Quote:
Originally Posted by D. Bergin
I pretty clearly stated the years Foster broke out. What about the 6 years in baseball prior to that?
He had 1 halfway decent season from 69' to 75' prior to his breakout year in '76.
Maybe Bautista is guilty, I don't know, but I'm not going to throw a guy under the bus without any evidence other then "he's doing really well right now".
Ben Oglivie is another guy who didn't develop a power swing until he was around 30 or so.
|
I think you missed the whole point re Foster, Dave. His "breakout" which might be considered similar to Bautista's Babe Ruth imitation was his 52 homerun year, and the point was that he, unlike our little Jose, didn't go from zero to hero. Instead, my point was that Foster demonstrated substantial talent for two years before that (he was 26, by the way, when he had his first good season, 23 HR, 78 RBI, .300, followed it up with another the next year, 29 HR, 121 RBI, .306), then had a year where obviously everything went right (52 HR, 149 RBI, .320). Bautista did not even remotely demonstrate substantial talent over the course of any full year before the 2010 season, when he came out of nowhere to hit 54 homers. Do you
know how many players hit 54 or more homers before the steroid era? The answer is Ruth, Hack Wilson, Foxx, Kiner, Mantle, Maris and Greenberg. Unless this old post-50 brain-faded fan missed one somehow, THAT'S JUST SEVEN PLAYERS. NONE, REPEAT NONE, OF THEM CAME OUT OF NOWHERE TO DO SO. Please don't even think Hack Wilson--he won four homerun titles in five years up to and including his 56 homer campaign, losing out only by one to Hornsby's 40 one year earlier. And Maris had previously hit 28 for the Indians/A's in 1958 during a season he started at only 23 years of age; was on pace for a truly star-level season that went off-track only due to injury for the A's in
1959, causing his average to plummet below the over .300 pace with power he had maintained before the injury (although he and that season did stay intact long enough for him to make the all-star team in '59); and would have hit over 40 homers in 1960 but for injury (rather than the 39 he did hit in only 136 games, winning the MVP with 112 RBI's and a .283 average).
Even Oglivie didn't come out of nowhere when he hit his 41 homers in 1980 (and that's a long way from the 60-70 full-season pace Jose has been on since last May). He hit 15 in only 305 at bats in 1976 (which would have given him 29, had he maintained the same pace and gotten the same number of at bats--592--he had in that 41 HR season); hit 21 homers in 450 at bats (equal to approximately 28, had he had the 592 AB's of his big season) in 1977; hit 18 homeruns in 469 at bats with a .303 average in 1978; and 29 HR's in 514 AB with a .282 average in 1979.
By the way, the reason why you guys are having trouble coming up with an anywhere near comparable match to the inconceivable progression Bautista has demonstrated over the course of the last year and 40 or so games is because THERE IS NONE! It is amusing to watch, however, and I do think it demonstrates something noble in all of your characters, in that you are willing to believe the best about somebody, when the evidence (given, it is circumstantial in nature) is to the contrary. I've been wrong in the past (heck, I loved McGwire from '92-2000, and believed he was legit), and it is a veritable certainty I will be wrong again, probably often. But there is something very disturbing to me in the record of this player, in that it has never been remotely duplicated during the years between 1920 (the first 50+ homer season) and 1990, by which time a whole lot of nonsense had begun to occur.
Larry