#AskSpector: Which third baseman would be the best foundation for a new team?

Jesse Spector

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#AskSpector: Which third baseman would be the best foundation for a new team? image

Welcome back to the #AskSpector tweetbag, the comedic story of six young adults making their way in New York. Monica lives in her grandmother's apartment with Rachel, across the hall from best friends Joey and Chandler, while Monica's brother Ross just got divorced when it turned out his wife was a lesbian and Phoebe is Monica's old roommate who is a masseuse and coffeehouse guitar player.

Wait, that's actually "Friends," a pretty underrated television show from the turn of the century that you should find time to watch, because really not enough people are aware of it. This is the #AskSpector tweetbag, where some guy answers questions from Twitter about baseball or anything else people want to ask.

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But really, you should watch "Friends." I mean, just check out the opening credits, with a song by a band called The Rembrandts that had 50 straight No. 1 hits in an infinite number of alternate universes, just as there are an infinite number of alternate universes where Ross doesn't suck.

OK, let's go to the questions.

 

 

There are a lot of good options, with 11 third basemen who currently boast a wRC+ of 110 or better: Todd Frazier, Josh Donaldson, Kris Bryant, Matt Carpenter, Mike Moustakas, Manny Machado, Yunel Escobar, Kyle Seager, Evan Longoria, Nolan Arenado and Trevor Plouffe.

If you're building a team around someone, though, you want them to be young. Arenado, Bryant and Machado are the ones who are age 24 and under. But you can also add to the conversation two guys at the hot corner who haven't played enough yet this year to qualify for the wRC+ list: Anthony Rendon, back with the Nationals after injury, and Rangers top prospect Joey Gallo, who has hit five homers in his first 15 major league games, including this one off some guy who will probably be bagging groceries this time next week.

Wait, that was Clayton Freaking Kershaw. That was the fifth homer by a lefty batter off Kershaw since the start of the 2013 season.

The problem is that Gallo, like Bryant, seems destined to be an outfielder for most of his career. My pick is going to be another guy who might not forever play third base, but that would be because he would move to shortstop. It's Machado, who is six months younger than Bryant and is hitting .289/.346/.510 with 14 homers this year. He had 51 doubles in his age-20 season to lead the American League -- two years ago. He's come back strong from injury, which we're still waiting to see from Rendon, and his offense isn't a product of Coors Field, which hurts Arenado's case, even though he's the best third baseman defensively.

You can't go wrong with any of the five, and my answer on this could easily be different the next time you ask and we've seen more of these young stars. Right now, though, it's Machado.

 

 

Nobody cares at all. Like, even a little bit. I dispute the notion that this wouldn't fly in the NHL, too. If a team won the Stanley Cup, then put a patch on the next season's jersey sleeves, there might be a little bit of a question about it, but opposing players would not care about it at all. Nor should they. Plus, it's just a patch. If you want to see some real boasting, go back to the 1906 Giants, who wore jerseys that didn't even name the team -- they just said WORLD'S CHAMPIONS in the largest available lettering to fit across players' chests.

 

 

I called the good folks at Major League Baseball, and they said that in each ballpark last year, there were approximately 1,300 credentialed media. That's for a series with a tiny market against an enormous one.

 

 

There are a couple of reasons. One is that the split-finger, which differs from the forkball in that the ball is not as deep between the fingers, is more popular. The other is that both pitches often are associated with arm trouble. The forkball remains a popular pitch in Japan, where the baseball is slightly smaller.

 

 

I'm not sure how I can hope to deal with that question here, as even Pope Francis is struggling with it. I'm far from the Pope's level.

 

 

Based on what we saw last October, the only logical option is Madison Bumgarner.

 

 

The only problem is that he didn't really, you know, drink those beers.

 

 

I don't think the answer to that is on the current roster. You could say Steven Souza Jr., with his .762 OPS and 13 homers, but you have to remember that he's a 26-year-old rookie. That doesn't really scream "long-term," and if he keeps this up into his arbitration years, the Rays would probably trade him at some point then, because there would be no chance they would want to pay big money for an outfielder in his 30s when younger talent, with a chance to continue improving, can be had cheaper.

 

 

Not really. The Dodgers might have a lot of Cuban players, but they do not have a lot of Cuban patrons at the ballpark. It's not like Cuban sandwiches are a staple on the L.A. culinary scene, either.

 

 

I'm glad you're not fishing for a Canadian answer, because you're not getting one. I'm going with the Hillsboro Hops in part because of their great name and logo, but more because Shelley Duncan is their manager, and I'll always be on the side of a guy who rode the Cyclone with me after a Brooklyn- Staten Island game in 2001, when I covered the New York-Penn League.

 

 

I keep hearing how LeBron can never measure up to Jordan from all the experts, so the answer obviously is 0.0, because LeBron won't even make it as high as Double-A.

 

 

I picked the Cubs to win the World Series, the Cubs are still doing well, and I have no reason to change anything I said, not least of all because they haven't released an alternate version of Back to the Future 2. So, the Cubs.

 

 

You definitely could. With 300 swings, there's a chance that you would make contact, and maybe dunk a little flare behind shortstop. It's just as likely, if not more likely, that you wouldn't get a hit in 100 at-bats against a major league pitcher, but you could.

 

 

Constantly in high school, but not so much since then, and I can't remember the last time I did.

 

 

Wild guess: 3 million.

 

 

Try putting your rotten fruit in the trash. If that doesn't get rid of the fruit flies, try taking out the trash. If that doesn't work, spray Febreze around. If that doesn't work, move to a new house. If that doesn't work, slather yourself in Vaseline and dive headlong across the floor of your new house. That won't help with the fruit flies, but your new house won't be empty enough to do it once you've moved in all your stuff.

 

 

I have not met Bob Uecker. I am not happy about this.

 

 

It would have to be a Babe Ruth bat, just to get a feel for what it was like and how different it was from today's bats. I don't think I really need to get tactile with much else there, but that would be awesome.

 

 

I don't think so, but with a really good blackballing, you just don't know. I don't think Ozzie Guillen is reviled throughout baseball — he's just in the Bobby Valentine segment of managers you're not going to hire because too much can go wrong. Cora being penalized by association would be kind of weird. I'd like to see him get a shot at some point.

 

 

No. I think that a dynasty has to be titles in more than half the years in a timeframe. Three in six years isn't good enough. If the Kings had won in 2011 instead of the Bruins, you'd be looking at two teams with three Cups in six years. You can't have concurrent dynasties. Chicago just has a truly excellent team.

 

 

Maybe hearing a different voice will help the Padres to perform better, but it's hard to say whether a new manager really makes a big difference.

 

 

I had a birthday party there when I was a kid. It's one of my favorite museums in the world.

 

 

It was Ryan Anderson, the Mariners' first-round pick in 1997. He had 146 strikeouts in 104 innings for Triple-A Tacoma in 2000, his age-20 season, then arm injuries destroyed his career. He didn't pitch again until 2005, when he went 0-1 with a 6.59 ERA between the Brewers' rookie-ball team in Arizona and Single-A Brevard County. He still had 23 strikeouts in 13.2 innings then, but he never pitched professionally again.

 

 

The worst case scenario for the Cardinals is that the FBI finds that the hacking went beyond the Astros' computer system, into NORAD, and that a computer simulation started on an old mainframe three years ago has been running the whole time, counting down until the computer figures out the missile launch codes for itself, goes into failsafe mode, and launches the United States' entire arsenal of nuclear weapons, because Professor Falken has been dead a long time now.

The Russians fire their nuclear weapons back at America, and between the detonations themselves, the fallout and the ensuing nuclear winter, nearly all life on Earth is wiped out, right before a previously undetected meteor comes along to finish the job. There still is some life, because as we learned from Dr. Ian Malcolm, before several of his associates were eaten by velociraptors, life finds a way.

After another 500 million years, life forms develop on Earth capable of time travel and opening portals to other galaxies, and the Earth of "2015 A.D." is allowed to continue on a planet called Uqmarlox-38, whose only difference from this planet at this time is that radioactivity has no effects. The Cardinals' front office is cleared of any wrongdoing, excpet for one guy who goes to jail.

During the parade for St. Louis' World Series victory, all the floats turn into robots and enslave humanity. There is no one to hit the restart button this time. Uqmarlox-38 is a robot planet now, and what's left of humanity squarely blames the Cardinals franchise for ever having existed.

Jesse Spector