DTroppens

I'm in. Maybe at a slower pace though. Maybe an induction once every month - the 15th or 30th.

No, I didn't see that. I was checking the wayback machine website for about two minutes during deadline during these posts. Honestly, I shouldn't have been making these posts here. That was just a ton of fun. I think we did players who retired every five years and voted weekly. I don't recall who gathered all the players eligible, but that took some work for sure.

It would be interesting to see a "utility OF" spot. People like Northrup played hundreds of games in all three positions. Growing up, I thought his primary position was LF. It wasn't until probably the 1990s (probably the internet and, again, playing board games that I realized he played more games in right and center. I think this happens in LF as well, like you said DH. The 60s were an interesting time when the Tigers had Northrup, Stanley, Kaline, Horton and Brown in their OF. Playing those seasons and following the box scores is kind of geeky fun seeing how the Tigers dealt with that from year to year. Injuries definitely helped out a lot making those decisions easier some seasons.

I think he came within one vote at one time. Ever since then whenever I play a Tiger game in the Whitehill era, I think about those days here. Actually, there are a lot of players I think about from when we did the HOF. Maybe it's something we should address again and do again. It was a lot of fun and one of the neatest things I've ever been a part of involving the internet.

I had it on a computer but that computer crashed. I still trip upon a hard-copy of the Detroit Stars stats we used to get the Stars involved that I created and printed for myself. I have about 20 memory sticks. I wonder if I saved it on one of those before that computer crashed. I did a lot of the summaries and I think did most of the voting tabulating and had all of that at one time. The bios have to be somewhere. But thinking about that, I did a lot of that at work as well on my office computer. It's possible some of that stuff is somewhere. Those memory sticks are probably my best bet.

I'm just catching up on this thread. Bobby is about where I'd expect him to be. Left field hasn't been the position of awesomeness in terms of quality players playing there for a reasonable time frame. He's where he is due to years served.

I feel like I hear White Wedding and Rebel Yell more on the radio today than I did when they were popular. Whenever I go to the UP (which is way more than it probably should be) it seems the rock stations up there play him a lot. Of course, those two songs probably are heavy rotation and when you are flipping, it's not shocking you'd run into those songs for all the stations I guess. I'd like to see Billy Idol before his career is completely done. I was a huge fan way back in the day. I didn't keep up with his 2000+ albums. There is one exception to that, I bought his Christmas album a few years ago expecting it to be pretty awesome, putting a little Idol into some songs. Instead, he just sounded like a lounge singer and wasn't impressed. But, that said, that was just a Christmas album.

At 39, this is probably Messi's best World Cup ever. He's been incredible the entire tournament. That cross pass on the second goal - perfection.

I was busy yesterday, so I didn't watch the game until a later night rebroadcast of the game. I'm amazed how easy it was to not see any results until I watched it, so it was basically "live" to me. Hard to get terribly excited about the game for me, someone with no dog in the fight. Spain dominated and you just had a sense France wasn't going to get back into that game ever. But at 1-0, you hang on to watch for certain drama to unfold. Instead, we see a second goal and it was just one of those generic 2-0 games that Spain completely deserved and you felt like you just watched a ho-humm group stage game. I may have been better off, just seeing the result so I wouldn't have felt so compelled to pour into the entire game. Obviously, either team winning wasn't going to shock me. But Spain is going to be mighty tough to beat if they keep this form in the finals. They gave up nothing.

Karma is a beautiful thing when it strikes back. I always pull for underdogs in games like this. But the Swis player started falling, reached back hoping to get a yellow or red on the defender. If they start legitimately start calling these dives and giving yellows consistently using VAR, this crap would be reduced dramatically and quickly. RIGHT CALL - deserved the double-yellow and red.

It just seems like teams "come from nowhere" to earn playoff spots now and others "fall from crazy heights" to lose playoff spots in this era more than I recall in past eras. Maybe I'm making too much of it, and maybe it's just my mind picking what I choose to remember, but maybe not. But I wonder this is the case and maybe it has to do with just the watering down of how many teams do make the playoffs now. Maybe a team that is five games below .500 but struck down with serious injuries have more wiggle-room to go on a 16-4 run and be in a race because playing .520 ball "is enough" to do that. And when you are trying now battling to get to 85 wins to get those playoff spots, the teams in that pod are generally going to play at that level and are more likely to maybe lose four straight because they are "just a .520 ball team." Let's use the AL in the 1980s as an example. Certainly there were probably teams that were 58-66 that maybe went on a 12-3 run to get above .500. And at the time if the Tigers played that squad we'd say stuff like "well this isn't the time to play these guys" or say "they are hot" but no one would be thinking of them as a playoff contender (unless they were in the AL West :)). Getting to 70-69 is nice, but it's likely not putting you back into any division title race, again with a few exceptions. And since you are fighting for just one playoff spot among seven teams, you had to finish in first. So, let's say a team does get to 70-69 and are eight games out with 23 left and in fourth place. Not only are you going to have to probably go something like 18-5 down the stretch to get to a legit win total, that 88 wins most likely make you look like you were a competitor when we look at the standings 10 years later, but chances are you were probably still eliminated with about a week to go in the season. It's very unlikely the three teams ahead of you (and probably at least two being at least six games ahead of you are both going to collapse and one of them isn't going to get to 90 wins without blitzing the world on fire to do it. Today, that same 58-66 team can probably go 10-5 over their next 15, improve to 68-71 and still be only be five games out of a playoff spot. And the teams they may need to leapfrog are teams that have played pretty much .500 ball as well. So if this team now goes even 16-7, at 84-78 they could earn a playoff spot. The level at which the teams competing for these final spots matter a lot. Maybe one team will go crazy hot, but there probably will be a few that just muddle around playing about .500 ball, leaving chances for other teams to go hot. If a team below does, they will pass them. In 1988 that was much tougher to do. The team you are trying to pass (and two others) are on pace to win 88 games at least. Too much there, I know.

Right now I'm just still enjoying the season as "a season" more than thinking about being in a race. If the team continues to produce results through this weekend, my mindset may change to this being a team challenging for a playoff spot. This is kind of how I treated it two seasons ago and it allowed me to just enjoy the process and the great run at the end of the season. It worked then, so I think I'll do it again. And if they lose two out of three this weekend and fall a few games further out, it'll keep me more even keel about stuff.

I found this video with Tim Howard and Landon Donovan. A lot of this stuff is stuff we've talked about here, or probably on other sites we hit. Interesting. I'm only 23 minutes into it.

I'm hoping the Egypt match is being played tonight. I still haven't seen it. I got home after a concert and supposedly the replay was going to start about 10 minutes, but they showed Mexico-England instead. The other station had the other Tuesday game on. I fell asleep on the floor trying to watch that game.

Now that's pretty funny.