The astros gave away a hall of famer - for nothing

That Joe Morgan trade really sucked.

 

BEN ZOBRIST! [/high squeaky Palillo voice]

 

Hey, remember when had Luis Gonzalez and he was a pretty ok player? And then after he was gone and in his 30's he turned into Babe Ruth? Wow, if only we had known he was going to be Babe Ruth.

 

Every team has a long and distinguished list of former players they dumped who turned out to be pretty good. This is not unique to the Astros. In fact, there're a couple of Astros right now who fit that mold - McHugh and Morton.

Honestly, and I'm not defending the Astros - they flat screwed the pooch with Martinez. BUT... it could have been so, so much worse because, per AstroBall, they were fairly indifferent to Altuve and Keuchel as prospects and they're only Astros right now, essentially, because they couldn't generate a market for them.

But, yeah... the Martinez release makes no sense. They were a terrible team in '14 and had room to carry a kid with potential to see what they had.

 

Speaking of giving away an actual HOFer....

ETA: if the NPB elected foreign players to its HOF, Tuffy Rhodes would be in it. Does he count?

 

Kenny Lofton

 

Remember when Porter publicly humiliated JD by pulling him from a game after he swung at the first pitch (and made an out) after the first two batters only used 4 pitches to make their outs? He then outed him at the post game press conference and made him explain to reporters why he was pulled.

I blame Porter for mishandling JD.

Meanwhile a young Altuve did the exact same thing a couple of weeks later and nothing happened.

 

If we didn't release JD Martinez, we might have ended our 10 month championship drought.

 

It seems like yesterday a good comrade posted JD thread, It was air langhi. My thoughts about him are in that thread and that was what 6 years ago. Miss the guy! but what if everything in the space time continuum is disrupted had he stayed. No Carlos beltran, no insider pitch tipping. No world series championship. We won the f'n world series! let J.D enjoy his vida loca. The red sox can win out the regular season. when it's playoff time, it's all whole different game.

 

Astroball essentially states that Luhnow blames Bo Porter for giving playing time to Grossman and Hoes over Martinez after he fixed his swing.

 

I will give Luhnow all the benefit of the doubt on that because Bo Porter is a ****ing imbecile.

 

It was a monster **** up for sure. But since we can’t be guaranteed to have won a World Series had we hung onto him I don’t give a flying f about the situation anymore. I’m 100% ok with every baseball move that happened from about 2013 to the climax of 2017.

 

[QUOTE="bobrek, post: 11934585, member: 724"I blame Porter for mishandling JD.[/QUOTE]
So does AstroBall.

Now, it's quite obvious Reiter had access to Luhnow, who was then able to control the narrative (Porter was very obviously not asked to participate). And it's not 100% explicit - there's a bit of culpability from Luhnow. BUT... it's a fairly obvious throwing-under-the-bus of Porter on JD Martinez.

 

All I got from this thread is that Bo Porter was a shitty manager and there’s a book called Astro Ball that I need to read.

 

So purely hypothetical unprovable meaninglessness (but since we're hindsighting and all)...if the Stros keep JD and he performs comparably the next 2 seasons, there's a good chance they do not get to draft Tucker and Whitley. Check back in 10 years and we'll see how that tradeoff looks.

 

I will bet you $1,000 that J.D. Martinez will never be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame located in Cooperstown, New York.

 

In this hypothetical situation, who's making this throw?


Who's making this plate appearance?


For baseball performance, Luhnow should be judged by the cumulative value of all his decisions and not just one or two.

 

Should have never traded Larry Anderson. Dude was a solid reliever

 

Right? All this hypothetical stuff is going to make @bobrek's head explode.

 

Cleanup on aisle 3.