jung

Nice play Jackie. That pile of crap did not deserve to go off the Monster. Erod tossed him a cookie and he missed it.

And that was a good job by ERod. If a pitcher is going to dot both corners with change ups low like that, the hitter is likely meat to any sort of FB. Too bad Erod exhibits that sort of command so rarely.

Maeda just showed us what a Change thrown with conviction looks like. He started Brock with a FB just at the knees in the middle of the plate and dotted it with the Change in exactly the same spot next. THAT is Pitching. We see about two or three examples of it a game these days....but THAT is pitching.

So here is what I don't get about this generation of rocket ship baseball hitters: Why even struggle with breaking balls and off speed stuff that starts below your knees? Yes pitch recognition is hard. But the dif between anything breaking or off speed and a FB is simply not rocket science. So you can recognize FB without much trouble...especially these guys who are downright other worldly at it. If its not FB and it starts below your knees, who cares if its the split, or the curve, or the Slider or the Change up. Why even bother to try to distinguish the pitch farther than FB or NOT FB. If its NOT FB and it starts below your knee ITS NOT FINISHING IN THE STRIKE ZONE. Its a ball that will not be a called strike and you are not likely to hit it if you swing at it. This is also why I think the Curve will come on AGAIN. It is already enjoying its second MLB life. It breaks big enough to start well up in the strike zone and finish below the strike zone whereas these s*** sliders the pitchers are throwing are either meatballs in the middle of the plate or bouncing up to home plate outside.

Obviously Eck has gotten a message from NESN management. "Iksnay on the rocket ship baseball-day Eck". His narrative has entirely changed from early in the year till now as it has become more obvious that this thing IS the worst of the rocket ships. "Stop it Eck...most of our fans and especially those in the park would not know a baseball from the front end of a bulldozer."

Joe can't even get out of the way of the players any longer. Just sort of treads water out there in the field....and Angel.....who's zipper did he fumble open to get this job?

Ya' OK Eck..lets just forget that Torre and Leyland chewed Verlander a new ******* between his first comments on the baseball and his last comments on the baseball at the ASG. Remy,,,,YOU DISAPPOINT ME!

Maeda doesn't dare throw Chavis a Slider over.

I am far more impressed with rafi's fielding this year than I am with his hitting. I am impressed with NOBODY'S Pitching and NOBODY's hitting and frankly I might never be impressed with either in MLB ever again.

So there ya' go....he didn't even swing at that. Gone....way back over the bulge in the RF fence. Ridiculous!

You mean JD's is not gone over the LF wall!!!! SHOCKING.

check that eck. this baseball will make pitchers more than a "little tentative"

Name me one Sox starter pitching with courage and conviction, command with challenge. Good luck with that.

Heard today there are 10 teams in on Wheeler. Nobody is going to be giving anybody away.

Bellinger...another guy standing right on top of the plate and able to reach across the whole plate and then some. Can Erod drive him off the plate?NOPE His elbow is over the inside corner.

So boiled down to the issue they have created with young fans and everybody but old guys like me that can dissect a game down to the finest point without even trying hard is that they have created a joyless game. They have taken a game that on its best day is hard as heck to play well and made it a game of the ultimate extremes. The hitter either hits a HR or K's....THE END. That 13 inning NLCS game between the Dodgers and Brewers last year: 41K's, 5 BB's and a grand total of 15 hits between both teams over 13 innings, 15 total hits! Worse, we have a bunch of computer nimrods telling managers and coaches what players should and should not do. HORSE s***. How many baseball games did computer nimrod play? You can guess how many I think he played. It is so out of control now that while there is actually little joy in the manner in which the actual game is played, there is all this "controversy" over whether a batter flips a bat or not and whether a pitcher is offended or not. Do you know why that is? Its because they have created such a joyless game that now nobody believes the hitter is actually celebrating out of joy but instead believes down to his bones that he is Dissing the pitcher and extended from that, dissing the opposing team. Then laughable absurdity of absurdity, MLBPA Player Rep Tony Clark complains that Mookie should be universally known by that single name and should basically be on the side of milk cartons and what have you. Makes a big stink about it. So what does the media do? Goes right to Mookie who is only several feet away in the AL clubhouse and tells him what Clark has said and asks him what he thinks. Mookie basically says, Nah.....I don't need that kind of attention, which entirely misses the point. Both Clark and Mookie entirely miss the point. The point is nobody outside of baseball knows Mookie from a hole in the wall and nobody cares, not even Mookie himself. Are they out in the communities like Mo Vaughn was years ago? NOPE. They have their foundations and their charities but are they doing the kinds of things that lets say NBA players do? NOPE. Are they transcendent in any way shape or form all the way from Mookie Betts to Mike Trout to Justin Verlander and Toronto's Jr? NOPE! It is now a joyless game played by joyless players, detached from the communities that support them, fixated on whether they are being dissed by their fellow players or not. They have rule changed and manipulated the game to be an exercise in utter futility, confusion and meaninglessness and it is not hard for even the least baseball savvy of us to see that. In fact, the less involved in the game the potential fan or actual fan is, the more it smacks him right in the face. HENCE, MLB's problem with Manfred's misguided madness! They have suspended Jake Marisnick for two games and fined him an "undisclosed amount" for running into Angel's catcher Lucroy at home plate the other day. In the first place, why undisclosed. Are you ashamed of your decision Joe Torre you IDIOT. Need to keep it under wraps do we? What are you punishing Marisnick for, pointing out once again what a ridiculous bag of crap you have created in these rule changes that protect nobody? Lucroy's biggest problem on that play is that he is now playing the game like some rule is going to protect him. Would have loved to have seen MLB's and the Astro's response if Marisnick had just made a right turn half way down the 3rd base line, called himself out and walked to the dugout.

Based on WHAT!!!! All the evidence is that MLB has been and still is headed EXACTLY the other way. None of the crap they have tried to shorten games has worked either and initiating policy and practices that has created more HR's and more K's goes in EXACTLY the opposite direction. Average length for games over the entire 2018 season was 3:05.58. Average length for the first half of 2019 or approximately 90 games was 3:00.11. Do we really think games will get shorter down the stretch or do we think they will get longer down the stretch/ I have little hope that the approximate 4 minute dif between 2018 and 2019 will hold up over the second half and it rose to 3:05 for the 2017 season. As for whether MLB will actually be able to initiate a pitch clock ......I would say that there is going to be a battle there. Give pitchers back a reasonable baseball, which means Manfred will have to admit that they know the ball is juiced and that they have juiced it more each year for at least 3 of the last 4 years and you might then have less of a battle over a pitch clock.

So somebody who has closed somewhere in MLB, someone who has at least proven that he can warm up, throw good enough to even be nominally effective in the 9th inning, cool down and do it all over again the next day is not a more reasonable alternative to a guy we just signed for $17M who we know has a cranky wing that has not proven a darned thing in the 9th inning as a Closer? Effectively that argument is "we have reached into the hat trying to pull out a rabbit all year and come up snake eyes. The only guy we have left down there in the bottom of the hat is Nate.....so what the heck. There is still a spot up on the wall we can throw Nate against." That is effectively the argument.

They are still hemorrhaging fans. Wait till you see the bloodletting when my generation starts dying off in earnest. My generation is the only thing buoying the whole enterprise at this point as baseball entertainment. Now there are still fans showing up at Fenway for the Fenway Carnival. Not sure that has much to do with baseball AND even THAT is down.

If DD makes a move to extend Porcello the top of my head will explode!

The mistake DD made was in not cleaning house after the 2018 run. You keep the core of the team, your young stars unless somebody makes you an offer you can't refuse in which case, anybody can go. Yet DD decided he had to validate moves by reinvesting in the same pieces: - Pearce, a total waste - Nate, fine to sign but not at $17M per. If you wanted him, find a way without overspending for him. Certainly don't pay $17M for him and then throw up your hands and call him your Closer. DD has lost the script here. - Sale, should not have extended him into a proven history of fading EVERY SINGLE SEASON. Now we own him till 2024 at almost $29M per....BRILLIANT! I don't care that he could pass a physical. Wear has never been considered an injury. So passing a physical simply does not give you the whole story. Wear is considered an injury when tissue starts visibly shredding and bone starts visibly crumbling. THEN ITS AN INJURY. Yet pitchers do nothing but wear and since none of them throw with their legs any longer while all trying to throw a ball through a brick wall, they wear away faster now. Offing Kelly and Kimbrel was OK. But doing nothing to replace them was like WHAT? What are you doing DD. Are you saying that they were so useless that they did not need to be replaced? Is that what you are saying? What the f*** was that? We didn't need to replace them but boy we sure needed that platoon 1st baseman. Get serious!

Unfortunately that is putting blinders on to what has actually happened. Shifts began as a means to try to combat particular tough hitters. They shifted on Williams. Joe Madden re-released it as a means to try to control David Ortiz. In neither case were shifts widely used nor were they fed by computer data. You could count total shifts across both leagues in three figure numbers. That grew to above 1,000 which grew quickly to 3,000 to 4,000 which then grew to over 6,000 per year. They now not only shift on virtually every LH hitter but the over-shift on virtually every one of them. They are now shifting on RH hitters from LH pitchers in some cases and they are now shifting by hitter, by count. I think the last numbers I saw which were at a site dedicated to total shifts had the 2018 numbers at over 8,000 shifts and the over-shift is now so much the norm that they no longer call anything but what used to be called an over-shift a shift. So the simply shift has lost all meaning and there are so many over-shifts taking place that what used to be called an over-shift is the only thing they will count as a shift in their data. I don't know if there is actually a way for them to shift more at this point unless they shift on every RH hitter v every LH pitcher. So you can talk about what hitters could do and you can even talk about what hitters might do or should do all you want. It has not worked out that way. I should also point out that there is hardly a way any longer for MLB to rob more exciting play from the game and insert more BORING play into their game which is why of course there are no longer any transcendent players, no games that the younger generation looks forward to watching as MLB to them is just wallpaper, background noise. BORING, like seeing a computer aided fielder just reach down for ball hit directly at him or watching an uncompetitive pitcher throw a Rocket Ship baseball to a nothing hitter and watching said nothing hitter hit it to Mars. The ratings continue to decline, attendance continues to decline and nobody outside of true baseball fans that continue to follow the game knows the best players in today's game from Adam. The saddest part of the whole miserable mess is that MLB and its insane response to what they clearly saw coming has not just been futile, it has likely hurt them worse than what they were trying to address, a clear case of the remedies being worse than the ailment. Frankly I am now to the point where if Manfred is not somehow compelled to change direction, MLB won't likely survive me, something I would not have even considered as little as ten years ago. They almost killed it once from greed, stupidity and incredible arrogance. Having been given a new lease on life, I would have thought they would have cared for it better. This time, it looks more like sheer, unabashed stupidity that has run their car into the ditch.

What he says is simply an indication of what he thinks his arm can handle. Its not more than that. But its not less than that EITHER! A) I put what I considered the be the key line in my post which you quoted above. I have repeatedly said in this thread that Eovoldi to the pen...Not a problem that I can see particularly since he has to do something to get his arm back in shape. Eovoldi to Closer....a problem and the reasons should be obvious. You want to dance around that...be my guest.

Pitchers wear out. It just happens. Nobody has ever considered "wear" an injury until wear turns into actual broken and shattered bone or tissue. I don't think pitchers throw as much with their legs as they used to and that is wearing out arms faster especially given how young they start throwing hard now without using their legs. At one point in time, the Mets, THE METS probably had more Starters throwing with their legs than there is today in the entirety of a league of MLB. Ryan was scary to watch throw. The force you could literally see in his pitching motion up from his calves and through that big rear end of his was enough to scare the living daylights out of normal people. You would seriously question the sanity of a batter to stand in against that. How long did Ryan pitch? How hard did he throw? I see very very few pitchers today that throw from their shoelaces. They all sling the baseball, trying to throw 98 and then we all wonder why they break down. Nobody cares whether they throw in a manner that would allow them longevity any longer. They are expendable commodities. Funny because those that are at the top of the league pitching stats (such as they are) are getting paid millions of $$ and they are STILL in the overall treated like expendable commodities. See turning Eovaldi into a $17M Closer with no earthly idea if his arm will stand up to that for a very relevant example.

They don't have to make the shift entirely illegal. But the number of shifts has grown exponentially in the last 10 years to an absurd level now because they are being fed by computer data. I would simply insist on two infielders on either side of second base...PERIOD. Position those two either side of Second anywhere you want to but must have two either side. In other words, outlaw over-shifting infielders. Do what ever else you want to do with fielders. You want to have the equivalent of an over-shift by supplementing your infielders with an outfielder and risk have the ball hit into a massive hole in the OF defense....go for it.