ALCS 2018 - Houston Astros

uk_sox_fan

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Nov 11, 2006
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Great win, I watched it this morning on DVR, news blackout before I watched. It was awesome and I'm glad i did it this way because I'm shaking off a cold and went to bed at 7pm and woke up at 4:30am.

An 8:30pm east coast start isn't like a 8:30pm east coast start in the NBA, where games are routinely less than 3 hours. 1:15am finish time. That's late.

This absolutely sucks, the most important games of the year are almost impossible to watch.
Welcome to my world! This is how I watch every important sports event over here (though the Superbowl I usually watch until halftime and then only the 2nd Half on tape delay). You give yourself 2 hours in the morning before you have to leave and FFWD through the commercials and you're usually fine.

Though yesterday the 4 1/2 hours I set to cover the game (including 15m of pregame) wasn't enough to get me the heart-attack bottom half of the 9th so I had to read about that and watch it this evening when BT Sports replays the game again. Other than that blacking out all media just means cancelling alerts on my phone.
 

uk_sox_fan

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Nov 11, 2006
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12% being same odds as 3 heads in a row

I don't quite buy it, as they are throwing a double sided coin tonight (Verlander), but it does show how close they are....
I kind of like the fact that they're burning Verlander now - gives us Sale and Eovaldi against mere mortals for 6 & 7 if needed. Of course JV could return out of the pen for either of those, but I still think it's lining up well for the Sox this way.

That and Price v Verlander may just work out because baseball.
 

johnmd20

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Not to be too blunt, but do you guys realize how entitled you sound?

I am in Lijiang, Yunnan, China, and I've been watching illegal streams from Eastern Europe fed through an illegal Chinese VPN. The odds of my laptop functioning completely correctly ever again are pretty slim.

But more relevant: my brother-in-law back in San Diego is a lifelong Padres fan. He'd offer to give up an eyeball, a kidney, and a chunk of his liver for the Padres to be in the position the Sox are in now.

(My wife's family isn't so smart).

I really, really don't intend this as a "who is the better fan" competition - I just want you all to recall what it was like in '03 and '04. Nobody gave a flying f*ck what time the games were scheduled. We all ditched work and/or stayed up and watched every pitch, and we were furious at every mismanaged decision in '03, and thankful for every Yankee-eliminating, Shaughnessy-undermining moment in '04.

We've been spoiled since, which is great. But c'mon...complaining that your team's ALCS games are on past your bedtime? Really??

The playoff time slots have been essentially the same for 25 years - an occasional 2pm or 9pm start time is the price of following the MLB playoffs. Either enjoy the ride or don't, but don't forget how much some other fan bases would love to deal with the massive "inconveniences" that you're complaining about.
It was brutal in 2003 and 2004 and it is brutal now. It's always been brutal for people on the east coast. In 2004, I was an absolute zombie for a full month. I was also 14 years younger.

The fact that you're in China is laughable and an embarrassing point to make. Last time I checked, baseball was played in the United States and the Major League Baseball Team The Boston Red Sox are based in the eastern time zone.
 

Dan Murfman

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Mad Dog with a good rant on start times.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The <a href="https://twitter.com/MadDogUnleashed?ref_src=twsrc^tfw">@MadDogUnleashed</a> loses his mind over the start time of last night&#39;s <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/NLCS?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc^tfw">#NLCS</a> Game between the <a href="https://twitter.com/Brewers?ref_src=twsrc^tfw">@Brewers</a> vs. <a href="https://twitter.com/Dodgers?ref_src=twsrc^tfw">@Dodgers</a>. Classic Mad Dog! <a href="https://t.co/tyudYrMclv">pic.twitter.com/tyudYrMclv</a></p>&mdash; Mad Dog Sports Radio (@MadDogRadio) <a href="">October 17, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
 

johnmd20

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He was snoring his ass off at that time.

Man alive, that's a great rant and it's insane, but I completely agree with it, except for the channel part. I don't care if it's on FS1 or TBS, I care that the games end hours after midnight.

Hours, with an S.
 

Lose Remerswaal

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The nfl can schedule their big games at a reasonable hour because they fall on weekends. If baseball tried to play all these games to end by 10pm in the east they would have to start at 3 in the west and you can't do that to the fan bases out there.

Thank goodness for the mound visit rule or these would be 5 hour games.
And to Lurker 42: Move.

I am heading to California next week so the games will end at a reasonable time
 

CantKeepmedown

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Jul 15, 2005
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I am dragging ass this morning after about 3hrs of sleep. It's late, yes, but it's only 3-4 days a week for a month. I had a few coffee vodkas as the game started and was so wired at the end, there was no going straight to sleep. I'll try and squeeze a nap in before tonight, but I doubt it. I can sleep tomorrow.
 

BoSox Rule

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Jul 15, 2005
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I don’t think it’s entitled to expect a game to start before 8:40 Eastern. Baseball is a regional sport all year round and I know they want as many eyes as possible, but you can have the LCS game overlap for an hour and nobody is going to give a shit.
 

wade boggs chicken dinner

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Mar 26, 2005
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Not to be too blunt, but do you guys realize how entitled you sound?

I am in Lijiang, Yunnan, China, and I've been watching illegal streams from Eastern Europe fed through an illegal Chinese VPN. The odds of my laptop functioning completely correctly ever again are pretty slim.

But more relevant: my brother-in-law back in San Diego is a lifelong Padres fan. He'd offer to give up an eyeball, a kidney, and a chunk of his liver for the Padres to be in the position the Sox are in now.

(My wife's family isn't so smart).

I really, really don't intend this as a "who is the better fan" competition - I just want you all to recall what it was like in '03 and '04. Nobody gave a flying f*ck what time the games were scheduled. We all ditched work and/or stayed up and watched every pitch, and we were furious at every mismanaged decision in '03, and thankful for every Yankee-eliminating, Shaughnessy-undermining moment in '04.

We've been spoiled since, which is great. But c'mon...complaining that your team's ALCS games are on past your bedtime? Really??

The playoff time slots have been essentially the same for 25 years - an occasional 2pm or 9pm start time is the price of following the MLB playoffs. Either enjoy the ride or don't, but don't forget how much some other fan bases would love to deal with the massive "inconveniences" that you're complaining about.
In 2004, I had just started a job that didn't have anything for me to do in the month of October (or November for that matter) and didn't have any kids. Watching games to 1:00 a.m. and drinking while doing it and going through that week without sleep was a show of character at that point in my life.

Not the same now. Plus if I make a sleep-deprived mistake, it could be really really bad.

Just my story. But one reason why I love to follow baseball but can't watch it anymore.
 

moondog80

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Sep 20, 2005
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The nfl can schedule their big games at a reasonable hour because they fall on weekends. If baseball tried to play all these games to end by 10pm in the east they would have to start at 3 in the west and you can't do that to the fan bases out there.
I think starting a game at 3, especially in this age of smartphones where everyone has access to instant everything, is less of a hardship then finishing a game after midnight. If I had to choose between the two, give me the 3:00 start 10 times out of 10.
 
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lapa

New Member
Apr 20, 2018
544
This is kind of fascinating. Moneyball was largely about how valuable walks were and how people were ignoring OBP in favor of BA, so this approach is kind of pulling a Moneyball on Moneyball.
Not really
Moneyball was about using statistics and analysis to identify specific components which could be evaluated as contributing to success which were undervalued by other teams for various (often historic reasons).

The specific example most used in the original book was OBP but all kinds of other stuff followed like defensive range factors, launch angle etc. but there’s always a lag in teams pushing a particular market efficiency and the rest of the league catching up - at which point that market inefficiency is gone and another equilibrium is reached so you have to find a different angle that everyone else is missing (hypothetically imagine if you could dig up guys who swung successfully more often at first pitches in an environment where pitchers grooved the 0-0 pitch because of trying to counter walks)

You can’t just take pitches now because teams know about obp and counts so pitchers hit the strike zone more so it’s just a natural response to try to take advantage of that shift caused by the original trend

The point is moneyball is a generic concept and methodology and not the specific examples identified at any particular time - you can’t moneyball moneyball, moneyball by definition is self-moneyballing
At least as I understood it
 

Soxfan in Fla

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Jul 30, 2001
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It’s like Kimbrel is walking a tightrope blindfolded and drunk yet somehow didn’t fall off the damn thing despite stumbling all over the place on it. I can’t believe he hasn’t actually blown a save yet. He’s flirted with complete disaster in 3 of his 4 appearances.

Please don’t do a 2 inning save again Cora.
 

ookami7m

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It was brutal in 2003 and 2004 and it is brutal now. It's always been brutal for people on the east coast. In 2004, I was an absolute zombie for a full month. I was also 14 years younger.

The fact that you're in China is laughable and an embarrassing point to make. Last time I checked, baseball was played in the United States and the Major League Baseball Team The Boston Red Sox are based in the eastern time zone.
Came here to say this. In 03, 04, and 07 I lived in the mountain time zone and didn't have kids until the 07 series. So staying up was less of an issue. 2013 I lived in CA and the worst part of those games was missing sections of the listen while I was on BART home.

East coast fans get the late game times and it sucks (I'm central time zone now and being up to 12:30 last night has me dragging ass today - but as John says, I'm 14 years older now and the nature of life just makes those things harder.

My daughters get to watch the first hour or so of the games (the 11 year old gets a little more time) and I'd love for them to be able to watch more of the games with me but I'm also not particularly interested in missing the first half of the game because I'm at work still.
 

JimD

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Nov 29, 2001
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So many of my postseason baseball memories are associated with late nights. Game 6 in '75. 1986. The '04 comeback. Literally my entire life as a Sox fan. Last night was later than most but otherwise it just feels like part of the deal. The Boston Red Sox are in the postseason, kicking ass and imposing their will on their opponents. This may be the greatest Sox team of all time. If I have to stay up late and endure some bleary-eyed days at work, so be it. I did it at age 41 in '04 and I'll find a way to do it at age 55 this year.
 

BaseballJones

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Oct 1, 2015
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Kimbrel this postseason is putting up one of the most remarkable shows I've ever seen in my near 5 full decades watching the sport.

4 g, 5.1 ip, 6 h, 5 r, 5 er, 5 bb, 6 k, 8.44 era, 2.06 whip, 10.1 k/9, 4-4 saves

And it's not like that line was done in by one horrendous outing. All four outings he's given up at least one run. All four outings he's put at least two guys on base. And it's not just walks, though it's that too. It's hits. He's walking guys and giving up hits. He just hasn't yet given up that backbreaking XBH that blows the game. Saved by defense several times, and came within a foot of giving up a homer a couple of times but the ball has stayed in the park against him for the most part.

This is the highest of high wire closing acts I've ever seen.
 

Sam Ray Not

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Among the many amazing things in that Breathtaking Baseball Barnburner was how the Killer Bs factored into all of David Schoenfeld's amazing moments.

THE CATCH: Benintendi (off Bregman)
THE THROW: Betts
THE BIG BLAST: Bradley
THE CONTROVERSY: Betts
THE BULLPEN: Brasier, Barnes

I won't focus on the last, harrowing chapter of the bullpen saga for now, except to say that even without benefit of hindsight, putting in a guy who's an emotional and mechanical wreck right now and has never in his career recorded a two-inning save — with Barnes having thrown a grand total of five pitches — may have been Cora's biggest head-scratcher of the season. Only thing I can think (noted by someone in the gamethread) is that Barnes' hip may still be bothering him.

On the bright side: if his hip isn't bothering him too much, Barnes' low pitch count might make him available for a longer stint tonight. With the whole staff pretty spent and/or injured right now, it's hard to imagine we're not gonna need him.
 

Zososoxfan

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Count me in the group that says 8:40pm EST scheduled start time is too late. Doesn't seem so ridiculous to have one game start at 6:30pm EST (perhaps the matchup not including a west coast team) and another start at 7:30pm EST. I assume MLB is avoiding overlap to allow fans to watch as much of both matchups as possible. But I can't imagine there are too many of these fans out there. Moreover, it would likely draw in more fans if they could do a split screen and watch both games when they are overlapping NFL redzone style.

Also, whenever these discussions come up, I like to reference this image:



For mobile users, it's a population chart of the US by timezone:

Eastern - 47.6%
Central - 29.1%
Mountain - 6.7%
Pacific - 16.6%
 

JimD

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It may say more about my fevered brain this morning due to lack of sleep, but I'm strangely confident about Price tonight. I think he comes up big, JD finally breaks out with a huge hit tonight and the Sox close this out.
 

Spelunker

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Jul 17, 2005
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Which is everyday for us west coasters....add in kid after school commitments et all and......well let's just say there are pros and cons to any start time.
I love early starts on the West coast: I can watch the game at work. 530 starts are extra annoying because I either have to leave early, or watch/listen while commuting.
 

Sam Ray Not

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Kimbrel this postseason is putting up one of the most remarkable shows I've ever seen in my near 5 full decades watching the sport.

4 g, 5.1 ip, 6 h, 5 r, 5 er, 5 bb, 6 k, 8.44 era, 2.06 whip, 10.1 k/9, 4-4 saves

And it's not like that line was done in by one horrendous outing. All four outings he's given up at least one run. All four outings he's put at least two guys on base. And it's not just walks, though it's that too. It's hits. He's walking guys and giving up hits. He just hasn't yet given up that backbreaking XBH that blows the game. Saved by defense several times, and came within a foot of giving up a homer a couple of times but the ball has stayed in the park against him for the most part.

This is the highest of high wire closing acts I've ever seen.
And just to pile on: the fact that we have one of the great defensive outfields ever making huge play after huge play makes Kimbrel's reluctance/inability to just go right after hitters from the get-go even more infuriating. The hard-hit balls are way easier to stomach from a leadoff hitter (viz. the solo shot by Judge in the 5-4 Game 1 vs. the MFY, the only inning this playoffs where Kimbrel has sort of resembled his good self) than after he's filled the bases by over-nibbling, throwing head-high heaters that no one's ever gonna chase, badly yanking breaking balls, etc. etc.
 

JMDurron

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For all the talk about the start times, isn’t the ridiculous duration of just a 9-inning game the bigger problem, with the start time exacerbating the issue?

Darling’s monacle-dropping about “integrity” aside, I’d like to see some kind of solution implemented to reduce the frequency/impact of sign stealing strictly from a pace of play perspective. Last year’s ridiculous number of mound visits have been replaced by this year’s obscene number of timeouts, step-outs, and passed/balls wild pitches as teams devote more time and energy to protecting their signals than they spend executing pitches. It’s slow and sloppy and drags out the dead time between pitches in these critical games. I don’t have a solution, but I think we might be misidentifying the problem here. Every pitcher turning into Daisuke Matsuzska on the mound from a pacing standpoint is bad entertainment, no matter when the game happens to start.
 

Red(s)HawksFan

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It may say more about my fevered brain this morning due to lack of sleep, but I'm strangely confident about Price tonight. I think he comes up big, JD finally breaks out with a huge hit tonight and the Sox close this out.
Shades of Game 3 2013 ALCS maybe? Price in the Lackey role. JD in the Napoli role. Verlander in the Verlander role. I'm feeling it.
 

chrisfont9

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Not to be too blunt, but do you guys realize how entitled you sound?

I am in Lijiang, Yunnan, China, and I've been watching illegal streams from Eastern Europe fed through an illegal Chinese VPN. The odds of my laptop functioning completely correctly ever again are pretty slim.
ut.
Oooh, Lijiang! I really wanted to go there when I was in China.

I'm on the West Coast and would like to toss out there that there are some 60 million people in my time zone, including a pretty decent number of baseball fans, who would also like to watch these games and have given up on complaining about how they start while we are still at work. The playoff series belong to the entire country, not to the fans of the teams involved. That said, it's only the presence of two games and MLB's insistence on trying to squeeze out six hours (plus) of prime time programming that's caused this. I'm old enough to remember when they'd have just played one of the LCS games in the afternoon.
 

The Talented Allen Ripley

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Where does the "emotional wreck" part come from?
Exactly. I'd say Kimbrel has balls of steel to hang in there the way he did last night, considering he had no idea where the ball was going. Another pitcher might have literally had a nervous breakdown right on the mound. I'm not worried about Kimbrel's emotional state or mental toughness at all.

That's not to say I trust him to close out a tight game at the moment (I don't), but my trepidation is based on the issue being physical/mechanical. I don't fear Kimbrel wilting, he's a bulldog. He's just a bulldog who can't throw a strike right now.
 

chrisfont9

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And just to pile on: the fact that we have one of the great defensive outfields ever making huge play after huge play makes Kimbrel's reluctance/inability to just go right after hitters from the get-go even more infuriating. The hard-hit balls are way easier to stomach from a leadoff hitter (viz. the solo shot by Judge in the 5-4 Game 1 vs. the MFY, the only inning this playoffs where Kimbrel has sort of resembled his good self) than after he's filled the bases by over-nibbling, throwing head-high heaters that no one's ever gonna chase, badly yanking breaking balls, etc. etc.
Well he just can't hit his spots, so he's erring on staying out of the middle? Or he has no idea where it's going. But if we are to believe some of the reporting that the Sox have made a conscious choice to risk walking guys to avoid home runs, I'd say that's working out great, even if it's a nightmare to watch.
 

JimD

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For all the talk about the start times, isn’t the ridiculous duration of just a 9-inning game the bigger problem, with the start time exacerbating the issue?

Darling’s monacle-dropping about “integrity” aside, I’d like to see some kind of solution implemented to reduce the frequency/impact of sign stealing strictly from a pace of play perspective. Last year’s ridiculous number of mound visits have been replaced by this year’s obscene number of timeouts, step-outs, and passed/balls wild pitches as teams devote more time and energy to protecting their signals than they spend executing pitches. It’s slow and sloppy and drags out the dead time between pitches in these critical games. I don’t have a solution, but I think we might be misidentifying the problem here. Every pitcher turning into Daisuke Matsuzska on the mound from a pacing standpoint is bad entertainment, no matter when the game happens to start.
Go to the pitch clock and eliminate the step-outs/timeouts by batters. The solution is available, MLB just has to figure out how to implement it.
 

chrisfont9

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The whole season-long story about the Sox' bullpen being a weakness is actually pretty overblown IMO. The Yankees had a super-pen, and they're home watching because their rotation sucked and the Sox' pen muddled through. Now we have the Astors down, they of the mega-pen, because maybe having a great bullpen isn't such a big deal in the playoffs? The number of plate appearances are so small that you just need guys who can stay steady and execute a few pitches and hopefully be OK. And if you are counting on your awesome bullpen to save you, well, that works great for a couple games, but the Sox have seen McCullers and Pressly enough to lay off their "unhittable curves". It's nice to have a great bullpen to get into the playoffs, but once you get there I'll take a great rotation over a great bullpen any day.
 

Al Zarilla

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The nfl can schedule their big games at a reasonable hour because they fall on weekends. If baseball tried to play all these games to end by 10pm in the east they would have to start at 3 in the west and you can't do that to the fan bases out there.
I’m on the West Coast and 3 o’clock Pacific start times would be fine for the two scenarios:

1. When the Red Sox are in it, I should always have enough vacation and/or personal time to use to leave early from work and not miss many, if any innings.

2. If they aren’t in it (remember in the long ago?) I don’t give much of a rats ass, and if I did, like when I had a strong second (Giants) team, again, leave work early. Bottom line is that most people out here don’t care about baseball playoffs unless the local team is in it. So why punish the eastern and central time zone folks with these start times?
 

DJnVa

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Mookie Betts played travel ball with Tony Kemp. Kemp should have known not to run on him.
 

shepard50

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I’m on the West Coast and 3 o’clock Pacific start times would be fine for the two scenarios:

1. When the Red Sox are in it, I should always have enough vacation and/or personal time to use to leave early from work and not miss many, if any innings.

2. If they aren’t in it (remember in the long ago?) I don’t give much of a rats ass, and if I did, like when I had a strong second (Giants) team, again, leave work early. Bottom line is that most people out here don’t care about baseball playoffs unless the local team is in it. So why punish the eastern and central time zone folks with these start times?
Agree.

I am in LA. During baseball season I am at my desk by 7 AM. That means I am also usually home by 4 PM. watching the game with my kids. Cater away to the population centers in the east, it works for me.
 

dhappy42

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Oct 27, 2013
15,725
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Am starting to get annoyed with all the media referring to the "disputed Homerun". It was a disputed double - thanks to Mookie's brilliance.
Yeah. I’ve even read articles — written by supposedly professional sportswriters — describing the “controversial call” as if the replay review overturned a home run call on the field.

The TBS crew in the booth got it wrong in almost every way imaginable when trying to describe how fan interference works and even when describing what anyone could clearly see in the slow-mo replay: that Betts was at least one foot away from the wall, in the field, with his glove hand extended nearly straight up (i.e. also in the field of play) when it was struck by fans’ hands, then by the ball.

The ball never made it over the wall. It may have been headed that way, but it hit Mookie’s glove, then a fan’s hand (also interference) then caromed onto the field. Not a home run by any definition.

There wasn’t just one instance of fan interference. There were at least two: (1) fan or fans reaching into the field of play interfering with Betts’s ability to make a catch and (2) the fan touching the ball after it deflected off Betts’ glove.

1) calls for an out
2) calls for a dead ball (a double, in this case)

The “stolen home run” talk is ridiculous.
 

Sam Ray Not

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Where does the "emotional wreck" part come from?
Out of my [hat].

At minimum, do you not think it's fair after four outings to surmise that there's a psychological component to his current struggles — that it's not just mechanical or a stretch of unfortunate random variance?

And heck: even if we allow that the psychological component is unknowable and not at all predictive: giving five pitches to Barnes and 35 to Kimbrel seems, as Sprowl noted in the gamethread, "well, lopsided."

(Edit: sorry, just noticed there's a separate Irish Slocumb thread).
 
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RedOctober3829

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Jul 19, 2005
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deep inside Guido territory
Just want to take a step back and say that this team is pretty damn special to watch. This group just has a special feel to it. To me, they know they're good and they have the mental fortitude to overcome any and all obstacles in it's path. I think that comes from the manager Alex Cora. Alex has done an amazing job with pretty much each and every decision that has come his way this month. It's night and day from the previous manager.
 

EllisTheRimMan

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Kimbrel this postseason is putting up one of the most remarkable shows I've ever seen in my near 5 full decades watching the sport.

4 g, 5.1 ip, 6 h, 5 r, 5 er, 5 bb, 6 k, 8.44 era, 2.06 whip, 10.1 k/9, 4-4 saves

And it's not like that line was done in by one horrendous outing. All four outings he's given up at least one run. All four outings he's put at least two guys on base. And it's not just walks, though it's that too. It's hits. He's walking guys and giving up hits. He just hasn't yet given up that backbreaking XBH that blows the game. Saved by defense several times, and came within a foot of giving up a homer a couple of times but the ball has stayed in the park against him for the most part.

This is the highest of high wire closing acts I've ever seen.
Safe to say that if he doesn’t turn things around he’ll eventually cost us at least 1 game. That said, unless he’s physically not right, the odds are he will turn it around for the stretch run because those numbers are completely out of whack with his 2018 and career averages.
 

splendid splinter

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Yeah. I’ve even read articles — written by supposedly professional sportswriters — describing the “controversial call” as if the replay review overturned a home run call on the field.

The TBS crew in the booth got it wrong in almost every way imaginable when trying to describe how fan interference works and even when describing what anyone could clearly see in the slow-mo replay: that Betts was at least one foot away from the wall, in the field, with his glove hand extended nearly straight up (i.e. also in the field of play) when it was struck by fans’ hands, then by the ball.

The ball never made it over the wall. It may have been headed that way, but it hit Mookie’s glove, then a fan’s hand (also interference) then caromed onto the field. Not a home run by any definition.

There wasn’t just one instance of fan interference. There were at least two: (1) fan or fans reaching into the field of play interfering with Betts’s ability to make a catch and (2) the fan touching the ball after it deflected off Betts’ glove.

1) calls for an out
2) calls for a dead ball (a double, in this case)

The “stolen home run” talk is ridiculous.
Why do you think it would be a dead ball? There are two possibilities - Mookie’s glove was hit in the field of play, or it was hit reaching into the stands. If the former, that’s interference and an out, and touching the ball is irrelevant, or just another instance of interference. If the latter, he has no right to the ball and it doesn’t matter if someone hits his glove or touches the ball after it hits his glove, it’s a HR.
 

joe dokes

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Jul 18, 2005
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Out of my [hat].

At minimum, do you not think it's fair after four outings to surmise that there's a psychological component to his current struggles — that it's not just a stretch of unfortunate random variance?
No. To be fair, I have a hard time saying "yes" to anything that starts with "after four outings." But even beyond that, i don't think there anything psychological about his not-strike throwing. Im sure it sucks for him. And maybe he's pressing like a hitter in a slump. But that's just normal baseball shit.
 

drbretto

Member
SoSH Member
Apr 10, 2009
12,072
Concord, NH
I won't focus on the last, harrowing chapter of the bullpen saga for now, except to say that even without benefit of hindsight, putting in a guy who's an emotional and mechanical wreck right now and has never in his career recorded a two-inning save — with Barnes having thrown a grand total of five pitches — may have been Cora's biggest head-scratcher of the season. Only thing I can think (noted by someone in the gamethread) is that Barnes' hip may still be bothering him.

On the bright side: if his hip isn't bothering him too much, Barnes' low pitch count might make him available for a longer stint tonight. With the whole staff pretty spent and/or injured right now, it's hard to imagine we're not gonna need him.
Doesn't this kind of answer the question?

Cora has been stealing outs all postseason. He's a genius when it's Sale or Porcello. He puts in Edro for a single batter and SoSH collapses on itself (I know, this is a separate thing), but just like with Sale and Porcello, I'm fairly certain none of these pitchers were ever going to pitch from the stretch. This lets Cora steal a few outs and save the bullpen basically for free. So, he has Barnes come in and steal his one out and he's got a 3-run lead to save with his closer. At that moment, saving Barnes for tonight's game makes a ton of sense to me.

Now, I ask myself why not just have Price start the 8th instead of setting him up for after Kimbrel? I think that would have been a better option, but I still think its defensible. If Kimbrel can't handle a 3-run save (and he should totally be able to. He should.), and the game ends up going longer, who else is going to pitch then? So, saving Price for an emergency backup makes sense there, too.

IMO, Kimbrel's struggles made it look like Cora made a bad call, but that's on Kimbrel. If the closer can't be trusted with a 3-run lead, then you have a closer problem, not a manager problem.
 

Philip Jeff Frye

Member
SoSH Member
Oct 23, 2001
10,229
Oooh, Lijiang! I really wanted to go there when I was in China.

I'm on the West Coast and would like to toss out there that there are some 60 million people in my time zone, including a pretty decent number of baseball fans, who would also like to watch these games and have given up on complaining about how they start while we are still at work. The playoff series belong to the entire country, not to the fans of the teams involved. That said, it's only the presence of two games and MLB's insistence on trying to squeeze out six hours (plus) of prime time programming that's caused this. I'm old enough to remember when they'd have just played one of the LCS games in the afternoon.
I'll toss back that there are 250 million people who live in the eastern and central time zone who would like to watch these games too, especially the parts that matter in close ones. Its absurd that MLB wants moments like the Benintendi catch or the Bellinger walkoff to occur in the middle of night when nobody but devoted fans are watching. And then they wonder why nobody likes baseball anymore.

Is it better for fans on the west coast to miss the early innings of games, which almost by definition cannot be that dramatic because there's still so much game to come, or for fans on the east coast to miss the later innings of games, which are sometimes meaningless in a blowout but sometimes produce great drama? I would think more fans on the east coast and more drama in late innings would carry the day, but apparently not.
 

Max Power

thai good. you like shirt?
SoSH Member
Jul 20, 2005
7,877
Boston, MA
Go to the pitch clock and eliminate the step-outs/timeouts by batters. The solution is available, MLB just has to figure out how to implement it.
Absolutely this to get the games moving more quickly.

I think the issue with signs is going to have to be solved with technology. The pitcher will have to start calling the game from his glove and the catcher will get the sign in an earpiece. I suppose you could do it the other way, but the catcher would need a way to communicate without the batter hearing or seeing what he's doing. Nobody is close enough to the pitcher to hear anything.
 

Captaincoop

Member
SoSH Member
Jul 16, 2005
13,487
Santa Monica, CA
I’m on the West Coast and 3 o’clock Pacific start times would be fine for the two scenarios:

1. When the Red Sox are in it, I should always have enough vacation and/or personal time to use to leave early from work and not miss many, if any innings.

2. If they aren’t in it (remember in the long ago?) I don’t give much of a rats ass, and if I did, like when I had a strong second (Giants) team, again, leave work early. Bottom line is that most people out here don’t care about baseball playoffs unless the local team is in it. So why punish the eastern and central time zone folks with these start times?

I don't see the start time as the problem as much as the length of the game.

A nine inning game should never take 4.5 hours. That was ridiculous, and talking to a lot of people at work today, they lost a lot of viewers because of it.