jung

Actually we had the slap hitting era already. It was the astro turf era with hitting coaches teaching hitters to purposefully put the ball on the ground which was not for many stadiums actually ground. It was hideous baseball. Too little power and too much straight line speed as opposed to speed and agility. It was even more awful than one dimensional power baseball. The thing to remember about where sports programing appears is that the networks bid for it if they choose to do so. If ABC outbid Fox, they games would be on ABC. The fact that the Networks are not for the most part bidding is what makes for control by certain networks over others. TBS for example does not have near the bidding muscle of a major network. Baseball is more effected because it WAS the National Pastime and is based on a 162 game season. Nothing else in sports entertainment had that model nor close to that model nor that moniker nor that profile. My biggest complaint about the Old Men Yell at Cloud issue is that they should do one or the other. Do not revel in these players for being vocal, somewhat verbally and emotionally aggressive and then stuff them down a hole when it blows up in their faces. The talking heads of baseball turn into the same thing that Cable News has turned politics into...another personality contest built from nonsense. Either accept it for what it is or don't. Don't make it some contest of "well lets see how this works out" and then pulverize the player when his antics appear to blow up in his face within the context of game results. That is bold faced hypocrisy. Its BS and I don't blame the players for not giving a rats behind what the talking heads and by extension us think about that stuff.

Well the Pace of Play issue and the impact from the Overload really are not the same thing. Pace of play is driving what players do or don't do but its not driving the actual talents of the players unless we want to make the case that earthworms have a shot at filling a ML uni some day. The Overload is actually effecting the talents of the players on the field and that will ultimately effect player development if its not already (hint: it is already). Not sure how I feel about the pace of play issue in the post season. Do NFL officials call games the same way in their post season? NOPE...not even close. I do know that pace of play is driving MLB off the major networks and onto cable and that is not good for MLB. We already have had the complaint that people can't find the post season games and in some cases can't watch them at all. Games are too long and actually too unstructured for Networks. You can't do your network planning around what is now such a wide spectrum of game times in MLB. 2:30 v 4:00 does not get it done. Though in truth, we baseball enthusiasts have to come to terms with the simple fact that if the National Pastime still enjoyed wide appeal, the Networks would find a way to make that work. We are being driven off the Networks by Survivor and drivel of that sort. Honestly surprised that Fox is carrying the WS. Won't likely see that much longer either. Pace of play is really about rhythm. Pitchers are trying to get hitters out of their rhythm and hitters trying to do the same to pitchers. So enforce the rules. Keep the batters in the box and force the pitchers to throw. Take that rhythm disruption part of the game which never existed before back out of the game and we are back to 3:00 games on average.

No MLB Baseball is not dying assuming that MLB was really the frame of reference. Clear evidence that its not thriving either. Not sure it will survive once my generation is pushing up daisies. Remember, MLB and baseball were once referred to as the "National Pastime". Nobody considers Pastimes meaningful any longer unless they come in the form of dancing fingers across a keyboard or thumbs on a game controller or over a video monitor. Once my generation dies off, I am not even sure what percentage of the sporting populace will actually even understand what is happening on the baseball diamond. I think I am doing my part to prevent that. Gotta' tune into game threads to find the people on baseball forums that actually know what is going on between the lines and in the dugouts for anybody actually interested in learning something about baseball from baseball forums. They don't always agree nor even often agree. But at least they for the most part actually know what the f*** is going on within the game itself. Its the lack of understanding and appreciation for the physical and mental intricacies of the game that is going to kill it as sports entertainment if anything does because buried in those intricacies is the beauty of this beautiful game.

If I had to choose between rooting for the Dodgers or rooting for the Yankees in a WS, I would simply watch the games totally disinterested in the outcomes, laughing at Machado and Judge trying to out-boom box and out-crotch grab each other the whole way. Slight rooting edge for any AL team v any NL team for the NL's continued nonsense regarding the DH and the wreckage it is causing in their game and the utter stupidity of 4 WS games played one way and 3 played another way.

Dodgers have that experience from last season. Is that an advantage over us? I don’t see it. Not a factor.

Puig gets neutralized at least in Fenway for sure. His line drives are doubles in Fenway, not HR's.

This "fad" has gone from slightly over 2,000 shifts per year to over 31,000 of what used to be called an Overload shift per year and is effecting the talent level of the ballplayers on the field. I think we are beyond a fad at this point. Joe Maddon re-invented the Overload starting with PA's to David Ortiz in 2006. So we are 12 years into a "fad" that has grown 15x since then. And MLB and the Commissioner can absolutely legislate the Overloaded infield. And yes, if anybody is wondering, total shifts were up again 2018 over 2017.

That is absolutely right. They would not shift Rod. But that is really the point. Computer databases now create an environment where pumping enough data at the database allows virtually every hitter tendency to be exposed and the result is Overload shifts used all the way down to the bottom of lineups. The only players that escape it are the true all field hitters. However, was anybody ever going to admire Rod for his power hitting? You don't get both kinds of hitting out of one hitter more than once, maybe twice in a generation. More might be able to do it for a single year...but not more than that. We have one Trout and one Mookie and Mookie has not even done it long enough yet to be in the Trout category. I don't want to see baseball based on computer databases. If somebody wants to play fantasy baseball based on computer databases, they are welcome to knock their minds out. But it is the advent of computer databases combined with the Advanced Shift, the Overload that makes for the anomaly of fat turd infielders simply positioned so that every play they make is made one foot left or right of where they are positioned. I don't need to see the result of fat turd infielders simply allowed to succeed based on what a computer tells them to do. I need to see great pitching by Pitchers, great plays by great Infielders/OFer's and great hitting by great Hitters. Again everything that happens in baseball starts with a pitch. The battery knows what pitch and what location they are going to. In fact, the Shortstop and 2nd baseman knows what pitch and what location they are going to. The hitter doesn't know either the pitch or the location. The hitter can't do more than guess. You are just never going to see hitters able to beat that in combination with the Overload unless they try to hit over it, an effort that creates its own kind of boring baseball. Teams should be allowed to put their OFer's anyplace they want to. They should be allowed to put their infielders two either side of 2nd base. With that one restriction put them anywhere you want to put them. You just can't aim baseballs with any precision with a baseball bat unless the hitter knows what pitch is coming to what location. The result is that baseball is caught between a rock and a hard place: - Force hitters to try to aim for spots on the field and the power game will be completely gone from baseball. That would appear to be the opposite of what MLB wants. - Force the battery to tell the hitter the pitch and the location, and you don't even have baseball any longer. You just killed the game itself. - keep going the way they are going with these ungodly infield Overload Shifts and its like you have poured molasses over the entire field and taken all of the speed and agility out of the game substituting in fat turd infielders that have been "positioned" to make plays. In fact, it has gotten so bad now that i am using last year's terminology. The MLB page dedicated to Shift or Shifting is no longer making a distinction between what had been called the Shift and what had been called the Advanced Shift or the Overload. Now starting with this year, all Shifts are Overloads and unless a team Overloads, it is no longer even considered a Shift. A Shift is now what used to be called an Overload Shift. In other words they are only counting three infielders on one side of 2nd base as a Shift. They are so deep into this mess now that they are not even counting AB's as a reference point for total Shifts. They are counting PA's instead. In other words, they think the Shift has become such a factor in baseball that they believe it is now driving the entire contest between hitter and battery/defense. Is that really what we think will make for exciting baseball? So based on those numbers, PA's v Shifts....182,911 PA's yielded 31,816 Shifts for the year 2018. If they used AB's you would likely have something like 120,000 AB's yielding 31,816 Shifts. Those numbers do not even count Shifts within PA's and we all now know that teams are Shifting based on the Count, not just the Hitter but the count for that Hitter in that PA! I don't even want to think what that total Shift number would be....has to be north of 45,000 total shifts all in. So where is all this really going? Just take the players off the field and let Fantasy leagues knock their minds out playing the game with computer generated players performing based on computer generated positioning and that is really the point. Computer baseball is NOT real baseball. Sorry to tell all you Fantasy Baseball fans that think you are actually doing something that correlates to real baseball. Have all the fun you want to have. It does not correlate to real baseball and MLB is treading on very dangerous ground here.

The Shift IS IMO just a defensive alignment and I am fine with it. Its the Advanced Shift that is wrecking havoc within the game itself. The Shift would actually be very difficult to legislate against. However the Advanced Shift, the Overload, would be easy to kill off via rule and an outright ban. Its the Overload that is the real killer anyway. The problem with asking hitters to "beat the Advanced Shift, the Overload" is that the ball starts in the hands of the Pitcher. Every play, everything that happens in baseball starts with a pitch and the Battery represents the only element on the field that is directing the pitch. They alone, Pitcher and Catcher knows what they are trying to accomplish with each pitch, what pitch will be thrown and its intended location. The only way to give Hitters a reasonable shot at beating the Advanced Shift would be for Hitters to be told where the pitch is going. At that point you would destroy baseball completely. Simply too great an expectation to expect hitters to be able to beat the Advanced Shift enough times. Get rid of the juiced baseball and maybe you would have a shot at making that compromise. Does anybody believe we will go back to the pre-2016 baseball? Not me. Simply too much incentive with the juiced baseball to simply try to hit over the Overload. We should have realized that the Advanced Shift would continue to grow into the monster it has become. It was obvious that the more data that could be compiled on each hitter, the more each hitter would face not just a Shift but an Advanced Shift, an Overload. The most dangerous hitters face the most Advanced Shifts. Keep the Shift. Kill the Advanced Shift, the Overload. Unless you can put laser sights on baseball bats, hitters will never be able to beat Overloads unless you tell them exactly what the pitcher is trying to do with each pitch and which pitch he is going to throw and its intended location. Once you do that, you completely destroy the game of baseball. We are simply incentivizing baseball toward a one dimensional power game and that is just boring as heck baseball. Anybody that thinks the NL game is "exciting" baseball needs his head examined. While the DH has saved the AL for now us baseball enthusiasts are likely just kidding ourselves if we think the AL is working on anything more than a temporary reprieve from the AL looking year by year more and more like the mess of NL baseball.

I would like both as well were it not for the multiple abominations of: - the juiced baseball - the advanced shift - MLB rules changes All of which has led to hitters becoming entirely consumed by fence crashing, leaving the yard. The difference is that in the NL, there is still a spot in the batting order for the pitcher. My first thought when looking at the possible consequences of DH v no DH coupled with, rules changes, the juiced baseball and the advanced shift was that the NL would retain some semblance of baseball play in that the pitchers would remain the kinds of bat handlers they always had been, trying to at least have productive AB's even if those productive AB's were productive outs. The exact opposite has happened. Instead, pitchers simply do not even practice bunting in the NL. No pitcher in either league practices with a bat in his hands, entirely consumed with their pitching. They don't even practice at least making effective contact, hitting the ball behind the runner via bat handling either. How do I know that? Because they can't do it anymore. You do what you practice in baseball. You don't practice it, you can't do it. There is nothing IMO in the world of sports harder than hitting a baseball thrown by somebody that knows what he is doing. You don't practice with a bat in your hands, everything you do with a bat in your hands from that day forward is pure dumb luck or the lack of it. So since an NL team has to generate some offense and they have a total black hole in the 9 spot, the rest of the batting order simply tries to leave the building now one batter after the other, before they get to the black hole at 9. The combination of juiced baseball, advanced shift and rules changes have made for that. What does that Pitcher in the 9 hole do when he gets to the plate? Well since he does not really practice doing anything with a bat in his hands, guess what.....he tries to leave the building! What the heck. Everybody else is doing it. I might as well close my eyes and hope to run into something. The total effect of keeping a spot in the batting order for the pitcher combined with everything else in the list of bullet items above is that it turns the modest mess of some AL play into the total disaster of all NL play. Now the NL games have turned into a combination of K's, weak pop ups, fly balls, extra base hits, HR's, BB's and a rare single and even rarer ground out in that order. A Single is usually a ball mishit and beaten out by a speedy hitter. The preponderance of K's and weak pop ups overwhelms everything else by miles. There is no hit and run, no hitting behind runners, little opposite field hitting, no manufacturing runs. There is simply trying to leave. They are so obsessed with trying to leave that not only is a K just fine in pursuit of leaving but a weak pop up, the most pitiful thing in all baseball is just fine in pursuit of leaving the building. As for the fielding, you no longer see DP's in the NL. Nobody is ever on 1st base other than somebody there by virtue of a walk or infield hit for one and since all you have to do in the Advanced Shift is wait for some computer geek to tell you where to stand and wait for the ball to come to you, they can no longer even bend over to make a play. If they do make a play on the ball, they cannot transfer it between the other infielders so as to actually execute a DP. Infielders in the NL spend entire games just standing there waiting to get off the field. That is one heck of way to be prepared to make a play on a ground ball or a hot smash not hit right at you....ANY PLAY at all for that matter. Heck infielders no longer have to have footwork even to defend themselves whether in the AL or the NL. The real difference in the two leagues now is that at least in the AL down in the 9 hole there is a batter, an actual hitter who can handle the bat, a guy that works at his game, that practices with a bat in his hands. Even that guy thinks he should be leaving the building. But at least he practices with a bat in his hands and he CAN hit behind runners, hit and run, maybe even lay down a bunt. They are all trying to leave in the NL, all the way down to the Pitcher trying to run into something. Why even should the 8 hitter in an NL order try to advance runners with a black hole at 9 hitting right behind him? For a multitude of reasons not the least of which is that NL baseball has turned into pure trash, the NL needs to give up holding a spot open in the batting order for the Pitcher. The argument that it maintains a purer form of baseball has been turned entirely on its head by the list of bullet items above in this post. Holding a spot open for the Pitcher has had the exact opposite effect of the argument for it and there is simply no way that even a whole bevy of double switches in a single game makes up for missing out on exciting infield play, hit and run baseball and manufacturing runs. Lets not even get started on the true arcade baseball stupidity of seeing four WS games played one way and 3 others played another way depending on being in an AL or an NL park. Its another whacked out artifact of something that should have been dealt with ages ago. Heck, its only the Series that 30 baseball teams, 1,200 ballplayers, 400 coaches, about 3,000 front office personnel, 5,000 network execs and some millions of fans aim at every year...But who gives a darn when compared to the "sanctity" of pitchers hitting, a sanctity that has been breeched more times than a red light district lady in a Naval Port city. In the name of God, please NL adopt the DH and Manfred please get rid of the advanced shift. If MLB wants to live with the fantasy that it is "protecting" infielders with its stupid rules around the bases, fine. Send a Christmas card to Pedey every year while you are at it.

True...but the Commissioner does have a hand in dealing with the abomination of the advanced shift which should be banned across baseball, both leagues regardless of whether the idiot NL continues to resist the DH. Shifting is fine. The Advanced Shift is a mutation, an abortion that simply turns great plays into mundane BS and encourages ridiculous levels of attempted fence crashing by the hitters. Oh yea... watching fielders just stand there taking hot smashes moving not more than a foot left or right is exciting as all get out. We are turning infielders into the equivalent of lawn chairs with a basket attached to the seat. What did we all think...that there would be some excitement in thinking the fielder might hurt his hand through his mitt catching one of those things? Surprise surprise, there is no excitement in any of it....zipo....zero....nada!!!

Honestly, the brand of baseball they are playing in the NL is so utterly awful and so suggestive of teams that are fathoming the depths of the tragically misguided that I don't think either will stand up to facing a real, actual baseball team, the Boston Red Sox. The Dodgers probably represent the greater challenge just because they have pitchers that act like pitchers, a manager that uses them like you use pitchers. The Brewers have this claptrap of young, strong arms that someday might represent a pitching staff but don't today and a manager just willing to try anything to get them through a game. By comparison, the only oddity in the way Cora has used his pitching staff is in using Starters that actually have assigned Starts later in the very post season series they are playing in as relief pitchers in high leverage innings. That is it and Cora has clearly been driven to that because he has nobody else to give those innings. The Dodgers will suddenly become at least 25% more dangerous the instant they stop using Grandal behind the plate. He is not even a AAA grade defensive catcher. Awful does not even begin to describe this guy. They would probably trade Machado straight up for Swihart in a NY minute just to get through the 1 game plus a series they have left to play. if they win the Saturday 7th game they would be desperate to avoid the two dozen WP's and PB's and blown assists Grandal is likely to provide in 5 or 6 more games. Finally after last night's game the talking heads of baseball while not acknowledge the full ramifications of the train wreck of an NLCS series we are watching at least said the words I have been saying for days if not weeks. Every single NL hitter is fence crashing or trying to and that is all there is to see here. No infield play. No hard hit liners. No oppo field hitting. No moving runners or manufacturing runs. Panels of baseball experts were offering that if either of these two teams can actually push a run across the plate, that team will win game 7 and thus the series. The entire series has become a Bataan Death March through weak pop ups and K's that unfortunately reflects the best of what the NL currently has to offer. Good pitchers simply know how to keep you from fence crashing if they know that is all the hitter is going to try to do every AB. Steadfastly continuing to insist that assigning the Pitcher a spot in the batting order creates a more pure version of the game has had the exact opposite effect on it given MLB rules changes and the advanced shift. Arguing that the Double Switch is worth this mess of a game is now being exposed for its laughable absurdity. While one game away from a full 7 game series this series has already created more K's than any post season series in history, something like 140 K's so far. Virtually half the outs have been K's. I would wager that half the remaining outs to this point are weak pop ups. If there is ever the rare chance at a DP, the infielders blow it up somewhere along the way as it now appears impossible for infielders on the two best teams in the NL to transfer the baseball between three of them without screwing up. The advanced shift in a very few years has created beer keg infielders that can barely bend over let alone make a play, infielders that have grown catatonic through inning after inning of inactivity. Who did not see THAT coming! I would offer that the only thing that has saved a reasonable amount of the AL from a similar fate has been the DH. I would want any AL team to crush like a bug whichever one of these NL teams comes out of this mess. The AL suffered a similar fate for its unwarranted slow footedness in adopting an integrated league many years ago. Its high time this NL crap gets exposed for what it is. We should all here as Boston Red Sox fans and fans of baseball thank God for the Boston Red Sox and for the Houston Astros for that matter and the Cleveland Guardians and for all AL teams with a few AL exceptions that I will not mention in this post. We should thank God for the DH which is in large part responsible for saving the AL game from the full depths of incoherently ugly we are seeing from the NL. Commissioner Manfred better get his s*** together after this season is completely done. If not, MLB will one day very soon deserve to be wearing those hideous Player's Weekend Series unis that make them look like beer league softball teams because that is what they will be.

The Brewers were not even fouling any of them off and it wasn't the second time through the order or anything like that. They were totally ignoring the possibility that a FB might be coming in their first AB's even in FB counts and had Ryu's breaking stuff entirely timed up right from jump street, batter after batter. The hitters were beyond comfortable. That is just not possible without having some sort of help. Ryu's location was not optimal but I am discounting that. I don't think it would have mattered where in the strike zone he threw them. the Brewer hitters had him so timed up and were so certain they were going to see the breaking ball even where a hitter would normally expect a FB.

Brilliant...just proved my point. Thanks for playing.

With all the noise about stealing signs and what have you, it really did look like the Brewers had something on Ryu tonight. There is simply no way for a team of hitters to be that prepared for 1st pitch breaking balls. The Brewer hitters were sitting in hammocks hitting Ryu's secondary pitches even when he was throwing them in odd places in the count.

Then I would question whether you know what is a post season thrashing is actually. As for what is in bold in the quote above, I have no idea what form of logic draws that conclusion. You comment also suggests you simply do not know the various responsibilities of each of the components of a batting order. In the first place, the manager that moves his 3 hole hitter to lead off part way through a 7 game post season series knows he is being thrashed. But since you don't appear to know how different the responsibilities of the lead off hitter and a 3 hole hitter I would not expect you to know that.

Watching these NL games is just a scream. They could put out lawn chairs with buckets on them for infielders and do as much as these teams have to do. The pitchers don't throw anything that a hitter would hit on the ground and the hitters don't hit anything on the ground. You could go a few games without seeing a DP. Those are as rare as hen's teeth even when there are runners on base. Its mainly on the hitters who would clearly prefer a weak pop up to a hard hit liner or something hard hit on the ground in spite of how silly and useless a weak pop up looks. In fact a weak pop up is as useless as tits on a bull. Cain is the only guy that actually tries to hit the ball on the ground and you can hardy call what he does "hitting". Everybody else, both teams is just trying to crash the fences and the game is a progression of extra base hits, HR's, Fly outs, weak pop ups and K's...mostly weak pop ups and K's. Virtually nothing else happens on the field of play. Even the pitchers try to crash the fences. Even with so many hitters trying to crash the fences there are not many HR's from two of the HR hitting-ist teams in baseball because the pitchers know how to keep them from leaving. There are a tremendous number of passed balls and wild pitches because even the Catchers, usually the bedrock of team defense can't catch. The announce teams seem utterly oblivious to the fact that they are watching about half of what an actual baseball game would be. Either that or they are under instructions to make all of this sound and look wonderful or at least normal. The WS games regardless of whether its Brewers or Dodgers are going to be quite a contrast in type and style of play. Frankly a WS between the Sox and either team has every likelihood of looking like somebody put a soccer team and a rugby team on the same field and decided to derive a championship out of the result. I am not even sure a WS game is going to look like both teams are playing with the same baseballs.

Ain't that the truth!

Pretenders with big mouths have not faired well this post season. Judge with his NY, NY nonsense in our park and Bregman with his stupid tweet got exactly what they deserve. We for some reason seem to encourage this juvenile nonsense and then we revel when it blows up in the player's faces. One or the other please. Doing both at the same time does not make much sense. But it does speak to bigger societal issues than we are not going to resolve in a baseball forum.

You are not tipping pitches when you can't get one of your two pitches over and you are over-throwing the other one to compensate. No MLB hitter has to look for a "tip" in those circumstances. The AB of the year that typifies Kembrel's problem in that regard was the Stanton AB in NY late in the year. He let go of one of his fire breathing FB's when everybody in the building knew that was what he was going to throw because it was the only pitch he could get over the plate and Stanton sent it to Mars. You just cannot throw it past good MLB hitters if they definitively know you are throwing the FB. But to me the bigger issue for a team looking to spend big money on Kimbrel is the narrow range within which he performs: - has to be a Close situation - has to be given a clean inning - has to be a Close of 4 outs or less Now we can add to that: - has to be working regularly or does not struggle but completely falls apart Enough already! That does not sound like $13m worth of Closer to me when we have guys like Mookie and X headed into arbitration years and pitchers like Eo that we probably really want to try to sign to a longer term deal. So I would be very surprised if the Sox bring Kimbrel back because to my mind he has become a managerial nightmare that simply performs in a range that is just too narrow.

Its not funny at all. I would contend that if JBJ ever stops thinking oppo, he will again start to pull his head off, his shoulders will fly open, he will even likely start over-rotating again and he will dig himself another of his legendary massive holes. The only way he continues this recent recovery will be to continue to think opposite field because its the only thing that keeps his head quiet and his shoulders from flying open and THAT is what allows him to take a pitch up and in and do something with it to RC field. A RC field shot is not a pull shot and trying to pull the ball is what generally leads to JBJ's downfall. That said, he still to this day has a massive hole in his swing right where most LH hitters want the ball...low and inside. Beni has a similar problem. When he thinks pull, his swing gets too big, his hands get outside the baseball and nothing happens other than this big gust of wind from home plate. The dif between the two players is that Beni is much younger than JBJ who is now 28 years old! Beni is a maturing ballplayer. JBJ is a mature ballplayer. For him to still be going through these massive slumps at 28 is unacceptable. He either once and for all sticks with the only approach that works for him or he does not. One thing I thought was refreshing was that right in the middle of JBJ's 2018 disaster, he did start over-rotating again. Cora just came out and said it "He is over-rotating for one thing". Farrell would never do that. He would stand there in the face of what you could see with your own two eyes and blather some nonsense. I thought Cora was refreshing in that regard.

Correct...however I was never of the doom and gloom crowd convinced that if the Astros won game 5 making it 3-2 Boston coming back to Fenway that there was some magical momentum element that was just going to do the Sox in. I would have been concerned about Sale in game 6 but with Eo going in 7 and two games in our park to win it all, I would have taken that any day. Frankly given how the two teams were playing I think the chances of the Astros winning three straight games, two of them in our park was remote at best regardless of having Cole on tap. Altuve gimping around given their other injuries was likely the last straw. The only shot AJ had was to get Bregs going and he made the wrong move if that was his intention.

Bregman's OPS batting lead off for the 12 regular season games he played there was .741. His OPS batting from the 3 hole was 1.008. But you go ahead and live with the fantasy that it was a good idea to move him to lead off. THE MOVE was bringing Correa and probably Gonzalez up in the order behind him and moving Gurriel down, not moving Bregs to lead off. His problem was that the Sox would not pitch to Bregs, not that they needed a lead off hitter. It was a panic move and it didn't work. You only have so many chances in a 7 game series to make something happen. You could say that AJ realized his team was getting thrashed. You could say that he realized that his team was not even executing their standard offensive process. If you want to credit him with that, be my guest. He made the wrong move. It clearly did not help. So it is hard to even make the suggestion that keeping Bregs at 3 and moving Correa and Gonzalez up to protect him was not the better move. But you go ahead. You haven't made your argument yet. You are welcome to keep trying.

Starter?? They have turned him into an ignition switch.

That was not a very hard hit ball. But OK, lets say that drops. Bregs would have been 1-9 from lead off. Very impressive numbers. AJ should have left Bregs where he was and moved Correa and Gonzalez up and Gurriel down. He got himself halfway there for Game 5. Too late! They didn't switch to aluminum bats in the NL. They just don't play baseball over there any longer. Seems like the pitcher occupying a spot in the batting order is actually now coming home to roost for the NL given the contemporary rules instituted in baseball combined with the advanced shift. What, we didn't think this stuff was going to effect the game? Now that would have been naive. Bat handlers are in very short supply. Nobody bunts. Even pitchers don't move runners over with productive outs. So, the NL teams are trying to bang before they get to the pitcher's spot. What a shocker that is! The last vestige of moving runners and opposite field hitting is in the AL with teams like Boston and Houston providing the best examples.