Tell me he's no Crazy Joe.

 

Oops. Wrong one.  

That's better. Isn't it?

Welcome to the major leagues tonight, Spencer Jones, and long may you thrive.

In anticipation of his grand debut, Carl J. Weitz was good enough to send us a comparative assessment by a major-league scout, Andy Singer, which concludes that the best we can hope for from Mr. Jones is that he will be another Joey Gallo. Which Mr. Singer feels he likely will not be.

You can read it hear, if you like:

https://www.startspreadingthenews.blog/post/projecting-spencer-jones#:~:text=It's%20not%20fair%20to%20Spencer,of%20fact%20or%20evidence%2Dbased%20analysis.

Singer acknowledges our Gallo trauma, but tells us that "Gallo was a very good Major League player at his peak." He insists that "peak Joey Gallo was an All-Star level offensive player" who "was enormously valuable offensively in the aggregate." 

"Despite all of his flaws," Singer insists, "Joey Gallo had a very valuable offensive peak."

Yeah...No.  

Joey Gallo was never a very good major league player. No player who hits a lifetime .194 over 10 years and would have averaged 223 strikeouts a full season (had he ever played one), has ever been a very good major league player. 

The fact that major-league baseball in general—and Andy Singer in particular—have convinced themselves that he was, embodies everything that is worst about our game today.

Joey Gallo was Mr. Three True Outcomes, walk-strikeout-home run—the most boring brand of baseball ever invented. Even at his "peak," when he was hitting 40 and 41 home runs in a season, Gallo batted .206 and .209—and struck out 403 times.

Over the whole course of his career, Gallo fanned 1,292 times. That's almost twice the number of walks and home runs (705) he had, combined. It is more than twice the number of total hits—557—he had.  

This is not what I want from Spencer Jones. This is not what anyone should want, from any ballplayer.

Forget about career peaks, and the like. What I'd settle for were the fill-in seasons that Mike Tauchman and Mike Ford had for us (suspiciously, both in 2019, the year the ball went crazy). Or the one that other Spencer, Shane, had filling in for us in 1998.

In the meantime, tell me no tales about how good Joey Gallo really was. The guy made Dave Kingman look like a contact hitter. He is no one to emulate, no one to hope that anyone becomes.

Unless you're talking about that other Joey:

Joey, Joey,

Man of the streets, child of clay...