Frayed Knot

Rained out in Bawston today. Re-sked for Monday at 6:00

Y'know you don't need permission to start a new thread.

Game 2 - [crossout:27sc2ud9]rained[/crossout:27sc2ud9] Matthew'd out in Washington. Rescheduled for 1 PM Sunday

Yeah, the Porcello as Boston ace thing kind of snuck up on me as well. He was a real promising prospect with the Tiggers but they brought him up so young (ML debut at 20) that it's not surprising that he didn't set the world on fire immediately. The Sox have been hit and miss on some of these high profile deals they've made but, after getting not much out of him in 2015 AND being on the hook for $20M+ thru 2019 (Sawx signed him to an $80+M deal immediately after trading for him) they've been rewarded here in season two. As for who the Tigers got when trading him ... some dude named Cespedes (also Gabe Speier and Alex Wilson) so I guess you could say that they dealt Porcello for Michael Fulmer so it doesn't look so bad from that perspective. btw, Jays go up two games to none

metirish wrote: Game 2 starts at 1pm on TBS J.A. Happ, 20-4; 3.18* vs Yu Darvish, 7-5; 3.41 * How the hell did THAT happen? Happ turns 34 next week and hasn't had a season this good since his first full season in the majors back in 2009 when he was 2nd in ROY as a Phillie Between that year and this one he was 49-56; 4.36 for five different teams

Ceetar wrote: I mean just the fact that catchers can significantly and quantifiably affect the calls advocates to a less subjective method in my opinion. According to Eric Byrnes, who played the role of passionately vocal advocate for the system in this piece, that even though no current players would go public on this issue, the biggest push-back he got off the record was from catchers afraid that their value could decrease if their 'pitch-framing skills' are no longer of any use.

Ceetar wrote: Frayed Knot wrote: and no one fails to call a strike on the pitch right down the middle. I'll see if I can find it, but this isn't actually true. Extremely rare obviously, but in cases where the ball still has a lot of break and misses the spot and the catcher isn't expecting it and drops it. Let's see if I can find it. Fine, not never. But of the approximately 650K(?) pitches/season I think it's safe to say that there are probably no more than a handful of obvious pitches that get called incorrectly by home plate umps and that the vast majority of incorrect calls occur on the fringes of the zone. Add in the idea that we're talking about pitches with speeds approaching 100 mph while dipping and sliding left, right, and down while doing so, and I'm quite frankly surprised that when given a 2-3 inch tolerance margin that the error rate on those pitches is only at the 1/4 to 1/3 rate and not closer to 50/50.

Snitiker is apparently under consideration for the permanent Braves job as he and former SD skipper Bud Black are reportedly the leading two candidates. And whoever winds up with the job is going to have to hire a new pitching coach as Atlanta has opted NOT to pick up the contract of Roger McDowell, ending his 11 year run at that post.

I didn't think it was a strike in real time, but 'upon further review' the 1st base ump was correct, he went far enough.

Fman99 wrote: AL baseball to be sure, 10:18 PM and it's all of the middle of the 6th inning. Yeah, well we Met fans can't complain about that too loudly either. This year the Mets played barely 40% of their games (72) in under 3 hours, just 34 games (21%) that came in under 2:50, and just six were shorter than 2:30. And to think that 2-1/2 hours used to be the average time for a game.

Look at Francona going to Andrew Miller in the 5th inning in an attempt to calm things down!! Only once all year did he appear prior to the 7th, either while on the Indians or back with the Yanx.

RealityChuck wrote: Reyes's 2018 option is for $4 million, but Colorado pays all but $500 k The buyout alone for Reyes's 2018 season is for $4M, his salary for that season would be $22M - but the contract he signed with the Mets after his suspension was up has nothing to do with that. His Mets deal just gets subtracted from his original Marlins contract which Colorado and (mostly) Toronto are on the hook for. Whatever he agreed to w/the Mets for 2017 is probably fairly small and is virtually a certainty to get picked up.

I was going to say 'Welcome to American League Baseball' (after the Indians went back to back to back) but we Met fans really can't say that this year considering the type of games we played most of the season.

So I went back and re-watched the REAL SPORTS piece so as to review some of the data they put forth. MLB claims that HP umps get 90-plus pct of the calls correct. This guy at Yale they went to said it was more like 88% and he got that from analyzing over three seasons worth of data, more than one million pitches in total. REAL SPORTS also added that they took the same data to a third party and got the same answers. But even those numbers don’t tell the whole story because a sizable portion of pitches are no-brainers to call — after all, no one mis-calls a strike on the old 55-foot curve or on the one that sails to the backstop, and no one fails to call a strike on the pitch right down the middle. It’s the ones on the borderline that present the biggest problem so they isolated the data down to just those pitches within two inches of the edge of the zone in either direction (about 32 of those in a typical game) and found that umps got nearly 1/3 of those calls wrong (31.7%). And even when the margin of error was expanded to 3” on either side there was still around a 25% error rate. And then there are the reasons why they get some of these wrong. The concept of ‘Omission Bias’ says that people tend to shy away from making a sort of final decision on things. In the case of ball/strike calls it translates into a 3-0 pitch on a corner being called a strike 89% of the time but one in the same location on an 0-2 count results in a strike only about 59% of the time. IOW, umpires display a tendency shy away from awarding a 4-pitch walk or a 3-pitch K on borderline pitches. I think everyone in baseball suspected that was always the case, this merely confirms it. Then there’s the ‘Social Influence’ factor which says that, consciously or not, humans tend to be swayed by the approval (or not) of those around them. This is actually thought to be the basis for almost all home field [court / pitch / ice] advantage in sports according to a book I read a couple years back called SCORECASTING which analyzed a number of issues dealing with sports. In that book's chapter on home advantages the authors effectively ruled out everything normally cited as the reason why the home team has an edge: tendency towards packed houses? — made no difference; reputation for having a particularly loud/rowdy crowd? — not a factor; and so on. What they did find was that while HF-ad tended to be very consistent within a sport — rates in college hoops the same as in the pros; MLB games were the same as in minor league games which also mirrored Japanese league baseball; home teams in MLS soccer had the same edge as in Premier League and South American leagues, and so on — those edges tended to be very different between sports and the over-riding reasons they came up with were the volume and influence of subjective calls. Basketball, with its sheer volume of calls and where virtually every call is a subjective one, and also soccer, where the potential result of subjective calls (to award a free kick or not?) can have such an out-sized effect on the game, had by far the highest home court/pitch edge to them whereas baseball, where most decisions other than those borderline ball/strike calls are mostly cut and dried, had by far the smallest. And guess what?, when the borderline ball/strike calls are analyzed the result is that the missed calls tend to favor the home team more often than not. One example they cited was one of the StL/Tex WS games from a few years back where missed calls favored the home Cardinals 14 to 2. Tough to tell if/how much effect those calls had on the outcome, but guess who won that game?

Andrew Benintendi. Rookie just called up partway through the year and even then missed some time with injuries ... but he's expected to be a star so you're probably going to know him. I could have done without the ridiculous overturn of Chisenhall's slide at 2nd base (safe changed to out) which is the type of "bad" call that NO ONE had in mind when replay was instituted.

Not that I know of. There is a clause that allows players dealt in the middle of a multi-year FA deal to demand a trade elsewhere but Bruce's deal w/Cincy wasn't a FA deal so I don't believe he qualifies. There's always the chance he may Get traded this winter, but it won't be because he forced it. Benjamin Grimm wrote: I'd hate to have to argue Zack Wheeler's arbitration case. Got to be a little weird to argue either side of that case. There can't be too many comparables to a player with 3-1/2 years of ML service but still less than 50 appearances and all of them more than 2 years in the rear view mirror.

I'm kind of in a fuck the Dodgers mode too, both on the end of this season and on just general principles. And nothing against the Giants, except they've won three times in the last five years. A winning season for the Nats would do a lot to help steal a little bit of attention towards baseball in that town now that the Redskins are into their third consecutive decade of sucking (and I won't be forced to listen to their announcers crow about it) ... although there's always that in-division thing Which means I'm probably pulling for the Cubs, not in any weepy/jump on the bandwagon/break the curse way, but just as the best alternative.

The first series kicks off in just a few hours and the Canadian team and the team from the city where they care more about football in June than they do about baseball get the shitty start times once again: 4:30 on a Thursday followed by 1:00 on Friday (3:30 & non local time). They then get the prime-time slot on Tuesday then a couple of TBAs for Games 4 & 5 which translates into the networks saying: you just set there and wait while we see which series we really care about are still going and then we'll slot you in whenever else is still available Anyway, weird fact I heard just the other day on the Rangers. They won 95 games this year but did so with only a plus 8 run differential. Not in one game or for the final week, but that was their total for the whole frickin' season, a gap which translates to a Pythagorean record of 82-80. No team had previously won 95 or more games with anything less than a +66 in RS vs RA but the Texans were an absurd 36-11 in one run games which was enough to get them the best record in the AL Marco Estrada for the Jays, who needed starters Marcus Stroman and Nelson Liriano just to get through the WC game, faces off against phormer philly Cole Hamels

A quick checklist to keep track of everyone's status as we enter 'The Void' CESPEDES - thru 2018 @ $23.75/per, but can opt out "after the 2016 season" (which usually means after WS is over) REYES - 2018 Option. Not sure of the amount WRIGHT - thru 2020 GRANDERSON - 2017 @ $15M BRUCE - $13M option / $1M buyout WALKER - FA LONEY - FA NIESE - Options for ’17 ($10M / 500K buyout) and ’18 ($11M / 500K) CABRERA - 2017 @ $8.25 plus 2018 option @ $8.5 / 500K buyout COLON - FA DUDA - Final year of Arb eligible DE AZA - FA REED - Final year of Arb eligible HARVEY - Arb eligible FAMILIA - Arb eligible BLEVINS - FA LAGARES - signed thru 2019 + option for ’20 @ $4.5, $6.5, $9.0, $9.5 SALAS - FA JOHNSON - FA R. RIVERA - FA RUGGIANO - Arb eligible EDGIN - Arb eligible HENDERSON - Arb eligible WHEELER - Arb eligible d’ARNAUD - Arb eligible SYNDERGAARD - Arb eligible FLORES - Arb eligible deGROM - either pre-Arb or 'Super 2' eligible. TBD pre-Arb: CONFORTO, ROBLES, MATZ, VERRETT, CAMPBELL, PLAWECKI, CECCHINI, GILMARTIN, GOEDDEL, GSELLMAN, TY KELLY, LUGO, MONTERO, REYNOLDS, SMOKER

Benjamin Grimm wrote: I wonder what ever happened to all of the people who thought the Mets had "dumped R.A. Dickey" for a bunch of nobodies. Were there all that many of those? Maybe there were but I don't recall too many. btw, I noticed that R.A. isn't even slated to start any of the games in Texas's upcoming series w/Toronto.

Edgy MD wrote: Frayed Knot wrote: I didn't have a problem taking Syndergaard out when he did. The concept of always stretching your pitchers works until it doesn't as with Harvey last year. Pull Harvey after the walk. There's a medium between pulling him with no indication of failure and riding him despite an indication of failure. That medium is where wisdom lies. And maybe that medium for Thor was the two lengthy innings and allowing three of his final seven batters to reach. And while you can argue that one of them was that infield grounder, one of the outs came on the drive to the 408 mark. On the Loney play, he was closer to it than I remember but I guess my point here is that if the 2nd baseman can field you should let him so perhaps Loney's bigger crime here was not recognizing that he didn't need to go roaming for the ball in the first place.

His whole September + October wasn't particularly good. oe: .214 w/4 HRs

I didn't have a problem taking Syndergaard out when he did. The concept of always stretching your pitchers works until it doesn't as with Harvey last year. And it's not that I think Syndergaard's arm is going to fall off if he goes over 110 pitches (he was at 108) but at some point effectiveness can be expected to fall off and his final two innings were anything but smooth, involving 37 pitches, 2 hits, a walk, an SB, and that drive to CF that sent Granderson into the wall. Edgy MD wrote: Loney's indifferent wave at that infield hit has sealed his fate for me. I don't think he was anywhere near that ball. More a case of him straying too far than not far enough IMO. If anything I'd have preferred him to stay put and allow that to become a 4-3 putout rather than the more difficult, time-consuming, and ultimately unsuccessful, 4-to-1 attempt.

If Lou Piniella kicked enough dirt on that ump he'd probably grind it to a halt.

HahnSolo wrote: Lot of pressure on the Dodgers too. They keep getting to the postseason and falling short. Yeah, between all that spending and this being the fourth year in a row for them in the post-season, they can't afford to blow too many - although at least they won a round recently (although just one). I almost think there's maybe more pressure specifically on Kershaw who's been positively ... ordinary in October in the same way that Greg Maddux and to some degree Peyton Manning are always going to have those "yeah ... but!" comments tacked onto their HoF careers.