Frayed Knot

This might be going better if the Mets had more than just the one hit.

So NOVIG is a "Prediction Markets for Sports". Nice to see that they've yet to run out of attempts to describe gambling as anything other than gambling. It's the 'gaming' industry. And, remember, your state provides you with the 'Education Lottery' so it's really a way to educate your children rather than a method to separate you from your money at a 50% clip.

Getting tossed six times in a season is tough to do in this era of replay and challenges. Not quite in Aaron Boone territory but a lot for his initial ML season.

Gary mentioned Jonah Cox's dad last night. Jonah is a rookie OF/2B this year though his pops was a catcher for the Expos about whom I have no memory. Now I know why. https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/c/coxda02.shtml Darron Cox had 27 ML PAs in his career, all in 1999, including one AB vs the Mets. He had been double-switched into a game at Stade Olympique to start the 8th inning and came to bat in the 9th where he grounded out facing John Franco for the final out of a 10 - 3 NYM win. He spent the 2000 & 2001 seasons playing in AAA Colorado Springs (Jonah was born in Colorado in 2001) but never returned to the majors. Jonah made his ML debut on May 31 and is making an impressive showing so far.

So we gained a game on everyone in the East last night except the Braves - and the Braves are hardly our concern at the moment. This puts us at 2.0 and 6.5 G behind WAS & MIA as they lost to the Dodgers and Cubs respectively on Friday. Yanx @ Padres was 1 - 1 after 9 (Max Fried and Walker Buehler started). Yanx scored the ghost runner on a 1st pitch single (took 2nd on throw) in the 10th off Mason Miller (he had also pitched the 9th). But that inning got shut down when the Pads got a K/2-5 CS DP, than another K. On came Paul Blackburn, who'has been pitching some good set-up ball for the Yanx this season, and he K'd his first batter. But his first-pitch to the next guy (Luis Campusano) was a walk-off 2R HR and the Padres got to play bouncy-bouncy at home plate.

Anthony Molina -- 24, R/R, Venezuela -- will be the pitcher of the other part. This will be his 3rd outing/2nd start for SFG after being acquired from the Braves in the Tyler Mahle deadline deal. Just six appearances/14.1 combined ML innings pitched this season following two partial and mostly ugly seasons for Colorado in '24 & '25

Good thing they packed on all those runs while they could cuz the Giants have 12 hits at this point (Mets have 8)

There's just simply no such thing as an error anymore.

Sale [6 IP, 2 R, 6 H] out-rules Sanchez [6 IP, 3 R, 5 H] and then the Braves tack on two vs the Philly pen for a 5 - 2 win in the opener. Braves up their NLE lead to 4.0 G

It's nice that somebody is. Kind of tired of hearing 'journalism' with the depth of, 'So coach, how great was your team today?'

Lee keeps coming up with men on base ... so it's nice that there's a seven six-run lead. Also nice that he keeps going hit-less.

I think the Rutgers debacle Thursday night is also why we haven't heard from Ashie today.

And yet he keeps proving it.

J.H. Lee looked hitter-ish last time up, and he's not a guy you're likely to double up ... so, big out there.

So fresh off his story lifting the lid on the cap circumventing by the Clippers, Pablo Torre is looking into none other than Mark Walter and his financing of the Dodgers. https://nypost.com/2026/09/04/sports/pablo-torre-takes-aim-mark-walter-dodgers-350-million-magic-johnson-gift/ So ... maybe something?

Not surprising since it's pretty easy to see that you can't spell BASEBALL without Basabe

Tugboat's takin' on water.

Cubs & Brewers wound up splitting their four game series (Cubs won 2 - 1 yesterday on a PC-A 2R HR). Those two clubs play three more next week in Milwaukee but with the Cubs 8 games out of 1st with 21 left even a sweep there is still going to leave them needing a miracle. And while this won't be the Phils last chance to catch the Braves they better get started soon. They're a much more manageable four out with 22 to play including seven more head-to-head so this could get interesting. A Fri-Mon wrap-around series starts tonight in Philly. They'll then do three more next weekend in Atlanta. And it may even be the Mets best last chance to climb out of the cellar. Our weekend visit from the Giants coincides with the Nationals (3.0 G ahead) headed to Dodger stadium while the Marlins (7.5) play host to the Cubs.

So I guess almost no one else saw it.

Couple of things here: 1) The NFL model will never be like the MLB model because the NFL broadcast pool is a) HUGE and b) almost entirely centralized since 100% of football games are broadcast by one of the participating networks. iow, aside from local radio rights (a teensy weensy portion of the whole) there's not a lot of difference in the broadcast incomes of teams. By contrast, baseball's central broadcast money is evenly distributed just like the NFL's. But then each team also has its own local TV/radio deals which can vary widely and represent a much larger portion of the whole. So unless you're going to pool all that local money and then split it up evenly there's always going to be disparities. Now pooling all that local money is never going to fly with the larger market teams. Plus, if teams were only going to hang onto 1/30th of any new monies they earn via local media, it would remove all the incentive for clubs to strike better deals for themselves or to do things like start their own networks (YES, SNY) or streaming services. It would be a big dampener on both incentive and investment. 2) Of course the ultimate goal is salary suppression. They'll call it 'cost predictability/stability' or some such pseudonym but, yeah, the idea is to limit the cost of labor overall and set it on a predictable path from year to year. And I've harped on this for years now: there's no correlation between a cap and so-called parity/competitive balance. The NFL, which not only has long had a hard cap (no exceptions for incumbent players like the NBA) and has consistently had more teams in their playoff tourney as compared to completely cap-less MLB, has had Fewer Super Bowl winners, Fewer Super Bowl participants, and More franchises on the outside looking in (defined as those who have failed to reach a conference/league final ... iow, be a Final Four team) than MLB has had WS winners / participants / and non-final-four teams. You'll hear it said often that it's the complete opposite by those who simply assume that of course a cap increases parity (or by those who think part of their job description is to parrot whatever the NFL tells them) it just doesn't happen to be accurate. In this century, the NFL has seen 13 different teams win a SB (43% of teams), 20 different teams play in a SB (62.5%), and has five franchises which have not played in an NFC or AFC championship game (15.6%). In MLB those numbers for the same time frame are 16 (53.3%), 22 (7.3%), and 2 (6.7%) * SB winners: Seahawks (2), Eagles (2), Chiefs (3), Rams (1), Buccaneers (2), Patriots (5), Broncos (1), Ravens (1), Giants (2), Packers (1), Saints (1), Steelers (2), Colts (1). SB participants: All except Redskins/Commanders, Cowboys, Lions, Vikings, Bills, Dolphins, Jets, Browns, Jaguars, Texans, Chargers. Raiders No conference championship games: Texans, Cowboys, Raiders, Dolphins, Browns World Series winners: Dodgers (3), Rangers (1), Astros (2), Braves (1), Nationals (1), Red Sox (4), Cubs (1), Royals (1), Giants (3), Cardinals (2), Yankees (1), Phillies (1), White Sox (1), Marlins (1 ), Angels (1), Diamondbacks (1) WS participants: all but Brewers, Reds, Pirates, Padres, Orioles, Twins, Angels, Mariners No NLCS/ALCS: Reds, Pirates

And Projection #2 would be Joe AJ McEwing

Of the nine position players listed on the Giants' BB-Ref page: - two: Luis Arraez (PHI) and Heliot Ramos (NYY), were traded at the deadline - three others: (3B) Matt Chapman, (C) Daniel Susac, (SS) Wily Adames, are on the IL That leaves: Rafael Devers, DH Bryce Eldridge, and OFs Drew Gilbert and Jung Hoo Lee as full/full-ish season active guys. Their nine other active position players are call-ups/replacements who have fewer than 150 ABs this year, most of them have yet to hit even the 100 mark. Oh, and most of the pitching staff is on the IL as well. This will be the 4th ML start for Matt Wilkerson, a 26 y/o Canadian lefty drafted in the 10th round in 2023 out of Central Arizona College Perhaps given all that, the Giants were a predictable 10 - 18 in August and now sit five games behind the Mets in overall standings.

Basketball people were pretty shocked when all this came down on Wednesday (or maybe late Tuesday), mainly because it seemed like the commish's office was dragging their feet while "sources" were casting doubt as to the accuracy of Pablo Torre's reporting (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize). It all gave the feeling that if they ignored this long enough then maybe everyone would simply forget about it and it would go away. And then ... BAM! Nothing but a (relatively) small fine and no suspension for the player involved in all this even though he was certainly in on the whole cap evasion game. All of which kind of cements Adam Silver's reputation as a player-friendly commissioner and the NBA overall as a player-run league. The larger point here, and the reason I brought it up in this thread, is that, even before considering the whole 'fairness' concept of a salary cap in the first place, they don't really work. If a team or teams think a player is worth some amount but the rules say he can't get that much then someone is going to figure out a way to get it to him. It's happened in the capped world of the NFL at various times and we know how well not paying college players worked (which is to say: didn't work at all) for over a century or more. I'm sure someone here knows more about the relatively recent "fair play" (I think they're called) rules in European football (soccer) than I do, rules which seek to govern how much one team can spend and therefore dominate their league(s). But I do know there have been instances of teams pulling end-arounds to skirt those regulations as well.

So that top projection slot thingie has got to be Benge in .... imma guess back in 2026

Unfortunately, I think Howie Rose has shamed the Mets into burying #8 for eternity or until official retirement, whichever come first. This was the Nick Morabito game in a game where Nick Morabito didn't even start.