8/30 SOX @ LA Angels 10:07PM EST

[moonslav59]

Just watched the rest of the game.

 

I hated seeing Workman almost lose the game for us. He's been a bright spot, this year.

 

Mookie seems to be returning to near 2018 form.

 

I guess JBJ's warming back up necessitated his sitting out last night. He was at 1.039 over his last 12 games with 5 dingers. If the guy could just play D, we could play him more.

 

He's had 6 days off in the last 18-- must be tired at 29.

[moonslav59]

Wow Workman blew it and Cashner was fantastic by the looks of it.

 

More impressive was DHern going 2 IP without a walk.

 

Our staff K'd 20 last night!

[a700hitter]

Yeah, I think we might be seeing somebody like Ryan Weber pitch some innings today.

They need some reinforcements after last night.

[a700hitter]

They needed the win , but poor offence in this game and another blown save

Cora’s fault 100% not putting in his best defensive OF for the bottom of the 9th. He put Bradley in for JD later to run the bases and get picked off. Dumbass not making the defensive change causing him to use 6 more innings of bullpen.

[Bellhorn04]

I guess JBJ's warming back up necessitated his sitting out last night. He was at 1.039 over his last 12 games with 5 dingers. If the guy could just play D, we could play him more.

 

He's had 6 days off in the last 18-- must be tired at 29.

 

Are you knocking the greatest manager in Red Sox history again?

[a700hitter]

Are you knocking the greatest manager in Red Sox history again?

Francona is managing Cleveland

[Bellhorn04]

I guess JBJ's warming back up necessitated his sitting out last night. He was at 1.039 over his last 12 games with 5 dingers. If the guy could just play D, we could play him more.

 

He's had 6 days off in the last 18-- must be tired at 29.

 

Jackie's OPS against lefties is .624.

[mvp 78]

Jackie's OPS against lefties is .624.

 

Pffft, SSS

[Bellhorn04]

Pffft, SSS

 

And it was .562 last year. Yikes.

[dgalehouse]

They need some reinforcements after last night.

 

Probably just have to gut it out tonight. As of tomorrow, we can have all the reinforcements we want . And some we don't want .

[jung]

Actually, I will think exactly that.

Also, the notion that OF play is "worse than it used to be"--as in the great days when baseball players had to work second jobs over the winter--is ridiculous.

The only reason to ban the shift is to appease players like B. Harper who would like to hit for higher averages and earn their inflated salaries.

 

Well in fact, its not as if diminished skills are being encouraged just by the shift. The stupid rules around the bases encourage diminished skills, particularly for middle infielders who now think they don't have to protect themselves from onrushing baae runners. Agility unused becomes agility ignored becomes agility that decays and thinking that JUST BECAUSE ballplayers were not paid as they are today made them somehow inferior is ludicrous.

 

You just never saw many of the really great players getting REAL press in the 30's and 40's and 50's because they were playing in what was referred to as the Negro leagues. You have to go hunting just to find their stats which of course are generally denigrated by baseball "intelligencia" of every era since then because "they did not play against white ballplayers". There is a crock if I ever heard one. There were great ballplayers of all racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds all the way up through the 80's and they knew how to play the game as it is intended, a multi-demsional game as opposed to the one dimensional game that Manfred is literally invoking with his nonsense.

 

The most important and most basic quality of a baseball player is hand/eye coordination and the better the ballplayer the more remarkable his or her hand/eye coordination to the point where MLB players have hand/eye coordination that makes them seem like aliens compared to the rest of humankind. You have a training tool that improves hand/eye coordination to that degree because I don't. You have a spread sheet that guides a player to significantly better hand/eye coordination than that which God gave him, because I don't. There is not a single drill or methodology that has been proven to sufficiently improve hand/eye coordination over what God gave you in the first place. If you don't have that God given talent in buckets you can practice baseball till hell freezes over....you are not going to make a mark playing the game, not because you are so bad but because the players that go past you like you are standing still have so much more God given talent specific to this game than you have.

 

So what is your argument, that from the early 1900's till now humans have EVOLVED to the point where they are so much better in the key elements that define a baseball player???....REALLY!!!!

 

Why do you think so many pitchers break down constantly now. It's because so many of them do not have the God given talent to do what MLB and the media tells them they have to do, another ass backwards dynamic that is driving the game right into the sewer.

 

The peak decades for quality of play were very likely the period from the mid-70's through the mid-90's.

 

MLB has been going downhill since the mid-1990's and not because of the steroid era either. Since the beginning of this decade the pace of decline has accelerated and it has gone straight down the drain. If they began to fix it tomorrow it would be a decade anyway before they could clear away the wreckage.

Edited August 31, 2019 by jung

[moonslav59]

Are you knocking the greatest manager in Red Sox history again?

 

Yup, just like I did the second best, the third best...

 

[moonslav59]

Jackie's OPS against lefties is .624.

 

They took the lefty out after 5 and played 9 more innings- No JBJ.

[jad]

Well in fact, its not as if diminished skills are being encouraged just by the shift. The stupid rules around the bases encourage diminished skills, particularly for middle infielders who now think they don't have to protect themselves from onrushing baae runners. Agility unused becomes agility ignored becomes agility that decays and thinking that JUST BECAUSE ballplayers were not paid as they are today made them somehow inferior is ludicrous.

 

You just never saw many of the really great players getting REAL press in the 30's and 40's and 50's because they were playing in what was referred to as the Negro leagues. You have to go hunting just to find their stats which of course are generally denigrated by baseball "intelligencia" of every era since then because "they did not play against white ballplayers". There is a crock if I ever heard one. There were great ballplayers of all racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds all the way up through the 80's and they knew how to play the game as it is intended, a multi-demsional game as opposed to the one dimensional game that Manfred is literally invoking with his nonsense.

 

The most important and most basic quality of a baseball player is hand/eye coordination and the better the ballplayer the more remarkable his or her hand/eye coordination to the point where MLB players have hand/eye coordination that makes them seem like aliens compared to the rest of humankind. You have a training tool that improves hand/eye coordination to that degree because I don't. You have a spread sheet that guides a player to significantly better hand/eye coordination than that which God gave him, because I don't. There is not a single drill or methodology that has been proven to sufficiently improve hand/eye coordination over what God gave you in the first place. If you don't have that God given talent in buckets you can practice baseball till hell freezes over....you are not going to make a mark playing the game, not because you are so bad but because the players that go past you like you are standing still have so much more God given talent specific to this game than you have.

 

So what is your argument, that from the early 1900's till now humans have EVOLVED to the point where they are so much better in the key elements that define a baseball player???....REALLY!!!!

 

Why do you think so many pitchers break down constantly now. It's because so many of them do not have the God given talent to do what MLB and the media tells them they have to do, another ass backwards dynamic that is driving the game right into the sewer.

 

The peak decades for quality of play were very likely the period from the mid-70's through the mid-90's.

 

MLB has been going downhill since the mid-1990's and not because of the steroid era either. Since the beginning of this decade the pace of decline has accelerated and it has gone straight down the drain. If they began to fix it tomorrow it would be a decade anyway before they could clear away the wreckage.

 

Please provide film of tthe great Negro League players you seem to have watched throughout their careers. I'm going by what I saw in ordinary games of the 50s and 60s. You are making straw-man arguments about evolution, which I didn't mention and which you apparently know nothing about. But you do type in CAPS! THAT"S HUGE!

[jung]

Please provide film of tthe great Negro League players you seem to have watched throughout their careers. I'm going by what I saw in ordinary games of the 50s and 60s. You are making straw-man arguments about evolution, which I didn't mention and which you apparently know nothing about. But you do type in CAPS! THAT"S HUGE!

 

It is you that is making a straw-man argument. I never said anything about film or how many of them I saw play.

 

I mentioned evolution because the only way to make a reasoned argument that today's ballplayers are significantly better than the ballplayers of an earlier era would be evolution. Hence would would have to argue that the human species has "evolved" to be better ballplayers in the short span of 100 years or so.

 

They are not better. Your argument appeared to be that since some of them had to hold two jobs, one in the off season, they could not possibly be as good. Pay has nothing to do with the quality of play. Pay in Professional Sports entertainment is a consequence of market conditions. The stupid strike of the mid-1990's damn near killed MLB entirely. If that had happened no matter how many good or great ballplayers there are out there, they would not have been making squat for income.

 

There is a larger pool of humans that we draw baseball players from now but we are not producing a higher percentage of great ones or even good ones. All we are doing these days is focusing their toils on particular aspects of the game using stats to do it. That does not necessarily make a "better" baseball player. It likely if anything simply makes for a less multi-dimensional ballplayer. For pitchers its velo and spin rate at the expense of command and for hitters its power virtually at the expense of everything else.

Edited September 1, 2019 by jung

[jad]

It is you that is making a straw-man argument. I never said anything about film or how many of them I saw play.

 

I mentioned evolution because the only way to make a reasoned argument that today's ballplayers are significantly better than the ballplayers of an earlier era would be evolution. Hence would would have to argue that the human species has "evolved" to be better ballplayers in the short span of 100 years or so.

 

They are not better. Your argument appeared to be that since some of them had to hold two jobs, one in the off season, they could not possibly be as good. Pay has nothing to do with the quality of play. Pay in Professional Sports entertainment is a consequence of market conditions. The stupid strike of the mid-1990's damn near killed MLB entirely. If that had happened no matter how many good or great ballplayers there are out there, they would not have been making squat for income.

 

There is a larger pool of humans that we draw baseball players from now but we are not producing a higher percentage of great ones or even good ones. All we are doing these days is focusing their toils on particular aspects of the game using stats to do it. That does not necessarily make a "better" baseball player. It likely if anything simply makes for a less multi-dimensional ballplayer. For pitchers its velo and spin rate at the expense of command and for hitters its power virtually at the expense of everything else.

 

Oh well. Not worth arguing. I'm talking only about players I've seen play over the years. I can't think of more than a handful of 50s players (Mays for one; Williams of course another; maybe Mantle) who are as good or better than your basic players of today. Same in other sports (particularly basketball, where, with the exception of players like Wilt or Russell, few would be likely to play even in the D-league; or football, again, with a few exceptions--Jim Brown?--what about those 230 pound lineman of the early sixties!--who weighed less than QBs of today). Of course athletes weren't as good generally as pro athletes are today, because in the 50s you didn't have 100s of thousands of kids devoting their lives, 24/7, to single sports. Much smaller pool to choose from, and even that consisting of players with far less commitment to the sport. I've only seen a few clips of Negro league players, so I have no idea how good they were, and I really don't know what your evidence is that they were so much better than players of today.

[moonslav59]

Evolution is NOT the only way players can get better from one era to another.

 

Your speculations are spoken like they are facts, and with all due respect, I find myself disagreeing with just about everything you post. Maybe part of it is because how you present opinions as facts.