Hammerin’ Hank Blanco powers Twins
Putting aside the newspaper’s blasphemy, Hank White had a four-hit night last night. He’s now hitting .364 with 4 homers and 7 RBI.
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Hammerin’ Hank Blanco powers Twins
Putting aside the newspaper’s blasphemy, Hank White had a four-hit night last night. He’s now hitting .364 with 4 homers and 7 RBI.
Use code “Journal” for a 5% discount.
My theory is, when Henry entered “free agency” along with Gary and Javy, there was some sort of cosmic disturbance that caused a genetic mix-up.
Or maybe the Twins have just been playing with the A.C. again.
Or, he’s just putting together a career month and his final stats will look like this:
.225/.295/.330
Thanks. I picked him up in my yahoo league!
I was thinging the same exact thing. He is putting up crazy numbers for Minnesota. As long as he keeps this up, Maeur will remain in the minors.
Mauer isn’t in the minors, he’s on the DL. And despite Blanco’s power surge, he will return to the backup role when Mauer’s healthy.
By the way Mac, “Hank White.” I never thought of that before. Funny.
No thanks on that twincities.com signup. I hate when newspapers make you do that.
Along those same lines…
Does anyone have the text of that Terrence Moore column from AJC.com trashing the Braves for not having anough African-American players? I really don’t want to have to pay $30 per month to read his lunacy. From what I’ve heard, TM doesn’t count Julio Franco or Andruw Jones as being black.
As Moore says, Julio and Andruw are black, but not African-American. His point was about the dearth of African-Americans in management positions, and their decreasing numbers on the field.
I tend to agree with the first point — what to do about it is another debate altogether. As to the second point, he cites Joe Morgan’s claim that scouting budgets are going increasingly to overseas prospects instead of inner-city ones. Maybe that’s true–I have no way of knowing.
I’ve heard it said that Billy Beane’s strategy of preferring college players to high school players results in fewer African-Americans being actively scouted as well.
Is this a bad thing? If you could show that the concentration of young talent is similar in the inner city to that found in college and overseas, then yes. If not, I don’t see how you can blame MLB for going where the talent is.
Is this a bad thing?
Well, yeah it’s bad if you like the highest quality of baseball. The top athlete created by God is the black athlete and baseball isn’t getting many of them anymore. This why I always rail against those that say the level of play in baseball is at it’s highest point right now. There is simply no way for this to be true with football and basketball taking away so many elite athletes.
Sure Latin America and the Pacific Rim fill in some of the gaps (can you imagine the level of play if Latin American kids liked soccer instead of baseball? Yikes!) but losing the black athlete is hurting baseball. And there’s probably nothing to be done about it. Too much ground has been lost to hoops and football.
Hank White was a Skip-ism. Of course I can’t heam him on the radio now, but that’s another story…Skip coming back from drinking after a rain delay…good times.
I’ll just pretend like I didn’t read the part about God creating elite athletes and giving them black skin.
Let’s talk about facts. There has never been any scientific study suggesting significant differences in the genetic makeup of blacks, whites, or anything in between. From a genetic perspective, classifying human beings based on skin color is quite arbitrary. The concept of “race” is not only meaningless, but it seems to be an idea that has done more harm than good for humanity as a whole. If humanity is to progress, the idea of “race” is probably something best left behind.
Having said that, there is certainly a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting differences among people with different skin color. Some people say blacks build more muscle mass quickly and have greater stamina. Some people say white people are more intelligent. But this is all purely anecdotal and unscientific, more the result of stereotypes and misperceptions of fallable human eyes. These observations don’t hold up to scientific scrutiny. The important thing to remember is that the genetic variation within the “races” is much greater than the genetic variation between them. There’s black guys out there who can’t build muscle mass quickly or run fast or play sports. There are white guys who can get ripped after working out for a few weeks. There are black men who are geniuses. There are white men who are idiots. The spectrum runs wild in both “races”, so much so that suggesting there is a difference is not only uninformed and ignorant, but detrimental to society as a whole.
Human beings have evolved to recognize trends and patterns. Figuring things out and reasoning taught us many lessons over our history, like shitting in drinking water is bad, and eating raw meat might get you sick so cook it on the fire for a few minutes, perhaps. In our relentless search for patterns and reason, we sometimes make mistakes and think we see a pattern when there really isn’t one. Scientific inquiry and statistical reasoning can help sort these things out. And science and statistics tell us that the difference between the so-called “races” does not exist. Hell, there’s hardly any difference between us and chimps! If that doesn’t knock you off your high (white) horse, I don’t know what will!
We love reason, we love patterns, and we love the excitement of competition. That probably helps explain why so many of us here love baseball. So let’s talk about baseball and throw all this “race” stuff in the garbage where it belongs!
What Larry said (great comment). Robert, from now on you should just think stuff like that instead of saying it because it really makes you sound like an idiot and an ass.
I don’t as a rule censor things here. (Other than Spam.) But I can be convinced to change that practice, Robert.
Robert and Paul Hornug must be buddies.
Well, fair enough I guess. The facts are that blacks dominate sports where speed, strength and agility are difference makers and they likely would baseball if there were more interest. That’s not a good or a bad thing, it’s just the way it is. It also has nothing do to with intelligence (I’m guessing that’s why Paul Hornug was brought into this?).
I’m just noting that the level of play in baseball suffers if it fails to draw the interest of the African-American community. I’m certainly not the first and I won’t be the last to be concerned about this fact.
I guess the “made by God” comment would be easy to misinterpret. Rather than explain it, I’ll just apologize for it.
Oh, and thanks for the threat of censorship. I guess it’s Ashcroft’s world and we all just live in it.
It’s my web site and you just post comments on it. Okay? I don’t want to have to censor, but I’ve seen what happens when the site management doesn’t take problems in hand. The site gets taken over by the most extreme elements and eventually becomes unusable for everyone else. I don’t want that to happen here.
The facts also reveal that people named Robert are prone to mindless generalizations.
Alright, I’ll give it one more try and then give up. It’s amazing that you can’t have a conversation involving race in any way in this country without people freaking out…
Say for some reason, young black kids in this country suddenly found it uncool to play basketball and 80% of them stopped playing (which is what’s happened to baseball, but not suddenly and probably not 80% but bear with me). In a few years the NBA would see their steady flow of LeBrons, Carmelos, KGs, Dwight Howards, etc, start to dry up as these guys would now be catching passes, flyballs, pucks, or maybe going to medical school. Would it affect the quality of play in the NBA? Of course. Should basketball fans be concerned if something like this happened? Absolutely.
So, that’s what I’m getting at. This has already happened in baseball to a large degree. For whatever reason, African Americans make up a dispropotionally large segment of the perfessional athletes in this country, so it’s in every sports best interest to try generate intrest among the younger generation. The next Willie Mays would probably end up playing point guard or cornerback. And that sucks if your a baseball fan. That’s why I disagree with any statement that baseball is at it’s highest skill level at present day because it’s clear that the game as lost the ability to draw athletes from a place where a lot of good athletes come from.
Sorry for the distraction, let’s go back to picking on Jesse Garcia.
Sorry Robert, I don’tbuy into your logic either. You’re talking quality of play, which I disagree with (look at the field goal and free throw % in the NBA, the players coming into the NBA today don’t have the same fundamental skills that their predecessors did). The diversity of all races and nationalities in the sports not only brings the quality of play because you are drawing from a larger pool of players (i.e Asia in the case of baseball), it also brings in more fans(again Asian fans in baseball and golf). Anyone who knows Terrence Moore knows his agenda.
One last comment Robert. How can every sport have the “highest level of talent” if those African American athletes choose to play one sport over the other? Your logic escapes me, but your ignorance is obvious.
Great game by the Braves tonight. Great defense by Garcia, who has only 1 error in over 200 chances in the bigs. That’s why he is with the Braves right now.
The facts are that blacks dominate sports where speed, strength and agility are difference makers
I also believe this is true, as a rule, but is not inconsistent with the valid points that Larry makes.
The important thing to remember is that the genetic variation within the “races” is much greater than the genetic variation between them.
This gets so dicey. If the variation within Group A is 100 to 60, and within Group B is 85 to 50, this variation is greater than the difference in their averages (80 vs. 67.5). So the above is not disproved, but the difference between the groups is clear. I don’t think it’s that controversial to apply this to athletic performance (speed, fast-twitch muscle, etc). The problem arises when some intrepid soul decides to apply it to intelligence.
I don’t think there’s anything to fear. Certain aspects of athleticism are purely physiological, and are therefore objectively measurable. “The Bell Curve”, on the other hand, was crap, as it relied on culturally biased pseudo-science to reach preordained conclusions about intelligence. YMMV
Gregson, I hope you aren’t lumping me in with that martian because of my comments on the other thread. My comments were meant more light-hearted and sarcastic, and I apologize for the way my comments seemed as if they were supporting the man who criticisized Mac. For one thing, Mac is The Man. Whoever thinks differently can go play in traffic…
Very good post Sam. I’ve reread my original post several times a cannot see any way that I implyed anything about the intelligence of African Americans, nor did I indend to. It’s good to see that someone on this board can understand what they are reading. It seems the moderator cannot.