Walkoff grand slams, a ball dies in the mud, a long-tenured executive gets the axe, and we talk about Liz Cheney, mock Donald Trump, and ask some pretty personal questions about Captain America
Right, who's the last decent player to come out of that system? Gallo? I guess Dunning has a chance to be an average starter.
What sucks is that I liked their style of rebuild (trade veterans at the deadline and sign top free agents in the offseason), and worry that the ownership has soured on it. Maybe the strategy will remain in place and the GM and manager needed to go. Their farm was pretty bad for a while (which is on the GM), but now at least seems in the conversation for being top 10 due to replenishment from trades. Maybe changes to player development and draft strategy are warranted. But I really like the idea of trading veterans if you can get the right prospects back and then spending money in the offseason to have at least a decent product.
Apologies all, but I had some sort of weird version screwup when I published this and it put in the one without a little sign-off -- and one which included two way/war typos in the Captain America item that I actually -- I swear! -- fixed before publishing. Substack will do that sometimes. Revert to a previous draft, etc. I usually catch it but this time I didn't.
Spending any time wondering if anyone is a virgin is kind of icky. If that is the sort of humor She-Hulk is giving us, that is another reason I am not interested. Even though Jennifer Walters is one of my favorite Marvel characters. (BTW, comic book Steve Rogers is something of a horndog.)
Sadly, the adaptation of The Langoliers is not something anyone quotes.
That Mets bullpen will give all of us in MetsLand apoplexy. But a win is a win. I looked up who else homered in his first at bat, and it's an interesting list. There are people (mainly pitchers) who never homered again. And a lot of players of note, including Aaron Judge. The current HR champ among people who homered in a first at bat is Gary Gaetti, but I suspect Judge will take that away eventually. Only two Hall of Famers homered in a first at bat, Earl Averill and Hoyt Wilhelm, who is one of those pitchers with one home run. Congrats to Baty on what I hope is a successful career in Queens.
Not sure how much you can blame your apoplexy on the bullpen last night. The problems were started by Scherzer totally running out of gas in the 7th (despite only throwing 91 pitches), and ironically the long Mets top of the 9th (where they got 3 insurance runs) kept Diaz on the bench too long and negated the possibility of a 2 inning save.
Nah, the padding the lead negated the need to use Diaz for 2 innings so they could save him for today. Or so it appeared. Ottavino faced 3 batters and got 1 out (admittedly that out was almost an inning ending double play), 1 home run, and 1 walk. That's not very effective even if you don't count the 3 inherited runners he let score. And May gave up 2 runs, 3 hits, and a potentially game tying flyball to the warning track in his inning, so he wasn't very effective either.
Somebody besides Diaz has to be able to pitch an inning without giving up runs once in a while.
Another day, another Mets worry. They made us feel better about the offense yesterday, but then two of the few relievers who you thought you could sort of rely on imploded. Leaving one guy in the bullpen you trust. (Do we trust Lugo today? OK, call it two.)
The bullpen has been a source of concern all year, and I expected them to do something about it at the deadline. But all they added was Givens, who was OK with the Cubs but has given up 9 ER in 6 innings for the Mets. And since they traded away Holderman, the net result is they made the bullpen worse. Was what was obvious to us not obvious to the front office?
Will add that while I still think this is foolhardy, the Mets might be getting back four pitchers from the IL soon and all are slated to be in the pen. But of them, only Joey Lucchesi is a lefty and he's coming back from TJ surgery. Surely they aren't counting on him, are they?
What's weird is that the Twins had similar bullpen issues, and were able to get two good arms. Sure, Lopez (with years of team control) was somewhat pricy in prospects, but Fullmer wasn't at all. And other contenders were able to add bullpen help. If the Mets had a surplus of starters and could move some into the pen for the stretch, I could understand it. But most of their veteran starters have injury risk, so they need the depth.
HR in 1st AB was a trivia Q I had in my pocket back in the day when I was a trivia expert.
love the Wilhelm answer.
Tyler Austin & Judge went back to back in their respective 1st ABs.
One of the great Q was:
HR in 1st TWO ABs: Bob Nieman and Keith MacDonald.
HR before 20th Bday and after 40th -- Ty Cobb and Rusty Staub. (I'd give this Q with "the names rhyme" and at the firehouse guys would be lost. Kaline was close?)
HR 1st and LAST AB?
Paul Gillespie and John Miller (but, alas, I had to look that one up).
Lemme know if I got any wrong folks.
PS -- Spahn was a prolific HR hitter, I think he has the record for most consecutive years with a HR among pitchers.
Pretty accurate. Each of them has approximately one single principle which makes them a step up on those with zero, but it's barely onto the curb out of the gutter really.
Romney gets slightly more credit. After all, he invented Obamacare. He's also made noise about being cool with the child tax credit, albeit in crappy form. And he voted to convict and remove Trump from office both* times, not just the second time. God dammit, did I just... sing the praises of MITT FUCKING ROMNEY?
*well, on the first charge, "abuse of power." Not guilty on the other one, "obstruction of congress." Eh.
Lost in your Guardians/Tigers recap is the fact that not only did the 6 runs in the 8th come after 2 outs (both K’s), but they actually came after a THIRD strikeout…with Luke Maile reaching first on a wild pitch. Apparently they’re the first team since at least 1961 to score 6 runs in an inning after already striking out 3 times.
And then, of course, Gimemez (who struck out to start the inning) also struck out to end the inning. Crazy inning…
That Guardians eighth inning was even stranger than you describe- they scored six runs after striking out three times, then ended the rally with a fourth strikeout.
'On Tuesday night Dennis Eckersley ripped the Pirates, calling them “pathetic” and “a no-name lineup” a “hodgepodge of nothingness” and ripped the organization for having a low payroll and not trying.'
Wonder what he'd have said about the Gnats if the Red Sox played them this year?
I know the Nationals suck, but they're in no way approaching the horseshit that Bob Nutting has been pulling for decades.
Washington is paying roughly as much for Strasburg and Corbin as the Pirates are spending on their total payroll.
So yeah, the Nats are shitty, but they've taken a much different path to arrive in their current state of shittiness. Hell, they've won their division 3 times in the past 10 years (and that's not counting 2019 when they won the World Series).
The Pirates have literally never won the NL Central (their last division title was the 1992 NL East). In the past 30 seasons, they've only finished 2nd 4 times. It's absolute garbage.
I feel bad for Pirates fans, because they're at the mercy of a trash heap of an owner with no relief in sight.
She-Hulk was...um... god, I hate saying that we're over Marvel'd because I too am a Large Mark but... oh and then I watched the Groot shorts and I was...um... god, i hate saying it... does Marvel need to take a nice long break?
The Braves score 7 in a Scherzer start and don’t win. That’s tough. Odorizzi didn’t have it and Snitker’s bullpen management was questionable. Fried returns tonight to face deGrom. Should be a good one!
It is tradition for Atlanta fans to hate bullpen & roster management. I'm pretty sure that Craig wouldn't have this Coffee gig if it weren't for gripes about Albie Lopez or Keith Lockhart.
But what decisions yesterday should be questioned? Yates is hoped to be a key middle / set up guy who needs to get in some innings as part of his return post TJS. Stephens didn't have it but (a) has been mostly fine this year and (b) per the rules requiring facing three batters, could have, at best, been taken out only one batter earlier.
Brewers fan chiming in. We might be the one franchise fanbase that actually kind of likes how the bullpen and rotation has been used in the past few years - well, at least by Craig Counsell, the manager. He's sort of earned the nickname Mr. September. However, now that roster expansion is down to 28, he's got fewer levers to pull. Also, it helps with Josh Hader is your closer.
Ah yes, has there ever been a trade that worked out worse for both teams than Hader to San Diego for Taylor Rogers and Some Guys? Dinelson Lamet was DFAd to save $2m within days, the two prospects are prospects and only that, and Taylor Rogers has just plain sucked. Not Counsell's fault, but the FO - under ownership orders to Never Tank, which is fun until it isn't (but beats the alternative) - has taken heat for this and perhaps deservedly so. I'm being more patient. We'll see.
I see what you're saying, but the Brewers needed something more specific than just another bat: they needed another Lorenzo Cain. Everyone on the infield had an OPS+ above 100 at the deadline, and most of the outfield did too. And Hiura, despite the strikeouts, has finally started making hard contact again (he needs to DH more against lefties). The catchers are hitting fine for their position. But according to baseball-reference today, the Brewers' biggest hole is CF, where they rank 22nd out of 30 teams in wins above average. That's their worst position by far - the second lowest wins above average from a non-pitcher position rank is 15th and that's first base. Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, the pitching overall has been worse than the position players. That's what you get with an unlucky-first-two-months Brandon Woodruff and a two-months-injured Freddy Peralta, among other things I suppose.
So, yeah, what they needed was Lorenzo Cain. A centerfielder. SOMEONE who can hit even league-average and play good CF defense. Michael Taylor would have made a great trade target. Also, if Hubert Humphrey had distanced himself from LBJ earlier in the campaign, he might just have beat Nixon in '68.
He got through 1-5 in the lineup just fine the third time. Coming out to start the 6th having thrown ~80 pitches and not allowing any runs in innings 3-5 seemed reasonable to me. BYMMV.
Apparently Greg Brown, the Pirates play-by-play voice and the biggest homer in all of broadcasting, had this to say on the local sports radio station in Pittsburgh in response to Eckersley:
"I'd ask him, what's more ridiculous? A team with the lowest payroll finishing in last place OR a team [like Boston] with the 5th or 6th highest payroll being under .500?"
Good god, what a great company robot... err, man. The only thing more cringeworthy than his constant, blatant homerism is when he “laughs” at a joke on air trying to sound like a human, it’s like he learned how to laugh by watching Alex Moffat impersonate Mark Zuckerberg on SNL and not realizing it was a joke.
Seems like a nicely veiled criticism of the team front office to me. Reword it: "What can you expect from a team owned by an asshat more interested in profit than winning?"
I don’t know, it’s hard to believe he meant anything other than thinking he was dropping some hot comeback to Eckersley. This guy is known for having no shame in scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel to try to paint the Pirates front office/ownsership’s ways of operating a baseball team in a positive light.
Having watched Pirates games for years and slowly rotting away to the point I no longer have a soul or understand the concept of emotion, I know that the day Greg Brown offers a truly critical word about the Pirates is the day as there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos and that'll be a home run. And so that'll make it a 4-0 ballgame.
GM Chris Young of the Rangers has had a fascinating career, highlighted by getting the win in the 3-inning scoreless relief stint in extra innings in KC's win in Game 1 of the 2015 WS.
Wikipedia article about him is fun, with 2 tidbits worth mentioning: his only HR was the first by a Princeton alum since Moe Berg in 1939; and,his father in law is president of the NHL Capitals. Must make for interesting sports-executive level family conversations.
Columbia: Lou Gehrig or Eddie Collins or Sandy Koufax
Cornell: Harry Taylor or Joe Birmingham - no one good
Dartmouth: Brad Ausmus
Harvard: Eddie Grant
Penn: timeline puts the similar Doug Glanville as better than 1800s Roy Thomas
Princeton: Will Veneble*
Yale: Gentleman Jim O'Rourke from the 1800s or Ron Darling from Roger Angell's Web of the Game
*Big honorable mention for the late Bob Tufts. Not for his pitching for the Royals, but for his frequent posts at Baseball Think Factory. Gotta love an internet dweeb.
Well Venable will probably never be played by Ant Man in a feature film. But then again, I'm hoping that Venable treats his family and friends better than Berg. The book version of Catcher Was a Spy paints a pretty ugly picture of his late life as a paranoid, habitual liar, living off the kindness of his mistreated sister. And it also notes how incredibly inflated Berg made his spying actions seem. I'm sure that dressing in a ceremonial robe while on tours of Japan with ball teams pre-war allowed him to sneak around and take vitally important photos, right?
He did serve in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) during WWII and was stationed in Europe. But as I remember from my reading several years ago, his service wasn't notable or significant. Volunteering for quasi military service in wartime and assigned to war zone areas is, itself, otherwise honorable, but AFAICT, the tasks assigned were either routine or did not achieve the desired results (e.g. tasked with identifying German scientists who could be induced to defect, he didn't actually find any.)
I'm not explaining well. Both Rod Carew and Al Bumbry served in the U.S. Army during Vietnam. Carew was a reservist who never left the continental U.S., Bumbry lead a platoon and earned a Bronze Star. Their service isn't the same. Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan both were officers in the USA during WWII; the former was a pilot on combat bombing runs, the latter filmed ads to sell bonds. Their service isn't the same.
Did Koufax attend Columbia? Googling tells me he enrolled in their General Studies program but it's unclear he ever attended. When would he have? He went to University of Cincinnati after high school and then never finished college.
Never mind. He took night classes at Columbia for a few months. I suppose that counts.
Steve Rogers had to have been a pretty good pitcher to have been allowed to lose 22 in a season and lead the league in losses twice! You've got to be talented to be allowed that long a leash. Then, after a decade of seasoning he could well have won a CYA with his brilliant pitching in Montreal circa 1982. Easily the best Expos pitcher and, depending on how you weigh career vs. peak, the best for the combined Nat-Spos.
No proof, but my guess is that a ballplayer in the 1970s was afforded a lot of opportunities to engage in sexual congress.
When I was a kid, if I made a joke about the pitcher Steve Rogers having the same name as Captain America, maybe three friends would have gotten it. How things have changed.
But, just like giving Bob Feller credit for time on the USS Alabama or Monte Irvin for his years in the Negro Leagues, you need to adjust Steve Rogers WAR for the years he missed due to service in WWII then frozen in the ice. Right?
I am glad I went to bed before the end of that Rays/Yankees game. I knew that the Rays were in trouble when it got rain delayed. The Rays needed to keep that thing moving and sneak out of town. Looks like the Yanks took that hour to get riled up. I also hoped that when Kluber hit Donaldson it would not comeback to haunt the Rays. He is the kind of guy to take serious umbrage with that. Sure enough with a Granny Slammy in OT he got his. Much better to read about it the next day. No one is going to sleep after listening to that deal.
The only thing missing from Eck's comment is a specific callout to Bob Nutting, who is perfectly happy to sit back, collect national revenue, and make a tidy profit while the Pirates languish in the cellar.
I wish MLB had Euro-style promotion/relegation so sacks of shit like Bob Nutting wouldn't be able to cash checks without even pretending to attempt to win games. It's pathetic and it's detestable.
I hope he gets booed and heckled whenever he shows his face in public in PGH - if he's going to treat the city with abject contempt, it's only fitting for that contempt to be returned in spades by the people of Pittsburgh.
(And I'm not even a Pirates fan! I can only imagine how angry the remaining fans who haven't yet given up on the Pirates must be.)
“I hope he gets booed and heckled whenever he shows his face in public in PGH”
…Which is why he *doesn't* show his face in public here. Or do interviews, except for the occasional Opening Day fluff piece about how he has no plans to sell the team (because why would he part with such a consistent moneymaker?).
There was a story a couple weeks ago where a fan took a picture with Nutting and unzipped his jacket to show his t-shirt reading "Sell the Team". There's good reason for him to not show his face in public.
Yes, I agree with you about Liz Cheney, but I will shed a tear for my Wyoming friends.
I used to live in Wyoming—went to high school in Riverton and spent 12 years in Laramie—and I have a lot of friends back there. Laramie is the college town, and its county is one of two in the state that vote Democrat. (The other is Teton County, home to Jackson and its many rich out-of-staters.)
Living in a state where your vote has never mattered, doesn’t matter, and probably will never matter does funny things to your psyche. I often worry that some of my friends suffer from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. For this election, I know many Democrats who registered Republican and voted for Liz Cheney: how else to make their vote matter? They were quite shocked to find themselves supporting a Cheney.
I don’t know how common this cross-party voting was overall, but Cheney (28.9%) did less than three points better than Biden in 2020 (26.6%), so the impact was minimal.
It’s always been tough to be a Democratic in an overwhelmingly red state, but MAGA Republicans are a new level of scary. I really feel for my Wyoming friends right now.
I don't know if this is a good thing or not, but my brain is almost happy when these Trump wackadoos keep primarying more "traditional" politicians because the wackadoos are typically so over the top that they can't really navigate the political process in as meaningful a way as someone like Cheney may have been able to do. On the flip side, that is a big reason why I'm way more terrified of a DeSantis candidacy than I am of Trump running again.
I used to root for the idiots to win their primaries because it improved the chances of my preferred candidates winning. I don't anymore because sometimes a stupid and horrible human actually gets elected and does real damage. And at this point the stupid and horrible are actually driving Republican's cruel priorities. Agreed on DeSantis--being similar in demagoguery to Trump, but more politically astute is scary.
Thirded re DeSantis. I mentioned this in my longer standalone but per Heather Cox Richardson, Alex Jones has officially announced he's switched his support to DeSantis from Trump. This is important, and others will do so too. The 2024 GOP primary will be batshit crazy regardless of whether Trump runs, but should he run (and all odds are that he will, unless he's in jail, and even then he might pull a Eugene Debs... man how about THAT comparison), they'll need to conduct debates wearing straitjackets and in a rubber room. Anyway, as I wrote elsewhere, I'm pretty convinced at this point that the Democrats who run the election machinery would rather run against the damaged loser Trump than DeSantis, or Noem, or whoever else "rising" star in the GOP might shoot for the nomination.
They absolutely want to run against Trump rather than a "real" politician. The Democrat machine tipped their hand this past election cycle when they actually funded ads that almost supported the wackiest of wackadoos in the Republican primaries.
For example, in PA, Democrat governor candidate Josh Shapiro's campaign ran ads that were like "A vote for Doug Mastriano is a vote for Trump" (For those not from PA, Mastriano is a legit crazy person who was 100% in DC on 1/6 and very possibly stormed the Capitol and was recently ask by the Congressional committee to be deposed but refused to go. Also has some insane views on topics like election integrity, where he bragged that if he wins, PA will never have another Democrat in office, and abortion, which he says the death of the mother is still not cause for abortion)
Ratfucking! I do love it. Remember when McCaskill in Missouri elevated Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin through the MO GOP primary, and hung on to her seat for another six years? It works. Sometimes.
I sure hope it works this time, too, because given the makeup of Pennsylvania (Philly on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, and Kentucky in the middle), a Republican governor will turn the state into a dystopia VERY quickly
They tried to do it again in Missouri with that scumbag Greitens (I should probably mention at this point that I don't live in MIssouri, I just read about elections a lot) but he was so odious, not even Democratic stealth efforts could put him over.
Fetterman looks pretty good but, yeah, the governor's race in PA needs to absolutely not go to Mastriano.
Right, who's the last decent player to come out of that system? Gallo? I guess Dunning has a chance to be an average starter.
What sucks is that I liked their style of rebuild (trade veterans at the deadline and sign top free agents in the offseason), and worry that the ownership has soured on it. Maybe the strategy will remain in place and the GM and manager needed to go. Their farm was pretty bad for a while (which is on the GM), but now at least seems in the conversation for being top 10 due to replenishment from trades. Maybe changes to player development and draft strategy are warranted. But I really like the idea of trading veterans if you can get the right prospects back and then spending money in the offseason to have at least a decent product.
Apologies all, but I had some sort of weird version screwup when I published this and it put in the one without a little sign-off -- and one which included two way/war typos in the Captain America item that I actually -- I swear! -- fixed before publishing. Substack will do that sometimes. Revert to a previous draft, etc. I usually catch it but this time I didn't.
Spending any time wondering if anyone is a virgin is kind of icky. If that is the sort of humor She-Hulk is giving us, that is another reason I am not interested. Even though Jennifer Walters is one of my favorite Marvel characters. (BTW, comic book Steve Rogers is something of a horndog.)
Sadly, the adaptation of The Langoliers is not something anyone quotes.
That Mets bullpen will give all of us in MetsLand apoplexy. But a win is a win. I looked up who else homered in his first at bat, and it's an interesting list. There are people (mainly pitchers) who never homered again. And a lot of players of note, including Aaron Judge. The current HR champ among people who homered in a first at bat is Gary Gaetti, but I suspect Judge will take that away eventually. Only two Hall of Famers homered in a first at bat, Earl Averill and Hoyt Wilhelm, who is one of those pitchers with one home run. Congrats to Baty on what I hope is a successful career in Queens.
Not sure how much you can blame your apoplexy on the bullpen last night. The problems were started by Scherzer totally running out of gas in the 7th (despite only throwing 91 pitches), and ironically the long Mets top of the 9th (where they got 3 insurance runs) kept Diaz on the bench too long and negated the possibility of a 2 inning save.
Interesting stuff about the first-AB homerers!
Nah, the padding the lead negated the need to use Diaz for 2 innings so they could save him for today. Or so it appeared. Ottavino faced 3 batters and got 1 out (admittedly that out was almost an inning ending double play), 1 home run, and 1 walk. That's not very effective even if you don't count the 3 inherited runners he let score. And May gave up 2 runs, 3 hits, and a potentially game tying flyball to the warning track in his inning, so he wasn't very effective either.
Somebody besides Diaz has to be able to pitch an inning without giving up runs once in a while.
Another day, another Mets worry. They made us feel better about the offense yesterday, but then two of the few relievers who you thought you could sort of rely on imploded. Leaving one guy in the bullpen you trust. (Do we trust Lugo today? OK, call it two.)
The bullpen has been a source of concern all year, and I expected them to do something about it at the deadline. But all they added was Givens, who was OK with the Cubs but has given up 9 ER in 6 innings for the Mets. And since they traded away Holderman, the net result is they made the bullpen worse. Was what was obvious to us not obvious to the front office?
I mean, it's right there in Holderman's name!
Will add that while I still think this is foolhardy, the Mets might be getting back four pitchers from the IL soon and all are slated to be in the pen. But of them, only Joey Lucchesi is a lefty and he's coming back from TJ surgery. Surely they aren't counting on him, are they?
What's weird is that the Twins had similar bullpen issues, and were able to get two good arms. Sure, Lopez (with years of team control) was somewhat pricy in prospects, but Fullmer wasn't at all. And other contenders were able to add bullpen help. If the Mets had a surplus of starters and could move some into the pen for the stretch, I could understand it. But most of their veteran starters have injury risk, so they need the depth.
Of note is that Baty is that hit his HR on his first swing of the bat - the first pitch he saw was a ball.
HR in 1st AB was a trivia Q I had in my pocket back in the day when I was a trivia expert.
love the Wilhelm answer.
Tyler Austin & Judge went back to back in their respective 1st ABs.
One of the great Q was:
HR in 1st TWO ABs: Bob Nieman and Keith MacDonald.
HR before 20th Bday and after 40th -- Ty Cobb and Rusty Staub. (I'd give this Q with "the names rhyme" and at the firehouse guys would be lost. Kaline was close?)
HR 1st and LAST AB?
Paul Gillespie and John Miller (but, alas, I had to look that one up).
Lemme know if I got any wrong folks.
PS -- Spahn was a prolific HR hitter, I think he has the record for most consecutive years with a HR among pitchers.
At least Kimbrel isn't in your bullpen. When he enters a game I so long to have Kenley Jansen back.
Yordan Alvarez is another notable first hit for a homer guy.
For future reference, you can a do a find and replace with Mitt Romney for Liz Cheney and only have to change some pronouns.
Are you sure they use pronouns?
Unlike mirrors, I think they can if they want to
Oh, they use them, all right. It just wouldn't occur to them to tell people which pronouns they use.
Pretty accurate. Each of them has approximately one single principle which makes them a step up on those with zero, but it's barely onto the curb out of the gutter really.
Romney gets slightly more credit. After all, he invented Obamacare. He's also made noise about being cool with the child tax credit, albeit in crappy form. And he voted to convict and remove Trump from office both* times, not just the second time. God dammit, did I just... sing the praises of MITT FUCKING ROMNEY?
*well, on the first charge, "abuse of power." Not guilty on the other one, "obstruction of congress." Eh.
Mitt’s original CTC plan was pretty dang good. Of course that couldn’t stand and the revised version is bad.
Lost in your Guardians/Tigers recap is the fact that not only did the 6 runs in the 8th come after 2 outs (both K’s), but they actually came after a THIRD strikeout…with Luke Maile reaching first on a wild pitch. Apparently they’re the first team since at least 1961 to score 6 runs in an inning after already striking out 3 times.
And then, of course, Gimemez (who struck out to start the inning) also struck out to end the inning. Crazy inning…
That Guardians eighth inning was even stranger than you describe- they scored six runs after striking out three times, then ended the rally with a fourth strikeout.
Beat you by 2 minutes!
'On Tuesday night Dennis Eckersley ripped the Pirates, calling them “pathetic” and “a no-name lineup” a “hodgepodge of nothingness” and ripped the organization for having a low payroll and not trying.'
Wonder what he'd have said about the Gnats if the Red Sox played them this year?
I know the Nationals suck, but they're in no way approaching the horseshit that Bob Nutting has been pulling for decades.
Washington is paying roughly as much for Strasburg and Corbin as the Pirates are spending on their total payroll.
So yeah, the Nats are shitty, but they've taken a much different path to arrive in their current state of shittiness. Hell, they've won their division 3 times in the past 10 years (and that's not counting 2019 when they won the World Series).
The Pirates have literally never won the NL Central (their last division title was the 1992 NL East). In the past 30 seasons, they've only finished 2nd 4 times. It's absolute garbage.
I feel bad for Pirates fans, because they're at the mercy of a trash heap of an owner with no relief in sight.
She-Hulk was...um... god, I hate saying that we're over Marvel'd because I too am a Large Mark but... oh and then I watched the Groot shorts and I was...um... god, i hate saying it... does Marvel need to take a nice long break?
Of course it does. Turning out show after show and movie after movie will make the brand thinner. And there is nothing special about it now.
The Braves score 7 in a Scherzer start and don’t win. That’s tough. Odorizzi didn’t have it and Snitker’s bullpen management was questionable. Fried returns tonight to face deGrom. Should be a good one!
It is tradition for Atlanta fans to hate bullpen & roster management. I'm pretty sure that Craig wouldn't have this Coffee gig if it weren't for gripes about Albie Lopez or Keith Lockhart.
But what decisions yesterday should be questioned? Yates is hoped to be a key middle / set up guy who needs to get in some innings as part of his return post TJS. Stephens didn't have it but (a) has been mostly fine this year and (b) per the rules requiring facing three batters, could have, at best, been taken out only one batter earlier.
What fan doesn't hate their team's bullpen management?
To be fair, and as an impartial observer, the Mets medical staff has truly sucked in the not too distant past.
Brewers fan chiming in. We might be the one franchise fanbase that actually kind of likes how the bullpen and rotation has been used in the past few years - well, at least by Craig Counsell, the manager. He's sort of earned the nickname Mr. September. However, now that roster expansion is down to 28, he's got fewer levers to pull. Also, it helps with Josh Hader is your closer.
Ah yes, has there ever been a trade that worked out worse for both teams than Hader to San Diego for Taylor Rogers and Some Guys? Dinelson Lamet was DFAd to save $2m within days, the two prospects are prospects and only that, and Taylor Rogers has just plain sucked. Not Counsell's fault, but the FO - under ownership orders to Never Tank, which is fun until it isn't (but beats the alternative) - has taken heat for this and perhaps deservedly so. I'm being more patient. We'll see.
The Hader trade didn't bother me at all. It's the failure to obtain another bat that really grinds my gears.
I see what you're saying, but the Brewers needed something more specific than just another bat: they needed another Lorenzo Cain. Everyone on the infield had an OPS+ above 100 at the deadline, and most of the outfield did too. And Hiura, despite the strikeouts, has finally started making hard contact again (he needs to DH more against lefties). The catchers are hitting fine for their position. But according to baseball-reference today, the Brewers' biggest hole is CF, where they rank 22nd out of 30 teams in wins above average. That's their worst position by far - the second lowest wins above average from a non-pitcher position rank is 15th and that's first base. Interestingly, and perhaps counterintuitively, the pitching overall has been worse than the position players. That's what you get with an unlucky-first-two-months Brandon Woodruff and a two-months-injured Freddy Peralta, among other things I suppose.
So, yeah, what they needed was Lorenzo Cain. A centerfielder. SOMEONE who can hit even league-average and play good CF defense. Michael Taylor would have made a great trade target. Also, if Hubert Humphrey had distanced himself from LBJ earlier in the campaign, he might just have beat Nixon in '68.
Leaving Odorizzi in to face the order for the third time.
He got through 1-5 in the lineup just fine the third time. Coming out to start the 6th having thrown ~80 pitches and not allowing any runs in innings 3-5 seemed reasonable to me. BYMMV.
Apparently Greg Brown, the Pirates play-by-play voice and the biggest homer in all of broadcasting, had this to say on the local sports radio station in Pittsburgh in response to Eckersley:
"I'd ask him, what's more ridiculous? A team with the lowest payroll finishing in last place OR a team [like Boston] with the 5th or 6th highest payroll being under .500?"
Good god, what a great company robot... err, man. The only thing more cringeworthy than his constant, blatant homerism is when he “laughs” at a joke on air trying to sound like a human, it’s like he learned how to laugh by watching Alex Moffat impersonate Mark Zuckerberg on SNL and not realizing it was a joke.
Seems like a nicely veiled criticism of the team front office to me. Reword it: "What can you expect from a team owned by an asshat more interested in profit than winning?"
I don’t know, it’s hard to believe he meant anything other than thinking he was dropping some hot comeback to Eckersley. This guy is known for having no shame in scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel to try to paint the Pirates front office/ownsership’s ways of operating a baseball team in a positive light.
Having watched Pirates games for years and slowly rotting away to the point I no longer have a soul or understand the concept of emotion, I know that the day Greg Brown offers a truly critical word about the Pirates is the day as there's a drive into deep left field by Castellanos and that'll be a home run. And so that'll make it a 4-0 ballgame.
Yeah, apparently for Brown the only stat fans should care about is "$ spent per win" - that's pathetic.
GM Chris Young of the Rangers has had a fascinating career, highlighted by getting the win in the 3-inning scoreless relief stint in extra innings in KC's win in Game 1 of the 2015 WS.
Wikipedia article about him is fun, with 2 tidbits worth mentioning: his only HR was the first by a Princeton alum since Moe Berg in 1939; and,his father in law is president of the NHL Capitals. Must make for interesting sports-executive level family conversations.
Best players from each Ivy League school:
Brown: Fred Tenney
Columbia: Lou Gehrig or Eddie Collins or Sandy Koufax
Cornell: Harry Taylor or Joe Birmingham - no one good
Dartmouth: Brad Ausmus
Harvard: Eddie Grant
Penn: timeline puts the similar Doug Glanville as better than 1800s Roy Thomas
Princeton: Will Veneble*
Yale: Gentleman Jim O'Rourke from the 1800s or Ron Darling from Roger Angell's Web of the Game
*Big honorable mention for the late Bob Tufts. Not for his pitching for the Royals, but for his frequent posts at Baseball Think Factory. Gotta love an internet dweeb.
Koufax attended Columbia, sure - but he actually pitched for the University of Cincinnati.
Venable might be a better player than Moe Berg, but was Venable a spy? What matters more, WAR or conduct during war?
Well Venable will probably never be played by Ant Man in a feature film. But then again, I'm hoping that Venable treats his family and friends better than Berg. The book version of Catcher Was a Spy paints a pretty ugly picture of his late life as a paranoid, habitual liar, living off the kindness of his mistreated sister. And it also notes how incredibly inflated Berg made his spying actions seem. I'm sure that dressing in a ceremonial robe while on tours of Japan with ball teams pre-war allowed him to sneak around and take vitally important photos, right?
I had the sense that he might have played a real role during the war, but you do right some good points.
He did serve in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) during WWII and was stationed in Europe. But as I remember from my reading several years ago, his service wasn't notable or significant. Volunteering for quasi military service in wartime and assigned to war zone areas is, itself, otherwise honorable, but AFAICT, the tasks assigned were either routine or did not achieve the desired results (e.g. tasked with identifying German scientists who could be induced to defect, he didn't actually find any.)
I'm not explaining well. Both Rod Carew and Al Bumbry served in the U.S. Army during Vietnam. Carew was a reservist who never left the continental U.S., Bumbry lead a platoon and earned a Bronze Star. Their service isn't the same. Jimmy Stewart and Ronald Reagan both were officers in the USA during WWII; the former was a pilot on combat bombing runs, the latter filmed ads to sell bonds. Their service isn't the same.
I love ya, ya know that.
how can I put this?
Lou Gehrig. period.
Well ... Collins had more bWAR and the bWAA are fully interchangeable.
#toosoon
hold on, I'ma look up Collins' retirement speech.
(full disclosure, my youngest son's middle name: Gehrig)
If you are Curt Schilling, I’m going to be surprised!
Did Koufax attend Columbia? Googling tells me he enrolled in their General Studies program but it's unclear he ever attended. When would he have? He went to University of Cincinnati after high school and then never finished college.
Never mind. He took night classes at Columbia for a few months. I suppose that counts.
that's how I recall it as well, from books about him
Steve Rogers had to have been a pretty good pitcher to have been allowed to lose 22 in a season and lead the league in losses twice! You've got to be talented to be allowed that long a leash. Then, after a decade of seasoning he could well have won a CYA with his brilliant pitching in Montreal circa 1982. Easily the best Expos pitcher and, depending on how you weigh career vs. peak, the best for the combined Nat-Spos.
No proof, but my guess is that a ballplayer in the 1970s was afforded a lot of opportunities to engage in sexual congress.
This is who we are talking about, right?
When I was a kid, if I made a joke about the pitcher Steve Rogers having the same name as Captain America, maybe three friends would have gotten it. How things have changed.
Max Scherzer's WAR in 6 1/2 years with the Nats was 38.8.
Steve Rogers' WAR in 12 years with the Expos was 45.1.
I'll take Max as best for the combined franchise.
But, just like giving Bob Feller credit for time on the USS Alabama or Monte Irvin for his years in the Negro Leagues, you need to adjust Steve Rogers WAR for the years he missed due to service in WWII then frozen in the ice. Right?
Speaking of frozen in ice, how do we adjust WAR for the frozen head of Ted Williams?
I don't know if you can add much. He's been pretty cold lately.
I am glad I went to bed before the end of that Rays/Yankees game. I knew that the Rays were in trouble when it got rain delayed. The Rays needed to keep that thing moving and sneak out of town. Looks like the Yanks took that hour to get riled up. I also hoped that when Kluber hit Donaldson it would not comeback to haunt the Rays. He is the kind of guy to take serious umbrage with that. Sure enough with a Granny Slammy in OT he got his. Much better to read about it the next day. No one is going to sleep after listening to that deal.
The only thing missing from Eck's comment is a specific callout to Bob Nutting, who is perfectly happy to sit back, collect national revenue, and make a tidy profit while the Pirates languish in the cellar.
I wish MLB had Euro-style promotion/relegation so sacks of shit like Bob Nutting wouldn't be able to cash checks without even pretending to attempt to win games. It's pathetic and it's detestable.
I hope he gets booed and heckled whenever he shows his face in public in PGH - if he's going to treat the city with abject contempt, it's only fitting for that contempt to be returned in spades by the people of Pittsburgh.
(And I'm not even a Pirates fan! I can only imagine how angry the remaining fans who haven't yet given up on the Pirates must be.)
“I hope he gets booed and heckled whenever he shows his face in public in PGH”
…Which is why he *doesn't* show his face in public here. Or do interviews, except for the occasional Opening Day fluff piece about how he has no plans to sell the team (because why would he part with such a consistent moneymaker?).
There was a story a couple weeks ago where a fan took a picture with Nutting and unzipped his jacket to show his t-shirt reading "Sell the Team". There's good reason for him to not show his face in public.
Yes, I agree with you about Liz Cheney, but I will shed a tear for my Wyoming friends.
I used to live in Wyoming—went to high school in Riverton and spent 12 years in Laramie—and I have a lot of friends back there. Laramie is the college town, and its county is one of two in the state that vote Democrat. (The other is Teton County, home to Jackson and its many rich out-of-staters.)
Living in a state where your vote has never mattered, doesn’t matter, and probably will never matter does funny things to your psyche. I often worry that some of my friends suffer from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome. For this election, I know many Democrats who registered Republican and voted for Liz Cheney: how else to make their vote matter? They were quite shocked to find themselves supporting a Cheney.
I don’t know how common this cross-party voting was overall, but Cheney (28.9%) did less than three points better than Biden in 2020 (26.6%), so the impact was minimal.
It’s always been tough to be a Democratic in an overwhelmingly red state, but MAGA Republicans are a new level of scary. I really feel for my Wyoming friends right now.
I don't know if this is a good thing or not, but my brain is almost happy when these Trump wackadoos keep primarying more "traditional" politicians because the wackadoos are typically so over the top that they can't really navigate the political process in as meaningful a way as someone like Cheney may have been able to do. On the flip side, that is a big reason why I'm way more terrified of a DeSantis candidacy than I am of Trump running again.
I used to root for the idiots to win their primaries because it improved the chances of my preferred candidates winning. I don't anymore because sometimes a stupid and horrible human actually gets elected and does real damage. And at this point the stupid and horrible are actually driving Republican's cruel priorities. Agreed on DeSantis--being similar in demagoguery to Trump, but more politically astute is scary.
Thirded re DeSantis. I mentioned this in my longer standalone but per Heather Cox Richardson, Alex Jones has officially announced he's switched his support to DeSantis from Trump. This is important, and others will do so too. The 2024 GOP primary will be batshit crazy regardless of whether Trump runs, but should he run (and all odds are that he will, unless he's in jail, and even then he might pull a Eugene Debs... man how about THAT comparison), they'll need to conduct debates wearing straitjackets and in a rubber room. Anyway, as I wrote elsewhere, I'm pretty convinced at this point that the Democrats who run the election machinery would rather run against the damaged loser Trump than DeSantis, or Noem, or whoever else "rising" star in the GOP might shoot for the nomination.
They absolutely want to run against Trump rather than a "real" politician. The Democrat machine tipped their hand this past election cycle when they actually funded ads that almost supported the wackiest of wackadoos in the Republican primaries.
For example, in PA, Democrat governor candidate Josh Shapiro's campaign ran ads that were like "A vote for Doug Mastriano is a vote for Trump" (For those not from PA, Mastriano is a legit crazy person who was 100% in DC on 1/6 and very possibly stormed the Capitol and was recently ask by the Congressional committee to be deposed but refused to go. Also has some insane views on topics like election integrity, where he bragged that if he wins, PA will never have another Democrat in office, and abortion, which he says the death of the mother is still not cause for abortion)
Ratfucking! I do love it. Remember when McCaskill in Missouri elevated Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin through the MO GOP primary, and hung on to her seat for another six years? It works. Sometimes.
I sure hope it works this time, too, because given the makeup of Pennsylvania (Philly on one side, Pittsburgh on the other, and Kentucky in the middle), a Republican governor will turn the state into a dystopia VERY quickly
They tried to do it again in Missouri with that scumbag Greitens (I should probably mention at this point that I don't live in MIssouri, I just read about elections a lot) but he was so odious, not even Democratic stealth efforts could put him over.
Fetterman looks pretty good but, yeah, the governor's race in PA needs to absolutely not go to Mastriano.