Frayed Knot

Cubs have five now six walks plus a HBP. Four of those seven free passes have scored with one currently on base.

And a two out RBI hit of our own ... whoda thunk it?!?

NYM pitchers have allowed a solo HR, a 3R HR, a 2-RBI Triple, a 2R HR, and now another 3R HR -- ALL WITH TWO OUTS -- just in the last 20 innings. So that's 11 runs that could have been prevented by retiring one batter but weren't.

The Cardinals were so impressed by Wise's feat that they traded for him a year and a half later even-up for some scrub named Steve Carlton . OK, there was more to it than that. Both pitchers were coming off good seasons in 1971: Carlton = 20-5, 3.56 ERA; Wise: 17-14, 2.88. Wise had turned 26 late in the '71 campaign, Carlton would turn 27 that winter. But perhaps their biggest similarity is that both wanted more money in those pre-FA era days so both were at odds with their respective front office and threatening to 'hold out' as spring training was about to get underway. The reaction by both clubs was something along the lines of, 'You guys can't tell us what to do cuz we hold all the power' and so their solution was to trade them even-up for each other with each, in effect, saying, 'He's your headache now!' The trade was made on February 25th, 1972 Of course the deal lopsidedly favored the Phils as Carlton immediately rung up one of the greatest pitching seasons ever and outlasted Wise by is seasons on the back end on the way to the HoF even while not having a single friend among voting sportswriters. Wise had a nice career. But then there was Carlton's.

Stepping aside from offensive woes for a moment to look at a pitching issue that's been in the back of my head for a while but am just now getting around to see if it holds up under scrutiny. The season-to-date league-wide pct of PAs taken with 0 outs, with 1 out, and with 2 outs are: 34.5%, 33.2%, 32.3% and the numbers for NYM pitchers mimics those percentages with only minor differences: 34.1%, 32.9%, 33.0% (less than 1% variation in each case). The overall pct of Runs Allowed with 0, 1, and 2 outs is 24.2% / 38.6%, 37.2% -- that runs are scored at a lesser rate w/no outs is not surprising since a larger pct of those ABs take place with no one on (leadoff ABs) while RA rates with 1 out and 2 out occur at a roughly even frequency. Now look at how the NYM staff RA rates fare and we find just 20.8% w/0 outs (nearly 4 pct points lower than lg avg), 36.0% w/one out (also lower tho closer to the MLB pct), and then a whopping 43.3% with 2 outs, more than six pts above lg avg. What this shows, or at least implies, is that our staff is often failing to get that 3rd out on the first or second opportunity to do so and so are almost-but-not-quite getting out of innings with at least lesser damage. Saturday's disaster is a perfect example as 10 of the 15 Philly runs, including the last 8 straight, came after two were out. Those include the Harper HR, the 2R Harper triple, and two of Schwarber HRs. That's eight runs from four ABs that coulda but weren't prevented. Now in a blow-out game like that one even theoretically turning around a couple of 'What if' ABs was unlikely to have changed the W/L outcome. But the overall numbers show that game to be not an isolated instance and more like part of a season long trend..

A monsoon just hitting late in the first half of France/Iraq WC game in Philly France up 1-0 btw on a goal by MmmmBop

Or not.

So maybe we tired this Duran guy out yesterday (he threw 17 pitches)

We're still not making great decisions on ABS challenges ... but we are getting a little more accurate (lucky?) recently.

Wheeler's getting gray hairs in his beard. Of course I had gray creeping into my beard at a similar age too. The difference is, I was no longer getting big league hitters out by that point.

2 runs in, still just one out, 1st and 2nd, not a single ball out of the infield.

Oh good, I was hoping for TWO leadoff walks in front of Harper.

Oh good, I was hoping for a leadoff free pass in front of Schwaberharper

See my above post Meanwhile I see that NBC thinks the intro deserves its own song. I just hope the estates of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer get some royalties from that one.

John Franco and John Kruk will be the color commentators tonight. I haven't been watching this new NBC version of Sunday Night Baseball (mainly because it's been mostly on their PEACOCK channel) so I don't know if, instead of using a fixed team of announcers, they've been using a rotating stable of 'locals' like this for each game or not. Seems like an odd move if they have but I guess they figure it keeps the fans of the two scheduled teams a reason to tune in and keep the paranoids from claiming 'Bias!!' each time they don't like what some color guy just said.

On Saturday all the NL East teams won (except the Mets of course) so we lost ground all around. Today only Miami won with the Braves & Nats losing (to MIL & SFG).

"Your Holiness, I'm Joseph Medwick. I, too, used to be a Cardinal" -- Former StL Cardinal outfielder Joe Medwick to Pope Pius XII during a visit to the Vatican

Was it over when the Germans bombed the Mets pitching staff? Yeah, it pretty much was.

Wagaman's throw to 2B on Harper's double is off-line (by a lot), Semien's error after a nice play.

Remember fans, the replay reviews will only be used to overturn obviously incorrect calls and the process will be quick. That one, like a lot of others, was neither. It was another one of what I call 51% calls, the type they swore would never happen and it took, what, like three minutes, or 50% longer than a between innings break. 'We can't tell for sure but we think it's more likely he didn't catch it than did so we're going to overturn it'.

In early Saturday games: - the Jays returned the favor to the ass-kicking they got from the Cubs yesterday by scoring 3 in the 7th then 5 in the 8th en route to an 8-6 win in a game the Cubs led 5-Zip thru 6. - the Reds pounded out 15 hits today for a 10-2 win which is bad ... but it was against the Yanx so that negates the degree of badness. If we wind up losing out to the Reds (y'know, like we did last year) it's our own fault.

Not sure why you didn't just tack this stuff on the the (T)WiB thread that you yourself started this week, but .... - the Brewers just had the tying runner thrown out at the plate for the 2nd out in the 9th for an eventual 3-2 loss. The Brewers are good enough not to HAVE to win Misiorowski's starts, it still suxx to lose them.

So while we're currently suffering from a case of Weekend Series Interruptus, the rest of the sport moves on. Important series going on starting tonight include: Nats @ Rays; Brewers @ Braves; Giants @ Marlins; and the Reds continue their New York/New York stretch with three games in the Bronx following a day off in NYC for the visiting Cincinnatians. Managers used to think of a day off in NYC as the worse thing for their players. Just getting back the same 25 you came with was tough enough. btw, Braves are facing Misiorwski tonight, the Reds get Schlittler. (If Schlittler has a dominant game against your team did they get Schlitlered-upon?)

Recent tradition in the NFL has awarded the opening game of the season, a stand alone Thursday Night three days prior to opening Sunday, to the Super Bowl winner. So when the Baltimore Ravens won the SB in February 2013 the baseball schedule was already out and it so happened that Orioles had a scheduled home game on what would be the NFL opening Thursday to kick off the 2013-'14 season. And since Baltimore also has a shared parking baseball/football area, the Ravens had to ask the Orioles to change their schedule. The O's, god love 'em, refused sending the NFL and their paid spokesmen (media members) into a major hissy fit decrying that some minor sport like baseball wasn't getting out of their way on command and breaking their long-running 'tradition' (it was probably less than a decade at the time) of the SB champ getting to lead off their season at home. The Ravens still got that lead-off game but it was played 2,000 miles went in Denver. I suspect it's the other way around since MLB's September sked would be out months prior to football's so the NFL would know ahead of time which two (,maybe three) September Sundays the Phils would be at home and could easily give the Eagles a road game those days, or a Sunday night start, or one of the Monday/Thursday games that week. October would be tougher since everything on the baseball end is a constantly moving target so then it's probably MLB's turn to at least tinker with start times of games.

Three words: Shared. Parking. Lots.