 comments
So, I live in the Valley of the Sun where the D-Backs play, and... they LOVE Adam Dunn here. And, while I don't think that the radio personalities here are great by any stretch of the imagination, there was something astonishing (to me anyway) that happened this morning.
Derek Hall, the President of the Diamonbacks was on the morning show on 620 AM KTAR -- Doug and Wolf, and they spent several minutes discussing Dunn's performance since he's been a D-Back. Do you know what didn't come up? His strikeouts, whether he's a winner, nor his base-clogging ways. Do you know what they did discuss? His OBP (over .500), his slugging pct (over .600), and the fact that he's been a leader! Derek Hall said that he stayed late after the game yesterday taking batting practice, and other Diamonback players followed suit. He remarked that Dunn has really been a positive influence in the clubhouse particularly on the young players on the squad (which the D-backs have plenty).
If you want to hear the interview, it will be available later today here...
I realize that the stats that they are quoting here are small sample sizes, but it's striking to me that they seem to get what's important and what Dunn brings to the table. It's also remarkable to me that I haven't heard once that fact that he strikes out alot and is just a baseclogging loafer who can't play defense and has never been a part of a winner.
For what it's worth, as young and transient a town Phoenix is with only a few years of being a baseball town under it's belt... they sure seem to dwarf Cincinnati in their savvy and appreciation of a player like Dunn. Also, with Derek Hall, local radio personalities, and other D-backs management and players fully behind him, Dunn must feel that he's in a utopian work environment compared to Cincy. I wouldn't be shocked if he really has his best stretch of baseball here through the end of the season and into the playoffs. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he's working for a 9-figure contract.
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I don't disagree with what you wrote
But you do have to keep in mind that they are still in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. And Dunn has hit HRs in back to back games for them, so I’m sure they’re pretty happy right now. All fans are better at focusing on the positive when their team is winning. But when they are losing – a lot – it gets harder to do that.
The season doesn't start until the Cincinnati Reds take the field! Reclaim The Opener!!
by TheC on Aug 21, 2008 12:17 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs
Agreed.
And, like I mentioned, it is a small sample size. I just think that they know and appreciate what they get with Adam Dunn — OBP, SLG, and by extension OPS. And, even when he comes back to earth (to his 2008 Redleg production) then I don’t anticipate the same complaints that many in Cincy had/have — Ks, baseclogging, and apathy.
But, I certainly concede your honeymoon argument.
Illusions Michael. Tricks are what whores do for money...and candy.
by Steve Holt on Aug 21, 2008 12:43 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
:-(
I miss Adam Dunn.
I think we overmeet as a society.
by Gray on Aug 21, 2008 12:28 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs
I'm happy for him
I hope he can keep producing for the Dbacks. I don’t expect an 1100 OPS, but I hope he gets to feel what it’s like to take a team into the playoffs. I wish him luck and will be rooting for both he and Griffey to get there. But not David Ross because fuck the Red Sox, they’ve had enough fun lately.
I’m more a hello man and a welcome man than a good-bye man. And to me Adam Dunn was more a person than a player.
by Slyde on Aug 21, 2008 12:43 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
i'll be rooting for dunn, ross, and casey
by chandrathan on Aug 21, 2008 12:45 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
Its kind of like we all have new favorite teams to root for
These trades were a re-birth for Reds’ fans. We can now follow the White Sox pennant chase and the DiamondBacks pennant chase. I agree though – I can’t bring myself to root for the RedSox. Maybe we can trade Weathers to the Rays.
The season doesn't start until the Cincinnati Reds take the field! Reclaim The Opener!!
by TheC on Aug 21, 2008 12:51 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
No, I want to root for the Rays
plus Weathers already has a ring.
I’m more a hello man and a welcome man than a good-bye man. And to me Adam Dunn was more a person than a player.
by Slyde on Aug 21, 2008 1:07 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
"Steve Holt!" [pumps fists into air]
just knowing that Steve Holt is posting on RR has made my day, hope you make it into the movie.
by jacob brumfield on Aug 21, 2008 3:38 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs
yes
Kentuck Arts Festival: October 18th.
Details at Sinful Savage Tigers
by Man Mountain on Aug 21, 2008 11:19 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
There's not a lot of logic to it.
It’s kind of like on a boat with “Women and children first.” I mean, why should they…
Illusions Michael. Tricks are what whores do for money...and candy.
by Steve Holt on Aug 22, 2008 1:11 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
3 decades
I realized a sad truth the other day.
From about 1975 till 1983, my favorite player was Johnny Bench. A Red, through and through.
83-86 was, well, the Paul Householder years. Let’s not talk about it.
86-2004 my favorite player was Barry Larkin. A Red, through and through.
Heir apparent to My Favorite Playerdom was Adam Dunn when he came up. He held the title, from Larkin’s retirement until August 11, 2008.
For the first time in 3 decades, my favorite player was not a Red. That’s like, 2 entire Crofler lifetimes.
I’m still not sure what to do about that.
by bbjones on Aug 22, 2008 11:45 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
One reason for this I think...
Is that Arizona never had anyone like Pete Rose (overachieving hustle guy who got the most out of athletic gifts that were perceived to be fairly modest and put together a hall-of fame-worthy career playing baseball the “right” way).
I am weighing the pros and cons of having a figure like that on the team.
Pros: ’75 and ’76 would not have been possible without him, and he was pretty darned fun to watch.
Cons: Bet on baseball and lied about it. Also not much of a role model otherwise. Gave rise ot a generation of casual fans who now populate the sports talk airwaves, saying that they’d rather have Ryan Freel/Jeff Keppinger/Norris Hopper than Adam Dunn/Edwin Encarnacion, etc…
Hey Dusty...Are you sure you're OK? You might need an MRI.
by Paul Householder on Aug 22, 2008 12:34 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs
Craig Counsell.
"Being a human cannonball is not just a job, Pee Wee. It's a career."
by Fat Vegas Alan on Aug 22, 2008 11:54 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
Plenty scrappy...
But also plenty mediocre. With Rose you had the perfect storm of people thinking he had not as much talent (not really true) and still had a HOF-caliber career just by hustling.
The Reds will be saddled with the comparison (and Reds fans will constantly ask one- or two-dimensional players who are nonetheless very good or great to be like Pete) until the generation that remembers the Pete Rose era dies off.
Hey Dusty...Are you sure you're OK? You might need an MRI.
by Paul Householder on Aug 22, 2008 1:07 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
Schilling was a pretty talented pitcher with Arizona.
He played baseball the right way, and he didn’t look like much of an athlete, but he also had a 96-97 mph fastball and pinpoint control.
Not really my picture of a scrappy overachiever having a HOF-caliber career. He had a lot of talent, and got the most out of it.
Hey Dusty...Are you sure you're OK? You might need an MRI.
by Paul Householder on Aug 22, 2008 1:04 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
Not to get off on a rant / tangent here
But that is the one thing about the Pete Rose mythos (and yes, it has risen to that level) that drives me absolutely crazy.
If you buy into the fallacy that Pete was this barely talented hack and only through the Herculean task of raising himself up by his own bootstraps, he achieved this career of Hall of Fame proportions, then every ballplayer that comes down the road will fall short. It seems that lots of people have done this and I will admit that I used to look at ballplayers this way before I really thought much about it.
The fact of the matter is that, while Pete might not have had the same toolset as someone like Joe DiMaggio, he did have the skillset of Pete Rose…one of the fifty or so best hitters to ever wear a baseball uniform. Was Pete driven to work hard? No doubt. But I think that most baseball players, particularly today, put in hours of hard work that fans never see, which is why many fans think they can play baseball. It looks simple enough, right?
And it is a great image…scrappy (read: “no-talent”) kid from the otherside of the tracks makes good by playing like his hair is on fire from the first intrasquad pitch of spring training to the last out of the World Series. But it simply isn’t true. Pete Rose was one of the greatest hitters to ever play the game. He just simply chose to express his competitiveness in a different way…a way, I might add, that alienated just as many teammates as it did opponents. He did not overachieve his talent level.
Think of it this way — what if someone applied the Pete Rose mythos to someone like Manny Ramirez? Kinda puts him in a whole nother light, doesn’t it?
I love Pete Rose, but (my sig aside) I don’t buy into the cult of personality anymore.
"I'd walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball" - Pete Rose
by Officer Dibble on Aug 22, 2008 9:32 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
I thought his teammates loved him?
I’ve never heard that one.
Kentuck Arts Festival: October 18th.
Details at Sinful Savage Tigers
by Man Mountain on Aug 22, 2008 11:05 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
If his teammates loved him
Then please to explain the icicicles between him and Bench or him and Morgan…and why more of them haven’t been standing up for him in the whole HoF debacle?
Schmidt certainly does, I’ll grant you…and the fact is that as Mad said, he actually hung out with the black and Latino players, but there seem to have been a lot of others who didn’t care for him.
"I'd walk through hell in a gasoline suit to play baseball" - Pete Rose
by Officer Dibble on Aug 22, 2008 11:58 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
Pete got along with Bench early on.
Things went sour when they went into business together (I think it twas a car dealership deal) and the business failed.Bench blamed Pete the biz failure and that drove a wedge between them. Bench also thought of himself as a better player and wanted to be the BMOC of the BRM. However Tony Perez was the defacto leader and Pete and Tony.were close friends.
Although I obviously wasn’t in the clubhouse there was a lot of tongue clicking and eye rolling in Cincinnati because Pete did hang with the black players. My memory of Pete and Joe is that they were pretty tight.Things went south between those two when Rose denied gambling when it was apparent to everyone that he was lying.
I was an enormous Perez and Morgan fan as well as Rose. There was a great energy between those three on field at least while Bench was seemingly the odd man out.
You can tell your uncle stuff that you could not tell your dad. That is kind of the role of an uncle. I feel very much like a father sometimes but sometimes I feel like a teammate.
Dusty Baker
by Madville on Aug 22, 2008 12:13 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
Right.
And by thinking that every barely-talented hack can be a HOF-er by just hustling and working hard, the team you get is made up of exactly that — barely talented hacks.
You also run out of town anyone who happens not to look like he is hustling all the time (even though he might hit 40 home runs every single full season he is with the team).
Hey Dusty...Are you sure you're OK? You might need an MRI.
by Paul Householder on Aug 22, 2008 1:14 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
From Olney's blog
Most home runs vs. the group of good pitchers:
PLAYER BA AB H 2B 3B HR RBI BB S0
Adam Dunn .221 104 23 2 0 11 18 30 30
Vladimir Guerrero .272 114 31 4 1 10 21 12 18
Kevin Youkilis .284 141 40 4 2 9 26 17 32
Manny Ramirez .271 133 36 7 0 9 28 17 30
Carlos Quentin .280 100 28 4 0 9 17 11 16
by kennythered on Aug 22, 2008 10:35 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs
Pete had an extremely high baseball IQ
My wife and I went to Riverfront all the time in 1975 and 76. We would scalp tickets and try to get as close to 3b as possible. Pete made the game more exciting and interesting because of how he would position himself for different batters and even for different pitches. He was a walking encyclopedia of every batter’s strengths and weaknesses in the league. He worked at getting into position and was a decent glove man a had an accurate and strong enough arm. He was focused every pitch….
At the bat he was a machine. He was an extremely talented hitter. Great bat speed, he understood how to hit the ball where it was pitched. He wasn’t all that slow either.
The myth of Rose as an ‘everyman’ rising above his limitations to achieve greatness stemmed from his family living in Price Hill. His dad was a fine athlete, his brother was pretty good and his son was good enough to have a decent minor league career.
There was nothing noble or heroic about Pete. But he hung out with the black players and was comfortable with the latin players too. that was unusual back in the day. You never saw Johnny Bench hanging with Conception or Danny Driessen.
Pete was a smart and talented player who stayed within his limits and achieved great things. His drive and intensity are part and parcel of his talent.
Too bad he began to believe his own myth, married such an ugly woman and had no sense of ethical boundaries.
You can tell your uncle stuff that you could not tell your dad. That is kind of the role of an uncle. I feel very much like a father sometimes but sometimes I feel like a teammate.
Dusty Baker
by Madville on Aug 22, 2008 10:46 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs
dude, you need to learn to reply
or I’m gonna have to put you on probation.
I’m more a hello man and a welcome man than a good-bye man. And to me Adam Dunn was more a person than a player.
by Slyde on Aug 22, 2008 10:54 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
No not probabtion...next it will be house arrest
I can do better…I know I can, but its hard to hone in on the reply with my nose (straight jackets make typing difficult)
You can tell your uncle stuff that you could not tell your dad. That is kind of the role of an uncle. I feel very much like a father sometimes but sometimes I feel like a teammate.
Dusty Baker
by Madville on Aug 22, 2008 12:00 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
I do believe this
Only Philly and Cincy fans are idiotic enough to not like a player like Dunn
Norris Hopper's #1 fan!!!
by Zach K on Aug 22, 2008 11:17 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs
The reason Reds fans don't like done is because they are sheep.....
Marty and the rags started to bad mouth his lack of hustle and everyone that called in to Lance started to agree. This town rarely has a original thought about anything. Especially when the statistics don’t support their bias. They just say that he does not play the game the right way…..meaning like Pete.
I'm the only winner on this team. The rest of 'em, they're losers. Either by choice, or by birth.
by Willie Mays Hayes on Aug 22, 2008 3:54 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
More like lemmings
You can tell your uncle stuff that you could not tell your dad. That is kind of the role of an uncle. I feel very much like a father sometimes but sometimes I feel like a teammate.
Dusty Baker
by Madville on Aug 23, 2008 12:21 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
Add New York Yankees fans and Mets fans to that list.
by Thebukkakebandit on Aug 23, 2008 1:14 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs
Last night...
Dunn had his first 0-for-4 night with 3 Ks and no walks in a 5-4 Diamondbacks loss. Of course, his line with with Arizona is still .258/.489/.516…
He now has 10 strikeouts, 8 hits (including 2 doubles and 2 HRs), and 14 walks in 45 PAs. With us he had 120 strikeouts, 87 hits (14 doubles and 32 HRs), and 80 walks in 464 PAs. So he’s basically right on pace for what he did with us, except for drawing almost twice as many walks. (Note that drawing more walks while holding hits constant for the same number of PAs raises his batting average by reducing the number of ABs.)
I think we overmeet as a society.
by Gray on Aug 23, 2008 3:44 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs
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