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You’re a terrible pitcher, Carlos
DMZ · July 29, 2008 at 5:57 pm · Filed Under Mariners
…
Dave adds sarcastic comment about Silva’s new grip giving him more sink here.
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Comments
37 Responses to “You’re a terrible pitcher, Carlos”
Mousse on
July 29th, 2008 6:00 pm
Can’t wait for the back strain excuse again.
gwangung on
July 29th, 2008 6:01 pm
And we paid just $48 million for him.
cody on
July 29th, 2008 6:02 pm
Agreed.
cdowley on
July 29th, 2008 6:02 pm
Guh… what? After that first inning, I thought he might have an OK night.
Damn you and your pre-game confidence curse, Bill Kreuger!
msb on
July 29th, 2008 6:05 pm
Blowers was much less confident.
bermanator on
July 29th, 2008 6:06 pm
That’s why Washburn has to stick around. Maybe he can teach Silva a new pitch. His clubhouse leadership plus Silva’s natural guile = Success!
Envirohawk on
July 29th, 2008 6:07 pm
Derek, please – terrible pitchers everywhere will take offense with a comparison to Carlos Silva.
NoStars on
July 29th, 2008 6:11 pm
My back hurts just watching this.
Memoraballs on
July 29th, 2008 6:16 pm
Sure glad I bought the Washburn and Silva “Marineros” jerseys on sale. Maybe I can return them for store credit and get that big Richie Sexson bobblehead.
Maybe we can get the Yankees to take him as a throw-in in the Washburn trade..
(/sarcasm) (Click to Edit seems to mean that I can’t use greater than and less than for my sarcasm end tag. Not the end of the world, but perhaps of interest to the proprieters, to whom a cap is hereby tipped)
enazario on
July 29th, 2008 6:42 pm
Maybe he can teach Silva a new pitch. His clubhouse leadership plus Silva’s natural guile = Success!
Methinks you are confusing guile with gut?
Emerald on
July 29th, 2008 6:46 pm
gwangung said:
And we paid just $48 million for him.
What bothers me is not the $48 million we owe him, but the next ~3.40 years we must call him ours.
MG8222 on
July 29th, 2008 6:50 pm
With $48 million dollars, you’d think he could afford a personal trainer
ChrisB on
July 29th, 2008 6:55 pm
I remember the Simpsons, when the Critic came on the show – interviewing Rainer Wolfcastle:
C: How do you sleep at night?
R: On top of a pile of money….
argh on
July 29th, 2008 7:35 pm
Gotta hand it to the Player’s Association — they’ve got their guys waddling into multi-million dollar contracts and apparently there’s little management can do about it. Or is genteel obesity one of those ‘old baseball’ things that is sacrosanct, sort of like chewing tobacco or Ruthian alcoholic excess?
skipj on
July 29th, 2008 7:54 pm
Gotta hand it to you argh. That was funny.
I blew some chaw through my nose and spilled most of my cocktail.
Karen on
July 29th, 2008 8:20 pm
Save the multiuseful Washburn until his contract is up — hey, he can run, and he can serve as the DH — who needs Vidro when you have Washburn?
And the M’s DON’T need Silva for “the next ~3.40 years we must call him ours.” If there’s any guy on a team’s roster that seriously needs to be invited to stay home and collect his salary as far away from the team as possible, Silva’s that guy. Him and Batista.
edgar for mayor on
July 29th, 2008 8:39 pm
He obviously was getting squeezed out there and pitched better than his numbers would indicate.
/sarcasm
RallyFried on
July 29th, 2008 9:05 pm
With $48 million dollars, you’d think he could afford a personal trainer
Or afford a lot of food!
M’s now 7-15 when Silva takes the hill.
hoser on
July 29th, 2008 9:09 pm
15 – Did I miss something? I don’t think the Player’s Association signed a multi-year contract with Carlos Silva @ $12M/yr. Complain about the contract all you want, but please leave the innocent bystanders alone. We all know who signed that contract.
rufusgufus on
July 29th, 2008 9:11 pm
I am completely OK with the Yankees taking Silva’s contract off our hands with nary a prospect in return.
Complain about the contract all you want, but please leave the innocent bystanders alone. We all know who signed that contract.
Seriously? Innocent bystanders? While it is true that the M’s signed that contract it is also true that the players union is hurting baseball through coercive tactics that force teams to offer contracts they wouldn’t otherwise in a free market. In real life if you suck, you get fired. Baseball is not a true free market due in large part to the union and it is hurting the game. Teams are handcuffed into carrying Silva-like contracts when the player isn’t earning enough to warrant minimum wage.
With the Mariners, especially, need we even have to explain how this is hurting baseball? Imagine if Sexson could have been released without pay for not living up to some predetermined performance level. Same for Washburn, Silva and Batista. The M’s would be in a far different situation if they were able to drop a player who stunk. I don’t know, like any other American company usually can.
While it is true that the M’s signed that contract it is also true that the players union is hurting baseball through coercive tactics that force teams to offer contracts they wouldn’t otherwise in a free market.
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Teams don’t have to sign guaranteed contracts.
Did you know that?
Fehr doesn’t put a gun to someone’s head and say “sign this outrageous contract”.
The M’s didn’t have to give those contracts out. They did it out of their own free will.
This is no different than companies that offer their executives huge guaranteed deals and then fire them. It’s a sunk cost.
eponymous coward on
July 29th, 2008 10:47 pm
23-
Look, nobody makes Team X sign Player Y to a deal- and if you think that an NFL-style world of non-guaranteed contracts would make things better, I have Ryan Leaf collecting millions of dollars and being generally useless to show to you, as well as Shaun Alexander counting for millions against this year’s salary cap while not doing a damned thing for the Seahawks on the field.
And no, the Mariners COULD tell Silva and Batista to go away tomorrow. They just did it to Richie Sexson.
joser on
July 29th, 2008 11:04 pm
You know, if you looked at “any other American company” with a minimum $100 million payroll, you’d find most of them have at least 25 people who, even if fired, would continue to collect checks. These are, as Derek notes, typically known as “executives” and their contracts are often described as “golden parachutes.”
hoser on
July 29th, 2008 11:37 pm
coffeemonkey,
The Oakland As operate under the same players association rules as the Mariners. They don’t sign Carlos Silva to 4 year/$48M contracts. They have a significantly lower payroll and consistently outperform the team I am a fan of.
I could probably substitute a number of other teams including the Minnesota Twins into the above paragraph.
The rules all teams follow allow players to be undercompensated for about 6 years after they make it to the Major Leagues. The team I root for got rid of five such cheap assets to get two years of one fairly well compensated and fragile player to go with Carlos Silva. What does this have to do with the Players Association?
When I looked at your blog I saw an interesting discussion about ad hominem. Aside from the technicality that the player’s union is not a person, how are your two posts here different from the same sort of ad hominem attacks that you decry in your blog?
Phightin Phils on
July 29th, 2008 11:57 pm
Maybe he can teach Silva a new pitch. His clubhouse leadership plus Silva’s natural guile…
Methinks you are confusing guile with gut?
There’s nothing natural about that gut. Silva is just unnaturally cylindrical…not just for a pitcher either.
bratman on
July 30th, 2008 12:33 am
I thought he was supposed to pitch better in warm air
Sidi on
July 30th, 2008 12:38 am
On the whole Silva “MLBPA vs. Owners/fans/whomever is being wronged by the players” discussion…I’d just like to note that it isn’t a former player who is the commissioner. And still has very strong ties to his former club. The MLBPA has a pretty good amount of power, but they can only influence small things directly (such as a mediocre player reaching a level specified in the contract). I’d be hard pressed to think of something as massive as the draft slotting/signing bonus pressure that has come out of the players recently.
Baseball teams offer what they want. If they feel like getting in a bidding war for a player, or just offer one gigantic stupid contract, the players didn’t force that. Someone has to sign Silva’s contract, or Zito’s, or Vaughn’s, or Hampton’s, etc. Even teams that claim to be losing money hands over fist are rising in value steadily (based upon franchise sales). Some teams will always just be better at not being stupid.
heck I thought Silva’s new pitch was the splitter we all heard so much about when they signed him. Remember, that was how he was going to get out lefties this year?
Bavasi really screwed this team on his way out.
Jay R. on
July 30th, 2008 7:58 am
My wife and I were listening to the game during our commute home last night. As soon as Silva gave up 3 or 4 consecutive hits, I predicted that he would suddenly have back pain once the score got bad enough. We got home, I turned on the game, and lo and behold- 6-0, and Silva was coming out of the game hurt. I hate always being right about this team, since all my predictions are dire.
AssumedName on
July 30th, 2008 9:54 am
On the bright side, we’ve got a thin, lousy pitcher going tonight! Any bets on a Dickey appearance tonight, say around the 2nd inning?
hans on
July 30th, 2008 9:55 am
The first time I read this, I thought it said:
“Dave adds sarcastic comment about Silva’s new grip giving him more stink here”
DMZ said (my comments in bold): WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHANot a very convincing argument.
Teams don’t have to sign guaranteed contracts. I know.
Did you know that?Yes.
Fehr doesn’t put a gun to someone’s head and say “sign this outrageous contractâ€.You’re right, he uses super soaker.
The M’s didn’t have to give those contracts out. They did it out of their own free will.Again, I’m there with ya.
This is no different than companies that offer their executives huge guaranteed deals and then fire them. It’s a sunk cost.The difference is these companies operate in a free market, MLB does not.
Executives that sign big contracts have done so in a mostly free market, MLB isn’t a free market. If MLB were a free market and these contracts still existed, so be it, the free market has seen fit to allow it (as it has with executive contracts). Between the Players Union and the fact that teams play in arenas that they don’t fully fund we don’t have a free market in baseball.
hoser said (my comments in bold): When I looked at your blog I saw an interesting discussion about ad hominem. Aside from the technicality that the player’s union is not a person, how are your two posts here different from the same sort of ad hominem attacks that you decry in your blog?
Please explain how my argument is ad hominem. I am not attacking the Players Union personally, I am arguing that their policies are hurting baseball, that is not ad hominem.
hoser on
July 30th, 2008 3:57 pm
According to your blog,
Too much in America today we let people get away with avoiding the truth while bashing an opponent personally.
Ignoring the grammar, It seems that this is the gist of your complaint about ad hominem attacks.
The truth in this case is that the Carlos Silva signing was just a bonehead move by some apparently decent people who were paid to know better, but they did not.
You have now bashed the players association for the third time, apparently just because you have it in for them. Your only complaint is about,
coercive tactics that force teams to offer contracts
, which seems like enabling nonsense to me.
The two harms of the ad hominem attack, according to you, is letting someone avoid the truth and letting someone get away with a gratuitous attack.
You are avoiding the truth and making gratuitous attacks. Therefore your posts are the same sort as the ad hominem attacks except for the technicality that the PA is not a person.
QED
I don’t understand what you are saying about the free market either. It seems sort of religious to me. 30 teams could ignore Carlos Silva or sign him for whatever they could agree on.
Even if there were some sense in what you are saying, I don’t see how any sensible person could blame anybody but Mariners management for the Silva signing. So why even talk about the PA or which market is how free? They’re irrelevant
P.S. The truth about outrageous executive compensation is that the executives often control the board and their compensation committees indirectly. It is at least partly corrupt.
My original post concerned the “innocent bystanders” comment by another poster and I was simply pointing out that the Players Union is not an innocent bystander, if that is what the other poster meant by that comment.
I’d be happy to take this to email as I don’t think arguing the finer points of logic on this forum is really what people want to read.
Can’t wait for the back strain excuse again.
And we paid just $48 million for him.
Agreed.
Guh… what? After that first inning, I thought he might have an OK night.
Damn you and your pre-game confidence curse, Bill Kreuger!
Blowers was much less confident.
That’s why Washburn has to stick around. Maybe he can teach Silva a new pitch. His clubhouse leadership plus Silva’s natural guile = Success!
Derek, please – terrible pitchers everywhere will take offense with a comparison to Carlos Silva.
My back hurts just watching this.
Sure glad I bought the Washburn and Silva “Marineros” jerseys on sale. Maybe I can return them for store credit and get that big Richie Sexson bobblehead.
Carlos Silva: this year’s Gas Can..
Maybe we can get the Yankees to take him as a throw-in in the Washburn trade..
(/sarcasm) (Click to Edit seems to mean that I can’t use greater than and less than for my sarcasm end tag. Not the end of the world, but perhaps of interest to the proprieters, to whom a cap is hereby tipped)
Methinks you are confusing guile with gut?
gwangung said:
And we paid just $48 million for him.
What bothers me is not the $48 million we owe him, but the next ~3.40 years we must call him ours.
With $48 million dollars, you’d think he could afford a personal trainer
I remember the Simpsons, when the Critic came on the show – interviewing Rainer Wolfcastle:
C: How do you sleep at night?
R: On top of a pile of money….
Gotta hand it to the Player’s Association — they’ve got their guys waddling into multi-million dollar contracts and apparently there’s little management can do about it. Or is genteel obesity one of those ‘old baseball’ things that is sacrosanct, sort of like chewing tobacco or Ruthian alcoholic excess?
Gotta hand it to you argh. That was funny.
I blew some chaw through my nose and spilled most of my cocktail.
Save the multiuseful Washburn until his contract is up — hey, he can run, and he can serve as the DH — who needs Vidro when you have Washburn?
And the M’s DON’T need Silva for “the next ~3.40 years we must call him ours.” If there’s any guy on a team’s roster that seriously needs to be invited to stay home and collect his salary as far away from the team as possible, Silva’s that guy. Him and Batista.
He obviously was getting squeezed out there and pitched better than his numbers would indicate.
/sarcasm
Or afford a lot of food!
M’s now 7-15 when Silva takes the hill.
15 – Did I miss something? I don’t think the Player’s Association signed a multi-year contract with Carlos Silva @ $12M/yr. Complain about the contract all you want, but please leave the innocent bystanders alone. We all know who signed that contract.
I am completely OK with the Yankees taking Silva’s contract off our hands with nary a prospect in return.
Squeezed…like a nice juicy hamburger so you can get it in your mouth?
(It’s getting tougher to work the fat jokes into the conversation)
Complain about the contract all you want, but please leave the innocent bystanders alone. We all know who signed that contract.
Seriously? Innocent bystanders? While it is true that the M’s signed that contract it is also true that the players union is hurting baseball through coercive tactics that force teams to offer contracts they wouldn’t otherwise in a free market. In real life if you suck, you get fired. Baseball is not a true free market due in large part to the union and it is hurting the game. Teams are handcuffed into carrying Silva-like contracts when the player isn’t earning enough to warrant minimum wage.
With the Mariners, especially, need we even have to explain how this is hurting baseball? Imagine if Sexson could have been released without pay for not living up to some predetermined performance level. Same for Washburn, Silva and Batista. The M’s would be in a far different situation if they were able to drop a player who stunk. I don’t know, like any other American company usually can.
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Teams don’t have to sign guaranteed contracts.
Did you know that?
Fehr doesn’t put a gun to someone’s head and say “sign this outrageous contract”.
The M’s didn’t have to give those contracts out. They did it out of their own free will.
This is no different than companies that offer their executives huge guaranteed deals and then fire them. It’s a sunk cost.
23-
Look, nobody makes Team X sign Player Y to a deal- and if you think that an NFL-style world of non-guaranteed contracts would make things better, I have Ryan Leaf collecting millions of dollars and being generally useless to show to you, as well as Shaun Alexander counting for millions against this year’s salary cap while not doing a damned thing for the Seahawks on the field.
And no, the Mariners COULD tell Silva and Batista to go away tomorrow. They just did it to Richie Sexson.
You know, if you looked at “any other American company” with a minimum $100 million payroll, you’d find most of them have at least 25 people who, even if fired, would continue to collect checks. These are, as Derek notes, typically known as “executives” and their contracts are often described as “golden parachutes.”
coffeemonkey,
The Oakland As operate under the same players association rules as the Mariners. They don’t sign Carlos Silva to 4 year/$48M contracts. They have a significantly lower payroll and consistently outperform the team I am a fan of.
I could probably substitute a number of other teams including the Minnesota Twins into the above paragraph.
The rules all teams follow allow players to be undercompensated for about 6 years after they make it to the Major Leagues. The team I root for got rid of five such cheap assets to get two years of one fairly well compensated and fragile player to go with Carlos Silva. What does this have to do with the Players Association?
When I looked at your blog I saw an interesting discussion about ad hominem. Aside from the technicality that the player’s union is not a person, how are your two posts here different from the same sort of ad hominem attacks that you decry in your blog?
Maybe he can teach Silva a new pitch. His clubhouse leadership plus Silva’s natural guile…
Methinks you are confusing guile with gut?
There’s nothing natural about that gut. Silva is just unnaturally cylindrical…not just for a pitcher either.
I thought he was supposed to pitch better in warm air
On the whole Silva “MLBPA vs. Owners/fans/whomever is being wronged by the players” discussion…I’d just like to note that it isn’t a former player who is the commissioner. And still has very strong ties to his former club. The MLBPA has a pretty good amount of power, but they can only influence small things directly (such as a mediocre player reaching a level specified in the contract). I’d be hard pressed to think of something as massive as the draft slotting/signing bonus pressure that has come out of the players recently.
Baseball teams offer what they want. If they feel like getting in a bidding war for a player, or just offer one gigantic stupid contract, the players didn’t force that. Someone has to sign Silva’s contract, or Zito’s, or Vaughn’s, or Hampton’s, etc. Even teams that claim to be losing money hands over fist are rising in value steadily (based upon franchise sales). Some teams will always just be better at not being stupid.
heck I thought Silva’s new pitch was the splitter we all heard so much about when they signed him. Remember, that was how he was going to get out lefties this year?
Bavasi really screwed this team on his way out.
My wife and I were listening to the game during our commute home last night. As soon as Silva gave up 3 or 4 consecutive hits, I predicted that he would suddenly have back pain once the score got bad enough. We got home, I turned on the game, and lo and behold- 6-0, and Silva was coming out of the game hurt. I hate always being right about this team, since all my predictions are dire.
On the bright side, we’ve got a thin, lousy pitcher going tonight! Any bets on a Dickey appearance tonight, say around the 2nd inning?
The first time I read this, I thought it said:
“Dave adds sarcastic comment about Silva’s new grip giving him more stink here”
…I like my way better.
DMZ said (my comments in bold):
WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Not a very convincing argument.
Teams don’t have to sign guaranteed contracts. I know.
Did you know that? Yes.
Fehr doesn’t put a gun to someone’s head and say “sign this outrageous contractâ€. You’re right, he uses super soaker.
The M’s didn’t have to give those contracts out. They did it out of their own free will. Again, I’m there with ya.
This is no different than companies that offer their executives huge guaranteed deals and then fire them. It’s a sunk cost. The difference is these companies operate in a free market, MLB does not.
Executives that sign big contracts have done so in a mostly free market, MLB isn’t a free market. If MLB were a free market and these contracts still existed, so be it, the free market has seen fit to allow it (as it has with executive contracts). Between the Players Union and the fact that teams play in arenas that they don’t fully fund we don’t have a free market in baseball.
hoser said (my comments in bold):
When I looked at your blog I saw an interesting discussion about ad hominem. Aside from the technicality that the player’s union is not a person, how are your two posts here different from the same sort of ad hominem attacks that you decry in your blog?
Please explain how my argument is ad hominem. I am not attacking the Players Union personally, I am arguing that their policies are hurting baseball, that is not ad hominem.
According to your blog,
Ignoring the grammar, It seems that this is the gist of your complaint about ad hominem attacks.
The truth in this case is that the Carlos Silva signing was just a bonehead move by some apparently decent people who were paid to know better, but they did not.
You have now bashed the players association for the third time, apparently just because you have it in for them. Your only complaint is about,
, which seems like enabling nonsense to me.
The two harms of the ad hominem attack, according to you, is letting someone avoid the truth and letting someone get away with a gratuitous attack.
You are avoiding the truth and making gratuitous attacks. Therefore your posts are the same sort as the ad hominem attacks except for the technicality that the PA is not a person.
QED
I don’t understand what you are saying about the free market either. It seems sort of religious to me. 30 teams could ignore Carlos Silva or sign him for whatever they could agree on.
Even if there were some sense in what you are saying, I don’t see how any sensible person could blame anybody but Mariners management for the Silva signing. So why even talk about the PA or which market is how free? They’re irrelevant
P.S. The truth about outrageous executive compensation is that the executives often control the board and their compensation committees indirectly. It is at least partly corrupt.
hoser:
My original post concerned the “innocent bystanders” comment by another poster and I was simply pointing out that the Players Union is not an innocent bystander, if that is what the other poster meant by that comment.
I’d be happy to take this to email as I don’t think arguing the finer points of logic on this forum is really what people want to read.