2 comments Adam Dunn=Sponge

As Jane Austin once famously wrote;

"it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. And Adam Dunn is terrible."

Very true Jane, very true. No lesser literary critic than Jeff Passan concurs.

Swinging for fences

Adam Dunn has glaring weaknesses but the D'backs got stronger after dealing for him

glaring. Blinding. Fucking deafening weaknesses. But they did get stronger after dealing for him. I guess I might be convinced since the most similar player through seven seasons is this dude.

No player in baseball history has been quite like Adam Dunn...

BEHOLD, the power of the internet truly is imposing. I, like you, Jeff, thought that no other hitter in the one hundred and sixty nine year history of baseball every hit a lot of home runs, struck out a lot and walked plenty. But my eyes have been opened. Opened by the power of this scary new technology called the internet and baseballreference.com. And the moment they were opened I had the misfortune of being blinded by a passing Adam Dunn weakness. What are the odds?

the epitome of a hit-or-miss guy, so it is fitting that he’s on the move for the first time in his career, heading to the Arizona Diamondbacks, in the sort of deal that clicks or bombs but rarely sees an in between.

ugh, dude, you are so reaching here. First of all, what did the D'backs give away? A bunch of prospects, I dunno, say they are awesome prospects, which I guess you're assuming for the dire consequences you envision. OK, you know what is the youngest team full of prospects in the one hundred and sixty nine year history of baseball? The Arizona Diamondbacks. Man, it is so fun to say things are the only one of their kind in like two centuries. So they are really young and don't really want to be any younger, in fact, young, inexperienced hitting is a big part of the problem this year. So they need to get older, more experienced, and more level headed.

Furthermore, you know what the most likely outcome here is? That the Diamondbacks fall somewhere "in-between". I still think they will win the World Series (I've always been contrarian), but they probably won't, statistically, but they probably will make the playoffs. Isn't that the definition of in-between? It's literally the most likely outcome.

Simple though it may sound, if the Diamondbacks do hold their tenuous 1½-game lead over Los Angeles in the National League West, the trade is a success.

I'm not sure why that sounds simple. It sounds pretty accurate to me. You should have more self confidence Jeff! I don't need you giving me a little disclaimer before every opinion. It's not like I'm dissecting everything you say and making fun of you. Then taking those beliefs and putting them on a website for people to see, humiliating you. That would make me a bit of a dick now wouldn't it?

Because without Dunn, the Diamondbacks – buoyed by Brandon Webb and Dan Haren playing Batman and Robin – would be hard-pressed to survive a season laden with trip wires.

I beg to differ with Dodgers superfan#1 right here, but I'm sure you'll offer some analysis and evidence for your opinion.

The latest, a season-ending wrist injury to second baseman Orlando Hudson, made the deal – which just beat the 48-hour deadline after the Diamondbacks claimed Dunn off waivers from Cincinnati – all the more imperative. Oh, there were other bummers: losing Eric Byrnes for the season and lamenting the selling of Carlos Quentin, whose 32 home runs tie Dunn for the major-league lead, and getting substandard production from some of their great young talents, Justin Upton and Chris Young chief among them.

I don't see why Justin Upton and Chris Young's poor performance so far would be a trip wire for the future. If anything, statistically it suggests they are likely to regress to the mean and be better over the last month and a half. Unless you're suggesting their both terrible, which is a pretty big call for a #1 pick in 2005 and a dude who hit 32HR in his first season in the majors. But you are Jeff Passan, who listens to no fan and laughs in the face of things of things that make grown men cower.

I'll give you Orlando Hudson, I guess. Eric Byrnes however is hitting .209/.272/.369. He's not very good even when he's at his best. Carlos Quentin playing for the White Sox has nothing to do with the games the D'backs have already played (they didn't meet in interleague) let alone a "trip wire" for what is coming up. You could say you've "struck out" with this passage Jeff.

Sorry.

Hudson’s absence shook the Diamondbacks, and shook them into action.

shook them deep in their soul, rattling their ribcage with a tremour that could only be measured by an existential angstometer.

Dunn is a mess of exaggerations – size, at 6-foot-6 and 275 pounds, and swing, a long, looping strike of force, and mannerisms, with his outsized sense of humor. But he has undeniable raw natural power, which will play at Chase Field just fine.

the same power in PNC Park? Ho-ho-ho, an absolute recipe for disaster my niave friend. It would appear you don't know a lot about running a baseball team. That cockamammy nonsense may play down in Chase Field, but it doesn't fool us around here.

With eight more homers this season, Dunn will become the eighth player in major league history to hit 40 or more in five consecutive years. Babe Ruth owns the record with seven. Alex Rodriguez and Sammy Sosa did it six times. Ralph Kiner, Duke Snider, Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr. round out the list.

this trade does sound like a risk.

Griffey, a teammate of Dunn’s with the Reds for the last eight seasons, can’t understand why the 28-year-old isn’t more of a commodity. Maybe it’s Dunn’s batting average – .233 this year, .247 for his career. Or the nonchalance with which he’s perceived to conduct himself – due, perhaps, as much to the long-running idea that he regrets leaving a scholarship to play quarterback at Texas as the fact that, yes, Dunn does carry himself in the outfield like a sloth.

or perhaps, just perhaps, too many people involved in baseball teams are totally full of shit! Yes! Eureka!

Whatever the case, Dunn’s reputation has been the object of whispers that in June went public when Toronto general manager J.P. Ricciardi ripped him on a radio station as a player who “doesn’t really like baseball all that much.”

The two had never spoken.

“For someone to think just because he likes throwing a football around, he isn’t passionate about baseball – it’s just so far from the truth,” Griffey said last week. “If you don’t care about baseball, you don’t hit 40 home runs every year. You just don’t.”

Dunn’s retort – “I don’t know the clown,” he began – was pointed. Still, the questions raised by Ricciardi about his commitment could have driven down his trade value.

I submit a challenge to our readers. Who can come up with the funniest word to describe the stupidity required to have flippant comments from an uninformed source on someones personality, who doesn't even play, not only on that team, but any team, convince you to not want one of the best players in the Major Leagues? You'd have to be inbred wouldn't you? What about Jeff, who has been swayed by this argument second hand? I don't know if there's any more hope in this column dearest Jeffrey.

Because, in the end, Cincinnati GM Walt Jocketty got Dallas Buck, a one-time hotshot prospect with a history of arm troubles, and a couple of players to be named later.

this Dunn sounds like a risk (part 2).

For eight years, Dunn languished in Cincinnati, where the postseason meant a derriere imprint on the couch. He’ll play right field and hit fourth in Colorado on Tuesday, the Diamondbacks going headlong into the Dunn experience.

better put your sunglasses on Phoenix.

Part of it is the laughable fielding and the absurd strikeout numbers, which makes Arizona’s lineup – already with serial whiffers Young, Upton and Mark Reynolds – more porous than a sponge.

there is this thing, it's called a colander . It's entire purpose is to have lots of holes. Porosity is a measure of the void spaces in a material. A sponge's purpose is to absorb liquids. Literally to stop liquids from passing through. If a colander had an opposite, it would be a sponge. This metaphor, in other words, could not logically be more wrong.

And the other part...

the non-sponge part.

consists of home runs and walks, the two special qualities that separate Dunn from his predecessors and contemporaries. Think five straight years of 40 homers is impressive? Dunn is 20 walks from hitting 100 for the fifth straight year, and only Bonds has done 40-100 five in a row. Never Babe Ruth. Never Ted Williams. No one but Bonds and, soon, Dunn.

risk!

The Diamondbacks are fine with the skeptics trashing Dunn. They can chuckle that 36.8 percent of his hits this year are home runs...

wh-wha-why is this bad? Is there some metric done on what constitutes the optimal percentage of hits that are home runs? Wouldn't it be 100%, and closer is better? Do you mean he doesn't have a lot of hits? Nearly as retarded a way of judging a player.

or call him Dave Kingman with a good eye or train cameras on his outfield antics in preparation for the blooper reel.

Arizona is in a pennant race, and it needed to do this. As its newest player can attest, it’s better to swing for a home run than stand there with the bat on your shoulder.

well to be fair, he does that a bit too, you forgot to mention, he's third in walks. Anyway,

RISK!!!