damn, just imagine what he could have done last yr at Minute Maid.....24 hr's in the first round! ! !
ya, i was gonna mention that...we protected hildago instead..... i'm pretty sure we could have re-acquired him back if we wanted to in the Wagner trade.... I would have done that... Wagner for Abreu.....
am i the only one who HATES this international contest? what's the point? why does bud selig always mess with a good thing?
Well, atleast the game is on FOX. I'm at my parents house in Sugarland, and they don't have cable. Headed back to CS in 5 days. WHOOP!
i thought this international thing would suck and when i walked in abreu had 7 homers with 4 outs and i was thinking i had just missed most of what would probably be the best performance in the round. he then proceeds to hit 17 more as i just sit in amazement. in all the years he's been around, i've never known abreu to be so effortlessly powerful. he looked like he was just chilling on some of those swings and they would go 450. and then he hits the 2nd farthest one ever, 517'. although i swear sosa had multiple 500 footers in just one derby and then did it a few more times in other, but they only had him down for 1 500 footer. i find it hard to believe after all the blasts he hit in milwaukee. he wasn't even in the top 5 again. and even though i missed it, apparently ortiz goes ahead and break's tejada's record himself and gets 17. were they massive shots or just regular 400 footers?
seriously, more than half the time i'm listening to berman i'm thinking, "what the hell are you talking about?"
and for all the talk of berman, is there anything more annoying than listening to morgan give ****ing strategy tips? he's always suggesting someone stop after a certain point. like they mentioned abreu only got 6 after getting 24 and he said "should've stopped." are you kidding? yeah, you're putting on an amazing show for the fans, why don't you just stop at 10 or 11 since that'll get you to the next round. he makes it sound like this isn't a showcase for the fans, but the most serious contest in the world. this is to watch guys hit as many homers as possible, as far as possible. not watch a guy who gets hot carefully plan out his route to the title by strategically stopping at 9 in the first round and then at 9 or 10 in the second. watching him just shatter the record was great and is why they hold this damn thing. for the memorable "mcgwire over the green monster time and time again", "abreu hitting 24", "sosa knocking down light towers" moments. how many people could even list the past champions more than they can remember those specific rounds?
Holy crap. He obliterated the records. Most in one round (15) gone: 24 Most in the finals (9) gone: 11 Most overall (27) gone: 41 That was fun to watch.
This is a wonderful case of hindsight being 20/20. Around the time Hidalgo and Abreu were comming up, I was a truly obsessive minor league baseball fan. I had subscriptions to Baseball America & Baseball Weekly, etc, and read them until they wore out, and had a job selling beer at St. Louis Card's games so I could get in free to watch. I could have told you top AAA & AA prospects for every NL team and about 90% of the AL teams off the top of my head. I set my VCR to record the AA & AAA top prospect games for those leagues that showed them on ESPN for several years. In short I was a nut. Around Hidalgo's last year at high A, when I started to really pay attention, everybody talked about him as 1 step down from and a couple of years behind Vlad Guerrero & Andruw Jones. Abreu was always talked about with reference to Rod Carew, or maybe someone like Luis Gonzales was before he started hitting 25+ home runs regularly. In other words, he was thought to have a wonderful swing and great work ethic, but physically limited to a best case .325-20-75 type. As was the case with Jeff Bagwell and Sammy Sosa before him, nobody had much experience with marginally athletic guys putting on 25 lbs of muscle and becoming super homerun machines. Everybody thought Abreu was "solid" or "nice" but used the magic phrase "five tool talent" about Hidalgo. Would you choose to keep a generally unproven but "solid" player, or go with the slightly more unproven "five tool talent" comming up behind him? If Steve Francis were suddenly to grow 6 inches, develop Jason Kidd-type point guard skills and court sense and became the greatest player of all time, I'd have trouble blaming the Rockets for trading him away for T-Mac.
why was it an either/or with abreu and hidalgo? i don't remember the scenario. did the phillies demand one of those two guys in a trade we made? also, hard to blame the stros, no one was criticizing the year hidalgo blasted 44.
When the MLB expansion draft came around the only unsettled position on the roster was RF. Abreu had 1 year in the majors at right field, and Hidlago was a RF in the minors. They could have probably kept both of them and created a whole somewhere else, on the major league roster, but they were at the point that they thought they were legitimate World Series contenders. It was decided at some point that they would leave one of the two unprotected because they only had enough room in the majors for 1 of the two, and while there would have been less desireable players at other positions that could have been exposed, it would have required another (hypothetical) trade in order to make the team ready to compete. Abreu was taken in the expansion draft and traded to the Phillies right away.
thanks ottomaton, makes sense. i just looked up his stats, he's been consistent as hell basically since his very first season with the phillies. hidalgo has had the single best season between the two but career-wise it's not even close.
We should have let the Dog out and kept Bob, but it is so easy to look back now and say that. Damn he tore HR Derby though.
In addition, there was basically no space in the OF. We had Derek Bell who was just reaching his 'prime' (when he was still good), Luis Gonzalez, James Mouton (still considered a good prospect at the time)...plus we were finding room for Hidalgo and Abreu. Both of them playing full time anytime soon didn't seem like a possibility with 3 vets in front of them. Add to it that we knew we had Daryle Ward waiting in the wings as well.. (plus we went out and got Alou and Everett after losing Abreu, got rid of Mouton and Luis in the process) --Come to think of it, do you realize we also had Daryle Ward waiting at the time? He wasn't as ready, but we thought he was a great prospect.. and it took him until *2003* to finally get some decent playing time (and subsequently get traded since we couldn't find a spot for him). If we couldn't find a chance to evaluate a 2nd prospect, we probably wouldn't have been able to evaluate a 3rd if we had kept Abreu. Or maybe Ward would still be in the minors
