Colorado Rockies 1976

The bolded made me think of this instantly (go to the 10 sec mark): https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=jaws+tiger+shark&ru=%2fvideos%2fsearch%3fq%3djaws%2btiger%2bshark%26FORM%3dHDRSC4&view=detail&mid=79DF0BD9D3EE3176AB6879DF0BD9D3EE3176AB68&rvsmid=BF7314554C66DC831E0BBF7314554C66DC831E0B&FORM=VDQVAP

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?!? https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/mlb/tim-tebow-still-in-consideration-for-spot-on-mets-roster/ar-BB167zm9?ocid=spartanntp

The bolded is my one beef here. The Devils falling one spot I can live with...it happens, and I can only imagine how Detroit and Ottawa are feeling (falling from potentially #1 and #2 to #4 and #5, though at least Ottawa had SJ's pick at #3 to soften the blow a little). But yeah, with the "field bet" odds that the other teams had, that pick shouldn't have been any higher than #4 overall...if you want to make an argument for #3, I guess you can make it, but #4 feels more "right". aylbert pointing out how the collective odds gave the field bet crowd too favorable of a chance to get the #1 seed shows that this system was flawed from its inception. But like others have said, though I don't believe that the result was rigged (no way that the Devils get two #1s in three years if the system truly was), it just feels wrong...wrong enough that people are going to say "Of course, there goes the friggin' NHL manufacturing drama and interest!" It's not a good look.

Ok now THAT’S a joke.

On all levels.

Yeah that’s legit.

Got two firsts recently...can’t lose my sh!t over this.

The Red Wings were no strangers to bringing in aging bigger-name vets (even if they’re pretty well past their primes).

The funny thing is much as I don't like playing amateur psychologist, I suspect Elias is probably happy with everything he accomplished too, and with having spent his whole career here, on one team (along with winning a pair of Cups and yeah, owning what is looking like the last Devils number to be retired for a long long time). I'm sure he would love to be in the Hall someday, but I don't think it's going to crush him if he ultimately never gets in. A lot of players would kill to have enjoyed a similar career, Hall or no Hall.

The bolded was me (he put up 0.90 PPG for this stretch BTW)...I was looking at what I call Elias' "meat" years...basically lopping off his development and decline seasons, which weren't really reflective of the player he was in his prime. Yeah, once we put aside any bias that we have toward Elias (not to mention that we love the guy), he really is the perfect borderline case...not getting in during his second year of eligibility shouldn't be seen as him being unfairly snubbed. I didn't watch nearly enough of Alfredsson game in and game out during his career, but based purely on his numbers (and a 10-year stretch where he put 782 points in 731 games...expand it out a little (age 24-37), and you get 931 points in 920 GP in a 13-year stretch...that's a long chunk of seasons to manage better than a PPG in the Dead Puck Era, and he was a +173 in those 13 seasons to boot), I can't really argue that Elias should go in ahead of him. And the times that I did see Alfredsson, I knew I was watching a terrific player. I know guys get docked for not winning championships, but at the same time, I'm not sure how fair that is. Alfredsson had 100 points in 118 playoff games with the Sens...was their failure to win a Cup while he was there all on him?

Not this early in his eligibility. I do think he squeaks in eventually though (though Alfredsson not getting in yet makes me wonder how long we'll have to wait. Feels like it's going to be a while).

Always a hoot seeing hockey players just wearing their jerseys, no equipment underneath, no full uniform, no helmet, no skates...really gives them that "Could be one of us" vibe, in an awesome way.

I’m definitely not against the idea of Turgeon getting in at some point. Sure, he played a nice chunk of his career during Live Puck, but it’s not like tons of guys during that era finished with 1327 points. He’s 32nd on the all-time list...the only two guys ahead of him who aren’t already enshrined are Jaromir Jagr and Joe Thornton...and both of those guys are obviously shoo-ins once they become eligible. Like I said previously, you will probably get some “Then why not Nichols and some other guys?” kinds of arguments...but so be it.

That Cup-clinching game was half a lifetime ago for me...quite literally. How did 25 years go by so damned fast?!

The knock against Turgeon has always been the era he played in, and the lack of individual hardware (one Lady Byng) and no Cups. I think some see his one monster year (58 G and 74 A in 1992-93, which saw a lot of monster years...like Mogilny and Selanne's 76-goal seasons...14 players managed 50+ goals that season) and think that's blowing up his sample a bit. Yeah he put up a hell of a lot of points not to get in, but I guess if he ever makes it, then cases start to be made for other Live Puck guys (like Bernie Nicholls), whose numbers look a lot better now than they did back then.

Yeah for sure...that "meat" part of Iginla's career that I put up is worthy all on its own, as far as this era goes. Elias' "meat" seasons by comparison are really really good and many players would kill to have had a run like his, but I'm not quite sure it's truly H-O-F worthy. Certainly not earlier-entry Hall of Fame. He'll probably have to wait until his late years of eligibility to get in, which I think is fair. I've brought it up before, but the guy who really shouldn't get in down the line is Marleau...nor should Doan, for that matter. In Marleau's case, there's something to be said for somehow damned near NEVER missing games and managing to play in over 1700 regular season contests, but that alone doesn't make one a Hall-Of-Famer. Using the same "meat" years metric (excluding early development and later decline years and focusing on the prime seasons), Marleau had a 15-year stretch where he put up 916 points in 1179 games (30 G and 33 A per 82 GP, 0.777 Points Per Game). That's very solid, no one would dispute that...and Marleau's freakish durability allowed him to compile well over 500 goals and 600 assists for his career...and I have nothing against compilers, because I think there's always something to be said for guys who manage to be good and manage to do it over multiple decades. But being solid to good and seemingly impervious to injury does not a H-O-Famer make. Very nice career, and he'll be Mr. Shark for a long long LONG time. Basically if I'm arguing that Elias is borderline (and I definitely consider him to be a better player than Marleau), then I can't make any case for Marleau. As far as Doan goes...he shouldn't get any consideration at all. Not knocking him, but the numbers just aren't there at all. There's never any shame in being a solid player, and playing 1540 games in the NHL. Fine career, and he has plenty to be proud of...can't all be superstars or even stars. But nowhere near H-O-F caliber.

As far as Iginla's NHL career goes, when looking at the "meat" portion of his career (basically his overall peak years...in his case, age 22 through 37), he had a hell of a run for 15 seasons. 1158 GP, 527 G, 566 A, 1093 Pts, +95, 0.943 points per game. 37 G and 40 A per 82 GP (30 or more goals 12X, including 40+ twice and 50+ twice). You could probably make an argument that this stretch alone in the Dead Puck Era should get in him on the first ballot. Those are pretty impressive numbers.

Still feels like it's too early for him to be inducted. He obviously meant a lot to us (much in the same way Marleau means a ton to Sharks fans, and Doan means everything to Yotes fans...not equating Elias to either player, as I think he's better than both of them...just that those guys are likely similarly loved by their fanbases). I have Elias as a borderline case myself...if he gets in, I'll be very happy about it, and thrilled for him, but if he doesn't, I won't consider it some major travesty or slight...that's not to say I won't be bummed about it if it doesn't happen for him. The fan in me 100% wants to see it happen for him someday. Now, as we know, the Devils didn't always do right by Elias...I don't think they always found the right kinds of players to play alongside him. He might very well have put up better glamour numbers with another team, in a different system. But going strictly by his Devils numbers...there's a lot of good with some very good sprinkled in...I'd say his best year was actually 2003-04, in that he stubbornly found a way to get his numbers that year despite not getting a whole lot of help from his team (and no way does that EGG line enjoy any success with out the "E" part...he put up an insane 18 G and 18 A in his final 24 GP that season). Take out his earlier development seasons and final decline seasons, he did have a very long peak (age 23-37), where he was pretty steady...averaged 0.9 points per game over 989 GP (356 G and 535 A for 891 Pts, and was a +155). So about 30 G and 44 A per 82 GP for the "meat" of his career. Is he an absolute, gotta-get-in-someday Hall Of Famer? Not so sure...no matter how I look at him, he screams "borderline" to me...and to be clear, I find NO shame in that...to even be a debatable Hall Of Famer still means you were a hell of a lot better than many of your peers, and whether he gets in or not, I won't view his contributions to the Devils any differently than I do now. But like I said, I'm rooting for him to get in all the way.

Not belated...I celebrated on Saturday, but the actual day is tomorrow...so I'm going to enjoy this last day in my 40s. Yeah the last third of The Sandlot might as well be a Wile E Coyote - Roadrunner episode, and that part of the movie drags on at least 10 minutes too long. It's exactly like I said...Evans simply ran out of ideas and decided to extend the final act of his movie to a disproportionate length. The bones for a better overall story were definitely there though...it just needed a better director than Evans, and a better writer to flesh out Evans' script. Haven't seen Bull Durham in years and it is pretty good. Oddly what kind of turns me off about it now isn't necessarily the movie itself...I just find Tim Robbins' and Susan Sarandon's over-the-top Hollywood politics stomach-turning...enough so that I don't have much interest in watching Bull Durham at all anymore. My main beef with The Natural is that they do a very lousy job with the actual baseball. After Roy Hobbs knocks the cover off the ball (literally) in his major league debut, he's either hitting a 500 ft home run (and doing damage to clocks and stadium lighting) or striking out on three swinging strikes. What is this, The Dave Kingman Story? Seriously though, I would've liked to see something other than all-or-nothing ABs...like Hobbs grounding into a DP when he's slumping, or legging out a double during a "He's red-hot again" montage. The lazy scripting of his batting scenes really take me out of the movie. And of course (SPOILER ALERT), there's a subplot involving Hobbs not knowing that he has a son and somehow remaining oblivious to it for far too long, when it's abundantly clear to EVERYONE watching the movie that, duh, it's YOUR son Roy! And though the character is clearly supposed to be guarded after what he went through as a younger man, he's often even more boring than Derek Jeter was, as far as offering the slightest insight into who he really is. Only saw Field of Dreams once, thought it was meh...just didn't make much of an impact on me. Eight Men Out even with its inaccuracies is a thoroughly entertaining movie, and really brings you back to a time where ballplayers weren't that much better of than ordinary working Joes, and had a "one of us" vibe...Buck Weaver just chatting with the neighborhood kids shows how "touchable" they were, though obviously they were still revered by fans. Agree with your favorites. The original Bad News Bears would rank #1 for me (I won't even watch the remake). Major League is just a classic and still holds up. A League Of Their Own is also terrific. The Rookie (starring Dennis Quaid) is pretty good in a Disney kind of way...a good one to watch with the family.

Yeah that's the simplest explanation and I'm sure that getting the last change had a little something to do with it, but it's amazing that it seems like damned near EVERYONE they played suddenly figured them out in road games. I almost wish I could watch the 2001-02 season over just to see how much of their lack of road production was due to freakishly bad luck (Arnott shooting 4.4% ?!), how much of it was due to coaches knowing which of their personnel could shut them down, and how much of it was due to them simply not playing well on the road.

Agree with MB3 in that I've never been a big fan of trying to measure everyone for all eras by the same stick. I think the most anyone can truly hope to be is one of the best of their respective era. As fun as the A-line was to watch in 1990-00 and 2000-01, man did they drop off in 2001-02...especially on the road. Somehow they became home-ice wonders: Elias: Home 39 GP, 20 G, 24 A, 44 Pts, 90 Shots, 22.2 S% Away 36 GP, 9 G, A, 16 Pts, 109 Shots, 8.3 S% Arnott (of course some of this sample came as a Dallas Star): Home 35 GP, 21 G, 15 A, 35 Pts, 107 Shots, 19.6 S% Away 38 GP, 4 G, 5 A, 9 Pts, 90 Shots, 4.4 S% Sykora: Home 37 GP, 15 G, 18 A, 33 Pts, 108 Shots, 13.9 S% Away 36 GP, 6 G, 9 A, 15 Pts, 86 Shots, 7.0 S% Was off how much their shooting%s fell off on the road. It would be one thing if one of them saw that kind of drop (bad luck, it happens), but all THREE saw their numbers just plummet in road games.

Since we still don't have any actual baseball to talk about... After an early 50th-birthday celebration on Saturday (my actual birthday is June 24, this Wednesday...and yes, I'm actually turning 50), yesterday morning I watched just about all of The Sandlot with a couple of my buddies, who'd crashed at my place. I gotta admit, this movie is way more revered and remembered as a "classic" much more than it really has any right to be. It's not downright awful by any stretch, but it's not really all that good either. It does have the occasional magical moment that doesn't feel forced (the part where Ray Charles' rendition of "America the Beautiful" plays at the kids manage to play some ball under fireworks that seem like they'll never ever end comes to mind), but overall it feels like several "Our Gang" episodes lumped together without much really holding it all together, with a lot of uneven acting performances (especially from the children who make up The Sandlot nine...it's not that hard to see why most of their careers didn't lead to a whole beyond this film, though it's not all on them...the script at times is rather clunky). Some cliched directing hurts as well, and unfortunately David Mickey Evans, as director, insisted of providing the narration of grown-up Scotty Smalls himself...I had forgotten how stiff and generally uncomfortable he sounded in that role. His career didn't exactly evolve much either. What really sticks out is that it truly feels like Evans realized that he didn't have quite enough going on for a full-length feature, past the initial "skits within a movie"...so the part where Smalls drills his step-father's sacred Babe Ruth-signed baseball into The Beast's lair (and Smalls and his teammates concoct scheme after scheme to try to get it back) gets overly fluffed out and just drags on FOREVER...not to mention that some of their "Get The Ball Back" inventions seem to be a bit too involved to be believable. And that's where things really fall apart...especially the idea that top player and future major leaguer Benny "The Jet" Rodriguez would be capable of outruning the would-be "Beast" for what appears to be several MILES before managing to coerce him back into his lair (at which point it becomes obvious that the so-called Beast is not really so Beastly after all...but would ALL of these kids really be THAT scared of a large dog, who's almost always chained up to boot? Most of them were not THAT young.) Not saying it's unwatchable, but it's definitely far from being this awesome classic...it's heavily flawed.

Flyer fans do show up to the Rock, and the nights I've seen the most fights among fans have been games against the Flyers. Ranger fans are largely dummies, but damn do the Flyers fans have the market on violence pretty well cornered. I used to go to the Spectrum back in the day wearing a Devils jersey, and amazing nothing happened (though I didn't do much to draw attention to myself...I'd cheer when the Devils scored, but would sit back down and not attempt to start anything with anyone). Not so sure I'd go to a Flyer home game now...just don't need the aggravation.

Darling (and others) felt like in that situation (meaningless game in a lost season), might as well keep rolling with the kid and let him figure things out. Darling clearly sided with Oquendo on this one, even with the horrible numbers at the plate. To Jose's credit, he turned himself in to a credible hitter who could play literally EVERYWHERE on the field...but as a Met, man was his bat just nonexistent. A .514 OPS and 45 OPS+ (with the Cards, he managed a .690 OPS and 93 OPS+). Even Rey Ordonez laughs at Oquendo's Met numbers...I'm guessing given how young he was in 1983 (just 19 at the start of the season), he was simply not ready yet.

Just a couple of other Darling tidbits: One of the reasons that Darling despised Howard (and claims many of his teammates did as well) came down to a meaningless September game in 1983 (Darling had just been called up), where the Mets were up 3-0 against the Padres in the third inning, but were stranding too many runners for Howard's liking. He decided to have Rusty Staub punch-hit for a very young (and very light-hitting) Jose Oquendo, with two outs and more runners on base. Darling called it a total bullsh!t move and said it destroyed Oquendo, who wound up sobbing on the bench for a while before meekly escaping into the clubhouse. Darling implied that Staub felt horrible having to go in for the kid, and that his teammates to a man were furious with Howard. I'm not saying that Howard shouldn't have given Oquendo a shot there (game didn't mean anything and the Mets were already up), and yanking a guy THAT early in the game is pretty harsh, but I don't think Darling realized HOW bad Oquendo had been at the plate...the poor guy had put up a Tim Tebow-like .182/.212/.212 slash over the previous two months. It wouldn't have surprised me if Howard (who many claim is actually quite GOOD with young players) had given Oquendo many opportunities to show something, and simply felt like he finally had reached his wit's end. From an outsider's viewpoint (who has quick access to game logs and other numbers), I think even if Howard shouldn't have done what he did, I don't think it was quite the travesty that Darling made it out to be. And of course we're all very aware of Mackey Sasser's throwing yips...basically, after a home plate collision where got his bell rung in a game against the Giants, he suddenly couldn't throw the ball back to the pitcher without double/triple/even quadruple clutching, and even then, he'd throw some grounders and rainbows that made Darling crazy. Darling added that any number of times in a given game, Mackey would take the ball to the mound with him (Darling would meet him roughly halfway to the plate, knowing what the deal was) to try to make it look like he wanted to go over something quickly with Darling, when in reality sometimes he didn't want to even attempt to make a throw to the mound. What Darling especially didn't like about that move by Mackey was that he thought it made it look like Mackey was somehow far more in control of the game than he could ever hope to be...as though it was RONNIE who needed constantly maintenance. Like other Met pitchers (Gooden comes to mind), Darling seems to lament the "offense at the expense of everything else" mentality that GM Frank Cashen appeared to be embracing more and more, which led to Sasser getting more and more ABs...and the irony was, Sasser wasn't really THAT good of a hitter...yes, he could make contact very well, and could hit for a good average (.297 over his first three Met seasons), but he didn't walk, and didn't really hit for much power. What pissed off Darling the most about him was that he thought Mackey didn't really seem aware of how his baggage behind the plate affected everyone on the field...Darling felt that Sasser should have been somewhat apologetic about his issues. Darling said there was one night out on the town where a particularly attractive groupie-type was eyeing up Mackey, who was definitely enjoying the attention...Darling hits the bathroom to take a leak some time later, and standing next to him to take a leak is...the particularly attractive groupie-type, who as it turns out was a dude (who actually VERY convincingly appeared to be a hot chick). After Darling went back out to the bar area, Mackey asked Darling what he thought of that "girl" (Mack hasn't seen "her" go into the men's room), and Darling said something like "Yeah, she's hot Mack, go for it!" Darling says he knows that Mackey and his potential prey did indeed leave the club together, but Mackey never said anything about what happened after, and Darling never asked. But Darling clearly considered that some kind of justified revenge towards Sasser for being such a brutal catcher to work with.