TWiB Notes: Week of Aug 1st - 8th

[Frayed Knot]

- Despite both hitting their first career HRs on Tuesday AND being handed early 6-0 leads, neither Max Scherzer nor Jon Lester stuck around long enough to get a Win
Scherzer, first HR in 262 career ABs, left after one inning with 'neck spasms', something you normally associate with giving up HRs, not hitting them. The Nats went on to blow the lead and lose the game to the Marlins
Lester, 197 ABs, took over 100 pitches just to get through the 4th and never came out for the 5th despite an 8-1 Cubs lead in a game they'd go on to win 16-4



- The starting pitchers last night in the Philly/Angels game were Aaron Nola and Ricky Nolasco
I think MLB should have been forced the teams to move the site of that game to New Orleans

[Edgy MD]

And we've got 3,000 hits for Adrian Beltre.

But a Fox Sports shmo wants you to toss it out because (1) he excelled in his 30s, and (2) he's Dominican, so you do the math.

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[Edgy MD]

Also, what's better than naming your kid after a Texas city? Naming him after two Texas cities, like Austin Jackson.

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[Frayed Knot]

I'm going to go out on limb here and guess that this is probably the first time Doug Gottlieb has talked about baseball in .... well how long has he had his own show?
He's a basketball geek, which is fine in itself but it's a group who are at least as bad as the football geeks at avoiding the topic of baseball entirely unless they have something negative to say.
Gottlieb, btw, played college hoops at three different schools due to drug and theft issues that got him kicked out of Notre Dame before diverting himself to some backwater college while the
heat died down then finally winding up at Oklahoma State.


But since he brings it up:

Beltre from age 20-29: 273/328/462
from age 30 thru today: 305/355/507

Not exactly "an explosion" especially considering that he hit 48 HRs as a 25 y/o, a number he hasn't come within a dozen of during his "questionable" years, and that those age 32 and up seasons
correspond to his home park being in Arlington Texas. Or we could point out that Beltre's HR rate is lower now than it was a decade ago but that of course would require research on Gottlieb's part
and he'd prefer to come up with simplistic conclusions in advance, saves time and effort that way.

[seawolf17]

Just being a racist rabble-rouser is way easier than being a sentient human being. Fuck Gottlieb.

[Guest Mets Willets Point]

Edgy MD wrote: Also, what's better than naming your kid after a Texas city? Naming him after two Texas cities, like Austin Jackson. [tweet]https://twitter.com/sporer/status/892551345563213824[/tweet]

Austin Jackson was Torii Hunter's teammate on the Tigers in 2013 playoffs. He must have been taking notes about how to flop over the bullpen wall and actually make the catch.

[Frayed Knot]

From the 'Why couldn't they have done this LAST year at this time' file, the SF Giants have DFA'd 3B Conor Gillaspie
Injuries and poor hitting [.163/.281/.288] limited him to just 80 ML ABs this year with 2 HRs


I don't think I realized that Gillespie is now 30 y/o and had been kicking around the majors since 2008, first with the Giants, then the ChiSox where he was a full-timer in 2013-14, then did
a season with Angels before going back to the Giants in 2016.
It just seems like he appeared out of the ether last October as someone sent to annoy us and now is disappearing again.