Frayed Knot

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: That was kind of a disappointing loss. Mostly is was just a long one (3:55) ... and a poorly pitched one (10 walks plus about a million full-counts). ... had a lot of bad base-running to it also (including twice in one inning) ... should probably note the iffy defense while we're at it (Lagares's throw ... Ugh!) ... with not a lot of hitting (nine hits but seven of them singles) ... and then there's the part where two of the starting eight were unable to finish the game (Flores & d'Arnaud) But other than those minor details I thought it was pretty good.

Zvon wrote: Frayed Knot wrote: Bad read by Murph maybe but an even worse call by Teufel. Fortunately he was ignored. Tuefel almost got in Muffys way! Wtf was that? And that was a bad call by Tim. Well if you want to hold a runner up it's good to get right in the path so he'll be more likely to see you. The problem is, once Muffy decided to keep running, Timmy suddenly had to bail.

Good lord Satin is slow!!

From John Sickels' career retrospective on Helton: "Here�s the irony of Coors Field: It undoubtedly helped players put up ENORMOUS numbers. And at exactly the same time, it undoubtedly made those numbers look like mirages. . .you get the sense that if (Helton) had put up significantly WORSE numbers but played his whole career somewhere else, his career might be valued higher." With the proper statistical adjustments, we can work around the Coors issue. Using the "normalizing" tool at Baseball Reference, Helton would have hit something on the order of .292/.387/.496 with approximately 323 home runs* in a neutral park/league environment, still impressive in historical terms. Also keep in mind that WAR adjusts for park effect. His career WAR of 55.7 puts him in the neighborhood with first baseman like John Olerud (57.7), Fred McGriff (57.2), Bill Terry (57.0), Norm Cash (54.6), and Will Clark (52.0). As for the minor league comps, Mark Grace checks in at 45.7, Don Mattingly at 40.7. wRC+ is also park-adjusted, and his 132 mark in that column puts him in territory with Clark (136), McGriff (134), Rod Carew (132), Keith Hernandez (131), and Olerud (130) among first basemen with 8000 or more plate appearances. * as compared to his actual .317/.415/.539 w/367 HRs Full article -- http://www.minorleagueball.com/2013/9/16/4734260/todd-helton-prospect-retrospective-colorado-rockies-career-hall-of-fame

Valadius wrote: It's like disqualifying old-time players for smaller gloves or bigger outfields. No, because something like smaller gloves were universal way back when so no one player had an advantage over others. It's like discriminating against pitchers who pitch in pitcher's parks and hitters in stadiums with short porches or other oddities. It's part of the game. It does nobody any good to ignore it. Nobody is ignoring those factors, merely taking them into consideration.

And now another bad read by MdD--he couldn't possibly think Flores was running there and the throw was low enough to be cut anyway--but we get out of it again.

Bad read by Murph maybe but an even worse call by Teufel. Fortunately he was ignored.

The Reds were yesterday's major winner in the NL races (Central and WC) as they gained a full game on the losing Cardinals and Pirates (Pitt almost got no-hit by SD) and a half-game on the Nats who were idled by a madman. The Nats are making up yesterday's postponement by playing a day/night with the Braves. In the day portion they jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the 1st inning, then got one hit for innings 2-8 while the Braves took a 5-3 lead In the 9th the Nats just scored three off Kimbrel to win the game - the last two coming via a one-out grounder going through the legs of Simmons at SS. Seeing as how the Nats have to practically run the table to stay in the mix, a win like this is huge. As it is, things are getting a bit tight.

... that YOUR 4th place Mets opened a big Five game series with the 1st place (although only 2 games above .500) Pirates. The Mets, who sat at 73-76 as September 17th began, sent ace Tom Seaver to the mound where Tom Terrific, a month shy of winning his 2nd Cy Young Award, ... got his ass handed to him by Pittsburgh bats. There are rumors that a then teenage Mikey Francesa was heard to utter into his toy microphone "See, this proves he can't win the big one" but I'm still looking into that. After yielding 5 runs on 7 hits plus a walk, Seaver was yanked after the 3rd inning in a game the Mets would go on to lose 10-3 with Ray Sadecki, 22 y/o Craig Swan (2 IP - 4 ER), and Buzz Capra taking the remainder of the punishment. Ten of the Pirate fifteen hits would go for XBs including 2 doubles, a triple, and a HR from Willie Stargell. That's right, Willie both had a triple and opted NOT to stop at 1st base on his 2nd double so as to "achieve" a cycle. As the day ended, Pittsburgh sat on top by one game over idle Montreal, with StL 2.5 games back, the Mets now 73-77 and 3.5 games back, and the Cubs at -5.5. The (65-84) Phils were the only team really out of it with just two weeks to go at -11 games

Repeating the first half of 2013 is unlikely to be the case whether he has the surgery of not or even had the partial tear had never occurred - so the phrase 'returns to form' is subject to various interpretations. I'm leaning right now towards the current recommendation being NO surgery and he'll be on the mound for opening day 2014 as a solid front of the rotation type pitcher even if without the whole Gibson/'68 or Gooden/'85 vibe. I'll have to read through the choices to see which choice comes closest to that.

Niese - 2.7 Atchison - 0.3 Black - 0.3 Hawkins - 0.6 Brown - 1.5 Duda - 3.0 Young - 0.6

Harang - 1.0 Atchison - 0.5 Young - 1.5 Murphy - 1.0 Recker - 1.2 Duda - 0.5 Baxter - 0.5

Sure, but Yanx fans have cast themselves this year as the gritty underdog overcoming steep odds just to be where they are. In doing so, their decent but hardly great record is disguising a below average team as a pseudo-contender and that's bound to fool at least some of the crowd. As a side note, that their run of success from mid-August or so until this past weekend (where they were actually outscoring their opponents) came not despite the older guys they either wanted to get rid of or never wanted in the first place (Granderson, Soriano, and especially ARod) but because of them makes this even more fun.

John Cougar Lunchbucket wrote: MFYs were eliminated from the division crown last night as though that were any mystery. But eally, terrific job by the Sawx to take, what 6 of 7 vs. these frauds in September. - Yanx are 6-2 in September vs Balt & ChiSox, but that gain gets smacked down by the 1-6 vs BoSox - Jays, Giants, Rays, and Astros left. - It still bugs me that they're 8 games over .500 with a Negative 15 RS/RA differential, although if some YLDBs want to interpret their season as being more of a success than it actually was based on that illusion then maybe it's not so bad after all even I think the front office is probably too smart to see it that way. - And, yeah, it would be great if our four game sweep--let's repeat that for the hard of hearing ...FOUR GAME SWEEP!!--winds up being a large part of why they fall short. Boston has kind of a weird team--seems more like a thrown-together collection of odd pieces rather than any sense of common theme--but it's certainly working.

TEX --- TBR --- CLE -1/2 BAL -2-1/2 NYY -3 KCR -3-1/2 Weekend wrap-up - Boston sweeps the Yanx, outscoring them 22-7 in the process. The real surprise is that the three games managed to take a total of "just" 9:02. Those teams often have trouble getting two games complete in nine hours. - Oakland swept the Rangers and have essentially sewn up the AL West (+6.5) - Indians sweep the ChiSox and, in doing so, put themselves in the lead challenger position with probably the easiest schedule coming down the stretch (KC, HOU, CHW, MIN) - KC loses two of three in a tough series with Detroit. Tigers won 3-2 on Sunday via an 8th inning HR after losing 1-0 on Saturday when Prince was thrown out at the plate for the game's final out. - Tampa took two of three from Minnesota, which sounds decent except that they already had the first two games in the bag and were up 3-0 in the 7th with David Price on the mound yet somehow managed to lose 6-4. [MAD-DOG]You can't be doin' that Mikey, you can't be doin' that![/MAD-DOG] - Orioles took 2 of 3 from Toronto Upcoming: - Free-falling Texas goes to Tampa for some WC-on-WC action Chasing teams probably want to see a sweep here. They won't care which way as long as one of the teams becomes easier to reach. - Indians @ KC Royals probably need all three for themselves, but would do the other contenders a huge favor by taking two - Yanx @ Blue Jays (starting Tuesday) Yanx are 13-3 vs Toron'o (remember, don't pronounce the last T when at Baghdad airport) this season - Orioles at Boston You've done your job Red Sox nation and you've done it well. So how's about taking the next couple of days off?

Yes, there are those who will acknowledge that there are mitigating factors but then hate when someone tries to do something radical like quantify the size of it, something that even leads to the point of pushing back against the notion that the factor even matters. Person A) 'Willie Mays was much more than just numbers, you had to see all the things he did with his glove, with his arm, and when running the bases beyond merely steals' Person 'Absolutely! In fact Mike Trout is like that too and it's why I think he should be MVP over Cabrera even though Miggy has an edge in the Triple Crown stats' Person A) 'What are you, one of those Bill James-ian keyboard communists?'

The biggest thing the Wilpons did wrong was shaft Doubleday. -- I've heard this a number of times before but how this supposed shafting took place has yet to be explained to me. Fred, as a minority owner, had a clause in the contract that if a certain pct of the team were to be sold then he had the right of first refusal to buy that portion. That Nelson failed to know this or was mad because he didn't want Fred to be an equal partner is his fault and certainly nothing underhanded from Wilpon. I liked that guy and he knew baseball -- I have and had no opinion of Doubleday personally, but he never struck me as a guy who knew baseball particularly well. Owning a team to him seemed much more of the rich guy's toy than any kind of lifelong dream.

A .415 OBA (26th career) is going to be tough for some to ignore, as is his 20th best career OPS (954) The Coors factor comes into effect when you look at the 'Adjusted OPS+' [cue some writers eyes glazing over while they start screaming about nerds with pocket protecters ruining the sport] where he suddenly plummets to 132nd overall.

Boy that was some display of hitting there -- a rally which consisted of a walk, a seeing eye hit, a walk, two ground-outs too soft to be turned into DPs, and a seeing eye hit.

Helton will get a lot of consideration. The biggest question, I think, will be how to figure in the Coors factor coupled with the whole 90s/200s/steroid era factor.

The fact that virtually all of our outs for the entire game haven't left the infield makes this inning no surprise at all.

EX-ZACH-LY what we didn't need!

Pitching to ANY Met is not considered dangerous these days.

I'm surprised they're even pitching to EYII

Was it over when the Germen K-bombed Biscayne Bay? ... Let's hope so.