jung

lol slash .....got a good laugh out of jacko's season long misses!

There is nothing about how Cora handled the staff in the post season that is applicable to the regular season. Had we a better pen it would not have needed bailing out by our rotation guys. Said it in August, our rotation would bail out our bullpen. Even I had it wrong. I thought it would be ERod, Eo, Price and maybe Rick bailing out our pen. Heck THEY ALL DID. Masterful job by Cora...took real guts by him, the coaches and by the pitching staff. However there is nothing to admire in the Brewers and Rays formula. They were both born of necessity. That said, the metrics-nerds think that is all wonderful and are creaming all over themselves over this....like that goon on MLB Network. "Sure, whats wrong with it. Just keep doing it for 162 games". Sure IDIOT!

Heck if you are keeping Eo trade Porcello.

Yea its totally an issue of how much over not staying under. Can't take a Championship Sox team apart in Boston and just claim you want to get back under. This ain't Miami. I bet John Henry is not thrilled with the beer can throwing incidents which were quite high during the duck boat rally. He has millions invested in these guys and kids and moms and girl friends on those things. Those missiles were coming from 20 yards out unannounced and unwanted. "When Gronk can play Shortstop somebody let me know" probably flashed through Henry's mind. Cora gets beer dumped on him in the process. Not a pretty picture.

I don't think he goes because the window is closing and the Sox have a real shot at going back to back. That would be a real achievement. Unless somebody was willing to give them a bundle in trade for him on the year he has left, I suspect there is more of a chance they try to make hey out of 2019 with X on the team. Given all the other dynamics at play, not a good time to go hunting for a Shortstop and 2 through 6 hitter for a Championship team.

I don't think they even make an effort for Pearce. Its easy for fans to fall in love with these late season signings. I suspect Baseball Management looks at them as just this year's late season signings. There could be some ways to fit Eo in if they want to go that route. Kimbrel is gone. Pom is gone. Do they really want to keep Porcello or trade him out to somebody? Eo is younger. Rick is more reliable....the steady eddie of the staff after he gets past a couple Porcellos per game. Probably can't even afford to resign Kelly. IMO, they virtually have no shot at staying under the Lux Tax unless they are truly going to start to disassemble the team. Big arb money coming. Ultimately the guys to protect of the killer B's is Betts and X. Then Benni, then JBJ. So ultimately I think JBJ is out at some point.....maybe Benni too eventually. But the Killer B discussion is not for this year with the exception of possibly cutting bait on JBJ.

Thats right...that was a straight up trade. What was I thinking? I think the Marlins got something like 4-5 bodies out of that.

Geez I guess the Governor thinks its a good year to be all in with the Red Sox. He was pounded today at the rally....just crushed before 12 noon. "WOOOO-HOOOOOO". OK Governor!

A number of teams were struggling with the Tax last year. That is true. We will know for sure based on this FA season. If its all same same, then last year will look like an anomaly. If it looks more like last year that would not surprise me either. Owners are making bundles but they are making bundles because of their network ownerships or TV deals all of which are driven by commercial ad buy rates. The ratings numbers going the wrong way will have an immediate impact on the revenue stream and it won't be insignificant either. This will be a good year to monitor salary because the Lux tax element is not so prevalent this year. I do wonder why Yelich did not attract more competitive bidding regardless of any factor. Unless his low HR totals in that graveyard for fly balls the Marlins play in simply was not calculated accurately.

I actually think last year's salary surprises were not surprises but a change in trend. Think the era of player salaries going up and up and up has passed them by. We will know from this year's FA signings.

Thee of those NL WS from the Giants at the end of their run. The point is the NL is now out of touch and out of step with the administrator which is MLB. The juiced baseball and launch angle hitting to this degree is only three years old. The Overload is only eight years old and has only become as prevalent as it is (32,000 overloads in 2018) in the last four years growing exponentially year over year. The rule changes of relevance are only three years old. So going back to 2009 in this discussion makes no sense. SORRY. Pitcher hits is killing NL quality of play and its killing it competitively as much as being late to integration killed the AL in the All Star game at a time when the ASG really and truly meant something. Actually the Yankees had a winning record against the NL in interleague play in 2018 as well. Still and all even though the 3 BEST teams in all baseball pounded out the NL in interleague I just do not see how the interleague record is meaningful nor will it be until the NL gets its head screwed on straight. I am not cherry picking the Interleague records as much as I just don't think they mean a rats behind in this particular discussion. Either MLB has to move back toward the NL game (good luck with that) or the NL has to wise up. For example does anybody in their right mind think we would have had a 7:20 minute WS game on the AL format? Does anybody think that game did MLB any good? Was anybody outside of hard core Boston and LA fans watching it after 6 hours?

Don't care about interleague play records. Until the NL gets its head screwed on straight, they are meaningless. By the way, the Red Sox pounded the NL senseless this year in interleague play. The Astros pounded the NL in interleague play. Still meaningless to me. AL has won 4 of last 6 WS. So they are already on a run. If you go through my post #89 in the 2018 World Series Champions thread, I go through what the format is doing to the NL in morbid detail stat by stat. Honestly the AL has issues as well. But at the very least the AL is keeping in step with what the administrator for both leagues, MLB is driving toward while the NL is now totally out of step with MLB. You can be "independent" of your administrator all you want to be....but at the end of the day the administrator, in this case MLB has the velvet hammer.

Dodgers at 2 is an absolute joke. That team is trash and its upper management is trash. I thought the Dodgers would lose in the WS but put up a better fight. Usually on field management and players get the leeway to succeed in the post season. That team was so throttled by absurd upper management and baseball ops that Roberts clearly did not push back on. Until all that changes, they are going nowhere. Yet they are clearly the best of the NL teams which says more about the NL than it does about the Dodgers. Yankees might be rated 2 to whomever is 1 if they learned anything from the 2018 season and if they rebuild their rotation. Too young in the everyday player corp and too old in the pitching corp to really be taken seriously in 2018 in a league that holds the Red Sox and Astros. Red Sox had young guys that had turned into maturing players, not mature players but maturing players plus adds like JD with X and Holt and Nunez to round out the experience. Yankees were just too young (everyday players) and too old (pitching corp) to go far in the 2018 post season. Frankly no team in the NL should be rated above the the big 3 AL teams, Red Sox, Astros, Yankees...put those three in any order you want to put them for 2019. My God I am not even convinced an NL team, ANY NL team could be rated over the Guardians with the caveat mentioned in the ESPN power rankings....lots of FA's for Cleveland to sift through. Being as I am not partial to pinstripes I would hope the only AL team that might bring in Machado would be the Yankees. He is well capable of destroying what that team has going for it. He should stay where he is as he is the perfect NL player now. Anybody with an eye for baseball can see that the NL is now way over burdened by its format. It is just about as burdened by its format as the AL was when it was late adopting integration and got slaughtered year after year in an All Star game that actually meant something in that time. NL is headed for some NASTY years IMO if they don't get their heads screwed on straight.

So moves will be made by all the contenders for 2019. But Vegas opening line on 2019 WS champs: Sox and Astros both open at 6:1 Yankees, Dodgers open at 7:1 Clev, Cubs, Brewers, just about anybody left with a shot open at 10:1 Clearly then Vegas thinks Sox/Astros are the 2019 ALCS. Opening Dodgers at 7:1 and nobody else in the NL at better than 10:1 says the obvious given what the Dodger team really was.....utter trash. Yet Vegas does not think that at this point anybody else in the NL can keep them from getting at least out of the NL. Probably the only reason the Dodgers are even at 7:1 is because Vegas sees them in a cake walk out of the NL and to the WS. I tend to agree at this point. Sox/Astros to the ALCS which turns out to again produce the WS champ.....injuries and mileage may vary.

Pom gets a spot walking alongside a duck boat today.

It sure as heck ain't the cost of a damn extra trophy! Thats pocket change.

That would have been the best result IMO. However since the auto companies have been involved in these Championship MVP award prizes there has at least as I recall NEVER been a co-MVP awarded in any of the major team enterprises where they offer that prize. As insane as it seems, it appears that it does not happen because whomever is putting up the prize vehicle won't push another one across the table. They probably would if the Networks spent even five seconds per game panning over to a shot of the prize vehicle. I never saw that vehicle until it was awarded and I think i only missed coverage walking the damn dog!

When MLB starts again to exhibit a bare minimum of common sense about ANYTHING I will at least begin to stop sweating it. Until then, I will hold my opinion and you can hold yours. They already have one league exhibiting pure trash. But MLB hides behind the notion that as the administrator they can do absolutely nothing about that. Really MLB? You can exert no influence on the NL...none.....zippo...zero....nada. MLB and the AL and NL being intensely secretive organizations, for all I know they could be operating at fever pitch behind the scenes to resolve their collective messes. But I doubt it. Oh by way, since they only exist because of an anti-trust provision designed specifically by law passed by the people we send to Washington DC, should MLB actually be allowed to be as secretive as they are?

What by the way do the Broadcast Rights holders know about who should be the MVP of the WS? They bought the rights, sold their commercials. They are out at that point. However, are there other influences on broadcasters that might sway their vote? You're darn right there are. My God Chevy is giving away a truck. They have more right to a vote than the Broadcast Rights Holders have. MLB.com I can see having a vote. I can see sports writers having a vote though having two split one vote and be informed moments before that they are the two is laughable. If you want only 5 votes cast, fine...not much time to get the votes in and tabulate them. I get that. But if you are going to have only 5 votes, get the Broadcast Rights clowns out of there and make it a cumulative vote. Have the 5 voters plus the splits give you their top three candidates for the MVP and the winner is the guy that gets the most votes. That is 15 actual votes they would have to tabulate. No big deal. Who is the idiot at MLB Headquarters that came up with yet another stupid MLB cluster that would immediately make more sense with the application of a bare minimum of common sense?

But the guy who won two games in the WS of baseball, a game that will always be driven by pitching until and unless they change the fact that every single thing that happens in baseball starts with a pitch did not deserve the award? You are welcome to your opinion. I just don't think so. But that is not my real complaint here though my preferred vote was co-MVP Price/Pearce followed by Price alone followed by Pearce alone. My real complaint here is that as usual with MLB and especially lately they have adopted an utterly STUPID process.

So this is an interesting fact that I did not know because it simply does not really interest me to know. There are only 5 votes for WS MVP. 3 of those votes go to the broadcast rights holders. 1 vote goes to MLB.com. One vote is shared by two sports writers who are chosen moments before the vote is actually cast and told that they are the two sports writers that will share a vote. What a cluster that is. Can MLB get anything right lately? Pearce got the award on a 3-2 vote. 5 total votes with some splits and the sports writers that will split one vote chosen moments before they have to vote. RIDICULOUS!

Oh but GM's should just be able to pull up a computer database and presto ......understand which pitchers will yield the most value for a big money contract. The only GM's that can't are those that just don't pull up those endless streams of data from the computer which surely will without question reveal which pitchers will go out and perform to their contracts.....RIGHT??? Those GM's should of course be summarily FIRED!

That is simply a consequence of more tightly packed teams as to record in the NL than the AL. The AL had the better teams by far than the NL and as a consequence more AL teams were knocked out early. Big win totals also yield big loss totals. The AL had three teams with over 100 win totals. The NL had none, meaning of course that the NL had more tightly packed standings and closer races. Has nothing to do with the actual quality of play which will eventually effect all attendance. Once baseball itself becomes bombastically boring nobody will care how tightly packed the races are between the teams playing. 4 of the top 5 in attendance were NL teams, none of which including the Dodgers would have likely even made the WC had they been in the AL. The top 5 in attendance were: Dodgers Yankees Cardinals Cubs Giants The only one of those clubs that even stood a chance of getting into the AL post season had they been in the AL was the Dodgers. Biggest increases in year over year attendance were: Astros Yankees Brewers (probably the only NL team besides the Dodgers that would have stood any chance at all of even achieving a WC had they been in the AL in 2018) Phillies Mariners No shockers there. Biggest declines in year over year attendance: Blue Jays Marlins Royals Tigers Orioles No shockers there either. The issue is and has been the combination of NL insistence on maintaining a spot in the order for the Pitcher contending that it yields a purer form of the game when it in fact does not coupled with the overarching administrator, the MLB, attempting to turn a multi-dimensional game, in fact a game that depends on its multi-dimentionality into a one dimensional power game. The consequence is both leagues heading for problems by virtue of MLB rules changes, the juiced baseball and acquiescence to the Overload all of which are leading to bigger, less agile, players and high HR rates coupled with monster K rates and other out related manifestations of weak hitting. The only dif is that the added burden of keeping a spot in the order for the Pitcher is driving the NL off the cliff edge faster than the AL is going there. This is leading to higher quality play in the AL, more play that reflects the aspects of this game that actually make it popular while the AL is actually more in step with MLB's desire for more power. The simple fact is the AL gets more good, entertaining stuff out of its game than the NL does with its Pitcher Hits format. The following material will make the point that all the NL gets is higher bunting rates and the God almighty double switch. There is NOTHING I repeat NOTHING interesting about computer positioned oversized, overblown and in some cases fat slob ballplayers that are not agile fielders making plays one foot to their left or one foot to their right because they were standing where the computer told them to stand. There is nothing interesting about taking agility, running the bases and moving runners around the bases and supplanting that with additional HR's by virtue of launch angle and the additional K's and other weak, useless outs it yields. The AL is in fact getting more multi-dimensionality out of its format because it is not burdened by holding a spot in the batting order for the Pitcher. In fact, it was reported that the reason that the strike zone was universally called tighter in the post season than in the regular season is that MLB noticed the alarmingly high K rates and as usual decided that two wrongs make a right. It instructed its umpires to call tighter zones in the post season in an effort to cut down on the K rate, an entirely idiotic direction. The K rate increases have nothing to do with the strike zone. The K rate increases have everything to do with launch angle changes adopted by hitters trying to conform to what MLB wants and the limited amount of time the bat now stays in the hitting zone. The high K rate is a consequence of a short sighted, dimwitted insistence on driving the game to one dimensional power baseball and the tools MLB has used to try to make that happen. Those are: - acquiescence to the Overload and in fact encouragement of it - the juiced baseball - rules changes As dimwitted as MLB has been, the NL's insistence on continuing its Pitcher hits nonsense has been entirely at odds with its administrator, MLB and has driven the NL game to: - a plethora of lumbering, wildly gesticulating ballplayers that attempt to "cheer" their balls over the fences as opposed to running the damn bases - hideously high K rates with 9 of the top 15 strike out total teams being NL teams while 9 of the top HR hitting teams were AL teams. - However, the NL has 9 of the top 15 AB/HR rate teams. They are hitting more HR's deeper into the order than AL teams since they have to try harder to score ahead of the useless pitcher's spot in the order. But NL teams are actually hitting fewer total HR's. - 9 of the top 15 teams in extra base hits are AL teams - 9 of the top 15 teams in plate appearances are NL teams meaning the preponderance of over long baseball games are happening in the NL - 10 of the top 15 fly ball hitting teams are AL teams. Combined with the other stats, it would appear that the most telling revelation is the degree to which trying to score ahead of the pitchers spot is driving NL players down in the batting order to try to lift the ball while not succeeding at it - as you might expect then 10 of the top 15 and all of the top 5 GB/FB rate teams are NL teams - 8 of the top 15 sacrifice fly teams are AL teams - 14 of the top 15 bunting teams are NL teams as you might guess. However bunts even in the NL are down to 0.008 of all PA's. Nobody actually bunts any more with the exception of the pitcher uselessly trying to get something out of a PA. So there you have it: - more of what everybody complains about in MLB, over long games, high K rates, one dimensional baseball happens in the NL than in the AL - The AL actually gets more power while maintaining more multi-dimensionality out of its game because it is not burdened by the Pitcher Hits format - The AL both conforms more to where the administrator for both leagues, MLB is driving this game while maintaining a multi-dimensional game. The ONLY thing the NL gets out of its Pitcher Hits format is 14:15 of the highest bunting teams. However the bunt is a pretty boring baseball play and at 0.008 of all PA's even for the NL teams it is simply there because the Pitcher has a spot in the batting order in the NL! My view of it is that both MLB and the NL have work to do. MLB cannot mandate that NL give up its Pitcher Hits format. The NL owners must come to their senses about that. However, MLB must IMO confront the Overload directly. And worse than that for NL the better teams and more of them are in the AL and its now not even close! Finally I have one last thing to offer on this topic. Manny Machado, now that he is in the NL should stay there. He is the perfect NL player from head to toe both in his attitude toward the game, his posture and his demeanor on the field and his performance within the game. He is an oversized, overblown, lazy blowhard. Stay where you are Manny. Please God AL GM's just leave him there TO ROT!

The AL is already off on a WS run that I suspect only gets worse for the NL from here. 2013: Red Sox 2014: Giants at the end of their run 2015: Royals 2016: Cubs 2017: Astros 2018: Red Sox again That is 4:6 of the last WS with the gap in baseball play and sports entertainment value just starting to widen and widen between the two leagues.

Thats not the discussion you have engaged in. The discussion you have engaged in a bit late is what were the Dodgers as a competitor to the Red Sox and as an extension of that would other AL teams have either crushed or beaten the Dodgers. The Astros would have crushed them even with their injuries. The Yankees would have beaten them. Cleveland probably beats them in a 7 game series. If you moved the Dodgers into the AL, they don't even make the WC IMO and neither do the Brewers.