Mookie has an 184 OPS+ right now ... only 6 Red Sox players have had a season with an OPS+ of 184 or higher.
Speaking of 1918, that's got to be the only year in history where someone led the league in both K and HR while batting in under 100 games?
The debate is us enjoying it. Remembering it. Gauging our feelings then and now. The day-to-day rising and falling, the cast of characters that's diverse but not a crowd... this is about as good as it gets as a baseball fan.
This should be the tagline for this group as it encapsulates everything we are about! Great job!
He’s pitching pretty well for the Diamondbacks this year : 4-0 2.17 ERA and averaging just over 8 k/9
I know I'm late to this party, but I really wonder what Al Kaline would say about this.
I would think so. The fact that they cut the 1918 season short by one month helped (even though Ruth did not hit any HR after July).
Clay Buchholz had one of the more underrated starts in Red Sox postseason history....game 4 at STL while the team was down 2 games to 1. They needed him to give them something and give them a chance to win and tie the series back up.
What's with all the chemistry puns? We're really just talking about a few Chance Adams
But, but, but...Erik Bedard.
He's actually 5-1 / 2.68 ERA in 10 games (57 IP; 51 Ks; WHIP = 1.105) but your overall point stands.
If I'm ever in a "Is This the Greatest Awesome We've Ever Joyed in Now We Suck the Marrow from its Excellence" thread asking why people can't enjoy themselves, can someone PM me or have an Uber bring a Snickers over or a puppy or something?
If they win 120 games and the WS, they are the best ever even if Dick Radatz, Vaughn Eshelman, and Sammy Stewart are in the bullpen in October.
Right. Like, in 2013, there was, "What club would it take to actually hit that fucking red seat?"
Right, but if we go head to head against the Yankees pen, then we are in in trouble. Did you watch the games this weekend? Oh wait...
Didn't Pedoria miss time also? Wasn't it Beltre who injured Ellsbury and Jeremy Hermida. Bizzare! amazing how that team still managed 89 wins. One less then the 2011 disaster. Hindsight is 20/20 but obviously we should have kept Rizzo and Beltre and not made the trade for A-Gon and Crawford. I loved the 2006 team also because they played small ball and were not our fathers Red Sox.
Didn't Pedoria miss time also? Wasn't it Beltre who injured Ellsbury and Jeremy Hermida. Bizzare! amazing how that team still managed 89 wins. One less then the 2011 disaster. Hindsight is 20/20 but obviously we should have kept Rizzo and Beltre and not made the trade for A-Gon and Crawford. I loved the 2006 team also because they played small ball and were not our fathers Red Sox.
I stand corrected, I did see Pedroia out 75 games.
And Buccholz having a good year was injured playing offense in Colorado.
I've been saying for a while on this board that the 2010 team was the great/forgotten/snake-bitten team of the John Henry era. According to this analysis, they lost 9.1 wins to injury, which ranks them as the 7th "most injured" team between 2010 and 2017. In addition to all the high-profile injuries recounted in this thread, I remember a point where the top four catchers in the organization were all hurt at the same time. Just an awful cacophony of injuries.
Wow, awesome chart! My main takeaway (other than reinforcing the fact that Gump's management of the 2002 team was even more stupefyingly criminal than the ALCS the next year) is that while we talk about the 2004 team going "beast mode" starting mid-august, the 1949 team was a league-average team for the first 1/3 of the way through the season (even below-average at points), and then they went on a legendary tear - a run differential of over +2.2 runs per game for the last 100+ games of the season. That pace (though not the full-season number) must rival even some of the great Yankees teams.
You're always a glass half-empty kind of poster, aren't you?
That might be the best backhanded shorthand for how awesome this season is: just 100 wins would be a massive disappointment, and would leave us all nervous going into the postseason.
As someone whose brain tends to work that way, I can testify that it's not tough at all. It means that when things go right you have the luxury of adding pleasant surprise to satisfaction, and when things go wrong you at least never have to feel sucker-punched.
I can't be the only one who was hoping for you to respond to that with "I am an idiot", although maybe we should save that for Boegarts from now on.
This is not to be nitpicky— just some interesting historical comparisons:
Chicken or the egg. Are the bad teams really bad or good teams really good piling losses onto those bad teams?
The AL Central is the god awful division and they have played their "worst" baseball against them, a .636 winning percentage. And they haven't even played Cleveland yet.
The Royals and Whitesox have been winning games of late too, granted they are still on pace for well over 100 losses. OTOH, the Whitesox have been awful of late and are back on pace to lose 100 as well. It's also definitely not the weakest the AL has been in over 40 years.
